A Decadent Night in Paris With Georges Barbier - A Booktryst Golden Oldie

by Stephen J. Gertz

BARBIER, Georges. Le Grand Décolletage.
Le Bonheur du Jour, ou les grâces à la mode.
Paris: Chez Meynial, 1924

This past Saturday, alone and at loose ends, I called Lisette. She was, as ever, loose, so we made plans for the evening, a night on the town in Paris and pleasure.

I stopped by to pick her up. An hour later, she was still involved with her Grand Turning, transforming herself into a siren and I was duly alarmed. I just stood there, in awe. All I could think was, Aw, if there is a God, I’m under that dress by midnight..

BARBIER, Georges. La gourmandise.
Falbalas et Fanfreluches
Paris: Chez Meynial,1925

We stopped to sup. We had the soup. There was a fly in it. Performing a languid tarantella, as our waiter informed us when we asked what it was doing there, the fly, apparently, in the midst of an inter-insect identity crisis. Afterward, Jocelyn, Lisette’s special friend, stopped at our table to say hello and comment upon Lisette’s gown, which she had, at the last minute before leaving home, put on instead of the wearable, floral patterned yurt I’d planned on being inside of under cover of darkness and Lisette.

She asked about our meal. “It was fly,” we said, “super-fly.”

“And so are you, Lisette,” Jocelyn said. I looked into Lisette’s  eyes and saw what Jocelyn was talking about, a thousand tiny lenses looking back at me as if I was a granule of refined sugar. Sweet night ahead!

We asked Jocelyn to join us; we desperately wanted to stick together. But Jocelyn insisted that we remain single so that the three of us could continue into the evening without her feeling like a third wheel.

BARBIER, Georges. La Danse.
Modes et manièrs d'aujourd'hui
Paris: Maquet, 1914.

We wheeled over to Danse Macabre, the popular night-spot. A troglodyte manned the velvet rope. He refused us entry but I slipped him a mickey and he let us in before losing consciousness. “Always tip the bouncer,” I told the ladies as his head bounced on the sidewalk. We breezed in.

Lisette excused herself, and when she returned she was wearing yet another gown. I, during the interim, grew a mustache and put some eye shadow on. While Lisette and I  danced, Jocelyn drank the joy-juice flowing from the Chinese God’s phallic fountain into her champagne coupe full of cherries. Jubilee, my friend, a real jubilee it was.

You know me, Al. We danced until the cows came home. When they arrived it became too crowded  so we ditched the bovine for divine and further delights.

BARBIER, Georges. Le goût des laques (Taste of Lacquers).
Le Bonheur du Jour, ou les grâces à la mode.
Paris: Chez Maynal, 1924

Don’t ask me why but Lisette and Jocelyn had a  yen for a taste of lacquers so we stopped at a lacquer store, picked up a bottle and settled in a Japanese park comprised of a few vivid screen panels, just off the Champs-Élysée. They - once again! - changed their clothes, and the two of them huffed lacquer fumes while I stood aside and watched them get giddily shellacked. Jocelyn wandered off, we knew not where, led by the hallucinations she was now following in a trance.

BARBIER, Georges. Le Soir.
Falbalas et Fanfreluches
Paris: Chez Meynial,1926

“If you promise not to change your gown again I’ll take you to a palace of infernal pleasures,” I begged Lisette, now garbed as a goddess.

BARBIER, Georges. Oui!
Falbalas et Fanfreluches
Paris: Chez Meynial, 1921

“Oui!” she replied, but not before changing her outfit once more. I swear, she had a walk-in closet in her purse. She wasn’t a clothes horse; she was a clothes whale and craved fresh clothing, a lot of it, as if it were krill. A moment later, two birds shat on my spats. Auspicious omen! Time to evacuate and get this party started. So we both used the bathroom and then went on our way. Pops Marchande was waiting for us.

BARBIER, Georges. La Paresse (Laziness)
Falbalas et Fanfreluches.
Paris: Chez Meynial,1925

You know me, Al, most parties I wind up checking out the books in the library. So, I go into the library and, yikes!, there’s Lisette draped over pillows on the floor, to all appearances in a state of post-coital bliss,  lazily smoking a cigarette as if she had been doing it all her life instead of starting just fifteen minutes before when she donned a smoking pantsuit and was inspired by it to begin, despite the Surgeon-General's warning medallion on the front of the garment. Jocelyn, who had, apparently, followed her favorite hallucination, was at her side, spent, and lost in ecstatic reverie. 

That being the reason we attended Pops Marchande’s party in the first place, the three of us glided into the den.

BARBIER, Georges. Chez la Marchande de Pavols (House of the Poppy Merchant).
Le Bonheur du Jour, ou les grâces à la mode.
Paris: Chez Meynial, 1924

There was Pops Marchande, holding an opium tray and pipe, awaiting us. And sprawled on the floor and across pillows were five women in dishabille, each a dish and highly dishable. You know me, Al. When I bang the gong, I’m gone. What happened next, I have no idea. But I have a vague recollection of a bunch of women in the throes of opium-soaked rut, running their tongues all over me and each other, kisses from all directions on all parts, caresses that began and never stopped, and the sense that we were all drifting upon a cloud of silk that soothed as we floated upon a zephyr.

It was nice to see Lisette without any clothes on for a change. While it lasted.
 

BARBIER, Georges. Au Revoir.
Le Bonheur du Jour, ou les grâces à la mode.
Paris: Chez Meynial, 1924

Dawn broke and it was time for us to get dressed and leave.  Lisette, Jocelyn, and I said our goodbyes, and Ho Chi Minh, an Indo-Chinese dishwasher in Paris and part-time chauffeur working for Pops Marchande, drove the two of us back home.

BARBIER, Georges. Voici des ailes! (Here are my wings!).
Falbalas et Fanfreluches
Paris: Chez Meynial, 1925

We were both still rather dreamy from opium. It was a nightmare for me, however, when gum-on-my-shoe Jocelyn appeared out of nowhere; there was no scraping this woman off. "Here are my wings," the flapper said to Lisette, who had not only changed into yet another gown but had dyed her hair blonde before bedtime.

You know me, Al. I'll fight any joe who tries to horn in on my jane. But this Jocelyn! Geesh! She had bewitched Lisette and there was nothing I could do about it. They flew into the bedroom, the winged-spider carrying her prey aloft. The fly in the soup at supper tried to warn me but I wasn't listening...

I slept on the couch.

Gay Paree. Don't ask, don't tell. You didn't, I did. Sorry.

I'm joining the Foreign Legion.

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Apologies to Georges Barbier and Ring Lardner.

Booktryst  revisits Georges Barbier and his exquisite illustrations in pochoir in In Paris with Scott, Zelda, Kiki, Ernest, Gertrude, Etc., and Georges Barbier.
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Originally appeared November 15, 2010.
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In Paris With Scott, Zelda, Kiki, Ernest, Gertrude, Etc., and Georges Barbier

by Stephen J. Gertz

"All gods dead, all wars fought, all faith in man shaken," I  said to Zelda. The novel was killing me. I didn't know where to begin, what it was about, nothing, and needed  madness to fan my flaming youth and fuel the typewriter. So we went to the Artists and Models Ball. It was the Jazz Age. Laissez les bons temps rouler.

Kiki looked ravishing in a gown that Man Ray spent the entire evening underneath, ravishing Kiki from within what he called “my darkroom of delights,” where, he boasted, interesting things always developed. When the lights were low, you could see its red light faintly aglow; she was a walking brothel. Zelda and I were pleased that Kiki resisted his entreaties to wear the violin ensemble; he would have fiddled with her f-holes all night. Man is a shameless satyr. Would it kill him to engage the f-stop every now and then?

"How's the book going," he asked from within.

"Not so great."

I ran into Gertrude Stein. Her gown was a huge thing; you could have hidden a rhinoceros in it. But considering that a rhinoceros was already occupying the premises, it was a moot point. Yet it did have the slenderizing effect she was after; Gertrude was a svelte calf and cut quite a figure.

Gertrude was Gertrude was Gertrude, though she’d deck me if she knew I referred to her in the past tense; she’s got a right like Dempsey. She’s very much into the present, tense if she doesn’t like it and can’t return it for cash or credit. Alice was at home baking who knows what, and Stein was all by herself, doing a whole lot of nothing. “Gert, what gives?” I asked.

“It takes a lot of time to be a genius,” she said, “you have to sit around so much doing nothing, really doing nothing.”

“But, Gertrude,” I replied, “if you’re doing nothing by definition you’re doing something. Doing is action.”

“Don’t start up with me, Scotty. I’ll pop you this side of paradise to the other side of hell.”

She apologized immediately for the threat, asked how the book was going ("Lousy"), and offered me an Alice brownie.

"No, thanks," I said, "I prefer my snacks 90-proof."

Thus inspired, I stopped at the bar, had a few snacks, and then casually went looking for Ernest. Couldn't find him.

Saw Natalie Barney. She was in page boy drag, coming on to every woman in the room.

"I am a page of love, sent by Sappho," she said to each one. I've heard worse opening lines. She's been using this routine since 1899 when she threw herself at Liane de Pougy. It's getting old.

When Natalie pitched the line to Zelda, she replied "And I'm the King of Sparta, sent by Alcibiades."

Natalie was taken aback by Zelda's impertinence, which she found so charming that she was taken on her back, right there, by Renée Vivian, whose poetry Natalie knew by heart: the curve of her buttocks, the contour of her hips, the crease of her furrow. Natalie was always forthcoming about her sexuality but preferred coming first; so competitive.

Afterward, Renée said, "I do not belong here. Who will bring me hemlock with their own hands."  The life of the party.

Zelda and I excused ourselves and went looking for Ernest in earnest. I searched all over but for the life of me could not find him. The problem was that Ernest was not Ernest. Or. rather, that Ernest was earnestly trying to find the real Ernest.

Apparently, he did. We finally caught up with him, as he, I guess, caught up with himself, and I never saw him so radiant. He really looked divine, the diaphanous top  of his extraordinary gown highlighting his pecs. It did prove difficult, however, when he left to spar a few rounds on the balcony with an extremely reluctant Ezra Pound, whose stock demurral, “Canto, boy-o,” Ernest repeatedly ignored. His frock got the worst of it; organza wrinkles easily and chiffon is so delicate. It was sheer travesty. Particularly as Ernest had the weight advantage over Pound.

"I'm not going to get in the ring with Tolstoy," Ernest said.

Sure, Tolstoy was dead. Yet he still had an excellent chance against Ernest, who always overestimated his prowess as a boxer.

I asked him, What's with the hat?

Turns out, he'd been assiduously avoiding Gertrude, with whom he'd had a major falling out, and figured the hat would mask his identity, the gown, apparently, too subtle a charade. I'm probably the only one who knows the truth: He insisted that they spar and she kicked his ass; he couldn't fight his way out of a wet paper bag. Having a woman clean his clock was too much to bear, his clockworks got all bent out of shape, and he never gave her the time of day again.

"Any progress with the book?" he asked, already aware. I didn't bother answering; the schadenfreude was palpable.

"First you take a drink, then the drink takes a drink, then the drink takes  you," I thought to myself while Zelda was in the ladies room having a transient breakdown. The drink took me over to the bar; it was lonely and wanted companionship. I obliged.

 

Gerald and Sara Murphy paraded by. Sara, a statuesque beauty, led the way, with Gerry as her worshipful  attendant. He was protecting her from the glare of dim light with a parasol from which hung, at first glance, sausages but on closer inspection were actually penises. G & S are the soul of decadent modernity, Paris' favorite fun couple. They have a flexible marriage; he bends to her will, she stretches his tolerance.

"Interesting umbrella," I said to Sara.

"And when there's a gentle breeze," she replied, "it's a heavenly wind chime."

O-kay... I mentally scratched her off my to-do list.

A moment later, a woman began a flamenco baile, danced right up to me, stopped, gave me the  once-over, said, "The night is a skin pulled over the head of day that the day may be in torment," handed me a flower, and danced away. "Lighten up, Djuna," I called after her but she was already halfway across the ballroom. My troubled manuscript came to mind. I felt the night pull over my head. Time for another snack, a double double.

"How's the book coming along," someone behind me asked. I turned, and, my God,  it was James Joyce, indescribable in an outfit more out there than his prose. "It is you, Scott, isn't it? Without my fookin' glasses I can't see a fookin' thing."

"Jimmy, all good writing is swimming under water and holding your breath," I said. "And I'm drowning."

"A corpse is meat gone bad. Well and what's cheese? Corpse of milk," he said, obliquely, but I  understood, acutely. What's a blocked novel? Corpse of writer.

"I'm ready to put a gun to my head," I lamented.

He leaned in, squinted at me, hard, and said, "I can help.  I've got a gat. It's a hell of a gat, one big giant gat, it's a rich gat, a fat gat, an enigma gat, a gat in a hat and spats, a gat to end all gats.  This gat's be great."

Suddenly, a green light beckoned from across the bay. Two giant blue eyes, faceless, behind a pair of yellowed glasses, winked at me from above a valley of ashes while in the west an egg set as the moon. The drinks had finally kicked in. I felt serene.

Yes,  I  can  write  this  novel, I  thought. I   retrieved  Zelda   from  the   ladies  room,  we  said  our goodbyes, and staggered out into the night. It was tender.

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Apologies to Georges Barbier and F. Scott Fitzgerald.
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All images from Georges Barbier's Vingt-Cinq Costumes pour Le Theatre, Paris: Chez Camille Bloch & Jules Meynial, 1927, and are courtesy of Eric Chaim Kline, Bookseller.
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If you enjoyed this bagatelle you may also be entertained by A Decadent Night in Paris With Georges Barbier.

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A Decadent Night in Paris With Georges Barbier

by Stephen J. Gertz

BARBIER, Georges. Le Grand Décolletage.
Le Bonheur du Jour, ou les grâces à la mode.
Paris: Chez Meynial, 1924

This past Saturday, alone and at loose ends, I called Lisette. She was, as ever, loose, so we made plans for the evening, a night on the town in Paris and pleasure.

I stopped by to pick her up. An hour later, she was still involved with her Grand Turning, transforming herself into a siren and I was duly alarmed. I just stood there, in awe. All I could think was, Aw, if there is a God, I’m under that dress by midnight..

BARBIER, Georges. La gourmandise.
Falbalas et Fanfreluches
Paris: Chez Meynial,1925

We stopped to sup. We had the soup. There was a fly in it. Performing a languid tarantella, as our waiter informed us after we asked what it was doing there, the fly, apparently, was in the midst of an inter-insect identity crisis. Afterward, Jocelyn, Lisette’s special friend, stopped at our table to say hello and comment upon Lisette’s gown, which she had, at the last minute before leaving home, put on instead of the wearable, floral patterned yurt I’d planned on being inside of under cover of darkness and Lisette.

She asked about our meal. “It was fly,” we said, “super-fly.”

“And so are you, Lisette,” Jocelyn said. I looked into Lisette’s  eyes and saw what Jocelyn was talking about, a thousand tiny lenses looking back at me as if I was a granule of refined sugar. Sweet night ahead!

We asked Jocelyn to join us; we desperately wanted to stick together. But Jocelyn insisted that we remain single so that the three of us could continue into the evening without her feeling like a third wheel.

BARBIER, Georges. La Danse.
Modes et manièrs d'aujourd'hui
Paris: Maquet, 1914.

We wheeled over to Danse Macabre, the popular night-spot. A troglodyte manned the velvet rope. He refused us entry but I slipped him a mickey and he let us in before losing consciousness. “Always tip the bouncer,” I told the ladies as his head bounced on the sidewalk. We breezed in.

Lisette excused herself, and when she returned she was wearing yet another gown. I, during the interim, grew a mustache and put some eye shadow on. While Lisette and I  danced, Jocelyn drank the joy-juice flowing from the Chinese God’s phallic fountain into her champagne coupe full of cherries. Jubilee, my friend, a real jubilee it was.

You know me, Al. We danced until the cows came home. When they arrived it became too crowded  so we ditched the bovine for divine and further delights.

BARBIER, Georges. Le goût des laques (Taste of Lacquers).
Le Bonheur du Jour, ou les grâces à la mode.
Paris: Chez Maynal, 1924

Don’t ask me why but Lisette and Jocelyn had a  yen for a taste of lacquers so we stopped at a lacquer store, picked up a bottle and settled in a Japanese park comprised of a few vivid screen panels, just off the Champs-Élysée. They - once again! - changed their clothes, and the two of them huffed lacquer fumes while I stood aside and watched them get giddily shellacked. Jocelyn wandered off, we knew not where, led by the hallucinations she was now following in a trance.

BARBIER, Georges. Le Soir.
Falbalas et Fanfreluches
Paris: Chez Meynial,1926

“If you promise not to change your gown again I’ll take you to a palace of infernal pleasures,” I begged Lisette, now garbed as a goddess.

BARBIER, Georges. Oui!
Falbalas et Fanfreluches
Paris: Chez Meynial, 1921

“Oui!” she replied, but not before changing her outfit once more. I swear, she had a walk-in closet in her purse. She wasn’t a clothes horse; she was a clothes whale and craved fresh clothing, a lot of it, as if it were krill. A moment later, two birds shat on my spats. Auspicious omen! Time to evacuate and get this party started. So we both used the bathroom and then went on our way. Pops Marchande was waiting for us.

BARBIER, Georges. La Paresse (Laziness)
Falbalas et Fanfreluches.
Paris: Chez Meynial,1925

You know me, Al, most parties I wind up checking out the books in the library. So, I go into the library and, yikes!, there’s Lisette draped over pillows on the floor, to all appearances in a state of post-coital bliss,  lazily smoking a cigarette as if she had been doing it all her life instead of starting just fifteen minutes before when she donned a smoking pantsuit and was inspired by it to begin, despite the Surgeon-General's warning medallion on the front of the garment. Jocelyn, who had, apparently, followed her favorite hallucination, was at her side, spent, and lost in ecstatic reverie. 

That being the reason we attended Pops Marchande’s party in the first place, the three of us glided into the den.

BARBIER, Georges. Chez la Marchande de Pavols (House of the Poppy Merchant).
Le Bonheur du Jour, ou les grâces à la mode.
Paris: Chez Meynial, 1924

There was Pops Marchande, holding an opium tray and pipe, awaiting us. And sprawled on the floor and across pillows were five women in dishabille, each a dish and highly dishable. You know me, Al. When I bang the gong, I’m gone. What happened next, I have no idea. But I have a vague recollection of a bunch of women in the throes of opium-soaked rut, running their tongues all over me and each other, kisses from all directions on all parts, caresses that began and never stopped, and the sense that we were all drifting upon a cloud of silk that soothed as we floated upon a zephyr.

It was nice to see Lisette without any clothes on for a change. While it lasted.
 

BARBIER, Georges. Au Revoir.
Le Bonheur du Jour, ou les grâces à la mode.
Paris: Chez Meynial, 1924

Dawn broke and it was time for us to get dressed and leave.  Lisette, Jocelyn, and I said our goodbyes, and Ho Chi Minh, an Indo-Chinese dishwasher in Paris and part-time chauffeur working for Pops Marchande, drove the two of us back home.

BARBIER, Georges. Voici des ailes! (Here are my wings!).
Falbalas et Fanfreluches
Paris: Chez Meynial, 1925

We were both still rather dreamy from opium. It was a nightmare for me, however, when gum-on-my-shoe Jocelyn appeared out of nowhere; there was no scraping this woman off. "Here are my wings," the flapper said to Lisette, who had not only changed into yet another gown but had dyed her hair blonde before bedtime.

You know me, Al. I'll fight any joe who tries to horn in on my jane. But this Jocelyn! Geesh! She had bewitched Lisette and there was nothing I could do about it. They flew into the bedroom, the winged-spider carrying her prey aloft. The fly in the soup at supper tried to warn me but I wasn't listening...

I slept on the couch.

Gay Paree. Don't ask, don't tell. You didn't, I did. Sorry.

I'm joining the Foreign Legion.

__________

Apologies to Georges Barbier and Ring Lardner.

Booktryst  revisits Georges Barbier and his exquisite illustrations in pochoir in In Paris with Scott, Zelda, Kiki, Ernest, Gertrude, Etc., and Georges Barbier.
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