a bouquet of Pâquerettes
When preparing an introduction to a screening of Jean Renoir's 1890s-set French Cancan (1955), starring Jean Gabin (see here), I became curious about Madame Pâquerette, the woman who plays the former Cancan dancer Mimi Prunelle. Madame Pâquerette was a character actress who also had rôles in Jacques Becker's Casque d'or (1952), Rue de l'Estrapade (1953) and Montparnasse 19 (1958). The IMDB credits her with nineteen rôles between 1943 and 1963, most of them in the 1950s. The Base de données de films français adds another seven films. The last seventeen images in the gallery above are from this period of her career. Several sources give her real name as Marguerite Jeanne Puech, born 1876, died 1965.
The IMDB also credits her with a further twenty-three rôles, including fifteen from the 1920s and five from 1911. This seems to conflict with an anecdote related by Annette Wademant, who wrote the script of Becker's Rue de l'Estrapade: 'I must tell you the story of the scene with the pear and Pâquerette, who wasn't a professional actress. She was supposed to taste a pear. Jacques says: "Camera, Action", and Pâquerette just pretends to eat the pear. Jacques expresses his surprise and she replies that she didn't want to spoil the fruit!':
The idea that Pâquerette was a novice has support from André G. Brunelin, who says that she was discovered by Marcel Camus, assistant director on Casque d'or, where Pâquerette plays Anatole's grandmother:
However, before being discovered by Marcel Camus, Pâquerette had appeared as a tramp in a brief shot of Le Chanois's Sans laisser adresse (1951):
And in the 1930s and '40s had other small rôles. Here she is in Un ami viendra ce soir (1945), Le Corbeau (1943), Conflit (1938) and Un carnet de bal (1937):
Clearly, in 1953 Pâquerette was a professional actress, despite Wademant's claim. According to the IMDB, she had been so since 1911.
Thinking about her rôle in French Cancan, I had the idea that the character Mimi Prunelle, a tramp who had been a cancan dancer in her youth (the 1850s-60s), represented a nostalgia not only for an early moment of theatrical performance but also for an earlier moment in the history of cinema, and that Renoir was remembering that forty years before Pâquerette had played in Pathé comedies and dramas. The one film she is credited with from this period that I knew already was Max et sa belle-mère, in which Pâquerette plays Max Linder's mother-in-law. However, I had doubts as to whether the woman in the Linder film was the same woman who played several character rôles in the 1950s. More than forty years separate the images left and right below, and faces can change, but I don't think these are images of the same person:
In trying to establish a visual continuity between these two women across forty years, I discovered that there were several performers called Pâquerette over this period, and that on occasion one Pâquerette had been confused with another. In total I think I have found twelve different Pâquerettes. This post is mainly an attempt to sort them out.
To begin with, the photograph used to illustrate the page for Pâquerette on the IMDB is an image neither of the actress in Max et sa belle-mère nor of the actress in French Cancan:
To begin with, the photograph used to illustrate the page for Pâquerette on the IMDB is an image neither of the actress in Max et sa belle-mère nor of the actress in French Cancan:
That image is of a young woman from a series of postcards called 'Les plus belles femmes de France', published in the early 1920s by the Armand Noyer company. As far as I can make out, Noyer first published various sub-series under thematic headings such as 'Heroines', 'Goddesses', 'Silks', 'Colours of the Rainbow', 'Birds', 'Flowers', etc. Each woman photographed was given an individual title. Here are, from the six series just mentioned, 'Beatrice', 'Circe', 'Brocade', 'Red', 'Nightingale' and 'Daisy':
Noyer then made a selection from these series and published different photographs of the same models under the simple heading 'The Most Beautiful Women of France'. The models kept the sobriquets they had been given in the earlier series. Here, from that second selection, we see again 'Béatrice', 'Circe', 'Le Brocart', 'Rouge', 'Le Rossignol' and 'La Pâquerette':
The last of these above is the photograph used in the IMDB bio of the actress Pâquerette. Someone has confused the model's flowery sobriquet with the actress's screen-name. Just to be clear on how dramatic is the IMDB error, here are the film actress known as Pâquerette, from Marcel L'Herbier's L'Homme du large, and the anonymous model labelled 'La Pâquerette' in the postcard series. Both images are c.1920-21:
The IMDB isn't the only online database to illustrate the film actress's biography with a photograph of someone else. Here is the Wikipedia page for Pâquerette:
The photograph in the corner is correctly identified as 'Pâquerette in 1916, with Pablo Picasso and Moïse Kisling at La Rotonde'. However, that is not the actress Pâquerette but Pâquerette the companion of Picasso and fashion model, who worked mostly for Paul Poiret and Germaine Bongard. Her full name was Emilienne Pâquerette Geslot and she was born c. 1896. The photograph is one of several taken by Jean Cocteau on the same day in 1916, either in the café or out on the streets of Montparnasse:
Here are two more from the series:
This Pâquerette is said to have modelled for both Kisling and Picasso, as well as for André Derain and Othon Friesz, but I haven't yet seen any painting identified as of her. She retired from art and fashion in the 1920s, married a doctor, had a family and died in 1934.
These digressions leave unresolved my initial difficulty regarding the identification of the Pâquerette who appeared in French Cancan and sixteen other films in the 1950s and '60s, as listed by Wikipedia (right), with the woman who appeared as Max Linder's mother-in-law and, apparently, eight other Pathé productions at the time:
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The issue is, then, are these images - from 1914 and 1958 - of the same woman?
From various listings and othe sources I have found a total of nine Pathé films from between 1911 and 1914 that include a Pâquerette in the cast: Prix de vertu (1911), La Doctoresse (1911), Rigadin poète (1911), Rigadin n'aime pas le vendredi 13 (1911), La Suggestion du baiser (1911), Sa Majesté Grippemiche (1912), Sherlock Holmes roulé par Rigadin (1913), Don Quichotte (1913) and Max et sa belle-mère (1914). Regarding the latter, a confusion arises because there were two Max Linder films with the same title, one from 1911 and the other from 1914. The plots of the two films are very different, though they both feature an encumbrant mother-in-law.
In the 1911 film she visits Max and his wife, and Max - with the complicity of the servants - arranges that she suffers several mishaps: she is watered by the gardener, covered in dust when the carpets are beaten, has hot soup poured on her head, has her bed collapse under her as she sleeps and finally is chased away by a bear. I don't know if this film still exists but here are a still showing the soup incident and a poster featuring the bear:
In the 1911 film she visits Max and his wife, and Max - with the complicity of the servants - arranges that she suffers several mishaps: she is watered by the gardener, covered in dust when the carpets are beaten, has hot soup poured on her head, has her bed collapse under her as she sleeps and finally is chased away by a bear. I don't know if this film still exists but here are a still showing the soup incident and a poster featuring the bear:
In the 1914 film the mother-in-law accompanies Max and his wife on their honeymoon. Here is the review of the film from Moving Picture World (August 21 1915):
The IMDB lists only one film with this title, dating it 1911 but mixing information from the two films. It shows the still and the poster from the 1911 film but reproduces the summary from Moving Picture World of the 1914 film as well as its poster and a still:
The IMDB gives the cast list of the 1911 film, and it is here that Pâquerette is said to play the mother-in-law. Jacques Richard's Dictionnaire des acteurs du cinéma muet lists both films in his filmography of Pâquerette, but I don't think these can be the same woman three years apart:
Whether or not the mother-in-law in the 1914 film is called Pâquerette, that actress appears in two other films in 1914, one of them for Pathé and the other for Eclipse:
The only ones of these I have seen are L'Homme du large, Petit ange et son pantin and La Venenosa, but there are several pictures of Pâquerette to be found in the period's film journals. Here are images from seven of these films:
Here she is in La Rue du pavé d'amour (1923):
In 1923 she was interviewed by Mon Ciné magazine about La Voyante, Sarah Bernhardt's last film, in which Pâquerette played the concierge. She gives details about her earlier career, and makes clear that she played the mother-in-law in the 1914 Max et sa belle-mère:
She speaks of her rôles in films with Rigadin, and though I don't recognise her as any of the women in, for example, La Doctoresse or Rigadin n'aime pas le vendredi 13, we can I think conclude that the Pâquerette who made films for Pathé between 1911 and 1914 and the Pâquerette who made films in the 1920s are the same woman. As already noted, she also made Le Pari de Papillon for Eclipse, a film in which her rôle wasn't particularly big but in which she did have an impressive close-up:
The doubt I expressed earlier as to whether the Pâquerette in French Cancan was the woman in Max et sa belle-mère remains. I don't recognise the woman in Renoir's film as the woman in those films from the 1920s. Jacques Richard, in his dictionary of silent film actors, is the only proper historian to have written about Pâquerette, and he does think that all of those films feature the same person.
His entry describes her as a picturesque but diminished presence in French cinema after the coming of sound, citing rôles in Paris Béguin (1931), French Cancan, Montparnasse 19 and Zazie dans le métro. I think Richard is mistaken. I just can't see that these two women are the same person, even thirty-two years apart:
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Faces change over time, of course, and so do bodies. The 50s Pâquerette looks generally slimmer than the 20s Pâquerette, but the corpulence of the latter is not quite a fixed thing. A commentator in the New York Times, writing in 1927, said that it was all padding.
This is surprising given what she looked like in films of that period, especially Mare Nostrum, but perhaps she padded herself out for all of her 1920s appearances. This is how Michael Powell remembers her from that film: 'Rex was talking to a mountainous Frenchwoman […]. I heard him call her Madame Pâquerette.' Six pages later he again calls her 'mountainous', and in his reminiscences of Ingram's The Garden of Allah he refers to her 'grotesquerie'.
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However, Richard gives her real name as 'Marguerite Liliane Puech, wife of Portier', which is oddly at variance with the name and dates given by Wikipedia, where she is Marguerite Jeanne Puech, born March 27 1876, died May 6 1965 (the IMDB has March 6).
I suspect that Wikipedia's source for these birth and death dates is the website Les Gens du Cinéma, which references the relevant Paris registries. Those registries are accessible online, and I have reproduced the entries below. Next to the entry registering Marguerite Puech's birth has been added (below left) information about her marriage, on 29th October 1901, and her death:
Her spouse was not, as Richard has it, someone called Portier. Initially I got excited about the actual name, since her husband is listed as one 'Louis Jacques François Gasnier'. The film director Louis J. Gasnier worked for Pathé from 1905, first in France and then the U.S. He made many comedies, including some early Linder films, and went on to create The Perils of Pauline in 1914. Unfortunately, this Gasnier is Louis Joseph, not Louis Jacques, so Marguerite Puech's husband was not a Pathé film director. (In case any doubt lingers, Louis Joseph Gasnier married a Marie Jeanon in 1907, while Louis Jacques Gasnier was still married to Marguerite Puech - they divorced in 1922.)
So, so far I think that there were at least two different actresses called Pâquerette: one working for Pathé c.1912 and then in the 1920s, the other working mostly in the 1950s. I have had to abandon my initial idea that the Madame Pâquerette in French Cancan represents a reference to the early days of cinema.
All existing Pâquerette filmographies are composites, listing all films associated with an actress called Pâquerette but disregarding the possibility that it isn't each time the same actress. The most complete of these composite filmographies for the actress or actresses called Pâquerette is at the Ciné-ressources site, listing forty films including two - Conflit (1938) and Chiens perdus sans collier (1955) - that aren't listed by the IMDB or Wikipedia:
All existing Pâquerette filmographies are composites, listing all films associated with an actress called Pâquerette but disregarding the possibility that it isn't each time the same actress. The most complete of these composite filmographies for the actress or actresses called Pâquerette is at the Ciné-ressources site, listing forty films including two - Conflit (1938) and Chiens perdus sans collier (1955) - that aren't listed by the IMDB or Wikipedia:
The IMDB lists two films missed by Ciné-ressources, Les As de l'écran (1921) and Les Sorcières de Salem (1957); none of the seven extra films listed by the Base de données de films français is listed by Ciné-ressources.
Richard's dictionary has seven entries not found elsewhere: Rigadin poète, Sherlock Holmes roulé par Rigadin, five films in the Fritzigli series, Le Rêve d'André and Florette et Patapon.He also lists Gance's Napoléon with a question mark. When I have a spare five and a half hours I shall try to see if she is in that film. No filmography lists La Joyeuse Aventure du Grand-Hôtel, which features 'Mlle Pâquerette', according to La Cinématographie française 47 (27 September 1919): |
My doubt that the Madame Pâquerette of the 1950s is the same as the 1920s' Pâquerette was initially based on appearance, but the New York Times piece I quoted earlier included a piece of information that led me in another direction. I can't do anything with the knowledge that the actress in Ingram's film was a 'motor-woman on Paris street-cars' in 1917, as intriguing as that is: 5800 women worked as tram operators in Paris during the war (my thanks to my colleague the historian James Connolly for that insight). I don't suppose that she is either of the women in the photograph right, taken in July 1917 (reproduced in Margaret H. Darrow's French Women and the First World War (Berg 2000), p.193). |
On the other hand, the information that she had appeared on the stage does open vistas. An advertisement for the 1922 film La Résurrection du Bouif mentions that cast member Pâquerette is an actress from the 'Folies-Dramatiques', a theatre near the Boulevard Saint Martin. I can't find mention of her appearing there in the early 1920s but ten years earlier a Pâquerette is listed in the cast of at least three Folies-Dramatiques productions: Fruit d'Amour, Le Coup de Piston and La Reine de Golconde.
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A 1911 article in Comoedia (right) identifies the Pâquerette of the Folies-Dramatiques with a performer who appeared at the Ambassadeurs theatre some fifteen years earlier. That performer was Gabrielle Pâquerette, a singer and dancer famous for the facial and bodily distortions that transformed her good looks for comic effect. Several of her characteristic rôles are represented on the posters below: |
Below left is the film actress Pâquerette, from La Résurrection du Bouif; below right is the music-hall artiste Pâquerette, from a postcard c.1905:
In this instance I am confident that the faces match, and that this is the same woman.
The 1923 interview in Mon Ciné confirms that the film actress was once on the music-hall stage: 'I've been working since I was four. I started in the Music-Hall, singing romances and living on raw onions and scraps of bread.' She describes an enthusiastic audience of students at the Alcazar d'été, who encored her at length and postponed the entry of the popular singer Paulus, and how she was hired for a vast sum by an American who had been in the audience. She says she got married in the U.S., came back and continued in music-hall before moving on to the theatre and cinema.
Gabrielle Pâquerette did play at the Alcazar d'été in 1892, as did Paulus, though I can't find a record of them being on the same bill. In his memoirs Paulus speaks very highly of her: 'she was very pretty and happily made herself ugly in grotesque costumes; her comedy was irresistible.' The rest of the details in the interview fit the career of Gabrielle Pâquerette, as recorded by contemporary newspapers. It is clear, then, that the Madame Pâquerette of 1920s cinema was the Mademoiselle Pâquerette of 1890s music-hall. |
Which means that the Madame Pâquerette of 1920s cinema, aka Gabrielle Pâquerette, cannot also be the Madame Pâquerette of 1950s cinema, real name Marguerite Puech (27.3.1876 - 6.5.1965).
Gabrielle Pâquerette was born Mathilde Gabrielle Chabriais on 6th May 1873 at Périgueux in the Dordogne. The register of her birth, below, notes also her marriage in 1905 to Georges Marechal and their divorce in 1917:
Gabrielle Pâquerette was born Mathilde Gabrielle Chabriais on 6th May 1873 at Périgueux in the Dordogne. The register of her birth, below, notes also her marriage in 1905 to Georges Marechal and their divorce in 1917:
The register of marriage describes her as an 'artiste lyrique'.
In Dances With Darwin, 1875-1910: Vernacular Modernity in France (2008), Rae Beth Gordon discusses Gabrielle Pâquerette's act:
Through advertisements and notices in newspapers it is possible to trace the stages in Gabrielle Pâquerette's career up to around 1912.
In an 1893 interview to the Boston Globe she said that she had been on the stage about fourteen years. In 1891 she appeared at the Folies-Bergère in Paris and in 1892 debuted at the Trocadero in London. In 1893 she was appearing in New York, at Tony Pastor's theatre and then at Koster and Biel's. In New York she got married for the first time. The American newspapers report on her marriage in detail. Here, from the Chicago Daily Tribune, is the most succinct of those reports: In 1894, on returning from the U.S., she was at the Jardin de Paris and again at the Folies-Bergère. She returned to the U.S. in November 1895 and stayed till the following May. When she returned to Paris she left her husband Louis Verande in New York.
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In Paris she starred in a revue called Paris-Snob at the Parisiana, a theatre where she appeared regularly until 1904, appearing also at the Olympia. She continued to play abroad, appearing at the Berlin Wintergarten and at the Tivoli in London in 1902:
Betwen the early 1890s and 1903 her appearance changed considerably. A review of her act at the Casino des Lilas in Bordeaux in 1903 describes her as fat:
These postcards date from some time after 1905:
In November 1903 Gabrielle Pâquerette featured on the front page of almost every French newspaper after she was attacked by a former lover, the mime artist Max Illy. Here is how the crime and trial were reported in the Daily Telegraph (November 20th and December 24th 1903):
Some of the French reports of the trial comment on her physique: 'grande et plantureuse personne' (Le Petit Parisien); 'cette grande belle fille' (Le Figaro); 'grande et forte personne, peu jolie sous ses bandeaux botticellesques qui vont mal à sa large figure' (L'Intransigeant).
In March 1911 Pâquerette joins the Folies Dramatiques company, by which time she has foregone all glamour to play the role of a corpulent mother-in-law. The reviews in Comoedia and La Presse of her debut in Fruits d'amour are explicit on this point:
Pâquerette appears in other Folies-Dramatiques productions in 1911 and is in a show at the Nouveau Cirque in 1912, while at the same time playing in Pathé films. The last of these is the second Max et sa belle-mère, which opened in Paris in January 1915 and must have been made shortly before. After that there is no trace of her in the newspapers until the September 1919 review of the film La Joyeuse aventure du Grand Hôtel. As we know, she had been working on the trams during the war, and had divorced from her second husband in April 1917.
It isn't always easy to be sure that a newspaper mention of a performer called Pâquerette is referring to the right Pâquerette. In the 1880s and '90s there was an equestrian star of the Cirque Molier called Miss Pâquerette. One of the lesser stars of the Moulin Rouge in its first years was a dancer called Pâquerette. In 1908 a smitten industrialist supplied 50.000 francs for the staging of a new operetta called les Hussards d'Augereau on condition that his mistress, Pâquerette de Neustrie, be its star; she was a disaster, as was the show. Around 1910 there was a child star in the Paris music-halls called Little Pâquerette, a 'danseuse à transformation'; she grew up to be the 1930s music-hall star Marguerite Gilbert. In the late 1920s there was a singer performing in Montmartre cabarets called Pâquerette Denège. A certain Mademoiselle Pâquerette was a star of the nude show at the Folies Bergère in 1930. That same year Mademoiselle Pâquerette was also the name of an amateur champion wrestler. In the 1930s and '40s there was a famous dance teacher in the U.S. called Pâquerette Pathé. Here are just three of these distracting alternatives:
None of these, of course, is likely to be confused with 'the real Pâquerette'. Nonetheless, posters, advertisements and reviews often specified that they were referring to 'la vraie Pâquerette'. This was because soon after Gabrielle Pâquerette became famous another artiste began to appear on stage as Pâquerette, imitating her style and songs. This other performer was none other than Gabrielle's elder sister Blanche. Notices in Le Mirliton of January 26 and February 2 1894 alerted readers to the deception:
The second of these notices finishes by saying that 'until now Blanche Pâquerette sang with her husband, and has only in the last few days received permission from her sister to perform in her genre.' In March 1894 the same journal publishes a 'rectificatif', making clear that 'Pâquerette (the real one) has never given her sister Blanche Pâquerette permission to perform in her genre, and certainly not to use her name and her posters'. This didn't stop Blanche, who appeared in New York in March 1895 performing in the style of her sister: 'Blanche Pâquerette, one of the drollest and most eccenric of Parisian singers, made her American debut yesterday at Proctor's and was much applauded. She has an odd personality, with vivacity and humor, and strongly suggests her famous sister who was here a year or two ago.'
Just how strongly Blanche's act suggested that of her sister can be seen by comparing her publicity postcard, below left, with images from her sister's posters:
Just how strongly Blanche's act suggested that of her sister can be seen by comparing her publicity postcard, below left, with images from her sister's posters:
Blanche's career continued in parallel with that of her sister, if more often in the provinces. Her appearance at the Scala in Lyon in 1896 was reviewed somewhat laconically by the brilliantly named (and no doubt pseudonymous) Ramsé de Késanlik: 'Blanche Pâquerette imitates well enough the real Pâquerette' (L'Art lyrique, 17.5.1896). In December 1898 she was at the Pépinière in Paris, copying exactly her sister's act ('un numéro en tous points semblable à celui de la Pâquerette de Parisiana' - L'Art lyrique 18.12.1898). Her November 1898 appearance in Tours was in fact advertised as 'B. Pâquerette, comique excentrique de Parisiana', claiming the prestige of the better-known venue. Such behaviour prompted her sister to publish this notice to theatre directors:
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Mme Gabrielle Pâquerette, the real one, from Parisiana, Folies Bergère etc., currently in Saint Petersburg, continuing her tour abroad having been in Moscow, Christiania, Berlin, awaiting her debuts in Bucharest, Stockholm, etc., etc., requests that MM the Directors do not confuse her with her sister who has taken her name and sings her genre under the name B. Pâquerette of Parisiana. Mlle B. Pâquerette is currently at the Pépinière.
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Reports of Blanche's performances are rare after 1898, though in August 1903 she did make the newspapers after collapsing in the street during a heatwave. In December 1908 she appeared at the Alhambra singing comic songs but using her real name, Blanche Chabriais. In September 1910 she appeared in a Montmartre hall, again as Blanche Chabriais. We might think that she had heeded her sister's warnings about using her stage name, but in June 1912 Blanche again made the newspapers when she went to court against the directors of the Nouveau Cirque, who in January had hired her for their new revue, thinking she was 'the real Pâquerette'. On discovering that they had hired Blanche, not Gabrielle, they dismissed her, but she went to court on the grounds that she had offered her services in good faith, under her known stage name Blanche Pâquerette. She was awarded 600 francs in damages.
The Nouveau Cirque revue did in the end feature Gabrielle Pâquerette, and made a strong point of the fact that this was the real one.
The Nouveau Cirque revue did in the end feature Gabrielle Pâquerette, and made a strong point of the fact that this was the real one.
I have found no further trace of Blanche Chabriais, dite Blanche Pâquerette. She didn't, as far as I can tell, get any film rôles in the 1920s by passing herself off as her sister, though I wouldn't put it past her.
Of Gabrielle I know nothing after the last film credit, a 1931 sound film mentioned by Jacques Richard in his dictionary of silent film actors. The copy I have of this film is very poor, but I think that this is she, tending Jeanne Marnac's hair:
Of Gabrielle I know nothing after the last film credit, a 1931 sound film mentioned by Jacques Richard in his dictionary of silent film actors. The copy I have of this film is very poor, but I think that this is she, tending Jeanne Marnac's hair:
That film is Augusto Genina's Paris Béguin, and curiously enough it stars Jean Gabin, which is where this post started. It would have been very neat to circle round and finish with Gabin and Pâquerette together in 1931, but they don't appear in any scenes together, and anyway, as I think I have established, this is not the same Pâquerette:
Acknowledgements
I am indebted to Greg Philip for information that put me on a right track for this research. I strongly recommend his blogposts on 'lost cinema' such as this, at 'A Lost Film', on the actor Charles de Rochefort, and this, at 'Film perdu', on Sarah Bernhardt's last film.
I am grateful to Aga Baranowska for the invitation to introduce French Cancan at the NFT last year.
Without the wealth of resources made available online by the BNF at Gallica, this kind of research would be almost impossible. I'm very grateful to Gallica and strongly recommend following them on Twitter:
https://twitter.com/GallicaBnF
Acknowledgements
I am indebted to Greg Philip for information that put me on a right track for this research. I strongly recommend his blogposts on 'lost cinema' such as this, at 'A Lost Film', on the actor Charles de Rochefort, and this, at 'Film perdu', on Sarah Bernhardt's last film.
I am grateful to Aga Baranowska for the invitation to introduce French Cancan at the NFT last year.
Without the wealth of resources made available online by the BNF at Gallica, this kind of research would be almost impossible. I'm very grateful to Gallica and strongly recommend following them on Twitter:
https://twitter.com/GallicaBnF