Exactly how much fun was it being an impoverished artist in Paris?

What he really wanted, Picasso once remarked, was to live ‘like a pauper, but with plenty of money’. It sounds most appealing: the perfect recipe for a bohemian life, dreamed up by a supreme master in the art of having it both ways. To begin with at least, however, Picasso had to make do only with the half of his formula: living like a pauper with scarcely any cash at all. La vie de bohème, this enjoyable book makes clear, might have been romantic but was also hard.

Sue Roe has written a portrait in words of an era, through which are threaded the stories of the various people who passed by — painters, models, collectors, dealers. But her book takes its main title from a place: Montmartre. It’s an address that still has allure. Although for the best part of a century it has been a kitschy tourist attraction, it was for a few years the epicentre of the budding movement known as modern art.

Why Montmartre? A hill to the north of central Paris, this was a good site for windmills and market gardens. By the late 19th century, parts of the district were beginning to be gentrified, but the northern slope — as can clearly be seen from Van Gogh’s paintings of 1886–7 — remained a semi-rural shanty town. The area suffered from what we would call ‘social deprivation’. In other words, much of Montmartre was a slum — home to an assortment of mattress menders, circus performers, prostitutes, petty criminals and small traders.

Consequently, this was a quarter which had just what young artists always need: cheap rents. In this respect, Montmartre was the predecessor of other districts colonised by painters and sculptors, such as New York’s SoHo in the 1960s. The fact that the locality abounded in inexpensive restaurants, bars and dance halls added to its appeal.

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For much of this decade Picasso lived and worked in a rambling wooden building nicknamed the Bateau-Lavoir or ‘washing-boat’ because it looked like the creaking vessels in which laundry was done on the Seine.