Les Girls From La Vie Parisienne

It was said of the years between 1870 and 1929 that the world was divided into two camps: those who lived in Paris, and those who wanted to. For the few who failed to regard it as an island of sanity in an insane world, it served equally well as the reverse. It possessed for many the attraction of an artistic and intellectual mecca, drawing unto it pilgrims from all over the world who came to touch the robes and receive the blessings of its glittering pantheon of iconoclastic deities: Gauguin, Gide, Hemingway, Giraudoux, Proust, Picasso, Joyce, Pirandello, Malraux, Milhaud, Fitzgerald, Modigliani, Stein, Stieglitz, Schiaparelli. Many others, however, hearing the archetypal call of the Panpipe down the twisting alleys of Montmartre and Montparnasse, were lured into a maelstrom of mah-jongg, gin fizzes, sinuous tangos, encrimsoned mouths, art nouveau, lemon-yellow Hispano-Suizas, "casual" suicides and gigantic ribboned candy boxes. "We drank up our lives," one survivor has said, "as though through a straw." One can never hope to recapture the bittersweet flavor of that life -- today so irretrievably lost, yet still so magically seductive. But the enchanting and ephemeral vision of the time -- its light and movement, its color and mood, its texture and design -- has been caught and imprisoned, like a butterfly in amber, between the pale blue-green leaves of La Vie Parisienne -- an extraordinary publication which burst upon fin de siècle Paris like a Bastille Day fireworks display. Decade after decade -- until the Wall Street crash shattered all the blown-glass illusions of the age -- La Vie was a gilded mirror for tattle and whimsy, art and letters, farce and fashion but most of all, for six upbeat generations of frothily evanescent womankind. Wrought by the most luminous literary and artistic figures of the time -- Baudelaire, Colette, Dore, and many others, all contributing under elaborate pseudonyms -- La Vie added its own beguiling chapter to the Origin of Species. By gradual evolution, it created the conquered but unconquerable, elegantly disarrayed Parisienne -- an emancipated and gently predatory breed of ladies-who-don't-want-babies; a confection part musk, part sauce, part sugar-candy; a pneumatic child-woman with nursery tastes and bedroom eyes, permanently and charmingly arrested in the oral phase of development. She adorned its pages, habillé and déshabillé, sitting, standing, walking, sleeping, eating, bathing, preening, flittering, languishing -- caught in every mood and posture within the increasingly wide bounds of what was considered propriety -- a tantalizing and eluive ideal as sedulously emulated by women as she was pursuedby men. Even today the vision is undimmed. It is still a poignant thing to feel, filtered perhaps through a haze of sweet melancholy, something of the appetite for life with which the era -- and its giddy girls -- were so irrepressibly infused.

1870-80

In the Seventies, the girl of "La Vie" was a bulging hope chest of sachet, ribbon, lace whalebone, rosette garters, ivory cameos and lavender cologne. Petticoated, cinchwaisted, beauty-marked, full-bosomed and alabasterskinned, she was an elegant and indispensable fixture--along with marble urns, rubber plants and the day. In an epoch of social, political and artistic revolution, her world was bounded on one side by Sunday promenades in the Bois de Boulogne and on the other by languorous dalliance in her pillowed boudoir.

1890

While Toulouse-Lautrec sat drawing on tablecloths at the Moulin Rouge, the girl of the Nineties had emerged from her powderpuff chrysalis into a Freudian spring, triumphantly revealed without an encumbering stitch. Lips that had once brushed her fingertips now made an impressionmuch closer to her heart; she had cropped her hair, trimmed her figure to almost moved from the bedroom into the drawing room (leaving the door ajar). In a Paris still largely gaslit and horse-drawn, she was a fancy invention capable of smoking a cigarette, sipping medoc and discussing the Dreyfus affair, all at the same time.

1900

In the center of the stupendous Paris Exhibition of 1900 was an enormous replica of an ocean liner, complete with smoking funnels, drumming engines and rolling decks. It was an imaginary voyage to nowhere in a papiermache vessel, but it became the biggest attraction of the fair, and a kind of prophetic symbol of the coming decade. Dazzled by the glitter of an acclerating industrial revolution, the girl form "La Vie" began to barricade herself from the past, and from the encoraching spectre ofwar, with an impenetrable wall of cosmetics, telephones, gramophone records, horseless carriages, champagne cocktails, loud music and forbidden fruit.

1910

World War I, sad Giraudoux, "was born out of nothing more than the Germans' insensate desire to get to Montparnasse." As Cocteau strode its boulevards in his red necktie and hyacinth-colored army helmet, formidable divisions of Parisian cabdrivers armed with fromage and vin rouge motored tipsy draftees to the front for the glory of the tricolor and of the beloved Parisiennes they left behind, humming a Debussy tone poem and primping before the mirror.

1920

The last bugle of the Great War had been drowned bout by the hot licks of les jazzbandettes, the popping of corks, the scratching of phonograph needles, the stamping of dance marathons, the rumble of Isotta-Fraschinis--and the creaking of bedsprings. The Twenties girl--her eyelids smudged with lampblack, her lips slashed with red, her powdered limbs clinking with enormous imitation stones, her body sheathed in a trapezoidal Poiret chemise of raspberry and lime green--was a cubist apparition in a surrealistic world. Cocaine and opium were the snuff of the smart set. Maharajas in red bathing suits and Chicago multimillionaires in brown sweaters stalked the Latin Quarter side streets in search of les filles bohemiennes. Max Jacob, the monocled poet, claimed to have seen the Virgin Mary on the Metro. And then, in 1929, Diaghilev died in Venice, and his black gondola crossed the lagoons to the cemetery carrying with it not only the golden age of the Ballet Russe, but somehow also the élan vital of the age itself--leaving behind, it seemed, only a few empty champagne bottles, tattered Japanese lanterns--and imperishable demoiselles form "La Vie Parisienne"--to show that it had ever really happened at all.