10
As an artist, a man has no home in Europe save in Paris.
FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE
Tourism began with the end of World War I. Before then, few people traveled far from where they were born. Emigration was a last resort, contemplated only in cases of cataclysmic social breakdown, such as the famine brought on by the 1845 Irish potato blight or the 1880s pogroms against Russian Jews.
The handful of Americans, Australians, Canadians, or Russians who came to Paris before 1914 did so for one of three reasons: they were rich, they were poor, or they had something to hide.
The rich were drawn to France as a flower is drawn to the sun. An American heiress or Russian princess would order her wedding dress and trousseau from such couturiers as Paquin, Worth, or Poiret and travel to Paris for fittings. At the same time, she might commission a set of silverware from Puiforcat or a service of Limoges porcelain, and perhaps acquire a French chef or ladies’ maid.
While she did so, her father and fiancé would browse the art accumulated by successive monarchies and add to their own collections. If sportsmen, they watched thoroughbreds race at Longchamp, or hunted deer and pheasant in the forest of Rambouillet. At night, they ate and drank at Paris’s restaurants or enjoyed the company of its women, the most beautiful in the world, and the most skilled at giving pleasure.
Another kind of hunter, or rather huntress, came to Paris hoping to acquire an aristocrat of her own. Watching throngs of heiresses cruise toward France aboard the Cunard and White Star liners, one wit christened them “the fishing fleet.” Nothing flattered these nouveaux riches more than a European title. It put a shine on the millions earned in mining, railroads, or beer, while, to an impecunious French aristo, such a marriage could mean a new roof for the family château, a town house in Paris, a box at the Opéra, and a carriage to ride in the Bois de Boulogne.
A few such couples, after a while, even grew to like one another, but most exploited the marriage for all they could get, then bowed out. Anna Gould, daughter of railroad millionaire Jay Gould, and uncharitably compared to a chimpanzee in appearance, purchased Paul Ernest Boniface “Boni,” Marquis de Castellane, Paris’s handsomest though poorest bachelor. By the time they divorced in 1906, he’d reduced her fortune by $10 million—a modest price, she may have thought, for the right to call herself la Comtesse de Castellane.
The second category of foreigners exiled in Paris had little money, but they didn’t feel they needed it. Anyone willing to subsist, cold and hungry, in a bug-infested garret while learning to write, paint, or compose could do so for longer in Paris than in any civilized city on Earth. In America or Australia, a person who preferred art to business was regarded with suspicion. But the French tolerated, even treasured, their bohemians. Nobody urged them to find respectable work; quite the reverse. In 1899, describing young painters studying at the many private art schools, an American wrote:
Students are the pets of Paris. They lend to the city a picturesqueness that no other city enjoys. So long as they avoid riots aimed at a government that may now and then offend their sense of right, their ways of living, their escapades, their noisy and joyous manifestations of healthy young animal life are good-naturedly overlooked.
In Puccini’s opera La Bohème, inspired by Henry Murger’s Scènes de la Vie de Bohème, the students are so poor that Rodolfo, a novelist, has to burn the manuscript of a novel to keep warm. Mimi, the model with whom he falls in love, is dying of tuberculosis, a disease epidemic in the tenements where they lived. But at night they meet at Café Momus, where Musetta, a model who has hooked a rich lover, struts her good fortune. Hundreds of such students subsisted in Paris on a trickle of dollars, rubles, or yen sent from home—a situation that would rebound on them in 1914.
Between the rich and poor, but overlapping both, a third group chose Paris because it permitted them to enjoy pleasures which, back home, were illegal or disreputable.
Sex was everywhere. Prostitutes loitered along the boulevards and congregated in certain cafés and bars, the addresses of which were listed, along with the ladies’ specialties, in the booklets called guides roses.
Wealthier sensualists patronized brothels. At Le Chabanais, the most select and expensive whorehouse in France, if not the world, you could indulge your fantasies in opulently decorated rooms that imitated a tent in the Sahara or an Arctic igloo. The owners, a syndicate of wealthy sportsmen, most of them members of the snobbish Jockey Club, took pride in their establishment. They bought entire rooms from Paris’s frequent exhibitions of exotic furniture and decoration and transferred them intact to the mansion on rue Chabanais. Toulouse-Lautrec decorated one room with images of centaurs.
Regular clients included Queen Victoria’s portly son, Edward, Prince of Wales, the future King Edward VII. In contrast to his saintly ancestor, Edward the Confessor, Bertie was known as “Edward the Caresser.” He liked to relax at Le Chabanais with his cronies as a girl splashed in a gilded bath filled with champagne. Periodically the men dipped out a glass and raised the kind of loyal toast never heard at Buckingham Palace.
Paris’s permissive moral climate was just as encouraging to women. In Manhattan or Melbourne, lesbians had to hide their nature, but in Paris Sylvia Beach and Gertrude Stein lived openly with their companions and socialized at 20 rue Jacob, the home of railroad heiress Nathalie Clifford Barney. She even built a columned temple on the grounds, where she and her friends gathered in Greek robes to recite the poems of Sappho and make love, free of moral or legal restraints.
If you preferred pharmaceutical sensations, the “green fairy” of absinthe, flavored with wormwood, had a devoted following. Its drinkers shrugged off the threat of brain damage from impurities in the brewing process, a small price to pay for the “artificial paradises” celebrated in the poems of Charles Baudelaire.
Intellectuals and socialites preferred hashish from the cannabis plantations of France’s North African colonies. No opium was more fragrant than that from the poppies of Annam and Tonkin, and Paris’s fumeries competed to offer the most opulent décor in which to savor it. Ladies favored the drug dissolved in spiced alcohol as laudanum—the Prozac of the belle époque.
If you fancied a change, the more refined heroin and—the modish favorite—morphine, were freely available. Socialites carried their own hypodermics, ready to shoot up at supper parties in the hotels across the Place de l’Opéra. The most fashionable syringe, the Pravaz, could be made to order in platinum or gold and inlaid with precious stones as a gift for lover or wife.
Hard drug use wasn’t confined to France. Although aspirin, as a synthetic, was available only on prescription, “natural” drugs such as cocaine, heroin, or opium could be bought legally at any pharmacy in the form of pills, gels, syrups, even teas. Harrods, London’s most select department store, possessors of the royal warrant to supply goods to the royal family, sold vials of heroin gel, and a drug kit containing cocaine, morphine, syringes, and needles which it recommended to “sweethearts and mothers” as “a Welcome Present for Friends at the Front.” The British government only restricted its sale when commanders complained of officers too stoned to go “over the top.”
Though Paris encouraged those diversions known to other cultures as vices, in a city founded on fashion they seldom lasted longer than a season. No dismissal was more damning than the label vieux jeux—old games. As summer vacations ended in 1914 and people wandered back to Paris, itsjeunesse dorée, gilded youth, looked around languidly for the next diversion.
But autumn 1914 brought no caravan from the Americas or Asia with an exciting cargo of new styles and ideas. Nothing would arrive to equal Sergei Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes, which had sent ripples across the surface of painting, music, and couture in 1909. The great scandal of 1913, the premiere of Le Sacre du Printemps, would not be repeated. Instead, “old games” would continue to be played until their pleasure soured and staled. “Like a fruit,” wrote Cocteau, “a short war might have grown and dropped from the tree, whilst a war prolonged for exceptional reasons, firmly attached to the branch, went on growing, ever presenting new problems and new lessons to be learnt.”