Avenue de l’Opéra, heart of the Right Bank’s up-market vice in the belle époque.
Like Prince Bertie, I was well pleased with my Parisian address. Gazing through the fluttering curtains, I could imagine that nothing had changed in Paris since Monet rented his first studio—at least if you closed the double-glazed windows against the traffic.
The Pretty Women of Paris paints a lively picture of this brilliant district and the beautiful women who ruled it. Poring over its pages, we can learn a great deal about the individual courtesans, including the names of their pets, the number of their illegitimate children, and the color of their thoroughbred horses. We can also gain more substantial insights into how belle époque society worked, learning, for example, how these women began their extraordinary careers. Many burst into the Parisian high-society scene via the stage, where a poor but attractive girl might get her big break. The wealthy actress Lucie Davray, a favorite at the Opéra in 1883, had been a teenage flower seller during the siege of Paris when she was plucked from a crowd to perform a play for the troops and was discovered by a lecherous agent. Others were more entrepreneurial. Marie Estradère earned a name for herself at a government soiree; instead of mingling, she retired to a bedroom and gave the politicians “manual relief” for five francs. Another self-promoter, Hautense Daubinesco, became a regular in the most exclusive social pages of the French press thanks to her pro bono work with journalists. The eccentricities of each courtesan seemed to function as niche advertising. Mathilde Lassens liked to make love while her maid played a barrel organ in the next room. Lee d’Asco filled her mansion with animals, including a tame bear, and on one occasion, as if more notoriety were needed, she ascended in a hot-air balloon dressed as a man wearing a revolver. After tossing her clothes to well-wishers below, she returned to the ground stark naked.
Pretty Women also depicts the courtesans’ opulent, if precarious, lifestyle. Then as now, dealing with client requests could be a delicate business. We discover that Leonie de Clómenil kept a solid silver chamber pot and floor mirrors to entertain her many bathroom fetishists. Henriette Chavaroff had a regular engagement with a rich Spaniard who liked to see her kill a live rooster with a knife. And Marthe Dalbet would show off the small scar on her neck inflicted by a jealous “idiot lover” who attacked her with sulfuric acid, then jumped to his death from the window in remorse. For some, the risks were richly rewarded. At age twenty-nine, Gabrielle Elluini was credited with a fortune of £100,000, roughly $20 million today. She turned down the proposals of aristocrats to marry a dashing young actor, then spend her days painting and hosting right-wing political meetings. A belle from the American South who called herself Mrs. Jackson married a French count and lived in luxury worthy of Marie Antoinette.
Few of the women who flit across Pretty Women’s pages are remembered in history books. An exception is La Valtesse de la Bigne, born Louise Delabigne, who became the lover of Emperor Napoléon III and influenced his diplomatic decisions. Her regal beauty and wit put her on a par with the hetaerae, courtesans of ancient Greece—the author opines—despite the fact that by 1883 she was “suspiciously near forty.” Blessed with sky-blue eyes and cascading auburn hair, Louise had made her start as an artist’s model whose bevy of famous lovers, including Manet and Courbet, earned her the nickname Painter’s Union. She eventually married an indulgent Turkish banker and established herself in a palace filled with priceless artifacts, including a giant bed of gilded bronze. La Valtesse kept to her artistic roots by hosting a literary salon every Monday night, which was frequented by male admirers including Flaubert, Guy de Maupassant, and the Goncourt brothers. The meticulous author Émile Zola also attended while researching his famous novel about a courtesan, Nana, whom many believe to be based on La Valtesse. Zola’s depiction is the moralistic counterpart to Pretty Women. Nana is beautiful but vacuous and self-absorbed, and the unwitting agent of a new social revolution. Like some “diseased insect,” she rises from the gutters of Paris to wreak revenge on the aristocracy, infecting men’s bodies, destroying their spirits, and leeching their wealth, before she slides back into the cesspit in which she was born. La Valtesse was at first offended—Zola used details from her house, even her bed, as the model for Nana’s—but was reportedly bemused by his focus on the character’s brute sexual appeal to men. “As if a woman so stupid could succeed in this life,” she scoffed. “To triumph, one must establish relationships at a higher level.”
PARIS ON $25,000 A DAY
“D-a-a-a-d, can we go up the Eiffel Tower today?”
Sam woke up with the same question ever since he saw the structure explode with fireworks on Bastille Day. Les was under the impression that the Louvre might be worth a look. But I explained that the famous sites of Paris had to be avoided at all cost. Summer was no time for riding bateaux mouches along the Seine. The crowds, the ticket lines, the souvenir vendors … the experience would be deathly. Instead, I steered them on my alternative itinerary. Observed the right way, Paris was a palimpsest of erotica.
At first blush, finding actual physical traces of the louche past is a masochistic pursuit. For the last century, Parisians have traded on nostalgia for the belle époque, and restaurants that survive from the era have usually undergone a dozen renovations and even offer floor shows for tourists. With their red vinyl banquettes, faux-brass lamps, and irritable waiters in white aprons, they are closer to Pepé Le Pew cartoons than period reality. Worse, Paris has also undergone a transformation in its very atmosphere and reputation. The legal brothels of Paris were all closed in 1946, and the city was “cleaned up” by postwar conservatives. It is now Europe’s bourgeois capital par excellence, well-to-do and rather smug. There is nothing of the sensual frisson in the streets of, say, Rio de Janeiro, Havana, or Barcelona. In fact, most of central Paris is about as provocative as the Upper East Side. Historic playgrounds like the Palais Royale now feel like a minimalist art event. In short, Parisians’ strongest passions are reserved for their shoes.
It takes a combination of perseverance and creativity to locate the era’s sacred sites. Pretty Women in hand, I first tracked down the Maison Dorée, or Golden House, on 20 Boulevard des Italiens, the busiest café hunting ground of aspiring courtesans in 1883—now a bank. Across the street once stood the Café Anglais, whose respectable facade hid the notorious Grand Seize Room. It was here that the Chilean belle Isabelle Féraud agreed to settle a wager by a young man that he could extract a flower from her nether regions “without injuring the blossoms.” She chose a gardenia and reclined upon a table as admirers crowded about. “A roar of applause greeted the saucy scamp as he lifted his flushed face,” wrote one eyewitness, and revealed the intact flower between his teeth, like some perverse ancestor of Gomez Addams. Señorita Isabelle apparently took his triumph in stride. She went about with a golden key to her bedroom dangling on her watch chain, to provoke spur-of-the-moment offers. One besotted youth had given her £1,000 for a night, roughly $25,000 in today’s currency, and was later seen wandering Paris with no boots.
Lapérouse, a romantic restaurant that still operates on Le Quai des Grands-Augustins, once maintained private rooms for gentlemen to discreetly ply courtesans with champagne, delicacies, and expensive gifts. Against all logic, we decided to dine there en famille. Luckily, Les traveled well prepared: She’d purchased two boy’s suits from H&M before we left New York, specifically so we could venture into swank Parisian eateries without snide looks from other diners. In fact, as we took our plush seats for the prix fixe lunch, they looked like infant Beatles on tour. We tried to order nineteenth-century style, although it was hard to share escargots with linked elbows when the boys were gurgling in horror. To my relief, the phalanx of hovering waiters intimidated them into staying in their seats and keeping their grossed-out mewling to a minimum.
The courtesans’ mirror in the private rooms of Lapérouse restaurant.
The main dining room of Lapérouse is now inspired kitsch, with art nouveau mirrors
on every wall, but the tuxedoed maitre d’ took us upstairs to visit the original cozy chambres particuliers, which survive in the attic under softly lit chandeliers. The antique mirrors were clouded with etched marks. Apparently, the ladies would test their diamond gifts by scratching them along the glass, to make sure they weren’t being duped.
Afterward, we scoured the stalls of used-book vendors by the Seine, the bouquinistes, who for centuries had sold works “to be read with one hand,” unavailable in the rest of Europe, along with risqué souvenirs like translucent lingerie embroidered with the words Prenez-Moi, Take Me. In 1883, literature fans would visit the Enfer, or Hell section, of the Bibliothèque Nationale, where nine hundred pornographic books were kept in a restricted reading room (it was discontinued in the 1960s), or seek out the specialist collectors often referred to as erotobibliomaniacs. The esteemed “Auguste Lesoue … f” claimed to have thirty thousand volumes and eighteen thousand etchings in his library, and an elderly colonel of the Russian Imperial Guard, Prince Alexandre Galitzin, had published an underground guide to erotica, Catalogue of the Secret Cabinet of Prince G**** in Bruxelles. Of course, there was also the perverted Frederick Hankey, a retired English officer who had one of the filthiest libraries in Europe. He boasted of attending public executions in order to arouse his passions and fantasized about binding his books in human skin. (The Goncourt brothers, the great Parisian chroniclers of the demimonde, described him as “a madman, a monster, one of those men who live on the edge of the abyss.”)
Then there was Montmartre. It is difficult to picture today, but in 1883 the quarter was still a rustic hillock with barnyard animals in the streets, although it had plentiful cheap bars frequented by writers, artists, and their free-living models, who draped themselves revealingly over chairs, sipping absinthe and smoking cigarettes sweetened by opium. Travelers loved to slum at cabarets like the Chat Noir, which offered witty stage spectacles combining themes of sex and death, and of course can-can dancers performing their jaw-dropping routines. I paid my respects at 75 Rue des Martyrs, site of the Japanese Divan, where the modern striptease was invented in 1894 by one Blanche Cavelli with a show called “Yvette’s Bedtime.” Today, it’s still a lounge club, the Divan du Monde, although all traces of the oriental decor have vanished.
Unfortunately, the pleading for the Eiffel Tower didn’t stop. “D-a-a-a-d …” I had been determined not to sully my mission with such a tawdry tourist activity, but finally I buckled. After waiting in line for ninety minutes, a lightning storm enveloped the spire, and all visits were abruptly ended. On the second attempt, we were better prepared. We took a bottle of wine, some Brie and baguettes, so we could at least enjoy a picnic while waiting to buy the tickets. Unseemly perhaps, but soon the exhausted, hungry, and painfully sober Spaniards around us were looking on in envy as we merrily approached the ticket booth. The French have finally cottoned on to the true needs of travelers: At the summit, we discovered a champagne bar that dispensed plastic flutes for a mere $20 each.
Now, with Paris at night stretched out before us, I had to admit this wasn’t such a bad idea after all. Back on earth, we lolled on the moonlit grass, fell off the carousels, and searched in vain for a public restroom. A typical night out for family debauchees.
MIDNIGHT IN THE SEX MUSEUM
The next evening, after reading Asterix the Gaul to the boys for the twelfth time, I decided to venture out alone and see what might happen if I visited one of the addresses in Pretty Women. The very first listing under A was Jeanne Abadie at No. 80, Boulevard de Clichy. Mademoiselle Abadie was “a dashing, well-dressed person of about twenty-seven, who looks very well by gaslight, in spite of her false teeth.” She had been brought up in the wings of a theater, where she caught the eye of the rich boulevardiers. Her personality was “rough and fiery,” the author warns, but “her tariff is moderate.”
The address was in the heart of Pigalle, now the center of Parisian sleaze. So as Les curled up with a good book, I slipped out into the night.
“Don’t get too carried away with this research,” Les muttered, without looking up.
I emerged from the Métro at Place Pigalle, a name once heavy with romance. In 1883, bohemians were hanging out at the Café de la Nouvelle-Athène, where Degas had painted The Absinthe Drinkers, and Parisians were hailing Manet’s colorful depiction of local nightlife, The Bar in the Folies-Bergère. (Less romantically, Manet died that same year from tertiary syphilis contracted in his misspent youth.) But the vibe in Pigalle these days is tragically more like Times Square 1983, with the Boulevard de Clichy now lined with neon-lit sex shops, peep shows, and scrums of Germans out on stag nights. Still, I dutifully began following the numbers, looking for Mademoiselle Abadie’s old haunt at No. 80. It turned out that the very next door, No. 82, is the all-too-famous Moulin Rouge. It was opened in 1889, and in Mademoiselle Abadie’s day was a more humble music hall. Tonight, guards with loudspeakers were herding throngs of tourists into lines behind velvet ropes. No. 78 was an erotic supermarket. But where was No. 80?
It was then I noticed, a couple of doors down at No. 72, the Musée de l’Érotisme, the Museum of Eroticism. The modern world has seen a flurry of successful institutions in this field, but they are clinical and uninspiring places. Surely this one would tap into the rich tapestry of Parisian sensuality. It was open daily until 2:00 a.m., appropriately, so I eagerly handed over my admission to the gaunt attendant dressed as a Goth.
At midnight, the museum was deserted, except for a few giggling couples. I carried around my notebook and scribbled furiously, trying hard to look scholarly. The exhibition began without much promise. Spread over seven floors, most of the collection seemed to be cheap souvenirs from Japan. But the displays were more inspired on the level devoted to Paris, with original nineteenth-century photos of bordello scenes, streetwalkers, cross-dressers. Projected on a wall were blue movies from the early 1900s, which would be shown in the waiting rooms of brothels “to excite the appetites.” They were the direct descendents of the tableaux vivants of the belle époque maisons closes. One involved two “nuns” cavorting with a puppy, with the girls looking at the camera and laughing.
Parisian low life was obviously still going strong right through the 1930s, the heyday of Henry Miller and Anaïs Nin. How could the postwar brothel closures have so completely destroyed the culture?
The museum’s co-owner, Alan Plumey, was still in his office. Wiry and unshaven, edging for a cigarette, he looked like he had just spent a wild night on the tiles. Plumey had started this museum in the early 1990s, he said, inspired by the success of Europe’s first sex museums in Amsterdam and Berlin. He had chosen the Pigalle location with hesitation. “I dislike the avenue, it’s rather horrible,” he admitted. “But unfortunately, Pigalle has the history. The name is internationally famous. Ten million tourists a year now come here. We catch a few of them.”
I asked him what had ended the epic saga of Parisian debauchery. To illustrate, Plumey took me to one of his favorite exhibits, a handwritten ledger of accounts from the Second World War, where a Parisian prostitute carefully listed the schedule and income from her dealings with German military officers. It was a busy roster.
“Horizontal collaboration,” he grinned wolfishly.
Prostitutes were the scapegoats of the Occupation, he explained. No sooner had the Germans taken over Paris in 1940 than working girls were obliged to take them on as clients. The luxury maisons closes were converted into brothels for Nazi officers and did a roaring trade, to the disgust of French men, who were already feeling emasculated by the nation’s abject military collapse. It’s still something of a sore point in France: When historian Patrick Buisson revealed in his 2009 book, 1940–45, Erotic Years, that some Parisian prostitutes even preferred the German conquerors for their personal cleanliness, good looks, and hard currency, it caused a scandal. In contrast to the image of heroic resistance, many single French women—and married women whose husbands had been killed, wounded, or
were POWs—were also forced to sleep with the enemy for cash or black-market goods. But it was the prostitutes who drew French rage after the Liberation in 1944, their hair clipped and sometimes marched naked through the streets by howling crowds.
A popular French heroine named Marthe Richard—a former aviator, First World War spy, and supposed resistance figure—was chosen by conservative French politicians to lead a campaign to close the bordellos. In the spring of 1946, urged on by the strictly Catholic Yvonne de Gaulle, the municipal council of Paris passed legislation to end 150 years of tolerance. One brothel madame tartly noted that she recognized many of her best clients voting for the ban: “I suppose all the poor guys were afraid to be roasted by their wives when they got home if they’d voted against it.” It was the end of an era. Before long, most of the brothels were turned into residences for students. Naturally, the move didn’t end the sex trade, but removed its glamour. It also made the plight of women forced into prostitution much worse. Around 1,500 brothel workers either ended up on the streets or had to set up illegal houses in the suburbs. Prostitution in Paris became much the same as in London, Moscow, or Cleveland—a marginalized profession, more vulnerable to disease and street violence. By the 1950s, many Parisians recognized that the ban was a failure. Police records proved that the self-righteous Marthe Richard was a fraud, a former prostitute herself who had changed her name, fabricated her heroic history as a spy, and spent the first years of the Occupation in pro-Nazi Vichy procuring women for German officers. She went on record as regretting her campaign to close the brothels, and in her sixties she went on the Paris stage—ironically enough, playing a madam.
The Sinner's Grand Tour Page 6