The Devil in Montmartre
“Originally located on the Boulevard de Rochechouart, the popular cabaret had opened to promotional hoopla; a torch-bearing parade of Hydropathes costumed like Swiss Guards, led by a flamboyant mountebank, Rodolphe Salis.
Prior to opening his cabaret, Salis, an artist of modest talent, and three of his painter friends, had eked out a living by painting cheap religious paintings. Each friend contributed to the product, the Stations of the Cross, according to his specialty, drawing and painting fa...ces, bodies, draperies, or background. But in a marketplace glutted with shoddy artwork the scheme could never prove lucrative. On the other hand, Salis’s idea for a new cabaret was, like Oller and Zidler’s Moulin Rouge, a stroke of entrepreneurial genius, meeting a demand for bawdy, avant-garde entertainment in exactly the right place at the right time.
Salis based his interior design for the cabaret on a fanciful seventeenth-century tavern that might have been frequented by Cyrano de Bergerac or Dumas père’s Musketeers.MoreLess
Prior to opening his cabaret, Salis, an artist of modest talent, and three of his painter friends, had eked out a living by painting cheap religious paintings. Each friend contributed to the product, the Stations of the Cross, according to his specialty, drawing and painting fa...ces, bodies, draperies, or background. But in a marketplace glutted with shoddy artwork the scheme could never prove lucrative. On the other hand, Salis’s idea for a new cabaret was, like Oller and Zidler’s Moulin Rouge, a stroke of entrepreneurial genius, meeting a demand for bawdy, avant-garde entertainment in exactly the right place at the right time.
Salis based his interior design for the cabaret on a fanciful seventeenth-century tavern that might have been frequented by Cyrano de Bergerac or Dumas père’s Musketeers.MoreLess
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