After a brief education and some odd jobs as employee of a lottery agency and as clerk in a bailiff's office, he embarked upon a singing career while frequenting the goguettes.

[4] The new genre was typified by "a frantic, disjointed movement that was seen as [...] epileptic and puppet-like" that the theatre critic Francisque Sarcey termed gambillard in relation to the mimicking of the gesticulations and dislocations of puppets, in which the performer mainly used his legs while hopping, striding, jumping.

[3][4][7] In his memoirs, Trente ans de Café-concert, Paulus said he was inspired by a group of male comic dancers, Les Clodoches – very much in fashion in the late 1860s – and by Thomas Holden's marionettes.

[3][10] In 1883, Paulus signed a lucrative for three years at the Concert Parisien, demanding an astronomical fee (he was the first to do so), but he sang regularly at other venues, sometimes going so far as to sing, for different audiences (including private performances), up to 40 songs in a single evening, making up to FF 1,500 (equivalent to $3,798,059 in 2022) per day.

In 1885, he left Concert Parisien and following a lawsuit (which he lost - the breach of his contract cost him FF 30,000 equivalent to $75,961,182 in 2022), he found himself at the La Scala and the Alcazar d'Été.

[2][15] In 1887, he founded the journal La Revue des Concerts, together with the songwriters and composers Lucien Delormel and Léon Garnier, where he gave free rein to his vindictive character causing it to close in less than two years.

[17] Because Paulus refused to perform outdoors, some thirty arc and mercury lamps had to be used in Méliès provisional studio near the Paris Opera, one of the first times artificial light was used for cinematography.

[18][19] On 19 December 1906, a gala evening was organised for him by the daily newspaper Le Figaro at the Théâtre de la Gaîté, in which the greatest artists took part.

[3][20] A year and a few months later, on the first of June 1908, aged 63, he died of arteriosclerosis[1] and was buried in the Cimetière Sud de Saint-Mandé, which is part of the commune but located in the 12th arrondissement of Paris.

These memories are full of anecdotes about the café-concert, its contemporaries and some legendary figures: Thérésa, Gustave Nadaud, Eugénie Fougère, Céleste Mogador, Virginie Déjazet, Marius Richard, Polin, Harry Fragson, Yvette Guilbert, Félix Mayol, Aristide Bruant, Dranem and the soprano Hortense Schneider.