Maurice Utrillo Rabbit

Paris was Montmartre with its pleasures, its temptations, and Utrillo, whose excellent appearance was admired, soon lost it. The rue Saint-Vincent, which bisects the rue des Saules in half, at the level of the cemetery and the Lapin Agile cabaret, was only a narrow passage flanked on one side by the planks of an old palisade and the other by a retaining wall dominated, beyond badly maintained gardens, by the dilapidated houses of the rue Cortot. In this way, when Utrillo could no longer get a drink at La Belle Gabrielle, he took the passage to end up at Adele's and later at Father Frede's who had taken over the operation of the establishment. As a police measure, Frederic Gerard had just closed the Zut he had founded on the top of the Butte when he bought the license from Adele. It was a famous "rabbit" that Frede. With his big clogs, his pants, his velvet jacket, his red headband, his beard and his eyes sparkling with mischief, he looked more like an opera bandit than an innkeeper, but the "kind Bunting remaining fashionable, Adele's successor was inspired by it.

We drank Corsican wine at his house and the neighborhood of the maquis, which was not demolished until after 1910, lent Frede's outfit a little of the local color that the neighborhood required. On the other hand, the "box" was what it is today, a one-storey house that was enlarged on the right, on the ground floor, by a sort of zinc-covered storeroom where aesthetes and shopkeepers neighborhood gathered to say verses and drink others, to the satisfaction of each and everyone.

Now it was less pots than liters that Utrillo cared about, and although Frederic occupied his spare time baking pottery in a kiln that caused Genty, the humorist, to write in the Rabbit's guestbook: Potter, you found success in an oven, the painter did not enter into such subtleties. Whether he was served his kil of red in a soup tureen or in a high-cooked vase, he saw no impediment, convinced as he was that the content, even of a work of art kneaded by the innkeeper, was worth more than the container. The only way to prevent Utrillo from exposing his point of view was to give him a drink, because he then slept off his wine "without making a big fuss". Drunkards were not usually admitted to Frede's, who had the principle that a customer who got drunk in his establishment had paid the right to be drunk, while if he had drunk elsewhere, he hardly brought in anything. nothing but shit.

Utrillo, however, was never unwelcome.



Also, when he suddenly appeared from the street in an unfortunate state of intoxication, they let him in and parked him at the back of the room, with a liter, so as not to have to give the agents some opportunity to to intervene. Indeed, among the regulars of the cabaret, there were, in addition to the honest people who had nothing to fear from the cops, a certain number of individuals who would not have tolerated being informed, with the courtesies of use, of their means of existence. Under innocent and somewhat frolicsome airs, these gentlemen always showed themselves so suspicious that one of them, one evening at the table next to his, noticed a student from the Conservatory taking down the lines of the scene he had to enter the competition, thought that the unfortunate boy was engaged in some dirty work as an informant and struck him on the head with a truncheon which brutally interrupted his theatrical career forever.

The old reputation that the Rabbit of the Cabaret des Assassins had preserved sometimes caused fearsome characters to take shelter there, to track down a spinning mill, whose presence could entail certain risks. This is how Victor, one of Frede's sons, was shot in the back of the neck while he was giving change at the counter. On the walls were still shown the grazes made there by a gang of malefactors armed with revolvers whose magazines had emptied themselves, so to speak, in the course of a sudden argument. Miracle Utrillo got through such fights! When I think of it, I wonder how we could have saved him from the fatal consequences of his excessive drinking if, by misfortune, the whim of one of these "beautiful children" had caused a controversy.

The atmosphere of the neighborhood lent itself admirably to the settlement of all kinds of accounts. Imagine, on the other side of the street, the low wall of the Saint-Vincent cemetery, at the corner of which an evil street lamp was, each evening, extinguished as soon as it was lit, the large disjointed cobblestones of the roadway, the bollards which prohibited the descent to cars, and I do not know what sinister air with which, around, were imprinted the decrepit houses.

Socks in history - Falke Cashmere Knee High Socks, Wardrobes Of Women

You will easily share the impressions we experienced on certain nights on leaving the cabaret. Utrillo, who painted the Rabbit, does not seem to have retained bad memories of it. Even under the snow that a postcard had spread to several million copies, the Rabbit remains for him a place of choice where Frede had not received, like Marie Vizier, the instruction to refuse him to drink. Also, whatever the time when the artist had the leisure to draw a new painting from it, we always feel that he is ready to paint it with the sardonic kindness and the sympathy of the drunkard for one of the rare outlets where no one ever blamed him for being drunk.