The socialist journalist Jean Texcier, shocked by everything he saw in Paris, wrote a list of more than thirty suggestions for women not brave enough to resist actively yet ready to convey to the occupiers that they were not welcome without antagonizing them. For example, a shop with a sign announcing ‘Hier Spricht Man Deutsch’ was to be avoided even if it was where basic underwear had previously been bought. Go elsewhere, he urged, choose a shop where they did not speak German. Colette, too, advised in her columns that Parisian women should go out only to find food and should stay at home as much as possible. But some, such as waiters, Jews and prostitutes, were denied a real choice. On the day the Germans took control, the best-known brothel in Paris, Le Chabanais, once frequented by royalty, announced with a notice on its door: ‘The house will open at three o’clock.’ Yet in another part of town a popular brothel for German soldiers behind the Gare Saint-Lazare doubled as a place of safety for downed British airmen on their way to the free zone because ‘the Madam and her daughter are ardent supporters of de Gaulle’.
Paris was quickly dubbed the sex capital of the German Reich as more than 200 brothels, famously known as les maisons closes, remained open during the Occupation, some offering special effects or catering to unusual requirements, but all of them places of illusion where the social and moral rules of the outside world had been dropped. So deep-rooted were the legalized brothels in France that one Madam was famous for allowing First World War veterans free access on Thursdays. There was an entire specialist lingerie business called Eva Richard built around the brothels as the girls had to buy approved items of alluring underwear from the brothel-owners who made an additional profit. A handful of the most breathtakingly opulent among them – Le Magueryon, Le Sphynx, the One Two Two (at 122 Rue de Provence), as well as Le Chabanais – were reserved exclusively for German officers, although Hermann G?ring had his own favourite, Chez Marguerite at 50 Rue Saint-Georges. Luckily, the Jewish Madam at the Chabanais, Marguerite Nathan, swiftly fled to Nice, leaving the house under the control of a deputy, just before the Germans took over the city. There was even a guide specially printed for officers with detailed photographs explaining what they might expect in each and with advice on how to avoid the risk of infection. But at the other end there were some extremely rough, less hygienic houses, and plenty in between, where the girls harboured few romantic illusions. One explained: ‘I’d get there at 9 a.m. [and stay] until 2 a.m. After a hundred and seventy tricks your head is spinning around … it takes seven minutes a trick – undressing, dressing and sex included. You give the guy a glass of water, he has an erection, done.’
The brothels, nightclubs and gentlemen’s clubs all offered various kinds of entertainment important for the German sense of wellbeing. Some were even called maisons d’illusions, an acceptance that they were places where all the social and moral rules were dropped and the girls were trained to make even the guiltiest man feel cleansed. They provided such a thriving mini-economy that one young boy, a Jewish refugee from Vienna, scraped a living, unsuspected for almost two years, with false identity cards stating he was Robert Metzner from Alsace, a not uncommon ruse for those with Germanic accents.* His job was to show German soldiers the sights around the Place Pigalle, Paris’s red-light district at the foot of Montmartre.
As soon as I saw a soldier approach I’d go up to him and say, ‘Would you like me to show you a place where you’ll be very well entertained?’ All the small places wanted more customers. There were two particular cabarets – one called Paradis and the other called Yves – where we got a commission for taking German soldiers depending on whatever they consumed. It saved my life.