From "Hawkins of the Paris Herald"

Sarah Bernhardt, 1879: "It's curious how many idle stories there are about me. My favorite dishes are supposed to be burnt cats, lizards' tails and peacock brains sauteed in monkey butter, whatever that is..."

I saw La Goulue sometime after her retirement from the Moulin Rouge. True to her soubriquet, meaning the glutton, she had ruined her dancing career by overeating, and my glimpse of her was as a lion tamer in a street fair. She later became a wrestler and just before she died in 1921 she could be seen selling oranges outside the Moulin rouge.

"In the early years of the century, the Folies Bergere competed with the Moulin Rouge by producing revues that featured English dancehall girls, because French girls are incapable of learning the precisions required in a chorus line.

Ladies of pleasure had been known under the Second Empire a les biches and les soupeuses. A biche was a small deer. A soupeuse was a beauty of limited virtue available for supper. By the turn of the century, the appellations had gone out of fashion in favor of the simpler 'demimondaine'.