A Whorehouse in Tours
L’Etoile Bleue, a bordello in the old part of Tours, isn’t what it used to be. Its ground floor dance hall, behind which soldiers, farmers, or the bourgeoisie once picked their girls through a one-way mirror, now houses the Junior Chamber of Commerce. And the apartments on the floors above are rented by two “respectable” young women, a hard-working single mother and a professional singer. Like every maison de tolerance in France (bordellos were called “maisons de tolerance” because they were officially tolerated rather than sanctioned), this place went out of business in 1946 when a new law closed all the cathouses. This forced the prostitutes who lived full-time in them—with miserable salaries and under the watchful eye of the police—into the streets. The closing of the bordellos was, in part, a symbolic gesture, for during the Occupation these establishments had been pressed into service to the Germans and had become associated with the taint of collaboration.
Inside and outside L’Etoile Bleue, architecture and memories persist. Each business day, the Junior Chamber of Commerce’s secretary nonchalantly types her communications under an erotic fresco, painted during the bordello’s prime years in the late 1930s. It shows a farm girl with hoisted skirt, pressed against a wine vat, about to be mounted from the rear. In the apartment above, the single mother says she sometimes envisions her normal-looking laundry room the way it used to be, when it served as a jail cell for misbehaving prostitutes; once she came home rather late, and as she opened the building door, an aged local standing in the street, who remembered the old days, jibed, “Bonjour, salope” (“Hey, slut”).
Jean-Paul Veyssière, Tours’ rare book purveyor, was born next door to L’Etoile Bleue just three years after its closing. He and his childhood friends got their sex education playing inside the building in front of erotic murals or leafing through the pornographic photos still left in some of the rooms. When a puritanical mayor tried to bulldoze the building, Veyssière and three others dug up ex-prostitutes, former clients, and even the son of the laundry man, who offered an historical account of being pressed into the standard client’s delousing before he was allowed to climb the stairs to deliver clean sheets. Veyssière and his preservationist colleagues organized a petition among locals that literally stopped the bulldozer at the door.
Today the building stands intact, its art-moderne-inspired facade of red and blue mosaic looking garish and disturbingly mystical on the rue du Champ de Mars. Some of the tension between the kitsch and the occult throughout this building comes from the repeated five-point-star motif on the doorway, on the iron banister, and elsewhere, suggesting hidden or forbidden codes.
Although clientele and prostitutes have been banished, evocations of past functions remain: the vivid blue-and-red doorway has a pentagonal peephole covered by a grill, through which the management could scrutinize prospective clients. Inside, the vaguely chic ballroom with its gold-and-beige mosaic floor rests undisturbed beneath the clumsy star-shaped chandelier. Its walls feature a stylish mural of a twentieth-century naked Diana cavorting ambiguously with her hounds as well as an X-rated fresco of nymphs and satyrs.
All of this pink festivity is undercut by the one-way mirror offering a view of this room from the smaller room behind it. Forethought and salesmanship were essential to the seemingly abandoned pleasures of this building. Surveillance always cast its calculating glance on the naughty pink, blue, and red decor of this palace of love.