The Montmartre Investigation by Claude Izner Page A

his propensity to turn events into the plot of a novel. But it was impossible to deny that there were similarities between the circumstances of the murder and Iris’s account. The red dress, the bare feet, the slipper found by Grégoire Mercier. Now that he was on the trail it was out of the question that he should abandon it.
    â€˜Le Moulin-Rouge…Gaston…Is he a musician? Dancer? Stagehand? I’ll go there this evening. That way I won’t have provoked Tasha for nothing, and I’ll get to see the ladies show off their underwear.’
    He laughed to himself. The ardent eyes, shiny black hair and sensual mouth of Eudoxie appeared before him: the beautiful Eudoxie Allard, languorous succubus who had tried to seduce him in the offices of Le Passe-partout , where she worked as a typist. Hadn’t she given up journalism to become a dancer? He vaguely recalled Isidore Gouvier saying of her: ‘She’s been taken on by Zidler at Le Moulin-Rouge to kick up her pins.’
    â€˜Let’s see, what did he say her stage name was? PhiPhi?…No…Fifi…Fifi…Fifi Bas-Rhin!’
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    Victor climbed out of the cab and stood still for a moment, mesmerised by the incessant movement of the red sails. Drawn to this flame of variegated colour, a crowd of revellers filled Boulevard de Clichy, where two years previously a Catalan named Joseph Oller and a former butcher, Charles Zidler, had built a sumptuous music hall on Place Blanche, aimed at dethroning the Élysée-Montmartre. It was an instant success, thanks to its principal attraction, the cancan, revived from its heyday in the 1830s. Now the lewd dance, which had been only accessible to habitués of the clubs and dives of Pigalle, was available to the bourgeoisie and aristocracy of Paris.
    Beautiful women escorted by men in evening dress, errand girls flanked by lovers, their caps pushed back on their heads; all had come to bask in the glow of the tawdry windmill that ground out nothing but jigs, polkas and waltzes at a time when the real mills on the heights were in their death throes.
    Victor paid his two francs. Passing through a lobby decorated with paintings, posters and photographs, he was surprised by the size of the interior; it resembled a station concourse furnished with tables and chairs surrounding a dance floor occupied until the start of the show by couples whirling around to the syncopated music. Charles Zidler, a shrewd innovator, had taken care to provide his clientele with an extravagant experience, a temple of pleasure designed by the illustrator Adolphe Willette. High up on a wooden balcony, supported on pillars ornamented with banners, was an orchestra of forty musicians. The vibrantly coloured décor was starkly lit by gas footlights, chandeliers and electric globes and was reflected in a wall covered with mirrors; the effect was oriental in flavour.
    Victor tried to reach the bar, knocking into Englishmen in knickerbockers and tweed deerstalkers, and making way for demi-mondaines , genteel in their pallor and their slenderness, and showing off the latest dresses from Worth.
    â€˜Hello, handsome, what will you drink?’ asked the waitress, a comely girl with a mane of red hair.
    â€˜Nothing, I’m looking…’
    â€˜Yes, look, look, and when you’ve found what you need, let me know. Just shout out: “Sarah!”’
    He studied two enormous canvases hung behind the bar, evidently by the same artist. One showed a dancer doing the chahut before a man with a hooked nose in the midst of a crowd of people. He immediately recognised the man and woman from the poster he had spotted the night before on Boulevard Bonne-Nouvelle. The second was of a woman on a horse, prancing before a circus audience.
    â€˜You there, you’re in love but you can’t say so because you’re too lily-livered! Suppose I serve you a cocktail?’ proposed Sarah, sticking her bosom out. ‘With