Off a disheveled street whose questionable past seeps into its dingy present, a garish eruption from a buried era awaits the wary visitor, reports The New York Times.
Vivid greens, blues and browns on a long painted ceramic frieze mingle with one another, but above all with flesh: flesh depicted in pinks, creams, and off-whites; flesh uncovered or uncovering; flesh flayed or fanned; flesh bestriding more flesh; flesh swaying, sagging or swooning.
This cavalcade of undressed ladies from the early 1920s is the city’s lone emissary from the vanished and once-thriving universe of the Parisian bordello. They are ironic, determined, weary, languorous, gazing out from half-closed eyes, unsubmissive.
The frieze at Aux Belles Poules – The Beautiful Hens – as the brothel at 32 Rue Blondel was called, is a unique survivor, protected by indifference, crude wooden boards, a Chinese emporium, a busy wholesale clothing business, and finally, in 1997, grudging admission to the adjunct historic monuments list.
Now, for the first time in nearly 70 years, the painted ladies at Aux Belles Poules are making a triumphant reappearance.
Caroline Senot, who inherited the property, is bringing the place back to life, though not in its original form. She intends to use the old brothel as an events space for readings, receptions and parties, enticing customers with the women in the frieze and offering a window into an unrecoverable past.
“We’re absolutely not about apologizing for the exploitation of women,” she said as the women gazed down at her. “There’s this historic past that I’m fighting for.”
Of the 200-odd Paris brothels – licensed and inspected, luxurious and low down – flourishing by the mid-1930s, Aux Belles Poules is all that is left from an era when a prosperous sex business was well integrated into the life of Paris.
It was a middling establishment by the standards of a time when the Chabanais’s ornate Moorish Room competed with the One-Two-Two’s Ducal Room, for 30 francs a pass.
The basements of the fanciest had faux torture rooms equipped with whips and chains. There was even a special police unit whose business was to make sure the brothel-keepers kept their establishments clean and stocked with condoms and rubbing alcohol.
Ms. Senot’s father ran a sober computer-network maintenance business from the ex-brothel’s big ground floor room, where many years before the elaborate “tableaux vivants” – or living pictures – amused ogling customers. A finely wrought Art Deco staircase, discreetly tucked in the back, led to the small upstairs rooms for clients.
The frieze, demurely covered with boards, awaited its deliverance, while Ms. Senot’s father dispatched computer technicians all over Paris.
The family knew of the building’s sultry past, all the more so because Aux Belles Poules’ spiritual descendants continued to exercise their trade up and down the Rue Blondel, in central Paris near the Porte Saint-Denis.
One day in 2014, with her father retiring and Ms. Senot wondering what came next, they decided to take the boards down.
“It was like opening a Christmas present,” Ms. Senot said. “I was just jumping about everywhere. My jaw was, like, dropping. Every time a board came down, I said, ‘It’s not possible.’”
The frieze bore the stigmata of years of disrespect. Pipes had been bored into it, and there were holes, nicks and cracks everywhere. It was a mess. Finally, this summer, Ms. Senot hired a team of sisters, experts at restoring painted ceramics, who have toiled diligently to make the ladies and their companions whole again.