There was a fear of depopulation that struck at the core of the French nation, especially following the humiliating defeat of the Franco-Prussian War [1871]. Medical and social institutions began to regulate prostitutes through health inspections and to register and restrict them to the so-called maisons de tolerance. [...]
The use of the word Montmartroise to describe a woman who inhabited this neighborhood was an extension of the practice of applying place names to French citizens from various regions [...]. Montmarte was not a region but the red-light district of Paris. Appropriately, the magazine La Vie Parisienne described the Montmartroise as cunning, possessing loose morals, and attractive in an unusual way. She was said to be "more parisienne than the Parisienne."
"Voila le plaisir," an illustration by Karl Happel [...] published in the journal Le Chat Noir (1894), depicts the most common role of the Montmartroise. In this illustration, a woman announces herself as "pleasure," and the presence of a black cat signals that the pleasure is sexual. As the official organ associated with Rodolphe Salis's cabaret by the same name, this magazine pertained to life in Montmarte [...].
For [a] cover of Le Courier Francais (1898), Willette drew a bare-breasted performer whose dress seems to spin a spider's web [...]. In the background, Father Time sits transfixed, his feet sprouting mushrooms. The sand has run out of his hourglass. The suggestion here is that the Montmarte performers ensnared their audiences, causing time to stand still.
Willette took this theme of Montmarte pleasures and vices even further in his stained glass window for the Chat Noir. The design for the window [...] features a woman holding a black cat (signifying sexual pleasure) over her head [...]. The full moon in the background indicates not only the hours when the cabaret did most of its business, but also suggests that the woman is the priestess [...].
The woman's dress is covered not with fleurs-de-lys, but with beetles, associated with death since they feed on carrion.
Sahib (pseudonym of Louis-Ernest Lesage, 1847-1919) refers to the window in his illustrations depicting the cabaret Chat Noir, including one for La Vie Parisienne (1887). This demonstrates the importance of Willette's image in identifying the nature of the cabaret.
The black cat and the occult associations came to be incorporated in all future references to the cabaret. [...]
Henri Dumont, the artist of the poster "Tous les soirs aux Ambassadeurs, Yvette Guilbert" (c. 1890), shows the singer emanating, like a genie from a bottle, from the tail of the black cat [...]. The Chat Noir transcended its physical domain in many ways. [...] An illustration by Henri Riverie shows that the realm of the cabaret environment literally spilled out into the streets. The street provided a direct expression [...] through the presence of prostitutes. [...] [Prostitutes] were linked to the conditions of modernity in several articles and poems published in Le Chat Noir. While prostitution itself was not new, the attitude of the prostitute had changed. For instance, Jean Lorrain contributed the following verse:
"Modernity, Modernity! / The brazenness of sluts / Despite the boos and tut-tuts / Gleams brightly through eternity."
All text above by: Elizabeth K. Menon, Evil by Design: The Creation and Marketing of the Femme Fatale (University of Illinois Press, 2006). [Bold emphasis and some paragraph breaks/contractions added by me for accessibility. Presented here for commentary, teaching, criticism.]
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