OVERVIEW - CultureShock! A Survival Guide to Customs and Etiquette - page 43

and south to the pleasant junction of Denfert-Rochereau.
But Montparnasse is known not so much for its geography
but for its intriguing atmosphere. It was a hangout in the
18th century for students venturing away from the Latin
Quarter; later it became famous for its bohemian and
intellectual life.
Imagine the intensity of this area less than a century ago,
when cheap rents for studios and cheap booze drew poverty-
stricken artists to this worker's district from the increasingly
expensive Montmartre. Now world-renowned Amadeo
Modigliani, Marc Chagall and Pablo Picasso were a few of
these unknown artists who descended upon Paris. Eastern
European Jews without a franc to their names also came to
escape pogroms and Russian thinkers such as Lenin and
Trotsky contemplated revolution
during their stays here. In the
1920s, after World War I, came
the Americans: writers, artists
and their patrons. Paris was
a playground for those with
American dollars, and unlike in
the United States, the alcohol
flowed until all hours in cafés we
frequent even now—Le Dôme,
La Coupole and La Closerie des
Lilas. Unfortunately in 1929,
the stock markets crashed, pockets were emptied and the
Americans went home. But not, of course, the French. It
was about this time that a new breed of intellectuals such as
Sartre and Beauvoir congregated at the area around Carrefour
Vavin, but when World War II came and the Germans took
over the cafés of Montparnasse and closed the nearest métro
station, the crowd moved up to Saint-Germain.
Legends die hard: the commercial area and cinemas are
always crowded and the cafés and nightspots hum into the
wee hours of the morning. The sterile Gare Montparnasse,
the Tour Montparnasse, its shopping mall and several
concrete apartment blocks do nothing, however, to remind
us of what once was.

Modigliani arrived in Paris in 1906
and first stayed at Montmartre
before moving to Montparnasse.
Tubercular and drug-addicted, he
was even known as the 'king of
Montparnasse'. Two films have
been made about Modigliani's
life: Jacques Becker's Les
Amants de Montparnasse and
Mick Davis' Modigliani , starring
Andy Garcia and French actress
Elsa Zylberstein.