Place Blanche After Dark
Getting there and getting home: Métro line 2, the taxi rank past midnight, and what to wear at the door.
The cabaret sits on Place Blanche where the boulevard meets the foot of the Butte, and the simplest arrival is the Métro — Blanche on line 2 puts you at the kerb almost directly. Come up the stairs and the red mill is overhead before you have finished buttoning your coat; visitors gasp, and after twenty-five years I still find it a fine way to arrive anywhere. If you come for the seven o'clock dinner, be on the boulevard by half past six; the doors run like a railway.
Leaving is the part worth planning. The last trains on line 2 are honest but finite, and after the eleven o'clock show you will be outside in the small hours. The taxi rank on the place itself fills quickly at show-out; my habit was to walk one block up toward Abbesses — five minutes, uphill but gentle — where the cabs queue shorter and the drivers are awake. Rideshares do pick up on the boulevard but the double-parked chaos at midnight tries anyone's patience.
On dress, since the door takes it seriously: think dinner, not nightclub. A jacket for men settles every question; for everyone else, the standard is simply that you made an effort for an evening out. Trainers and shorts get the apologetic head-shake I gave a hundred times a season — and the door's head-shake, unlike mine, is final. Paris in any season rewards a decent coat; the wait between sets outside is short but the wind on Place Blanche is sincere.
If you arrive early, the streets around are worth the extra half-hour. The rue Lepic climbs away from the boulevard with its little shops and the windmill of the Galette still turning above; Place des Abbesses, where I live, is the prettiest square in the quartier and its Métro entrance is a Guimard original, one of the last. Have a glass there before you descend to the boulevard — the hill does the rest of the evening for you.
And after the show: walk a little before you queue for a cab. Montmartre at one in the morning is quieter than you think, the mill goes dark against the sky, and for a moment the whole quartier belongs to the people who just stepped out of the doors. I have walked it ten thousand times. It never once felt ordinary.
Since I am an old Montmartroise, one last neighbourly word about the quartier at night, because visitors sometimes worry. The boulevard is busy and bright until the small hours — theatres, restaurants, the eternal crowds — and in twenty-five years of leaving work between midnight and one I never once felt uneasy walking to my street. Keep to the lit streets as you would anywhere, keep your bag close in the crowd outside the doors — spectacle crowds are pickpocket weather in every capital on earth — and the hill will treat you kindly. The worst that ever happened to me on Place Blanche at midnight was losing a glove to the wind, and a taxi driver found it on the pavement and drove it back to my street without charge. That is the neighbourhood I know, and the one I am handing to you in these pages.
