by Luc Sante
There was never any shortage of women available to staff the houses, rather the contrary, and traffickers of all sorts had little difficulty harvesting bodies. One middle-aged woman, arrested in 1906, had a habit of strolling the boulevards and accosting young unemployed women whom she would engage as housemaids; a few days later they would find themselves shuttled off to whorehouses in the provinces. Larger-scale enterprises sent women abroad, generally operating under the guise of employment agencies that recruited “dancers” and “entertainers” for what were usually described as music hall revues in Argentina or the Cape Colony, on renewable ten-week contracts. Some went straight to brothels, others to dance halls or bars, where they were employed as B-girls, paid strictly on a percentage of the champagne they were able to flog. The influx of women from Paris was such that in those days, “French lady” was the euphemism for whore in Cape Town, “Francucha” in Buenos Aires. Chevalier cites an undated press report regarding a dive on the lower slopes of Montmartre that around 1910 was the principal clearinghouse for the trade:
All day long there hung about characters of an extreme and unusual elegance, with significant nicknames. They were the go-betweens, the suppliers for pimps from around the world. From time to time one of these, just arrived from Buenos Aires or Cairo or Manchuria, would come in, his fingers heavy with rings … to discuss quantity and quality and age, preferably from 16 to 18. The harvesters would work factory exits or the windows of employment agencies where notices were posted. The young women were hauled off to orgies, expertly orchestrated, in some suburban villa.
Sometimes the women weren’t given even that much notice. A police raid on a hotel in 1902 netted a whole crew of teenagers bound for the Cape Colony who were fully persuaded that they were joining a dance company, this one as a seamstress, that one as a maker of slippers.
“Marietta,” an anonymous carte de visite from a brothel album, 1865
Three employees of a luxury house, 1930s
The years just before World War I saw an efflorescence of whorehouses, many of them specialized. Thus Chez Marcelle (on Rue de l’Arbre-Sec) and L’Acropole (on Rue de Hanovre) were only two of many that catered to sadomasochistic fantasies, and Chez Sabine (on Rue Caron) further refined its appeal by indulging slave scenarios—with African women, no less. At Chez Adèle (on Rue d’Aboukir) you could disport yourself in a coffin. Chez Sevoline (on Rue des Rosiers) welcomed couples, while Chez Jeanne de la Grille and Miss Beety—both on Rue Saint-Sulpice, in a neighborhood once known to taxi drivers as “the Vatican”—catered to the ecclesiastical trade. There exists a menu of services, dated 1915, from an establishment run by Mlle Marcelle Lapompe,* supposedly at 69 Rue du Chat-Noir—there is no such street in Paris—which, real or not, perhaps gives a sideways glimpse into the bordello economy: an ordinary hand job cost thirty-three sous, upped to fifty for the additional insertion of the pinky into the anus; fellatio set one back 3.50, or four francs if swallowing was involved (there was apparently no additional charge for the suggested preliminary consumption of a mint lollipop by the woman); the varieties of soixante-neuf ranged from 1.75 up to four francs. “Journey to yellow lands” rated 4.90 with the maid or 4.95 with the waiter, while something called “pissette sur la quéquette,” which sounds as if it might have required use of Edward VII’s stirrup chair, in addition to a bucket, dented one’s wallet to the tune of 5.45.
The price of love on the notional Rue du Chat-Noir, 1915
Any number of refinements were introduced to the scene after the war, such as a whole spate of houses near the Opéra that fronted as couture houses or jewelers, perfumers, or antique shops. While these might be seen as appeals to the clandestine lure of prostitution, quite the opposite sort of attraction ruled the two major bordellos of the interwar era, Le Sphinx (opened in 1929) and One-Two-Two (1933), which were about as discreet as department stores. Le Sphinx, on Boulevard Edgar-Quinet, in Montparnasse, was noted for its Egyptian Revival façade (still extant) and décor. Its four owners had significant underworld ties as well as healthy connections within the government. In addition to its presiding madam, it employed five auxiliary procuresses who supervised sixty-five women, who each worked three times per day and twice on Sundays. Run along modern managerial lines, it was not only impeccably clean but also notably cheaper than many of the smaller upscale houses around town (a standard thirty francs per visit) and perhaps for that reason drew a clientele that included settled former bohemians, among them Simenon and Hemingway and most of the Montparnasse painters. It was particularly renowned for its erotic spectacles, as refined and choreographed as any top-flight supper club floor show.
The bar at Le Sphinx, 1930s
One-Two-Two, named after its address, 122 Rue de Provence (which runs behind the Galeries Lafayette), followed the tradition of Le Chabanais in priding itself on its theme rooms: Kama Sutra, Cleopatra, Versailles, igloo, pirates’ lair, medieval torture chamber, hayloft, and so on. Its seven floors attracted maharajahs, Hollywood stars, the Aga Khan, Leopold III of Belgium, and suchlike moneyed riffraff; its restaurant, Le Boeuf à la Ficelle, in addition drew many women from the entertainment industry. (Marlene Dietrich seems to have been spotted in every one of these houses.) When the Germans occupied Paris the major brothels lost no time in complying with the wishes of the invaders. After all, hadn’t Hitler called Paris “der sogenannte Puff Europas” (the so-called whorehouse of Europe)? Hitler himself was allegedly seen at Le Sphinx, while Chez Marguerite on Rue Saint-Georges was said to be Goering’s favorite. Those two, in addition to One-Two-Two, Le Chabanais, and the still-extant Fleur Blanche, were essentially conscripted, and for all four years catered almost exclusively to German officers and the French Gestapo.
The reception room of a large bordello, 1920s
That sort of “horizontal collaboration,” which during the postwar épuration (cleansing) saw many a small-town whore publicly stripped, shorn, and spat upon, was perhaps the major factor that led to the wholesale shuttering, in 1946, of brothels nationwide—1,400 of them, including 180 in Paris. This abrupt break with tradition was the result of a rare joint enterprise between the Communist Party and the Mouvement Républicain Populaire, a Christian outfit, under the aegis of the woman who gave the law its name: Marthe Richard. She was a chameleonic creature who enjoyed a colorful and improbably byzantine career over the course of her long life (1889–1982). She had been a prostitute herself in her youth, first on the street and then in a soldiers’ brothel, from which she was allegedly discharged for knowingly transmitting syphilis. Soon, married to a rich man she met in a Paris bagnio, she became a pioneering aviatrix, although she seems to have taken extraordinary measures to counterfeit some significant flight records. Widowed during World War I, she worked as a spy, but along the way got caught up in Mata Hari’s orbit and found herself unwittingly used as a double agent—which didn’t stop her from being awarded the Légion d’Honneur, nor from writing a heavily fictionalized heroic account of her experiences, which became a bestseller and later a movie, in which she was played by Edwige Feuillère. During World War II she seems to have been one of those many French nationals who rallied to the Resistance very late in the game but thereafter claimed various unverifiable feats of derring-do. In any event, her claims got her elected in 1945 to the Paris Municipal Council, as a representative from the Fourth Arrondissement, and her successful initiative to shut down the houses of prostitution in her district led very quickly to a wholesale national ban.
Marthe Richard, circa 1946
It seems unlikely that any set of circumstances other than the end of the war and its consequent purges could have led to the devastation of what might as well have been national monuments—as, indeed, the façade of Le Sphinx officially remains—and the sale at auction of their often unbelievable fixtures and furnishings. The outrage was loud and widespread. According to Pierre Mac Orlan, the closures represented “the collapsed foundation of a thousand-year-old civilization,” while Arletty, referri
ng to the fact that the French term for brothel is maison close, quipped, “It’s worse than a crime, it’s a pleonasm.” There were sundry initiatives to smear Richard, who was accused of jewel theft, among other things, but none of the charges stuck. Although she suggested at the time that the closing of the houses was only the first step toward an eventual eradication of the sex trade, no such thing happened, and the women were simply turned out to try their luck on the sidewalks, inspected on the fly by a “speculum brigade” sent out by the police. Richard spent her remaining three and a half decades variously equivocating and regretting the action to which her name was irrevocably tied.
Fixtures of Le Sphinx being dumped on the street, 1946
The business* was alternately plagued, abetted, and exploited by the police. The brigade des moeurs, or morals squad, was first dissolved in 1881 after a commission denounced it as “arbitrary,” “inquisitorial,” and a “secret police.” In its place was founded the brigade mondaine, which might be translated as “worldly brigade,” the agents of which were called “les bourgeois,” and which had the specific mission of rooting out clandestine brothels, those that were neither inspected nor taxed. In 1910 a section mixte was added to it, in effect a drug squad. Its tasks were transferred to a brigade des moeurs four years later, and that was renamed brigade mondaine in 1930—the name changes give the impression of successive veils drawn over a deeply rooted bent for corruption. In 1975 the Mondaine was dissolved and its functions assumed by the brigade des stupéfiants et du proxénétisme (drugs and pimping), and then those two aspects were finally split between two squads in 1989. The earliest version of the brigade earned its reputation through such pursuits as a minute surveillance of the adulteries of the prominent, which would seem to be a script for blackmail. Records were kept, for example, of the cash gifts Sarah Bernhardt received from her lovers and of the visits Zola paid to brothels for his research. Many of the grandes horizontales, such as Cora Pearl and Blanche d’Antigny, were systematically tracked by the squad, while others, down on their luck, were recruited as informants.
The squad began seizing pornographic photographs in the 1850s, at the dawn of the medium—Gustave Courbet was cited for possession in 1867—and would periodically crack down on porn whenever public opinion seemed to tilt in that direction, such as the 1930s, when a demagogue, the Abbé Bethléem, made a great show of tearing up publications he found offensive at newspaper kiosks, or the 1950s and early ’60s, when, with the encouragement of the prim Mme de Gaulle, the squad regularly seized filthy postcards, which look remarkably tame today, or such mildly risqué magazines as Paris-Tabou and Paris-Frou-Frou. The activities of the drug squad, too, varied wildly from era to era. Hashish, although consumed by everyone from Baudelaire and Gautier to Apollinaire and Artaud, doesn’t seem to have aroused police interest until the 1960s.
The paddy wagon. Illustration by Théophile Steinlen for Aristide Bruant’s Dans la rue, vol. 2, 1889
Much the same was true of opium until the 1930s—before World War I, a pipe cost less than a drink in a café. However, around that time, cocaine—its argot name back then, bigornette, derives from bigorner, the root “to kill”—became a problem. It flooded the underworld as well as bohemia; there were open-air markets in Montmartre; various murders were attributed to its effects. After World War I, Laurent Tailhade, who blamed cocaine for destroying the Montmartre bohemia—Tailhade was always mourning the end of something or other, prematurely or not—enumerated the sketchy types who skulked around plying women with the drug, people with names such as Max-la-Bombe and Le Pépère: “restaurant porters, hotel waiters, unemployed barbers, thugs in espadrilles, three-time losers, cashiered madams.” Dope was the mortal enemy of pimps, who could easily lose their employees to its effects, and killings of dealers were frequent.
A brothel employee, circa 1860
But the facilities were different for the different classes. In 1913, André Warnod wrote:
The pharmacy is heralded by its red and green lights. OPEN ALL NIGHT, says the sign. “Now there’s a model pharmacist, who stays up to take care of the injured and relieve the sick,” think those who don’t know that behind the big red and yellow luminous flasks in the window lies a commerce in forbidden drugs, which opens wide to neurotic women the mysterious gates of the artificial paradise. They come there for their ether … Cocaine and other substances are harder to get and often require intermediaries who charge elevated sums for their indispensible services.
Among these was an American, identified only as le grand Thomas, who appeared on the scene before the first war—big, well-groomed, debonair, everybody’s idea of the rich American—who claimed to be the son of a general, and whose picture had appeared in the New York Herald. He had six apartments in Paris, the principal one being a luxury flat on Rue Cambon, where he entertained the bon ton, and he went everywhere in a big car. He claimed to be a supplier of arms to the Italian army, which apparently was true, but he made a lot more money running cocaine, morphine, opium, and hashish, and had a sizeable network of pimps, whores, café owners, and hoteliers in his employ. Scandal broke in 1916 when a little blond dancer called Chiffon was found bleeding out in front of one of his buildings. Before dying she told the cops that Thomas was in the habit of drugging her and then torturing her before an audience of men in dress suits, in a hoodoo ambiance of black drapes and candles around the bed. Finally she had deliberately cut herself, deeply enough to require a trip to the hospital, but instead had simply been tossed out on the street. Thomas was expelled from France as an undesirable alien, but after a brief trip to Monte Carlo he was back, with all the proper documents. He was said to have supplied drugs to Miguel Almereyda, the anarchist who was the film director Jean Vigo’s father and whose precipitous decline due to drugs has a familiar late-century ring to it. What became of Thomas seems to be unrecorded. Between the wars the drug supply was intermittent, tossed by the four winds. In 1938 the squad seized one hundred kilos of opium, in 1942 (in the middle of the war) a mere five hundred grams, and then in 1946 all of three kilos. But right around then the Corsican Mafia took over the trade and modernized it, and everything changed.
L’opium à Paris by Delphi Fabrice, 1907
Alumni of the Petite-Roquette: “Whatever happened to the Homebody?” “He’s gone wrong, he’s taken to blow.” Illustration by Aristide Delannoy, from L’Assiette au Beurre, 1907
Homosexuality was also of great interest to the morals squad, who began keeping a register in the 1840s, with photographs when available, that accumulated some twelve hundred names in a decade and was divided into three categories: pederasts, shameful pederasts, and infamous pederasts—the last often wore such sobriquets as “la belle Andrée” or “la petite Colette.” Homosexuality was not specifically illegal, although pimping and prostitution of males were, as was blackmail of course, and until the 1980s the police displayed considerable anxiety about links between homosexuality and murder, as if one naturally led to the other. Gay male cruising along certain quais and in the galleries of the Palais-Royal was noted as far back as the eighteenth century, and chickenhawking became the special attribute of the Passage des Panoramas soon after its construction, but with the introduction of the vespasiennes (public urinals) under Napoléon III, a special police groupe des homos had to be dispatched to curtail trade in what were even then known as “teahouses.”
A mid-nineteenth-century “infamous pederast,” before … and after
A jésus, 1887
Most traffic between jésus, as young male prostitutes were known, and tantes (“aunties”: their clients) occurred in public places. There were undoubtedly male brothels in the nineteenth century, but evidence of them is scant. It was not until the twentieth that notoriety was achieved by the houses operated by Albert le Cuziat, who had been valet to Prince Radziwill. Most famous was the Hôtel Marigny, on Rue de l’Arcade, behind the Madeleine church; it was seized by the morals squad in 1918. The police inspector noted in his report th
at in addition to after-hours drinking, every bedroom in the hotel was occupied by a male couple, in each case one of them a minor, who were engaging in “antiphysical debauchery.” Among those picked up in preliminary sweeps was Marcel Proust, “rentier, 46 years old, 102 Boulevard Haussmann,” who later transferred le Cuziat’s attributes to his character Jupien. Despite the seizure, in the 1920s and ’30s le Cuziat went on to open other such houses, which retained a certain literary allure.
Chorus boys, 1930s
In Pigalle there were crackdowns on sailors, not because homosexuality was illegal per se, noted the police report, but to preserve the morals and the good name of the fleet. Sailors were ever notorious. In his 1924 novel La lumière noire, Carco describes a dive on Quai des Orfèvres (right by police headquarters) where women were not welcome:
Sailors wearing sashes and skin-tight jerseys, their necks bare, made up most of the clientele. They waited near the counter or sometimes danced with one another in hopes that someone would cut in. The waltz is what they liked … With every bar of the song, the blue sashes of the sailors seemed to wrap more tightly around their waists so that they comprised a sort of chain, the living links of which flowed together seamlessly. Little by little this chain stretched over to us and drew us into the rhythm of the roundelay, swift and ardent and vertiginous. Foreheads and cheeks glowed with moisture. The pleasure that marked their faces drew them together in a physical expectation that was almost bestial.
But were they even necessarily sailors? The appeal was such that the streets were filled with faux marins. In the twentieth century, anyway, Paris was not lacking in gay nightlife. Before 1914, Bal Wagram, a dance hall that catered to all, had a significant and unabashed gay clientele, of both genders. In the 1920s and ’30s there were bars and clubs in Montmartre—Le Roland’s, Le Trèfle Rose (the Pink Clover), M. Tagada on the street parallel to the funicular—and the bals musette on Rue de Lappe featured not a few that were largely or primarily gay: Le Bousca; Les Trois Colonnes; La Musette, which according to Chevalier featured in its men’s room in the ’30s a mural by a famous artist (he couldn’t quite remember which) of an old man ogling a young sailor pissing. Léon-Paul Fargue wrote, “On Rue de Lappe there were young ephebes with untidy nails, darned sweaters, and rosy cheeks who would deliciously pick your pocket while murmuring ‘baby’ and ‘sweetheart’ and ‘sugar’ to keep you interested.” That is perhaps the only thing Fargue wrote that spelled out his homosexuality, although his liaison in the 1890s with his lycée classmate Alfred Jarry was not much of a secret.