She was a legend. The Princess of Blood. The Priestess of Sin. The one star the Grand Guignol produced in its sixty year history.

Masochist and exhibitionist she added immeasurably to the legend the Grand Guignol would become. Audiences were transfixed because she was. They were aroused by the carnage on stage because she was, la Maxa, surrendering herself to scandalous pleasures, enflamed by the forbidden alchemy of pleasure and pain.

Probably. Possibly. Behind the facade lay a private person who walked home every night and lived with her mum. In front of it was an entertainer shrewd enough to know the value of a good legend.

Maxa epitomises the problem of biography, even in a superficial survey like this. The truth is she was a private individual, there is no diary, she wrote no autobiography, her biography is reduced to inventing relatives and wandering off into chapters of entertaining irrelevance (Pierron 2011) in an attempt to find its elusive subject. In her time she appears to have been legendary, but we have little to no primary evidence. The temptation to fill in the gaps with wish fulfillment or personal agenda is strong.

Oh so strong.

In the beginning.

Paula Maxa, the Princess of Blood, the High Priestess of Sin, was built, not born. First there was Marie-Thérèse Beau.

Birth.

The birth of Marie-Thérèse Beau is registered on the 20th August, 1892.

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A transcription from ChatGPT renders:

French:

"L’an mil huit cent quatre-vingt-douze, le vingt août, à huit heures du matin, Acte de naissance de Marie Thérèse, née avant-hier à six heures du soir, boulevard Clichy 104, fille de Pierre Émile Beau, âgé de trente et un ans, entrepreneur de peinture, et de Marie Ticot, âgée de trente et un ans, son épouse, sans autre profession.

Dressé par nous Roubaud, Adjoint au Maire, Officier de l’état civil du 18e arrondissement de Paris, sur la présentation de l’enfant et la déclaration faite en présence de :

Joseph Garrel, âgé de vingt-neuf ans, entrepreneur de serrurerie, et de Auguste Blanquet, âgé de trente-quatre ans, marchand de vin, tous deux domiciliés à Paris.

Et ont signé avec nous, après lecture : E. Beau, Garrel, Blanquet, Roubaud"

English (translation also from ChatGPT):

"In the year 1892, on the 20th of August at eight o’clock in the morning, Birth certificate of Marie Thérèse, born the day before yesterday at six o’clock in the evening, at 104 boulevard Clichy, daughter of Pierre Émile Beau, 31 years old, painting contractor, and Marie Ticot, 31 years old, his wife, with no other profession.

This record was drawn up by Roubaud, Deputy Mayor and Civil Registrar of the 18th arrondissement of Paris, upon presentation of the child and declaration made in the presence of:

Joseph Garrel, 29 years old, locksmith contractor and Auguste Blanquet, 34 years old, wine merchant, both residing in Paris.

The record was read aloud and signed by the father, the two witnesses, and ourselves.

Signatures: E. Beau, Garrel, Blanquet, Roubaud."

ChatGPT's tendency to invent is infuriating, however I can make out enough details to have confidence in what, for now, are the salient parts. I'm not convinced that Monsieur Garrel is Garrel, it looks more like Garrean to me, but the witnesses are not relevant to this piece. Experience so far though is that ChatGPT is completely untrustworthy.

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Marie-Thérèse Beau entered this world on Thursday the 18th August 1892 at six o'clock in the evening, in 104, Boulevard de Clichy. Presumably she was born at home and that was home to the Beaus. Today it's an Italian restaurant with five floors of apartments above it. There is no indication of which apartment the Beaus lived in.

Step out of number 104, onto the boulevard, look to your left, and you can see the red wings of the Moulin Rouge just a few doors away, close enough to hear the music, especially if your windows are open on a warm summer's night.

Across the road opposite the Moulin Rouge is the Rue Blanche. Walk down the Rue Blanche and you are leaving behind the relative safety and respectability of the Boulevard de Clichy. To walk down the Rue Blanche is to walk past absinthe bars, past music, offers of sex and the ever present threat of violence.

We're not done yet though; off the Rue Blanche is a narrow alleyway, the Rue Chaptal. Head down the Rue Chaptal. The music fades into the distance, only starlight guides us, and there's precious little of that through the smog of Paris. Amazingly there is a turning into an even darker dead end, the Impasse Chaptal. Regarding us from the end is a brooding building, gothic and bizarre. It's a building that demands a haunting; the shadowy forms of medieval nuns should watch us from its empty windows. Perhaps they do. Hundreds of years ago it was a chapel. In 1892 it's very sensibly locked shut for the night, an artist's studio during the day. In five years time an ambitious police clerk will open it as a theatre. In twenty five years little Marie Thérèse will invent a new character for herself and carve a legend, and arguably a prison, on its stage. But we don't know that yet. Right now it is very dark and very quiet.

Let's go get a drink. The bars never close.

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Childhood.

"I was born in ordinary surroundings. My parents were well-off, but by no means were they to be considered "modern" parents at all. I guess they hardly knew what "modern" meant."

"My mother was a school teacher. She gave me all the care a loving mother could give her child. I learned perfect manners and foreign languages, and took piano lessons. I revealed an early talent for music and dreamed of becoming a famous concert pianist."

Paula Maxa may have lived a quiet and old-fashioned life, the epitome of respectability with middle class professional parents. Marie-Thérèse Beau was born six doors down from the Moulin Rouge to a house painter and his wife who, according to Marie-Thérèse's birth registration, had "no other profession".

Marriage

What do we call her? There seems such a gulf between the actress and the woman. Whether it's Marie-Thérèse or Paula, a side note on the birth record above tells us that she married:

Married on 1st August 1912, in Fourg (Doubs), to Count Charles Gustave Joseph Le Clerc de Bussy de Vaucelles (Recorded 6 August 1912 by the mayor)

Marie-Thérèse married Charles de Bussy 17 days before her 20th birthday. She was 19, he was 37. His Wikipedia page makes no mention of a wife. He died in 1938.

Paula Maxa is a terrible historian. Great entertainer, terrible historian. In her 1938 interview (reprinted in full in the 2nd edition of Mel Gordon's "Theatre of Fear and Horror" (2016, p148)), she tells us:

"At the age of sixteen I married the Count C______"

Presumably Charles (de Bussy). She then goes on to say:

"I was already familiar with the Grand Guignol since I had seen several plays there before. I remember especially an adaptation of Stevenson's The Suicide Club."

The Paris Archive gives us a date of 1912 for the marriage. If Maxa had been sixteen then this would have put her year of birth in 1895 - the marriage was before her birthday. We have two dates of birth for Maxa - the official one of 1892 and the claimed one of 1898. Neither of them match Maxa's report. If, as seems likely, the official date is accurate then Marie Thérèse Beau married Charles de Bussy when she was nineteen.

There's something else - the play she's referring to, the adaptation of The Suicide Club, is "Les Nuits du Hampton-Club" by André Mouëzy-Éon. According to Agnès Pierron, Les Nuits du Hampton-Club only ever played once, in February to May 1908 (Pierron 1995, p1407). That 1898 birthdate demands that Maxa be attending plays at the Grand Guignol at the age of nine, which seems implausible. Even the 1892 date only makes her fifteen.

An unpleasant possiblity

Unpleasant to our modern sensibilities at least. Was Maxa already in a relationship with a man seventeen years her senior at the age of fifteen? Was she indeed going to the Grand Guignol at the age of fifteen with her thirty two year old lover as she claims? The man she would marry four years later and (from the look of things) immediately lose interest in?

Or did she marry in 1908, and it just took the registrar 4 years to update her record and he simply couldn't be bothered to put the right year... no, that doesn't strike me as plausible. Whatever Maxa may have told people, she married legally and officially in 1912. As for before that...

The past is a foreign country, they do things differently there.

The film career

Doesn't appear to have gone far. There she is in early cinema crime serial Les Vampires playing the innocent maid Laura. She looks new, eager, too naive in the ways of film to stop her bonnet concealing her face. There she is at the beginning and at 6:15, looking like perfect maid casting.

1916. She will start work at the Grand Guignol the following year, initially in small parts. IMDB has no other credits for her. The trivia on her IMDB page grandly states that "she was chosen to be killed in films up to 350 times" but offers no evidence. 350 films would have been a superhuman output - by contrast Charlie Chaplin, one of the most prolific film actors of all time, has 93 acting credits. Nicholas Cage, a man legendary for never turning down a role, has (at time of writing) 117.

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Bibliography

Gordon, M. (2016). Theater of Fear and Horror: The Grisly Spectacle of the Grand Guignol of Paris, 1898–1962. Port Townsend, WA: Feral House.

Pierron, A. (ed.) (1995) Le Grand Guignol: Le Théâtre des peurs de la Belle Époque. Paris: Robert Laffont. Collection: Bouquins. ISBN: 9782221069011.

Pierron, A. (2011). Maxa: la femme la plus assassinée du monde. Paris: Éditions Riveneuve. ISBN: 9782355391255