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boasted: “God created the world, Napoleon founded the Legion of Honor, and I invented Montmartre.” 12 Solis opened Le Chat Noir in 1881; it was a cabaret that would forever influence entertainment in Paris. The waiters were dressed like members of the prestigious Académie française, with the headwaiter wearing the colorful uniform of the papal Swiss guards. The interior was decorated in the style of Louis XIII, with ornate, voluptuous lines and colors. Its entertainment ranged from ombres chinoises (Chinese shadow puppets) to barbed political humor and songs that commented on follies and scandals in the news. Avant-garde composer Erik Satie often accompanied singers on the piano, and another composer, Claude Debussy, was a regular patron. Stand-up comedians told dirty jokes and threw insults at members of the audience, bringing roars of approval. One performer whose act was so vulgar as to be beyond taste was Pétomane, the world’s greatest farter, whose poster proudly proclaimed: “the only performer who doesn’t pay composers’ royalties.” 13 Though Le Chat Noir had closed in 1897, its spirit and influence lived on through the Belle Époque, inspiring other entertainment venues throughout Montmartre.

Another option was the café-concert, a kind of music hall or nightclub. A contemporary described the raucous atmosphere:

In all of these halls, singing, dancing, and often shameless dramatic performances are given these days in front of princes, wealthy loafers, fashionable ladies, and those who act as if they were. This type of entertainment… manifests above all, a desire for uninhibitedness, spectacle, and debasement that is peculiar to our times. However low the [more formal type of] theater may have sunk, however little it demands from its audience in terms of behavior and intellectual effort, it still makes certain demands. One may not smoke or keep one’s hat on there; moreover, one has to understand the play, or at least seem to understand it, and even the actors do not say or mime everything. In the café-concert, on the other hand, there are none of these limits! One smokes, drinks, comes and goes as one pleases, while watching highly suggestive acts and listening to incredibly risqué jokes. The café-concert is the paradise of libertinism and the more determined bad taste. On top of this the prices are low and the incitement of all the senses is practically free. For a few sous one gets everything that refreshes as well as excites. How then could one avoid coming here to still, or seem to still, the freely admitted or secret desire for dissolute excess that currently plagues the peuple as much as good society? 14

Montmartre became well known as a place where people went to abandon their inhibitions. At Le Rat Mort in place Pigalle, for example, women dressed in men’s clothing and danced with one another. Guides to the city, such as one written in 1913 by the English man Frankfort Sommerville, raved about the area Parisians nicknamed the Butte. “Montmartre,” he declared, “is the dwelling-place of the most curious collection of poets, painters, sculptors, bar-keepers, vagabonds, girls of the street, models, apaches, scoundrels in the world — the most gifted and the most degraded (and there is not always a very sharp line dividing them). Montmartre is just as remarkable a mixture of gaiety, strenuous work, poetry and mockery, artistic sense and irreligion.” 15

To outsiders, perhaps the best-known spot in Montmartre was the Moulin Rouge, which opened in October 1889 to take advantage of the Paris World’s Fair of that year. Its moving windmill sails (and later, flashing electric lights) served as a beacon to attract visitors to its shows — revues and popular musical plays as well as dance routines. (One observer commented that the cabaret’s “sails never ground anything but the customers’ money.” 16 ) The Moulin Rouge was renowned for its professional female dancers performing the then-risqué cancan, and the first time Picasso visited Paris, he went there, as did many other tourists. Posters and paintings of the entertainers