After the World Fair ended, Eiffel's iron-and-glass wine pavilion was bought by Alfred Boucher, sculptor of public monuments and friend of Rodin, and re-erected in passage Dantzig in an altruistic gesture of help for struggling artists. Very soon La Ruche, or the Beehive, became home to Fernand Léger, Modigliani (briefly), Chagall, Soutine, Ossip Zadkine and many others, mainly Jewish refugees from pogroms in Poland and Russia. Boucher, somewhat overwhelmed by the unconventional work and behaviour of his protégés, commented good-naturedly: "I'm like a hen who finds she has laid ducks' eggs."Léger, evoking the poverty, recalls how he was invited to lunch one day by four Russian residents who had just made a few francs selling cat pelts. The meal was the cats, dismembered and fricasséed in vodka. "It burnt your mouth and it stank," he noted, "but it was better than nothing." The writer Blaise Centrars was a regular visitor, as were Apollinaire and Max Jacob, who provided a link with the Picasso gang across the river in Montmartre, and there was much cross-fertilization going on in the cafés, too, especially La Rotonde, at 105 boulevard du Montparnasse. But at La Ruche itself, the French were in a minority – you were much more likely to hear Yiddish, Polish, Russian or Italian spoken. It's still something of a Tower of Babel these days, with Irish, American, Italian and Japanese artists in residence, although, as an Italian mosaicist who has been there since the 1950s said, there's no longer the Bohemian camaraderie and festivity of the old days. The buildings were saved from the bulldozers in 1970 by a campaign led by Marc Chagall, since which time physical conditions have improved.
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