La Belle Epoque
13 Rue de l’Amour by Georges Feydeau
Royal Theatre Northampton, 1997
Feydeau’s farces could not have been written at any other time or in any other place. Like frenetically animated cartoons, they caricaturise the pleasure-bent lifestyle of Paris at the end of the last century. To the Edwardian British, crowding into the capital for a few nights of dissolution and debauch, the period was known as the Naughty Nineties. But the French, who rated style above content even in matters of the gutter, called it “la Belle Époque”.
Over the preceding decades the scene had been carefully set as if in preparation for this apotheosis. Baron Haussmann’s urban regeneration had cleared many of the slums and laid the ground-plan of the long sweeping boulevards, trimmed with elegant houses, which would provide the home bases for the rising middle class, that new élite with time on their hands and money in their pockets. In 1889 the Exposition celebrated 100 years of the Revolution, and so warm and all-embracing was the welcome it extended to the visitors crowding into the city that many of them never wanted to leave. That same year also saw the rise of the Eiffel Tower and the first turning of Willette’s great wooden sails on the roof of Zidler’s Moulin Rouge, and those two symbols, the one triumphantly thrusting upwards to the heavens, the other louchely beckoning to the base needs of men (and women), came to represent the two major attractions of fin de siècle Paris.
But while the eye was being ravished by the surface glamour of the Faubourg Saint-Germain on the Left Bank opposite the Louvre, the rest of the body’s appetites were being catered for in the low dives at the foot of la butte sacrée itself, Montmartre. Even as late as the second half of the last century, a few vineyards and cottages clung to its slopes providing the artists who had ventured there in search of peace and light a decidedly rural sense of solitude. But by the 1890s the city had begun to climb the hill, building as it went. Renoir had painted the Moulin de la Galette near the summit as early as 1876, but for those who could summon neither the will nor the wind to strike out for the top, there were always the stews, taverns and cabarets of Clichy and Pigalle at its foot.
These quickly became the haunt of pimps, prostitutes and petty crooks and low-lifes of all descriptions, rubbing shoulders with the more respectable types from the town out for a night of adventure. The Moulin de la Galette itself was a second generation bal musette, a kind of seedy dance hall where the main characteristic of the entertainment was the uninhibited nature of the dancing. It was in places like these that the can-can became the visual symbol of decadent abandon with much swirling of petticoats and flashing of thighs, while further down the hill in the Élysée-Montmartre the most infamous exponent of the chahut, or high-spirited quadrille, was to be found. Louise Weber or La Goulue (“Greedy-guts”) was a well-known face and figure from the area, a street urchin whose unaffected and voracious sensuality had made her reputation, such as it was, before she was twenty. Shameless to the point of aggression, she and the other star attractions of the cabarets, like the haughty Grille d’Égout (“Gutter-scratchings”), the angular male dancer Valentin-le-Désossé (“Valentin the boneless”) and the dignified Jane Avril, provided ample inspiration for the tireless Toulouse-Lautrec, whose truncated figure could be seen toddling every night from bar to brothel in search of more sensation, another thrill, the next glass of wine. In his sketches and paintings he somehow managed to capture not just the look and the feel of these places, but also the sounds and very nearly the smells emanating from their murky corners, exhaled from the sweaty orchestra pit or thrown up by those never-white-for-long petticoats…
Pleasure domes like the Jardin de Paris and the Folies Bergère, the birthplace of the international variety show, and the little Divan Fayouac, which first presented a sketch wherein a woman disrobed for bed thus ushering in a century of striptease, were the pulsing, throbbing heart of Paris after dark, and all Europe knew it. The Moulin Rouge itself became the epitome of all that was decadent, indecorous and downright rude. Its heyday lasted a mere five years, but in that time it was the Mecca for all those, rich and poor alike, seeking to swap the workaday world for a few hours’ heady sensation and sensual sin. The Moulin Rouge meant Montmartre, Montmartre was Paris, and Paris spelt pleasure. Poets rhapsodised about it, intellectuals sought to capture the essence of its attraction between bouts of hilarity, and the Prince of Wales naturally visited incognito.
Pornography flourished, but it shocked only those who were deprived of even its most modest equivalents at home. Although there was a certain amount of special pleading on the part of those who saw there was a profit to be made by propagating an air of Parisian mystique and eroticism, the spirit of the times was certainly the most rumbustious and unbuttoned in Europe. And while the Third Republic in France was as stiff with hypocrisy as Victorian England, it was also prepared to accept the body and all its appetites as an inevitable and enjoyable part of life. Numerous racy journals and magazines celebrated this fact in endless risqué articles and cartoons featuring husbands and lovers, wives and cuckolds, bellboys and courtesans, and while the level of humour was generally no higher than the hip, its lewdness was liberating and in the most practised hands, such vulgarity could even aspire to wit.
Which is where Georges Feydeau comes in. By minutely observing his characters in the single-minded pursuit of their desires, he was creating a symbol for the whole riotous period. When personal satisfaction becomes the only goal, all the other realities and aspirations go out the window. As his audiences watched these amoral and manic characters being put punishingly through their paces, they laughed as at a distorting mirror. Elegant, lecherous and totally self-serving, Feydeau’s characters bring to heightened life an aspect of their times which we still recognise, and the fact that his classic farces are still popular today suggests that maybe the Paris of the Belle Époque was not so much a place in history as a state of mind which will find its echo in each succeeding generation.
PS
At the time I wrote this piece, my wife and I had only visited Paris a couple of times as a couple. In those days we used to take the overnight ferry from Newhaven to Dieppe, arriving in the early hours to slum it in a series of increasingly dodgy pensions in Clichy, that sink of depravity where Henry Miller tells us he once spent some quiet days as a debauched expat. One room had a small brown stain on the wall by the headboard, as if some previous occupant had made a last despairing effort to scrawl their murderer’s name in their own blood or other bodily secretion. In another, the bathroom on the landing was so narrow that once inside, there was no room to turn around – you had to make your mind up going in…
Be honest, if you were a Japanese tourist you’d want to take a picture, wouldn’t you?
Once the kids were old enough we went back numerous times, and the Place du Tertre was a happy hunting ground. Our children were innocently sitting on the kerb one afternoon, drinking cans of Coke, when they were suddenly descended on and thoroughly photographed by a happy flock of Japanese tourists. They must have thought, here were some of those street urchins they’d been reading so much about. Just as memorable perhaps, though more sobering, was the time a silhouette artist would not take no for an answer and literally cut out our portraits while the four of us stood there shuffling our embarrassed English feet. And since he was the one holding the scissors, we ended up giving him the last of our euros too…
The Reluctant Sitter (Paris, 2000)
I admire the artist’s dexterity which contrived to shave a few years off and made me look like one of these post-war Left Bank intellectuals. His aggressive sales tactics, not so much.