The Sinner's Grand Tour

by Tony Perrottet

  It was as compensation for this sorry loss that King George IV, who had become an honorary member of the Beggar’s Benison four decades earlier, presented the club with the locket of his own mistress’s pubic hairs in an elegant silver snuff box in 1822. Benison tradition holds that he greeted the sovereign at the Leith docks on his highly publicized official visit and pressed it into his eager hands. The tuft was intended to be the embryo, as it were, of a new and revitalized wig, although the idea never got off the ground. At least nobody stole it, as I found out this wonderful morning, when I got to examine the royal gift in the club cache. The records say that King George was given in return several prick glasses to take home to the royal palace—“to his intense delight.”

  The Wig Club’s box and stand—minus the dreaded wig itself. (Reproduced courtesy of the University of St. Andrews.)

  Perhaps this was reason enough for royal concern over where Prince William would study. The press might at any point take a leering interest in the trail of royal debauchery. “You know the British tabloids.” Jessica shrugged.

  Hmmm, the royal connections were everywhere, I mused to myself. Who could have possibly stolen such a treasure?

  In the underground archive of the university library, with anemic PhD students blinking at their laptops, I sifted through original Beggar’s Benison diplomas and piles of scribbled correspondence until I found a crumbling, leather-bound volume—the Minutes of the Knights Companion of the Wig, starting with the first meeting on March 6, 1775. The ornate cover features a gilt drawing of the stolen pubic headpiece—even more wild, florid and curly than I had imagined, like an exuberant head of broccoli.

  I tried to track the wig’s progress since the last meeting of the club in 1826. According to his notes, it had been perfectly intact when the indefatigable Colonel Kavanagh had gotten hold of the Wig Club artifacts in the 1920s. It appears to have gone astray at some point in the 1930s. In 1938, when American historian Louis C. Jones of Columbia University hunted it down for a book on Georgian clubs, he received the report that the wig was being preserved “in a lawyer’s office in Leith … although which lawyer’s office [Jones writes] this author did not discover.”

  Here ends the trail. But I couldn’t stop thinking about this last detail. Could it be that the sacred relic was somehow still sitting in a solicitor’s filing cabinet?

  But Les grew irritable when I suggested a detour to Leith. And even I had to accept that I couldn’t scour every legal office in town. Henry and Sam were now in open rebellion. They’d had quite enough of seedy provincial backwaters, deranged publicans, and icy rain. They wanted swimming pools, sushi, and videogames—thinking for some reason that all this could be had on the Continent—but would settle for spring mattresses, clean towels, and a door that locked. We ended up in a generic Edinburgh hotel, and I had to admit it was nice to have a shower that didn’t spit flakes of rust on your head.

  Our northern tour was winding down, and, as British comics say, it’s always a relief to get the first leg over. The boys were gazing in catatonic bliss at the first TV they’d seen in two weeks. “Spongebob, Chowder,” Henry murmured holding his knees and rocking back and forth.

  Meanwhile, on the hotel computer, I had found Leith’s only online magazine, where I could place a classified ad about the wig. Perhaps someone had heard stories from a grandparent, or even knew where the relic was but had remained silent out of embarrassment? I immediately got a line back from the editor of Leith Links. “This seems to be far, far too interesting to ignore,” he wrote, with evident patriotic pride. He suggested that I write a report on the wig’s peregrinations, which a few days later appeared under the promising title, “The Case of the Missing Wig.”

  Is Scotland’s Strangest Relic Still Hidden in Leith? ran the headline. An Ongoing Investigation by Our New York Correspondent. Up top was a fetching cartoon of a bald King Charles II asking, “Have you seen my wig?” I concluded with a rousing call to arms for all Scottish history lovers: “Could the wig—no doubt the worse for wear—still be somewhere in the musty cupboards of a Leith solicitor’s office? … Anyone with any information on the item’s whereabouts, please drop a line.…”

  The next morning, I called David Stevenson, to tell him about my media blitz. He wasn’t optimistic. “I imagine some poor young legal clerk put his hand into a filing cabinet one day and discovered this festering ball of hair. Probably let out a shriek and threw it straight into the fire.”

  Chapter Two

  PARIS TO THE GUTTER

  “Erotic Archaeology” of the Belle Époque

  To get a fresh view of any overly romanticized city, I like to follow an out-of-date guidebook—out-of-date, preferably, by a century or more. By celebrating forgotten avenues and long-gone eateries, these yellowing editions manage to conjure the past as a tangible world, teeming with activity and life. You can almost hear the horse traffic, smell the flower markets, taste the roast quail.

  So in the case of Paris, the City of Eternal Love, I chose a suitably specialized reference—a prostitute guide from 1883.

  THE PRETTY WOMEN OF PARIS

  Their Names and Addresses,

  Qualities and Faults,

  being a Complete Directory or

  Guide to Pleasure

  for Visitors to the Gay City.

  Not quite as practical as the latest Rough Guide, perhaps, but an effective distraction from the modern world nonetheless.

  The Belle Époque, the “beautiful era” from 1880 to 1914, when Paris established itself as the world capital of illicit pleasure, may qualify as Europe’s most beloved golden age. Romantic movies like Moulin Rouge! with their cast of handsome rogues, mad painters, and golden-hearted ladies of the night, ensure that its reputation continues to smolder, as do the parade of Impressionist blockbuster art shows. At the time, Paris blazed even more brightly as a beacon of permissiveness. It was universally acclaimed the most stylish city in the Western world, with the finest restaurants, most avant-garde writers, most brilliant entertainments—and sin, lashings of sin, elegantly prepared.

  Sex, and most particularly the sex trade, was simply classier in Paris. “There may be other towns … as voluptuous as Paris,” conceded one English visitor of the 1880s, “but none where love and pleasure are practiced with more exquisite refinement.”

  For travelers arriving from benighted Anglo-Saxon lands, the city was a delightful assault on the senses. Stepping from the railway platform, they felt transported to an endless springtime: the air was more fragrant, the breezes warmer, the streets more alive. Paris pulsated with theaters, dance halls, and brasseries with their distinctive zinc-topped bars—over thirty thousand drinking spots, three times more than New York and six times more than London—all exuding a palpable sexual energy. Even the poorest Parisian girls wore their clothes with coquettish flair, visitors raved. The flower girls in their near-transparent summer dresses, were “fearfully fascinating,” wrote the English poet Arthur Symons, who visited in 1890, “faces so eager and wild, so wicked and so innocent, so impure and so pure; ripe red lips that might suck the soul out of you; mouths so amorous and at the same time so full of laughter …” The city was the ultimate escape, an enclave of erotic fantasy far from judging eyes, and its freedoms were not only reserved for men. High-society women from Moscow to Minneapolis were drawn to its parlors, where adultery was an avid sport, like moths to the flame. At dawn, they would be seen quietly leaving the fashionable mansions of the Champs-Élysée and stepping into waiting carriages, their elaborate undergarments rolled into a convenient ball. Gay visitors employed only slightly more discretion, heading to the marble-laden bathhouses around the Luxembourg Gardens to meet handsome students eager for cash. Local bon vivant Marcel Proust himself favored the Hôtel de Saïd near the markets, where off-duty legionnaires gathered for R & R. The most exclusive lesbian club was called Les Rieuses, the Merry Women, hosted weekly by a trio of Parisian actresses in a private candlelit mansion.

 
But Paris’s true fame is owed to its prostitutes, known as les cocottes or les horizontales. The rest of the world marveled at the brazenness of their trade, which had been regulated since Napoléon’s day to control the spread of venereal disease. By the belle époque, there were 150 licensed brothels in central Paris alone, where girls were given twice-weekly medical inspections, an unheard-of precaution in Britain or the United States at the time. They were known as maisons closes, closed houses, because their green window shutters remained bolted at all hours of the day. Some of these houses became international legends for their luxury and decor. The most upscale were designed by famous French artists, and offered nightly tableaux vivants, living paintings, with creative themes like “the naval officers on leave,” “the wife wakes up,” or “the crazed nun.”

  Paris’s most illustrious “fantasy brothel,” Le Chabanais, photographed around 1900. The grotto-style entrance.

  Paris’s most illustrious “fantasy brothel,” Le Chabanais, photographed around 1900. The Louis XV room. (Courtesy Galerie Au Bonheur du Jour, www.aubonheurdujour.net)

  A step down in the market were the licensed streetwalkers, who would retire to government-approved hotels, where furnished rooms were available for an hour or a night. In the 1880s, there were approximately thirty thousand “public girls,” so that wherever men wandered in the city, whispers would emanate from the shadows, Couchez avec? Many foreign visitors, rather than viewing the trade as the last resort of women who had been abandoned or widowed, celebrated it as another example of Gallic good taste. “Are they not winsome, as fresh as rosebuds fresh gathered?” mooned one English traveler of the ready supply of French girls, adding that in the Latin Quarter, “for a five-franc piece, you can have your will of her.” That was eighty-five U.S. cents—about $40 today. On the Right Bank, he warned, the rate was twice that.

  But while the romantic view of the Parisian cocotte flourished—gay, carefree, enjoying her work—the reality was, not surprisingly, very different. In the darker recesses of the city, the going rate in budget brothels was a mere one franc ($7.50 today). Nicknamed maisons d’abattage, “slaughterhouses,” these were places where men took a numbered ticket and lined up outside the doors, and a worker would endure up to 60 passes a day. At this desperate bottom end of the market, any girl who did not register within the system was at the mercy of the dreaded Police de Moeurs, Morality Police, which hunted down unlicensed prostitutes. Abuses were rampant. After midnight, agents would block off whole streets in the working class districts and launch themselves into the crowds with terrifying shouts. According to historian Jill Harsin in Policing Prostitution in Nineteenth-Century Paris, the scenes were reminiscent of Nazi roundups in the ghettos. Cheap hotels would be locked and searched room to room for “clandestine whores.” Many innocents, invariably poor, were dragged to the women’s prison of Saint-Lazare by mistake, before the notorious system was finally toned down in 1904.

  The most legendary class of fille de joie operated on a level far above the state-regulated brothels and the grubby fingers of the Morality Police—the top-class courtesans of the belle époque, les grandes cocottes. These were the true princesses of the Parisian demimonde. Many had risen from poverty to become the lovers of financiers and politicians, princes and millionaires, and through their beauty and connections were able to shape their own lives. A lucky few amassed personal fortunes, their incomes bolstered by lavish gifts of fine clothing, jewelry, even whole mansions and country villas, before their charms faded. The painter Auguste Renoir, in the biography by his son Jean, My Father Renoir, refers respectfully to the courtesans’ strength of character and keen intelligence, which made them excellent companions in any social circle.

  It was to help outsiders navigate this exotic world, with its own codes and manners, that my guidebook The Pretty Women of Paris was written in 1883.

  This slender opus has long enjoyed an underground cachet among academics for its wealth of colorful detail. Although anonymous, it was evidently composed by a well-to-do expatriate in Paris who was intent on assisting his countrymen, with 169 copies privately printed in 1883 (four of them on “syphilitic-green paper” for the personal use of the Parisian chief of police, the author cheekily claims in his preface). Today, Pretty Women is extremely rare, with only three known survivals. One of them happens to be in the New York Public Library, kept safely under lock and key in the Rare Books Division, so before I left, I made an appointment to peruse it. (Mysteriously, it is part of the Arents Collection of Tobacco). The librarian winked at me over his spectacles as he handed over the text bound in discreet gray paper: “Looks interesting.…”

  It was—a keyhole peek into the bedrooms of 1883. The two hundred or so women are listed alphabetically by name and address, with each one given an extensive description in the florid style of the era. Admittedly, it’s hardly high literature. The author strays into the crass vernacular of the horse track, praising “a well-nourished frame,” “teeth white and strong” and “ruby gums that are a sure sign of health.” The comely Berthe Legrand, of 70 Rue des Martyrs, has “teeth like a terrier,” but the mere movement of her hips stimulates men’s desires, the author enthuses, “like the vapor of cooked meat on the olfactory nerves of a hungry man.” But there is also a wealth of anecdote and gossip that allows the women’s outsize personalities to shine through the overheated prose, allowing me to recreate the ambiance of the city during its erotic apogee. What’s more, Pretty Women includes specific addresses for the finest clubs, nightspots and private boudoirs. All this would—I hoped—lead me to the belle époque’s liveliest secrets.

  THE CHUNNEL OF LOVE

  As the Eurostar whisked us under the English Channel, with the promise of sunnier times ahead, I reasoned to Les that there was a point to all that dismal northern weather: We would now experience the same euphoria travelers felt in the 1880s when they escaped stodgy Britain for salubrious France. I realized I had to redeem myself after the bleak parade of moldy Anglo lodgings. The boys were starting to resemble pallid Dickensian waifs, refusing point blank to eat another egg.

  I wanted a great hotel for us in Paris, so I began looking for a former brothel. This wasn’t difficult: In fact, it’s probably harder to find a hotel there that wasn’t a former brothel. But then I found something even better: the Hotel Édouard 7, former pied-à-terre of the most notorious lecher of the belle époque.

  In his profligate youth, the Prince of Wales—Britain’s future King Edward VII—was a celebrity in Paris, thanks to his Gargantuan appetites for both food and sex. Perpetually availed of champagne and cigars, his girth filled out by five high-protein meals a day, he would receive a standing ovation at the theater whenever he appeared with a comely new paramour on his arm. “Bertie” (also nicknamed Edward the Caresser by the English) had plenty of free time to play: He remained the gadabout heir to the throne until age fifty-nine, thanks to the epic sixty-four-year reign of his mother, Queen Victoria. When he was finally crowned in 1901, he arranged for a special box for all his mistresses to attend the ceremony, much to the chagrin of his wife, Alexandra.

  From 1877, Bertie kept an apartment in a building on the Avenue de l’Opéra, an address he relished because it was the Right Bank’s upscale epicenter of vice, then dubbed the clitoris of Paris. He gave it up twenty-seven years later when he became king, and the building changed hands several times before it became a hotel. But it has carried on the Parisian tradition of admiration for the prince, naming each suite after his many celebrated consorts, including actress Sarah Bernhardt, opera singer Nelly Melba, American socialite Jennie Churchill (mother of Winston Churchill), and courtesan Alice Keppel (great-grandmother of Camilla Parker-Bowles, second wife of Prince Charles).

  Even today, legends of Edward’s appetites still filter through Paris. One in particular stands out. According to Maisons Closes, the classic study of Paris brothels written in 1958 by an eccentric antiquarian calling himself Romi (real name Robert Miquel), the prince grew so o
bese in middle age that he commissioned the construction of a fauteuil d’amour—a “sex chair”—to be kept in his favorite brothel. This bizarre device was said to have allowed him to have sex with two prostitutes at once without crushing them with his enormous bulk.

  The chair’s provenance could be traced until 1951, when, sadly, it disappeared into the hands of private collectors.

  When we arrived at the Hotel Édouard 7, the immaculately groomed doorman smiled at us knowingly, as if we were on an illicit tryst—rather strange, considering we had two rambunctious urchins in tow. Les remained suspicious as we were led through the gleaming foyer, past a bronze bust of the portly prince, and up the elevator to the fifth floor, where Bertie had his apartment. Our room was designed in “belle époque moderne”—the same rich velvet upholstery, but with sleek enamel picture frames instead of the traditional ornate gold. There was even a balcony over the wide Avenue de l’Opéra, leading to the Palais Garnier. Completed in 1875, this famous boulevard was a key element in Baron Haussmann’s nineteenth-century transformation of Paris from a medieval warren into the visually coherent Ville Lumière, City of Light, we know today—a vast stage set for the pursuit of the good life. It wasn’t hard to imagine the chic crowds flashing their diamonds beneath gas chandeliers, their faces bathed in prismatic light. Unlike other European opera houses, the Paris Opéra was privately funded, and rich male “subscribers” were allowed access backstage. After the performance, they would trawl the cluttered dressing rooms, hung with costumes and silk petticoats. (“It was common knowledge,” writes historian Charles Bernheimer, “that dancers at the Opera were chosen more for their sex appeal than for their talent …”)