Bijoux de Montmartre

Signed in pen lower right, studio stamps verso, marked “Page 86, Pl.384”

Draped in strands of costume pearls and crowned with a feathered hat, the woman known only as La Môme Bijou sits alone at a café table in Montmartre. Her heavily rouged cheeks and stacked jewelry speak of faded elegance, defiance, and survival. Brassaï found her in the Parisian night, where she had become a fixture—part performer, part apparition.

“Once she was rich and famous… Now she lives on charity, she reads the customers’ palms,” Brassaï later recalled. In this photograph, he captures not only her physical presence but the fragility of identity shaped by memory and loss.

Rendered in stark silver gelatin, Bijoux de Montmartre is less a portrait than a study in resilience—of glamour held together by will and ritual, of a woman who chose to become her own myth.