BRINGING BACK THE BROTHELS?
A SHADY NEW LOOK TO THE CITY OF LIGHT
Staff members at Le Sphinx, Paris’s most modern sex establishment, in 1938. The decorations are by Kees van Dongen,
Jordan Bardella, glamorous young leader of the French right-wing, and tipped as the next president, favours bringing back brothels. According to Le Monde, his party “plans to submit a bill that would allow brothels to re-open and be run as cooperatives by sex workers themselves.” Such a bill would almost certainly fail but the very fact of it even being considered represents a reversal of the legislation that killed the thriving (and entirely legal) French sex industry in 1946.
Though Napoleon I was a sexual naif until Josephine Beauharnais took him in hand, he was also a soldier, so accepted prostitution as ineradicable. As emperor, he decrimanlised it, subject to restrictions : not, significantly, religious or moral but legal and medical. Women had to register with the police and pass a weekly medical examination. Men could own a brothel but a woman – the traditional madame – must be in charge. Clients paid her, and she in turn paid the wages, and provided food and lodging. “Boy friends” and “protectors” were barred.
By 1810, Paris alone had 180 brothels, known as maisons close, and within fifty years there were more than a thousand across the nation. With legality came social acceptance. The itinerary of every visiting head of state included “an evening with the President of the Sénat,” but instead of a night of speeches and toasts, they spent it at 12 rue Chabanais, a discreet bordel. Its owners - businessmen and aristocrats, many of them members of the exclusive Jockey Club - enjoyed decorating their home-from-home. Harry Crosby, nephew of financier J.P. Morgan, praised “the Persian and the Russian and the Turkish and the Japanese and the Spanish rooms, and the bathroom with mirrored walls and mirrored ceilings, and the thirty harlots waiting in the salon.”
One of the rooms at Le Chabanais.
Brothels were part of the tourist experience. A 1929 guide book urged travelers to visit. “The ladies see no harm in you coming, merely to inspect them. They will parade for you in frankest nudity, and dance with one another in a mirror-walled room, so that of their charms, you may miss nothing.” Mirrored walls were a feature of the city’s most modern bordel, Le Sphinx. Kees van Dongen created the gilded sphinxes and sarcophagi, a band played for dancing and a bar served cocktails. One visitor compared it to the first-class lounge of a transatlantic liner – except that, strolling among the tables were beautiful girls wearing only high-heeled shoes. Periodically they paraded on stage. When bandleader Duke Ellington visited, his hosts urged him to choose a companion for the night. Reviewing the choice, the Duke said “I’ll take the three on the right.”
Edwige Feuilliere as Martha Richard and Erich von Stroheim as the German general she suppposedly seduced in the film Marthe Richard au Service de la France.
All this ended in 1946, when Marthe Richard ran as a candidate in the municipal elections. During World War I, she’d spied for France, and a wildly fictitious memoir, adapted as a film in 1937, made her an instant celebrity. Among her campaign promises was one to close the brothels. Her proposition was passed, starting a trend that swept the country. Reformers could have learned from the experience of the USA and Prohibition. The results in France included a pandemic of STDs, the invasion of organised crime, and widespread street prostitution, with such areas as Pigalle becoming internationally notorious.
But haven’t Tinder and other dating sites taken casual sex off the table? Obviously not, to judge by the girls cruising such suburbs as Belleville, the transgender hookers who haunt the Bois de Boulogne, and exchangiste clubs like Montparnasses’s 2+2 , never mind the on-line escort and massage services. Will things be different in the workers’ paradise envisaged by the right? If they win in 2027, we may find out
The 2+2 sex club on Boulevard Edgar-Quinet, Montparnasse. The menu of costs and services is displayed outside.
A bonus. The following story, from a collection of similar tales I wrote some years ago and published pseudonymously, is set in Le Chabanais, and describes a typical transaction. Every detail, however improbable, is historically correct - including the unconventional use of a cheese omelette. Bon appetit.
RUE CHABANAIS.
Sidonie clicked along the third floor corridor, careful not to catch a heel in the uneven parquet flooring and risk dropping the covered silver chafing dish.
Anyone watching her coming towards them would have seen a pert, petite girl of about eighteen whose skin, a pleasant cafe au lait, suggested, correctly, that she was metisse - of mixed-race parents, probably from one of France’s overseas colonies: in her case Île de Réunion.
As for what she wore, though they might have looked askance at her silk stockings and red patent leather shoes with their very high heels, the white lace apron tied around her waist and behind her neck would have appeared, though perhaps a touch abbreviated, entirely appropriate to a domestic about to serve her master his evening meal. The illusion would not have survived a glimpse from behind, and the revelation that Sidonie wore absolutely nothing else.
“What are you doing here?” someone hissed as she passed the staircase leading to the lower floors.
M. Julien stood on the next landing down. To look at his well-cut three-piece suit with the watch chain and the carnation in his buttonhole, you’d never take him for a whoremaster – more like a vendeur in an upper-class retail establishment; perhaps one of the couturiers whose salons lined avenue Montaigne.
Sidonie showed him the dish. “For M. le Ministre.”
“Oh, yes. I forgot.” He descended the remaining stairs and lifted the lid of the dish. “You’d better re-heat it before you serve him. You know how finicky he is. After that, though, you’re needed in the Moorish Room.”
“But I have a rendezvous tonight, M’sieur Julien! Madame said I could leave at five.”
“This is more important. It’s the Bey of Tunis. And he particularly asked for you. Now go and serve the minister.”
For emphasis, he slapped her lightly on the bottom and pushed her towards the end of the corridor – technically a misdemeanor under the house rules, which forbade staff laying hands on the girls, for pleasure or otherwise. Not that she was likely to report the favourite nephew whom Madame Kelly had put in charge of day-to-day management of the best maison close in Paris. This was too good a job to lose.
Reaching the end of the corridor, she lifted one knee to support the dish, and gently tapped on the door.
“Entrez.”
Turning the knob, Sidonie stepped into what resembled, to the same casual eye that saw nothing unusual in her attire, a conventional middle-class salon, sumptuously but rather conventionally furnished in the style of three decades earlier. A large red velvet chaise, piled with pillows and over-burdened with gilded fringe, stood along one wall, and, along the other, an elaborately carved but quite hideous bureau. Above, in a large canvas of the Barbizon school, cows drowsed in the shadow of willows beside a stream, while from the opposite wall a portrait of a bearded gentleman, robed like an arab, stared in the general direction of the chandelier, as if averting his eyes from the activities it illuminated.
Otherwise, the principal piece of furniture was a mahogany dining room table, at the head of which sat the gentleman presently honoured with the post of Minister of State for Colonial Affairs. The table was set only for one, which was just as well, since his scrawny figure was quite naked – a sight sufficiently unappetising to put anyone off their dinner.
Sidonie lit the spirit burner of the food warmer on the bureau and placed the chafing dish on top. She had a soft spot for the old boy, odd as he was. So she gave him more than his money’s worth, pottering around with her back to him as if looking for silverware, and even bending over and crouching, all of which showed off her tight brown buttocks and shapely legs. But when she turned back with the now-warm dish in her hands, he wasn’t even looking her way - just staring at that painting of the arab.
Well, if the minister preferred a mouldy old portrait to her pretty ass, c’est m’est egale. But irritation at his lack of appreciation made it easier to carry through her performance.
“M. le Ministre est pret?” she enquired.
The elderly man looked at her fondly. “Oui, mon enfant.”
Sidonie walked to the table and lifted the lid. Steam plumed up from the omelette, glistening with butter and now sizzling slightly from its re-heating.
Approaching, like any well-trained waitress, from the left, she paused, looking down into his lap, and the feeble erection poking indecisively from its nest of grey hair, like a fledgling sparrow wondering if it had the courage to fly.
“M. le ministre est servie,” she said, and flipped the dish.
No precise terms existed to describe either the sound of a hot omelette landing on the naked genitals of a minister of state, nor those made by the minister as, hands whitely gripping the arms of his chair, he moaned, writhed, twitched, and ejaculated into the hot egg.
Standing politely behind his chair, Sidonie waited for the paroxysm to subside, then handed him the first of three large linen napkins with which he cleaned up the mess. After that, she helped the old gentleman hobble, wincing, to the screen, behind which a bidet waited, with warm water, soap, and ointments.
“Is there any other way in which I can assist M. le ministre?” Sidonie asked.
“No, my child,” He patted her on the arm. “You have been more than obliging. You may run along now.”
As usual, he had left three jetons beside his plate – customary payment for the omelette trick. Each jeton, made of cardboard covered in thin metal, resembled a gold louis, and cost about the same when a client bought them at the door. Regulars kept a dozen or more hidden in hollow canes, with a real louis on top, to fool their wives. By using jetons, the management meant to make sure the girls didn’t get their hands on any cash. But since the Minister was always generous, Sidonie looked under his plate. 50 francs!
As she tucked the note into the pocket of her apron, she looked more closely at the portrait of the arab (actually a mediocre likeness of Pierre Savorgnan de Brazza, discoverer and first governor of the Congo.) What made him more interesting to the Minister than her shapely fesses?
Might he be, she wondered, the Bey of Tunis? She tried to recall His Excellency’s last visit, but it had been a bit of a galere, with sand all over the floor, Eloise and Marie-Claude, both near-enough naked, shaking their foufounes in a rough approximation of a danse du ventre while Pierre and Jean-Marc stood just out of sight, holding up the painted backdrop of the desert, and His Excellency Muhammud VI al-Habib knelt behind Sidonie, taking her up the cul.
From a minister of the Republic to a man who was virtually king of a whole African nation – and in the same afternoon! It was just like her mother said, reflected Sidonie as she hurried to the dressing room and swapped her maid’s apron for the transparent silk harem pajamas and loose bolero jacket of a Moorish houri. Working in a top-class house like Le Chabanais, you only met the best sort of people.