I’d have given anything to have spent time in a Parisian café called The Dead Rat ‘le Rat-Mort’. But long before I’d learnt about this rough and ready drinking hole, it was long gone to wherever great cafés go when they die.

Le Rat-Mort Café Time and date unknown

The Dead Rat Café was several things all at once. It was a café, restaurant, nightclub and cabaret. After modest start, it grew into a louche and raffish establishment and stayed that way for almost a century. It began in 1837, when a lemonade vendor set up his stall at number 7, Place Pigalle. Later, it evolved into Café Pigalle and later still it made a play for fame by calling itself “le Grand Café de la Place Pigalle”.

This hopeful puffery didn’t much improve its standing. Because across the street , at number 9, Place Pigalle, stood Café la Nouvelle Athènes, a name that that boasted of its link to classical Greece. It attracted many of the best artists in Montmartre. Degas, Toulouse Lautrec and Susan Valadon all painted the café. Manet, van Gogh, Seurat and Zola were regular customers and , a little later, so too were musicians like Maurice Ravel and Satie. But it’s also worth remembering that Montmartre was a tough working class neighbourhood of cheap bars, dives and dosshouses. It witnessed fierce fighting in 1871, when the Commune was crushed and thousands killed or banished to the French penal colonies.

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Café Pigalle’s change of fortune came about by happy accident. A band of irate customers had a flaming row with the boss of the Nouvelle Athènes. They flounced across the road to the café at number 7, Place Pigalle, gave it a new name and the Dead Rat was up and running . The first arrivals at The Dead Rat commissioned a large painting of their patron and it floated above them on the ceiling. Panels depicting stages in the life of cafe’s significant rodent adorned the walls.

There are stories, all less than convincing, about how the café got its new name. Was it because the first arrivals thought that new paint and plaster in the café reeked of dead rat. Or because fishmongers flung dead fish into the nearby fountain on Place Pigalle? Or that the first drinker, pulling a pint of beer at the bar startled a rat ? I like the story that a couple, happily hidden in a private alcove set aside for such commercial trysts, were joined by an inquisitive rat.

The Dead Rat Café was a home from home to poets, painters, newspaper editors, artists models, celebrated drunks plus a panoply of formidable lesbians, who added a certain rigor to what was a rowdy all-night drinking hole. Colette was a customer and she writes of these lesbians that they embodied a ‘certain Rat-Mort style’ and the term was a compliment by then.

What set the Dead Rat apart was that it was also a café for women of various kinds and classes and that gave it extra reach in 19^th century Paris, when literally tens of thousands of cafés competed for customers. Girls hoping for modelling jobs from the painters in the café, often perched on the rim of the fountain over the road. The Dead Rat did what rare cafés do - it gave its regulars a feeling of complicity. It drew them in and fitted itself around them.

Lautrec’s painting of a booth in The Dead Rat gives a pictorial boost to stories of the café’s private rooms . The woman is said to be Lucy Jourdain, a high class prostitute, a ‘poule de luxe’.

Private room at the Rat Mort, Toulouse Lautrec 1899

Some visitors to the Dead Rat were notorious but none more sensationally so than Paul Verlaine and Arthur Rimbaud . The poets met in 1871, when Rimbaud was sixteen and Verlaine eleven years older. Rimbaud was rude, wild, uncontrollable and often stoked to the eyeballs. Verlaine was courtly, even gentle, until he drank too much, and he often drank too much. Between them they wrote some of the greatest poems in the French language. They also proved to be a danger to themselves and others. The love affair of the two poets was laced with violence.

It was at the Dead Rat that Rimbaud told Verlaine he wanted to show him a new game, as an ‘experiment’. The player spreads his fingers, takes a sharp knife and stabs the blade between all five fingers, as rapidly as possible. It is a form of five-fingered roulette. Properly speaking, the game is played against oneself and not, as Rimbaud preferred, against your friend and lover. But there never was anything remotely proper about Rimbaud. The hapless Verlaine spread his fingers and Rimbaud stabbed away. But he missed Verlaine’s hand entirely and stabbed him in the thigh. That’s not an easy thing to do. The chances are that Rimbaud was drunk or stoned, probably both.

I knew a bit about the Knife Game because I’d played it myself but forgotten utterly what it looked and felt like it. Reading about it brought back a memory of my school days so vivid it knocked me sideways. My school was run by Irish Christian Brothers, tough men from Cork. Discipline was enforced with detentions , expulsions , beatings and sometimes visits from the police. None of us were ever particularly shocked by any these things . We did what we could to dodge these penalties as a matter of course but we accepted them as natural because that was the way things were.

The upside of this was that we were left very much to our own devices. No teachers or anxious parents helicoptered overhead and we’d have been appalled had they done so. By the time I was about twelve, I’d seen the knife game played, well and badly, quite often. Some of my classmates used a crisply sharpened pencil instead of a knife. It took place at break-times on the school playground or we used a wooden desktop in a classroom. We played the game when we were bored, when we felt daring or just for fun. When the knife hit a finger, and it did, the blood was wiped or licked away. And it could be copious. A running tap, a sticking plaster was the usual treatment and we never said a word about it.

My momentary recapture of lost time was a long way from Marcel’s Proust’s madeleine dipped in lime blossom tea. But such moments can’t be commandeered and mine came with the image of Verlaine and Rimbaud playing the knife game at the Dead Rat.

The Dead Rat ran out of road in the 1930’s, when the Sicilian mafia moved in and opium and guns took over from pens and paints. It was by then a sorry shadow if its happily disreputable self. The Nouvelle Athenes , its old competitor, did better and hung on until 2004 . Today, what you will see at its address is a rather pedestrian Bio shop. The Dead Rat Café presents an even sadder picture. It has been reduced to the forgettable facade of another boring bank. Only the lucky or the most sanctified cafés of Paris, manage to escape the developers and the barbarians.

Count Henri Marie Raymond de Toulouse-Lautrec-Monfa , to give him his title and full name, dealt with the fate that genes and absinthe dealt him in two remarkable ways: painting and tomfoolery. Besides his passion for bars, brothels and dancers, he delighted in outsize jokes and over-the-top costumery. Some so wild they took a toll on even the most loyal of his long-suffering friends and family.

One of the best of Lautrec’s jokes involves a café in Montmartre, a café as far as I know never existed until Lautrec painted it into life and called it Café la Mie. It also has another, more apt title - ‘The Last Crumbs’ and he painted it in 1891, ten years before his death,

At the Café la Mie, 1891, Oil and gouache on cardboard

A couple sit at a table and the redheaded woman turns away, perhaps in disdain . Her saturnine companion stares at her empty plate beside which is a scrap of bread. This pair are, quite literally, down to their last crumb. The name of the café carries a double meaning of the sort that delighted Lautrec. It plays on the phrase “Un miché à la mie” , a bit of street slang familiar in both the bakery and the brothel. It refers to a large, round loaf of bread but also to a client who is too mean, or too broke, to pay a prostitute for what he owes her.

If photography in the 19^th century, was seen as a growing and formidable threat to the painter because it so easily captured an exact likeness, it could also become an ally. Lautrec had been working from photographs for some years before he produced this dramatic image.

And we still have the photograph he worked from. It has been very carefully posed and the painting shows Lautrec’s eerie skill in capturing a likeness. It is also an example of Lautrec’s alarmingly wayward sense of humour. It was a savage wit but there is so often in his paintings and drawings also an underlying tenderness

Photographer unknown, published later in L’Amour de l’Art 1931.

We do not know the name of the redheaded woman in the painting. But the lugubrious man beside her is Lautrec’s life-long friend , the wine merchant and photographer, Maurice Guibert. When Lautrec first came to Paris , Guibert acted acted as his guide and advisor . He introduced the young painter to every drinking hole, cabaret , brothel and chorus line Montmartre had to offer. Guibert was a very good photographer and immortalised his protege in various guises, in hats and cloaks, in unlikely poses and improbable outfits and in one case turned Lautrec into his own twin.

The two Lautrecs - Artist & Model. Photo Maurice Guibert 1890

Guibert was a regular at the suppers Lautrec enjoyed preparing. He was a chef of ambition and his cooking was as unexpected as his paintings and posters. His studio was equipped for superior meals and he cooked with pride, if without much regard for the effect his dishes might have on his guests. His recipes , described with stunning understatement as ‘adventurous’, were gathered together later by a friend, in a recipe book called ‘The Art of Cuisine’. Dishes included ‘quails in ashes and thrushes in juniper; stewed fillets of porpoise (preferably “harpooned” from the bowsprit of a cutter in the English Channel) and grasshoppers grilled in the fashion of Saint John the Baptist.’

Absinthe was his constant and fatal tipple and Lautrec hit the bottle in a big way. As he succumbed to the charms of what some drinkers called ‘the green fairy’, his habits became all the more outlandish. Julia Frey, in what is by far the most moving life of Lautrec, recounts his odd ways and wild escapades. He would mix raw eggs, rum and coffee for breakfast. He suffered from hallucinations that led him constantly to suspect his money was mishandled. He changed his underwear compulsively several times a day and developed an unnerving urge to make unwanted proposals of marriage to women he had only just met. For some reason, redheads were a particular attraction. He could be wildly generous and gave away his possessions impulsively, everything from cash to bed linen .

The two things he loved most combined to kill him, sex and booze. He died of alcoholism and syphilis. At the end of his life he was back in the ancestral family estate in Albi. And back in the milieu and with the mother he always longed to escape but to which, and to whom, he constantly returned. Contradictions were the stuff of his life. A kindly doctor who attended him in Paris, got closest to it when he described Lautrec as ‘a delicate spirit in a deformed shell’. About Lautrec’s constant and colossal consumption of alcohol, he thought it perhaps might be described as a form of ‘ agreeable suicide’

His father, Alphonse, may have contributed something to the bizarre humor Lautrec so enjoyed. As his son lay dying, his father used the elastic laces from his boots to shoot the flies that buzzed about the room. At his son’s funeral , impatient because the horses drawing the carriage moved so slowly, Alphonse pushed the coachman aside , lashed the horses into a gallop and the mourners, following on foot, had to run to keep up with the cortege. I think Lautrec might have enjoyed the spectacle .

Strange, is it not, how people who make something original are often happy to put it behind them. T S Eliot’s farewell to a finished poem sums this up rather well. ‘Go away, ‘he would say, ‘find yourself a place in some book.’ I think Gail Behr may have felt something of the sort when she put the Grand Café & Rooms on the market and moved on.

The Grand Café & Rooms Plettenberg Bay, South Africa

What struck me about the Grand Café & Rooms, when it opened in Plettenberg Bay back in 2004, was the café and it came with intriguing contradictions. Gail Behr had designed the quirkiest café on the Cape coast. Even the name was a tease born of a healthy irreverence for pomposity . By hitching ‘Grand Café’ to the throwaway tag, ‘& Rooms’, she made sure it would not be mistaken for just another pricey boutique hotel. The name hinted at spartan boarding houses, or no-frills motels. It was nothing of the sort. The promotional pamphlet Behr issued at its launch spoke excitedly of rooms with French beds and goose-down duets. The atmosphere of the Grand Café & Rooms would be anti-posh, comfortably down at heel and reassuringly but not ridiculously expensive, with no hint of the boarding house about it. Gail Behr enjoyed droll contradictions but, over time, they made it hard to square the circle.

I was happy to settle for the café alone. To me there had never been anything like it. The Grand Café pulled off the tricky job of doing simple things well. Excellent coffee and Mozart on the sound system were such novelties they felt positively unSouth African. What made the café truly grand came naturally and needed no puffery. It was the view from its deck, with the sea below and pastel blue mountains beyond. Later, when Behr designed the Dorp Hotel in Cape Town she said about it : ‘This is not a party place; it’s not a cocaine and champagne joint. It’s an oddballs club’

The Grand Café & Rooms felt like that . Her idea of a club was personal, a private place that admitted only those applicants who were as interesting, as other and as individual as she was. It was a high bar. It was as if what she built and designed were defendable hideaways, clubs that doubled as castles. She was quick to raise the drawbridge whenever undesirable invaders showed up on the other side of the moat. A friend recalled how she reacted:

‘“She dreaded the arrival of guests. We’d hear a car pull up, and we’d leopard crawl to the window. I would say, “you have to let them in. They are guests and this is a hotel”.

The right sort seem to have been people and places that were reliably off-centre, slightly creased and intriguingly odd. Her word for it was an untranslatable South Africanism, skedonky , meaning more or less something, or someone, knocked about by life , battered and bruised but soldiering on. It is an endearing trait but perhaps not a good business model . Anyone who knows Plett also knows that its summer season seethes with plutocrats but you’d struggle to find enough oddballs and eccentrics to fill even a small café.

The Grand Café & Rooms was up against that reality from the start. The very idea was preposterous – but what better reason for having a go ? As she explained in an interview she gave to that defunct magazine,Noseweek : ‘It’s not funny but then life’s not funny. It’s fucking tough. How else do you do life without a sense of the ridiculous?’

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The more interesting question about the Grand Café & Rooms is not why Gail Behr eventually moved on but why she built it in the first place. While it was was in restaurants , fashion and hotels that Behr made her name, she did so in the salubrious Cape . Yet it was Johannesburg where she was born and bred, that made her. The city has a way of stamping a life-long impress on its citizens. Deep down it is still the rough-scrabble mining camp it began as, back in 1884. The gold has gone , the town is broke but its citizens still enjoy mining the city’s rich absurdities with bleak , sometimes bitter, humour. As any gold miner knows, it takes a little acid to leach the ore from the rock. Behr called her hometown ‘the most wonderful place in the world . I miss it and I go there regularly. ‘

Her childhood reflected the city’s rapscallion ways. Her father founded a toy company but preferred playing the field. He kept a mistress in faraway Milan, suggesting a cosmopolitan streak his daughter admired. He ran off when Gail was eight and her mother divorced him and remarried. She also took care to lop off her ex-husband’s head in every photograph she possessed. Whenever her absent father showed up in Jo’burg, searching for his daughter, Gail was packed off to a new school to keep her out of his reach . She recalled running away from a convent school no fewer than eleven times . That was the sort of record for sheer grit that would win high praise in Jo’burg. She prized her unusual education. ‘I did the full gamut... English, Afrikaans, religious – every possible bloody school … we learnt about every possible type of human.”

Looking back later in life, she attributed her predilection for ‘running off with older men’ to her need to find her missing father. She was twenty when she married for the first time . It did not last long before she ran away with her riding instructor, a fleet-footed philanderer, and another version of her father. Next, she met Nicolas Behr, a white Russian baron from Latvia, who lived on a farm in Plettenberg Bay. He ticked all the boxes. He was seventeen years older than she was and, almost inevitably, an enthusiastic womaniser . At first, she tried her hand as a matchmaker but when none of the women she found were acceptable, Behr married the baron herself.

In the interview with Noseweek, she explained why the marriage lasted. ‘We were sort of social anarchists. We felt the same way about things even though he was a fascist and I was a tired old commie.’

When the baron died suddenly, after fifteen years of marriage, she buried him in the garden in Plett. ‘I put up a huge fascist tombstone and sat at his graveside for months. I had a magnificent period of mourning, then I laced up my boots and kicked on. I built the Grand Café in a fury of grief.’

This makes the Grand Café & Rooms a most unlikely monument. It also says something about how she resolved her problem of being always on the run, looking for home.When she did not find it she built a new one for herself.

Her last was the remarkable Dorp hotel, built high on a hillside above the old Malay Quarter in Cape Town. Being a Behr original , it is does all it can not to be mistaken for a hotel. Her description of it puzzled me when I came across it . She described the Dorp as ‘a haven for bruised nuns’. Then I remembered the convent from which she ran away so often.

I never pass the site of the Grand Café & Rooms without a pang of regret. A successor , renamed and repainted , stands on the spot today. I can trace the original outlines of the old red-brick stairway leading up to the flamingo pink portico. It is as if the old Grand Café peers out from behind a mask of newly applied make-up There was an irreverence about the Grand Café & Rooms that I liked a lot. It was a burlesque show, on the corner in a sleepy seaside town. It always did look too good to be true and, sad to say, things that look that way too often are.

Grand Café & Rooms Plettenberg Bay, (photo Chris von Ulmenstein)

The inventor of this quizzical café-cum-hotel was Gail Behr. She was, by turns, an interior designer, hotelier, restaurateur and a rebel who loathed the mundane. The name teases because ‘grand’ was the last thing the Grand Café set out to be. The name conjures up an image of some rooming house in the old American west, twinned with a blush- pink bistro on the Côte d’Azur but the fun of this improbable café was that it would not be defined. The Grand Café was, to use a word Gail Behr liked, skedonk. This is almost untranslatable South African street slang and echoes the bump and grind of an old jalopy on its last legs. But it may also extend to things gently bruised and bent, yet still good to look at. In the years when the Grand Café & Rooms paraded its pink facade on the main street in Plettenberg Bay, there was nowhere quite like it anywhere in South Africa.

It opened back in 2004 and for some years, whenever I was in Plettenberg Bay, I’d drop in for coffee. The café doubled as a dining room, and what made it special was its deck. You looked across the sea to the distant Tsitsikamma Mountains, sometimes seemingly built of blue powder, at other times so sharply etched they might have been cut from the sky itself.

The Grand Café did simple things very well, from rye toast and boiled eggs to the laid-back music mix of Mozart and Sinatra. I can’t remember ever seeing its owner but then I don’t look for company in a café. The best of them are places where you can be alone in a crowd.

Gail Behr liked to describe herself as shopkeeper at heart, but you’d need to add that whatever she sold was always bespoke. Some years before her death in 2022 , when she was designing a hotel above the old Cape Malay quarter in Cape Town, she described it as neither hotel, nor house, nor pub but rather ‘a kind of oddball’s club.’ That summed up the essence of the Grand Café & Rooms.

I have still a pink advertising flyer, issued around the time it first opened its doors. The copy speaks excitedly of red velvet and grand French beds, of goose-down duvets and capacious baths. It promises a refuge ‘fit for the worldly traveler... a haven where ‘grand-chic meets retro-romance’.

Grand Café deck, overlooking the Indian Ocean

A closer glance at the advertising brochure for Grand Café & Rooms hints at firm rules for guests. They may bring their children - but only if they are ‘over sixteen’. And they may bring their dogs, providing they are ‘well-behaved’. Gail Behr reminds me a little of that acerbic star of the hospitality industry, Basil Fawlty . Like him, she found that few guests ever came up to scratch and so, whenever possible, she preferred to do without them.

She once gave to Noseweek, the one South African satirical magazine worthy of the name, a remarkable interview. Like Behr herself it is sadly no longer with us. She died in 2024.The magazine was never afraid of speaking its mind, and this must have appealed to her because she did not mince her words. She summed up what she most disliked as ‘bullies and bullshit. And she promised that if guests at her establishments were ever rude to her staff, ‘I don’t give a fuck about throwing them out’.

I think she saw the Grand Café & Rooms as very much her home. After years of putting up with guests who failed to meet the high bar she had set, she eventually took over several rooms in the Grand Cafés rooms and moBved in . What that did not work out, she sold the Grand Café and moved on.

In a brave attempt to describe her, an observer called Gail Behr a modern-day Gertrude Stein. But this does justice to neither woman. If she resembled anyone, it might be someone like Muriel Belcher, doyenne of the Colony Club in Soho. This was the favoured drinking hole of artists like Francis Bacon and Lucien Freud, once described as ‘a character-building glorious hellhole...’ I think Gail Behr would have enjjoyed the compliment.

The oddest thing about her oddball’s club was the reason why it came to exist at all. The Grand Café & Rooms was not born out of sunny enthusiasm but from loss. Gail Behr preferred the surreal to the sentimental and the inspiration behind it came to her at a graveside. I’ll say more about this in the second part of this piece.

Not long ago, I sat in the Font Cafeteria in La Bisbal. This pretty pottery town in northern Catalonia is about an hour from the French border. I was reading George Orwell’s account of his time in the trenches during the Spanish Civil war. Orwell’s splendid diatribe is as fresh today as it was almost a century ago. And it is eerily prophetic of the political delusions of our times.

Where better place to read Homage to Catalonia than in a café in Catalonia? The Font has been here since the 1920’s. Like Catalonia itself, it looks very different today from the place it was in the brutal 1930’s. An old sepia photo of the Font shows a more imposing establishment , bigger and broader than the neat corner tearoom-cum bakery and ice-cream parlour where I sat with my book.

Font Cafeteria Placa Libertat La Bisbal Photo: Sabor Especiado

Orwell arrived in Barcelona 1936 and signed up almost immediately. He joined the ‘Lenin Brigade’, a group of left-wing anarchists, largely amateur and loyal to the ponderously named Workers Party of Marxist Unification, known by its Spanish acronym, POUM. The war was a brutal ,dangerous and often absurd and Orwell explains why it was so in quiet, brisk notes that make his account so startling to read. From the start, he thought the war was being fought on a mixture of ‘hope and camouflage’.

Homage to Catalonia is a fierce book yet lovely for its sanity and limpid clarity. It’s a well-tempered diatribe. An English critic described Orwell’s laconic style as ‘irony tempered with vitriol’. Orwell saw action in the mountains, amid the mud and snow of a bitter winter. His fellow soldiers were ill-trained, armed with defective weapons , wearing flimsy boots that fell apart in the icy slush.

He is always warm when ne records the generosity of his comrades but he manages, somehow, to remain supremely unimpressed by war. There is drama but no glamour. There is farce and fury, but no glory. The five important things a soldier cares most about in trench warfare , Orwell lists in their order of importance : ‘firewood, food, tobacco, candles, and the enemy...’ the enemy, he points out, comes last.

It was when he meets a maestro of masquerade , a fat Russian Stalinist , a forerunner of an ‘entire profession’ that Orwell foresees the future of lying. The wholesale manufacture of falsehoods the fat Russian personifies was something that turned Orwell decisively against Stalin and Soviet dictatorship. This was to resurface in Animal Farm , his fable that tears into Stalinism. It is most memorably there in Orwell’s mordant invention of the Ministry of Truth, the perfect instrument with which a tyrannical state persuades its citizens not only to believe the lie but to love it.

As he watched the Left he detested go to war against the Left for which he fought ,Orwell’s illusions evaporated . To call the Spanish civil war a war for democracy,he decided, was ‘hogwash’. Even as Franco’s advanced on Barcelona, former allies who once fought real fascists now went to war with each other. Communist-led, Spanish Republicans, following Stalin’s directive in his ominous pamphlet : ’Ways of liquidating Trotskyists and other Double Dealers’ ,denounced as fascists Orwell’s comrades in arms, the anarchists and socialists of POUM.His friends were locked up, several were never seen again. Orwell was lucky to escape with his life.

Orwell was still recovering after being shot in the throat and on the run when he left Spain. He took the train for Port Bou , on the French border, carrying only a goatskin water bottle, small metal oil lamp and the notes that became Homage to Catalonia. His camera and photographs and anything else of value had been stolen by his own side. A theft he notes without resentment.

La Bisbal escaped the fiercest fighting in the Spanish Civil War, although towards the end its Romanesque palace served as a jail for those who resisted Franco’s fascists. I don’t know if Orwell passed through La Bisbal, on his way to the French border, or if he visited the café in Catalonia, where I sat reading his book. But quite by chance, I came across an unexpected reference to La Bisbal at the end of the Spanish War, in an account by the historian Nancy Phillips. She found it in the archives of former East Germany.

In January 1939, a large group of volunteers met in La Bisbal , at an unnamed café. Most of these fighters came from Germany and Sweden and served in the 11^th Brigade. They were due to leave Spain but were asked to rejoin the war. Franco had taken Barcelona , then Girona, and swept all before him. Floods of refugees, soon to number over half a million, fled towards the French border and exile. So many volunteers turned up that the café they met in was too small to hold them all . The meeting moved outside and voted to protect the refugees.

I think it’s unlikely that any café in la Bisbal was large enough to accommodate hundreds of soldiers. So it is possible that the Font, with its open access to Liberty Square, might have been the café in question. I’d like to believe so. But the story comes from the archives of the old East Germany, that most enthusiastically Orwellian of the Soviet satellite states. The only history permitted in the archives of the German Democratic Republic was also propaganda or, in Orwell’s word, ‘hogwash’.

Cafés are often conundrums. Good places for being alone but doing so in company. The right kind of café leans into that desire and this is part of the complicity it offers. The right café provides comfort, like familiar crockery, chipped at the edges perhaps but cheerful. Cafés come in many versions but when they vanish they cannot be revived. Now and then, rare examples survives. And the Troubadour is certainly one of these.

Adrian Maddox’s in his ‘Classic Cafes’, now sadly out of print, paid homage to what he called the vanishing ‘formica caffs’ . It is a love letter to those disheveled establishments with their ‘easy-wipe surfaces, the Pyrex vinegar container, the squeezy bottles of ketchup and brown sauce, the Formica tabletop, faux-leather banquettes and gaudy tiles’. They were dotted around London and other British cities, in the 1950’s and 1960’s. Many of the originals have closed , ‘Starbucked to death.’ They cannot be revived except as caricatures of their cheap and cheerful former selves. Those who mourn their passing will find splendid examples preserved on the Maddox website:http://www.classiccafes.co.uk/index.html).

When a young Canadian couple , Michael and Sheila van Bloemen, arrived in London in 1954, the bedraggled bedsits and dank basement flats of Earl’s Court were affordable nesting grounds for young colonial wayfarers. Broke but brave, they rented the attic over a grocer’s shop on the Old Brompton Road. They went on to buy the grocer’s shop downstairs , turned it into a coffee bar and called it the Troubadour.

The Troubadour Old Brompton Road Earls Court London

In the 1950’s, espresso joints answered to many job descriptions – they were milk bars, corner ‘caffs’, holes in the wall or greasy spoons. Often they came with real, or pretended , Italian connections. The Mokka Espresso bar was first to arrive in Soho in 1953. The story , disputed but too good to lose, is that the Mokka was opened by no less a personage than Gina Lollabrigida.

The Mokka boasted the first Gaggia coffee machine in London, a truly Roman totem, all aroma, gleam and steam. The new wave of coffee houses were soon serving thousands of espressos and cappuccinos in intimate hidey holes for happy, or hapless, like-minded kids. Anyone might walk in and anything went. And anything meant live music; folk , skiffle, rock , jazz - or simply a juke box in the corner than played them all .

By the 1960’s,the best musicians in the business were playing the Troubadour. Jimi Hendrix, Joni Mitchell, Elton John, Elvis Costello, Morrissey and Led Zeppelin, Paul Simon and Miles Davis were names on the bill before their names meant much to anyone. Bob Dylan might not be known at all had he stuck to his stage name, ‘Blind Boy Grunt’, for his British debut at the Troubadour in 1962.

What made the Troubadour work is what still makes it work. Its staying power was evident when I sat down there with an espresso, not long ago. The shadowy front room was almost empty , after what would have been another reliably late-night gig . Three or four silent customers at a corner table, the garden deserted , the staff missing, the blinking lights on the coffee machine the only sign of life. The Troubadour seemed not so much to have awoken but to be turning over in its sleep. Another day barely begun.

Michael and Sheila van Bloemen, decked out their new coffee house with bits and bobs and whatever tat they found in the junk shops on the Portobello Road. The decor still bemuses. Kettles, pith helmets and tractor seats are strung from the ceilings and ukuleles, pub mirrors, posters and fiddles bespatter the walls.

Treasures for the Troubadour, from the Portobello Road

The Troubadour soon had several other strings to its bow. It was a café, bar, club , working office and music mecca. Left-wing radicals of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, CND, plotted confrontation over coffee . A bunch of swivel-eyed young satirists founded and published Private Eye here and the Troubadour served as the magazine’s editorial office. One day in 1968, a posse of Black Panthers showed up on their first visit to London. They were being filmed, along with the Rolling Stones, for ‘One on One ‘, an improbable movie by Jean-Luc Goddard, who was briefly over from Paris. What did the Panthers make of the Troubadour’s ranks of coffee pots, pub signs , solar topees ? Not since Leonard Bernstein produced cocktails and canapes for the Black Panthers, in his double-story, thirteen room Park Lane penthouse in New York, an evening immortalised by Tom Wolfe in ‘Radical Chic’, has there been so unlikely a juxtaposition.

‘There must be a whiff of the 50s & 60s to the classic café. A waft of early 70s is acceptable’ Adrian Maddox suggests.

The Troubadour offers more than a whiff of those decades, it delivers the full blast. I’d like to say the café is unaltered but that’s wrong. There have been crucial changes yet somehow these vanish into the wood-work and all is (almost) what it was . The Troubadour is a coffee house ‘with benefits’. It goes on doing what the name on the door says it does and has kept doing it for decades, under four successive owners.

In a touching burst of unrestrained enthusiasm, Adrian Maddox claims ‘the classic British caff... as ‘ our Deux Magots , existentialism with chips and beans’. The Troubadour, perhaps as a Gallic gesture, has put out a couple of tables on the pavement. I am not sure that makes a French connection at any time short of high summer. On a blustery spring morning, I sat at a pavement table , watching the black cabs trundle along the Old Brompton Road and I have to say Paris felt a long way off.

What Adrian Maddox gets right is when he identifies what makes the British cafés he celebrates and remembers so unmistakably themselves. Things that go with eggs and chips in the ‘formica caffs’. The ticking radiators, melamine counters, vats of tea and windows that did not open. The sorts of cafés, as Maddox puts it, ‘for nestling into on a drizzly London morning and watching the world go by.’

What made a cavernous hostelry on the Kurfürstendamm, with its ponderous furnishings, pernickety waiters and indifferent cooking, one of legendary locales of Weimar Berlin? It helped a lot that the quality of the Romanisches Café’s customers outshone the cuisine. One observer described the customers as ‘fanatical vagrants, common folk and educated rogues, all completely cured of narrow-minded nationalism’.

The cure proved to be short-lived but while it lasted, a good time was had by the Romanisches Café’s devoted admirers. Bertolt Brecht, Otto Dix, Joseph Roth, George Grosz, Marlene Dietrich, Erich Maria Remarque, Walter Benjamin and Billy Wilder were just some of those who drank, danced and scandalised the bourgeoisie of Berlin. They were frequently photographed . Stephen Spender who lived in Berlin in those years called it a place of publicised faces, ‘presided over by the camera’.

Of course they also wrote about each and that helped the legend along. Lotte Lenya thought Bertold Brecht looked like ‘a herring with very sensitive hands’. Albert Einstein was dubbed ‘the relative husband’, for his constant flirtations at the café tables. But no-one looked at the patrons of the café with a sharper eye than Jeanne Mammen, a young artist who loved - and loathed - the place. She worked in pencil and watercolour and her lithographs from the 1920’s and 30’s breathe the sour-sweet air of Weimar café society.

At the Romanisches Café Berlin 1930 Jeanne Mammen

Under Kaiser Wilhelm, censorship in Berlin had been fierce and when the Kaiser abdicated in 1918 everybody spoke out all at once. Berlin in the Weimar years was home to hundreds of independent publishers, dozens of cabarets, film studios and theatres. At the tables of the Romanisches café, journalists wrote copy for several of over fifty daily newspapers.

Jean Mammen’s subjects were the cafe’s grandees, drunks, rakes and rebels. She shows cross-dressed women (‘les garcons’) and its ‘tauentzien’ girls, dancers with an eagle eye on paying partners. Her pictures are startling for their energy, but even more striking for their icy disdain. You feel she never really liked the people she paints and yet she could not look away. I think her lithographs are every bit as powerful as Toulouse-Lautrec’s, but with a crucial difference. Lautrec’s dancers and bordellos are shown with a certain tenderness. Jeanne Mammen turns an icy eye on café nightlife of Berlin in the 1920’s and 1930’s. Her pictures are as provocative as the people she paints.

The philosopher, Walter Benjamin , saw the Romanisches less as a café than a ‘strategic headquarters’, where its participants explored ideas, controversies, radical politics and sexual experiments of which several shaped the 20^th century. Those who take to café life, Benjamin suggested, possess a ‘passion for waiting.’ And I would add to that, a passion for watching.

Jeanne Mammen had a passion for watching. She once wrote that she wished to be nothing more than a seeing eye. But what her eye recorded with scornful delight disturbed the easily offended moralists active among Berlin’s increasingly powerful National Socialists. When her illustrations were featured in a published guide to Berlin’s gay and lesbian nightlife, her work was banned.

The Romanisches Café was a territorial arena and celebrity status counted. The large front room was given over nervous newcomers. The side room was reserved for intellectual and artistic celebrities, those ‘in the swim’. The outside terrace was set aside for the chess players. A rare photograph, showing the empty front room , perfectly captures the blank boredom of the staff as they await the arrival of the party animals .

Front Room Romanisches Café 1917

As a girl, Jeanne Mammen studied painting in Berlin , then in Paris and Brussels. But when the First World War loomed, her family were expelled from Paris for being German and then from Belgium. Back in Berlin, she was hounded for being Jewish. Loneliness , exile and endurance were what she knew best. In many ways, the Romanisches Café was as close to home as she ever got. But it was to be a temporary haven.

You might say that what sunk this remarkable café was what once made it so popular. Its celebrated customers came less and less. Respectability came to call. Walter Benjamin noted how the artists faded away ‘ into little more than part of the décor, while the bourgeoisie – represented by stockbrokers, managers, film and theater agents, and literature-loving clerks, began to take over the space.’

Far more dangerous customers were soon knocking on the door. As early as 1926, Joseph Goebbels complained that “ Bolshevik Jews … sit in the Romanisches Café and hatch their sinister plans for a revolution.” By 1933, uniformed Gestapo officers reserved their own table and things were never the same again.

Jeanne Mammen spent the war in Berlin, working under the radar and somehow survived. When canvas and oil paints were unobtainable, she used cardboard and gouache. To earn a living she sold second-hand books from a barrow. She turned bits of wire from the bombed-out Berlin streets into sculptures. In the harsh years following the war, she made sinuous paintings using string from food-parcels friends sent her from abroad.

The café was destroyed by Allied bombs in 1943, but you might say it began to die in the 1930’s, when Gestapo officers set up their table and many guests fled. Wolfgang Koeppen, who knew it as young man, composed a kind of graveyard lament for those who once made the cafe so memorable. They were scattered, he writes, ‘all over the world or were captured or were killed or took their own lives or cowered and still sat in the café, with mediocre reading material, ashamed of... the great betrayal...’

Jeanne Mammen lived in Berlin until her death in 1976. Her work has very slowly received the attention it deserves. But I don’t think that bothered her one bit. The best sort of patriot, Gore Vidal once suggested, is rude about his own country. Jeanne Mammen was outspoken to the end. ‘I find it vile even still.’ she wrote,’ the whole manner of the people is alien to me.’ She immortalised her crowded Berlin cafés with carefree insolence and biting wit. Yet there is something approaching admiration in her dissection of the disagreeable, jostling customers of the Romanisches Café, the dodgy men and dubious women. And it renders them anything but alien.

It’s not uncommon to meet someone who reminds you of a character from a story. It is less usual to meet someone who prefigures a person you will meet only years later. That’s what happened to me one day in the mid 1970’s, at a pavement table outside Café la Palette, when I met a man who did both of those things. La Palette seemed to be made for surprising meetings.

Café La Palette Rue de Seine Paris

I was finishing my coffee on a summer morning, when I overheard snatches of conversation between a couple at a table behind me. He was burly and bearded, she was a petite brunette. He was speaking halting French, in a growl as thick as his beard , with an unmistakable South African accent. So I turned and greeted him in Afrikaans. He stopped in mid-sentence, came over to me and gave me a bearhug.

‘One of ours,’ he explained to the girl and for a moment I thought he might weep.

His name was Giljon and he was from a small town in the Transvaal lowveld. She was Élodie and they had been together, she told me, ever since she had ‘rescued’ him, lost and lonely in Paris. Giljon she explained, was ‘a rugby refugee.’ There had been a Springbok tour of France in November 1974 and Giljon had flown Paris to watch the game. The Springboks won at Parc des Princes by 10-8 . Giljon was among a group of young South Africans who celebrated the victory rather all too well, on the night before their flight back to Johannesburg.

At some point in the evening, as the group moved from café to café, Giljon wandered off on his own , got lost and missed the flight home. He spoke no French at the time and he could not pay for another ticket. He had met Élodie at a cafe in the Boulevard St. Germain, where she waitressed and they had been together ever since. Giljon took odd jobs at Les Halles , the food and vegetable market nearby, washed dishes and swept streets to earn money for another air ticket. But he seemed to be in no hurry to return home.

Giljon liked to make historical connections. His told me his name came from the Bible, the Afrikaans form of ‘Chilion’. He talked proudly of his French Huguenot roots . Living in Paris, he felt that he had come ‘home’.

I liked Giljon and Élodie, though I feared that seeming similarities between his background and hers might one day surface. Back in the lowveld town where he worked , Giljon sold farming equipment and this might be where misunderstanding crept in. Élodie took Giljon for a farmer, a Boer, and her very French reading of South African history told her that the Boers had been freedom fighters who rode out on horseback to repel the imperialist British invaders. Giljon deepened her sense of connection with the mounted guerilla fighters of the Boer War by pressing her to read Denys Reitz’s immortal memoir, Kommando. He also pointed out that, to begin with at least , the Reitz family had been French.

When we walked along the Seine and passed the statue of King Henry V, mounted on his horse, Élodie would point to Giljon and say fondly : ‘Just like my mad equestrian.’

Giljon was a fine speaker and I admired his beautifully measured Afrikaans. It made me feel very homesick. But homesickness is a fever that stokes illusions. Élodie pictured Giljon as some kind of cowboy, a Boer Zoro . I saw a man who had sold tractors in Ermelo. My view was more realistic perhaps, but hers was more perceptive and much more revealing.

I saw them both a few times at la Palette, then they vanished. They had talked of moving back to South Africa and also of heading south to the Camargue. Giljon liked Roy Campbell’s poem about its wild horses. If it was South Africa they had chosen then I feared Élodie might be disappointed to find that the Boers she met rode not horses but Japanese pick-ups.

Giljon things in common with Manie Kruger, a character in a story by my favourite South African writer, Herman Charles Bosman. Bosman also spent time in Paris and was much influenced by the stories of Guy de Maupassant . If Giljon made too much of his treasured French Huguenot connections, then so did Manie Kruger , a dreamer whose improvident musical ambitions to be a great soloist end in disappointment and failure. These opening lines from ‘The Music Maker’ sum up Bosman’s comic genius for unpeeling the layers of pretension and pathos that underlie the South African psyche:

‘One day Manie Kruger read an article in the Kerkbode about a musician who said that he knew more about music than Napoleon did. After that having first read another article to find out who Napoleon was, Manie Kruger was changed, man. He could talk of nothing but his place in history and his musical career...’

The man whom Giljon prefigured and whom I met many years later, was another dreamer with an overriding sense of his historical destiny, someone who took names and words to heart . He was Eugene Terre’Blanche, alias Mr White Earth, founder of Afrikaner Resistance Movement . Like Giljon, he spoke beautifully clear Afrikaans, though what he had to say was often poppycock. I got know him when British newspapers took an interest and asked me to write about him and his movement.

When I described Terre’Blanche’s rallies as ‘Nuremberg designed at Woolworths,’ he took it rather well. He was a very minor poet, a lamentable politician and when, in front of a bank of press cameras , he fell off his horse, the South African state media, dubbed him ‘a failed horseman’.

King Henry 1V Pont Neuf Paris

: Eugene Terre’Blanche (Photo Shayne Robinson)

In his lamentable career, there was again the pattern that is quintessentially South African.When he was murdered on his farm Villana, just outside Ventersdorp, on 3 April 2010, I covered the trial of his killers. His murder was yet another botched job. Again the pattern persists. However dark the tale, there runs through it a vein of bleak comedy. The same goes for Giljon, the crazy equestrian and for Manie Kruger, the unsuccessful music maker in Bosman’s bitter-sweet story.

There is more truth about South Africa to be found in its writers than in its constant racist rancour, more perception in its poets than its politicians and deeper insights to be gleaned from its failures than from its sermonising fanatics, past and present.

When I stayed for a while at 31, Rue de Seine, two significant ghosts haunted the house. The celebrated French writer, George Sand, had lived here in the 19^th century. Famed in France for her novels and even better known as the lover of Frédéric Chopin, hers was a rich and controversial life. But it seems a model of propriety beside that eccentric shaman in sandals , Raymond Duncan, brother of the more famous Isadora, who also lived at this address a century later.

Born in San Francisco in 1874, Raymond Duncan regarded the world as his stage. When the world did not see things his way, he built his own stage in the courtyard of Number 31, Rue de Seine. He called it his ‘Akademia’ and claimed it was based on Plato’s school of philosophy in Athens. The Akademia became his stage in his roles as philosopher, dancer, director, poet, actor, craftsman and mystic. He wore hand-woven Greek tunics and sandals in all weathers, and not much else. He tied back his long hair with a silk band and looked like a dancing druid . He gave courses in nutrition, movement and philosophy but his most cherished product, promoted tirelessly , was himself. ‘Wonderful are the arts of publicity,’ he once said and meant it.

Raymond Duncan died in 1966 but when I spent time at his old address I got the feeling he had never really left the building . I passed in the courtyard each morning, photographs , advertisements and posters featuring his exploits. In nearby Café la Palette, I met now and then, elderly neighbours who still remembered Raymond Duncan with a smile, a shrug and a shake of the head.

Inside Café la Palette Rue de Seine Paris

When the world laughed at his looks or his nubile disciples, he was unfazed. He had no sooner landed in Paris as a young man in 1929, than American newspapers, as far away as Oregon, were reporting excitedly on his costume and his career:

‘Raymond Duncan, of California, brother of the famous dancer, Isadora Duncan, has startled Paris by parading the boulevards attired in a classic Greek costume, with a tunic reaching to his knees, bare legs and a crown covering his long flowing hair. Several times he escaped arrest for immodesty.’

Although he lived in Paris for much of his long life, his heart was in Greece. But the classical Greek virtues he promoted were, like so many other things , figments of his highly individual imagination. Right from its start in 1911, his Akademia attracted disciples, many of them young women , who adopted his fashion for wearing only hand woven tunics and leather sandals, in all weathers .When a thief broke into the Akademia, he came away empty handed but left a despairing note. ‘It is not possible,’ he wrote, ‘to rob the nude.’

Raymond Duncan at the Akademia, Paris

Duncan gave up meat at about the same time as he abandoned conventional dress and this caused almost as much scandal in France as did his coterie of female followers .Viewed from a safe distance, he seemed to his compatriots back home in the USA, even more bizarre. He was one of those people, a scandalised editor wrote, who went to Paris in order to give Americans a bad name. But he also travelled regularly to the US , and performed at Carnegie Hall, unperturbed by the shock his personal habits caused his compatriots. He seems to have been immune to derision and beyond satire .

There were rumours about his relations with the young women who attended the Akademia. Along with promoting home-woven tunics and a vegetarian diet, Duncan also gave lectures on ‘la sexualité de l’avenir (the sexuality of the future). This had repercussions . In 1925, a group of disappointed acolytes signed a petition accusing him of bad faith:

‘We went to him to find beauty and harmony ‘ they wrote ‘– but what we got were lies and hypocrisy.’

Yet nothing got him down. On his 88^th birthday he danced the night away in Paris. When he turned 90, he appeared in another show at Carnegie Hall, for which he was the one-man cast . When he died in 1966, his obituary in Le Monde announced: ‘The Saint-Germain-des-Prés district has just lost its most picturesque character.’

That was putting it mildly.

When I had the good luck to stay at number 31, Rue de Seine, the last of Raymond Duncan’s followers was still living at his Akademie in the courtyard. I’d see her each morning as I came downstairs, on my way to breakfast at Cafe la Palette. Some said she was his last student, others said she was his last surviving mistress. She looked about 80 and was a stately presence. She wore her hair hair tied back with the silk band,as required by the Duncan dress code, her Greek tunic was belted at the waist and her sandals slapped softly on the cobbles as she crossed the courtyard.

cafe complicity christopher hope substack

In the early 1970’s I was lucky enough to spend some time in Paris at Number 31, in the Rue de Seine. It belonged to a friend who spent his summer holidays in Italy. You entered the building through large wooden doors on the street, passed into a courtyard where the concierge had her quarters. She scrutinised , with appropriate suspicion, those who came and went. Four - or was it five? - flights of stairs led up to the attic beneath the roof beams. This apartment would have been, I now realise, one of the last remaining garrets in the Rue de Seine. Perhaps not surprisingly, I spent much of my time not in the romantic but rudimentary warren of wooden rooms under the roof of number 31, but in Café la Palette, a short walk away.

Café la Palette Rue de Seine Paris

I found Rue de Seine rather daunting. The famous phantoms of St.-Germain-des-Prés pressed in from all sides and insisted I salute them at every turn. The Louvre was up the road , the Luxembourg Gardens and celebrated cafés like les Deux Magots and La Coupole were nearby. I knew from my reading that Baudelaire once had rooms in the Rue de Seine. Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir had lived in the Hotel La Louisiane. All of it seemed to come at me all at once.

I was fascinated by the people I saw on the street. But how was I to picture them to myself? I could neither draw nor paint and I struggled to find a way of fighting off image overload. Café La Palette pointed towards a way of doing this. Because it is on the palette that a painter assembles the colours that make a picture. If I looked carefully, the street seemed to have ways of painting itself. There was the greengrocer who polished each red apple to a scarlet sheen. The old fencing master in a dark -blue suit, stooped as a wind-blown tree, his épée long since laid aside. On his walk to the bakery each morning he seemed to glide by as if on ice.

The Rue de Seine in those days was raffish and nicely bedraggled, sometimes grey and gloomy, always vivid. But St.-Germain-des-Prés was gentrifying. Property prices were climbing, apartments and shops in rue de Seine were giving way to antique dealers, art galleries and coteries of visiting Hollywood actors who roosted in the bars and cafés. When Dior, Yves Saint Laurent and Hugo Boss opened showrooms and parked themselves like shapely tanks on strategic corners, the invasion was unstoppable. When I pass the entrance to number 31 Rue de Seine these days, its smartly painted doors look too good to be true.

Entrance: 31 rue des Seine

But Café La Palette has stayed much as it was. It goes back many decades but it was in the 1930’s that it became a popular hangout for students from the nearby École-des-beaux-arts. Somehow or other it has kept the relaxed air of a student bivouac. La Palette has its share of famous phantoms . Cezanne, Picasso and Braque all drank here and it turns up in films and contemporary novels. But it is not a café that hankers after the past. It is still what it was, a good place on the corner.

The Rue des Seine has constantly reinvented itself over the centuries. I remember seeing for the first time a small, nondescript hotel in the nearby Rue des Beaux Arts . It described itself, with towering simplicity as ‘L’Hotel’ . But nothing interesting is ever simple - and never in the Rue de Seine. Because for much of the 19th century, L’Hotel had been called the Hotel D’Alsace and it was a grimy, flea-ridden dosshouse. It was at the Hotel D’Alsace that Oscar Wilde, after his release from prison in England, checked in under an assumed name in 1900. He was in disgrace, dead broke and he hated the hotel. In a letter to his publisher, Wilde described it as so dirty and ugly that it broke his heart. He went on to remark, in a magnificent example of grace under pressure, ‘My wallpaper and I are fighting a duel to the death. One or the other of us has got to go.’.

As we know, he lost the duel.

In its present incarnation, the Hotel de Seine, as it is called today, is another place entirely. When he gave it a radical face-lift in the late 1960’s, its architect chose to celebrate the taste and brilliance of L’Hotel’s most famous non-paying guest but he left out all the sad bits. Wilde died there, unable to pay his hotel bill and friends had to settle that later. I like to think that he might have enjoyed the comedy of it all. Admirers from around the world make pilgrimages to this hotel and pay handsomely for the privilege of sleeping in the splendid Oscar Wilde suite, where the wallpaper does him proud. After all, Oscar Wilde never cared for false modesty : ’To love oneself,’ he suggested, ‘is the beginning of a life-long romance.’

Café Novecento is on a quiet narrow street in the centre of Rome, midway between Piazza Navona and Campo de‘ Fiori. The comfortable room at the back of the café, where I had breakfast, smelt of newly baked pastry and fresh coffee. But what caught my eye was a line of open books with their covers spread like wings, pinned on the wall. I asked the owner of the café where the idea came from and she said simply,’ I wanted to see how they looked.’

For someone who writes books, this flight of papery biblio-birds on the wall was unsettling. It reminded me that Rome is as much a stage as a city. The never-ending show may be beautiful but every now and then you get a glimpse of the brutality that underpins it and you think again .

Café Novecento Via del Governo Vecchio Rome

Even the name of Café Novecento (‘new century’) begs the question . Rome has been remaking itself for nearly three thousand years, so which particular century are we talking about? Café Novecento is a short walk from the ancient food market on the Campo de’ Fiori. Its name goes back to the time when it was a simply flowering meadow, not far from the Tiber. For centuries market stall-holders in this square have sold fruit, vegetables, meat, fish, flowers, fresh pasta and spices. But Campo de’ Fiori once had quite another function. It was a busy, open-air theatre of torture and public execution, where books that challenged Catholic dogma were ceremoniously burnt. As the poet, Heini, ruefully recorded, those who burn books will, before long, be burning people. It was on Campo de’ Fiori that the Roman Inquisition did both, feeding bodies and books to the bonfire.

The cowled figure of Giordano Bruno looms over the market stalls. Bruno was many things: monk, astronomer, polymath, playwright, magician, pantheist, satirist, mystic and also , it must be said, snake-oil seller. His writings influenced later mystic cults like Rosicrucianism and Freemasonry. His courage was extraordinary but he had a fatal gift for making enemies.

His life-long, restless travels in Italy, Germany, Switzerland and France all ended badly. His opinions infuriated his hosts and he was forced to flee for his life. After a visit to England, he dismissed this hosts as ‘disrespectful, uncivil, rough, rustic, savage and badly brought up’. Not surprisingly, they threw him out . The new Protestant movements, to which Bruno briefly attached himself, came to detest his ideas almost as much as the Roman Catholics did.

Along with Copernicus and Galileo, Bruno believed that the earth circled the sun but he went even further by asserting that our sun was merely one star among many, in an infinite universe. Church teaching held that our planet was the centre of the universe .The Roman Inquisition found Giordano Bruno guilty of heresy and, after a long trial, sentenced him to death .

On February 17, 1600, Bruno was taken to the Campo de’ Fiori, stripped naked, tied to stake with an iron plate clamped over his tongue and burnt alive. His ashes were tossed into the Tiber. A contemporary observer reported that the eerily named ‘Confraternity of the Beheading of St John’ sang hymns throughout the execution.

His statue on the Campo de’ Fiori, stands on the site of his execution and shows him dressed as a Dominican Monk, his first profession. It was erected in 1889, in the heady days of Italy’s unification, by radical free thinkers and opponents of Vatican power and it is a political statement in stone . Bruno faces towards the Vatican, he is an emphatic rebuke to the powers that condemned him

With his death there began the new life of Giordano Bruno, martyr to science, champion of independent religious belief and radical visionary of a reborn Italy. Every year , on the anniversary of his death, freemasons, pantheists , atheists and republicans assemble on the Campo de’ Fiori and lay a wreath in his memory.

Giordani Bruno Campo de’ Fiori (photo Remi Jouan)

I sat over my coffee a good while in Café Novecento and thought about this. Context is everything. Auden put it so well in one of his poems, when he asks: ‘who knows what ugly feast may village band be celebrating?’

In a properly ordered universe, books are not hunting trophies, pinioned to the plaster. In an orderly world, food markets are for sellers of aubergines and carrots, not for fiery martyrdom. But remove the familiar, reliable frame from something you think you know and its meaning vanishes. What you don’t see until almost too late, creeps up and sandbags you. Rome may wear its history on it sleeve, but not its heart. It is not a sentimental city. Some four hundred years after Bruno’s execution, on the anniversary of his death, the Vatican offered a partial apology for what it called a ‘sad episode.’

Nico liked to the urge school kids visiting his café to ‘read my walls’. But half the fun was looking at Nico in his ragged Panama hat, big and tall behind the glass display cabinet, His brother Ajax we glimpsed only now and then, when the kitchen door swung open. In the flickering neon light, his sweaty forehead turned yellow as the jars of piccalilli sauce, he stacked on the kitchen shelves.

The travel ads, photos and paintings Nico pinned all over his walls told us that however long we looked , we’d never know as much as Nico knew. He seemed to have stepped out of a poem we read in class, about a village schoolmaster so hugely learned he dazzled his neighbours:

‘And still they gaz’d and still their wonder grew / That one small head could carry all he knew’.

I’ve written, in earlier pieces, about the pictures of men in hats, pinned to Nico’s walls, that I remember best. One was a group of Greek sailors on a café terrace, white caps gleaming like mushrooms. The other was Manet’s painting of the Absinthe Drinker, a man in a hat as tall as a chimney. But the picture that moved me most , showed a thin, hungry man in a large cap, sitting at a café table.

Farmer in a café, Pie Town, New Mexico ,1940 (photo Russel Lee)

The photo had been taken, said Nico, in a place called Pie Town. That name spoilt the effect of the picture and I said so. We’d read in class a poem about a place called Xanadu and another about a lady from Shalott. You got lots of fake names in poems. Nico told me I did not deserve to live in a suburb called Arcadia, I hadn’t the brains to appreciate beauty or poetry. ‘Poems can be as true as geography,’ he said. There once was in China a real place called Xanadu. And Pie Town was real enough . It was a tiny settlement in New Mexico, ‘somewhere southwest of Albuquerque’. Why not look it up? The city lending library was a bus ride away and there I could borrow three books a week, at a penny a time. It was when Nico said ‘somewhere southwest of Albuquerque’, that I heard geography turning into poetry.

Each week I took the bus to the library and there began a love affair with books and libraries that has lasted a lifetime. Wandering among boulevards of tall, tightly stacked shelves gave me a dizzying sense of freedom. The air smelt of floor polish, paper and leather bindings. To pull a book from the shelves was to escape in some new direction, no permission needed, no adult help required. I tracked down New Mexico, found Alburquerque and read about the Great Depression in America, in the 1930’s. I trawled through photos, taken to show how bad things were for farmers in places like Oklahoma and New Mexico. Best of all, I found something Nico did not know – an outside view of Pie Town café, where the hungry farmer ate his meal.

Pie Town Café (Russell Lee, 1940)

Reading Nico’s walls was one way of letting in the outside world. But doing my own reading helped me to order the rush of names and places the two brothers pumped out so unceasingly that I felt I might drown in it. They talked about faraway cities like Paris, where Ajax had washed dishes and worked as a baker. Nico would correct him, ‘Rolling dough doesn’t make a baker. Anyway, you did that in Naples, not Paris.’

The origins of the bright yellow piccalilli they applied so generously to their scanty hamburgers were another matter of debate. Nico reminded Ajax he had served in the Greek navy, visited India and swore that sauce began as an Indian pickle, made with chili, gherkins, cabbage and turmeric. Ajax had worked in London and claimed that true piccalilli was made with cucumber, cider vinegar, cauliflower, mustard seed and currants. It was as English, Ajax repeated in his broad South African drawl - as ‘Buckenim Pelless‘.

One day I rode over to Nico’s place and found it closed and dark. I had hoped to return a gift Nico had made me a few days earlier – a sealed jar of his piccalilli. I see now it was a going-away present because the brothers left without warning and never came back. I hid the jar in my cupboard until I decided what to do with it. I knew that my mother would not be impressed by the gift. She always referred to the brothers as ‘those odd-bod Greeks’. Without Nico and Ajax and their hamburgers, that jar made no sense. There was no way I could eat it alone and so, in desperation, I dug a deep hole in a flowerbed and buried it.

But what you bury may come back to haunt you and that jar would not stay buried. As I grew older, it would be summoned by a chance line of verse, like those by Wallace Stevens :

/ I placed a jar in Tennessee, / And round it was, upon a hill/.

More haunting still was T S Eliot’s warning in The Wasteland:

/Oh keep the Dog far hence, that’s friend to men/ Or with his nails he’ll dig it up again!

Those memories that jar still digs up for me are of Nico telling us to ‘ read my walls’. Of Ajax shouting orders from the kitchen stove ,of Nico’s crystal sets that ‘let the outside world in’ and pictures of cafés and men in hats. For the gaggle of schoolboys who crowded into a tiny foodshop run by two noisy Greeks, on an unremarkable suburban street, this was sheer luck. Our Arcadia may have been, as the brothers reminded us often, a lousy copy of the Greek original. But for a while, we did have Nico’s place and that made it more than good enough for me.

Nico’s place was small. One front room, divided between the kitchen where Ajax worked, and the café. Much of the space was taken up by a glass display case and a big fridge. To eat the paper-thin ham sandwiches he sold, or one of his unusual yellow hamburgers, we would lean up against the glass display counter and nibble carefully. Nico’s made his shop feel much bigger by pinning to the walls, advertisements for airlines, ocean voyages, pictures of capital cities, photos of cafés in California and Katmandu , opera posters, song sheets and copies of paintings he fancied. The two brothers lived in rooms above the shop and, as best I remember, never married.

Nico liked pointing out to us how very little we knew. We lived in a suburb of Pretoria called Arcadia, a place in ancient Greece that summed up beauty and harmony. How come, he asked, did we know nothing about books, painting or music.

‘You got zero, a big fat nothing, in your heads. It hurts me, knowing how little you know. It’s a nothing emptier and deeper than even the Big Hole in Kimberley. And that’s not a compliment.’

None of us had ever been to Kimberley and we would take that as some sort of compliment. In our schoolboy world what counted was doing, not thinking, winning not losing. What mattered most was physical and forceful. What we needed to know was how to use our hands, feet and muscles.

We fitted exactly Ajax’s dim view of us. He’d come out of the kitchen in his red skull cap, looking more like a bishop than a cook, and complain : ‘You boys don’t know nothing about nothing. You come from very rough surroundings.’

Art, or what passed for it, was to be avoided or hidden. Reading a book in plain sight happened only in church on Sunday. To be seen, book in hand outdoors, or in unexpected places, stoked suspicion or derision and hinted at unhealthy rebellion, even sedition. None of my classmates had been to an art gallery. Anyone odd enough to take music lessons would hide his books inside his shirt when he cycled to lessons, or risk running the gauntlet of his jeering classmates.

‘Read my walls, boys, “Nico would invite us, whenever we arrived in his café.

His walls were a moving picture show. But one of the pictures might also be bait. That happened to me when I asked about a painting I called ‘the man in the hat’.

Nico shook his head: ‘That’s no hat. More like a chimney, if you ask me. And let me tell you - this very big picture got the painter into very big trouble.’

Nico stretched his arms out very wide and wiggled his fingers to show me just how big the painting had been and how much trouble it caused. What made the painting so wrong, said Nico, was also what made it great. And I was hooked.

Edouard Manet The Absinthe Drinker 1859

There once was a young artist called Manet, Nico told me. He entered his first important painting in a competition in Paris. The judges took one look and threw it out. Everything in Manet’s painting was wrong. Only kings and dukes and aristocrats should be painted full size. Instead, Manet had dressed this bloke in a rich brown cloak, a ridiculously tall hat and fancy shoes, ‘like a bloody ballet dancer’. Everyone knew him. His name was Collardet and Manet had painted an absinthe drinker as an aristocrat, a beggar like a baronet , empty bottle at his feet, about to down his last glass. Collardet was a rag-picker and a drunk, hooked on nasty green booze that tasted of liquorice. This painting was an insult to respectable people because it was their job to look down on derelicts like Collardet – not the other way around.

I can never get quite right the power of Nico’s performances, as he unpicked the history behind one of the pictures on the walls of his small shop . But some of his verbal tics stick like burrs in the fur of memory. He always pronounced the final ‘t’ in French words, with a breathy kick : ‘Manet-uh! and Collardet-uh!’. We waited to see the whisps of straw that hung from the brim of his old Panama hat float and fall.

Nico did what he could to reduce our invincible ignorance . He even added to his pictures on the walls, a black and white photo of the Big Hole in Kimberley. Water had partly filled the enormous hole and this meant, said Nico, that its emptiness, like our ignorance, was much deeper than we could see. But this made us prouder than ever that we should have something so big inside us.

But now and then, we did learn to look. One picture opened a window into another world. When I think back to Nico now, I see him not so much as a fisherman, baiting his hook. I see him as a man patiently dropping one stone after the next into a deep well, in the faint hope of hearing an answering splash.

I must have been about eleven when I decided that a room above a café was the place for me. I lived in Pretoria, in a suburb called Arcadia and when I rode my bike to school in the mornings, I passed a corner café with no name on the door. Most grown-ups knew it simply as ‘the Greek shop’. But to neighbourhood kids it was ‘Nico’s place’.

Nico lived over the shop with his brother, Ajax. He liked pointing out to those who stopped by his shop that the best things in the world, philosophy, architecture and mathematics, began in ancient Greece. Even the name of our suburb, Arcadia, we owed to Greece. The first and true Arcadia had been a place of perfect wonder and beauty, Nico told us, ‘but yours is a bad copy,’

I felt Nico was right about what was truly perfect. And that included the look and feel of his café. On late summer afternoons, I’d ride to Nico’s place for no other reason than to see the warmly lit upstairs rooms and steam from the kitchen misting the café windows. Finding things looking the way I’d hoped , I’d ride home again, popping jacaranda blossoms under my tyres as I pedalled.

Nico was also a radio ham and built his own crystal sets, thickets of copper coils, clips and connections, mounted on small wooden boards. A long wire fixed to the backyard fence or to the iron stairs of his outside fire-escape made an antenna. He helped me fit the uncomfortable plastic earpiece and told me I would hear voices from local radio stations, but others from faraway. ‘They let the outside in,’ said Nico. The voices were often drowned by squawks and squeals but they came all the way , said Nico, from the outside world and I was hooked.

Nico was also a general dealer and he sold milk, sweets, cigarettes, sandwiches, rice, firewood and paraffin. But the small front section of his shop was his café, known to the kids of Arcadia for hamburgers. They cost very little and Nico made them according to what he called ‘my Greek design’. A thin steak, often charred, was smothered in home-made piccalilli and clamped between slices of white bread. There were no tables or chairs in the small section Nico called his café, so we leaned against glass display counter and nibbled carefully , knowing that Nico did not like a mess.

Both brothers wore hats, always and everywhere. The brim of Nico’s old Panama trailed wisps of straw that swayed when he moved his head and danced when he shouted orders to the kitchen, where Ajax did the cooking. Ajax wore a small red skull cap like those I’d seen in pictures of Catholic cardinals. Ajax was a welder by trade and in his spare time he liked to sculpt scraps of iron into spiky circles, each showing some faintly human feature, an ear, eyelash or off-centre nose. He talked rather sadly of his masks as ‘my people’ and hung them like hunting trophies on the walls of the room.

Between Ajax’s scrap-iron masks, Nico stuck pages torn from the Reader’s Digest. Some were travel ads, others photos and paintings of men in cafés, from all over the world. And the men in those cafés all wore hats. I studied the pictures and read the ads so often I got to know them by heart. Royal Scandinavian Airlines offered flights ‘to 75 cities and 35 countries, in Europe and America’. Rhodesian Viscounts of Central African Airways took off for the Nile Valley or Paris or London, each week. Quantas Airlines flew ‘Super C Constellations to Amazing Japan’. The luxury cruisers of Farrell Lines squeezed an irresistible promise into a single sentence : ‘America Starts at Cape Town’.

The cafés pictured on the walls of Nico’s place were in Greece, Paris and America. The hats worn by men in these cafés were like nothing I’d ever seen. Men in Pretoria wore beige safari suits, long thick socks and thin moustaches. Never hats. The only men who wore hats were policemen and it was impossible to imagine a cop in a café, it would have been beneath his dignity.

My favourite picture on the walls of Nico’s place, at least until I knew a bit more about what it really meant, showed sailors crowded on a brick terrace, their round white caps sprouting like mushrooms among the café tables. Nico told me the café was in his home town of Thessalonica, where the Greek navy was based. Greece was fighting a war at that time and many of the sailors in the photo would soon be dead. ‘Killed by the Turks’.

Thessalonica 1916 (Photographer, unknown)

This was confusing because if Greece was perfect, why had Nico and Ajax left and come all the way to Pretoria, a city of civil servants who worked for a government that did not like foreigners, or ‘the outside world’ or Greeks for that matter ? It was a question I was too shy to ask Nico. Pretoria was a time capsule where everything and everyone seemed fenced in and went nowhere.

I did once mention the outside world to my mother but she soon put me right:‘I have enough trouble dealing with the one I’m already in. No thank you very much!’ If I could offer free flights on Quantas or Central African Airlines, to the Nile Valley or Sydney, to any city in forty-five countries, I guessed most people would have turned me down flat. So I listened to the voices on Nico’s crystal set and read the ads on his walls, they were gaps in the fence and let the outside in.

I was in South Kensington some weeks ago, walking through the busy streets between the Albert Hall and the underground tube station. Where shoals of tourists dodge the traffic to cross the Cromwell Road, under the lofty gaze of the bony dinosaurs that patrol the gardens of the natural History Museum. I was on my way to Gazette, a brasserie cum café in the French quarter.

A walk you know well sometimes tempts your mind to wander, so it was just as well that my feet knew the way. Because, suddenly, I was no longer in London but Athens, and the port of Piraeus. I’ve never been to Piraeus but I had once seen the movie,’ Never on Sunday.’ What triggered the unexpected connection was a notice outside a pub I passed, the Stanhope Arms. ‘Sunday Lunch!’ it promised. But lest some tourist, innocent of English codes and customs, took this to be an invitation to tuck into roast beef and Yorkshire pudding at any old time, there followed the caution - ‘Only on Sunday’ .

It is not much of a stretch from ‘Only on Sunday’ to ‘Never on Sunday’. I remembered Melina Mercouri who plays the entrancing Ilya in the movie, the whore with the heart of gold. In silk nightgown, cigarette in hand, she salutes her lovers in Piraeus and her irresistible song gives the film its title. And in faraway Kensington, I found my footsteps matching the beat of the bouzouki . I’d seen the movie in the early 1960’s, in a grainy pirated version , because the film’s unbuttoned sensuality ensured it was banned in South Africa. The old regime had a clear policy about such things: it suppressed anything that smacked of fun or freedom, locked up those who opposed its racial obsessions and did its best to bore everyone else to death.

On my way to Gazette, before I took my detour to Greece, I passed the old offices of the London Magazine, near South Ken tube station . I once shared happy lunches with Alan Ross, its editor , at his favourite Italian trattoria. He was an inspirational publisher of new poetry and the London Magazine with its publishing arm, introduced new poets to new readers. An Anglo–Indian, born in Calcutta, Ross spoke Hindustani before he spoke English. His colonial background made him particularly sympathetic to writers from distant places. Always prompt when he accepted work you sent him, blessedly reliable when he paid a fee, and courteous in his rejection slips, scrawled on picture postcards from the nearby Victoria and Albert Museum. Tennessee Williams once remarked that established writers tend to be ‘cruel to tom cats but kind to kittens ’. Alan Ross was kind to both.

I think he would have liked Gazette , hidden within the French Institute. The room is full of light, the seating is comfortable and the small menu changes daily. South Kensington is packed with French expatriates , boutiques, bistros, cheese mongers and bakers. But Gazette is without any kind of Gallic pretension and never tries to be anything but itself. It is French without fuss.

Gazette South Kensington London

It is also a good, safe place to think about the imminent death of books, authors and editors and literature as we know it. In my morning newspaper, itself a retrograde item, a Cambridge academic confidently assured readers that novels written by humans, would soon to be over-taken by AI fiction and fantasy, generated on command and free to all. What I persistently and foolishly thought of as ‘real’ books will survive as quaint, niche products only the rich could afford .

As someone who still practices this soon-to-vanish trade, I refuse to believe it is a lost cause. And refusal to believe in lost causes is palpable in the French Institute in South Kensington. In the Second World War, after surrendering to the invading German armies, France was thought to be a lost cause. It was then that London became a second home to the Free French. In June 1940, two days after the Germans occupied Paris, a young French army officer, Charles de Gaulle, went on BBC radio and appealed to his compatriots to keep fighting.

You cannot visit the French Institute without being reminded of that war. A plaque in the lobby commemorates the cost as well as the achievements of what at that time looked like a most improbable, if not a preposterous, resistance by the Free French.

Plaque in the lobby of the French Institute, South Kensington, London

That war may feel far away today but in the same dismal newspaper that morning, I read another dire prediction. The head of French armed forces, General Fabien Mandon, warned that a war with Russia was very likely in three to four years. France must be prepared once again, he wrote, ‘to lose her children.’ His remarks have drawn furious reactions in France for being sensationalist. Perhaps they are. But such warnings are multiplying now and, as current conflicts gather pace in Europe, some may see his comments as simple common sense.

As if to emphasise how precarious times have become, I had just started my lunch but not yet sipped my glass of wine, when a loud alarm went off in Gazette and everyone in the building, its cinema, offices , kitchens and lobby, were told to leave the building. There had been a bomb warnng. No time to pick up coats and scarves. With waiters, chefs , diners from Gazette and students from the nearby General de Gaulle Lycée, who had been watching French movies in the Institute, we waited over the road in the wintry wind, while the alarm rang. After about fifteen minutes the all-clear sounded and I went back to my table. My lunch was cold but the wine was fine.

Christopher Hope

South Africa is a problem for writers because so often it effortlessly out- writes them. Consider, as I do whenever I drop into Obz Café, a legendary watering hole in Cape Town, the case of the weeping waitress. She is not much heard of today and her place in the history of the café goes unremarked. That’s a pity because what happened to her illustrates how hard it is to get a fix on what passes for ‘real’ in South Africa, either then or now. The very name of the country begs a raft of questions: whose South Africa is it anyway? What does it mean to say you belong? And exactly who is asking the question?

Obz Café Cape Town

I have a routine when I am on my way to Obz Café. I stop first in Obz Books, a cheerful, tranquil haven nearby, filled with well-worn books that make most unpredictable connections. Dostoevsky rubs along with Patience Strong, Alan Paton bumps into Harry Potter and packed into some lower shelf, slender collections of verse by local poets stand shoulder to shoulder against the ruin of time.

A book or two in hand, I head to Obz. Some cafés boast of their historical connections, others are too busy keeping the lights on and the customers happy in a business where hours are long and profit margins punishingly thin. Obz has found itself on the cusp of history on two occasions, both replete with the ironies and absurdities that make them quintessentially South African.

At the turn of the last millennium, in 1999 and 2000, a series of bomb blasts shook Cape Town. The bombers were violent vigilantes known by the acronym, PAGAD, or People Against Gangsterism and Drugs. Gang members, who called themselves hunters of hoodlums, soon became hoodlums themselves. There were nineteen bomb attacks in all and the targets were nightclubs, bars, police stations, gay venues and pizza joints. The eighth bomb exploded in 2000, in a car parked outside Obz . The blast had been powerful enough for a witness to tell a local paper: ‘I saw the roof of a car fly past the restaurant’.

I was in the café a few days later and it was business as usual. Testimony to the way Obz simply gets on with things. That bomb blast outside Obz marks the start of what has grown into a deadly growth industry, assassination on demand. It turned out that the car carrying the bomb had been used some days earlier, in the murder of an anti-terrorist magistrate, gunned down in his driveway. Political operatives were the first targets for assassins. Then came accountants, forensic investigators, rap artists and whistle-blowers. A recent innovation is secretly to take out life insurance policies on the unwitting victim before the hit . Hired guns are plentiful, fees are low and the killers rarely if ever brought to book.

The second time history came to call at Obz café was in April of 2016. I was in Cape Town at the height of the student campaign to remove the statue of Cecil Rhodes from the campus of Cape Town university. A group of young activists strolled into Obz , had a few drinks and when the waitress presented the bill , one of the group, identified in the ponderous, polysyllabic jargon of that era, as ‘ a radical non-binary trans black activist’, added a hand-written note: ‘We will give a tip when you return the land.’ At which the waitress, as her tormentors gleefully reported, burst into ‘typical white tears.’

The students were black, the waitress white and the opposing sides had very different explanations of what had taken place. The black students maintained it was about land restitution and racism, in what they called ‘the settler colony known as South Afrika (sic).’ The weeping waitress became a symbol of brutal oppression, her ‘white’ tears were hypocritical , their colour metaphorical and her performance a joke.

It turned out that the students had chosen the wrong target, The young , working-class waitress earned a bare bones wage in Obz and spent much of it supporting her mother who was unable to work and dying of cancer. The waitress had never owned land or much else of anything . Her tears were not white but wet, the result of her frustration and despair. ‘An eye for an eye’, she told an interviewer, ‘leaves everyone blind.’

When the story broke in the press and social media, Obz café was caught in the middle of the oldest quarrel in South Africa. A familiar racial drama in which sadness was infused with farce. Some hailed the student trans activist as a hero of our times for refusing a tip. Others contributed to a fund to support the waitress. So much money was donated that the organisers opened a special Paypal account. It was, said the astonished waitress, ‘the most money I’ve ever had in my life.’

The drama said more about the complexities of race and identity in South Africa than any number of histories. And it deserves to be remembered in the café where it played out. A simple plaque would do the job, commemorating the day when the ‘radical non-binary trans black activist’ withheld a tip and a waitress did, or did not, dissolve into tears. I think a modest water feature would be nice, a small fountain , suitable for selfies and instagramable. Or even something as modest as a picture postcard, pinned to a wall. Picasso’s ‘Weeping Woman’ would be about right.

Woman Weeping, Picasso, 1937

It might serve as a caution against reducing what are real, pressing questions about land reform in South Africa, to self-serving, performative acts of asinine spite.

Christopher Hope

This photograph in a Paris café in the 1920’s, shows two women who fell in love and felt no need to hide or explain their affair. The photographer is almost forgotten today but his picture lives on. If you lean in closely, you can almost feel their mutual pleasure and excitement.

(Solita Solano and Djuna Barnes, Café Renaud, Paris 1926 (Photo Maurice Branger)

The woman on the left is Solita Solano - novelist, photographer, surveyor, runaway, journalist, poet and mystic. Sometimes all at once. Her companion is Djuna Barnes, who might best be described as a one-woman explosion. Solano and Barnes were members of a sorority of expatriate American lesbians, among them Janet Flanner , Natalie Barney, Gertrude Stein and Alice Toklas , who settled in Paris early in the 20^th century. Paris was tolerant to a degree almost unknown elsewhere and its cafés provided exactly the right backdrop to this very public affair

Djuna Barnes had no time for false modesty. She got her first job as a journalist with a New York paper by telling the interviewer: “I can draw and write, and you’d be a fool not to hire me”. She called her collection of interviews: I Could Never Be Lonely without a Husband. Her wildly unorthodox lesbian novel, ‘Nightwood’, is unsettling even today. It so impressed the young TS Eliot that he persuaded his publishers, Faber, to ignore the scandal and take on her book.

A good café is a remarkably free and easy haven. There is almost no human activity it will not encompass, from lovers of every stripe, to solo visitors of slender means who dawdle away the hours over a single cup of coffee, to well-coiffed women in notable hats, whom we see in this photograph. And why is this so? Because a café does not judg , it is benignly indifferent to the emotions of its customers. It does not know, nor care to know, what brings in its clients off the street , and when it does , it keeps what it knows to itself .

Looking at the photograph, I always rather liked to think that the small glass on the table, where the two women sit, contains absinthe. Because that particular tipple seemed to suit their happily disreputable careers. But I know this can’t be so because the photograph of Solano and Barnes was taken in 1926, and absinthe was officially banned in France several years earlier, at the start of the First World War.

Sometimes known as ‘the Green Fairy’, absinthe tastes of liquorice and packs a heavy alcoholic punch. A mixture of herbs and plants, particularly wormwood, it was invented by a French doctor in the late 18^th century. It proved to be irresistible. By the early 20^th century, French drinkers were getting through millions of litres every year. Writers and poets were particularly susceptible to the Green Fairy. Lewis Carrol, Baudelaire, Toulouse-Lautrec were among those who succumbed. Toulouse-Lautrec was so dependent that, when his family confined him to a sanitarium to dry him out, he smuggled in his daily dose of absinthe using a hollow walking stick. The popular view of the absinthe drinker was of a mad poet in a café , calling for ‘ une verte’, the kiss of the Green Fairy.

Café culture became almost synonymous with absinthe abuse and perhaps poets and painters did as much damage, by extolling the blissful delirium promised by the green fairy, as did those who called it the devil’s brew. Oscar Wilde declared that a sip of absinthe beat a fine sunset, Paul Verlaine took to it like mother’s milk and van Gogh turned it bottle and glass into a surprisingly flat still life. Absinthe time, ceremonial ‘green’ hour began around five in the afternoon. Iced water was decanted over a sugar cube poised on a special silver spoon, and slowly filled a specially designed glass.

The Degas painting, originally titled ‘At the Café ’, caused a hullabaloo among critics in Paris. It showed, with photographic accuracy, a couple of down-at-heel drinkers in a well-known Parisian watering hole, La Nouvelle Athènes. When the painting was shown in London, it acquired the name we know it by, ‘Absinthe’. English critics were delighted to claim it displayed the alcoholic degeneracy of the French. The melancholy man with the pipe, they said, was the worst sort of French alcoholic , and his companion was unquestionably a prostitute. Degas was forced to explain publicly that the couple, far from being a couple of drunks he found in the gutter, were a local model and a friendly painter, and both were good friends.

(Absinthe Edward Degas, 1876)

But the witch hunt was well underway. Absinthe, its detractors insisted, was the devil’s draught. Those in thrall to the Green Fairy, who suffered from what was known as ‘absinthism’, risked developing lethal hallucinations , vertigo, epilepsy, brain fever , it was a passport to the mental asylum . In 1914, absinthe was banned in France, and then in almost every country in Europe. A ban that was lifted only a few years ago .

The prosaic fact of the matter is that absinthe’s high alcohol content packed a considerable punch. Drink enough of it, with or without ceremony, and you passed out. The real scandal behind absinthe was the way the legend was exploited to sell more of the stuff. In a striking advertising poster of the era, absinthe becomes the path to power.

(Absinthe Leonetto Cappiello, 1901)

A man in the gleaming top hat regards with vulpine intensity a young woman who takes, what we are to assume, is her first sip of absinthe . What the poster sells is a cynical evocation of successful sexual voracity. It is an image a million unhappy miles from the happy intimacy we see in Maurice Branger’s photo of two lovers at the Café Renaud. The poster is from a world where no-one ever believed in fairies.

Christopher Hope

For many years, I spent every summer in Switzerland. I admired the country greatly and understood it very little. Switzerland is divided between four ethnic groups : German speakers dominate, followed by the French, then the Italians and lastly a scattered minority, the Romansch, who descend from the Roman legionnaires of the Emperor Tiberius.

When I was first in Switzerland, I thought that the Swiss rubbed along pretty well. As a South African, raised on the bitter stew of ethnic and racial rancour, I took this to be a happy miracle. But later, one of the few, truly witty books about Switzerland, put me right. The Hungarian writer, George Mikes, pointed out that this apparent Swiss tolerance had it roots in something more familiar: each of the four national groups cordially detested the other.

The Odeon Café, in the centre of Zurich , is a fine observation deck from which to contemplate occasional Swiss oddities. The Grande Café Odeon, as it was called when it opened in the centre of Zurich in 1911, is an Art Nouveau confection, decked out with red marble , brass fittings, sumptuous chandeliers and comfortable banquets. But it is not, and has never been, in the least posh.

Interior Odeon Café Bar , Zurich (Photo Ingrid Hudson)

Among the Odeon’s early attractions were free newspapers and magazines in several languages , a good bar, no fuss and no curfew. As a bottle of champagne was pricey, the Odeon was the first to serve it by the glass. But the real magnet was the city of Zurich, capital of neutral Switzerland and a peaceful cross-roads in a Europe ravaged by war. Switzerland in the First World War (and the pattern was repeated in the next world war) was well described as ‘a birdcage, surrounded by lions.’

The Odeon Café pulled in a rich mix of writers , painters, refugees, exiles and spies . Albert Einstein came for coffee , Vladimir Lenin lived across the road and dropped in to play chess. Mata Hari performed in cabaret. Somerset Maugham found it useful in his other job, as a spy for British intelligence . Aspiring youthful dictators like Stalin, Trotsky and Mussolini, were regular customers.. The perennially penniless James Joyce was a keen visitor. Working on Ulysses in the Zurich public library by day, he found evenings at the Odeon were a good time to touch friends for loans and free drinks. Tristan Tzara and Hugo Ball concocted the anarchic Cabaret Voltaire, in the nearby Café de la Terrasse. When its exasperated owner, grew tired of their Dadaist fun and games and threw them out, they simply moved to the Odeon.

This cavalcade of artistic sparkle and theatrics was also most unSwiss. The Swiss painter Balthus, after a lifetime abroad, once explained to me that Swiss artists who think themselves geniuses should move to somewhere like Italy, where artistic overreach is not frowned upon. Swiss understatement and an atmosphere of calm cordiality still distinguishes the Odeon Café today . Famous customers are recalled with pleasure but without fuss. Unlike like some famous Parisian cafés, it does not trade on its historic assets, and sell Einstein coffee cups or offer a breakfast of eggs ‘a la Mata Hari’ on the menu.

On my way to the Odeon a few weeks ago , I crossed the bridge over the Limmat, that deep , cold river that runs through Zurich . I walked passed the towering statue of Ulrich Zwingli, the 16^th century Protestant reformer. Cloaked and brooding, he leans on his huge sword. His protestant followers fought Catholic Swiss, in some of the bloodiest religious wars in all Europe. Zwingly died in one of these wars.

The Odeon café is a good place to consider that statues sometimes say more about how those who erected them wish you to feel, than about the figure memorialised in bronze or marble. Some years ago, I watched students on the campus at the University of Cape Town attempting to lynch the statue of Cecil Rhodes. It was the era when tearing down statues was all the vogue . For the student iconoclasts, this seated bronze figure of the master imperialist, morphed into a malevolent fetish.

By contrast, there is a giant statue of Nelson Mandela in Pretoria . You look up and see an effigy of a smiling ‘Dear Leader’ and you are expected to feel a mix of affection and awe. The style might be dubbed ‘North Korean rococo ‘ and I doubt Mandela would have liked it. The statue of Zwingli wishes you to contemplate a martyred reformer. What it does say is that Zwingli had a summary way of dealing with former disciples who made the mistake of challenging his teachings ; he had them bound and gagged, rowed into the Limmat river and tossed overboard. The quietly cordial distaste Swiss cantons feel for each other today is a considerable improvement.

The Odeon café does not make too much of itself. Or of those it once knew well. And that makes sense. Because the people who made the Odeon famous were often young, and broke and got be known long after they had left the Odeon behind and became literary monuments or dictators.

One of the Odeon’s customers, who had been there in its heyday, said something really interesting about this . In an interview with the BBC in the 1950s, Tristan Tzara, was asked if it was true that he had played chess in the Odeon, with Lenin, Tzara confirmed it. But he also said he felt embarrassed when he thought back to those chess games. Because, at that time, he had no idea “that Lenin was Lenin. I only realised it much later”.

Christopher Hope

We all have our heroes and when, with no warning, one appears before you in the flesh, the shock is unforgettable. Robert Browning put this well:

Ah, did you once see Shelley plain,
And did he stop and speak to you?

It happened to me one summer day, back in the 1970’s. I was sitting on the terrace of the Café Wien, a legendary coffee shop in the centre of Hillbrow. A short, unremarkable woman, carrying a brown paper bag, walked briskly by and I knew her instantly. The woman with the brown paper bag was none other than Phyllis Peake, and she ran the most celebrated brothel in Johannesburg.

I’d followed her career in the newspapers; her frequent court appearances and the sensational charges she faced. I was intrigued by how the grainy black and white pictures of a short rather unremarkable woman contrasted with lurid tales of sin and scandal. She had been dubbed by the Sunday scandal sheets, ‘the hostess with the mostess.’ I also admired the way she ignored the absurd puritanical obsessions of our profoundly hypocritical rulers.

It was no accident that I saw her from the terrace of Café Wien, in the heart of Hillbrow. This square mile of densely packed, high-rise apartment blocks was not so much a suburb as a hill-top carnival and it kept late hours and observed few rules. Cafés ,bars , dives and clubs boasted names we knew by heart: The Flying Saucer, Dunk-A-Donut , Milky Lane , Lucky Luke , Hamburger Hut, Golden Egg, Bella Napoli and Kiss-Kiss. When you recited them, they became poetry;

Café Wien Hillbrow, Johannesburg (circa 1979) Photo Nélio Mendes

Café Wien was a reproduction, in a distant African city, of a classic Viennese coffee house. Shortly before the outbreak of the Second World War in Austria, an industrious civil servant was told to count all the cafés in the city. He found they totaled an astonishing 1,283. Café Wien followed the format: apple strudel and whipped cream, very good coffee; newspapers neatly rolled on wooden wands, large plush chairs, backgammon boards and even movies, screened in a curtained alcove set aside for film buffs.

I had no idea where Phyllis Peake was heading when she strolled passed Café Wien but I knew where she had been. Her brown paper bag told me she had been shopping at the Fontana rotisserie, a location in Hillbrow as famous as she was. The Fontana, with its rows of chickens revolving slowly in the window, never ever closed. Its Greek founder, Taki Xenopoulos, announced when he opened his rotisserie : ‘I threw away the key’. The Fontana stayed open 24/7. In South Africa of that time, where even fishing was banned on Sundays in certain provinces, people drove long distances simply to stand outside the windows of the Fontana and stare in disbelief.

The Fontana 24/7 Confectionary . Photo courtesy of ‘Lost Johannesburg’.

I’d imagined few people still remembered, or had written about, the exotic madame who so offended the moral guardians of the old apartheid regime. But then I found on the internet, a graphic record of Phyllis Peake’s career. Howard Thomas had interviewed her in the 1970’s and hoped to write her biography. What struck him, as it did me, was the contrast between the glamour she brought to her trade and her rather modest person.

‘Her lounge was the antithesis of her. Deep scarlet velvet drapes, trimmed with gold braid, lush imitation gilt Louis XV chairs, and her teapot was pure Spode’.

Certainly, the woman I glimpsed her from the terrace of the Café Wien was far from the glamorous Madame the newspapers presented. She looked much as Thomas describes her:

’ She was lovely. Short...(with) grey hair down to shoulders, dead straight but scraggly. Just like the granny I had always wanted to have. Interesting, resourceful, and who’s spent her life having adventures.’

Most of those ‘adventures’ took place on the far side of law. Phyllis Peake began her career as a wedding photographer and specialised in civil marriages at the magistrate’s court in Johannesburg. She gave up her camera when she discovered her true vocation and opened the poshest brothel in town. Over the years she often found herself back in court, this time in the dock , charged with procuring, soliciting, prostitution and racketeering . But often the charges were dropped, witnesses clammed up and Phyllis Peake was back to doing what she did best. Her biographer suggests the reason the reason why she led such a charmed life was not unrelated to the fact that among her favored clients were judges, MPs, magistrates, priests and even police chiefs. And because several were still alive, her biography was abandoned. But she explained that it had been neither the police nor the press that did her in:

“Darling, it was when those massage parlours opened up. They sprang up like rats and mice, and took all the class out of the trade. Amateurs, darling. Amateurs.... no skills, no training, no …. CLASS. They were also very grubby. My place was spotless. Spotless, darling.”

Phyllis Peake has faded from view. So has Café Wien, along with many happy places in what was once Hillbrow. When I see the initials RSA, I read them not as denoting the Republic of South Africa but rather as the Republic of Resolute Amnesia. But I did once see Phyllis Peake plain but she did not stop and talk to me. That was just as well because I would not have known what on earth to say to her. I also remember that among those who presented her as a model of moral turpitude, was a journalist named Gordon Winter. He turned out to be a spy, working for BOSS, the secretive Bureau of State Security, dedicated to jailing, sometimes assassinating, opponents of the apartheid regime and even wrote a book about it. The Hostess with the Mostess did not. And yet she added a measure of unrepentant gaiety to a nation much in need of it.

Christopher Hope

This photograph shows a pretty hostelry in Arles that had several names. It was called ‘Café van Gogh’ and ‘Café la Nuit’. It gave those who dropped in for a meal or a glass of wine the feeling they were somewhere near, even inside, van Gogh’s famous ‘yellow house’. For his admirers, those yellow walls connected van Gogh and Arles.

Café van Gogh/Café la Nuit Arles ( now closed)

When I was in Arles this year, the ‘Café van Gogh’ had closed, after running into trouble with the French tax authorities. It sits sadly now, rain streaking its yellow walls, shuttered and deserted, no longer a café. But it was never the ‘real’ thing. The famous yellow house, where van Gogh lived for a few years around 1888, and the nearby café terrace, were destroyed in an Allied bombing raid in 1944.

But we do have paintings of the cafés closely associated with him. And it was of one of these paintings that the late Café van Gogh was a profitable imitation. This painting was also known by several names. It was called ‘Café Terrace at Night’, as well as ‘The Café Terrace on the Place du Forum’. I prefer the short, clear name it carried when it went on show for the first time, in 1891: Café le Soir ( ‘Evening Café’), because it suits the time, place and painter.

All his life, van Gogh showed an intense interest in the rough and ready. And this was confirmed by someone who knew him and did not like him. Jeanne Calment spent her life in Arles, and her opinions were as tough as her constitution. Despite a weak heart, a bad cough, and rheumatic problems, she lived to become the oldest person in the world. She took up fencing at eighty and was still riding her bicycle at one hundred. She gave up smoking only when her sight began to fail, and she disliked asking others to light her cigarettes. Jeanne Calment died aged 122 and was almost as famous for having known van Gogh. She had been about thirteen when she met him in her uncle’s fabric shop in Arles, where Van Gogh would buy his canvases.

Jeanne Calment recalled with vinegary bite, in a number of interviews, what she felt about the painter: “Good God, he was ugly! Most of the girls were afraid of him, but the prostitutes liked him because he paid them well.” On another occasion, she said that she found van Gogh “...ungracious, and impolite, crazy. I forgave him. They called him the Nut”.

But nut, or not, van Gogh would have been painting his café pictures about this time, and each reflects a very different reading of the painter.

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Café le Soir , van Gogh 1888

Van Gogh’s depiction of a terrace at night, on a street in Arles, is fastidious. He described what he was painting, in a letter to his brother Theo: “A huge yellow lantern lights the terrace, the façade, the pavement, and even projects light over the cobblestones of the street, which takes on a violet-pink tinge.”

And yet for all this scrupulous detail, to my mind, what he paints is not only a café. It is an expression of devotion. The light on the terrace is golden, the waiter approaches, and patrons settle at their tables. All is as it should be in such a perfect place. It contains all he wished for and always lacked; it is a love letter in paint.

At the same time, he was also writing to Theo about his dream of forming an apostolic fellowship of artists, twelve in number, modelled, of course, on Christ’s twelve disciples. Van Gogh’s religious yearnings were always close at hand. He writes of his “ terrible need for - dare I say the word - for religion. So I go outside at night to paint the stars and I always dream a painting like that, with a group of living figures of the pals.’

He had recently splurged on a roomful of straw-bottomed chairs, on which he hoped these disciple-pals would be seated, bathed in the golden light he gives to the terrace of the Café le Soir. Dreamlike though this scene may be, van Gogh was scrupulous about painting his stars with precision. Astronomers can date and time the painting to the first week of September 1888, around 11 pm.

The beatification of van Gogh is never very convincing. If he liked pleasant cafés, he was also very fond of raw-boned drinking holes, rough bars and brothels. ‘Night Cafe in Arles’ was painted in the same year as its beatific evening counterpart and carries an almost identical name. But it is much later now, darker and lonelier. The room is muddy red mixed with bilious green, oil lamps slither above a funereal billiard table, and desolate drunks slump at the tables.

Van Gogh writes to Theo: “I have tried to express the idea that the café is a place where one can ruin himself, go mad or commit a crime...”

The Night Café van Gogh Arles 1888

Which van Gogh do you prefer? The latter-day saint or ‘the nut?’ Van Gogh’s cafés, like the painter himself, have lots of both and run the full gamut, from light to dark. Oscar Wilde put it well: “We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars.’

Christopher Hope