Don’t get me wrong, Paris is sexy, but its real charm is that it thinks it’s so much sexier.
Tonight, Josephine
If Paris sees itself as such a sex machine, it’s because it is, in all fairness, a very experienced lover.
In the court of French Kings, sex was a perfume that hung permanently in the air. Louis XIV insisted on le droit de seigneur over any lady who caught his attention at Versailles. His successor, Louis XV, was notorious for his willingness to drop his silk breeches. And scattered around these depraved monarchs like so many silk cushions were the indolent, tax-exempt aristocrats, who had little to do apart from adopt the Kings as role models and bed each other’s spouses, servants and relatives.
Things didn’t calm down much after the Revolution, either, because the survivors were so happy to have made it through the Terror without being separated from their heads that they indulged in a frenzy of physical gratification. The young Napoleon Bonaparte first met his future wife Josephine at a chic Parisian party, where she, like all the other society ladies of the time, was dressed in a low-cut, almost transparent, gown that was split at the side to reveal pretty well all her curves as she danced. She was a serial mistress, but no one thought less of her for that, and a few years later she became Napoleon’s Empress.
The Empereur himself wasn’t much of a Latin Lothario—he was more of a practical man. He legalized France’s brothels, the maisons de tolérance, as a way of making sure prostitutes were under medical supervision so that his soldiers weren’t distracted in battle by itchy diseases. And ironically, it was this clinical measure that provided the last building block for Paris’s reputation as a capital of copulation.
During the nineteenth century, the city’s medicalized sex factories evolved into a whole subculture that attracted well-to-do young men from all over Europe and the newly rich continent of America. It became très chic to nip to Paris for a weekend or stop over on one’s tour of the great European capitals and, after a quick peek at the architecture and a dash around the Louvre, indulge one’s less artistic instincts in a high-class whorehouse. And these weren’t dark places where a man would sneak in, his collar turned up, and quickly choose the recipient of his paid attentions. The expensive bordels were often brightly lit temples of the senses, riotous cabarets with music and dancing, cafés where the female drinkers were all semi-naked and available.
And, like that other great royal role model, King Edward VII of England, who spent much of his youth undressing Parisian prostitutes,* in later life these satisfied customers would return to the city with their wives, and mentally relive their wild days as they drank Champagne in more decorous establishments. And at the end of the evening, back at the hotel with wifey, the men could almost imagine they were with little Brigitte or Marie-Rose, or one of the other girls they’d toyed with at the maison de tolérance. A Victorian wife would probably be surprised to see her staid, respectable husband looking so relaxed, and (as long as she didn’t suspect why he had that wistful look in his eye) would no doubt be delighted at his ardour. Arriving back home, couples would whisper to their friends: ‘Marriage in a rut? Love life gone off the boil? Go to Paris, tout de suite.’
And of course it wasn’t only married couples who were taking up bed space in Paris. Parisian hotels were so used to playing host to the unmarried that no hotelier would bat an eyelid if a couple signing in didn’t seem able to agree on what their name was. Pigalle was full of hôtels de passe where prostitutes brought their clients, and even less lugubrious places were not too conscientious about who was renting their rooms. This was how Paris became a bolthole for adulterers and illicit lovers who were afraid of damaging their reputations if they flaunted their philanderings at home—a trip to Paris was a journey to an oasis of immorality, with the added bonus that the city always had a sheen of romance. Taking your lover to Paris has always been so much classier than ducking into a motel or trying to convince some dragon of a seaside landlady that you really are Mr and Mrs Smith.
Paris would still like to think of itself as a kind of Western Bangkok, where unfortunate citizens of less erotic countries can come and lose their inhibitions. Coaches stop at Pigalle so that tourists can get a thrill by wandering past the explicit photos outside the lapdancing clubs and hostess bars. A whole section of the rue Saint-Denis, right in the centre of the city, still has scantily dressed prostitutes in doorways. There are also several well-known swingers’ clubs, openly advertised in ordinary listings magazines, where free-loving Parisian couples go to have sex with perfectly respectable strangers. At one of them, it is rumoured, a soirée not so long ago got off to a slow start because, as the manager explained, “We’re waiting for Monsieur le Ministre.’**
The Parisians would love to trademark the brand Sexe, or at least get an appellation contrôlée on it. I can hear the ads now, spoken by a modern Brigitte Bardot—‘Sexe de Paris, ze only real sex.’
But times are changing. The prostitutes are being edged out of the rue Saint-Denis, which is getting so clean that a far-from-daring friend
