The Sinner's Grand Tour

by Tony Perrottet

  Sadly, La Valtesse’s mansion at 98 Boulevarde Malesherbes is gone, as are most of the extravagant nineteenth-century abodes along the Champs-Élysées, where the grandes cocottes once lived cheek by jowl with high-society families. At No. 124, an Italian-born courtesan known as La Barucci, whose real name was Giulia Benini, had once told an army colonel that she would not sleep with him until he had paraded naked in front of her house—so he wrapped himself in a cloak, rode his horse at the head of his troops down the avenue, and then opened the cloak to her window out of the soldiers’ view. Nearby, at No. 103, the exotic dancer Mata Hari was arrested for espionage in 1916. She insisted to the police officers that she dress properly, then stripped naked in front of them. Abjectly enough, the officers reported that they were “revolted by such impudence.…”

  In fact, the only nineteenth-century courtesan’s house to survive on the Champs-Élysées is No. 25, former home of La Païva, a steel-willed, Russian-born beauty whose real name was Esther Lachmann and who became the lover of composer Richard Wagner, among others. Today, the basement has been turned into a sepulchral restaurant called (of course) La Païva, swathed in velvet drapes, its banquettes framed by columns evoking the classical caryatids of the Acropolis. The mansion itself has managed to survive the last century as the Travellers Club. When I rang the bell, a liveried doorman summoned the director, who turned out to be a passionate devotee of courtesan lore, though frail and in her sixties, with the wonderful name of Roselyne Winklarik. She proudly gave me a tour of the Païva palace, which blends French and Italian Renaissance styles in gaudy splendor. At last, I was breathing the air of the grandes cocottes! The onyx staircase and agate bathroom were inspired by the Arabian Nights, while the marble nudes supporting the drawing room mantelpiece were modeled from life by the irrepressible La Païva herself.

  Interior of La Païva’s mansion on the Champs Elysées, now an opulent private club.

  THE ATTIC OF ROYAL SEX

  The next day, when I opened my e-mails, there was a message from Louis Soubrier, with the riveting subject heading EDWARD VII CHAIR. “When you are in Paris,” it read, “I will show you the fauteuil d’amour with pleasure.”

  I was on the phone within minutes, getting directions to the warehouse. In the nineteenth century, the Soubrier family had made its fortune in historical replicas of Roman and ancien régime furniture—which is why, no doubt, it was a candidate to create this royal fantasy piece. Today, Soubrier deals in antiques, often renting for period films.

  Dashing from the Métro, I met Monsieur Soubrier as he was leaving the building. A dignified gentleman in his sixties, with a full moustache, tweed coat, and yellow silk cravat, he reminded me of a retired flying ace from the Western front.

  “Oh, I forgot to tell you that we close for lunch!” he said, mildly bemused by my ignorance of Gallic tradition. “Come with us, we’ll dine together!”

  Oh no, I thought, worrying that I would say something during the meal to make Monsieur Soubrier change his mind. (“You mean you only want to look at the chair? I thought you wanted to buy it!”) At his favorite café across the street, we settled at a table with one of his friends, a fellow furniture maker whose dachshund kept hopping about his feet. Edouard worked in contemporary designs, he said—exactly the opposite of Monsieur Soubrier. “I loathe history!” he admitted, as the appetizer arrived. “The past, it doesn’t exist for me. But for Louis, the past is everything.”

  Monsieur Soubrier regaled us with stories of his visits to America in his youth. In the 1950s, he had been to Newport, Rhode Island, and attended the birthday party of Jacqueline Bouvier. But I was fixated on furniture. Had he always known about his family’s famous chair?

  “My father was a very correct man, very formal,” he explained. “He never spoke of the fauteuil d’amour to me. But when it came on the market again in 1992, one of the very old maison workers took me aside. I learned that my great-grandfather had made the chair in the early 1890s, on specifications provided by the Prince of Wales himself. So I began looking in our archives. And yes, there it was! I found my ancestor’s original line drawings, and a watercolor of the design. It was living proof.”

  Soubrier purchased the chair from Drouot—for how much he would not say, apart from admitting it was “very, very expensive”—and has kept it in his warehouse ever since. For a short time, it traveled to New York City for an exhibition on “fantasy furniture.” This was no doubt where the rumor began that it had been sold to an American. One Midtown Manhattan gallery had apparently refused to display the chair, forcing the organizers to change venue. “The Americans were shocked,” he gloated.

  The luncheon continued at an excruciatingly slow French pace—salads were nibbled, desserts considered, coffees sipped—until I began to fear that Soubrier might decide on a nap instead. But suddenly, he put down his cup. “Allons!” he declared.

  Louis Soubrier, whose ancestor manufactured the royal “sex chair” in his Right Bank warehouse.

  Inside, the warehouse was crowded with antiques of every era—ship’s figureheads, chandeliers, oil paintings, porcelain vases—all the colorful detritus of French history. A hand-operated cage elevator slowly took us to the third floor, and we followed corridors through endless storage rooms, with hundreds more pieces stacked on shelves. It was too much to take in, and my eyes became exhausted.

  But on the top floor, in the farthest corner, some hulking object lay beneath a blue blanket. Soubrier whisked it off, then wrestled with several layers of archival foam. Finally, the sex chair itself stood before me in all its glory.

  “Voilà,” Louis said proudly.

  It was undeniably a beautifully made piece, vaguely like a cross between a gynecologist’s chair and a snow sled. The wooden frame was carved in eighteenth-century style, with two padded levels upholstered in pale green embroidered silk. Its practical use, however, required some consideration. The key lay at ground level, where there were brass plates, which swiveled for comfort—these presumably for King Edward’s feet.

  “Tradition holds that the fauteuil was designed for three,” Louis shrugged. “But the precise arrangement …? It is open to debate.”

  Soubrier ran his hands along the fabric. “We had to re-upholster the fauteuil as soon as we bought it. The chair was dirty,” he said. “Very dirty.”

  “Oh?” I said, not sure if I wanted to hear the details.

  We know that Le Chabanais was patronized in the 1920s by the full-bodied American comic “Fatty” Arbuckle, and during the war years it was also a favorite of the grotesque, morphine-addled Luftwaffe chief, Hermann Göring. In his memoir Between Meals, the rotund gourmand and New Yorker writer A. J. Liebling also confesses to visiting the place as a student. Presumably it wasn’t just Bertie who had taken advantage of the device. And one of the owners in the 1980s had been “a very, very active gay man,” Louis said, who had certainly put it to practical use.

  The legendary “sex chair” of King Edward VII in its current Parisian home.

  Downstairs, Soubrier showed me his great-grandfather’s watercolor of the fauteuil, which he had found in his archives and was now framed. As I said good-bye, he offered one last delicious morsel—unverifiable, but passed on as fact by the agents at the Drouot auction house. In 1951, when the first private owner, Louis Vian, had purchased the fauteuil, it had been delivered with a battered leather attaché case. Opening it, Vian was astonished to find a preliminary drawing for the chair scrawled by the Prince of Wales himself, with notes in his handwriting. The following morning, Vian was visited at his home by two extremely well-dressed Englishmen, who offered to buy the briefcase for a fabulous sum. Vian did sell it, although he turned down an offer for the chair itself. “They were from the Secret Service,” Louis said. “Covering up royal tracks.”

  The chair on display in New York in the mid-1990s. (Courtesy Louis Soubrier)

  Right: An artist’s recreation of the fauteuil d’amour in action. (© Lesley Thelander)

&nb
sp; Nineteen fifty-one, eh? About the same time they visited a certain lawyer’s office in Scotland?

  That afternoon, I rushed to Madame Canet to report my findings.

  “The fauteuil is still in Paris!” she said, nearly jumping for patriotic joy. “It’s still here! Still here!”

  I was pleased to deliver such happy tidings. But when she quizzed me on my adventure at Soubrier’s, there was a brief linguistic confusion.

  “Vous êtes monté?” she asked eagerly. You mounted?

  “No, no,” I said, blanching. “I didn’t mount it!”

  A few minutes later, when I was describing the chair in detail, she clapped her hands again. “Alors! Vous êtes monté!” You did mount!

  “No, really … I just looked …”

  I finally realized that she meant monter in the sense of “to ascend”—that is, I went upstairs to the third floor, where the chair was kept, rather than tested it out.

  That will have to wait for a more intrepid researcher.

  Chapter Three

  INFERNAL PROVENCE

  The Marquis de Sade Is Dead!

  Long Live Pierre Cardin!

  France has always been a Coney Island for literature lovers: The land is lousy with shrines like Victor Hugo’s apartment in Paris, George Sand’s mansion in Nohant, or Balzac’s cottage in Passy, where even the author’s old coffeepot is revered like a piece of the True Cross. But a more select breed of bibliophile has long made the pilgrimage to a remote southern village called Lacoste, where the château of one Donatien-Alphonse-François, Marquis de Sade, looms in decaying grandeur. Born in 1740, Sade remains one of France’s more outrageous cultural heroes—an aristocratic libertine who has gone down in history for his maniacal lifestyle and bizarre pornographic novels, including Justine, Juliette, and 120 Days of Sodom, each one overflowing with sexual fantasies of such nightmarish cruelty that they gave birth to the term sadism. For generations, interest in Sade’s crumbling refuge in Provence was limited to the cognoscenti. Then, one day in 2001, word leaked out that the Château Sade had an illustrious new owner, the celebrity fashion designer Pierre Cardin. Ever since, the king of leisure suits has stirred things up in sleepy Lacoste, introducing upmarket boutiques, cafés, galleries, and hotels, even an annual arts festival, until the villagers are once again revolting.

  As for me, I didn’t care how famous the new lord of the manor was. This devoted literary tourist just wanted to get inside that castle.

  Few writers’ homes are so intimately connected to their distinctive creative process. Constructed in the Middle Ages as a fortress against Saracen marauders, the ancestral château had captivated Sade ever since, as a boy, he first saw it crouching above the village like a wolf in ambush. His father gave it to him as a wedding present in 1763, when Sade was a charismatic and promising twenty-four-year-old, and it soon became his most beloved residence, where he lived for energetic interludes over the next fifteen years—his feral prime. Essentially, the château became the mise-en-scène for some of Sade’s more controversial real-life escapades, including a light-hearted romp dubbed “The Little Girls Episode” by biographers. This edifying incident occurred in late 1774, when the marquis, then aged thirty-four, came to winter in Provence with his wife and a string of fresh-faced household servants he’d hired in Lyon. The newcomers—five unsuspecting virgin girls and a handsome teen male “secretary”—were intended to supplement his more experienced castle staff, such as the luscious housekeeper Gothon, whom Sade had hired because she sported “the sweetest ass ever to leave Switzerland,” and a studly valet, Latour, by whom Sade liked to be sodomized while prostitutes watched and cavorted.

  As far as historians can discern, over the next six weeks, Sade dedicated himself to corrupting the captive minors. Holding them hostage in the château’s dungeon, he forced them to act out scenes from pornographic novels and his own intricately stage-managed sexual rituals. (Obsessively controlling, he liked to choreograph every detail. As a character complains in one of his fictions, “Let’s please put some order into these orgies!”) Modern French wives are legendarily indulgent of their husbands’ peccadilloes, but Sade’s wife, Pélagie, took conjugal freedom to new heights by overseeing this marathon debauch, keeping the five girls compliant, then hushing up the ensuing scandal. When the police came knocking, she helped bribe the outraged parents and spirit the girls, decidedly damaged goods, away to convents.

  Over time, the château also took pride of place in Sade’s literary imagination. As the biographer Francine du Plessix Gray points out in her classic At Home with the Marquis de Sade, its position hovering above Lacoste fed his outdated fantasies of feudal inviolability, where he could act out his rabid carnal desires with no fear of reprisal. Even later, when Sade was in prison, the château remained a font of inspiration for his grisly literary output—a Walden Pond for the polymor-phously perverse.

  Speculation has long been rife as to what remained inside the château, particularly the dungeon. Although the edifice was looted during the Revolution and pillaged for its masonry, connoisseurs of erotic literature began arriving in the nineteenth century to soak up its aura. In 1871, the French art historian P. L. Jacob was told by villagers that the walls of the dungeon were once painted with naked figures dancing in “a type of witch’s Sabbath” around supine women, a vision Jacob breathlessly compared to an absinthe hallucination. Later, the bestselling author of salacious history Dr. Augustin Cabanès was informed that revolutionaries had discovered in the dungeon “instruments of torture that served at the marquis’ debauches.” (“Or is it just idle gossip?” he mused.) Farmers spoke of secret tunnels all through the countryside, used by the marquis to evade police raids.

  By the twentieth century, the château had become a louche must-see for the avant-garde traveler to Provence. Surrealists like André Breton, who inflamed the modern fascination with Sade’s work, explored it; Man Ray sketched it; Cartier-Bresson and Brassaï photographed it; Lawrence Durrell wrote the racy parts of the Alexandria Quartet in one of Lacoste’s cafés. In the 1960s, at the same time as censorship restrictions were finally lifted on Sade’s works, artists began moving into Lacoste’s cheap stone houses, creating a modest bohemian community. A local schoolteacher, André Bouër, purchased the abandoned castle and made the first basic repairs to it in decades. He held energetic parties there every summer; locals would wake up to see comely filles de joie from Marseilles, their lipstick smeared, teetering down the lanes in high heels.

  But it is the château’s new owner, Pierre Cardin, who has caused more tumult in Lacoste than anyone since the marquis himself. The billionaire haute couturier was evidently tickled by the literary connection when he bought the seventy-acre estate. He erected a shiny bronze statue of Sade next to the castle, pumped a million euros into improving the structure, and started a summer theater festival that lured crowds from Paris and the Riviera. (Cardin’s website states that the event is a homage to Sade, who loved the stage and put on plays in the château himself.) But it soon became obvious that Cardin had grand plans for the village as well. He began buying up Lacoste’s historic structures, then converting them into galleries and stores. It seemed as if Cardin wanted to take over the whole village, turning it into a “St. Tropez of culture.” The reaction to this real estate grab among most of the original villagers was violent—much more so than if he had been hosting mad orgies in the château. Ever since, Lacoste has been torn apart by a mini–civil war with a viciousness that only French provincials can manage.

  I had no difficulty selling Lacoste to Les, who was so dewy-eyed about her first trip to Provence that she didn’t care which village we went to. The boys liked the sound of the menacing castle, thinking they were going to Gondor perhaps. I was relieved to learn that, despite all the renovations, the basic structure of the Château Sade was intact, including, I gathered, the former dungeon. But getting an invitation into the private lair of any celebrity can be a tricky business—and the volatile politics of
this weird little village made the task of even meeting Monsieur Cardin difficult. But I wasn’t heading into the hornet’s nest unprepared. I had a connection that would melt any Sade fan’s heart.

  THE MARQUIS AND I

  While researching Sade’s life in Provence, I came across a flimsy booklet on the history of Lacoste. At first, I paid it little attention. It seemed the typically myopic local study that wallows in eye-glazing statistics, with rosters of grape harvests and treatises on pâté production. But as I flicked through the pages, I froze in shock. There in the village tax census for the year 1608 was my own name, Antoyne Perrottet.

  My Gallic family moniker had been, until now, deeply obscure, so this was quite a coincidence. From the Middle Ages to the mid-nineteenth century, it turned out, a veritable army of Perrottets had infested this Provençal village—well, about ten extended families, roughly a quarter of the total population. Then, around 1860, Provence fell into economic decay, and the Perrottets all cleared out to Australia, America, Argentina. A quick call to the family genealogist confirmed that Lacoste was indeed our font.