THURSDAY, 27 JULY I916
Michel Corday has dinner at Maxim's
It is a beautiful, hot summer in Paris. The cafes are well patronised and the tables that cover the pavements are full. On Sundays the local trains out into the green countryside are packed with trippers. Groups of young women dressed in white swish along the streets on their bicycles. For those seeking the sea air, it is utterly impossible to find a vacant hotel room at any of the many resorts along the Atlantic coast.
Michel Corday and an acquaintance are in Maxim's, close to the Champs-Elysees, and he is once more struck by the contrast between what he sees going on and what he knows to be going on. He thinks yet again about how infinitely far away the war seems to be. The restaurant is famous for its cuisine and for its fashionable art-nouveau decor, which has made it something of a time capsule, a refuge from the present, a reminder of happier days, a promise of a future. Yes, the war is a long way away, but it is nevertheless present, although people prefer to keep quiet about the way it manifests itself here—through alcohol and sex, or perhaps more accurately, drunkenness and lust.
The restaurant is full of men in uniform, from different branches of the armed forces and of many different nationalities. There are also a few well-known faces, such as Georges Feydeau, the writer of farces, and Francois Flameng, professor and war artist, whose watercolours are to be seen in virtually every new number of the widely read magazine L'lllustration. Flameng is one of those civilians who cannot resist the gravitational pull of the military world and he has come up with his own uniform-like style of clothing: this evening he is wearing a kepi, a khaki jacket with rows of medal ribbons on the chest, and puttees. There are also women present, many of them—the majority, perhaps—are high-class prostitutes.
The quantity of alcohol consumed at Maxim's this evening is enormous. There are some pilots who are having what is called a champagne dinner and eating nothing at all. The level of drunkenness in the place is high: incidents that before the war would have led to sharp reprimands or to people looking away in embarrassed silence are now tolerated or even give rise to appreciative laughter from the other diners. Corday sees some British officers who have imbibed so much that one of them can hardly stand: the man tries to put on his uniform cap but, to the obvious delight of those sitting around him, misses his own head. Two extremely drunk men are standing at separate tables and hurling crude insults at each other across the elegantly ornamented room. No one pays any attention to them.
The business of prostitution is being conducted with virtually no attempt at concealment. If a customer wants to buy the services of a woman he simply speaks to one of the restaurant managers. Corday hears one of them respond quickly to a potential client: "Ready and at your service this evening." After which he names the price, provides an address and directions and concludes with "the hygiene requirements."
Even in France, where legalised brothels have a long history, the war has led to a massive increase in the sex industry. This, of course, is due partly to increased demand—swarms of soldiers arrive in Paris on leave every day and whores have poured in from all over the country—but also because the authorities, encouraged by the military, frequently choose to turn a blind eye to the problem. Even so, arrests for illegal prostitution have risen by 40 per cent.
There has also been a significant increase in sexually transmitted diseases.* Many of the armies routinely issue condoms to soldiers going on leave. Not that it does much good.** Surprisingly, not everyone tries to avoid infection: infected prostitutes sometimes earn more than healthy ones since they attract soldiers who want to catch a venereal infection in order to evade service at the front. The most grotesque expression of this can be seen in the trade in gonococcal pus, which soldiers buy and smear into their genitals in the hope of ending up in hospital.*** Those who are really desperate rub it into their eyes, which often results in lifelong blindness.
Even the prostitutes are doing their bit for the war. Some brothels used to take in homeless refugees and Corday believes that all the high-class whores in Maxim's this evening will have what is called "a godson." This means that, for patriotic reasons, they have "adopted" a soldier, which in turn means that when that soldier comes home on leave the prostitute in question will have sex with him free of charge.
The drunken uproar in the restaurant continues, to the accompaniment of popping corks, shouting, laughter, shrieks, yells and chinking glass. An officer in a particularly well-tailored uniform roars: "Down with civilians!"
On the same day Florence Farmborough writes in her journal about a wounded young officer whose death she has witnessed:
The terrible odour of putrefaction that accompanies that form of gangrene was harassing us desperately, but we knew that it would not be for long. Before Death came to release him, he became calmer—he was back at home, among those whom he loved. Suddenly he seized my arm and cried, "I knew that you would come! Elena, little dove, I knew that you would come! Kiss me, Elena, kiss me!" I realised that in his delirium he had mistaken me for the girl he loved. I bent and kissed his damp, hot face, and he became more tranquil. Death claimed him while he was still in a state of tranquillity.
* One of Corday's fellow diners, Georges Feydeau, would die from syphilis before the war ended.
** In the Austro-Hungarian army soldiers who became infected with an STD were punished. Attempts were made to reduce the prevalence of such diseases by the old approach—control at source. (One of the first measures the Germans introduced after taking Warsaw in August 1915 required all women involved in "professional fornication" to register and undergo medical checks.) Even so, 22 per cent of the Canadian troops in France suffered from venereal disease of some kind during 1915 and 20 per cent of the Allied soldiers who visited the French capital in the summer of 1917 became infected.
*** The same reasoning motivated a similarly disgusting trade in the coughed-up phlegm of tuberculosis sufferers.
~ From "The Beauty and the Sorrow" by Peter Englund, p. 281