WHO CAN CAN LIKE YOU CAN?
KILLERS AND HIGH KICKERS OF THE BELLE EPOQUE
The Paris police are powerless before the menace of the knife-wielding apache.
Tourists who line up at the Moulin Rouge for the supper show that concludes with an exhibition of the can can are seeing the last remnant of a gaudy period. The Moulin Rouge opened in 1889 on the site of a dance hall or bal musette which already had a bad reputation as a hangout for filles de joie and their pimps. The new owner, Joseph Oller, exiled them to its basement, but the women showed their displeasure by bursting in among the dancers, whooping, jostling, and flourishing their skirts to show they wore nothing under them. When people started turning up in the hope of seeing such disturbances, Oller put in tables to create a cabaret and hired the girls to keep misbehaving. Jean Renoir recreated the ambiance (but not the underwear) for his film French CanCan.
Opper called the new Moulin Rouge “The Paradise of Women” but the title was misleading: only men could attend its shows. One foreign visitor praised (not very accurately) “a big, flashy revue here. 100 girls who do not wear even a bangle. How tame by comparison is theater-going in America!”
Titillation wasn’t the only diversion on offer. Among his biggest draws was Joseph Pujol, aka Le Pétomane, a man “gifted,” according to his publicity, “with a breathing arsehole.” A virtuoso of the fart, Pujol could expel the sound of thunder and cannon-fire, “sing” in four octaves and, via a rubber tube attached to an ocarina, perform operatic arias and even the national anthem. The Edison company filmed him at the Moulin Rouge in 1904. (This film is without sound but you can hear him in…er, full voice on another YouTube posting.)
But what most came to see was the can can. To the Galop Infernale from Offenbach’s Orphée-aux-Enfers, the women rushed onto the floor, whooping, turning cartwheels, and flourishing their petticoats. It was all about behaving outrageously and the girls knew what was expected of them. Louise Weber, known as La Goulue (the Glutton) for her habit of snatching food from clients’ tables, was notorious for lése-majesté. Spotting the future King Edward VII, then Prince of Wales, in the audience, she yelled “Hey, Wales, you invite us for champagne?” Her companions included Nini Pattes-en-l’Air (High-Kicking Nini), La Môme Fromage (Little Miss Cheese) and Lucienne Beuze, aka Grille d'Égout (Sewer Grating). The more limber girls threw spectacular flying splits and executed the porte d'armes (Shoulder arms), grabbing an ankle and raising a leg almost to the vertical, displaying everything their crotchless pantelettes didn’t hide. (They repeated these poses for photographs, on sale in the foyer.)
Smaller versions of the Moulin existed all over Paris, one of them below Ernest Hemingway’s apartment on rue de Cardinale Lemoine. He called the Bal de Printemps a “noisy, rough music hall and hangout for sailors, whores, apaches and American expatriates, who nicknamed it ‘Bucket of Blood.’”
Apaches, named for the stone-faced Native Americans brought to Paris by Wild West shows, were members of the knife-wielding street gangs that infested working-class Paris. At the time, they were integral to the tourist experience of Paris.
American visitors wanted sex, alcohol and art. Crime didn’t much attract them, but it appealed to visitors from more rigidly disciplined nations, in particular Russia. For them, guides provided “the Tour of the Grand Dukes”. Sisley Huddlestone, long-time Paris correspondent of the London Times, described how “the Russians…were conducted to faked apache dens. There were the red-aproned golden-casqued girls, and the sinister-looking apaches with caps drawn over their eyes. In the course of the dancing, a quarrel would break out. A duel with knives would be fought. The grand dukes had their money’s worth of thrills; and then the girls took off their aprons and the men donned respectable hats and went quietly home to bed.”
Conscription during World War I broke the back of the gangs and the 1917 Revolution swept away the Russian aristocracy, but cabarets adapted the fake knife fights into an “apache dance”, in which a girl, dressed as a poule in black stockings and a slit skirt, let herself be scorned, rejected and flung around the stage but a mec in a striped jersey, a black beret, and a look of weary contempt.