Plumey is too young to remember the golden (and not so golden) age of legal prostitution, but he did recall the old theatres, where, instead of waiting to be lapdanced on, customers would go to see a sexy review—an explicit version of the Folies-Bergère and the Moulin Rouge shows. These cabarets have all died out now, killed off by the big, and then the small, screen.
In the 1970s, porn cinemas were doing a roaring trade in Paris, thanks to the lack of censorship. In France, this encouraged totally above-board producers to fund typically French films, featuring, say, a châtelain (château owner) and his maid, or a perverse husband and wife. That was when Plumey began acting in them. At first the settings were all provincial, so he also started to write scripts featuring Parisian characters like café waiters, delivery boys and gendarmes. These were filmed in Paris and were, Plumey told
me, very lucrative, ‘Because I knew how to write to a budget and my wife was a monteuse.’
At this point, our conversation was interrupted for a while because of a slight misunderstanding. I assumed that monteuse (literally, a female ‘mounter’) was some kind of porn-movie stunt-lady. An understandable assumption, surely, because one of the movies in Plumey’s filmography is Les Monteuses, the story of a young man who has a bewitching flute that causes girls to go wild and straddle the nearest male every time it is played. (And Mozart thought his flute was magic.)
But it turns out that the word monteuse also means female film editor. Madame Plumey was able to help her husband in the cutting room, not because she was one of the female leads in his movies.
Anyway, Parisian films like these helped maintain Pigalle’s reputation because they were shown in the neighbourhood’s porn cinemas, and received an even wider audience when the sex shops started up, and began to sell the videos.
However, these shops, like almost every sex-themed place on the boulevard and in the surrounding streets, are looking run-down these days. Plumey believes that this is because Paris itself is getting less sexy.
‘France used to be une grande nation copulatrice [a nation of great copulators],’ he said, ‘but now Parisians are tired and too materialistic. More and more men are becoming premature ejaculators or impotent. And the women are getting greedy—these days, you have to be rich to make a conquest. And people are more conservative. Even the porn movies shown on French TV are censored because they’re for the general public. There are things you can’t show any more.’
I asked whether this was why Plumey opened his museum in 1997, a place of titillation rather than gratification.
‘Yes,’ he said, ‘and that’s why we get so many women visitors. Women enjoy foreplay and aesthetics. Men are into direct, immediate action, they’re brutes compared to women. And we get lots of older people, too, couples.’
‘And lone men?’ I ask, remembering my one previous visit, when I was researching a scene for my novel Merde Actually, and wandered around alone, feeling very self-conscious and voyeuristic.
‘No,’ he said, ‘we don’t get many lone men.’
And with that, he announced that he was going to leave me to visit the museum on my own again …
Sex costs extra if you wear glasses
This time, because I was researching a book about Paris, I spent less time admiring the collection of ethnic erotica. The museum contains hundreds of sex-related objects from around the world, such as Mexican water jugs with the most startling handles and spouts, and Japanese engravings that seem to have been commissioned by men in need of some highly unrealistic flattery.
Instead I lingered in front of a 1932 cartoon that depicted Pigalle’s racy image in the inter-war years—it was a street scene, in which all the characters had suddenly been seized with the urge to have an orgy. The passengers of a passing bus had all leapt on one another. Meanwhile, a male pedestrian was fondling a sailor, a woman was enjoying herself with a pig that had escaped from a butcher’s van, and even the two horses pulling a cart had begun to do it doggy-style. Clearly there was something very special in Pigalle’s air back then.
The museum also houses several of the risqué songsheets that Monsieur Plumey mentioned. They feature coy pictures of smiling ladies, and have titles like ‘Les Marcheuses’ (The Streetwalkers), ‘Le Pensionnat des Demoiselles’ (The School for Young Ladies—a fantasy about soldiers being billeted with a dormitory full of schoolgirls), and ‘La Rue de la Joie’ (The Street of Joy), a song that includes the poignant lines:
Pour se faire aimer
On veut se donner
Hélas on ne peut que se vendre.
In other words—‘To be loved, we want to give ourselves, but alas we have to sell ourselves’—a myth that probably wore thin at the maisons d’abattage.
The most interesting part of the collection, though, deals with the old brothels, and includes publicity shots of the girls on offer at one establishment, most of them completely naked except for their shoes or the occasional scarf or necklace—the customers had to know what they would be getting for their money.
There are photos of the luxurious interiors of chic Parisian brothels like the Chabanais, the Sphinx, the One-Two-Two and the Quatorze (brothels were often known by their street numbers, because name signs were forbidden). The décors were as elaborate as film sets—an Egyptian room, a cruise-liner cabin, a medieval chamber, and even a kitchen with apron-only ‘helpers’. Every fantasy was there to be bought, and it was all legal. These photos weren’t sneak peeks behind the scenes, they were promotional literature—like a pre-1946 version of today’s brochures for spas.
And talking of the 1940s, the Musée also has some revealing documents showing which Parisian brothels
