The Sinner's Grand Tour

by Tony Perrottet

  But the extirpation of the city’s sinful golden age was complete, Plumey mourned. “Nothing remains of that time. Only a few facades. You can go to the site of Le One Two Two”—a famously elegant maison close from the 1930s on 122 Rue de Provence, a favorite of Humphrey Bogart and Cary Grant—“it’s now a union office, the National Federation of Leather and Hide Workers. It’s comic,” he added bitterly. “Comic!”

  “Any relics of the famous brothels?” I persisted.

  “Historians have asked me three thousand times if there are brothel artifacts,” he scoffed, exasperated. “There is nothing in Paris! Nothing!”

  By the time I left, bracing myself for the generic sleaze of Pigalle, Plumey was decidedly maudlin. “Today, the erotic in Paris is dead. Vanished! If you want an erotic ambience, go to Bangkok, São Paolo, Budapest. There is nothing left in Paris but nostalgia.” He smiled ruefully. “This whole city is just a museum of eroticism.”

  Outside, thinking once again of the winsome Mademoiselle Abadie, I stopped in front of an open doorway. The sign said La Diva, and if the sequence was right, it must be No. 80. Purple neon announced: THÉATRE, SHOW PRIVÉ, TABLE DANCE, LAP DANCE. Could this have been chez Jeanne back in 1885? I peered for a second too long, and the doorman demanded 20 euros to enter. I sighed. Well, hopefully it would be tax deductible.

  I was led into a dark, odoriferous bar, where a topless African girl was grinding a pole to throbbing music. The half dozen males in the audience, sitting at separate tables, shifted their blank gaze to me as I tried to hide in a private booth. Another African girl, wearing a golden Jazz Age dress, materialized by my side.

  “Hello, would you like a drink?”

  “Oh, no, that’s OK,” I gurgled suavely.

  “Do you mind if I have a drink?”

  Egad—I could imagine being extorted a fortune by the bouncers for her glass of “champagne” when I tried to leave. I hedged.

  She countered: “Where are you from?”—clearly the routine conversation starter. “Which do you prefer, New York or Paris?”

  I burbled that I was actually a historian, here because I’d read in an old guide that this had been a courtesan’s home 130 years ago.…

  “Really?” she asked. “You read that in a book?”

  “Yes.”

  “In New York or Paris?”

  “Well, New York.”

  “And which do you prefer, New York or Paris?”

  LAST FANTASY IN PARIS

  So much for human remains. In its last pages, Pretty Women had included an appendix listing the classiest brothels in the Paris of 1883. Although known only by their street addresses, they were once notorious enclaves of Parisian luxury safely operating inside palatial buildings. Surely something survived. And sure enough, just around the corner from our hotel lay 12 Rue Chabanais—which was, my guidebook raved, quite simply “the finest bagnio [bathhouse, a nickname for bordello] in the world.”

  If Paris was an island of fantasy within Europe, Le Chabanais, as Parisians affectionately referred to it, was its most creative expression. Each of the bordello’s thirty rooms was decorated in a different theme, creating a Disneyland of the erotic arts. It was opened in 1878 by a rich former courtesan, “Madam Kelly,” who allegedly spent over 1,700,000 francs on the interior design, $12.75 million in today’s terms, and was soon attracting Europe’s wealthiest financiers, politicians, dukes, and stars of the stage.

  12, Rue Chabanais today—a century ago, the most legendary bordello in Europe.

  So I wandered down Rue Chabanais, now a quiet lane behind the Louvre. The antique facade at No. 12 was still intact—a slender, eight-story building sporting a fresh coat of matte beige. Back in 1883, Le Chabanais’ exterior had also been kept plain to deter the riffraff. But as soon as the door was opened, a magical world was revealed. The bordello’s vestibule was designed as an underground grotto, complete with artificial rock walls and flowing waterfalls. The porter, an African in Moorish garb, stood below a sign declaring in English, WELCOME TO THE CHABANAIS, THE HOUSE OF ALL NATIONS.

  Today we can recreate a visit from a surviving floor plan, vintage photographs, and the brothel’s own small green souvenir books, which were handed out at top cafés as advertising. Clients were led to the first floor, the Pompeii Room, where scantily clad ladies were reclining on Roman couches beneath sixteen elegant vignettes by—who else?—Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, depicting male and female centaurs involved in sensual acts. Le Chabanais was one of the artist’s favorite retreats, where he spent long hours studying the casual moments when the girls were off work and simply enjoying one another’s company. It was on this floor that the financial business was discreetly transacted. No money could change hands upstairs, so clients would purchase jetons, or tokens, from the madam in advance, to trade for drinks and services. The minimum was 100 francs—around $750 in today’s currency. Absolute discretion was guaranteed, which is what made Le Chabanais a favorite with foreign dignitaries on tour. The sojourn was routinely described on their itineraries as a “visit to the president of the Senate”—a code that apparently backfired when the Queen of Spain actually did ask to meet the president of the Senate and was taken to the brothel, causing a minor diplomatic scandal.

  From this point, clients only had to choose their fantasy. There was the Hindu Room, the Turkish Chamber, the Louis XV Salon. The Venetian Room, evoking the Italian Renaissance, had a giant bed in the shape of a seashell. In the Japanese Salon, six divans were arranged in a circle around an incense burner, with decor so sublime that it won first prize in Paris’s 1900 International Exposition (itself a sign of just how tolerated prostitution was at the time). There was an Eskimo Chamber with an igloo, and even a Pirate Chamber, with portholes against which sea water would be thrown by workers.

  It came as no surprise to me that Le Chabanais was a firm favorite with the Prince of Wales. For a start, it was easy waddling distance from his Right Bank apartment. His preferred fetish was the Hindu Room, and it was here that he installed his two creative custom-made props. The first was an enormous bathtub crafted from gleaming red copper. It was cast in the shape of a ship, with a melon-breasted siren on the prow. The prince is believed to have filled it with Mumm champagne on warm summer nights.

  The other creation was his fauteuil d’amour—his love throne, or sex chair. By the 1890s, his girth was forty-eight inches, but the machine’s tall handles enabled him to lower himself without doing the poor girl any serious damage. The inventive device became notorious in Paris. It remained in Le Chabanais after the prince’s death in 1910, and the brothel owners even proudly displayed it when they began offering guided tours in the 1920s—during the day, when the girls were sleeping. The American newspaperman Walter Annenberg went on this particular tour in 1926. “They took you around the bedrooms like Tussaud’s waxworks,” he later recalled, “and told you about the clients.”

  King Edward’s sex chair, which Annenberg described as a type of hoist, was the highlight: “(The prince) stepped in there as if he were going into a stall.”

  When I rang the buzzer at No. 12, a balding doorman in a canary yellow sweater let me in. Of course, he said with a knowing smile, this used to be Le Chabanais, the most successful brothel in all of Europe. Today, it was an office building. The fantasy rooms had all been stripped long ago. But the original marble staircase was still there in the foyer, as well as the wrought-iron doors of the brothel’s two elevators—working in separate directions, to avoid embarrassing meetings. Their finely wrought grilles depicted a mother bird valiantly protecting her chicks from an approaching serpent.

  I asked about the fate of the brothel’s contents. “You should ask Madame Canet,” he shrugged, pointing across the street. “She’s the erotic archaeologist.”

  The memory of so much sin could not be washed away so easily on Rue Chabanais. Directly opposite No. 12 lay a boutique called Au Bonheur du Jour, which, the doorman proudly informed me, was the only commercial gallery of historical
erotica still operating in all of Paris, owned by a former dancer named Nicole Canet. (The gallery name, “Daytime Delight,” refers, slyly, to the joys of stolen afternoon trysts.)

  OK, I thought, this is just the specialist I need.

  I found Madame Canet unwinding at the back of her gallery. The erotoarchaeolgist was in her fifties, her wafer-thin frame fastidiously attired in a designer sundress and silk scarf. Surrounded by male nude photographs, with the piercing mascara-lined eyes of a silent film actress, she was the picture of Parisian elegance.

  But I quickly learned that Madame was not having a good day.

  “I’m tired!” she declared, clutching a bowl of herbal tea. “I’m not on form at all. Last night, I ate too quickly—a Chinese meal. Now I’m not well! To run a gallery like this, it’s too much for one person. I hang all of the exhibitions myself, I deal with the public.… Oh, I should never have opened this boutique! It’s really too much alone.”

  I offered my condolences, while delicately steering the conversation toward her glass cases of alluring nineteenth-century relics. She had started collecting historical items when she first moved to Paris from Burgundy several years ago. When she stopped dancing professionally, she began selling full-time. “I love to go back in time and play detective,” she said. “I need to discover things that aren’t in public circulation, things that need a certain expertise to identify and to authenticate. The erotic creations of the nineteenth century, for example, have a different sensibility, a different feel, a different emotion. Pornographic images were much more shocking in those days, and it was very dangerous to carry in your pocket, for example, postcards of naked men.”

  Madame Canet had opened her boutique in 1999—“of course, now I regret it!”—but had not deliberately chosen it for its proximity to Le Chabanais.

  “It was an accident, in fact. I found the listing in the newspaper,” she said. “But, you know, I wonder if there really is such a thing as coincidence. When I staged an exhibition on les maisons closes, the location received huge publicity. Thirty thousand people came, the lines were extending down in the street. But I sold nothing! The French don’t buy erotica. They treat my store like a museum, and won’t even buy a €2 postcard. My best customers are Germans, Swiss, Americans.”

  She narrowed her eyes at me. “And you, do you collect?”

  “I’m just a writer!” I confessed. “I can’t afford it.” She looked at me accusingly.

  To change the subject, I asked about the Parisian nostalgia for the maisons closes.

  “Oh, the sex trade has been so transformed today, it is so crass and vulgar. Back then, it was more glamorous, more mysterious. But the only women who achieved true independence were the top courtesans, who lived like goddesses. There were many low-category brothels in belle époque Paris that were sordid—really sordid. And even in the most expensive brothels like Le Chabanais, there was only a facade of luxury.…”

  The women were virtual prisoners, Madame Canet explained. They signed a legal contract stipulating that their living expenses would be deducted from their earnings, including their food, heating, laundry, candles, hairdressing, cigarettes, and opiates. Girls even had to rent their beds, their sheets, and new clothes—a fashionable dress went for 2 francs a month, a pair of stockings 6 sous. Few emerged with a profit. For all its swank, Le Chabanais was no better. Just above the Hindu Room, with its crystal glasses and goose-down mattresses, thirty-six women were sleeping in twenty-two narrow iron beds in the attic. Inspectors found these workers’ accommodations to be as squalid as a slum tenement, with tin basins full of dirty water, wallpaper falling in strips off the wall, wood stoves and rickety tables covered with make-up jars and coffee grounds. Only slivers of daylight would ever penetrate the permanently closed window shutters, ensuring a rank and unhealthy atmosphere. The girls were allowed outside only once every two weeks, in the company of the madam. “Who could withstand this claustration during the day, this eternal false illumination of the nights, this imprisonment prolonged for a week, two weeks, a month?” asked the French social campaigner Louis Fiaux in 1892. His exposé of brothel life, Les Maisons de Tolérance, was so detailed that it, too, became a collector’s item among French pornography lovers. A scandal occurred one hot July 14, during the Bastille Day festivities, when the suffocating girls crept out to join a public dance in their diaphanous chemises. According to one report, the crowd’s “stupefaction” at the rouged women changed to “entrancing delight” when the girls began “high-kicking of the most unblushing kind, considering that knickers are unknown in a brothel.”

  Not quite all of the brothel props had disappeared. Among Madame Canet’s triumphs of erotic archaeology was a porte-jetons, a gentleman’s bamboo cane, designed to hold twenty brothel tokens inside the handle; iron dog collars used for nineteenth-century S&m pursuits (“Businessmen spent their days being so unreasonable to workers, they wanted to be punished at night!”); even the rhino horn–handled whip of La Valtesse de la Bigne, the legendary courtesan, elegantly inscribed with the letters V and B in pink.

  When I asked what her favorite discovery had been, Nicole leaped to her feet.

  “There was a very large contraption, beautifully sewn from crimson dyed leather,” she said. “The man put his face into a mask, and planted his feet down here,” she said, positioning herself to demonstrate. “He was tied in at the waist, you know? The penis was here.” She thrust her pelvis forward. “And the testicles hung here …”

  I nodded somberly. “Impressionant …”

  “I sold it for a fortune.”

  Not surprisingly, countless artifacts are in the sweaty palms of private collectors.

  And Le Chabanais’ relics?

  Although the brothel closed its doors in 1946, she said, the contents were not auctioned off until May 8, 1951. She pulled from her shelves a hefty volume by Romi, the antiquarian who had attended the sale. At 9:30 a.m., the famous building was mobbed by collectors, who snapped up all the Venetian glass, antique tapestries, and gilded Louis XVI clocks. Toulouse-Lautrec’s centaur paintings were purchased by an unidentified buyer, and their location is still unknown. King Edward’s copper bathtub was bought by Salvador Dalí for 110,500 francs plus 22 percent tax. (Thanks to the massive postwar devaluations of the French franc, that would be only around $3,500 today.) The surrealist installed the tub in his suite at the Hotel Meurice in Paris and equipped it with a telephone.

  But what of the most infamous piece, I asked—the royal sex chair?

  There was a paper trail. At the 1951 auction, it was snapped up for a bargain 32,000 francs (around $1,000 today) by Alain Vian, brother of Boris Vian, a popular Parisian writer and jazz musician. The sex chair changed hands again in 1982, then was obtained by the famous Parisian auction house Drouot in 1992. They soon sold it to the great-grandson of the original nineteenth-century manufacturer, Soubrier. But Madame Canet had heard rumors that it had left Paris. “Four or five people have told me it was sold to a collector in the United States,” she said sadly. “It’s a pity. It should be in France!”

  Madame Canet then greeted the first customers of the afternoon, a couple of shy men she proceeded to work on.

  “Once, erotic archaeology was my passion,” she sighed as they left, sounding a bit like a disillusioned girl from the provinces trapped in a maison close. “But when you run a boutique like this one, you’re really a prisoner.”

  REMAINS OF THE LOVE TRADE

  I looked up the Soubrier company’s address. The family furniture emporium was in the same location it had been since the 1850s, on the Rue de Reuilly near the Place de la Bastille. So I sent the current dynastic patriarch, Louis Soubrier, a friendly e-mail, saying that I was a researcher pursuing the history of the shuttered houses of Paris. Would he perchance know who currently possessed the fauteuil d’amour of King Edward VII?

  I didn’t hold out much hope for a reply, but I couldn’t let the matter drop.

  In the meantime, Madame Canet ha
d kindly drawn me a series of maps to other brothels mentioned in Pretty Women, where fragments of decor from the era could still be found. Easily the most evocative was 32 Rue Blondel, once known as Aux Belles Poules, The Cute Chicks. The alleyway ran off Rue St. Denis, the last of Paris’s streetwalker strips, which has been continually operating since the twelfth century. (Other medieval alleys, now gone, were Rue Tire-Boudin [Cock-Puller Street], Rue Pute-y-Mire [Tart Idler Street], and Rue Gratte-Cul [Scratchy-Cunt Street].) In Rue Blondel, mature-age ladies of the night appeared in every doorway, sporting regulation leopard-skin tights, fish-net stockings and plunging bustiers. Aux Belles Poules could be identified by the lovely red faience tiles on its facade. After the 1946 closure, it was converted into a student dormitory. Its bottom floor operated as a candy factory, then a Chinese clothing importer. Two workers in white overalls happily let me have a peek inside. On the back walls, partly obscured behind rusty pipes, were ceramic tiles of half-naked nymphs lolling back on fluffy clouds, gilt-edged mirrors, and a mosaic of a voluptuous dancer holding a fan and baring one breast. Impossible to move, they had been left by collectors; city authorities have now put a preservation order on the building.

  32, Rue Blondel on the Left Bank, site of the bordello Aux Belles Poules, “The Cute Chicks.”

  But Rue Blondel was still a feisty place. As I took a photograph of No. 32, howls of fury began to echo up and down the alleyway. “Don’t photograph the girls!” A formidable woman in a German military cap swept down from nowhere and demanded to see my camera shots. When I explained my historical purpose, she softened.

  “It’s beautiful in there,” she said. “It should be reopened for us girls!”

  Gradually I learned that the relics of the top courtesans are preserved in more refined worlds far from the rough-and-tumble streets. In the Museum of Decorative Arts, for example, part of the Louvre, the famous bed of La Valtesse de la Bigne is on display in a hushed and darkened room. Costing 50,000 francs in 1875 (roughly $375,000 today), it was modeled on the extravagant lit de parade, or “parade bed,” of the Sun King, Louis XIV, in which he would recline to receive guests in Versailles. Cupids frolic on the gilded headboard, and fauns watch sardonically from the bed posts. In Nana, Zola describes the courtesan’s bed as “an altar, to which all of Paris would come to adore her sovereign nudity”—but he was obliged to invent the details of the decorations. Despite his pleas, La Valtesse had refused to let him inspect the inner sanctum of her bedroom. (“Chasse gardée, maître,” she reportedly answered, laughing. “Private hunting ground, maestro.”)