Hottentot Venus

by Barbara Chase-Riboud

  morning to nine in the evening. Admission: 3 francs per person.

  Sarah’s Venus was an immediate commercial success, much to my delight. She was the talk of Paris. Newspaper articles, posters and engravings began to appear. Queues formed outside 188 rue St. Honoré. High society began to frequent my small barrack either to amuse themselves or reserve an appearance of the Venus at their next soirée. Eventually, I thought, the Venus’s fame would reach the literary and scientific worlds, but by now I didn’t even need their guarantees. My letter to the great naturalist and scientist Baron Cuvier remained unanswered, but the public had taken to the Hottentot, and Sarah, though often drunk or sick, did fulfill her contract to entertain and amaze them. Alice was a perfect governess to keep her in shape to perform and provide her with companionship. My only worry was Dunlop. I was afraid he might show up again out of the blue and claim Sarah’s gains as her husband. This was what Sarah dreamed of, I knew, but I didn’t waste a lot of time worrying about it. I guessed he was probably in America . . . or dead, either of which suited me fine. I did have my problems with Alice, who was so protective and solicitous of Sarah that I had had to make several concessions as to how long I could exhibit her by day, her private doctor’s bills, her bottles of gin, her extravagant purchases of expensive gloves, hats and rhinestones. To be sure, I thought, Alice asked nothing for herself except her salary and she saved me great expense by doing the shopping and the cooking if we ate at home, which was rare since I spent most of my time gambling, whoring or simply passing the time with other showmen. But Alice was not the only one who felt protective or had affection for the Venus. There was Madame Romain, known as the “la Belle Limonadière,” who ruled (and owned) the sumptuous Palais Royal café called the Thousand Columns.

  La Belle was almost as fat as the circus freak who lived in our building, but she had the face of an angel. She was the daughter of a prostitute and at twelve her mother had sold her virginity for a fortune. She had begun to work in a house of prostitution and was noticed by a very rich gentleman who took her as his mistress and set her up in a small hotel in Passy. She remained his mistress for almost twenty years, leading a bourgeois life of ease and leisure. She had had one son, by her lover the Baron de S, and she had blackmailed him into adopting the boy. When he reached the age of sixteen, he was sent to Napoleon’s Ecole Polytechnique, and he was now a young officer unaware of his origins. Belle intended to keep it that way, although she was proud and enamored of him. When her patron died, leaving her son part of his fortune, Belle sold the hotel and bought the Thousand Columns with enough left over to turn it into the most decadent and fashionable of the Palais Royal cafés. Here, she ruled night and day, having returned to her old life without a qualm or a regret, sitting behind the cashbox on a high stool that looked like a throne, from which she surveyed everything and everyone like a sea captain, bejeweled and respected, a diamond tiara perched on her blond wig, which flowed in happy ringlets down her back. She controlled a platoon of pimps, gamblers and bodyguards and was well protected, thanks to the baron, by the Paris police, who not only left her and her girls alone but often asked her for help in solving the nightly crimes of the quarter. She also ran a gang of small boys whose only function was to protect her important clients from exposure by running warnings, like carrier pigeons, from one brothel to the other. Belle’s salons were always open to high officials who wanted meetings with the underground and the Corsican mafia or to strike deals between important criminals and the police. As long as you were on the right side of her, she was a loyal, protective friend, full of French common sense.

  Amongst the inmates of number 188 was a dwarf named William, better known as William the Cock, William the Prick, William the Dick or William the Will, who had a normal-sized head and a larger-than-normal-sized penis, which was as long as his short legs. The dwarf’s great specialty was to walk between the legs of women or climb up their limbs like a monkey hidden by their skirts. He was courted and adored by the quarter’s prostitutes. Hardened courtesans who had not had an orgasm in years used the small man as a living, inventive dildo. William the Cock always obliged, having become a master of the art of cunnilingus. He wore a padded codpiece that hung almost to the ground and made dirty bawdy jokes about it that never failed to excite the most obscene hilarity in his audiences. Cheerful and boisterous, he was the mascot of the Cour des Fontaines and a star attraction at the vaudeville theater. It was perhaps his elegies of the Venus that led to the preparation of a play based on her persona and popularity. The Venus’s success was tremendous. She needed neither publicity nor endorsements. Parisians flocked to see her. In only a few weeks she was a citywide celebrity and a subject of conversation in the salons of the rich and wellborn. The gazettes sang her praises. In the quarter of St. Germain a glove shop reopened its doors under the new sign “The Hottentot Venus.” And on October 24, only five weeks after our arrival from England, a new play, The Hottentot Venus by Théaulon de Lambert, opened in vaudeville. It was a new record for the production of a play composed and written around a news item. Its subtitle was Hate to the French. Sarah and Alice and William the Cock and I were in the first row of the opening performance. Only I and the dwarf really understood the play’s humor. Sarah and Alice couldn’t understand why the Venus never made a real appearance. For me, it only made my Sarah more valuable. I decided to raise the admission price by fifty centimes. But Alice had her hands full with Sarah’s drinking.

  —Sarah, she begged, you’ve got to stop drinking . . . The doctor says . . .

  —I don’t care what the doctor says.

  —Well, at least take your medicine . . .

  —No medicine . . . except my dagga.

  —Morphine . . .

  —No.

  —Oh, Sarah, Sarah. Alice would say when she thought she was out of my hearing, Let’s run away before it’s too late . . . You’re sick. You need to rest. We could go back to England. I can take care of you . . .

  I worried, but Sarah’s attitude had a morbid rigidity, a dull stubbornness that was possibly the stupidity of her race, a dense, angry, dreamy resistance to changing anything until her so-called inheritance, which she equated with her dignity, was restored. She never spoke to me about the dowry she had paid out to Dunlop, but several times I heard her speaking of it with Alice.

  —But you’ve made thousands of pounds, protested Alice. You’ve made ten hundred times ten pounds. You think Dunlop is coming back for you, but I tell you, Sarah, he’s not! He’s gone. Forget him.

  —He’s my husband.

  —He’s a bigamist.

  —I’ve forgotten what that means . . .

  —It means, Sarah, that he has two wives and one of them is white. He’s a traitor, a thief and a liar, Sarah, and a cruel deceiver of women . . .

  —Leave me be, Alice, leave me be . . . she would say. And Alice would do just that. Or go out and buy her a bottle of gin.

  —The vaudeville play The Hottentot Venus tells the story of a young man who decides to marry a savage instead of his well-brought-up cousin Amélie, said William the Cock, trying to explain the comedy to Sarah.

  —Then, Amélie says, it is certainly strange to see a Hottentot lady.

  —The Chevalier responds: A lady! She’s a Venus, Madame. A Venus who has arrived from England and who at this moment is admired by every connoisseur in Paris!

  —Amélie: She’s beautiful then?

  —The Chevalier: Oh! A horrifying beauty!

  —Then continued William, he sings:

  Already tout Paris sings

  Of this amazing woman,

  First, she speaks little

  Her song seems barbarous

  Her dance is quick and burlesque

  Her size a handsome handful

  It is said her hymen’s been engaged,

  But this Venus I bet

  Never makes love.

  William began to recite all the parts, first of Amélie, then of the Chevalier.

&nbs
p; —Amélie: One surely speaks much of her.

  —The Chevalier: It isn’t just a question of her, ahem . . . She has her little Hottentot songs that are so gay that all the ladies have already ordered their dresses and douillettes à la Hottentot this winter.

  —Then, said William the Cock, in the final scene, the Chevalier unrolls the portrait of the Hottentot Venus that he shows to all the cast of characters and the audience. Everyone screams in horror and says in unison:

  What a peculiar adventure!

  What looks until now unheard of!

  With such a shape!

  She can’t be a Venus!

  —And finally, continued the dwarf, the Chevalier sees the error of his ways and marries his cousin and lives happily ever after. There was even an American in the audience the other night who shouted out in the middle of the play that this marriage was mis . . . miscegenation. When I asked him what that was, he said marriage or fornication between a black person and a white person . . . Imagine, that’s a crime in America, punished by fine and prison.

  —Prison?

  —In America, of course. In France we abolished slavery under the Revolution. We produced the Constitution and proclaimed the freedom of our black brothers in the Bill of Rights. Under the Directory, this act stood. Then Bonaparte came along and reestablished slavery again in the islands of the West Indies. The prisoner of Elba, intoned William the Cock, has had the last word . . .

  All that winter, the Venus’s fame grew. She began to make appearances at aristocrats’ private soirées, to mingle with the bourgeois of St. Germain and the courtesans of the Tuileries and the Palais Royal. She was happiest with the petit bourgeois of the faubourg: the butcher, the baker, the lace maker, the cobbler, the confectioner, the milliner and the dressmaker. To them, she was Madame, a prodigy, a celebrity, who was also a client who paid well and promptly. I received many demands for an appearance of the Hottentot Venus at the various grand receptions of the winter season. I refused many, but from time to time I accepted and Sarah obliged me by donning her transparent dress and mask and allowing gentlemen and ladies whom she would never see again to gaze at her person with pity and horror. This was usually manifested by nervous laughter and coarse commentary. Didn’t they ever get tired? I thought. Weary of making themselves laugh at something which was not funny? Why was this laughter always so forced, and unnatural? I’m sure Sarah would rather have heard the rough, pure laugh of a hyena.

  In late February, the Venus was to appear at a reception of Madame de C, held each month in the luxurious salons of her Paris hotel. The cream of Parisian society attended: painters, writers, politicians, actors, opera singers, scientists and intellectuals of all sorts. Sarah was happy to appear because there would be music she could listen to while allowing herself to be stared at, whispered about behind her back and talked to as if she were blind, deaf and dumb. Madame de C ruled her salons with an iron hand, dispensing invitations, excluding this person or that, depending on her whim or the latest newspaper or court gossip. Sarah was to be the surprise of the soirée.

  I accompanied her that night. She stood for a moment on the steps of the Hôtel de C on the rue du Bac in the heart of St. Germain, facing the long line of rectangular windows interspersed with lit torches, all blazing. She stood, immobile for a moment, her red cloak around her shoulders, in the frame of one of the French doors, the light from which threw her shadow, long and black, onto the shiny cobblestones. The windows shone with the world of the rich and powerful, being served, holding conversations, exchanging in the most human way banalities, secrets, gossip, arguing, postulating, cajoling, lying, out of pride or ambition or maliciousness or faith, honor, strategy, simple greed or simple amusement. Male figures, or rather figurines, glided by in rich military uniforms, or black evening clothes. The ladies on their arms wore satin and lace, mousseline and crêpe de chine. Sarah tied a black lace mask across her eyes. I had told her once: If people cannot see your face, their imagination will invent a face more terrifying than even yours could be . . . The majordomo said nothing as we entered the salon. He knew who she was. The odor of human flesh, cut flowers, perfume and the chalk spread on the hardwood floors of the ballroom rose to my nostrils.

  The gathering combined Madame de C’s society friends with the luminaries of Paris and Europe. There were the writers Stendhal and Chateaubriand. The sculptor David d’Angers. Napoleon’s personal physician, Corvisart, the scientists Cuvier, Gay-Lussac, Arago, Etienne Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire. There was the actor Talma, Madame Destutt de Tracy, the senators Monge and Laplace. All were discussing the latest book of the exiled Madame de Staël and the existence of ideal beauty in Lessing’s Laokoon. Like a box of sweets, everyone was filled with the cream of knowledge and the cherry of himself.

  —Madame, my Venus Hottentot, said a tall man softly suddenly at her side. I have a picture of you sent to me a long time ago, I recognize you . . . You do understand me? Aren’t you the Hottentot Venus?

  I turned quickly and saw it was the Baron Cuvier, his pale avid eyes devouring Sarah.

  Baron Georges Léopold Chrétien Frédéric Dagobert Cuvier, director of the Museum of Natural History, surgeon general to Emperor Napoleon, peer of France, director of dissident cults, president of the Institute of France, inspector general of public education, member of the Council of State, lifetime consultant of the University, member of the Academy of Sciences and of the French Academy, grand officer of the Legion of Honor was known as “the Napoleon of Intelligence.” He was famous for his prodigious energy, output and extraordinary burden of responsibility. His fame also rested on his sanguinity, his brilliant political tactics and his penchant for changing sides at the right moment. That was how the suave and famous naturalist had survived the Revolution, the reign of Napoleon under which he had so prospered, and the Restoration of Louis XVIII, who had, despite Cuvier’s long and intimate ties with the ex-Emperor, appointed him to his Council of State. The doctor had suffered no political consequences at all because of his deep loyalty to Napoleon Bonaparte. On the contrary, his scientific reputation begun under the Emperor’s patronage had catapulted him to the highest echelons of prestige and power.

  —If the princess is amazed at your deformity, he said, Science, I must say, is confounded.

  There was cruelty and irony in his voice but nevertheless I allowed Sarah to follow him towards a group of people. I vowed to ask him later about my unanswered letter of months ago. The orchestra struck up, and for a moment, the Venus thought everyone in the world loved her. Cuvier escorted the Venus to her hosts, the prince and princess. I could not believe my luck! Now he could claim he had unearthed the body of the Hottentot, like one of his fossils, quite by accident.

  —Here is, Madame, my Venus Hottentot, he repeated dozens of times as he greeted his friends in the crowd as if it were one of his famous “Cuvier Saturdays.” Sarah I could see, was happy. I had complained to her about the scientist who had refused to examine her before her exhibition opened in Paris and whom I had never heard from since. I wondered vaguely what would be the outcome of this unexpected encounter.

  But Cuvier escorted her from one group of people to another, from famous writers to fellow scientists to a bouquet of magnificently dressed matrons busily fanning themselves.

  —The portraits of Sarah Baartman, said Stendhal, who was standing next to Etienne Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire, have invaded all of France. They have an exactitude, which is an antidote to the exaggerations of the English caricatures.

  —I have seen the vaudeville play The Hottentot Venus, which is quite amusing.

  —What can we do now that the English have taken all our African colonies?

  —Allow me, Madame, to draw your portrait, requested Léon de Wailly, a painter for the court.

  —Is there a difference between a Hottentot and a Bushman, Chevalier Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire? asked the Vicomte François René de Chateaubriand. You with your studies of monsters? Which is the most savage?

  —Etienne
’s been searching for the missing link. Is this it, Etienne?

  Several ladies, themselves in transparent dresses, approached the Venus and struck her with their fans. Others peered through the gossamer dress, their eager eyes searching.

  —I have long had a passion for teratology, said Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire to Stendhal, that is, the study of monsters. I have actually induced the birth of abnormal chicks by manipulating the embryos in the shell . . . Notice that the Venus has the beginnings of a snout that’s larger than that of the red orangutan that inhabits Madagascar . . . Notice the prodigious size of her hips and buttocks, protrusions that inspire comparison to the female species of the maimon and mandrill monkeys. This pathological condition is called steatopygia, a term I derived from the Latin roots for fat and buttocks but not in use outside of scientific circles . . .

  A small group of ladies gathered around Sarah, begging her to remove her mask.

  —Oh no, dear, said one, you’re pregnant. Do you want to give birth to a Hottentot baby?!

  —Oh, she must be too ugly to look upon in her entirety.

  —You haven’t seen the vaudeville play about her?

  —But you don’t actually see her, injected a voice.

  Sarah turned, startled that her reflection, with its feathers, pearls and glass beads, repeated itself in the cut-glass mirrors a thousand times. The banqueting black curves of her buttocks reflected over and over and over again into infinity. The conglomeration of dark-skinned Venuses invaded the pristine gilt-and-white-framed glass as if they had shattered them with cannon, dissolving the image into a regiment of effigies.

  —What is it? screamed Madame Destutt de Tracy.

  Suddenly, as if an alarm had been sounded, a whole group of ladies stampeded to the back of the salon where the orchestra played, pushing and shoving each other and hiding themselves behind the salon drapes. Sarah looked startled, caught unawares. The violence of the women’s reaction surprised her. Their panic induced a reverie that made her seem to sink downwards before my very eyes. Her head fell onto her breast, her arms hung slackly, her eyes filled with tears. It was as if she had been knocked unconscious by the blow of this final humiliation.