Paris Revealed Read online

  And talking of the 1940s, the Musée also has some revealing documents showing which Parisian brothels were allocated to the Nazis during the Second World War. A leaflet in German informs officers that three of the top-class establishments—at 12 rue Chabanais, 6 rue des Morillons and 50 rue Saint-Georges—were reserved for them, and tells them their nearest métro stations. However, the text spends even more time warning the soldiers that after each visit they have to go to one of the Sanierstellen (health offices) for a check-up, and need to get a receipt from the prostitute they have just visited so that her health record can be updated, too.

  Before Parisian brothels became illegal in 1946, they attracted almost as many tourists as the Louvre. Though you weren’t allowed to touch the Mona Lisa. Here, prostitutes in a luxury bordel wait for rich clients.

  The most intriguing insight into the sexual past, though, was a frame displaying a prostitute’s notebook, written in 1942. Each page was a record of the day’s business, and she had listed all her customers and the prices she charged them. The teacher had to pay 40 francs, the beau garçon only 30, while the chanteur (singer) got a special deal—27.50. This wasn’t her lowest price, however. The petit Juif (small Jew) paid 25 francs, as did the aveugle (blind man) and the writer (a poorly paid profession, obviously). And she even gave student discounts, charging the étudiant only 20. Her highest prices were for the grand gros (tall fat man), who was made to pay 45 francs, as was the louche-sounding type à lunettes (guy in glasses).****

  In any case, the girl’s services all came pretty cheap—using the official conversion tables provided by France’s economic-statistics institute, the INSEE, I calculated that her highest price, 45 francs, would have been the equivalent of around 15 euros today, the price of a salad and a glass of wine in a cheap Parisian café. Even if she got tips, or deliberately recorded lower prices so her Madame didn’t take such a big share, it looks as though the massive supply of sex for sale kept the prices very low. All of which explains her high tally of punters per day—fifteen or sixteen was about average, which wasn’t maison d’abattage standard, but still meant she was having sex with 100 men a week. After reading her notebook, any romantic notions about what went on in Parisian brothels go flying out the window.

  Parisian sex today—strip but no tease

  The streets of nineteenth-century Paris might have been paved in prostitutes, but it was of course rare to glimpse more in public than a stockinged ankle or a hint of décolleté. To see larger expanses of bare female skin, men would have to go to a brothel or, for less hands-on action, to one of the theatres or cabarets. This was when the Moulin Rouge, the Folies-Bergère and the Lapin Agile grew up, and kept starving artists like Toulouse-Lautrec in food and absinthe by commissioning them to create advertising posters.

  Here, can-can dancers would show underwear and even a bit of thigh, cleavages would be allowed to breathe, and risqué songs would add to the atmosphere of mass titillation.

  Meanwhile, rich gentlemen would catch the eye of the dancers—or was it the other way round?—and in between dances, presents would be offered and promises made, and the girls would make appointments to supplement their income.

  You can still go to these cabarets today, though the Lapin Agile has transformed itself into a chanson française music club, and the other two have become big-time tourist shows, giving visitors to Paris an evening of can-can, feathers and ooh-là-là. The Lido, on the Champs-Élysées, is a more modern version, with men and women putting on a Vegas-style extravaganza of long legs and occasional glimpses of bare curves.

  These days, however, the club that keeps Paris’s history of choreographed eroticism alive is one of the newest of all—the Crazy Horse, founded in 1951 by an ‘insatiable admirer of women’ called Alain Bernadin, who clearly didn’t give a damn about belonging to the Moulin-Lapin-Folies tradition because he named his club after a Sioux chief and opened it a long way from Pigalle, near the Champs-Élysées.

  The club attracts far more Parisians than outsiders, many of whom go along to see the regular guest stars who come to bare all on stage. Recently, Pamela Anderson, Dita von Teese and an actress called Clotilde Courau (better known in French celeb mags as the wife of the grandson of the last king of Italy) have slapped on the all-over body make-up and attracted big crowds.

  If you ask a Parisian what goes on at the Crazy Horse, he or she might not have been there, but they’ll know that it’s all about nakedness. The girls on stage are famous for wearing more square millimetres of covering on their feet than on the rest of their body put together.

  And so it was that I convinced my Parisian feminist amoureuse to spend an evening ogling naked female flesh. Vive Paris, I thought—there probably aren’t many cities where the feminists would do that without taking along some spray paint to graffiti the girls.

  The Crazy Horse (or le cray-zeee orrss as the French call it) is just opposite the Chamber of Agriculture and the Paris headquarters of Givenchy and Yves Saint Laurent—sex, fashion and food, the heart of the Parisian consciousness.

  Inside, the décor is plush velvet carpeting, muted lights and black woodwork—very illicit-feeling. A staircase leads down into the basement, and emerges in a surprisingly small theatre with tight rows of cabaret tables facing a tiny stage. It’s clear that the audience is going to get very close to the girls indeed.

  I look around at the audience and am surprised. Next to us are a middle-class, middle-aged couple—the type of people who sold me my bank loan and washing machine. There are also small groups of young women, pairs of businessmen getting some R&R, and what looks like a daughter and her parents—checking out career prospects, maybe. Most of them are in slightly formal evening wear, and only one couple have come wholly dressed for the part, with the woman in a silky pink corset.

  On the wall by the stage I notice a large plaque of names, similar to the one at the British Embassy that lists the ambassadors to Paris. This is slightly different, though. It’s a roll of honour of past dancers—names like Lady Pousse-Pousse, Diva Novita, Vanity Starlight and Venus Océane. Not their real names, of course—traditionally, a Crazy Horse dancer’s name is given to her by the show manager or artistic director after her first night on stage. The girl can refuse it once, but has to take the second name offered. Most of them apparently accept the first choice.

  The music starts, and is typically Parisian. Not accordion, you understand—these days, you mainly hear that played by Eastern European buskers on the métro. No, this is ’60s French rock’n’roll, what they call yé-yé.

  The curtain opens on a very un-Parisian scene—a row of naked female Grenadiers, marching on the spot and saluting. It’s a clotheless version of the Changing of the Guard at Buckingham Palace. They have the black-fur busbies, but there any resemblance with English soldiers ends. Their uniform is a flimsy framework of jacket that reveals their bare breasts, and they are wearing nothing down below except what looks like a strategically pasted rectangle of black silk to protect their modesty. Not a very practical outfit for standing around outside the Palace.

  After a few minutes, the curtain falls and the tableau changes—now it’s a silhouette dance in coloured shadow, a Parisian version of the credits of a James Bond film. Next comes a solo dancer miming to a song that suggests, rather unconvincingly given her almost total nakedness and willingness to point her buttocks at perfect strangers, that she’s a ‘good girl’.

  And as the show progresses, I realize that the girls in fact do almost no stripping. And although having young women shake their smooth, shapely naked buttocks at me for an hour or more is not a neutral experience, the dances are not at all pornographic. The girls are somehow too perfect, too doll-like, for sexual thoughts. The show is an almost abstract use of the female body, even in the slightly fetishist sequence where we see only legs and high heels.

  The dancers also look so alike that there’s no way a spectator can fixate on one of them, as the rich gentlemen at the nineteenth-century cl
ubs used to do. This is a deliberate policy. The dancers are chosen according to strict physical criteria, and two measurements have to be exactly the same—the distance from nipple to nipple and from navel to pubis. Only guest stars are ever allowed to break the mould.

  In the final tableau, all ten or so of the girls dance around the glittering letters D-É-S-I-R, miming to a bilingual song that talks rather erotically about Champagne flowing between one’s fingers, and then the show is over, the lights go up and the audience files out into the foyer to buy souvenir T-shirts and spangly knickers.

  I wonder what my partner thought of it all—as a feminist, she might say it totally dehumanizes women, and accuse me of taking her to see the public enslavement of her gender. Relations might be frosty for the next few days.

  We cross the street towards the Chamber of Agriculture and, nervously, I ask her opinion. She reflects for a moment, and then says that the show was much classier than she’d expected. ‘And I’d really like to know how that girl took off her stockings without taking off her shoes.’

  It’s a conclusion that says as much about Parisian sexual politics as it does about the city’s erotic cabaret.

  Où est le sexe?

  Where, then, does this leave Parisian sex?

  The city cherishes its reputation for being completely uninhibited and free-speaking. Deep down, it still thinks its theme tune is Serge Gainsbourg’s song ‘Je T’Aime, Moi Non Plus’*****, which contains a chorus that can be hilariously translated, rather like one of the old French sex films, as ‘I come and I go, between your kidneys, and I restrain myself.’

  The song’s orgasmic gasps and groans are not just the sound of Serge’s posh new English girlfriend Jane Birkin expressing her surprise at how turning herself into a Parisian sex kitten has launched her career, it is also Paris saying, ‘Bonjour, everybody, listen to us shagging.’ And as Bernard-Henri Lévy’s previously quoted outburst in the Sunday Times shows, Parisians still have a tendency to think they’re the only ones doing so.

  In fact, though, as we’ve seen in this chapter, sexually speaking, Paris has changed a lot in recent years. Pigalle is gradually shedding its seedy skin, and even though the Crazy Horse plays on the old showgirl reputation, it has turned its shapely back on the sordid pornographic side of the city’s history.

  Of course, Paris’s peep shows, sex shops and swingers’ clubs still exist, as does the prostitution—you can find women, men and everything in between hanging out on pavements all over the city if you know where to look—but these days the explicitly sexual stuff has pretty well all been marginalized.

  There are still plenty of erotic things to do here, but nowadays, more often than not, the explicit sex is left up to your imagination. Just as, in my chapter on Romance, the Hôtel Amour gave up trying to be a love hotel and turned into a true-love hotel, Parisian sex has stopped being seedy and has gone mainstream. It’s still naughty, but these days the naughtiness is also nice—romantic, even. The hard core has gone soft.

  Though it’s probably best not to destroy Bernard-Henri Lévy’s world by telling him so.

  * For the full story of his amorous adventures in Paris, see my book 1,000 Years of Annoying the French. Though for Edward it was less about annoying them than seducing them, both sexually and diplomatically.

  ** I should add, for legal reasons, that he is not a minister at the time of writing.

  *** In French, file can mean prostitute. When talking about a girl, strictly speaking one should say jeune fille—young girl—to make it completely clear she’s not also a hooker.

  **** As a short-sighted person myself, I felt obliged to go and ask Monsieur Plumey about this discrimination against spectacle-wearers, and he said the man probably had ‘special tastes’.

  ***** The song’s title is actually a cruel putdown: ‘I love you—neither do I.’

  During the Prussian siege in 1870–71, Parisians were forced to forage for food and eat ‘siege game’. Rat salami became something of a favourite.

  8

  FOOD

  Le dîner tue la moitié de Paris et le souper tue l’autre.

  (Dinner kills one half of Paris, and supper the other.)

  CHARLES DE SECONDAT, BARON

  DE MONTESQUIEU,

  EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY SATIRIST

  PARISIANS HAVE a hands-on, in-your-face, almost sexual rapport with food. It has to be seen, touched and felt as well as tasted. They need to be absolutely certain that it’s fresh—alive, even. Hence the shellfish stands in the street outside restaurants—the oysters, crabs and lobsters to be eaten in the brasseries are often displayed outdoors on the pavement, and the poor man (it’s almost always a man) responsible for opening up oyster shells and pulling off crabs’ claws has to work in the open air even in winter, just so that passers-by can ogle his wares.

  The same thing goes for the food markets, where all but the poshest stalls let you squeeze and sniff your oranges, avocados, fennel and bananas before you buy them. Even in supermarkets, only the softest fruit like strawberries will be under plastic—everything else is on display to be fondled by potential customers.

  My favourite description of Parisian food is in Émile Zola’s novel Le Ventre de Paris—‘The Belly of Paris’. The story is set in and around the food markets at Les Halles at the end of the nineteenth century, and begins with the hero, Florent, an escaped political prisoner, arriving in the city just before daybreak. He has hitched a ride with a woman coming in to sell her vegetables, and awakes, starved and exhausted, to the first rays of dawn: ‘The sun set the vegetables on fire,’ Zola writes. ‘He [Florent] no longer recognized the pale watercolour hues of twilight. Now the swollen hearts of the lettuces were burning, the carrots began to bleed red, the turnips became incandescent.’

  No one, not even the poutiest celebrity chef, ever wrote about turnips like that. Here is a writer who wants to have sex with a vegetable. And in Paris, that’s probably legal.

  Brain food, or food on the brain

  It’s a miracle that Parisians stay relatively slim, because food is never far from their thoughts. By a linguistic accident, even their word for ‘slim’ looks edible to English-speakers—it’s mince.* Not that Parisians are snackers and grazers—their thoughts are usually focused on regular mealtimes.

  These mealtimes are often spent talking about food. At a French dinner party, it is not considered polite to discuss what you are eating—apart from complimenting the chef, obviously. It is, though, very much the done thing to recall other great meals you have eaten. This may seem bizarre, like describing a torrid night spent with someone other than the person you are currently making love with, but in fact it is seen as a way of paying homage to what you’re eating. The food is so good that your taste buds have overloaded your brain with images of sumptuous meals from your past, and you have to express yourself.

  Logically, lack of food is therefore a double deprivation—nothing to eat and nothing to inspire you. This probably explains why the 1870–71 siege of Paris by the Prussians has stayed in the city’s folk memory for so long. It wasn’t just the shelling, the fighting and a subsequent revolutionary uprising—there was nothing to eat. And unlike in 1940, there was no way of getting relatives to bring in the odd hunk of bacon or bunch of carrots from the country. The city was cut off. Things were made even worse because at the beginning of the siege, in September 1870, the optimistic Parisians carried on eating more or less as normal—no one dared to introduce any rationing. Food was not too difficult to obtain because there were still farms and smallholdings in the closest suburbs, and Parisians had been warned of the likelihood of a siege, so many of them had got in plentiful stocks of food.

  Gradually, though, as winter set in, supplies dwindled and stomachs started to rumble. Restaurants began to serve wolf burgers and rhino drumsticks as the zoo animals were slaughtered. The poor had to sacrifice their cats and dogs, and even vermin became a delicacy. In the Musée Carnavalet, Paris’s history museum, there is a
gruesome painting of a street butcher during the siege. All he has on offer is rat—at the time, ratatouille was no joke.

  There is also a glass flask on display containing a real piece of bread baked during the siege. It is made of flour mixed with wood shavings, the latter perhaps being appropriate. After all, a baguette is a stick.

  But Paris being Paris, even during a siege it managed to fight off depression by turning privation into a gastronomic experience. Rats, mice, pigeons and anything caught in traps became known as ‘siege game’, and they weren’t just boiled up and eaten—they were prepared. Rat salami became something of a favourite.

  And although a famous Christmas 1870 menu served at the Café Voisin in the posh rue Saint-Honoré, based almost entirely on zoo animals, was only available to the rich, there is something admirable about it, like the musicians on the Titanic going down playing their instruments. The six-course meal included such delicacies as elephant consommé, roasted bear ribs, antelope pâté, kangaroo stew, camel ‘roasted English style’ (that is, without sauce) and, just to add the common touch, cat accompanied by a side dish of rats. No doubt conversation during the meal was about simpler foods from less turbulent times—a roast chicken, a fresh apple, real bread.

  This ability to eat their way through a crisis is still much in evidence today. Parisian workers, like all of their fellow French citizens, are under siege. Globalization is chiselling away at their jobs-for-life cosiness, employment laws are being tightened so that it is easier to fire inefficient workers and harder to go on strike (until 2004, some employers still had to pay employees for their strike days), retirement ages are being raised, and everyone agrees that it’s la crise. A friend of mine teaches at a journalism school in the 10th arrondissement and regularly sends students out to do vox pops. One of the most popular subjects is asking passers-by what they usually do at lunchtimes (yes, social issue number one for Parisian journalism students—lunch), and recently, to my surprise, lots of people have been complaining that they just get a sandwich and eat it at their desk. C’est la crise, they say.