by Luc Sante
The whores and hoodlums crowded together in the glare of the acetylene torches, which blazed with a hiss and spread through the booths a harsh light reflected indiscriminately by the red drapes, the ornate mirrors, the gilded moldings, the painted wood shelves, and the jars of English toffee. Rain beat down on the canvas roofs, which the wind intermittently inflated. Water dripped down and puddled. The stilled merry-go-rounds, covered for the night with immense tarpaulins, glowed faintly from afar. A rank odor permeated the place: wet wood, tar, face powder, humidity. Fernande passed from one cluster to another, briefly eager to see how a player was doing at the shooting gallery, then disappointed by the meager thrills of the barrel organs, the photographers’ booths, the exhausted jokes of the old clowns. One of these, decked out in green cast-offs and a flat cap, was barking the attractions of a tent of exotic dancers. The locals exchanged smiles, because they knew that the most beautiful of the undressed girls on offer within was none other than Pivoine, whom they all knew and despised. Pivoine, alias Marie-Madame, the object of their derision, fluttered on the threshold of the booth. They parodied her gestures and said cruel things to her. When the barker enumerated her charms, she displayed them with a pathetic submissiveness.
All the year round there were dance halls, as there had been for centuries. “Before 1848,” wrote a contemporary, “you couldn’t walk down any street in Paris without noticing, above a wineshop, a pitifully flickering lantern on which was written Bal.” Some of them were famous, such as the eponymous pleasure spot on Rue de la Grande-Chaumière, originally opened in 1783 by an Englishman named Tickson, which in the early nineteenth century was credited with having popularized the polka and birthed the Robert-Macaire and above all the chahut. Inspired by the Andalusian cachucha, a dance in which women employed every part of their body, the chahut was most famous for its high kick, which got it banned for a while as an outrage to public morals. Even though it wasn’t until much later in the century that dancers went as far as “kicking the moon,” and even though after the ban was lifted there was always an inspector on hand to see that displays did not become too licentious, the dance still was never considered entirely acceptable in polite company. Along the way it did engender a much greater success: the cancan, a theatrical dance executed by professionals before an audience rather than attempted by customers in a hall.
A masked ball. Illustration by Célestin Nanteuil, 1840s
The chahut was also practiced, and the cancan may have been born, at the Bal Chicard, on Rue Jean-Jacques-Rousseau just off Les Halles. Privat thought its name was the source of the word chic. He described it as “the most incredible jumble of social nuances, the oddest kettle of fish, faces impossible to reconcile with one another, occult and inexplicable contrasts,” and while Privat cheerfully admitted he’d never been there, the idea is borne out by Gavarni’s portraits of the clientele, and Gavarni was there every week. Outlandish costumes and wildly stylized attitudes predominate. Its dances were said to be especially unbridled, and small wonder: the orchestra apparently comprised ten solo pistols (or so Privat claims), four bass drums, three cymbals, twelve cornets, six violins, and a bell. To the racket produced by this ensemble the customers perhaps engaged in the waltz, the polka, the mazurka, the redowa, the roberka, the fricassée, the gavotte, the schottische, the varsoviana, the polichinelle, the hongroise, the meunière, the russe, the sicilienne orientale. In that same era the Bal Mabille, off the Champs-Élysées, was the elegant home of “the most transcendent polkeuses” (Gautier), but the ordinary stiffs had a great many places of their own to choose from; it was estimated around 1835 that fifty thousand people attended the bals every Sunday.
The chahut. Drawing by Constantin Guys, probably 1850s
Montmartre was especially dense with dance halls: the Grand Turc, the Molière, the Reine Blanche, the Ermitage, the Château Rouge, the Tivoli (ancien and nouveau), the Bal Roger, the Rocher Suisse, the Élysée Montmartre on Boulevard Rochechouart, which opened in 1807 and lasted (as a concert hall for its last half century or so) until it was gutted by fire in 2011, and the Boule Noire on the same thoroughfare (founded in 1822 and still running, also now as a concert hall), which was originally the Boule Blanche, but over time the boule got dirty. The Goncourt brothers visited and thought it sinister that all the women were dressed in black, while the men looked like hoodlums and the dances were animated by a “bestial” joy. There was the Folies Robert, also on the boulevard, the habituées of which included dancers with such monikers as Chicardinette, Élisa Belles-Jambes, Le Bébé de Cherbourg, Bertha le Zouzou, and one Jeanne d’Arc, so called because “she was burned by the English, which in those days was another word for creditors.”
“A dozen oysters and my heart.” “On your honor?” Illustration by Gavarni, from Les débardeurs, 1840
There was the guinguette and dance hall at the Moulin de la Galette on Rue Lepic, a beloved Sunday outing destination depicted by nearly every Impressionist (the windmill still stands, although now a private residence). Down the hill, on Boulevard de Clichy, on the site of the ancient and “rotting” Reine Blanche, was and remains the celebrated Moulin Rouge. It was primarily a music hall, a showcase for revues, rather than a dance hall proper (at least after 1900); it was explicitly intended for the slumming rich; and the cancan was already old news by the time it opened in 1889, for all that it has ever since claimed to be its birthplace. Still, the Moulin Rouge is worth noting for the quality of its terpsichoreans, many of them painted by Toulouse-Lautrec: Jane Avril, La Goulue (the Glutton), Grille d’Égout (Sewer Grate), La Môme Fromage (the Cheese Kid), Nini Pattes-en-l’Air (Feet in the Air), Rayon d’Or (Golden Ray), Sauterelle (Grasshopper), Clair-de-Lune, Cha-tu-Kon, Cléopâtre, Cascadienne, Cri-Cri. La Goulue (Louise Weber; 1869–1929), whose most celebrated male dance partner was Valentin le Désossé (the Boneless), enjoyed and endured a career of extremes. From inhabiting the hôtel owned by La Païva, mistress of Napoléon III, on Avenue du Bois, she went to jail “after some lark,” then became a lion tamer in a traveling zoo, then a laundress, “then nothing,” and spent her last years drinking in the Zone.
The resident troupe at the Bal Tabarin, circa 1900
The Bal Bullier, Boulevard de Montparnasse, circa 1910
The dance halls of Montmartre were by that point primarily known as showcases for prostitution, but there were dance halls in most other neighborhoods. In Montparnasse, the venerable Bal Bullier, on the site of the original Closerie des Lilas, was the preserve of such names as Nina Belles-Dents (Nice Teeth), Peau de Satin (Satin Skin), Bouffe-Toujours (Keep Eating), Henriette Zonzon, Isabelle l’Aztèque, Canard. In the Marais, the Bal des Gravilliers, opened in 1863, was at first a homey place where the music was provided by a couple of Italian pifferari on harp and violin, and where the house provided china and cutlery, although they didn’t serve food: clients would bring their own or buy from purveyors on the street. After 1900, however, it became a bal d’apaches. According to André Warnod, those gentlemen were “persuaded of their superiority because of the attention accorded them by writers … They might be dressed like any other bourgeois, but you could spot them right away, because of … their hands, their big, thick stranglers’ hands, their short-fingered hands.” Nearby was the Bal Charlemagne, known as the Bal des Moutons, since moutons (literally “sheep”) then signified police informants, who were prominent among the clientele. In Charonne stood the Bal des Lilas, known as the Bal des Punaises (cockroaches or bedbugs), which had, tucked away behind the orchestra, a bench reserved for women too drunk to dance, and those who lacked shoes. On Rue de la Gaîté was the Bal Grateau, “where the dances were nothing but battles, fisticuffs, quadrilles, obscenely swaying women unbuttoned down to their waists, hiccuping drunks.” The area around the Contrescarpe was home to the Bal de la Cave (“a stinking hell”), the Bal du Vieux Chêne (“paradise for ragpickers and fifteen-year-old hoodlums”), and the Bal des Vaches (“a bandits’ roost”). On the other side of town, by the
Quai de Javel, endured the “ignoble” Bal des Singes (monkeys), where the women smoked pipes and the whores “threw themselves into disgusting saturnalias.”
Le Bal des Puces, a novel by Aristide Bruant, 1910
Rue de Lappe, near the Bastille, was the center of the Auvergnat population, who in the mid-nineteenth century went “to the musette, the Auvergnat dances, and never to the French [sic] dance halls, because the Auvergnats … remain isolated like the Hebrews in Babylon.” They danced to their own music, played on the musette, a bagpipe smaller and higher pitched than the Scottish or Irish model. At some point, though, probably in the late 1880s or early 1890s, while the non-Auvergnat dance halls still mostly featured trumpets and violins, the musette slowly began to be replaced by the accordion, an instrument imported by Italian immigrants. As that occurred, the music itself began to change, the Auvergnat strain compounded by the Italian, with a dose of Parisian song, the result becoming known as musette, so that by 1900 a bal-musette would have been increasingly unlikely to feature the original instrument. Not everyone approved, of course. Addressing his compatriots in 1896, the head of a league of Auvergnat musicians warned that “where the accordion and the violin have replaced the musette, and the chahut has overtaken the bourrée, there, too, openhearted laughter has been replaced by the knife.” He had a point, since the familial atmosphere of the Auvergnat dance hall, open only on Sundays, was rapidly giving way to a seven-day bacchanal heavily infested with apaches. But it was a moment of syncretic change in popular music the world over, and musette was developing in parallel with jazz in New Orleans, tango in Buenos Aires, danzón in Cuba, paseo in Trinidad, and biguine in the French Antilles—all of them hybrids that bridged nations and continents, the music of diaspora.
A dance hall, 1930s
Anyway, not all was violence and dissolution. A typical hall on Rue de Lappe, seen by Warnod:
It’s free to enter, but generally you pay for every dance with tokens bought from the cashier, four or five sous apiece. Right in the middle of a waltz or a polka the music stops, then the manager gets up on a stool and yells, “The coin, let’s have the coin!” and the dance doesn’t resume until everybody has ponied up … Maybe the crowd is sloppily dressed, but you know right away you’re among good people. The women are solid, strapping broads with black hair and ruddy complexions who dance with spirit and laugh out loud. The men wear caps, but there are righteous caps, too: the caps of workers, of artisans, of railroad employees. Soldiers, on leave or quartered in Paris, undo their tunics; some are in shirtsleeves. Everybody dances, has a great time with big laughs and salty jokes, red wine or bottles of beer. The musician announces the next number, and the couples begin to sway. PROPER ATTIRE REQUIRED, say signs posted everywhere, and we’ve even seen these words painted on a wall: JAVA PROHIBITED. The java is the dance of the moment among a certain less desirable crowd, and this prohibition is enough to keep out the desperadoes who foregather every afternoon at the Petit-Balcon dance hall down the street.
By that time, 1922, dancers were abandoning the prewar repertory of the tango, the maxixe, the cakewalk, the craquette, while the fox-trot, le fox, was just starting to catch on. The java seems to have been something on the order of a modified mazurka, with a sliding step perhaps borrowed from the Argentinian milonga, while its name, which some claimed alluded to javanais (an underworld argot in which the syllable av is placed between every consonant and its succeeding vowel in a word, e.g., havôtavel), more likely derived from dchjava, the imperative of “to go” in the Roma language. Anyway, there was nothing inherently low-life about the dance, but it happened to have been claimed early by the apaches, and so for decades it was associated with criminals and shunned by the upright.
But if the squares stayed away, all the more reason for fashionable slummers to flock, to rub elbows with the whores and the hoodlums and savor that frisson of danger and perdition. The summit of high-low thrills was manifested in a dance hall called La Java, in the Faubourg du Temple, with its red lacquered walls and, hanging from the ceiling, that new and brilliant nightlife fixture: the mirrored ball. You could observe the bad boys and the fallen girls and the noceurs arrived by limousine from points west in their party clothes, but also something authentic and pure, local teenagers who were trying on the styles, who might later slide into a pimp-and-pro relationship or just go on to become regular folks. He would be wearing a sideways cap tilted back, a bandanna around his neck and a larger one around his waist, espadrilles on his feet, and a handkerchief drooping from his breast pocket with his embroidered initials showing; she, in black and red, with his initials tattooed in the crook of her left elbow. It was at La Java that Francis Carco observed a boy, his mouth agape, staring at a sensational girl, waiting until she lit a cigarette, whereupon he lit one, too, and proposed to her that they exchange gaspers, which they did, and then they took to the dance floor.
The java: sheet music for Fréhel’s “La vraie de vrai,” 1920s
“A couple of pure ones,” circa 1910
But by 1931, Carco was already writing the bal-musette’s epitaph: “It’s nothing but a banal, newly painted waiting room where travelers of all classes mingle, expecting a train that doesn’t arrive.” Such are the perils of being early on a scene; you peak early as well. Certainly Brassaï’s pictures of bals-musette from the following years show vivid and populous action—it was the war, if anything, that killed it. Furthermore, in the 1930s the music itself was only becoming richer and more complex. The primal scene had occurred in 1913, when Charles Péguri, a second-generation Italian accordionist from Marseille, married the daughter of Antoine Bouscatel, the premier Auvergnat bagpiper in Paris, thus formally merging the two strains. Soon there were Auvergnat accordionists in addition to Italian, Belgian, and native Parisian players. In the 1920s the bandoneon came in with a craze for all things Argentinian. Accordions found their way into the chanson réaliste; Gus Viseur and Adolphe Deprince accompanied Piaf and Damia, respectively. And by 1930, when Péguri hanged himself, musette had been thoroughly infused with swing. The dance hall accordionist, at one time alone up in his aerie, or accompanied at most by a violin or a harp, gradually became the leader of a full band, with clarinet, saxophone, piano, banjo, string bass, drums. Guérino, Tony Muréna, Charley Bazin, Jean Vaissade—all at various times played with Django Reinhardt, the great Roma jazz guitarist. Musette, a mongrel creature that drew elements from all over the globe, had become the quintessential sound of Paris.
Another prime source of popular entertainment was the café-concert. There had been music in cafés for a long time; the café-chantant (a singer warbling in a corner, maybe backed by guitar or violin) dated back to the early eighteenth century, and from late in that century until 1867 the Palais-Royal featured the Café des Aveugles, with its impassioned orchestra of the blind. The café-concert, born of the Second Empire, was another sort of enterprise. It was generally much larger than the ordinary café, for one thing; more significantly, at a time of increasing and pervasive repression, it was the voice of the crowd. Smoking was permitted, where it was not in theaters, and varyingly discreet prostitution was allowed to occur on the fringes, usually up in the loges, if there were any. The cafés-concerts often featured an orchestra of fourteen to twenty pieces and a whole variety show’s worth of performers in evening dress: a tenor, a baritone, a contralto, one “strong,” one “trilling,” and two “light” chanteuses, and three male and two female comic singers, who would all lounge around on the stage, waiting for their turn in the spotlight. Performances usually ran from seven to eleven most evenings, stretching from two to eleven on Sundays and holidays. An army of waiters and bartenders (as many as sixty) attended to the audience, which indulged especially in those populist favorites of the time, bock beer and cherries in eau-de-vie. The waiters, with their 5 percent share of the take in addition to tips, could earn as much as the conductor—twice as much as the singers and four times what a musician could net.
The accor
dionists Frédo Gardoni and Dino flanking the singer and actor Jean Cyrano, 1930s
A singer-accordionist in a café. Illustration by Théophile Steinlen, from Gil Blas, 1897
The first cafés-concerts were outdoor affairs, mostly in the then-wide-open spaces of the Champs-Élysées, with the stage set at the rear of a garden laid out with tables. But although the most successful of these, Café Morel, went on to a long career as the Alcazar d’Été, by the mid-1850s the new places were rooms the size of theaters, mostly along the boulevards: the Alcazar d’Hiver, the Eldorado, the Alhambra, the Cigale, the Éden-Concert, the Scala, the Ba-ta-clan; later the Folies Bergère, the Concert Mayol, and La Pépinière (which had a clientele consisting mostly of domestic servants); and the very toney Ambassadeurs, a seasonal place near the Élysée Palace, memorably depicted by Degas. Eventually the form spread out to many smaller outdoor joints along the quais, and to cabarets and music halls all over the city. Performance was general and mutual; the crowd was there not merely to take in the entertainment while getting a snootful, but also to put itself on display. As Alfred Delvau observed:
To live at home, to think at home, to eat and drink at home, to die at home—we find that annoying and uncomfortable. We need to be out in public, in the open, in the street, in the cabaret, the café, the restaurant—so that, for better or worse, we can be seen … We love to pose, to be the center of attraction, to have an audience—a crowd—as witnesses to our lives.
The haut monde had always enjoyed this indulgence, displaying itself at the opera and the races in its new clothes and adornments, creating an arena in which everyone was simultaneously spectator and spectacle. The café-concert in unprecedented fashion extended that ability to the other classes—although the different classes did not necessarily see one another. Divisions remained in force, as Huysmans noted of a humbler spot at Point-du-Jour: