Paris - Moulin Rouge - 18e

Plate LXXXVI – the Moulin Rouge …

I had been warned. From the street, in daylight, the exterior of the Moulin Rouge is rather boring, tired and uninviting. And it was true. Baz Luhrmann’s spectacular 2001 eponymously named film, with the hero’s quest for Love Beauty and Truth, gives the place an image way beyond reality. I therefore imagine the disappointment of more recent travellers to be even greater. My challenge then was to get a shot that somehow made it worth the time I’d taken to get there, and that came close to equalling the poster images created of the Moulin Rouge by artist Henri Toulouse-Lautrec. Thank goodness for the sculptural form of one of Hector Guimard’s decorative Métro arches, which I used to frame the familiar sight of the otherwise unremarkable little red mill’s exterior - the interior I am pleased to report still offers a glimpse into the romance of Paris in the Belle Epoque.

This cabaret theatre was built in 1889 by Joseph Oller, owner also of that other shrine of Parisian entertainment, the Olympia. The home of the famous and often imitated Can-Can dance, the Moulin Rouge has hosted many notable international performers since its opening including Ella Fitzgerald, Elton John and Liza Minelli, but it is for the lavishly costumed and produced adult music and dance spectacular revues that most visitors will venture onto this stretch of the Boulevard de Clichy at night. The lively and only moderately risqué Can-Can routines performed today (most often to Offenbach’s Barcarole) are somewhat ‘cleaned-up’ versions of the entertainment originally offered by the courtesans of the Moulin during its glory days as a classy brothel, when Can-Can was little more than an increasingly vulgar individual display of the lower female anatomy intended to entice their male customers.

Truth, Beauty and Love – well, maybe.

Paris - Boulevard Clichy - 18e

Plate LXXXVI - Boulevard de Clichy …

If you’re not here on ‘business’, the safest way for the curious, pedestrian tourist to walk along Boulevard de Clichy is to take the middle island in preference to the side pavements. Of course if you are there on business, and knowing the emporia of the area include such names as Love Theatre, Pigalle’s Peep Show or simply Sex Shop, you probably won’t want to do this. This is the red-light district of Paris so you then also won’t mind the continuous approaches of the pimps or mecs who ply their trade along the Boulevard - seemingly for twenty four hours a day. It started off as entertaining, but the persistence of some can start to seem annoying and then even threatening; but it does seem an unwritten code that they, with their promises of showing you a very good time, do not bother strollers taking that sacred middle ground. Of course this choice of path precludes any ‘window shopping’, and the often fading pictures of some of the performances on offer promise delivery of exactly what you’d go shopping for along certain stretches of the Boulevard. Nudge, nudge – wink, wink!

Such was my introduction to what I venture is the essential Paris - Pigalle and Montmartre. If anyone with only an hour in the city asked me where they simply had to go, this would be it. Forget the Louvre (it needs days) or the Eiffel Tower (you’ll see it from here anyway) and you’ll almost certainly pass the Arc de Triomphe en route. Montmartre is the Paris of Piaf, Degas, Lautrec, Renoir, Utrillo, Daumier, van Gogh, and Picasso, the Moulin Rouge, Au Lapin Agile and many cabarets, the Sacré Coeur and the Place du Tertre.

And of sex.