Nimble Rabbit

The Nimble Lapin is a Cabaret of Paris located at the top of the hillock Montmartre to the 22 of the Rue of the Willows in the XVIIIe district. Established in second half of the 19th century century, repurchased by Aristide Bruant in 1913, it was one of the privileged meeting places of Bohemian artistic of the beginning of the 20th century century, of max Jacob with Pablo Picasso while passing by Roland Dorgelès, Francis Carco or Pierre Mac Orlan. It is still today in activity.

At the origins of the Nimble Rabbit

Bottom and high Montmartre

See also: Montmartre (the Seine)

The bottom of Montmartre, become at the end of the 18th century, following the construction of the wall of the Farmer general and with the introduction of taxes on the products entering Paris (in particular on the wine), “a zone devoted to the pleasures”, shelters in the years 1880, in addition to many cabarets (the black Cat, the Moulin-Rouge), a very mixed and sometimes dangerous population (prostitutes with their upholders, marginal of all kinds.)

The top of Montmartre (Ridges-Montmartre), on the other hand, resembles until 1914 a village, famous for its fresh air, its mills and its residences at low prices, which attract the artists, many to come to settle there, and of which the number as from 1890 becomes considerable.

Roland Dorgelès, which knew it, evoked in its novel the Castle of the fogs (1932), “this corner disappeared from the Paris old man” from before the Great War, with which one makes little honor by confusing it “with Montmartre of in bottom, that of the nightclubs and the hairdressers for ladies”: On our premises, one would have believed oneself in the countryside. No the bus, not of large buildings, not of encumbered pavements. Each crossroads had its terminal fountain, each house its end of Pas garden of stores either: what would one make some in a village? Right what it is necessary of shops to render service to the housewives: a bakery and a fruit-loft. When other provisions were wanted, one descended Rue Lepic, where the commercial ones pushed their small cars, and one returned from the market with full nets. In this “village” côtoyaient themselves, without mixing, of the individuals of very diverse social conditions, which have each one their reserved space: “the small middle-class men in arm of shirt” had elected residence Rue Lamarck, “the pensioners dug their garden peas Rue of Good the”, “the beardless pimps cut off themselves in the small bars from the Rue from the Abbesses”, etc Only, the artists were everywhere on their premises, taking the chocolate with the pilgrims, aperitif with the arsouilles and lunching at the bar with the house painters.

Cabaret of the Assassins to the Nimble Rabbit

It is in the high part of Montmartre that in 1795 the building is built of what will shelter the Nimble Lapin , which becomes, in the neighborhoods of 1860, a baptized inn of carriers With Go robbers .

As from 1869, it takes the name of Cabaret of the Assassins , because are fixed on the wall of engravings representing of the famous assassins, of Ravaillac to Troppmann.

Between 1879 and 1880, the owner of the time entrusts to the caricaturist André Gill, familiar of the places, the clothes industry of a sign; this one painted a rabbit vêtu of a green frock coat and a red scarf escaping from the pot which was intended to him: the cabaret becomes known then under the name of rabbit in Gill , transformed soon into rabbit Agile . The rabbit of the sign would be in fact a self-portrait transposed of the caricaturist, who had taken part in the Commune (it belonged to the Commission of the artists), but had succeeded in escaping the repression which had followed.

Repurchased in 1886 by a former dancer of Cancan, Adele Decerf (called “the mother Adele”), this one, after being itself removed from the most doubtful part of its customers, in fact a coffee-restaurant-concert baptized In my countryside , which attend during the day accustomed of the Black Chat (Charles Cros, Alphonse Allais, Jehan Rictus, etc.) The chansonnier Aristide Bruant one is also accustomed by it, and it brings to it Toulouse-Lautrec and Courteline.

At the beginning of the 20th century, “the Adèle mother” resells the cabaret with Berthe Sébource, which settles there in company of his/her daughter, Marguerite Luc (called “Margot”, and future wife of Pierre Mac Orlan.) They are joined in 1903 per Frederic Gerard (1860-1938), called “the Frédé father”, thanks to whom the Nimble Lapin will become a place impossible to circumvent of Bohemian artistic Montmartrean or Rue Ravignan. ” When it moves in with the Nimble Lapin , it keeps with him its monkey, its dog, its corbel, its white mice, like its ass, with which it sells fish in the streets of Montmartre, in order to supplement its incomes”, “Frédé” sang sentimental lovesongs or realistic songs while being accompanied with the violoncello or the guitar, of which it played with a talent which did not achieve the unanimity. Especially, he did not hesitate to offer meals and drinks in his cabaret to the desilvered artists, in exchange of a song, a table or a poem.

Aristide Bruant, always regular customer of the Nimble Rabbit , binds friendship with the tenant, and when the building is promised with the demolition in 1913, it repurchases it and lets “Frédé” ensure management of it.

Artists and hooligans

The Nimble Rabbit , under the impulse of “Frédé”, becomes quickly for the Bohemian one of Montmartre “a true cultural institution. ” Attend It Pierre Mac Orlan, which two to three evenings per week, likes to sing songs of regiment, Roland Dorgelès, which also sings, but seldom, which is happy, because he sings rather badly, max Jacob, André Salmon, Paul Fort, etc Gaston Couté never sings, but ends sometimes up sleeping under a table, overcome by intoxication; Apollinaire reads there poems of Alcools ; Picasso paints a portrait of Marguerite Luc ( Femme with the crow , 1904), as well as a Arlequin drinking with the counter of the cabaret ( To Nimble Rabbit: Harlequin with glass , 1905.) The actor Charles Dullin made there his beginnings in 1902, with hallucinated recitations of poems of Baudelaire, Villon, Corbière or Laforgue: a not very orthodoxe Christ, was to write André Salmon later, remembering a statue which made “a little Jesus comrade according to the spirit of Social of this time. ”

But the artists are not alone to attend the Nimble Lapin : they cotoient anarchists of the Libertaire , with which the cohabitation is sometimes tended, and especially of the criminals come from Low Montmartre and the district of the Goutte of Gold. Francis Carco, unloaded with the Nimble Rabbit during the winter 1910-1911, remembers thus the “little girls and the prowlers who cherished poetry” fraternizing with the “ordinary customers” and offering to them to drink, but who, “other times, penetrating with the Lapin by surprise had decided to correct their wives and held up frayed razors, sem terror around them. ”

The tension still became sharper as from the moment when Frederic Gerard, who “wanted to create customers of artists” decided, “for the peace of those”, to drive out these undesirable customers: “these Sirs whose Frederic did not like the presence at his place, intended to be festival”, explains Francis Carco, and certain nights, of the blows of revolver were drawn from the outside through the squares of the cabaret. In its novel the Castle of the fogs , Roland Dorgelès mentions these incidents like occurring “from time to time”, without surprising anybody (“the police force did not even move”), and one of these attacks forms the heart of the novel the Quay of the fogs of Pierre Mac Orlan. Violence was to reach its paroxysm in 1910, when one of wire of Frederic Gerard, Victor (“Totor”), was cut down of a ball in the head behind the bar.

A famous “stove setting”: Aliboron/Boronali

See also: Joachim-Raphaël Boronali

The “period of disorder” lasted “two or three years”, Mac Orlan remembers, at the conclusion which “Frederic remained Master of the situation and the old man Lapin took this peaceful aspect which allured so many young people and old men. ”

But of other tensions, fortunately much less violent, existed within the customers attending the establishment: “antagonism reigned between the artists of avant-garde, appointed under the scorning name of " bandage in Picasso" (and little appreciated of the owner of the Nimble Rabbit ) and the traditionalists brought together around Dorgelès”, adversaries of the abstract painting, and which estimated that “if the artists did not try any more to reproduce the real-world, in a recognizable form, it did not remain any possibility of judging Article” It is the latter which, in 1910, develops a hoax remained famous: the sunset on the Adriatic , fabric allegedly painted by an Italian artist up to that point unknown, Joachim-Raphaël Boronali, in addition theorist of a new artistic movement (“excessivism”) and exposed to the Living room of Independent the.

Actually, the Manifeste of the excessivism was written by Dorgelès, and the table is of… “Milk”, the ass of Frederic Gerard, with the tail of which Dorgelès, assisted André Warnod and of Jules Depaquit attached a brush! Revealing trickery (report of usher to the support), Roland Dorgelès explains in the satirical newspaper Fantasio which he wanted “to show with denied, with the incompetents and the conceited one who encumber too most of this exposure the living room of the Independent ones, that the work of an ass, brushed with great blows of tail, is not moved among their works”, which insult the “honest artists” (Maurice Denis, Paul Signac, Paul Sérusier…) obliged to undergo the vicinity of their “small refuse. ”

Trickery had an enormous success: the table was “the comment object not very different from those which accommodated other modernistic works, and was sold a handsome price”

At all events, this hoax of Dorgelès and its friends belongs to a typically Montmartrean tradition: the stove setting, in which Jules Depaquit excelled, and who consisted of the development “of complex jokes, raised by one surprising deployment of imagination and dazzling word games”, practical which establishes the link between the humorists of the cabarets and the avant-garde of the years 1900, and of which the work of Alphonse Allais provides a completed example.

End of a world

Until the month of August 1914, writing Pierre Mac Orlan, the Lapin lived a life whose independence was the image even of Montmartre, where everyone escaped social disciplines which, however, were not severe. The inhabitants of Montmartre could create a rather exact image of happiness in the broadest interpretation of the law. This carefree time is completed on August 1st, 1914, with the proclamation of the general mobilization against Germany: “abruptly, all appeared carried, swept”, brings back Francis Carco. The customers are made rare with the Nimble Lapin , the majority of accustomed having left for the face, of which much was not to return: Often, however remembers Mac Orlan, the helmet of a person on leave ran up against the lintel of the door. It was a soldier of Paris, born with the Lapin a few years before. He drank rageusement; its mood was savage. One saw it returning once, sometimes two, then it did not return any more.

the Nimble Rabbit after the Great War

The Nimble Lapin will not find any more its statute of meeting place of the writers and the artists of the avant-garde, even if each year, the day of the inauguration of the Living room of Fall, the painters are accustomed to finishing the evening with the Nimble Lapin : the center of gravity of creation moved with Montparnasse, just like it would move with Saint-Germain-of-Meadows after the end of the Second world war.

In 1922, Aristide Bruant resells the cabaret with “Paulo”, the son of Frederic Gerard with whom it taught the song. Under its direction, “taken care”, the formerly abstract ones and more or less improvised, are now organized, the artists chosen by the new owner… and paid. Some of them are even accommodated like “boarders” of the cabaret. The Nimble Lapin enorguillit also to have itself like customers Pierre Brasseur, Georges Simenon, as well as American celebrities of passage to Paris, such as Rudolph Valentino, Vivien Leigh, or Charlie Chaplin, and that in 1955 Claude Nougaro makes his first appearances on scene, as a poet initially, then like chanteur.

In 1972, Paulo Gerard yields the management of the cabaret to his/her son-in-law Yves Mathieu who is always the owner: “taken care” are still organized there, during which singers and humorists occur.

Bibliography and references

Sources used

  • '' the nimble Rabbit. One century of taken care '', box of four cds, EPM, 2003 (booklet of Jean Buzelin)
  • Roland Dorgelès, the castle of the fogs , the Book of pocket, 1973 (1 ED. 1923)
  • Pierre Mac Orlan, the Quay of the fogs , Gallimard, Folio, Paris, 1995 (foreword of Francis Lacassin)
  • Pierre Mac Orlan, Montmartre/the Bands , complete Works, the Circle of the bibliophile, Geneva, s.d.
  • Andre Salmon, Memories without end, First time (1903-1908) , Gallimard, N.R.F., Paris, 1955
  • Jerrold Siegel, Bohemian Paris, 1830-1930 , Gallimard, coll “Library of the stories”, Paris, 1991.
  • Sarah Wilson (to dir.), Paris, capital of arts, 1900-1968 , Hazan, Paris, 2002

External bonds

Official site of the cabaret '' To Nimble Rabbit ''

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