As soon as the girls moved out, though, I found out how wrong I was. The next occupants were a young couple who immediately put up thick curtains, and scowled at me if I was looking out of my window and dared to nod or smile across at them, even though I was usually fully clothed.
Parisian friends regularly tell stories about sexy goings-on in their neighbours’ apartments—yelps coming through the walls or ceiling, a pair of splayed female legs poking up above a window sill, or silhouettes in a bathroom window performing a shadow play of stand-up fornication. But these, it now seems to me, are only symptoms of the sheer density of population in the city. Glancing in a neighbour’s window or inadvertently eavesdropping through thin walls are inevitable features of city life.
Even so, Paris still loves to think of itself as a sexier place than anywhere else, capable of making non-Parisians blush with its openness about l’amour. In a recent article for the Sunday Times, Paris’s resident philosopher and socialite, Bernard-Henri Lévy, wrote: ‘I am always working, but I do have time for a little pleasure as well. For me, the greatest pleasure in life is making love. You’re blushing? I’m sorry.’ Yes, he was convinced that his non-Parisian readers were so prudish that they would be shocked by this startling confession that he enjoys shagging.
Don’t get me wrong, Paris is sexy, but its real charm is that it thinks it’s so much sexier.
Tonight, Josephine
If Paris sees itself as such a sex machine, it’s because it is, in all fairness, a very experienced lover.
In the court of French Kings, sex was a perfume that hung permanently in the air. Louis XIV insisted on le droit de seigneur over any lady who caught his attention at Versailles. His successor, Louis XV, was notorious for his willingness to drop his silk breeches. And scattered around these depraved monarchs like so many silk cushions were the indolent, tax-exempt aristocrats, who had little to do apart from adopt the Kings as role models and bed each other’s spouses, servants and relatives.
Things didn’t calm down much after the Revolution, either, because the survivors were so happy to have made it through the Terror without being separated from their heads that they indulged in a frenzy of physical gratification. The young Napoleon Bonaparte first met his future wife Josephine at a chic Parisian party, where she, like all the other society ladies of the time, was dressed in a low-cut, almost transparent, gown that was split at the side to reveal pretty well all her curves as she danced. She was a serial mistress, but no one thought less of her for that, and a few years later she became Napoleon’s Empress.
The Empereur himself wasn’t much of a Latin Lothario—he was more of a practical man. He legalized France’s brothels, the maisons de tolérance, as a way of making sure prostitutes were under medical supervision so that his soldiers weren’t distracted in battle by itchy diseases. And ironically, it was this clinical measure that provided the last building block for Paris’s reputation as a capital of copulation.
During the nineteenth century, the city’s medicalized sex factories evolved into a whole subculture that attracted well-to-do young men from all over Europe and the newly rich continent of America. It became très chic to nip to Paris for a weekend or stop over on one’s tour of the great European capitals and, after a quick peek at the architecture and a dash around the Louvre, indulge one’s less artistic instincts in a high-class whorehouse. And these weren’t dark places where a man would sneak in, his collar turned up, and quickly choose the recipient of his paid attentions. The expensive bordels were often brightly lit temples of the senses, riotous cabarets with music and dancing, cafés where the female drinkers were all semi-naked and available.
And, like that other great royal role model, King Edward VII of England, who spent much of his youth undressing Parisian prostitutes,* in later life these satisfied customers would return to the city with their wives, and mentally relive their wild days as they drank Champagne in more decorous establishments. And at the end of the evening, back at the hotel with wifey, the men could almost imagine they were with little Brigitte or Marie-Rose, or one of the other girls they’d toyed with at the maison de tolérance. A Victorian wife would probably be surprised to see her staid, respectable husband looking so relaxed, and (as long as she didn’t suspect why he had that wistful look in his eye) would no doubt be delighted at his ardour. Arriving back home, couples would whisper to their friends: ‘Marriage in a rut? Love life gone off the boil? Go to Paris, tout de suite.’
And of course it wasn’t only married couples who were taking up bed space in Paris. Parisian hotels were so used to playing host to the unmarried that no hotelier would bat an eyelid if a couple signing in didn’t seem able to agree on what their name was. Pigalle was full of hôtels de passe where prostitutes brought their clients, and even less lugubrious places were not too conscientious about who was renting their rooms. This was how Paris became a bolthole for adulterers and illicit lovers who were afraid of damaging their reputations if they flaunted their philanderings at home—a trip to Paris was a journey to an oasis of immorality, with the added bonus that the city always had a sheen of romance. Taking your lover to Paris has always been so much classier than ducking into a motel or trying to convince some dragon of a seaside landlady that you really are Mr and Mrs Smith.
Paris would still like to think of itself as a kind of Western Bangkok, where unfortunate citizens of less erotic countries can come and lose their inhibitions. Coaches stop at Pigalle so that tourists can get a thrill by wandering past the explicit photos outside the lapdancing clubs and hostess bars. A whole section of the rue Saint-Denis, right in the centre of the city, still has scantily dressed prostitutes in doorways. There are also several well-known swingers’ clubs, openly advertised in ordinary listings magazines, where free-loving Parisian couples go to have sex with perfectly respectable strangers. At one of them, it is rumoured, a soirée not so long ago got off to a slow start because, as the manager explained, “We’re waiting for Monsieur le Ministre.’**
The Parisians would love to trademark the brand Sexe, or at least get an appellation contrôlée on it. I can hear the ads now, spoken by a modern Brigitte Bardot—‘Sexe de Paris, ze only real sex.’
But times are changing. The prostitutes are being edged out of the rue Saint-Denis, which is getting so clean that a far-from-daring friend of mine has even rented an apartment there for her student son. The street, for long a no-go area for property investors, is being targeted as one of the last ungentrified pockets of central Paris. Even Pigalle, the nerve centre of Paris’s sex industry, is changing—nostalgic residents complained bitterly when a sex shop recently closed down and was replaced by a health-food supermarket.
In fact, Parisian sex has become so endangered that it now has its own museum …
A trip down memory boulevard
The section of the boulevard de Clichy between the métro stations Blanche and Pigalle is dotted with sex shops (many of them looking decidedly jaded) and lapdancing clubs, and if a male walks along the north side of the boulevard, day or night, every 10 metres or so he will be approached by a man or woman who steps out from a velvet-curtained doorway and invites him to come in and check out the girls. Personally, though, I’ve never seen them pull in any punters. Well, no one sober, anyway.
The area is also home to a much more successful place that sells sex toys, pornography and ‘intimate’ jewellery, and attracts both male and female customers day and night despite the fact that it has no one outside touting for business—it’s the Musée de l’Érotisme, and it’s so respectable that it figures in the city’s museum listings, alongside the Louvre and Napoleon’s tomb at Les Invalides.
Hoping to get an insider’s view up the skirts of Pigalle, I made an appointment to talk to the museum’s curator, Alain Plumey. He is a diminutive, shaven-headed, pale-skinned sixty-year-old, dressed like someone who might sell second-hand books at a flea market. He is, however, a retired porn actor. In the 1970s and early 1980s, Plumey did his stuff in
129 hard-core movies with typically descriptive French titles like Suce-moi, Salope (Suck Me, Slut), Cuisses en Délire (Delirious Thighs), Blondes Humides (Wet Blondes) and Déculottez-vous, les Starlettes (Panties Off, Starlets).
I must admit that even I feel a tinge of nostalgia when I read those titles. Not that I’ve seen any of the films. No, before the internet and DVDs killed off Paris’s porn cinemas, the listings magazines used to publish the names of new X-rated releases, and they were often hilariously explicit, especially when translated literally into English—my all-time favourite was Il y a la Fête dans Mon Cul—There’s a Party in My Arse. It’s an image to make anyone’s eyes water.
But Plumey is not at all what you might expect of an ex-porn star. No open-chested shirt, gold medallion and leather trousers for him. When he speaks, however, there is no mistaking which industry he is working in.
‘I got into porn acting because I wanted to have lots of sex,’ he told me. ‘I’ve always been fascinated by sex. When I was a kid, there was a permanent funfair along the middle of the boulevard, and I used to crawl under the awnings to watch the girls in the striptease tents. They were often purple because of the cold.’
This part of Paris, he said, has been associated with sex since the reign of François I, King of France from 1515 to 1547. Apparently François used to venture outside the city walls to visit the convent at Abbesses. As Monsieur Plumey put it, ‘The mother superior was the biggest pimp in Paris, and used to rent out the nuns. And at that time, the windmills in Montmartre were all brothels. The millers used to provide girls to entertain the farmers while they were milling the grain. That’s why we have the phrase to enter a place comme dans un moulin, meaning to be able to walk in freely and feel at home. The windmills were open to anyone who wanted to have a girl. Then later on, in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, rich people built folies here, outside the city walls, to meet up with their mistresses in private.’
Folies were elegant country houses, often hidden behind discreetly planted trees, that became notorious venues for orgies, and served as models when Paris began to build its most luxurious brothels in the mid-nineteenth century. Even after the rapidly expanding city made the folies too urban to be discreet, the lower classes maintained the area’s erotic reputation with cheaper bordels, girlie bars and streetwalkers. The Folies-Bergère can-can show is a reference to the former rendez-vous houses, just as the Moulin Rouge harks back to the hospitality provided by millers.
In the nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries, though, despite all the cheap sex on sale, the atmosphere in Pigalle was far less seedy than today, Plumey told me, because it was much more open.
‘The brothels were often run by dangerous criminals, but they were rogues who excited the ladies,’ he said. ‘And the filles*** were everywhere, they were a part of life. Back then, no single working-class woman could support herself on her meagre salary, so they were all looking for a gentil monsieur [kind gentleman] to supplement their income. Part-time prostitution was the norm. And there was no shame involved—artists and writers celebrated the prostitutes. They were Picasso’s and Renoir’s models. Picasso’s painting Les Demoiselles d’Avignon was a group of Montmartre hookers. He painted it just up the road from here at the Bateau-Lavoir. And some of the most popular songs of the time were about prostitutes—the singers used to come out on to the boulevard, busk and sell the sheet music. People would take it home and sing the song around their piano.’
My own grandparents used to buy a lot of songsheets, and I’ve tried to picture my proper, white-haired grandad singing about ladies of the night while my granny nibbled fruitcake. But no, it doesn’t compute. And somehow I couldn’t picture respectable middle-class Parisians doing the same thing in the early-twentieth century, either, especially if Monsieur wanted to hide the fact that he was a client of the ladies in the songs. Here, I felt, the Parisian romanticism was kicking in. After all, alongside the chic brothels, France also had its notorious maisons d’abattage (knocking shops), where, right up until 1946, the girls would cater for eighty or ninety clients a day. Even if a girl worked a twelve-hour shift, it would mean seven or eight men an hour. Not idyllic by any standards.
Plumey is too young to remember the golden (and not so golden) age of legal prostitution, but he did recall the old theatres, where, instead of waiting to be lapdanced on, customers would go to see a sexy review—an explicit version of the Folies-Bergère and the Moulin Rouge shows. These cabarets have all died out now, killed off by the big, and then the small, screen.
In the 1970s, porn cinemas were doing a roaring trade in Paris, thanks to the lack of censorship. In France, this encouraged totally above-board producers to fund typically French films, featuring, say, a châtelain (château owner) and his maid, or a perverse husband and wife. That was when Plumey began acting in them. At first the settings were all provincial, so he also started to write scripts featuring Parisian characters like café waiters, delivery boys and gendarmes. These were filmed in Paris and were, Plumey told
me, very lucrative, ‘Because I knew how to write to a budget and my wife was a monteuse.’
At this point, our conversation was interrupted for a while because of a slight misunderstanding. I assumed that monteuse (literally, a female ‘mounter’) was some kind of porn-movie stunt-lady. An understandable assumption, surely, because one of the movies in Plumey’s filmography is Les Monteuses, the story of a young man who has a bewitching flute that causes girls to go wild and straddle the nearest male every time it is played. (And Mozart thought his flute was magic.)
But it turns out that the word monteuse also means female film editor. Madame Plumey was able to help her husband in the cutting room, not because she was one of the female leads in his movies.
Anyway, Parisian films like these helped maintain Pigalle’s reputation because they were shown in the neighbourhood’s porn cinemas, and received an even wider audience when the sex shops started up, and began to sell the videos.
However, these shops, like almost every sex-themed place on the boulevard and in the surrounding streets, are looking run-down these days. Plumey believes that this is because Paris itself is getting less sexy.
‘France used to be une grande nation copulatrice [a nation of great copulators],’ he said, ‘but now Parisians are tired and too materialistic. More and more men are becoming premature ejaculators or impotent. And the women are getting greedy—these days, you have to be rich to make a conquest. And people are more conservative. Even the porn movies shown on French TV are censored because they’re for the general public. There are things you can’t show any more.’
I asked whether this was why Plumey opened his museum in 1997, a place of titillation rather than gratification.
‘Yes,’ he said, ‘and that’s why we get so many women visitors. Women enjoy foreplay and aesthetics. Men are into direct, immediate action, they’re brutes compared to women. And we get lots of older people, too, couples.’
‘And lone men?’ I ask, remembering my one previous visit, when I was researching a scene for my novel Merde Actually, and wandered around alone, feeling very self-conscious and voyeuristic.
‘No,’ he said, ‘we don’t get many lone men.’
And with that, he announced that he was going to leave me to visit the museum on my own again …
Sex costs extra if you wear glasses
This time, because I was researching a book about Paris, I spent less time admiring the collection of ethnic erotica. The museum contains hundreds of sex-related objects from around the world, such as Mexican water jugs with the most startling handles and spouts, and Japanese engravings that seem to have been commissioned by men in need of some highly unrealistic flattery.
Instead I lingered in front of a 1932 cartoon that depicted Pigalle’s racy image in the inter-war years—it was a street scene, in which all the characters had suddenly been seized with the urge to have an orgy. The passengers of a passing bus had all leapt on one another.
Meanwhile, a male pedestrian was fondling a sailor, a woman was enjoying herself with a pig that had escaped from a butcher’s van, and even the two horses pulling a cart had begun to do it doggy-style. Clearly there was something very special in Pigalle’s air back then.
The museum also houses several of the risqué songsheets that Monsieur Plumey mentioned. They feature coy pictures of smiling ladies, and have titles like ‘Les Marcheuses’ (The Streetwalkers), ‘Le Pensionnat des Demoiselles’ (The School for Young Ladies—a fantasy about soldiers being billeted with a dormitory full of schoolgirls), and ‘La Rue de la Joie’ (The Street of Joy), a song that includes the poignant lines:
Pour se faire aimer
On veut se donner
Hélas on ne peut que se vendre.
In other words—‘To be loved, we want to give ourselves, but alas we have to sell ourselves’—a myth that probably wore thin at the maisons d’abattage.
The most interesting part of the collection, though, deals with the old brothels, and includes publicity shots of the girls on offer at one establishment, most of them completely naked except for their shoes or the occasional scarf or necklace—the customers had to know what they would be getting for their money.
There are photos of the luxurious interiors of chic Parisian brothels like the Chabanais, the Sphinx, the One-Two-Two and the Quatorze (brothels were often known by their street numbers, because name signs were forbidden). The décors were as elaborate as film sets—an Egyptian room, a cruise-liner cabin, a medieval chamber, and even a kitchen with apron-only ‘helpers’. Every fantasy was there to be bought, and it was all legal. These photos weren’t sneak peeks behind the scenes, they were promotional literature—like a pre-1946 version of today’s brochures for spas.
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