The Book of the Courtesans

by Susan Griffin

  This uniqueness may explain why courtesans were so often found at the cutting edge of new sensibilities. While she used time to her own advantage, the courtesan expanded the terrain of the imagination. Indeed, the fact that so often whenever culture made a daring turn, breaking old boundaries, flying in the face of convention, courtesans have been part of that history illustrates how time moves forward. In contrast to the conventional view, it is less by aiming yourself in the direction of the future that you will affect the tenor of your times than by immersing yourself in the present.

  How did she develop her unique presence? At this point, we can only guess. But our guesses are educated. Early deprivation and fear for survival would have played major roles in the unfolding drama. Traumatic events, losses, and miseries can make every moment of life seem like a precious substance, not a drop of which should be missed. At the same time, narrow escapes and fortunate breaks can loosen the hold that well-laid plans have on the mind, serving to free events from any narrative plot that is too constricting.

  And from this perhaps we can also begin to grasp why, aside from any efficacy, good timing is so attractive. Though you would not have been able to name the seemingly ephemeral effect she had of enlarging your consciousness, a courtesan’s awareness of time might make you long for her in the same way that a mystic longs for God. Or, if you are devoutly secular, for what is still nascent in yourself.

  Yet, as ephemeral as it may seem, this virtue means far less in the abstract than it does in the concrete example. So let us proceed, if not methodically, bit by bit, through many of the simpler expressions of good timing that are more plainly manifested in the lives of courtesans. This is, after all, hardly a dreary task. Known as a “good-time girl,” the courtesan had to be able to make men laugh, which called on comic timing. To dress well, she had to know what to wear—and when. And for flirtation, of course, essential to all her other accomplishments, she had to have exquisite timing. There is almost nothing she did that did not require this virtue. But we begin with the activity most often associated with courtesans, perhaps because it is the one with which so many began their careers: dance.

  The Way She Danced

  Then I started to dance, the way I have always danced.— Josephine Baker, describing her debut at the Johann Strauss Theatre

  The moment was legendary. Before the music began, no one had heard of her. But as she circled about the floor, her body moving up and down with a vitality memorable even today, every eye in the dance hall was on her. As the polka beat out its inexorable rhythms, the heat of attention only increased. When she and her partner stopped dancing, the inevitable crowd of men surrounded her. Because of the way she danced that night, her life would never be the same again.

  Why was her dance so powerful? Philosophy pauses here. Though time is a fascinating concept, it pales when you think of this scene. Even to begin to answer the question, we will have to expand our vocabulary. Timing may serve to describe the ability to coordinate desire and circumstance, yet it fails to illuminate the mysterious bodily process by which these effects are achieved. For this purpose, we must explore the concept of rhythm, too.

  Yet even this word needs some resuscitation. Perhaps because of the clock and metronome, in contemporary thought we have come to mistake rhythm for a simple mechanical activity. Even the dictionary makes this error, calling rhythm “a procedure with the patterned occurrence of a beat.” But buried deeply within the entries, you can find the word “cadence,” an older term, with an appealing gloss and a far more sensual patina. And listed third or fourth in the definitions of cadence there is an entry that serves this exploration well: “the pattern in which something is experienced. ”

  Just think of the beat that underlies all that we do. Breathing, of course, is almost too obvious. As is lovemaking, abundantly clear. But there are also walking, eating, and even seeing, as the eyes dart about the room, or speaking, as impulses and desires swim past and through consciousness, surface, and slide away again. Whether by the subtle starts and stops of a conversation or the inescapably loud punctuation provided by a pair of cymbals, rhythm shapes and inspires every moment.

  The rhythm at the heart of dance is the same as the one that informs all experience. The only way to move with a piece of music is to feel the rhythm as it expands into your hips, your legs, your arms, your feet. Think for instance of a line of Rockettes, or better yet, since many dancers from the Folies- Bergère became courtesans, a circle of chorus girls from that show. If one of them were to be off step, we would quickly sense her failure to feel the music. Her performance would lack more than tempo. The spirit of both the music and the dance would be missing, too. Her dance would be lackluster.

  The great French actress known as Rosay, who studied music as a child, referred to rhythm as a form of energy. She used the word to describe the way actors go beyond merely pretending to feel what the characters in a play are supposed to feel. Instead, she said, an actor must actually experience the feeling. If the courtesan was, to some degree, always acting, her success depended on how well she could act, that is, on whether or not she actually experienced the feelings she radiated. But this must have been what Rosay meant. When you find the right tempo for any activity, whether it is eating or walking, talking, or making love, you have also found the capacity to feel.

  In her Mémoirs, Céleste Vénard, the dancer known as Mogador, claimed that she never wanted to be a courtesan. Even so, she must have played the role with feeling. The way she danced was so inspiring that when she performed the polka in the crowded dance hall called the Bal Mabille, she made her reputation in a single night. Though we can only imagine this famous dance now, several clues to the charm it must have had remain for us. There is, for instance, the series of etchings and paintings that Toulouse- Lautrec did of dance-hall life. He often depicted a dancer and courtesan known then as La Goulue,*1 who was famous for dancing the cancan. At public dance halls, women would compete with each other over who could kick her legs higher and thus reveal more of what was underneath her skirts. La Goulue became famous as the undisputed winner. The thrill was, of course, to be able to see so far beneath the skirts of the dancers, who were not always wearing pantaloons. The ardor of the revelation was only increased with the progressively rapid, excited beat of the music to which each kick was timed.

  In one of the posters Toulouse-Lautrec designed for the Moulin Rouge, he portrays La Goulue with an expression that is neither bawdy nor frivolous. As she balances on one leg and lifts her right leg high, she stares intently into space, as if concentrating on her art. She is clearly a woman serious about her work. Of course, even if at other moments she laughed, she had to be focused at this moment. She was earning her living. But Lautrec has captured another energy altogether in the lower half of her body. La Goulue, whose name means “glutton,” was known for her appetite. Below her waist, a froth of lace and lingerie gushes forth, as if out of a hidden source within her, threatening to fill the room.

  Perhaps had we been at the Bal Mabille, we would have been able to detect waves of energy from Céleste’s dance filling the crowded room. It was a force that seemed to belong more to working-class women than to the refined and wealthy men who sought them. Even the dances they performed, like the cancan or the polka, seemed to be wilder, part of an earthier past that most Parisians had left behind. Imported from Bohemia, the polka conjured images of beer barrels and peasants and hay. To perform it took a great deal of raw physical energy; the word that comes to mind here is “robust.”

  Before Céleste began to attend the Bal Mabille, a woman known as La Reine Pomaré was the most favored dancer. She was named after the queen of Tahiti, whom she was thought to resemble. Given the reputation she had for energetic dancing, it is surprising to learn that during the years she reigned she was suffering from tuberculosis. In fact, TB, at least until its terrible final stages, did not prevent the afflicted from dancing. “ It’s not me who is dancing too fast,” Marie Duplessis o
nce said, “it’s the violins that play too slowly.”

  This is understandable from the point of view of the one who is ill. As your energy waxes and wanes, life itself seems to appear and disappear. Released once more from the confines of the sickroom, side by side with gratitude a kind of hunger arises, the urge to gobble every possible morsel of experience before the inevitable returns. Certainly this desire would have given La Reine Pomaré’s polka an evocative quality, as if she were dancing away death and sweeping up life with each wide and forceful step.

  From this short exploration, perhaps we can begin to imagine something of appeal of her dance. Since it was the lower half of her body keeping time with the music, her movements would have been especially erotic. Added to this would have been the desire to survive, which is of its nature erotic, too. The wish to forget every fear of privation, which remained nevertheless as if in every fiber of her body, would have made her dance especially vibrant. And all this would have been harnessed like a giant horse to the tempo of the polka, a horse that seemed to be able to fly.

  Pomaré’s illness, however, finally outpaced her formidable spirit. When the effects began to be visible, Brididi, her dance partner, the man who had both masterminded and profited from her career, started to look for a replacement—another hungry young woman who might fill the Bal Mabille with gentlemen eager to see her dance the polka. That was how Céleste got her start.

  On the night that Brididi asked Céleste Vénard to dance a quadrille with him, there must have been many hopeful young women waiting at the popular dance hall on the allée des Veuves hoping to be chosen. During the ninteenth century, countless young and single women who were looking for sugar daddies and lovers flocked to the public dance halls scattered all over Paris. Wealthy or titled men, young and old, came to the same places, looking for partners for the evening, perhaps to take home for the night, or if the desire was strong enough, to set up in an apartment. Dancing well would command the right attention and thereby increase a woman’s chances. And if, through talent and good fortune, she were among the elect, chosen to be elevated as a mistress, she would have to cut an elegant figure at the parties and balls to which she would be ushered by her new protector.

  When at last Brididi ushered her onto the dance floor, Céleste knew she was being auditioned. There would have to have been a brief moment of timidity, a fainthearted feeling. So much would be riding on her success. But again a good sense of timing would have saved her. Don’t think of anything else but the music, she could tell herself, and then let the music convey her where it might, her fear, her own resolve to survive, her lust for life, transformed in the alchemy of rhythm. Brididi was convinced enough by her talent to spend five hours over the next day teaching her the polka. It is not only in fairy tales that good fortune can arrive swiftly with almost no forewarning. Céleste had her debut the same night.

  What must La Reine have thought while she watched a pretender to her throne capture the attention of the ballroom? Céleste was given a new name that evening, a formative event in the life of a young courtesan, the christening that signaled her arrival in the fashionable underworld of Paris. As men crowded around her, eager to ask her to dance, Brididi cried: “It would be easier to defend Mogador than my new partner.” From that moment on, Céleste Vénard would be known by the same name as the Moroccan fortress that had just been captured by French troops.

  For a while, Pomaré and Mogador were a double attraction at the Bal Mabille. Should it surprise us that they became good friends? Who else would have had so much in common? In 1845, when Pomaré died at the age of twenty-one, Mogador was one of the few who attended her

  burial in the cemetery of Montmartre. It was she who paid for the marker, which bore a farewell to her friend chiseled in stone. From this we can begin to guess how important the preservation of memory was to her. Perhaps we might even say that she valued history (which is, of course, simply another facet of time). This conjecture seems almost self-evident when we read of the anger that Mogador expressed years later toward Zola for creating a portrait of Pomaré as an old and wretched woman selling secondhand clothes. “Is this what Naturalism is?” she asked angrily of her friend Georges Montorgueil. “Is this their idea of precise detail?”

  The passion Mogador had for setting the record straight must have helped her with her memoirs. This remains true even if the tone of her autobiography takes a decided slant of regret. “I was defending myself,” she said later. “I did not want to excite poor creatures to copy me, to follow in my steps; I wanted to show them the perils of this kind of life. . . .” Though this regret may have been hard to detect as she fought her way to success in the demi-monde, like truth itself, autobiography is fluid. It depends as much on a sense of timing as does dance. Whatever ideas you may have about yourself and your history are, of necessity, always shifting. This is not due to dishonesty so much as the creative nature of what is called “the self.” Over time, the stories you tell about your life will alter slightly, reflecting the attitudes of whomever you have more recently become. During the time that Mogador wrote her Memoirs, she had fallen in love with a young man, the comte de Chabrillan. As gradually it seemed more likely that she would marry him, she came to regret her past.

  But it was not only her past that she would end up regretting. The fact that she had written about it caused her grief, too. On the eve of her marriage, she tried to retrieve the book from publication. Yet her publisher, knowing he had a great literary success within his grasp, refused to relinquish the book. Mogador’s fears were not unfounded. The book came close to preventing her marriage. In this sense, we might say her timing was not good. Yet we could also say that in a larger sense her timing was perfect. The Memoirs were a sensation. They quickly joined that pantheon of notable works filled not only with great literature but also with books that capture the spirit of the time in which they are written.

  Among children who have been abandoned or endangered, it is often the case that when they come of age they find a home in history. After all, it was Mogador’s prominence in the public eye that had allowed her to survive, flourish, and meet the man she loved. Céleste could have remained silent and written no memoir at all, thereby if not erasing her past entirely, at least avoiding so much scrutiny. Or, if the urge to write was irresistible, at least as the prospect of marriage grew more real, she could have refrained from submitting the manuscript to her publisher. Yet, though she was in love and longed for a more respectable life, she must have found it difficult to discard altogether the fame that had saved her. Even under the influence of a great and tender passion it is difficult, if not unwise, to give up all that has sustained you in the past. Especially when what has sustained you is as precious and rare as the gift of celebrity—a gift which, in Cé leste’s case, had come to her in much the same way as the miraculous reprieve that saves the heroine of a fairy tale from the direst circumstances. In a part of her soul that was perhaps less visible to herself at this moment, could it be that Mogador knew her story belonged to time?

  If this is so, we can only be grateful, for time has given us her story, a compelling tale, which depicts her rise from rags to riches, filled with the grimmest circumstances along with glamour and romance. Because she rose from a perilous position as the illegitimate child of a working woman to become first a famous performer, then a countess, the two poles of her life—splendor and misery—could not have been further apart, although in another sense these opposites cannot really be disentangled. Misery was there in her memory, along with splendor, in its nascent form the night that, under the many beautiful gas lamps in the famous gardens that belonged to the Bal Mabille, she incited fire in the eyes of the gentlemen who watched her dance, just as splendor and misery are present in our minds most of the time, if only as fear and desire.

  Céleste never knew her father. He abandoned her mother, Anne, before Céleste was born. Soon after this, because of the shame she brought on them, Anne’s parents turned her out o
f the house when she was still carrying Céleste. If, after this fateful decision, the story of Cé leste’s childhood is in any way predictable to us because we can look back and say calmly, Yes, that is how it was in that time, to Céleste these events must have been as unpredictable as they were harrowing. Since in that century without welfare, when wages for working women were so low a single woman could not survive on what she earned, it is easy to see why Anne would stay with the man who was the first lover she found, even though he would often drink until he could hardly stand and then return home to beat her. It was only when he beat her so badly she had to be brought to the police station on a stretcher, and after he threatened to kill her along with her daughter, that Anne finally decided to leave him.

  She managed to get as far as Lyon, where she took a job in a milliner’s shop; but he followed her there, and while he was searching for her, found Céleste alone in the street one day. He kidnapped the child and brought her to a brothel, where he held her hostage. She was saved only because a kind and quick-witted prostitute locked her in her own room and secretly sent for the mother. Together, all the women in the brothel held him at bay, while mother and child made still another escape.

  It must have been a terrible time in Céleste’s life. But hearing the story, we should take note of the rush of energy that fills these two episodes. There are so many narrow escapes in her story. She is so often rushing with her mother through the streets of Paris or Lyon, around the corner, or to a railway station, moving breathlessly to the sound of doors slamming and cries of threatened violence, barely eluding capture. As, years later, Céleste whirled about the dance hall to the insistently jubilant sounds of the small band that accompanied polkas and quadrilles, the exhilaration of these two escapes must have livened her steps.