The Only Street in Paris: Life on the Rue Des Martyrs by Elaine Sciolino Page B

once and for all. Hilduin’s biography was so full of plot twists, spine-tingling drama, and miracles that it is no wonder that until the French Revolution, it was considered the most influential version of the life of Saint Denis.
    As for Saint Denis’s body, one version of the story is that he was buried at the site of his ultimate death by a pious but cunning Christian widow named Catulla. She is also said to have rescued the bodies of Rusticus and Eleutherius and reunited them with that of Saint Denis, so they all could rest comfortably together in peace. When the twelfth-century Saint-Denis Basilica was built there, it displayed what were believed to have been Saint Denis’s remains in reliquaries encrusted with jewels.
    The fate of Denis’s head, meanwhile, became the subject of fierce debate in the Middle Ages. The clerics of Notre-Dame Cathedral claimed to have possession of his cranium; the monks of Saint-Denis insisted they had his entire head. The dispute ended up in a protracted, acrimonious public trial in the French Parliament in 1410; its outcome is unknown. Denis became not only one of the most revered saints in Christendom but also the patron saint of France. French kings and future saints, including Bernard, Thomas à Becket, Thomas Aquinas, Joan of Arc, Francis de Sales, and Vincent de Paul paid homage by walking in Denis’s footsteps up the route that is now the rue des Martyrs. It may be illogical, but the devout pray to him to relieve their headaches. (He is also the saint to call on if you need to be freed from strife or cured of frenzy, rabies, or possession by the Devil.)
    IN MY NEIGHBORHOOD, SOME people who know the legend sought to give it a rational explanation. Valérie Tadjine, the hairdresser at Franck Provost at the bottom of the street, said it was possible Saint Denis could have walked without his head. She described the chickens and ducks she saw as a child at her godmother’s house. “I saw their heads chopped off, but sometimes their nerves didn’t die,” said Valérie. “They’d run as far as . . . I don’t know . . . maybe as far as Montmartre!”
    After a branch of the Belgian food chain Le Pain Quotidien opened on the rue des Martyrs, I asked Adeline Huré, a waitress in her twenties, if she knew the origin of the name. “Charlemagne came through here with the head of a decapitated king to the Saint-Denis Basilica,” she said, with great confidence. “There was a big hill and it is said that this was the hill of the dead, so he passed by with the head.”
    “Charlemagne carried a king’s head?” I asked.
    “Yes, but I don’t know if Charlemagne or someone else cut it off,” she said.
    François Perrocheau, the Pain Quotidien Paris district manager, began to laugh. “Wasn’t the king Richard the Lion-Hearted?” he asked.
    “Good try, but wrong!” I said.
    Other people told me the name referred to victims in French history—most often the 1789 French Revolution, or the 1871 Paris Commune, the violent Socialist movement that briefly ruled Paris.
    “Rebels marched down the rue des Martyrs from Montmartre during the Commune, and they were martyred, no?” said Juan Alarson, whom I met at a neighborhood fair at the place Saint-Georges.
    His friend Marie-José Ballesteros contradicted him: “No, no, it had something to do with the Revolution. I’m sure of it, the Revolution.”
    Claudine Dumoulin, who was with them, said both were wrong. “It was the road that led to the battle of Montmartre in the Middle Ages,” she said, inventing a battle that may never have happened.
    Enzo Guénard, a teenager whose father is the owner and chef of the bistro Miroir at the top of the street, said he was sure it related to the suffering of the Allies at the hands of the Nazis. “It dates from 1939 to 1945,” he said, sounding like a history professor. “The Germans tortured the Allies to learn about their secret projects.”
    I broke the news to all of them that the martyrs