Paris, sometime between 1897 and 1900. Since eight in the evening, the blades of the Moulin Rouge have been turning. Around half past nine, the spectators of the first turn, who have paid less, begin to leave, while inside the cancan continues to play. Perhaps it is the famous Galop infernal from Orfeo en los infiernos (1858), which makes the legs of the dancers jump at a dizzying pace, to the enjoyment of the men, who see their thighs stick out. At that time the champagne is already flying, and the cream of the Parisian bourgeoisie is carried away.
A five-foot-two man, scrawny, staggers between the tables. He is Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, the genius of Post-Impressionism and one of the most sought-after painters then swarming Montmartre. At that point in his life, his addiction to alcohol already had him completely under control. It was said that the police had to pick him up a couple of times lying on the street, semi-conscious, but he didn't care.
He never cared about criticism. Rejected by his class –he was the son of the Count of Toulouse-Lautrec-Montfa–, in Montmartre he chose to surround himself with prostitutes, dancers, paupers and also bourgeois, whom he drew doing what they did when they thought no one was there. I saw them. He painted the real world and the hypocrisy of the morality of his time.
In an aside, a reddish-faced individual watches the scene. He gets drunk on absinthe, thinking that with luck he will take a young man to his room at the Hôtel d'Alsace, the boarding house where he survives. If anyone asks him, he'll say his name is Sebastian Melmoth, but, Lautrec knows, he's Oscar Wilde.
The memory of that day in November 1895 in London is fresh, how can we forget it. Handcuffed and flanked by policemen, he was made to wait at Clapham Junction station while a mob jeered and spat at him. "Faggot!" That cry still echoed in his head. That is why in his exile in Paris he preferred to use a false name.
The friendship between these two enfants terribles was explosive. His anthological bar runs often ended with Lautrec giving the note at the Moulin. Of course, as long as he was not the owner, in which case he behaved. The one who instilled so much respect in him was the Catalan Josep Oller i Roca (1839-1922), who when he walked through his premises made everyone turn to look at him.
More than because of his elegant appearance or his exquisite forms, which at certain hours of the night would make him out of tune, because he was a legend. In addition to the Moulin, he had also devised the legendary Olympia cabaret, among other venues, as well as the mutual betting system that racetracks and casinos around the world use today.
He was close to Lautrec, and one of the few who knew that Sebastian who was drowning in rat poison in his premises was the author of The Picture of Dorian Gray (1890). Oller was rarely seen there, luckily for Lautrec, who would have been embarrassed. As the Tarrasense writer Ferran Canyameres (1898-1964) explained in a biography that he dedicated to his countryman, he was a man of character, who dared to tell her what he thought about his bad habits.
The painter, in turn, tried not to disappoint him; when he had it in front of him, of course. Once the Catalan kept him for eight days at his Marly-le-Roi farm to detoxify. It worked until some business claimed the host and Lautrec took the opportunity to escape to the town tavern. So drunk he ended up hitting the furniture, while the bartender asked for help.
It is one of the anecdotes that Canyameres gathered in José Oller and his time: The man from the Moulin Rouge (1959), where he explains how a Catalan ended up being "the Napoleon of attractions", as they called him in Paris.
He was born in 1839 in Terrassa, but when he was three years old his father moved the family to the French capital to continue his textile business there. He was successful, being able to afford his son several formative trips.
The young Josep had gone to Bilbao to study business, but once there he became more interested in the money that cockfighting moved. Back in Paris, he applied a novel system of betting that he called Pari-Mutuel to horse racing. All the participants who bet on an animal put the money in the same amount, which the winner(s) would then take in full, discounting 5% in organization expenses. It was more exciting than the games that had been offered at racetracks, since the prize was higher.
He was not quite thirty and was already making millions. So until in 1870 he had to leave the city due to the outbreak of the Franco-Prussian War (1870-1871). The fall of the Second French Empire harmed him more than the war: the new republican authorities considered that his enterprise was illegal and sentenced him to fifteen days' arrest in 1874.
Then he knew how to read the signs of the times and invest the money he had left in show business, which was booming. The end of hostilities with the German Empire had brought peace to Europe – precarious, but peace at last – and the Second Industrial Revolution, a renewed hope in technological advances as benefactors of humanity.
It was a period of progress and true cultural change, which after the First World War nostalgics would call the Belle Époque. What before was only for the aristocracy, now had been extended to everyone: the growing bourgeoisie and the proletarian masses also demanded spaces for fun and entertainment.
When he announced that he was opening the Moulin Rouge, the night before the opening of the Universal Exhibition in Paris in 1889, the expectation was maximum: if it was Oller's, it had to be good. He was designed so that people could drink, dance and socialize during the performances, which promised everything that was taboo in other places, both political and sexual. Also the burlesque, embodied in characters like Le Pétomane, who amused and disturbed in equal measure with his ability to play the piccolo or blow out candles with farts.
It was a room tailored to Montmartre, a neighborhood that, due to its low prices and the motley of its neighbors, had attracted young talents and nonconformist artists. From the Post-Impressionists, who preferred prostitutes to landscapes, to the realists, highly criticized by the academy for daring to paint poverty as stark as it was in reality.
The Catalan met Lautrec when he asked him to make the advertising posters for him. The one he drew the most times was the dancer La Goulue, his favorite muse. Despite having been “the queen of Montmartre”, when she died in 1929 she was obese, toothless and drunk, and she lived by selling cigarettes on a corner near the Moulin.
The painter did not have time to deteriorate so much. He died at the age of 36 between fits of madness caused by syphilis and alcohol. A very different ending to that of Oller, who in 1922 left rich and peaceful – although saddened by the early loss of his dear Carmen Coello, his wife – from him in his house on Avenue Carnot.
Those Lautrec posters, which today are museum pieces, and the canvases that he dedicated to the night, remained for history. In the Musée d'Orsay there is one that is not one of the most famous, but in which he sneaked a friend without permission who never allowed himself to be photographed. Watching La Goulue dance, there is Oscar Wilde.
