The Montmartre Investigation (27 page)

Parisian Nightlife in the 1890s

The 1890s saw the heyday of the
cafÃ©s-concert
and nightclubs, which embodied all the modernity and daring of
belle-Ã©poque
Paris. There were many such venues, to which both Parisians and visitors to the city flocked in the evening, mostly concentrated in and around Montmartre, the hub of artistic life in the city.

Founded in 1881 by Rudolph Salis, Le Chat-Noir, the first-ever cabaret, began life as an informal artistic salon. Artists, musicians and writers were invited to Salis's home to discuss their ideas and perform their work, amongst them Claude Debussy, Paul Verlaine, Erik Satie, Aristide Bruant and Caran d'Ache. It quickly became a fashionable nightspot, where the bohemian world rubbed shoulders with the aristocracy and bourgeoisie. The cabaret gave rise to a journal also called Le Chat-Noir, with contributions from Salis's regulars. It was successfully published on a weekly basis for over ten years.

Aristide Bruant, immortalised in a poster by Toulouse-Lautrec, went on to open his own cabaret, Le Mirliton, which became the home of satire and was particularly famous for Bruant's songs in which he made fun of the upper class members of his clientele.

Perhaps the place that most symbolises the Paris of that era is the greatest
cafÃ©-concert
of them all, Le Moulin-Rouge, whose
fin-de-siÃ¨cle
incarnation lives on in the art of Toulouse-Lautrec. Built in 1889 by Joseph Oller, it still stands today on Boulevard de Clichy in the neighbourhood of Pigalle. It was famed for its spectacular music hall, which included many different kinds of entertainer, including the extraordinary PÃ©tomane who, amongst other tricks, could fart the tune of
La Marsellaise
at will. But it is as the home of the cancan for which Le Moulin-Rouge is best known. The dance had first emerged in dance halls much earlier in the nineteenth century and was originally performed by men, and then by courtesans during the Second Empire. Yet it was at Le Moulin-Rouge with a chorus line made up of professional dancers that the cancan took on the form by which it is still known today. Respectable members of society would come along to be shocked at the flying splits and extraordinary high kicks of legendary dancers such as La Goulue, Jane Avril and Nini Pattes en l'Air. And the tradition continues to this day at Le Moulin-Rouge, where visitors can still see regular performances of the outrageous cancan.

Also by Claude Izner

Murder on the Eiffel Tower

The Disappearance at PÃ¨re-Lachaise

Notes

¹This catastrophe left forty-four people dead and more than a hundred injured.

²Situated on the left bank up until 1957 on the site now occupied by the Jussieu Campus of the University of Paris.

³Now called Gare d'Austerlitz.

⁴The river that used to cross the fifth and thirteenth arrondissements of Paris. Today it is channelled underground.

⁵Le Carrefour des ÃcrasÃ©s â the crossroads at Rue Montmartre and Boulevard PoissonniÃ¨re.

⁶The Salon des IndÃ©pendents was founded in 1884 by Georges Seurat and welcomed the work of all artists, in contrast to the Salon des Beaux-Arts, which had very strict admission policies.

⁷Her real name was Louise Weber (1869â1929).

⁸On 15 March 1891, every region of France aligned its time with Paris, which became the official time of the country.

⁹In 1891, during a May Day demonstration in the little town of Fourmies in the Upper Loire, soldiers fired on a crowd, killing nine people.

¹⁰(1602â1674). A Japanese representative painter of the early Edo Period, most famous for his folding screens and hanging scrolls.

¹¹See
The PÃ¨re-Lachaise Mystery
, Gallic Books.

¹²Drinking fountains scattered throughout Paris, fifty of which were donated to the city by British philanthropist Sir Richard Wallace in 1872.

¹³Song by Maurice Marc.

¹⁴See
Murder on the Eiffel Tower
and
The PÃ¨re-Lachaise Mystery
, Gallic Books.

¹⁵French journalist (1833â1902), who was a theatre critic and the author of a number of novels.

¹⁶Her real name was Lucienne Beuze. Her nickname means literally âdrainage grille'.

¹⁷A popular figure of the Latin Quarter during the 1890s. He was a bohemian and autodidact, who supported himself doing odd jobs, and became the right-hand man of the poet Verlaine, selling off his mementoes of the poet after Verlaine's death in 1896.

¹⁸A drinker of liquefied ether, a nineteenth-century practice that fell out of favour when the gas was reclassified as a poison.

¹⁹A language constructed by a German Roman Catholic priest, Johann Martin Schleyer, in 1879â1880, after he dreamt that God wanted him to create an international language.

²⁰French painter (1864â1951), known for his lithographs, etchings and watercolours.

²¹A singer whose real name was LÃ©on Fourneau; his name was first âlatinised' to Fornax, and then made to sound Russian by inversing the letters: Xanrof.

²²Play (and novel) by Alphonse Daudet.

²³See
The PÃ¨re-Lachaise Mystery
, op. cit.

²⁴Georges-Louis Leclerc, Comte de Buffon, naturalist and biologist who had a profound influence on the work of later naturalists, including Charles Darwin.

²⁵French writer (1829â1890). She contributed to the
Journal de la Jeunesse
and the
BibliothÃ¨que rose.

²⁶Xavier de Montepin, 1881. Jules Mary, 1886.

²⁷The policeman hero of the novels of Ãmile Gaboriau.

²⁸Alain-RenÃ© Lesage (1668â1747):
Le Diable Boiteux.

²⁹See
The PÃ¨re-Lachaise Mystery
, op. cit.

³⁰Impossible. (Author's note.)

³¹See
The PÃ¨re-Lachaise Mystery
, op. cit.

³²Alexandre Dumas the elder:
Ange Pitou
(1851).

³³Novel by Karl-Joris Huysmans (1879).

This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously.

THE MONTMARTRE INVESTIGATION
. Copyright Â© 2003 by Ãditions 10/18, DÃ©partement d'Univers Poche. English translation copyright Â© 2008 by Gallic Books. All rights reserved. For information, address St. Martin's Press, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010.

www.minotaurbooks.com

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Izner, Claude.

[Carrefour des Ecrases. English]

The Montmartre investigation: a Victor Legris mystery / Claude Izner; translated by Lorenza Garcia and Isabel Reid.â1st U.S. ed.

p. cm.

ISBN: 978-0-312-38376-3

1. Booksellers and booksellingâFranceâParisâFiction. 2. Paris (France)âHistoryâ1870-1940âFiction. I. Garcia, Lorenza. II. Reid, Isabel. III. Title.

PQ2709.Z64C313 2009

843'.92âdc22

2010021165