Few people know the story of 70 bis Rue Notre-Dame des Champs, in Paris. However, the building welcomed artists from the Parisian district of Bohème de Montparnasse for almost a century. The writer Patrick Modiano in collaboration with Christian Mazzalai, guitarist of the Rock Phoenix group, tells this story in a new book that will be launched on October 2.
70 bis entrance to artists It is presented as “a survey story” that mixes texts, photographs, paintings and files (classified ads, press articles …).
The book says that, in short chapters, the beautiful hours of the 70 bis of the Rue Notre-Dame Des Champs, where he met from the mid-nineteenth century to the painters, writers, illustrious or unknown poets, often landed to try his luck in Paris. This is particularly the case of Pablo Picasso, Auguste Rodin, Ezra Pound or Robert Louis Stevenson.
A “Document Caisse”
Patrick Modiano and Christian Mazzalai, who share the same passion for Paris and the archives, carried out the investigation after the discovery of “a background of documents” found in the basement and that “referred to many inhabitants of the 70 bis, from the second empire to the present,” according to Gallimard.
They dedicate chapters to a monkey named Jacques, who became the pet in the 1850s, Maria Latini, an Italian young woman who serves as a model, and the eccentric “Cowboy of Montparnasse” who was walking “on horseback and with a Texan hat.”
The 70 bis became a residential building and Montparnasse has largely lost its artist workshops.
“Today, it seems that one of the gates of the 70 bis where it is written on a small enamel plate ‘inputs artists’ has not been opened for a long time. Where are the artists?” Patrick Modiano Question.
The 2014 Nobel Prize for Literature has written many novels, including “Rue des de Boutiques” or “Les Boulevards de Belt”, which are full of places from places, streets and Parisian cafes, especially from the 1940s.
Christian Mazzalai is one of the four members of the Pop-Rock Phoenix group, which has become one of the standard “French touch” in 25 years.
Source: BFM TV
