There was a 1979 film about the world’s most famous flatulist.
The whole film can be legally downlaoded here.
I heartily recommend the series of bandes desinees of Jacques Tardi entitled “Les Aventures extraordinaires d’Adèle Blanc-sec.” They’re set in pre-WWI Paris, are wonderful melodramatic thrillers featuring an anachronistically feminist newspaper reporter, and are really good architectural and fashion guides to 1910-1914 Europe.
There are seven or eight in the series, and the first two have been translated into English. The link leads you to the second and better-written installment, Le Demon de la Tour Eiffel.
They sound like fun recreational reads—but using fiction as source material for nonfiction? I’d be drummed out of . . . well, there’s nothing to actually be drummed out of, come to think of it.
On the more serious side of art, Gertrude Stein was in Paris in 1912, at 27, Rue de Fleurus. The modernist painter Othon Frieze had just opened a studio. There were at least a couple of American painters studying at the Acadamie Moderne. Notably Charles Demuth, Marsden Hartley (arrived in April 1912) and Edward Fisk.
Since Exapno Mapcase mentioned feminists, Marie Laurencin had her first big exhibition at the Galerie Barbazanges in 1912 (don’t know the month).
Monet was there in July, not painting, but being diagnosed with cataracts. Marie Curie moved to Paris in October following a big scandal.
Oh, they’re not reference tools so much as a way to get your head into the period mindset. (Just disregard the plots concerning syringes of Plague sera, mysterious Assyrian demon-worship cults, and re-animated Pterodactyls.) I always dig my copies out when I want to disguise myself as a 1912 Parisian bourgeois.
Was that you? I thought it was strange that the dashing fellow with the accent and the antique outfit was asking when the pterodactyls were expected to re-animate.