The Montmartre Vineyard & Au Lapin Agile

Why is it significant?

At the corner of rue des Saules and rue Saint-Vincent, look over the fence at an improbable sight in a capital city: rows of grapevines climbing a steep slope. And opposite them, a low cottage with green shutters, with a painted sign of a rabbit leaping out of a saucepan.

Key Facts

Open the walk

At the corner of rue des Saules and rue Saint-Vincent, look over the fence at an improbable sight in a capital city: rows of grapevines climbing a steep slope. And opposite them, a low cottage with green shutters, with a painted sign of a rabbit leaping out of a saucepan.

Montmartre was wine country for centuries. The abbey's nuns tended vines all over the hill. When this plot was threatened by building in the early 1930s, local artists fought to keep it open, and in 1933 the city planted the Clos Montmartre. Today there are around two thousand vines, mostly gamay and pinot noir. Every October the Fête des Vendanges fills the streets for the harvest, and the small number of bottles is sold for local charities.

The cottage is Au Lapin Agile, one of the oldest cabarets in Paris, still going today. It once had a grimmer name, the Cabaret des Assassins. Then, around 1875, the caricaturist André Gill painted that sign of a rabbit escaping the pot, and people called the place the lapin à Gill, Gill's rabbit... which slid into Lapin Agile, the nimble rabbit. In the early 1900s it was run by Frédéric Gérard, known as Frédé, who played the guitar and kept a donkey called Lolo. Picasso, Apollinaire, Max Jacob and Utrillo drank here, sometimes paying with pictures.

In 1910 the writer Roland Dorgelès decided to make fun of the avant-garde. He tied a paintbrush to Lolo's tail, set a canvas behind the donkey and let him swish. The result, titled And the Sun Went to Sleep over the Adriatic, was shown at the Salon des Indépendants under the name of an invented Italian painter, Joachim-Raphaël Boronali, and some critics discussed it seriously before Dorgelès revealed the hoax. Picasso left his own tribute: a painting called At the Lapin Agile, from 1905, with himself as a harlequin at the bar. In 1989 it sold for around forty million dollars.

From the corner, climb back up rue des Saules. At the top of the slope, on the corner of rue de l'Abreuvoir, you will pass a small pink house with green shutters, La Maison Rose, which Maurice Utrillo painted and made famous. Turn right into rue de l'Abreuvoir and follow it to the little tree-shaded square at its far end.