Drugstore Publicis Saint-Germain

“The principle is the same as at the Champs-Elysées drugstore but vertically with double figure-eights. If you make a figure-eight, it’s the jackpot, it’s infinity, so you always pass through the same aisles again.”

Provoking this circulation is essential: it must transform the visitor into a pinball.

Slavik’s explanation: “Like a ball catapulted from one post to another, he will be projected from the bar to the bookstore, from the bookstore to the gift shop, from there to the perfumery, then to the tobacco shop, from the tobacco shop to the cinema, from the cinema to another bar, from there to the restaurant or the Picnic-Nic Store.”

And, for the ball to follow this path, Slavik is certain, “a certain poetic tenderness combined with the satisfaction of real needs” is required.

A few days before the inauguration, Slavik confided to a journalist: “It will be unbearable how beautiful it will be!”

Observation made by Le Monde newspaper: “Mirrors with worn silvering, lights of scientific intimacy, counters of light wood and glass, floors where Sienese marble and plush carpeting succeed each other, accepting the sound of a man’s hurried step who intends to buy razor blades or the glide of a couple coming to consume the whisky of complicity, everything seems to have been planned for enchantment.“

The same conclusion applies to Le Monde as to Candide.

Le Monde: “The most mundane purchase must become a sentimental choice and respond to the solicitation of a romantic snobbery, the supreme conquest of a highly studied sales promotion.”

Candide: “It is enough for Slavik to decorate a place for the turnover to be double what was expected in sales forecasts.

He achieves this through an understanding of what he calls anti-solitude, the arrangement of a melting pot of human beings. He achieves it by seeking to please children “who are imaginative fools” and by asking himself, like Céline, “Who are we talking to?”, while trying “to slip into the unknown cliff of everyone!”

The Drugstore's Architecture

GROUND FLOOR

The ground floor was lowered by 1.50m below sidewalk level to provide sufficient ceiling height for the mezzanine. One must therefore descend a few steps to access all the shops.

BASEMENT

Incredible, it consists of 4 levels as shown in the drugstore’s cross-section. The bookstore is on the 1^st basement level, as well as the cinema, projection booth, and screen.

The cinema foyer is on the 2^nd basement level, and generally all the technical areas are between the 2^nd and 4^th basement levels.

MEZZANINE

“Slender columns and copper arches, upholstered benches in Havana or dark red leather, cherry wood paneling and counters, lead-aged mirrors, lampshades with frills or white opaline, honey-colored marble floor, embossed ‘Incrusta’ paper ceilings (executed from period designs).

The 180-seat restaurant, forming two oval galleries, one small and one large, overlooks the ground floor. All the details of the decoration and layout (carpeting under the tables, upholstery of the benches, lighting, and colors) have been specially studied for their comfort.

Thus, the basis of the Drugstore II decor is a reminder of the “Belle Epoque 1900.”

At the restaurant: seafood, salads, hot dishes, ice creams and Saint Germain specialties, such as guinea fowl with sautéed peaches, aromatic hamburger, Belle Epoque sundae.

BRONZES

Bronze medallions created by Oonga, actually Marie-Pierre Thiébaut, sculptor, a former student of Zadkine, represent casts of eyes and mouths of contemporary personalities from arts and letters, based on an idea long cherished by Slavik. These are the eyes of Camus, Gérard Philippe, Picasso, Belmondo, Duke Ellington, and Oppenheimer. The mouths are those of Jeanne Moreau, Juliette Gréco, Brigitte Bardot, Françoise Sagan, Marilyn Monroe, and Marlene Dietrich.

“I had been thinking about these giant cameos for a long time,” Slavik confided a few weeks before the opening. Oblong and out of proportion – 64 centimeters high by 40 wide – it must be said, they upset the tradition that for centuries had insisted on engraving faces in (very) low relief on fine stones in miniature format. The 48 cameos desired by Slavik dismissed the faces. What remained were mouths. What also remained were eyes, or rather, one eye.

Location

149 Boulevard Saint-Germain, 75006 Paris

Press Review

Gault et Millau September 1979

Labyrinthine restaurant on the 1st floor, beautiful bookstore and newspapers in the basement: all the novelties and many comics.
On the ground floor: food (canned goods, alcohol, prepared meals), gifts, luggage, gadgets, perfumery, a good record section (with all the latest “hits”), a wide selection of humidified tobaccos, a late-night pharmacy. And also theater ticket rental and Europ-Assistance service.”

Testimonials

Jean-Louis Gaillemin (FB):
“Enchantment for the eye with its opalines, Havana leathers, decoration of mouths, eyes, hands, with its groups of students rushing in while waiting for a table. The best thing is to go… if you can find a seat.”

Nathalie Cornette (FB):
“The St Germain drugstore was two minutes from Rue St Benoît where we spent our youth.

This place, thanks to Slavik’s unique talent, had a soul. It was alive; each time, we discovered a hidden treasure, at the time of the Chef’s salad or tea, we admired, we feasted, we enriched ourselves with the works of this iconoclastic artist, hoping his talent was contagious. These hands, these outstretched arms, moved us deeply. Tourists from all over the world paraded through this living museum that should have been preserved… did they know it when buying their cigarettes? We did. Slavik was a dramatist.

On August 29, 2014, a wave of emotion, combined with the joy of having known this open-air Slavik museum, overwhelmed us like “Spleen et Idéal.”

With all our affection as witnesses of an entire era….”

Jean-Pierre Lorence (FB):
“Ice cream with my mother and drugstore salads.”

Jean Cayrol in “De l’Espace humain”, Seuil, 1968
“This drugstore created a particular world that has its own laws and imposes on its visitors a behavior, an attitude, a gait that attest to their pride in being admitted.

The topography of the place was designed in such a way that whoever enters this tiny commercial city feels privileged in their purchases, in their journey through narrow, trompe-l’œil circuits; they will instinctively adopt the demeanor of a casual and unhurried tourist.

Thanks to this subtle arrangement of miniaturized communication routes…

Many shop windows to look at. The drugstore is a mini-luxury department store. You can find everything there at midnight: pharmaceutical products, food, records, cigarettes. The drugstore allows people to have a feeling of being an insider in their mundane daily lives.

The light envelops objects and people in a golden luminosity reminiscent of American cigarettes: mahogany, beige, and gold easily combine. These are rich, pleasant hues that suggest perfumes. Delicate smoke, rare scent, mahogany…

Exotic menu.

To give the customer the impression that they have been chosen, that they are lucky to be there, and behind the windows, the onlookers who contemplate them. A discreet place, fin-de-siècle lighting.

The objects offered belong to the world of gadgets, of toys. They imitate the old.

It is rare to see people in a hurry in the hall or in this network of corridors reminiscent of those of an ocean liner.

Young people are seen waiting. Groups form especially in front of the drugstore where one can meet a friend or acquaintance.

Anything can happen in the honey and bronze setting of the Saint Germain des Prés drugstore or that of the Champs Elysées, delicate like a cigar box.

The refinement of colors and materials welcomes the visitor, making their approach easy, frivolity takes on a serious air. The lighting enhances faces.

Serge Gainsbourg and his friend Jacques Dutronc, regulars
Among the diligent celebrities of the Drugstore, Serge Gainsbourg, of course. He settled nearby in 1969, on Rue de Verneuil. He came regularly and sometimes with his friend Jacques Dutronc who had created Les Playboys, “the little darlings who eat their purr at the Drugstore.”

Serge Gainsbourg had written and sung with Catherine Deneuve: Dieu fumeur de Havanes, in 1980 for Claude Berry’s film ” I Love You.” The song was a hit in 1981. In 1984, in Ecce Homo, he paints his own portrait: ” Gainsbarre is recognized / By his jeans, by his beard / Of three nights, his cigars.”

The legend of Gainsbourg tells us that “he kissed the saleswomen, and in his moments of generosity, distributed five hundred franc notes.“

Sylvie, who worked nights at the Drugstore Publicis tobacco shop in 1987-1988, provides a detail, because we all know that all day long he smoked Gitane after Gitane… But in the evening….

“Serge Gainsbourg – he never bought Gitanes from me – he would ask for a Havana cigar which he always paid for with a 500 franc note. He always refused his change. We had a very wide selection, notably Montecristo, Davidoff… I would take out the requested large cigar from the cabinet where individual cigars were stored, so that each cigar would retain its humidity and be supple to the touch. Connoisseurs all had a precise and satisfied gesture to assess its quality,” she tells us.

She confirms the artist’s outbursts of generosity … “There was a luggage shop nearby, a newsstand, a delicatessen, a large toy store, a perfumery… On Christmas Eve 1987, Serge Gainsbourg, after buying his cigar, told me: “Tonight I’m buying a perfume for all the saleswomen present. Go choose yours.”

I remember the singer who, at closing time, when we saleswomen met outside for a last drink at the Saint Germain pub, could be seen on the garbage truck’s running board, barefoot in his Repettos, shouting “Hi girls.”

Doctors Geneviève and Michel Haag, psychoanalyst psychiatrists
MEMORIES OF THE SAINT-GERMAIN-DES-PRES DRUGSTORE IN THE MID-1960S

Why such pleasure in going up to dine, like travelers, around this golden rotunda? We dominated the noise of the commercial space below, finding ourselves near the top of the luminous columns whose hand-shaped capitals supported the perimeters of the upper floor.

Why did these mouths, these artists’ eyes, and these hands accompany these perimeters? We had the impression of being supported, contained, in an emergence of life, perhaps in this time of ongoing reconstruction after the Second World War. We had to cling to the essential elements of the human face, as in the beginnings of< our individual construction at the start of life: the mouth from which the voice emerges, the eye that exchanges light and interpenetrates in the deepest communications, the hand that supports the back and neck and thus allows one to receive the possible violence of messages from the voice and the eye. All of this seemed to provide a sense of security on the verge of a conceivable impulse. The entire rotunda could have moved like a carousel around a core of verticality. Why did the hands have six or seven fingers and not five, as we have five senses? But precisely, we do not only have five senses; we must add, to the senses passing through the orifices of the head in an envelope of tactility, the sensitivity of our muscular and labyrinthine activities that organize our balance in space as well as our< sensations/feelings of existence.

All the details of this work thus had a symbolic significance for the reasons we evoke, but perhaps for many others as well. Why did we allow such a masterpiece to be destroyed? It was a benefit for our body, for our psyche, and could help us maintain a creativity of peace within each of us in the face of the currents of destructiveness that cross us all and which, in tragedies between human groups, constantly explode and< sweep the world, currently creating much terror.

Bar Counter "Le Drugstorien"

The bar counter “Le Drugstorien,” with its Slavikian curves, opens directly onto Boulevard Saint-Germain and is accessible from both inside and outside. “I have a passion for snakes. Especially because they are curved. I am very sensitive to the sensuality of the curve, which is found in my drugstores. Enough with right angles. They are for commissaries and quartermasters. The curve, however, is visceral, and we return to the visceral…” Guy Monréal, “Who are you, Monsieur…Slavik,” Adam, October-November 1971.

It serves beer from long-armed English taps, all aperitifs, liqueurs and long drinks, sandwiches and a specialty, the “coup du taureau,” a hot and invigorating drink based on beef broth and gin.

The Bookstore

“On Sunday mornings, when we were sent to mass, we would run to take refuge in the Saint-Germain-des-Prés drugstore, opened around 1965, at the location of the current

Armani store, with its decor created by Slavik, so characteristic of its era, with upholstered leather and gilded chrome boxes that resembled early 20th-century car interiors…. We read comic books in the drugstore basement, until the day our mother caught us red-handed….

Philippe Costamagna -Histoires d’œil – Editions Grasset, 2016.

The Cinema

The cinema, “Publicis Saint Germain,” adjoins the famous Brasserie Lipp. The hall can accommodate 320 spectators. It reprises the drugstore’s decorative themes: walls covered with leather panels punctuated by slender copper arcatures, dentil cornices, and light fixtures.

Tones ranging from hazelnut to warm brown. Rounded Havana leather buttoned armchairs electronically connected to a synoptic panel in the entrance hall, allowing prospective viewers to see, at a glance, when buying their ticket, the available and occupied seats.

Small gallery and lighting

“Spotted in Village Suisse, he (Félix Marcilhac) received a commission: ‘the decorator Slavik, who wanted 1900s lamp bases for the Saint-Germain-des-Prés Drugstore. So I looked for evanescent female statuettes or sports trophies that we would mount as lamps. I bought them for 15 francs, re-silvered them, and resold them for 150 francs; I was very proud of myself!'”

Photo (p. 27) from the book Félix Marcilhac-Passion Art Déco, 2014, by Jean-Louis Gaillemin.

Hands serving as capitals

At the top of the columns, 40 “dream hands” with six or seven fingers, also dreamed up by Slavik, which, placed at the top of ten columns, seem to support the ceiling.

Indeed, six or seven fingers must be counted. Slavik’s justification: “You can never have too many fingers to caress.” But soon people did not hesitate to suggest that these hands were less involved in sensuality than in finance: they were said to be those of a certain Valéry Giscard d’Estaing.

Since 1962, he has been Minister of Finance and Economic Affairs. Such seven-fingered hands would certainly be very useful for recovering VAT, a tax to which only large companies had previously been subject and which he had just imposed on retail trade. Without confirming or denying that these hands were those of the minister, Slavik affirmed: “There must be tenderness, caress.”

Drugstore Inauguration

“At the Saint-Germain-des-Prés Drugstore, the Beaux-Arts Brass Band played “Les Hirondelles” and “Les Braves Gens” for the police prefect. 10,000 guests jostled at the opening. It was a veritable tidal wave that swept through from late afternoon. At 7:30 PM, the 5,000 copies of the special issue of France-Soir were sold out. At 3 AM, it still took 10 minutes to climb one floor!”

Gossip by Carmen Tessier.

“Sumptuous inauguration, 5,000 guests, 3,600 telegrams advising to avoid rush hour… 100,000 canapés, 50,000 sandwiches, 8,000 glasses of champagne. A 1900s decor revisited by Salvador Dali. The press judged the place modern, meaning partitioned, compartmentalized, isolating customers in boxes and cubicles. Gone were the large brasserie halls where everyone saw everyone: the taste for more intimate atmospheres was asserting itself. Twice smaller than the Champs-Elysées drugstore, it nevertheless attracted 2,000 to 3,000 people per day (visitors). Gainsbourg often went there to kiss the saleswomen. ”

Gilles Schlesser, Saint-Germain-des-Prés: Les lieux de légende, Éditions Parigramme (2014).