The Other Paris

by Luc Sante

  Sailors, real or pretend, 1930s

  Partygoers, 1930s

  Between the wars, Parisian gay life made a public appearance once a year, at the festivities of Mi-Carême, a traditional holiday not unlike Mardi Gras, although celebrated halfway through Lent rather than on its eve. In 1931 and 1932 Brassaï photographed the costume ball at Magic-City, an amusement park (the third built in Europe) on Quai d’Orsay. Its vast ballroom, with a capacity of three thousand, drew a mixed crowd with a large gay component from the 1920s until 1935, when an announcement was made that thereafter the balls would be “in good taste,” meaning that men in female drag would no longer be admitted. Brassaï’s pictures show elaborate costumes, eighteenth-century shepherdesses and nineteenth-century duchesses, suggesting a well-heeled crowd, although “every type came, faggots, cruisers, chickens, old queens, famous antique dealers and young butcherboys, hairdressers and elevator boys, well-known dress designers and drag queens.”

  A mixed bal, 1930s

  Brassaï also shot the bal des lopes—the sissy ball, you might say—at 46 Rue de la Montagne-Sainte-Geneviève, on Mardi Gras around 1932, as it happens, although the ballroom’s activities were year-round. It had been a typical neighborhood bal musette for a century, until at some point it changed, the date and the circumstances lost to history. It was sometimes raided by the cops, mostly left alone, and it generally drew mostly people from the neighborhood. The dancers whom Brassaï photographed include many in drag, but also regular people in their regular outfits. As he writes, “once in a while one would see butchers from the neighborhood—rather common in appearance, but with hearts full of feminine longings—forming surprising couples. They would hold hands—thick, calloused hands—like timid children, and would waltz solemnly together, their eyes downcast, blushing wildly.”

  A woman at her ease, 1930s

  There were lesbian couples in the crowd, too, working-class women who would have attracted no attention on the street. Paris had always been more accepting of lesbians than of gay men—no doubt largely because of the titillation factor for heterosexuals—so that such foreign women as Natalie Barney and Romaine Brooks were drawn there to live and work. The interwar period brought in new suggestions of emancipation, signaled by such things as the 1922 publication of Victor Margueritte’s novel La garçonne, the heroine of which is as sexually freewheeling as any man, with partners of both genders. There had long been cafés catering mostly to women, but now explicitly lesbian establishments opened, the most eye-catching being Le Monocle, in Montparnasse—also famously photographed by Brassaï—whose owner and staff, and half its clientele, essentially lived in male drag. Women-only bordellos had been noised about as early as 1907, but apparently there were more than a few in the ’30s. There were numerous prominent gay women in the entertainment industry, such as the great cabaret singer Yvonne George, who died young (and broke the hearts of straight men, most famously Robert Desnos, who wrote her some of his most beautiful poems), and the deep-voiced, formidable Suzy Solidor. It was a wide-open era, when the drag performer O’dett (René Goupil) could put on a show at the ABC in 1940 in which he played Hitler as a queen. Naturally that era was ended by the war—although it wasn’t so much the Germans who minded, actually, so much as the French collaborationist authorities, who raided bars and swept the pissotières, sending those rounded up to German labor camps, with a note that assured them the hardest tasks and worst accommodation.

  “An evening with the transvestite inverts,” 1930s

  The “outrage to public morals” laws held well into the 1950s and ’60s—they weren’t revoked until 1982—leading to a long period of quiet repression. But even as gay life went underground, the Paris-by-night of the tourists included a significant portion of drag, much of it at Madame Arthur’s, in Montmartre, where Serge Gainsbourg’s father was the pianist and the show was headlined by the internationally celebrated “illusionists” Bambi and Coccinelle. In this as in so many things, Paris continued its reign as the world capital of contradictions, which could be justified as dialectical or shown up as double-dealing.

  8

  Saint Monday

  For centuries upon centuries, drinking in a public place in Paris meant visiting a marchand de vin, a wine seller, who generally sold only white and red and perhaps marc, a liqueur made from the lees of wine. As time went by, his successors began to bring in beer from Alsace, rum from the Antilles, absinthe from the Midi, and a great range of eaux-de-vie from all over the country, as well as whiskey, port, madeira, ginever, kümmel, and every other sort of spirituous beverage from abroad. Their outlets ranged from those intended for the rich, which generally served food as well and were known as restaurants (even if the chief interest of their clientele was to become legless), down to the most primitive canteens of the poor.

  The barrage of labels given to establishments in the low to middle range over the course of the nineteenth century illustrates how quickly a label would become tainted: by adulterated drink, by a reputation for violence, by standing as a regular police target, by general squalor. Many of these words are barely remembered today: bibine, boc, bouchon, bouffardière, bousin, cabermon, cabremont, cargot. A tapis-franc was a dive in which everyone present could be assumed to be a criminal, a reputation cemented by its use in Sue’s Mysteries of Paris. An abreuvoir was a drinking trough for horses and cattle, hence a place that entirely dispensed with ceremony; and even farther down the scale was the assommoir, a “knock-out” shop, a relatively esoteric term until it was immortalized by Zola. Bastringue, caboulot, and troquet were perhaps half a step up; estaminet a step above that, since the term might actually appear on the front of the building; all four lasted into the early twentieth century, leprous reputations intact. Cabaret fell into the same category, although it has been preserved in the language through antiphrasis: it might ironically be applied to a chic establishment, and along the way it acquired an association with musical entertainment. Bistrot, from the Russian word for “quickly,” was imported by the Cossacks who swarmed through Paris after Napoléon’s defeat in 1814; in recent times it has come to signify a restaurant rather than a dram shop. Brasserie literally means “brewery,” and followed the mid-nineteenth-century rage for bock beer, but was generically applied within a few decades. Café, with its roots in the seventeenth-century coffee craze, has been a term of all work for the better part of two centuries. And then there is boîte, which can be applied to any sort of outlet, high or low, although its most celebrated usage has been as anchor of the term boîte de nuit, a “nightclub.”

  A family-run troquet, circa 1900

  A family-run estaminet, circa 1910

  We lack descriptions of the pothouses of the deep past, have only a handful of names: La Pomme de Pin, frequented by Villon and Rabelais, in the Cité; Le Berceau, on the Pont Saint-Michel; La Corne, on Place Maubert; Le Cornet Fleuri, by Les Halles; La Croix de Lorraine, near the Bastille; La Fosse aux Lions, behind Place des Vosges. We also have names for some of the tapis-francs of the mid-nineteenth century, which tend toward the flamboyant: Les Chats en Cage, Le Renard Qui Prêche (the Preaching Fox), Le Boeuf Couronné (the Crowned Bull), La Rose Rouge au Dé (Red Rose and Dice), Le Tombeau du Lapin (the Rabbit’s Tomb), La Libre Pensée (Free Thought), Le Pur-Sang (the Thoroughbred). Privat mentions Le Grand Saint-Nicolas as an estaminet for the lice-ridden, and he describes a tapis-franc called L’Abattoir (the Slaughterhouse) as “a smoky, dark, low, humid, airless cellar that the sun has never been bold enough to visit. Its squalid walls sweat misery and stink; its crippled tables and spavined benches serve as a dormitory for a stunted population of beings no longer conscious of their own existence and who retain no human qualities.” In those sorts of places they served whatever rotgut came to hand, poisonous concoctions called poivre (pepper) or camphre (camphor) or casse-poitrine (chest breaker), all of which more or less adhered to the general definition of eau-de-vie. Often, glasses came in three sizes: monsieur (large), mademoiselle (small
), and misérable (a thimble’s worth).

  “Three or four crocks and he’s ready to pass out. And he’s the one who stood at the altar and promised to protect you.” Illustration by Gavarni, from Impressions de ménage, 1843

  The most famous cabaret of the time was a place on Rue des Fers (now Rue Berger), which ran between Les Halles and the Saints-Innocents graveyard, and was named after its initial proprietor, Paul Niquet, who may have originated the signal nineteenth-century treat of the poor: cherries (or sour green grapes) preserved in eau-de-vie. The joint was described by both Privat and Nerval, which may have led to its becoming a magnet for slummers, or maybe it was the other way around. It served the marketplace clientele, country folk who started arriving at 4:00 a.m., when their work was done, and it also served the bottom rung of society, hard-core alcoholics, who began to leave when the others arrived. (The drinking joints around Les Halles enjoyed a special dispensation from the normal citywide closing time of 2:00 a.m.) There were two rooms, of which the one in front featured two zinc bars and a long oak bench, while the one in back, accessed from behind the counter and open only to habitués, held three long tables and a complement of benches, which were used more for sleeping than sitting. Fights were frequent, and according to Nerval the place had a novel system of control: waterspouts were turned on the fighters until they calmed down; if they failed to ease up, the water pressure was cranked up until they begged for mercy. Privat describes the crowd as consisting of ragpickers, poets, buskers, cashiered servants—people who never slept, at least not in a bed. “Their life is one long string of todays. The only tomorrow they ever have comes when they are picked up by some security force and thrown into a hospital bed to die.”

  A drinker. Drawing by Bécan (Bernhard Kahn), 1920s

  A tide had turned at the unspecifiable date when eau-de-vie became a staple; another occurred in the 1830s or ’40s, when absinthe arrived from the south. Privat attributes this latter innovation to a theater people’s café called Le Crocodile: “Our generation … is bored, it no longer wants to think, it reaches for obliteration believing it to be diversion.” A public hygiene specialist writing in 1900 alludes to an indefinite date when “the toxic powers of manufactured spirits and the essence of absinthe were multiplied by an enormous coefficient” as marking a sharp rise in both alcoholism and juvenile crime. A few years later, Lucien Descaves wrote:

  Michelet said that you have to live in the poor neighborhoods to appreciate how quickly the population renews itself. However, if that great visionary saw the causes for this as stemming from the deadly conditions of the workplace and the adulteration of basic foodstuffs, he could not imagine the future progress of an even more virulent scourge. It is nevertheless that scourge that within three generations can completely extinguish the lineage of an alcoholic. So it is that many Parisians are, in Paris itself, utterly deracinated. A son is no longer attached to the house, the street, the neighborhood where his people were born but had passed through too quickly to leave a trace. Not having any sense of his roots, it matters little to him to go in this direction or that; he rolls on, a bitter wave. The mists of antiquity, for him, is the lifetime of his grandfather, about whom he knows nothing.

  By the early twentieth century, alcoholism was recognized as destroying the social fabric of the working class, leaving its members isolated and impotent. The Bonneff brothers, pursuing their investigations at that time, found absinthe and jug wine (vin d’Aramon) sold in laundries, in employment agencies, in places that rented handcarts to market porters. Some dives had whorehouses in their back rooms, some made loans at usurious rates; joints near Les Halles gave overnight credit to market workers, which came due at 10:00 a.m., when the workers were paid. Construction sites imported laborers from the countryside, housed them in unsanitary barracks, fed them slops, and plied them with absinthe, which could not be refused without humiliation, if not beatings.

  “My daddy doesn’t drink eau-de-vie!” Public-service poster, 1920s

  The drunkenness of the poor became an object of nervous regard by the other half of the city, alternately condemned, fretted over, and rubbernecked. There was always a crowd eager for vicarious degradation. At the start of the twentieth century, Georges Cain took in Les Halles by night, heard the laughter and song at La Belle de Nuit and Le Chien Qui Fume and Le Caveau, and then went next door to L’Ange Gabriel,

  a notorious bistro, something like the Maxim’s of the apaches. The gigolettes and the toughs come here to swallow some snails and upend bowls of mulled wine. The big room upstairs is filled with worrisome characters, the heroes of knife fights or confidence tricks, with predatory eyes and thin lips, their girls pale with carmine mouths. All of them are smoking cigarettes, speaking in low tones while rapidly glancing to the sides, half listening to some poor devil of a violinist scratching out lugubrious waltz choruses.

  Fifty years later, L’Ange Gabriel was brought to the screen, convincingly enough, in Jacques Becker’s Casque d’Or (1952), as a fairly regular-looking bistro where the gangsters fill a large table, the girls hang around waiting to be noticed, one of the garçons is a police informer, and a party of slummers from points west all get a bit overheated from the excitement of their own daring. A knife fight indeed occurs, but in the alley, decently out of public view.

  At a bal, 1930s

  Considerably farther down the social ladder was Le Père Lunette, near Place Maubert, a venerable dump that managed to draw the tourists, apparently in serious numbers, becoming something like the Sammy’s Bowery Follies of its time and place. Part of the reason was that it was ancient—no one knew how old, but dating back at least to Louis-Philippe’s July Monarchy. Aristide Bruant sang of it in the 1880s as a place where, long before, you could go hear a singer called La Môme Toinette (the Toinette Kid, that is; like La Môme Piaf) and pay just three sous for the privilege. By 1900 it had declined somewhat. Cain again sets the scene:

  Dirty, stinking Rue des Anglais will soon fall to the pickaxes, and with it will go a notorious dive, a celebrated stage on the official tour of the places of ill repute: the cabaret of Père Lunette. A gigantic pair of spectacles jutting from a narrow red storefront serves as its banner … In the back room, as big as a closet, three wooden tables are crowded with drinkers who are more or less drunk, more or less consumptive, equally stupefied, who smoke, babble, rant, or snore while a guitarist tries to sell some romance … It smells of vice, misery, thuggery, the lowest kind of crookedness—but nevertheless this ignoble cabaret is not dangerous … Le Père Lunette is better than its reputation. As they say in the theater, it’s all hype and sham … It’s less accomplished than the third act of a melodrama, but it makes up for it in stench.

  J.-K. Huysmans had visited in the late 1880s and found it already moribund (“a meeting place for malicious urchins and evil grandmothers,” enlivened only by the occasional gratuitous murder). The American journalist Richard Harding Davis, in town a few years later and in search of Parisian low life—“In Paris there are virtually no slums at all … the Parisian criminal has no environment, no setting”—went there and found the dodge already in effect: the drunks “were as ready to do their part of the entertainment as the actors of a theater are ready to go on when the curtain rises.” He had a better time a block away at Le Château Rouge, on Rue Galande—Oscar Wilde also enjoyed himself there—where the bar was filled with sleeping bums and the back room contained a selection of paintings of famous murders.

  Père Lunette’s dive on Rue des Anglais, circa 1900

  Le Cabaret des Truands (the Hoodlum Bar), on Boulevard de Clichy, circa 1910

  The entertainment baton was soon taken up with alacrity by the tourist traps of Pigalle, fully stage-managed experiences such as Le Ciel and L’Enfer and Le Rat Mort, which featured elaborately lurid façades, waiters in costume, ordinary beverages given the names of philters and potions, and a lot of haunted house woo-woo.* The professionals had taken charge. No one by then, if ever, was much interested
in looking in on low-key everyday wretchedness, of the kind recalled by the poet Jean Follain:

  In 1925, many little bars on Boulevard Saint-Michel wallowed in their own misery … It was the year of suicides and thefts. That one, the guy they called the boxer, who claimed he was a champion, was in reality no more than a thief of fancy dogs from taxis. One day he was arrested on the street while his friends prepared buckwheat porridge in their garret. In the adjacent toilet a girl who had had all her clothes stolen at an art students’ ball and had to make her way back naked under a coat was crying for someone to go fetch her a dress from her aunt’s in Grenelle. Later on she gave birth to a child she wanted to feed but who died within a few weeks. One night you could see her drunk and bawling, in high mourning on the arms of two students; she had opened her bodice and taken out her swollen breasts. Out on the corner, starvelings conversed in low tones near big white posters with black letters.