The band was singing and my legs swung high, my skirt flapping and my bloomers fully exposed to all in the Moulin Rouge. I danced second row right. La Goulue danced to my left and La Mome Fromage to my right in the front row. They advanced with skirts held high as I retreated, legs almost touching our audience. Below us monocled men stared upward hoping someone had forgotten her underwear. As if the owner would allow that to happen.
We rotated, each taking our turn as the focus. La Goulue had yet to guzzle a single patron’s drink when she yelled to me. “Yvette, third row left!” she said as she passed by. It became my turn to dance the cancan with my legs over the floor and men’s eyes up my skirts. I did not mind, it was life, I had pretty legs, and this is how I made my living in the early days of the Third Republic. I looked as I took my spot and displayed my bloomers. And that’s when I saw her.
Many think the Moulin Rouge was a place only for men, for the cancan was sexual and many of us used our charms to meet benefactors. But there was more to the Moulin Rouge than the cancan. There were comics and actors and music and dancers of which we were a feature. Many women attended too, dressed in their finest evening dresses and finery, hats high and decorous, dresses tight and brightly colored. And at that table was such a woman, with dark-blonde hair and intense eyes.
She wore colored silks and satins, and flashes of real jewels adorned her eyes and fingers. I am fair, leggy with long dark hair up behind my wide brimmed hat. She was pretty as any dancer. Her beauty caught my eye, but what caught La Golue’s gaze was clearly visible under the table.
A woman’s dress often had many buttons and sometimes you would unbutton the lower to allow your legs more freedom. The wealthy blonde’s skirt was almost completely undone, and though she wore lovely stockings in bright red, she had left her bloomers at home. I looked and saw her woman’s mouth, pink and moist so openly displayed, I lost the beat and almost fell. Nita had to grab me before I tripped and I danced to the back, eyes still under that table in the third row, thrilled and fascinated by her daring.
“Yvette is in lust!” said La Goulue as she danced up front, to leap on the floor and drain the wine of a patron’s drink before hopping back. “I can see you want her!”
“Yvette is smitten!” said Nini, smiling at me with a wicked grin for she knew I often lay with women. Men paid my bills, and paid well for the pleasure of my company and the squeeze of my lips around their turgid cocks. There was my real living, my legacy; what paid for the fine dresses and allowed me to walk in polite company. Men are capable of great generosity when they crave your touch. Men paid my bills and none so far were priests more interested in my soul than my pussy.
“She must be a lesbian,” I said, rotating forward. “Like Colette or that pretty American Barney.”
“You adore pussy,” said la Voluptata to my left. “I have seen that look in your eyes.”
“She is a tease!” I protested, as we danced in line, cycling around each other. Yes, I was fascinated. My expectations were zero. Expectations are a luxury only the rich enjoy.
“Tel me you don’t want her!” Nini said.
“Why not? This one does not dress like a man like the Duchess de Morny,” said La Mome Fromage as she laughed her way by.
“Well she does not have the Duchess’s ivory cock,’ said La Voluptata. “If she had, we would have seen it!”
I was well used to the admiring gaze of our customers. Their lust gave me power. Her pussy, presented so flagrantly made me feel small and yet desirable.. I used her as my focus, for it is good to find at a fixed point in the audience for your eyes during the dance. Her pussy was my point of attention. We rotated and I went to the edge, and I saw only her legs, well-formed and fit. She was not a woman who spent her life in a chair. We twirled and bowed and danced with our hands on our hips, with high kicks showing off our legs until the dance ended. She smiled at me, and then closed her dress as the cancan came to its end.
The crowd was cheering and stomping on the floor. I saw young men, smartly dressed in their caps and coats, eyeing La Goulue, and one winked at me. Perhaps he would come to me later with a wallet stuffed with francs. When I looked out in the audience the woman had gone, disappeared as mysteriously as she arrived. We went back stage and began to change into our normal clothing, my fine dress and bloomers for the cancan left to the laundress with the others. Dressed in a long skirt and hat, I took the back way down the alley then four stories up to my flat and await paying admirers,
I took some wine and poured it and stripped off my skirt, chemise and corset, ruffled out my hair and headed for the window. There were some gentlemen who knew my address, and while my rent was paid, a girl could always use a bit more. I lay face down on the bed, smoking, and staring out the window listening to the clip-clop of hooves pulling the carriages down the street.
Three times someone knocked. Company, time to play Yvette the demimondaine with ambition. I expected a man with wiine on his breath, francs in his pocket and cream in his balls. “One minute,” I said, and went to my closet to draw out a robe, in case I was mistaken. I arranged my bed and with the cigarette dangling from my lips went to the door. I slid it open to a woman’s face, the same woman who had so proudly shown off her pink pussy. Her clothes were perfectly arranged, and a sly smile on her ruby red lips.
“I heard you sometimes entertained, Yvette,” she said, pushing past me and into my room eyebrows arched as she stood and took my flat in, a small sitting room and my bed, slightly messy. “Clearly you did not expect company.”
“I was not prepared for proper lady,” I said heading into my room.
“I am not proper,” she said with a small mile and sat on my love seat, legs open but her skirt down, not fully buttoned. She removed a cigarette from her own purse and I brought her a lamp. It flared and in the flickering lamp light I saw his eyes. “I am Madame Charlotte de Picardy.”
“You were hard to miss, Madame, I said, and locked the door, peeling off my robe to lay face down on the bed, legs in the air, looking at her. “What brings you to me? I am hardly the greatest dancer of the cancan. Nor am I the only dancer who noticed you.”
“We have a mutual friend,” she said, “the Duchess DeMorny.”
“I know the Duchess well,” I said, remembering the Duchess’s bare cunt perched upon my face. Several times I had shared her company, and once or twice her female lovers as well. And I licked my lips as DeMorny's flavor came back to me.
“I am more discrete than our friend the Duchess,” she said. “Cheri. I am a married woman, and my Jacques serves in the General Assembly. I can hardly afford to dress as a man, even if I wished to.”
It was then I placed her. Jacques de Picardy was a wealthy man who raised horses and surprisingly, a firebrand for the Republicans. “I have heard of his name, a great champion of the common people.”
“For the common man, certainly,” Charlotte said, taking a long puff then blowing out three perfect rings.
Her words made me wonder. A rumor had quietly circulated that de Picardy had affairs with men. “Are you a champion for the common woman?” I shimmied a bit, and batted my eyes at her as a test. I had no money of my own, but craved a patron. To be kept by a woman seemed so much more pleasant than to be kept by a man.
“I am,” she said with a smile. “Or I would not have shown you my pussy.”
“We dancers appreciated your generosity, Madame de Picardy,” I told her. “For I am not the only dancer who found you to her taste.”
“Yet you are the one the Duchess singled out. What do you know of my husband?” she asked.
“I have heard many things, some outside his politics.”
“My Jacques is ambitious and he wishes higher office. Care to tell me which rumors you may have heard?”
I rose and went to pour us each a small glass of absinthe, rolling my hips and she watched every step. “It is said in some circles that your husband had to visit a physician after a notorious party. Supposedly he became ill from ingesting too much semen.”
“You too, have heard the rumor. His enemies spread it eagerly. My Jacques is a good man, attentive and a fine listener. He cannot seek high office with a reputation for buggery. While I am of a good family who craves the taste of painted pearl. I stand between him and rumors and he prevents rumors about me returning to my Mama.”
“Not everyone can be so free as Nathalie Barney, or the Duchess de Morny,” I said. And it was true, particularly if one sought a career in politics. A beautiful woman made the perfect partner for a handsome man with a taste for cock.
“I am not a nun, who opens my legs only for God,” she said, her eyes on my legs. “I do admire Jacques,” she added, with a smile. “But I lack the thing he craves most, and he lacks the thing I crave most, a thing you have. I am told the girls who dance the cancan are very free in their living.” She took another long draw. Her eyes were on me, dark and focused like I was the only thing in the room but her. The intensity aroused me. “I also know ladies like yourselves know the value of discretion.”
“My life is my business,” I told her. “Mine and no one else’s. I am not proud. A girl of low birth does what she must.”
“An arrangement may be possible,” she said. “I know the constraints a woman like you lives under.” She set fifty francs out on my dresser. My mouth opened at the quantity, and my pussy watered. Yes, an arrangement with Madame de Picardy was very much to my taste
Appearances matter. Even Mathilde de Morny had married a man, a man everyone knew would never share her bed. It was part of the life, the little hypocrisy that allowed formal Paris to look the other way; most of the time! I realized what she was offering. She could keep me, and in return, I would, discretely, keep her happy. The memory of her pussy, bare and offered decided the image. If I was to be demimondaine, I wanted to be her woman.
I rose, in panties and stockings and went to stand before her, my breasts bared and my nipples erect. I refilled both our drinks. “To the future,” I said before sinking into her lap.
She laughed and tapped it back. “To accommodations,” she said and tipped the glass back, drinking the strong liquor in a single gulp. I filled her glass again and turned my back, peeling off my robe and walked topless to the window. I looked out at the gaslit streets and stared into the blue light, lit by golden lamps. I could see her watching me in the mirror, her eyes fixed on my bottom.
Lit in the golden lamplight, I began to dance, hips swaying from side to side, my hands in the air, stopping only to sip the liquor. She reacted as man might, and began to undo the buttons of her dress, this time from the top, stopping only to sip and to smoke. I never turned to her, but moved from side to side taking a long drag and blowing the smoke out the window then looking back to wink at her. I flicked my cigarette out on the street as Charlotte stood and her dress fell away. Underneath she wore only fine silk stockings with garters and a red corset. Her nipples reminded me of ripe mulberries. She stubbed out her cigarette and came to me.
I took a sip and arched my back, legs subtly opening. I felt her fingernails on my right thigh and her left thumb sliding under my panties to tug them downward. “You don’t need these,” she said.
“They only get in the way,” I said through my breath, looking out into the street, hearing two men argue and a woman flirted with a different man. Her hand covered my mound, squeezed it and her fingers traced out my pussy. She stroked my sex in a slow circular motion, palm with pressure on my mound. Her nipples, hard as pebbles, pressed into my back. I pressed my bottom into her, leaning forward a bit, rolling my hips as I felt the dance of passion in my bones.
“Mathilde de Morny said you liked being fucked.”
“She did?” I moaned. “The Duchess would know,” I moaned out as Charlotte pushed two fingers up inside my pussy, I clamped down on her fingers, pushing back to meet her thrusts. Teeth scraping across the back of my neck biting me, and then licking the marks. My pussy was seeping by then, coating her hand with my need. Hips undulating. “The Duchess has a very special cock, carved from an elephant’s tusk and attached to a leather harness. Wearing it, she fucks better than any man.”
“That’s not a very high bar,” Charlotte said, twisting her fingers inside me, her other hand on my hip as her thumb caressed my hood. “Men are not the lovers they imagine themselves. Perhaps they are better with each other. Surely my husband adores their cream, as I will soon adore yours.”
I gasped a bit as the turned my head for a kiss. A soft kiss at first, no stubble, nothing but full lips and anise taste on her tongue. I thrust my tongue into her mouth, hungry for her kiss, needing it as she played with my pussy, my pussy that was alive and breathing, hungry for more and wanting everything she might give me.
I began to moan when her fingertip found my clit, a slow circling, a very slow circling. “You do that very well Madame,” I managed to moan between kisses.
She grabbed me and pulled me back and threw me upon my own bed. I fell back. She was strong for a woman, and I was in no mood to resist, she pushed me back against the headboard. “And now we dance the pas de deux,” she said and pushed my legs back to kneel between my legs and lick.
I remember that first time so well, her tongue was strong but controlled, licking up one side of my pussy but to come down the other. I remember her smile and delight, and the way her nipples stiffened, so close yet out of reach. And I remember the thrust, the way she made a cone of three fingers and pushed them up inside me while her tongue danced lightly across my pearl. I ground with each hard confident thrust, the sheer brutality of her fingers balanced by the gentility of her tongue. She moaned as she licked me, a smooth musical note of breathless pleasure as my own body bucked and my hips began to writhe in rhythm to her tongue
She fucked me hard, mercilessly. I heard myself moaning, calling her “Cheri” above the din of the streets. I held her head in place with my hands, wondering how it was that it was her sucking my pussy rather than me hers. My moans grew louder and faster and I began to pull on my open nipples and then pinch them to balance the extreme pleasure of the moment with a little pain.
I did not last long, before the juices poured from my body onto Charlotte’s eager tongue. Four times I had grand mal seizures of joy, my body bucking against her mouth and more and more released as I was overcome with ecstasy.
I lay back for a moment, my chest heaving briefly exhausted. Ripples of pleasures passed through my body like waves breaking on the beaches of Normandy. “You’re not getting off that easy,” Charlotte said, straddling me, and lowering her already sopping pussy to my lips. “Show me you deserve to be mine!”
I showed her. I licked her with patience at first, exploring the pussy held just a nudge above my mouth. Her pussy lips were thin where mine were puffy, her clit prominent and pink while mine barely visible beneath her hood. I licked slowly around her pearl, then up and down her pussy lips, rewarded by a subtle juice that coated my lips and tongue. I squeezed her ripe bottom and kneaded firm flesh as I laid stroke after lick upon her pussy and clit.
“Stick out your tongue!” she commanded. I obeyed, laying my tongue flat on my chin. She bore down on it hard, pressing her clit into my tongue and then sliding back and forth, making a slide of my tongue, only up and down like a teeter totter, her clit huge and prominent and her flavor strong and musky, I felt my pussy hunger again.
Charlotte grabbed on to the headboard with both hands and leaned over me pushing her pussy hard on my face. Her full weight was arousing, commanding and made me feel like I was only a vessel of pleasure, but this time it was good, for it was she I needed, more than anything, she whose pussy I wanted and whose cream I craved to drink.
The bed squeaked with every thrust. Her full breasts bounced and her mouth was open and back, eyes like slits as she rode me, the headboard pounding into the wall.
I reached around to touch her pucker. One finger there triggered her discharge! Charlotte cried out, her release flooding my face with warm juice! I lapped frantically as she heaved upon me, pushing back from the headboard, to lean back placing her full weight upon my face, my so lucky face.
It seemed to last for a very long time before her spasms ceased and her breathing began to return to normal. She looked at me, and bent down to kiss me on the lips. “I must go,” she said. “My carriage is waiting, and it would not do for a married woman in my position to spend the night in the apartment of a demimondaine. She rose and then stopped to kiss me again and gather her clothes. I lay there stunned for a moment then rose to help her button. With another long, lingering kiss Charlotte was out the door and down the stairs.
I gathered the fifty gold francs on my bedside table. She had given me enough to last a month. Even if I never saw her again, the night had been more than worth it. I didn’t know if she would return, but prayed she would. Fifty francs was a lot of money. A woman like her was worth so much more. If she was always so generous, I could give up all others to concentrate on her.
In the morning I dressed and went down to Place Pigalle to get a coffee and a croissant. With fifty francs in my pocket I went to the bookstore and bought a book of poems by Paul Verlaine I had wanted then read happily in the bath until it was time to prepare for the show. Charlotte was not there, but she was back the next week, along with her husband and his male lover. An invitation was made and accepted. In public, we made a foursome. Jacques’s wealthy lover and I pretended to be paramours, as did Charlotte with Jacques. Charles was a slim man, funny and slim with an enormous cock Jacques delightedly spread his cheeks for. At night, in their grand mansion, Charlotte came to me as Charles went to Jacques. The de Picardy’s owned a grand mansion on the Ilse de la Cite, more than large enough to share.
I no longer dance the cancan. In September I spent my mother a letter, telling her I was to marry a physician. It was a lovely ceremony in Notre Dame, even though I spent my wedding night beneath Charlotte, my true bride.
