The Other Paris

by Luc Sante

  Then, until the First World War, there was the final stage: Fort-Monjol, for streetwalkers who had outlived the actuarial estimates. Some kept working well into old age in this warren of streets where the women sat on chairs in front of their doors; one of them worked out of a gypsy wagon. You can see them in Atget’s photographs. They don’t look miserable, but nevertheless “every skin disease of humanity seemed to have met up there: mealy psoriasis, purulent acne, flabby boils, inveterate staphylococcus and streptococcus, tumors, scabies—all flourished in the saltpeter of those stinking walls alive with vermin.” The deadliest taunt among whores was “You’ll end up at Monjol.”

  Whore, pimp, and john. Illustration by Subin de Beauvais, circa 1900

  Rue Asselin and the Hôtel du Fort-Monjol, circa 1910

  The arc of prostitution was a short rise and a long fall. Girls would come from the faubourgs or the banlieue or the provinces when they were fourteen or fifteen, or younger, and they might reach their apex there and then—but afterward they would have to keep working anyway, for as long as their bodies could endure it. They would shuttle among the various arenas—from sidewalk to stage, from Saint-Denis to the outer boulevards, from specialty house to Fort-Monjol, from furnished room to South America—and sometimes they managed not to be killed in any of them. Often the arc was sawtoothed, as shown by the career of Zola’s Nana. She is first glimpsed in L’assommoir, the daughter of Gervaise, a pretty girl restlessly beginning adolescence as her mother is plunging into the depths. She goes out on pretend errands that last longer and longer until one day she doesn’t come home. A neighbor soon sees her in a handsome carriage, dressed to the nines.

  At the start of the novel bearing her name, she is fifteen and onstage, drawing an eager male public but not because of any acting skills. She entertains admirers in her new apartment on Boulevard Haussmann (“which the proprietor rented to single ladies to give the plaster a chance to dry”), admirers who run the gamut from nobles to merchants to impetuous but penniless youths. But she gets bored and needs money, so before long she is once again, with her friend and lover Satin, walking the streets:

  A hundred meters from Café Riche, as they arrived on their beat, they let down their skirts, which they had been holding up carefully in one hand, and from then on, mindless of the dust, sweeping the sidewalk and rolling their hips, they walked slowly, slowing down even more when they crossed the field of light of a big café … In the darkness their whitened faces, spotted with lipstick and eyeshadow, took on the disquieting charm of some bogus Oriental bazaar set down in the street. Until eleven o’clock they remained in high spirits even as they were jostled by the crowd, only occasionally tossing a “stupid shit” at the backs of oafs who had stepped on their train … But as the night wore on, if they hadn’t made one or two trips to Rue de la Rochefoucauld, they became evil bitches, their hunt turning desperate.

  After managing to evade a police raid that sweeps up Satin, Nana finds her way back to the stage, where she bombs. Somehow, though, she soon manages to become a fashion plate, a cynosure at the races, the lover of great men—but then a scandal sends her off to parts unknown, perhaps Russia, from which she returns mortally ill. Zola, in his twin roles as novelist and reporter, makes Nana a rounded and singular character who is at the same time representative of a phenomenon. He had some dubious genetic theories, hardly uncommon at the time, about how such a figure represented the wrath of the people against the aristocracy, and he baldly issues his thesis from the mouth of another character: “as tall and beautiful as a plant growing in a manure pile, she avenged the wretches and the forsaken whose product she was … She unwittingly became a force of nature, a ferment of destruction, corrupting and convulsing Paris between her snowy thighs.” Nevertheless her path is credible in its outline, and you do not have to be a nineteenth-century moralist to see how such a story could not fail to come to a bad end. The legendary putative happy ending—the whore who marries into cosseted respectability—is alluded to and given a name (Irma d’Anglars, “a party girl such as they don’t make anymore,” who is now ninety and “thick with the priests”), but it is presented as something woozily distant and just barely verifiable.

  Zola’s Nana in its first American paperback edition, 1941

  It goes without saying that prostitution, in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries especially, kept the flame at a constant simmer beneath the cauldron of class; it was a destabilizing agent in the very bosom of the city. “I have made a pact with prostitution to sow discord among families,” wrote the Comte de Lautréamont in the person of his monster, Maldoror. “I’ve often wondered whether … in producing these beautiful women whose mission seems to be to ruin and cretinize the haute bourgeoisie and the last remnants of the nobility, they were not continuing quite peacefully the work of the most violent clubs of 1793,” mused Maxime du Camp, chin in hand. Prostitution, carelessly or ruthlessly, blurred every kind of line. “We find in the same bed, each given his day and accepting it without jealousy, the son of a good family, the draper’s assistant, and the tenth-rate actor,” complained another pamphleteer. Not only was it not possible for the bourgeois majority to frequent only the grandes horizontales, let alone make one of them his exclusive property, as Leopold II of Belgium managed for a while with Cléo de Mérode, but cross-class affiliations were built into the system. Doctors and bankers liked their rough trade. There were indeed women called femmes à lipettes, who catered to the working class by choice, but the most sordid circumstances primarily drew the bourgeois, who sought out obese women, disfigured women, amputees. For that matter, there were those who liked their women big, strong, and battle-ready, such as the whore in Montmartre in 1910 who, feeling disrespected, successively knocked cold a waiter, a café owner, and a policeman, and required a whole platoon of cops to take her down. “But certain connoisseurs appreciate that. Those women are brutal and vulgar, but they are ‘genuine.’ Among so many who are scrawny, rickety, anemic, tubercular, they stand out for their robust good health, whether farm girls or factory girls.”

  “Charitable sir, may God keep your sons away from our daughters.” Illustration by Gavarni, from Les lorettes vieillies, 1851–53

  There was little opprobrium attached to the practice of frequenting prostitutes, except among the strictest Catholics, who were not so much in fashion in the mid-nineteenth century. Whores had access to all but a few of the leading male citizens, and while blackmail would not have been terribly feasible then, they could give the men syphilis. But while attention has primarily focused on the ruin that syphilis brought to the bourgeois intelligentsia—the lives and deaths of, for example, Baudelaire, Flaubert, Maupassant, Manet, Gauguin, Van Gogh; the physical and mental deterioration chronicled by Alphonse Daudet in his almost unendurable journals—it should be borne in mind that the toll was much greater among the prostitutes, who generally did not have recourse even to the ineffective medicine that was available before Paul Ehrlich discovered Compound 606 (later called arsphenamine) in 1909. Unrecorded are the sufferings they endured in the Dépôt, the women’s prisons of Saint-Lazare and Les Madelonnettes, and the insane asylum La Salpêtrière.

  Marthe Miette, a lorette, circa 1860

  The most routine and quotidian torment prostitutes endured came from their pimps. Beginning at twilight or the end of the working day, whichever came first, they

  hang out on a corner, in a recess, in a dark wineshop, in the hallway of a cheap hotel, their hands in their pockets, their trousers molding their equivocal forms, a silk cap atop their pomaded hair, spit curls on their temples, a cigarette dangling from their lips. With their neck muscles strained and all the features of their greasy, pale faces fixed in a brutal and anxious state of expectation, they survey their employees accosting men on the street … When night falls, the same scenes are played out more violently in the glow of the gaslights … They follow their women on the prowl, empty their pockets, and beat them unmercifully if the take is low.


  A man became a pimp because, as a career, it easily outshone factory labor or peddling. The man had muscle, perhaps had a solid grounding in petty crime, or perhaps he seduced a girl whose prospects were no better than his and they more or less jointly decided on their path. Pimping, in addition to the possibility it accorded the poor boy to become an employer (a capitalist) without having to scare up a monetary stake, was also a trade imbued with its own elegance. Witness the pimp of the 1840s striding along the Boulevard du Crime: polished pointy-toed boots, jacket with nipped waist, cream or dove-gray hat tipped over one ear, brocaded waistcoat, pomaded sideburns, small gold ring in one ear, heavy watch chain, multiple rings, medallions made from the braided hair of his women. Mutatis mutandis, many of these elements were preserved over the decades and centuries, even as, for example, the hat became a cap and then a fedora. Then, too, the nineteenth-century pimps, for all their sins, were denizens of an organized underworld culture with its own laws of hierarchy and territory and mutual aid, in which disputes were adjudicated by a panel of senior members and perhaps settled by a duel, and in which job protection and benefits were markedly superior to those of any legitimate enterprise. After the war, however, all was chaos.

  The exercise yard at Saint-Lazare, circa 1900

  A reporter in the 1930s attended a lecture given in a Montmartre café by a veteran pimp known as Henri le Marseillais to a group of aspiring young macks. The killers and thieves who composed the criminal underworld had their standards, he asserted: loyalty, courage, propriety. But now they were under assault by riffraff. Just about everybody wanted to live off women, no matter how ill suited they were to the task: traitors, informers, hijackers of other men’s stables, frauds, slanderers, weaklings, false friends, plunderers of every sort, drudges tired of their jobs, cheaters blacklisted by the gambling houses, embezzlers just out of jail, bums who’d left their bridges, washed-up ex-athletes, pantywaists, failed artists, sandwich men. The mores of the past had been lost. The last of the vrai de vrai* had traveled, gone to America, been corrupted. They allowed their women to drink and, worst of all, to take cocaine, for a dose of which they’d deliver their man’s head to the authorities, already separated from its shoulders for their convenience. And the new breed of pimps tolerated competition! When some tinhorn gave the spiel to one of their women, they registered their indignation with all the ferocity of a notary mailing out a cease-and-desist.

  A pimp, 1890s

  But even before the war, would-be pimps came in all flavors. Chevalier relates a fait-divers of January 1912, when a Montmartre prostitute, very elegant and sought after, who worked solo out of her apartment, happened to encounter a Corsican on Boulevard de Clichy at three o’clock in the morning and agreed to accompany him back to his hotel. The Corsican got straight to the point: she was to work for him. She demurred, pointing out that, for one thing, she had the clap and in fact was scheduled for a hospital visit the following day. Enraged twice over, he strangled her, smothered her with a pillow, and stuffed her corpse under the bed. Undeterred, he promptly returned to the boulevard and soon found another woman to bring up to the room. Once there, they heard footsteps on the stairs—a police raid! The woman ducked under the bed. Her screams woke the whole neighborhood.

  A pimp settling his accounts, 1884

  Small wonder women were increasingly inclined to work on their own. A 1930 study alleged that “a majority” of streetwalkers were “clandestines,” and that a great many worked out of semilegitimate settings: hôtels de passe, dance halls, teahouses, cafés, shops, movie theaters. Both of these assertions appear a trifle optimistic. An American writer thirty years later noted the presence of freelance whores, known as amazones, who worked out of their own cars, as well as a certain number of bohemian insoumises in the cellar nightclubs around Saint-Germain-des-Prés, but the same old pimp-controlled street trade still prevailed. Prices ranged from one dollar American on Rue de Budapest, hard by the Saint-Lazare train station, through a midrange six to eight dollars in the bars on side streets near the Opéra, all the way to a possible fifty dollars in the Sixteenth, the Bois de Boulogne and de Vincennes, and along the Champs-Élysées. Before the Sarkozy Law passed in 2003, the sites of street prostitution mostly adhered to the traditional locations, some of them centuries old: Rue Saint-Denis and its tributaries; Place de Clichy, not far from Pigalle; Place de la Madeleine, near the financial center; Avenue Foch, in the heart of the haute bourgeoisie; the exterior boulevards in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth; and the Cours de Vincennes on its way to the Bois. The locations outside the center of the city appeared more upscale, but also tended to involve automobiles (the clients’), which exposed the women to more immediate danger from psychopaths. If pimps were in the picture, their protection was unavailing.

  The other option that had always been available to women was to work in a brothel, a maison close. Until 1946 these were legal, and though there were repressive periods when they were regularly raided and shaken down by the constabulary, most of the time they enjoyed official patronage and safety from graft, reformers, and trouble. The employees were spared from having to report to the Dépôt by a house physician who made regular inspections and treatments on site. Brothels ranged from minuscule establishments with just a couple of employees to major lupanars containing ballrooms and restaurants, and from the sordid to the respectable, even familial. Brothels often served multiple social functions in addition to their principal industry. Maupassant’s “La Maison Tellier” (1881) describes a house’s role as anchor in a small city—when it closes for a weekend the whole town is thrown into turmoil—but even in Paris there were clients who came just to socialize, to drink with the madam, to make business connections in much the same way that the houses of fraternal orders functioned in the United States. For the women, a brothel could be home and jail at one and the same time, as expressed in the réaliste singer Damia’s song “En maison” (1934). She enters the house at eighteen, under an assumed name, and although the work is taxing, she likes the music. She travels (Bordeaux, Marseille, Toulon), but always by going from house to house, so she doesn’t see very much of the landscape, and the men are the same everywhere. One of them offers to marry her, however strange an idea that might be, and she takes him up on it. So then she has a parlor, jewels, people kissing her hand—but finally it’s not so different from being in a brothel, only minus the music. So one day she returns to the life she used to lead, in a maison close.

  Parisian prostitution in the American imagination: Francis Carco’s Rue Pigalle (1927), given the drugstore treatment, 1954

  The workforce, with monsieur and madame and their dog, 1930s

  The glamour period of the brothel begins toward the end of the nineteenth century. La Fleur Blanche, centrally located on Rue des Moulins, opened as a house of prostitution during the Second Empire, but it became famous in the wider world in the 1890s chiefly as a result of paintings by Toulouse-Lautrec, who kept a room there and sympathetically documented the most humdrum aspects of its life: the medical inspection, the laundryman, the communal meals, the owners and their dog, and the hours of boredom endured by the employees, who lounged endlessly on sofas in their underwear. (It was another house, on Rue d’Amboise, where he painted individual vignetted portraits of sixteen of the women.) Le Chabanais was opened in 1878 on the street of that name, near the Palais-Royal, by a certain Madame Kelly (née Alexandrine Jouannet). It may not have been the first luxury brothel, but it quickly became the most famous. It was a destination bagnio for the crowned heads of Europe, who legendarily indicated visits in their schedules as “appointment with the president of the Senate.” The star boarder was the future Edward VII of Britain, known as Bertie, who had a truly remarkable stirrup chair built to his specifications and kept on the premises for erotic configurations that can only be surmised. Its theme rooms were celebrated: Pompeii, medieval torture chamber, Moorish, Louis XV, and Japanese. (The last was awarded a prize at the Exposition of 1900.) For all the high-tone
trappings, the establishment’s male support staff included characters with such names as Georges le Cuirassier, Ernest le Sourd (the Deaf), and Nez Pointu (Pointed Nose).

  Sheet music for “En maison,” by Damia, 1934

  The parlor of a brothel, 1930s

  As you might suspect, not all houses partook of this glamour. There were, for example, the so-called maisons d’abattage (slaughterhouses), which were cut-rate brothels that operated like factories. Of the twelve such houses counted in 1939 by the authors of the special issue on prostitution of Le Crapouillot, most were on the outer boulevards, but Le Moulin Galant, on Rue de Fourcy, lay between the church of Saint Paul and the Hôtel de Sens, in the Fourth. It employed sixty women who worked, often continuously in eight-hour shifts, for a set rate of five francs fifty—the fifty sous was for the use of a towel—unless patrons were sluggish in moving beyond the parlor, in which case there might be spontaneous price reductions and even auctions. The couple who ran the house, having given it a fresh paint job and exacting standards of cleanliness, by their lights, were eventually done out of it by a consortium of Parisian and Corsican gangsters, a crew with such monikers as Charlot Paletot de Cuir (Leather Coat) and Armand le Fou (Crazy Armand). Efforts by the former owners to press a lawsuit were ignored by the courts.