Paris at the End of the World

by John Baxter

  As few ventured into Montparnasse, Montmartre, or the working-class areas locals called Panam, the lives of typical Parisians remained an enigma to them. When they speak of the French in their letters, it’s seldom by name. Those they do describe are the bourgeoisie of central Paris, whom they would know only from seeing them on the street or in a café. Women were invariably admired from a distance. One Australian wrote:

  I never saw a really plain girl all the while I was there, neither did I see a thick pair of ankles. Invariably small in build, they are dainty without exception, with large languorous eyes, both blue and brown, lashes that lay upon their cheeks as it were, noses aquiline, sensitive and artistic, mouths small with moist red lips, rounded, well moulded chins and nearly always a dimple in each cheek. When they talk, they do it with their eyes, and when they smile it is the same, their conversation is full of music, it is just delightful to listen to them. Only small it’s true, but they are just bubbling over with the very joy of life, chock full of spirits and enjoying love and passion to their utmost capacity.

  Guides put out of work by the disappearance of the tourist trade preyed on the soldiers, steering them to the same clip joints they’d taken civilians to before 1914. One group of Australians fell into the hands of a guide who claimed to have worked for the prestigious Thomas Cook travel agency.

  We dived into a back street and went into the As de Coeur—Ace of Hearts. It was a dirty shop with a couple of naked (except for shoes, stockings and a flimsy silk scarf) women flitting about in it. They sat on fellows’ knees and carried on generally. We had a drink and departed. The next place was Les Belles Foules—The Beautiful Fowls [actually, Aux Belles Poules: poule corresponds to the English “chick”]—slightly higher in tone. Numbers of half dressed girls were here. They went on with some disgusting dances and foolery. Next place we took taxis to. It was an exhibition such as might grace a back street in Cairo, but something that I did not believe could be seen in Paris.

  Paris brothel, 1917

  Less squalid companionship was available to the personable visitor if he knew where to look. The bars of such music halls as the Moulin Rouge, Concert Mayol, and in particular the Folies Bergère were well-known pickup spots. An Australian who visited the Folies in March 1917 disapproved of the show’s suggestiveness, but also of the “working girls” of the promenoir.

  On the whole the show may be described as rotten. At the back is the promenade a very brilliant sight and nearly the whole audience repair there between the acts to stroll and listen to an orchestra there. Throngs of girls—some very beautiful—infest the place and persistently keep pestering you, clinging on to belt and having to be beaten off almost. The performance on the stage would not have been tolerated in Australia, first on account of its dirt (which had not even the redeeming grace of smartness) and secondly on account of its absolute weakness [i.e., lack of humor].

  Most of the songs and gags were in French. The only bright spot was at the last when all lights were turned out and a girl appeared in the air sitting in a chariot on the end of a long pole. This was thrust right over the audience and her feet brought just above the heads of the audience. There was great competition to get her shoes and eventually she lost them both. When the show terminated we set off for home and had to run the gauntlet of guides & girls which took not a little negotiating.

  Less predatory women cruised the upper lounges of larger theaters such as the Châtelet and Théâtre du Champs-Elysées. For a few francs, any one of them would take a man back home, or to an hôtel de passe that rented rooms by the hour.

  Military officialdom equated promiscuity with prostitution, but some women were just looking for a good time. Canadian writer and longtime Paris resident Mavis Gallant has written of “that mute invitation [that] used to be known as, ‘Suivez-moi, jeune homme.’ [Follow me, young man.] It was the prerogative of married women. The unmarried were chaperoned, or didn’t dare, or were semi-professional—which means to say, just now and then, hoping just for a good dinner in a decent restaurant, a cab home, a bit of cash.”

  Women encountered in this way expected no more than for the man to pay for a meal and the room, and perhaps “buy them a new hat”—the polite formula for a small cash gift. Most were more than satisfied with the arrangement. La Baïonnette published a cartoon of a young English private putting on his trousers while his companion of the night says coyly, “I wish there were more ‘contemptibles’ like you.”

  Encounters like this were common among soldiers on leave in Britain, where language was not a barrier. In France, to meet a woman required basic French. Officers enjoyed the advantage of higher education and could often speak the language, whereas, even after months in France, the average Tommy or Aussie knew little more than Promenez avec moi? (Walk with me?), Couchez avec moi? (Sleep with me?), Parlez-vous? (Do you, or will you, speak to me?), Toot sweet (i.e., tout de suite, immediately), and the all-purpose Bon (Good).

  Discouraged by their officers from learning the language, they developed a form of Franglais that further mangled communication. To them, the town of Ypres, which the French pronounce something like “Eepr,” looked like “Wipers,” which is what they called it. There was even a trench newspaper called The Wipers Times. Trying to order wine in a café and hearing the French ask for vin blanc, Australians misheard it as “plonk,” which became, and remains, Aussie slang for wine of any sort.

  Once the Americans arrived, language became a bone of contention. Doughboys resented what some saw as an unwillingness on the part of locals to learn “American.” As for learning French themselves, its grammar and pronunciation seemed to them perversely misleading. In one of his invented letters home from baseball player cum doughboy Jack Keefe, humorist Ring Lardner had him describe his problems with his French tutor.

  For inst. he asked me what was the English word for very in French so I knew it was tres so I said tres and he says no it was tray because you say the letter e like it was the letter a and you don’t pay no attention to the letter s. So I asked him what it was there for then and he said that was just the French way of it so I had a notion to tell him to go and take a jump in the lake but I decided to say nothing and quit.

  The few British and Australian soldiers who found French girlfriends then had to adjust to their more sophisticated sexual habits. In his memoir Good-bye to All That, Robert Graves, a captain in the Royal Welsh Fusiliers, wrote of his fellow officers, some of whom spoke French:

  A good deal of talk in billets concerned the peculiar bed-manners of Frenchwomen. “She was very nice and full of games. But when I said to her: ‘S’il vous plaît, ôtes-toi la chemise, ma chérie,’ she wouldn’t. She said: ‘Oh, no’-non, mon lieutenant. Ce n’est convenable.’ ”

  “Please take off your blouse, my dear.” “Oh no, my lieutenant. That’s not appropriate.”

  Gradually hints of new tastes crept into the jokes and songs sung by Tommies and Anzacs. In particular, a Tipperary parody signaled the arrival of cunnilingus on the Anglo-Saxon sexual menu.

  That’s the wrong way to lick a Mary.

  That’s the wrong way to kiss.

  Don’t you know that over here, lad,

  They like it best like this.

  Hurray pour les Françaises.

  Farewell Angleterre.

  We didn’t know how to tickle Mary

  But we learnt over there.

  28

  The Cure for Cockroach

  “Don’t be alarmed, Cinderella,” said the fairy. “The wind blew me your sighs. I know you would love to go to the ball. And so you shall!”

  CHARLES PERRAULT, Cinderella

  Every Paris magazine aimed at a male readership carried, next to listings of “rare and artistic” books and photographs, columns of classified ads for prostitutes. Most were disguised as offers of massages, baths, and manicures. Typically, “Miss Mohawk of New York” promised “hygienic care, expert manicures, English and Canadian massage and scientific treatment. A first
class house.”

  After 1915, a new category of advertisement joined them. In column after column, soldiers appealed for marraines de guerre—godmothers of war—who would write them letters, send them little comforts, and invite them home during their leave in Paris. Typically, Corporal Lorin of the 166th Infantry, stationed at the fortress of Verdun, “desired to establish relations with an affectionate, young and pretty Parisienne.”

  Officers had an edge; doctors and fliers even more. An “aviator in convalescence before returning to the front” appealed for “a pretty marraine, spiritual and loving.” Some played the soul card: “Poet, at the front since the beginning, suffering from cafard, requires a marraine between 25 and 30.” Cafard, literally “cockroach,” was poilu slang for the boredom and depression brought on by idleness—during which, it was said, men in the trenches passed the time taking potshots at the plentiful roaches.

  The marraines de guerre were an instant success. Women’s magazines published suggestions for suitable “comforts” to send adopted godsons. Most women contented themselves with knitted socks and scarves, though so many of these were received that aid agencies often unraveled them and sold the scarce wool to buy items the troops really needed. One journal proposed a practical use for the rabbit skins left over after making lapin à la moutarde. Dried and cured, they could be sewn together into a furry plastron, or chest protector, for one’s adopted filleul, or godson.

  The appeal for marraines de guerre was always assumed to have been a spontaneous expression by men at the front who, seeing no end to the war, reached out for a lifeline to the real world. Others suggested it was a cynical initiative by government propagandists to placate increasingly disgruntled poilus.

  Neither was true. It was a purely commercial proposition, invented by old hands at the game. The proof is in the ads themselves, most of which ask respondents to write “chez Iris.”

  Agence Iris was one of Paris’s longest-established matrimonial agencies. Mostly it placed ads on behalf of hopeful men and women. Replies went to its offices at 22 rue Saint-Augustin, where advertisers rented boxes to receive them. The agency wasn’t too fussy about who used its services. It was widely understood by adulterers that a box at Agence Iris simplified a clandestine correspondence. Iris also inserted advertisements and fielded replies on behalf of such “manicurists” as Miss Mohawk, as well as shady doctors offering to cure sexually transmitted diseases.

  Regular clients of the agency included Henry Désiré Landru, a dapper gentleman, always impeccably dressed, with a gleaming bald head and a flowing red beard. He almost always placed the same advertisement: “Widower with two children, aged 43, with comfortable income, serious and moving in good society, desires to meet widow with a view to matrimony.” Nobody inquired why he needed three boxes to handle the replies—until they found that he inserted the same advertisement under ninety different names and responded to approaches from 283 women, 10 of whom were never seen again.

  Overstretched in wartime, the police gave a low profile to missing persons, particularly as single women often moved without notice. A shortage of men had opened the market for female transport workers, shop assistants, and nurses. Once Landru’s activities were uncovered, they found that he checked each woman in person before deciding whether or not to murder them. Some he discarded. Many he seduced. One has to admire his systematic approach, not to mention his stamina. A typical schedule for May 19, 1915, read:

  9.30. Cigarette kiosk Gare de Lyon. Mlle. Lydie.

  10.30. Café Place St. Georges, Mme. Ho.——

  11.30. Metro Laundry. Mme. Le C——

  14.30. Concorde North-South. Mme. Le ——

  15.30. Tour St. Jacques. Mme. Du——

  17.30. Mme. Va.——

  20.15. Saint Lazare. Mme. Le ——

  Apparently just as tireless in the bedroom, Landru passed his evenings with a succession of these women in one of the seven city and four suburban apartments he rented under aliases. If they asked about his business, he claimed he’d been in aviation before the Germans seized his factories. If they pressed, he would describe his product, a variation on the whaling harpoon meant to skewer fighter planes in midair. (The French air force actually experimented with such a weapon but found it too heavy.)

  Sometimes Landru’s conquests were simply romantic, but the ten women he murdered, all widows, had money and were prepared to sign it over to him as a dot, or dowry, in return for a respectable marriage. Once he had their cash, he invited them for a weekend in his country house, killed and dismembered them, and cremated them in the kitchen stove. The bodies were never found, but a simple error of thrift caught him out. Knowing his companions would not be coming back, he bought return rail tickets for himself but only one-way for them.

  The marraines de guerre were Agence Iris’s greatest success. By the end of the war, it had handled between 200,000 and 300,000 such advertisements. “Marraines came in many forms,” wrote historian Alastair Horne. “Sometimes frightened soldiers would be prompted into action by fear more of their marraine’s contempt than of their lieutenant’s revolver. For the majority, the marraine was simply an unseen, unknown Beatrice who wrote her soldier beautiful letters telling him to be brave and die well; the happy minority sometimes also found her willing to share her bed with him on leave.”

  This underestimates the appeal to both men and women of a practical application of the truism “All’s fair in love and war.” Not only did women suffer just as much from cafard as men: there was a well-established tradition of casual sex in wartime, the so-called repos du guerrier, or warrior’s rest. In Also Sprach Zarathustra, Friedrich Nietz-sche wrote, “Man is made for war, woman is made for the warrior’s repose, and the rest is madness.”

  Wealthy women even adopted exotic godsons as accessories. One Australian visitor to the Bois de Boulogne noted, “It seems to be the fashion to have a black filleul, and one princess was strolling along with her husband and a coal black negro of the French Colonial Army.”

  The theater wasn’t slow to pick up on the phenomenon. In La Marraine de l’Escouade (The Godmother of the Squad), the heroine dresses as a boy to reach the front and find her fiancé, but the big success was La Marraine des Poilus in October 1916, in which Lily Grey, alias Lillian Isaacs, stopped the show with her version of, inevitably, “Tipperary.” Some true stories of marraines read like fiction. One sergeant accumulated forty-four godmothers. When he found he couldn’t enjoy them all during a single leave, he deserted to devote himself to their gratification.

  The satirical magazines were, as always, frank about what was really going on. In La Baïonnette, a soldier describes taking his pote to meet his marraine de guerre. “As soon as I said, ‘This man is my mate,’ she immediately, out of consideration for him, introduced him to her maid.” La Vie Parisienne, where many of the ads appeared, showed a young officer in the boudoir of a pink-cheeked, obviously satisfied woman. “Well, godson,” she says, “you’re not shy! You got to know my bed very quickly.” He replies, “It’s my business, dear godmother. I’m liaison officer for the troops who feel out the lay of the land.”

  Occasionally a misstep took place. A postcard circulated showing a woman opening a drawer on her bedside table, revealing, to her delight, a little soldier holding out his arms. The rhyme, roughly translated, says, “In the past, a woman opening her drawer was likely to find a little Polichinelle”—Punchinella, from Punch and Judy—“but today it’s more likely to be a poilu.” A “Punchinella in the drawer” corresponded to the British “bun in the oven,” meaning, to be pregnant. Fortunately, help was at hand. The same magazines that ran ads for the marraines de guerre also carried notices placed by faiseuses des anges—angel makers, or abortionists, so called because they sent unwanted babies straight to heaven.

  29

  Blighty

  The narrow ways of English folk

  Are not for such as we;

  They bear the long accustomed yoke

  Of
staid conservancy.

  ANDREW BARTON “BANJO” PATERSON, “The Old Australian Ways,” 1902

  The winter of 1917 was no time to be in London. But Archie had nothing to say in the matter. On February 10, after a month in hospital at Etaples, he was sent back to England with a warrant for admission to the military hospital at Lakenham, outside Norwich.

  When the boat docked in Folkestone, he took the train to London. From Waterloo Station, he needed to cross the city to Liverpool Street Station for the hundred-mile trip to Norwich. But what visitor from the far side of the world could resist the temptation to spend at least an evening in the city regarded by Anglo-Saxons as the heart of civilization?

  This, after all, was Blighty, the homeland that Tommies imbued with an almost mystical air of perfection. From the Afghan word bilāyatī, meaning “home,” Blighty was used by Indians and British soldiers posted to India as an all-purpose adjective for anything English.

  Early in the war, the word assumed all the longing of nostalgia. “Blighty leave” was time spent on the other side of the Channel. A “Blighty wound” was one that got you discharged. It turns up in such popular songs as “There’s a Ship That’s Bound for Blighty,” “We Wish We Were in Blighty,” and in particular, “Take Me Back to Dear Old Blighty,” which articulated the homesickness of the Tommy in the trenches.

  Take me back to dear old Blighty!

  Put me on the train for London town!

  Take me over there,

  Drop me anywhere,

  Liverpool, Leeds, or Birmingham, well, I don’t care!

  No other country had Britain’s idealized concept of a national homeland. A doughboy could sing “Swanee, how I love ya, how I love ya” without implying any superiority to another’s “little gray home in the west.” Australians loyally sang along with their British and American comrades, as enthusiastic for Tipperary or Tralee or Texas as if they’d actually been there.