CLEOPATRA'S BOUDOIR

As far as I can remember, I have been fascinated by belly dancers and exotic performers. My godmother was a professional belly dancer and instilled with world of dance within me at an early age. Over the years I have done some research on various performers from the late 1800 and early 1900s. To my surprise, a dancer named Sahary Djeli inspired the French perfumer Delettrez to create a perfume in her honour, aptly named Sahary Djeli. This perfume came out in 1910, around the same time that Sahary’s fame was at its peak.

Not much info can be found on Sahary Djeli, except that she was a Hungarian performer who created a whole persona based on her own imagination. She claimed to have belonged to a strange sect from the Orient and that the name Sahary Djeli meant The Socreress of the Century. Other rumors were that she was actually born on a French farm. Her main claim to fame was portraying the exotic Salome and dancing her so called Forbidden dance at many music halls and venues such as Le Casino de Paris, Les Varietes in Brussels and at the Hippodrome in London. Sahary was a contortionist and relied upon her unusual dance poses to keep her fame, one way to entice the crowd with her bizarre Forbidden Dance was to advertise her photo along with an artist’s rendition of how she would look in an X-ray taken of her holding the pose, this was seen in an issue of the Comœdia Illustré.

An article in the Grey River Argus January 11, 1912, titled "Mystery of a Dancer: Story of her Childhood."

Sahary Djeli , mysterious as ever, has returned to London, and will appear in a new Eastern Dance tragedy at the Hippodrome, at which house, it will be remembered the dancer scored an unusual success not long ago in an elaborate Salome sketch.

Sahary Djeli, resting on a divan from the fatigue of a rehearsal, was as secret and obscure as of old, on the subject of her parentage, absolely refusing to enlighten him as to her real name or real nationality and talking only of incidents of her babyhood, and of those more as if they had been of dreams than of actualities. Speaking in French, which she has entirely adopted with the view of forgetting her own native language or at all the events with the view of not giving tongue to it before strangers . Sahary Djeli told the following remarkable story of which she called the birth of her passion for dancing.

“It was in the East, long, long ago when I was a little girl, a baby almost, We were crossing the desert, going far into the interior, the sun - ah! you do not know what the sun is in this grey land, the sun was liquid fire. At noon we could bear it no longer, they had left me to play in the shadows of a few palms, and at the foot of one I was digging deeply for the root of a flower, when the elephants trumpeted loudly, and I looked round to see the desert beginning , as it seemed to me, to dance. I was entranced. So lightly the sand whirled round and round, came closer and waltzed away. Then the sand would sink lower and lower, tall columns of it falling until they settled on the ground like this.”

Rising to her utmost height she slowly sank down to her dressing room floor, and lay there for awhile a tangle of shimmering transparency. Then she assumed a sitting posture, common to the Eastern people of whose life she is obviously more closely acquainted with than she will admit and went on wit her story.

“And then the desert danced again, a furious dance this time, great whirling clouds of sand darkening the sky, the palms above me shivering, the elephants trumpeting more wildly than before. Some buried their trunks in the sand and lay flat, and I lay flat also, covering my face with my hands, and working my body as deeply into the sand as I could for protection. The darkness and the storm passed slowly away and when they had gone, I rose and looked around. Two of the elephants lay dead by the palms, further along the bodies of my father and two of his attendants.”

“Yes,” said Sahary Djeli, after a slight shiver, “I remember only too well, that first dance, the dance of death, which gave birth to my Dance of the Desert!”.

From the book: Dashing Stage Beauties of the World.  c1910.  a hard-to-find portfolio of prints published circa 1912 by Leslie Judge Company :

“SAHARY DJELI. All of our dancing in recent years has been influenced by the rythmic body movements of the Oriental dances, which in their original form greatly shocked society, but which as modified have merely infused a new, fascination into the Western dances. One of the public dancers who brought the unmodified dances of the East before audiences of the West was Sahary Djeli, of whom a critic wrote, after witnessing one of her performances: "As a female contortionist, she surpassed all her predecessors in Salome dancing. She almost succeeded in tying herself in a hard knot, than rolled down a flight of stairs and died at the footlights. A large chorus of dancers and negro slaves made an effective background for her. SAHARY DJELI is an Hungarian and made her debut on the stage in Budapest. Since then she has danced on all the stages of the principal cities of Europe. She is an extremely beautiful woman and her poses are the delight of all art connoisseurs. The photo shows her in the role of "Salome," which she has portrayed a number of times. She is sometimes known as the "Lady of the Jewels," because she is said to own more precious stones than any other lady in Europe.”

The Sahary Djeli perfume bottle is clear crystal, square shaped and topped by a brass cap over an inner stopper. The label is embossed gold foil.