La Goulue
Louise Weber (13 July 1866, Alsace-Lorraine – 30 January 1929) was a French can-can dancer who performed under the stage name of La Goulue (French pronunciation: [la guly]; "the "). She also was referred to as the Queen of Montmartre.
Very little is known about her early childhood, but it is believed that Louise Weber was born into a Jewish family from Alsace that eventually moved to Clichy, near Paris. Her mother worked in a laundry. As an impoverished young girl who loved to dance, Weber is said to have enjoyed dressing up in laundry customers' expensive clothing and pretending to be a glamorous star on a great stage. At age 16, she was working with her mother in the laundry, but behind her mother's back began sneaking off to a dance hall dressed in a customer's "borrowed" dress.
Dancing at small clubs around Paris, Louise Weber quickly became a popular personality, liked for both her dancing skills and her charming audacious behavior. In her routine, she teased the male audience by swirling her raised dress to reveal the heart embroidered on her panties and would do a high kick while flipping off a man's hat with her toe. Because of her frequent habit of picking up a customer's glass and quickly downing its contents while dancing past their table, she was affectionately nicknamed "La Goulue" (The Glutton). Eventually she met the Montmartre painter Pierre-Auguste Renoir who introduced her to a group of models who earned extra money posing for the community's artists and photographers. Achille Delmaet, husband of Marie Juliette Louvet, would later find fame as the photographer who had taken many nude photographs of La Goulue.
Louise Weber was taken under the wing of Jacques Renaudin (1843–1907), a wine merchant who danced in his spare time under the stage name "Valentin le Désossé". They danced at the renowned Moulin Rouge in Montmartre when it first opened, performing an early form of the Cancan known as the "chahut." The two were instant stars, but it was Weber who stole the show with her outrageously captivating conduct. Booked as a permanent headliner, La Goulue became synonymous with the Cancan and the Moulin Rouge nightclub. The toast of Paris and the highest paid entertainer of her day, she became one of the favorite subjects for Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, immortalized by his portraits and posters of her dancing at the Moulin Rouge.
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