The Book of the Courtesans Part 4: Camille Ackison, aka Paquita
Portrait of “Paquita,” by Alexandre Ken. Detail. Musée Carnavalet (source).
In the archives of the Paris police there is a leather-bound volume known as The Book of the Courtesans, containing the criminal files of a group of women called Les Insoumis— The Rebels. These are their stories.
THE FILE
Camille Ackison, dite Paquite, in the Archives de la préfecture de police, BB1. Photo by me.
January 20, 1872
She lived at No. 58 rue Lafayette in the 9th arrondissement, near the church of Notre-Dame-de-Lorette. Her mother was a fish merchant in Marseille. She was about twenty-seven years old, common, uneducated, and unschooled. Although “not pretty,” according to the police, she was neveretheless “blonde and very tall.”
Her lover was the son of M. Dubois, the founder of Maison Dubois, who gave her “crazy sums.” Her apartment was furnished by an upholsterer named César, who guaranteed the work—worth forty thousand francs—by persuading her to put the apartment in his name. When she didn’t pay, he kicked her out. She then moved to a very large apartment a few streets over at No. 58 rue Lafitte.
Portrait of Paquita, by Alexandre Ken. Musée Carnavalet (source).
In the same building, there lived a “public girl” named Maillet, and the two got on famously. They threw twice-weekly parties, with Ackison hosting on Fridays and Maillet hosting on Sundays. The guests were usually young people, “Greeks,” and the kinds of women who ran around to balls and big restaurants on the boulevards. They would dance to the piano and play games. On March 12th, 1872, she threw a grand ball, and guests were recruited from Chez Périn and from the races. She also facilitated rendez-vous.
Monsieur Tarbé des Sablons du Paubois nicknamed her “Bootstrap,” because of the many “leathers” [language mistakes] that she made in her conversation. “She received him and other journalists,” the police said.
April 1873
During the rue Suresnes pimping case, she was called to appear by the investigating judge, but acted as if the proceedings were beneath her. In the judge’s antechamber, she refused to sit near the other women who stood accused. One girl, named Lucie Lévy, called out to her sharply, asking who she thought she was to make such a fuss.
“We know you well, and you’re no better than us,” Lucie said.
When she realized that everyone knew her nickname was Bootstrap, she became more modest.
“She may have been pretty once,” the police wrote, “but today she is almost ugly.”
THE RESEARCH
Bal du Moulin de la Galette, by Auguste Renoir, 1876. Musée d’Orsay (source).
“Women of the world departed, scandalized by the neighborhood of lorettes...”
Au Bal Publique, by Constantin Guys, mid-nineteenth century. Musée du Louvre (source).
When Saturday evening mass let out at the church of Notre-Dame-de-Lorette, a gaggle of attractive young women loitered in the shade of its eaves. Well-dressed but not respectable, these were the wayward girls of the neighborhood. They were hoping to catch the eye of some pious young gentleman, who, having just confessed his sins, was ready to commit some new ones.
Unlike the grisettes, who still worked in a shop or a trade in addition to whatever stipend they might receive from a lover, these other young women had found sex and romance to be lucrative enough to justify relinquishing traditional employment. In honor of the church around which they often lived and congregated, they were dubbed lorettes. They were junior courtesans, and legally, sex workers.
They attended the public balls and threw parties. They fell in love and out of it, found security and then just as quickly lost it again. As Alexandre Dumas fils put it, in his Filles, lorettes et courtisanes, “this breed belonged entirely to the feminine sex: it was made up of charming little beings, tidy, elegant, flirtatious, whom one could not classify according to any known type: she was neither [...] a street walker, nor a grisette, nor a courtesan. She wasn't the bourgeois type, but she was not an honest woman, either.”
Portrait of Dr. Antoine Dubois, by François Gérard, c. 1813.
By all appearances, Camille Ackison, daughter of a Marseillaise fish seller, was a perfect example of a lorette. She even lived on the street that ran directly in front of the famous church. Alas, there isn’t much in the archives about the tall blonde woman also known as Paquita. Her other nickname—Bootstrap—is too generic a word to search for in the online newspaper databases. Born sometime around 1845, she has left no trace of herself in the municipal archives of Paris.
The men she knew, however, are easier to track down.
The Baron Antoine Dubois, a famous obstetrician, founded the Maison Dubois, a hospital, in 1858 on the rue du Faubourg Saint-Denis. Today the building is wedged between the city’s two northernmost train stations, the Gare du Nord and the Gare de l’Est. It had a large garden in the middle of the buildings, with trees and a fountain. His son Paul Dubois, accused of giving “crazy sums” to Camille Ackison, was a renown dental surgeon and, apparently, also a party animal.
Portrait of Edmond Tarbé des Sablons du Paubois, by Nadar c. 1875. Bibliothèque National de France (source).
The journalist who dubbed her Bootstrap due to her humorous malapropisms (called “leathers” in 19th century French slang) was also a playwright, music critic, and the editor of the newspaper l’Etoile. The police implied that he was her lover—the acclaimed man of letters, and the girl who couldn’t keep her words straight.
Edmond Tarbé des Sablons du Paubois and his brother Eugène were regular fixtures in the demimonde, and knew the eccentric photographer and balloonist Felix Nadar. During the Siege of Paris in 1870, when all roads in and out of the city were blocked by the Prussians, Edmond himself bought a hot air balloon in the hopes that they might use it to get out.
On December 27th, when the winter was darkest and the air so cold that the surface of the Seine had turned to ice, Eugène climbed into the balloon inflated with city gas, dubbed the Merlin of Douai (the rue Douai was a street in the 9th), and set off in the freezing night. They were far from the only ones to attempt to leave in this way, and some even succeeded, making it all the way to Scandinavia. Others fell into the Atlantic Ocean. Edmond and Eugène’s balloon was targeted by enemy fire, but ultimately landed safely, at around noon the next day, some miles south of Orléans.
When Eugène died less than six years later, leaving his own lorette mistress pregnant with twins, who then died in childbirth, Edmond adopted the children.
Départ de Léon Gambetta pour Tours sur le ballon l'"Armand-Barbès", le 7 octobre 1870, à Montmartre, by Jules Didier, c. 1871. Musée Carnavalet (source).
Dress, c. 1860. European. Metropolitan Museum of Art (source).
As reported in Le Figaro in 1881, Camille Ackison, aka Bootstrap, was known to go dancing on the edges of the city, such as at the Bal du Moulin de la Galette, as painted by Auguste Renoir in 1876. In it, young men and women waltz gaily beneath the dappled May light coming through the trees.
According to the research of historian Gabrielle Houbre, the apartment where Camille lived from 1871 to 1875 was large enough to host her weekly parties. It had two parlors with fireplaces, a living room, a dining room, a kitchen, and a bathroom. Her friend, who may have been named Mallet and not Maillet, lived in a similar apartment on the same floor. They each paid two thousand and nine hundred francs apiece—nearly €14,000 today.
When the police said that the two women had “Greeks” at their parties, this meant crooks in the slang of the day, especially those who cheated at gambling. Chez Périn, from which they recruited many of their revelers, was a dance studio just around the corner at No. 30 rue de la Victoire, that was popular with “les Insoumis”—rebel women.
The last mention of her was in La Petite Presse in 1895, when she would have been fifty years old.
“Lovely, leaned the tall and beautiful girl called Bootstrap, so called because she made three leathers for every four words,” wrote Gaston Wiallard.
After that, she vanishes.
Note: Due to having to deal with the Daily Mail stealing content from this blog this week, I was unable to complete a manual search through the archives for her death records. I will issue a correction/update if I am able to find it during subsequent research.
CORRECTION: An earlier version of this post failed to include the author’s own image of the police file with its attending photo, and stated that a photo was not included in the file. The post has been update to include the image of the police file’s page. We regret the error.
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REFERENCES & LINKS:
Archives de la préfecture de police, BB1
Les Livre des Courtisanes, by Gabrielle Houbre. Editions Tallandier, 2006
“Edmond et Eugène Tarbé des Sablons,” by Paul Morse, Chroniques Eaubonnaises, April 2020 (link)
“Echos,” Le Petit Parisien, 7 August 1906 (link)
“La Suppressor de la Police des Moeurs,” Figaro, 16 March 1881 (link)
“À Travers Champs,” La Liberté, 19 March 1881 (link)
“Crime du Prado,” La Petite Presse, 19 November 1895 (link)
“Courrier des Theatre,” Le Journal, 10 January 1897 (link)
“Echos,” Le Journal, 2 November 1903 (link)