There are more than a hundred churches in Paris, and quite a few of them, including the most famous one (Notre Dame de Paris), are named Notre-Dame after the mother of Jesus. Today I’d like to talk about one of the lesser-known churches that carries this name, and tell the story of the women connected to it.
The Story of Notre-Dame de Lorette
Notre-Dame de Lorette, located in the 9th arrondissement, was built between 1823 and 1836 on the ruins of an earlier church destroyed during the French Revolution. It’s a neoclassical church that bears a slight resemblance to the far more famous Madeleine Church. Like many churches in Paris, it’s pleasant to look at, inside and out, but there’s no particular work of art inside that would make it a must-see for the average tourist in Paris. So why am I writing about it anyway? For two main reasons. The first is the panorama, which I find stunning, that this church forms together with the Sacré-Cœur Basilica atop Montmartre, a view you can catch from Rue Laffitte. The second is the fact that this church gave its name to one of the phenomena that so define Paris: the “working girls.”
The Hierarchy of Prostitution in Paris
France, as everyone knows, is a highly hierarchical country, where everything gets categorized, organized and ranked. The Parisian sex trade was no exception, and over the course of history its prostitutes were also divided into several tiers. The lowest rank of the “working girls” were called grisettes, named for the gray dresses they wore. These were women who worked jobs that paid very little (for example, weaving flowers), and to “supplement their income” they had to take on “lovers” who paid for each visit. Despite these visits, the grisettes spent almost their entire lives in dire poverty, and the only real way out was to “move up a rank” and become a lorette.
A lorette was a woman with a lover who would rent her a small apartment and give her an allowance to live on. Many of these apartments were located near the Notre-Dame de Lorette church, which is how these women got their name. Lorettes lived relatively comfortable lives, as long as they held onto a lover, and to avoid “putting all their eggs in one basket” (quite literally), they sometimes took on several clients at once. Throughout the 19th century, lorettes could be found hunting for their prey at the many balls held across Paris, which anyone dressed well enough could walk into. Every lorette’s dream was to catch the eye of a nobleman, or simply a millionaire, at one of these balls and become a courtisane.
Courtesans have a rich history going all the way back to Renaissance Italy. These were elite prostitutes who offered their lovers far more than just a beautiful body. They were educated, sharp-witted women who became part, though never a fully integrated part, of the high society of their time. Famous examples of courtesans include Ninon de Lenclos (1620-1705) from the 17th century, Madame de Pompadour (1721-1764) and Madame du Barry (1743-1793) from the 18th century, and Marie Duplessis (1824-1847) from the 19th century, whose short life inspired Alexandre Dumas fils (1824-1895) to write “The Lady of the Camellias,” which later became the opera “La Traviata.” Each of these women, and others not mentioned here, had a fascinating life story, too long to tell in full here. But what they all had in common was the enormous wealth they managed to extract from their famous lovers. Cora Pearl (1836-1886), for instance, one of the most famous courtesans in Paris during the reign of Napoleon III, managed to pull millions of francs out of her lovers and even built herself a mansion, which during the Franco-Prussian War was turned into a hospital treating wounded French soldiers.
The Lavish Brothels of the City of Light
The working girls could be found not only in dark alleys, at balls and in mansions, but also in brothels, some of them extraordinarily lavish. One of the most famous brothels was called le Chabanais, named after the street where it operated between 1878 and 1946. It was one of the most magnificent brothels of its time, with every room built in a different style (for example, a Japanese-style room, or an Arabian-style room that Guy de Maupassant (1850-1893) loved so much he decided to build a copy of it in his own seaside house). From its opening until its closing, the place drew the crème de la crème of Europe, and its most famous guest was the Prince of Wales, later King Edward VII (reigned 1901-1910). The Prince of Wales, who even in his younger years was no lightweight, went so far as to invent a special chair that let him give and receive oral sex with two women at once without having to exert himself (a replica of this chair was on display at the Musée de l’Érotisme in Pigalle, which closed in 2016). The more lavish brothels, and the less lavish ones alike, were shut down by the French government in 1946, and the working girls moved on to work in other places (Rue Saint-Denis, for example).
Since these brothels held quite a few lavish pieces of furniture and other objects, all of it was sold off to the highest bidder at auctions held when the places closed. Which brings me to a little joke:
Madame Dupont’s daughter asked her mother for a talking parrot for her birthday. After a long search, the mother found one at a bargain shop in the center of Paris. Even though talking parrots usually sold for a high price, the seller was willing to let this one go for next to nothing. When the mother asked why it was so cheap, the seller explained that the parrot had lived in one of the fancy brothels of Paris before it closed in 1946, and as a result had picked up quite a few crude words it sometimes blurts out.
The mother, thrilled to get a talking parrot at such a price, decided to ignore the seller’s warning and take the bird home anyway. As soon as she got home and pulled the cover off the cage, the parrot started shrieking, “Old wrinkled whore!” But the woman decided to simply ignore it and hope it would pass. That afternoon the daughter came home and was delighted to discover the parrot, which greeted her with the words, “Young hussy, where have you been all this time? The clients are waiting!”
Even so, the mother and daughter decided to keep the pretty parrot in the living room and went on getting dinner ready. At seven o’clock sharp the father came home, and the moment he stepped through the door, the parrot immediately started shrieking, “Monsieur Dupont, are they coming now?!”
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