Crimes of Paris_ A True Story of Murder, Theft, and Detection - Dorothy Hoobler [18]
Oscar Méténier, a former secretary to the police commissioner of Paris, was the theater’s founder and the author of some of its skits. Oscar knew what he was writing about because he often walked through the city’s red-light areas and criminal dens searching for material. The other star was the playwright André de Lourde, called the Prince of Terror, whose works generally broke any boundaries of taste and decency. The son of a doctor, de Lourde had from an early age listened to the sounds of suffering from his father’s patients. He had also developed a morbid fear of death, which his father tried unsuccessfully to cure by making him sit vigil over his dead grandmother’s body the night before she was buried.
De Lourde used these childhood experiences to good effect by frightening others with his plays. His goal was to create something like a dream of Edgar Allan Poe, a man he admired, “to write a play so terrifying and unbearable that several minutes after the curtain rises, the entire audience would flee from the theatre en masse.” De Lourde called his works “slices of death.” 47
The Grand-Guignol shared with the avant-garde artists a desire to break through barriers to express humankind’s deepest fears and emotions. The size of the theater broke down the separation between the performers and the audience. All the tricks of the trade were used to heighten the horror for its own sake and induce a reaction from the audience — to shock people out of their conventional thinking. Success was measured by the number of audience members who fainted or threw up. The advertising for the show noted that there was always a doctor in attendance. Increasing the opportunity for stimulation, the bar at the theater served a special drink called Mariani wine, which contained, among other things, cocaine.
The theater’s intention to shock the middle class, épater les bourgeois, made it popular with the intelligentsia, but it also attracted people from the working-class neighborhood in which it was located, slumming aristocrats, and tourists from all over the world. There were enough guignolers, regular customers, to guarantee that the performances were always sold out. They came not just expecting sex and violence, but also secure in the knowledge that the “good guys” would never win. Not all the sex was on the stage. Boxes in the back of the theater covered with latticework were trysting places, and janitors had to hose them out after performances. It was a place of taboo and transformation.
Agnes Peirron, an expert on this form of entertainment, has written, “What carried the Grand-Guignol to its highest level were the boundaries and thresholds it crossed: the states of consciousness altered by drugs or hypnosis. Loss of consciousness, loss of control, panic: themes with which the theater’s audience could easily identify. When the Grand-Guignol playwrights expressed an interest in the guillotine, what fascinated them most were the last convulsions played out on the decapitated face. What if the head continued to think without the body? The passing from one state to another was the crux of the genre.” 48
In literature as well as in the theater, Parisians were fascinated with evil for its own sake. The French literary tradition is studded with celebrants of the dark side of humanity: François Villon, the Marquis de Sade, Arthur Rimbaud, Paul Verlaine, Charles Baudelaire. This preoccupation with evil also made itself felt in literature for mass consumption: in 1911 the most popular literary character in France was a criminal. Fantômas was the “hero” of a best-selling series of novels that sold as fast as their two authors could turn