Today, April 24th , was a gala night for Montparnasse in 1931. On Boulevard Edgar-Quinet, the avenue, shaded by acacia trees, that runs along the northern wall of the Cimitiere Montparnasse, Voisins and Bugattis queued to deliver celebrities to a four-storey building at No. 31. Among those stepping out into the hiss and blaze of flashbulbs were the mayor of Montparnasse and his wife, and the city’s notoriously corrupt police commissioner, Jean Chiappe. The single entrance was narrow, and steel shutters, as required by law, covered all the windows. On the façade, a relief depicted the Sphinx, that notoriously close-mouthed creature of Egyptian mythology, enclosed within a tightly coiled serpent. There was no other identification. But if you had to ask what went on inside, you obviously shouldn’t be here.
Paris had more than a hundred legal brothels in 1931, known as maisons de tolerance or maisons close. Guide books encouraged American tourists to visit. "The 'ladies' see no harm in you coming merely to inspect them," one advised. "They will parade before you in frankest nudity, and dance with one another in a mirror-walled room, so that of their charms you may miss nothing." Gaining admission, however, was complicated. In the better bordels, customers paid in tokens which the madame sold at ten francs but the women cashed in for seven. Tips were expected, and bonuses for unusual requests. Unless one had a friend to guide him through the process, the average tourist, however eager, generally gave up.
They were just as daunted by the city’s cafes. Where were the music, dancing and cocktails offered by such establishments in New York and Chicago?. In 1927, two enterprising managers opened La Coupole, a café on Avenue de Montparnasse aimed at Americans, with two bistros, a cocktail bar, a rooftop terrace, and a dance hall in the basement, with resident tango band.
In the corridors of France’s flourishing vice trade, the lesson of La Coupole didn’t go unheeded. Le Sphinx was the result. Not a brothel in the usual sense of the word, it more closely resembled an American night club. Two shady characters from Marseilles, Paul Carbone and François Spirito, owned it, but the law that permitted women to sell sex specifically excluded the mecs – pimps- who preyed on them, so Marthe Lemestre, alias "Martoune", a Frenchwoman who had run speakeasies in New York, was installed as the traditional, and legally demanded, madame.
Opening at 3pm and closing at dawn, Le Sphinx followed American boites de nuit in levying a “cover charge” to enter. Once inside, visitors found themselves in a spacious cabaret, with a band for dancing and a bar serving Martinis and Old-Fashioneds. One might have been in the first-class lounge on a transatlantic liner - except for the women who wandered among the tables, all skimpily clothed, and some wearing nothing but a pair of high-heeled shoes.
Technically, they were pensionnaires - hostesses- who took a cut on the over-priced champagne and cocktails they persuaded clients to buy. In practice, they offered more intimate services, although an hour spent with one - or more - of them of the mirrored bedrooms upstairs was disguised as a “haircut” or “pedicure”. To explain the system, the house produced a brochure in five languages, the English section written by American author Henry Miller, who took his payment in “trade”.
Until it closed in 1946, Le Sphinx attracted the cream of society and show business, including writers Colette, Ernest Hemingway, Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir and Jacques Prévert, artists Man Ray, Moise Kisling, Leonard Foujita, Jules Pascin and Kees van Dongen (who painted its faux-Egyptian murals), and movie stars Gary Cooper, Humphrey Bogart and Errol Flynn. Marlene Dietrich also used it as a cover for lesbian assignations with her lover Madeleine Sologne.
From time to time, a group of hostesses, in a version of the classic brothel "parade”, appeared on a stage at one end of the salon and performed a comic/erotic routine. When bandleader Duke Ellington visited, friends urged him to choose a companion from among them. "OK," Duke said. "I'll take the three on the end."
During the Occupation, the Sphinx became a night club where the cream of French talent performed for the Nazi high command. In 1946, the government, as part of a post-war reform movement, made brothels illegal. A public relations triumph for law, order and the Catholic church, the decision was in other respects disastrous. Forced back onto the streets, women were no longer subject to monthly health checks, which increased the incidence of sexually-transmitted diseases. Streetwalkers thronged Montmartre’s Place Pigalle, the notorious “Pig Alley” known to every serviceman, and pimps re-introduced the criminality which Napoleon Bonaparte, in legalising sex work, had been at such pains to exclude. As for The Sphinx, its owners got a little of their own back by auctioning off its beds and other fittings, noting in the catalog which politicians and religious leaders had enjoyed having hair and nails trimmed while reclining on them
Announcing the auction.
Certain sex acts, specifically sodomy, were legalized by the Revolution even before Napoleon seized power, but as a professional soldier, he recognised that paid sex would always exist, and provided for it in the Code Napoleon. Sex workers had to register with the police and submit to regular medical checks. Any found infected with an STD could be imprisoned until they recovered. Brothels were permitted, but with stringent rules about location, advertising etc. If you don't know it already, the depiction of a regional brothel in Maupassant's THE HOUSE OF MADAME TELLIER gives an accurate picture of how such places fitted into the social fabric.
Fascinating. For one thing, I didn't know Napoleon legalized "the world's oldest profession"!