The beds are big enough for 360-degree antics (except, perhaps, for basketball players), and so are some of the bathtubs—the Catherine Deneuve room comes with a king-size Jacuzzi. ‘Her’ bathroom even has a view of the Sacré Coeur, if you don’t mind people up in Montmartre ogling you through those tourist telescopes.
A true-love hotel
A few years ago, the sultry ambiance of Pigalle became even hotter when it was announced that the people behind the very trendy (or ultra-tendance as the Parisians like to say) Hôtel Costes and Café Beaubourg had created a Tokyo-style love hotel in Pigalle—an artily decorated place called the Hôtel Amour where you could rent a room by the hour.
As far as I know, no hotel in Paris had advertised such a service since the brothels closed in 1946. The city’s hotels haven’t needed to, because lovers wanting an afternoon or evening of intimacy simply go to any of them, and book a room for the night. The fact that they’re not there at breakfast time won’t bother the staff in the slightest. It just means less work for them clearing tables.
But with the Hôtel Amour, Paris seemed to be making a statement. Illicit love was going to set up its official head office (if that’s not a gruesome pun) just a couple of hundred metres southeast of the Place Pigalle.
I didn’t really become interested in the place until I started doing the research for this book, and wondered which chapter to include this hotel in—‘Romance’ or ‘Sex’? I decided to call up and make an appointment to have a look around.
The hotel’s voicemail was as erotically charged as you’d expect.
‘Pour joindre le restaurant tapez un,’ a naughty-sounding woman purred, ‘pour joindre l’hôtel, tapez deux, et pour joindre les serveuses, tapez … mais pas trop fort.’ (To translate the risqué message: ‘To reach the restaurant, hit one, to reach the hotel, hit two, to reach the waitresses, hit … but not too hard.’)
Anywhere except Paris, they’d get raided by feminists. Here, though, apparently anything goes. I set up a meeting with the PR man for a few days later at 1.30 p.m., the time, he told me, when the cleaning ladies go into the rooms. Would they be contractually obliged to dress up as French maids, I wondered. Surely not.
On the appointed day, around lunchtime, I emerged from the métro at Pigalle, and turned south, the bright neon of the Sexodrome erotic supermarket flashing red in my peripheral vision. I passed the tired-looking Theatre X, its neon distinctly less flashy, and walked down the rue Frochot, where the Play Lounge and Dirty Dick’s were closed and shuttered, and headed down the hill, past the corner café where an old fur-coated prostitute used to hang out. I know this not because I was a customer, but because when I used to play in bands, I would often come to the guitar shops in the neighbourhood to buy strings or get my bass repaired.
Next left, and I was in the rue de Navarin, and from a good fifty metres away, even in the early afternoon I could see the pink Amour sign protruding from the left-hand streetline, a beacon for lovers in search of a place to get undressed.
The entrance to the hotel didn’t look furtive or sordid at all—the reception area was in a corner of the ground-floor brasserie, where hip Parisians (the men unshaven, in jeans and dark pullovers over a white T-shirt; the women sporting ponytails and equally dark pullovers) were having laid-back business lunches. No huddling couples waiting for a room to be free. The waitresses, too, looked very normal—young girls in everyday streetwear.
The hotel’s PR man, an equally hip, equally unshaven young Parisian, greeted me cordially and offered to show me some rooms. He’d specified that most of them would be unoccupied at that time of day. Lovers, I presumed, catered for their food appetites before their sexual ones.
As we went up the narrow stairs, he explained that the building used to be a hôtel de passe, one of the places where streetwalkers would bring their clients. Almost all of these had since lost that trade, he said, and settled down into a seedy existence of just being a cheap, badly decorated hotel, which was what this was before the Amour people refurbished it.
And refurbish it they certainly have, with classy, knowing eroticism. Most of the bathtubs seem to be right in the bedrooms. From bath to bed and back again (with, presumably a quick towel rub in between) could be a dance of the seven oils. Large, strategically placed mirrors add to the effect. Several of the rooms have erotic photos—featuring no pornography, but plenty of nudity. One also has a glass bookshelf of vintage French photography magazines and racy novels—lots of oiled and pouting women on show there.
The crème de la crème of eroticism, though, had to be the room with 200 disco balls on the ceiling. Close the black curtains, turn on the lights, set the balls revolving (the disco balls that is) and you’re in your very own sexy cabaret show. The bath is, of course, at the foot of the bed, which stands on a raised plinth like a stage on which guests can play out their very own sex film.
So, I ask, how much an hour is this room? I resist the temptation to add ‘with and without the S&M waitresses’.
At which point the modern reality of Paris catches up with me.
‘Oh, the rooms aren’t rented out by the hour any more, or for the afternoon,’ I’m told. ‘We got raided a couple of times by the Brigade des Moeurs [Paris’s vice squad].’
‘Why? Surely the Parisian police weren’t cracking down on adultery and premarital sex?’
‘Prostitution. They were afraid
