Hôtel Le 10 Bis. Part 2: The Redhead Behind the Door (#721)

When we stayed recently at Hôtel Le 10 Bis, on the Rue du Débarcadère near Porte Maillot, I thought I had found a rather charming contradiction:

A thoroughly modern, discreet little Paris hotel occupying a building that clearly had a past.

I had no idea how much of a past!

Hôtel Le 10 Bis opened in its present form in 2016. Its earlier publicity chose its words carefully, describing the address as a haut lieu de la galanterie Parisienne - a celebrated place of Parisian gallantry.

That wonderfully French euphemism conceals a much better story.

For decades, 10 bis Rue du Débarcadère was associated with one of the strangest women in postwar Paris:

Kajla Lucienne Goldfarb

Better known as Katia la Rouquine.

Katia the Redhead.

And once I began reading about her, the Hôtel Le 10 Bis almost became incidental.

The real story was

Katia the Redhead.

From Radom to Paris

Lucienne Goldfarb was born in Radom, Poland, on October 30, 1924. She was Jewish. In 1931, when she was seven, her family moved to Paris and settled in the 11th arrondissement.

There was another influence in the Goldfarb household that would remain with Lucienne for the rest of her life:

Opera.

Her father, Fiszel, was a passionate music lover. In 1936 he took his daughter to the Palais Garnier to hear Saint-Saëns's Samson et Dalila, with the celebrated French tenor Georges Thill.

Lucienne later remembered being overwhelmed by his voice. She believed her parents had imagined a musical future for their talented daughter.

Then came the war.

Her father was arrested in 1941 and deported to Auschwitz in March 1942. Her mother, Sura, and younger brother Richard followed in February 1943.

Lucienne was still a teenager.

What happened to her next is the darkest - and most difficult - part of her story.

The Question That Never Went Away

In 1942, Lucienne contacted young Jewish members of the communist Francs-Tireurs et Partisans-Main-Oevre Immigre (FTP-MOI), a resistance network in Paris. She reportedly told them that she wanted to join the Resistance and avenge her deported family.

Shortly thereafter, members of the resistance network began to be arrested.

Among those who later accused her of being an informer was Henri Krasucki, who survived deportation and eventually became one of France's most prominent trade-union leaders.

Adam Rayski, another important figure in the Jewish Resistance, also said he had been followed after meeting with her.

In 1943, dozens of members of the network were swept up by the authorities.

Another survivor, Madeleine Meyer, recalled the teenage Lucienne very clearly: curly-haired, redheaded, apparently eager to participate. Meyer believed that her real purpose was infiltration.

These are grave accusations, and they should be described as accusations rather than established fact.

Lucienne denied them.

She maintained that she had been away from Paris in the Free Zone during part of the relevant period, and later declared that she had never even met Krasucki or Rayski.

There was never a trial establishing her guilt. Six FTP-MOI survivors filed a complaint against her in 1950, but it went nowhere. An amnesty covered certain collaboration offenses committed by people younger than 21, and Lucienne had been only 18.

Even her family apparently never learned the truth. Decades later her great-grandson acknowledged that no one in the family really knew what had happened.

And so, a question followed Katia la Rouquine for the rest of her life:

Was she a frightened Jewish teenager trying to survive occupied Paris.

Or did she survive by betraying other Jews?

Perhaps both fear and betrayal could have existed together. History, especially history lived at eighteen years of age under occupation, is rarely as tidy as we would like it to be.

But Lucienne's later career makes the accusations particularly haunting.

Because she unquestionably became an informer.

The Making of Katia

According to Lucienne's own account, her formal relationship with the Paris police began in 1947.

By then she was working as a prostitute.

After being arrested for soliciting, she was offered a condé: unofficial permission to continue working in exchange for information about pimps, criminals and traffickers.

She accepted.

And discovered that she was very good at it.

She disliked being called an indicatrice - an informer or snitch.

She preferred the grander auxiliary of the judicial police.

Police officers themselves seem to have accepted the description. She supplied information on drug traffickers, robbers, pimps and other criminals.

The arrangement was wonderfully convenient.

Katia supplied information.

The police supplied protection.

Former police chief Claude Cancès remembered a formidable woman who could walk into the legendary police headquarters at 36 Quai des Orfèvres as though she owned the place: blue eyes, cigarette holder, designer clothes, Chanel No. 5 and high heels.

She knew which piece of information belonged to which department and apparently dispensed intelligence accordingly.

One contemporary description called her the virtuose des indices - the virtuoso of informers.

She was later described as the queen of police informants, noting the bargain at the heart of the relationship:

Information from Katia in return for official blindness toward Katia's business.

It was an extraordinary symbiosis.

From Prostitute to Proprietor

By the late 1950s, Katia had decided that being an employee was less attractive than being the proprietor.

In 1958 she became co-owner of the fifteen-room Hôtel de Passe near Porte Maillot. She continued performing intelligence work for the police while learning the economics of running a house of assignation.

Then she noticed the larger building across the street.

Six floors. Twenty-three rooms.

10 bis Rue du Débarcadère.

She bought it in the early 1960s and created something rather more sophisticated than the stereotypical Paris brothel. Her clientele was intended to be prosperous, discreet and respectable. The interior had subdued lighting, satin curtains, thick carpets and plenty of red.

And she gave it a name:

Del Monaco.

That name leads us back to the little Polish girl sitting beside her father at the opera.

The Other Love of Her Life

In 1954 Katia attended Verdi's Otello starring the magnificent Italian tenor Mario Del Monaco.

She was smitten.

She managed to get backstage, met him, obtained an autographed photograph and subsequently followed his performances abroad, including Manon Lescaut at La Scala.

Opera increasingly became what she described as her second reason for living.

So, when she acquired 10 Bis Rue du Débarcadère, she named her establishment after him.

Think about that for a moment.

A Polish Jewish refugee, prostitute, police informer and Parisian madam, named one of the city's most famous houses of assignation after an operatic tenor.

You couldn't invent Katia la Rouquine.

The Redhead Goes to War with the Police

For years the arrangement with the police worked well.

Then the political climate changed.

In the early 1970s, French authorities began dismantling the cozy relationship between police and informants operating in the sex trade.

Katia was told that her protection had ended and that she should close.

She didn't.

In 1974 police raided 10 Bis Rue du Débarcadère, found prostitutes working there and arrested Katia on a charge of proxénétisme hotelier - essentially facilitating prostitution through the hotel.

This turned out to be a dangerous thing to do to a woman who knew where the bodies were buried.

Katia retaliated.

She described gifts and payments allegedly made to police officers - a mink coat here, a television there, an expensive lighter elsewhere.

More importantly, she had apparently been prudent enough to pay for things by check and retain receipts. Her allegations were not all substantiated, and some reportedly implicated officers who were not corrupt. But the resulting scandal was enormous.

In June 1975 the old Brigade Mondaine (or vice squad) disappeared into a reorganized brigade dealing with narcotics and pimping.

Katia had survived yet again.

From the Brothel to the Corridors of Power

Her later life becomes even stranger.

Katia developed a close friendship with Roland Dumas, the lawyer and Socialist politician who would become François Mitterrand's foreign minister and later president of France's Constitutional Council.

Their common language was opera.

They traveled to performances together, including La Scala, and in 1994 were involved in establishing the operatic association Opéralia.

Her social world eventually included people very far removed from the Paris streets on which she had once worked. Reports describe her moving among political leaders and international celebrities, particularly in the operatic world. Plácido Domingo became a friend. When she was seriously injured late in life, both Domingo and Dumas reportedly visited her.

The opera fantasy shattered in March 1998. As French judges dug into the Elf Aquitaine slush funds surrounding Dumas, they noticed highly anomalous, opaque financial movements weaving through the bank accounts of the Opéralia association. When the judiciary began tracking the money, they found themselves interrogating a 74-year-old vice-president of a prestige opera charity who was none other than Paris's most famous former police informant and brothel owner. While Opéralia survived the scandal and relocated its administrative footprint internationally, the investigation permanently exposed the bizarre social bridge Dumas had built between the French underworld and global high culture.

The boundaries between sex, money, police, politics and high culture seem almost impossibly blurred in Katia's world.

Perhaps they were never very clear to begin with.

The Book That Almost Disappeared

In 1976 Katia published her memoirs.

What she said was interesting. What she didn't say was more interesting.

She presented the story of her police cooperation as beginning after the war, in 1947. The accusations concerning the FTP-MOI and the Occupation were largely avoided. Survivors of the Resistance were furious.

Her publisher André Balland, himself associated with the Resistance, reportedly became so disturbed by the allegations that he had copies of the book destroyed.

Yet copies survived.

One particularly wonderful story concerns a later book discussing Katia's wartime activities. Police commissioner Lucien Aimé-Blanc went looking for it in a Latin Quarter bookshop. The bookseller supposedly told him that one hundred copies had arrived the previous day.

Someone had bought ninety-nine.

Katia!

True in every detail or not, it is exactly the sort of story that seems possible only with Katia la Rouquine.

The Last Years at Number 10 Bis

Katia remained associated with 10 Bis long after its glory days. The establishment evolved into a libertine or swingers' club, and she continued living there.

Then, in 2014, she suffered a serious fall and eventually entered a retirement home.

When developers acquired the property, they found that its history had not been swept away. Furniture, photographs, letters and personal objects remained. During the renovation, researchers even visited the elderly Katia in her retirement home to reconstruct the building's remarkable story.

Hôtel Le 10 Bis opened in 2016

The red rooms disappeared. The heavy curtains disappeared. The clientele certainly changed.

But the owners did not erase everything. Objects from the old establishment - including mirrors, statuettes and books - were incorporated into the new rooms as discreet reminders of what had once taken place behind those walls.

And that changes the experience of staying there.

Free as the Air

Toward the end of her life, Lucienne Goldfarb apparently felt little need to apologize for the extraordinary path she had taken.

She summarized it characteristically:

I lived as I wanted.

And then, three times:

Free, free, free as the air.

Perhaps that is the most appropriate epitaph for Katia la Rouquine.

Not innocent. We cannot confidently say that.

Not guilty. History never delivered that verdict either.

Certainly not respectable, at least according to the conventional standards of her time.

But free.

She seems to have spent most of her adult life making herself extraordinarily difficult for anyone - pimps, policemen, politicians or polite society - to control.

And now I think again about Hôtel Le 10 Bis

Today you walk through its front door into a stylish little four-star hotel. There is a reception desk, contemporary furniture, immaculate bedrooms and the quiet efficiency expected by travelers staying near the Palais des Congrès.

But once you know the story, it becomes impossible to see the building in quite the same way.

Somewhere beneath all that tasteful modernity linger the shadows of satin curtains and red rooms; policemen arriving from the Quai des Orfèvres; wealthy clients slipping discreetly through the door; young women climbing the stairs; Mario Del Monaco singing somewhere on a record player; and a heavily made-up woman with flaming red hair, blue eyes, Gitanes, Chanel No. 5 and a remarkable collection of secrets.

Katia la Rouquine.

The Redhead.

I went looking for the history of a hotel.

Instead, I found Katia.

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