The Book of the Courtesans

by Susan Griffin

  The exuberance might have been dampened but still not erased when Anne’s lover finally caught up with them once again. He promised to behave better when Anne, probably as much from exhaustion as love, took him back. Soon she found out he had joined a gang of thieves, but before she could make still another escape, fate stepped in with an unpredictable ending. He was killed suddenly in a riot in Lyon. With some money that her father had sent her, Anne returned with her daughter to Paris, taking a room on the boulevard du Temple.

  But now, even while destiny was robbing Céleste of any sense of safety, like the careening rise and fall of the polka, it also conspired to tempt her with something grander than simple security. A glittering life, sparkling with the same celebrity to which the young girl was soon destined, dominated the boulevard du Temple. All the great popular theatres were nearby: La Ga"té, L’Ambigu, the Variétés, the café-theatre Bosquet. Peddlers and showmen set up booths outside, and occasionally, actors performed in the street. Inside the Théâtre des Funambules, on the same bill that also featured acrobats and animals, the great mime Debaru performed as the sad-faced clown Pierrot. In the Variétés there were vaudeville acts, comedians, dancers, and musicians following each other onto the stage.

  The melodrama to be seen at the Ambigu or the Théâtre de la Porte Saint-Martin was perhaps the form that was most beloved, by common audiences and critics alike. Because of the great many scenes of murder and mayhem acted out in the neighborhood, the boulevard du Temple was also called the boulevard of crime. According to Dumas fils, Frédéric Lema"tre was capable of inspiring real cries of terror among the members of his audience. For a small fee, you could sit in the highest balcony of the theatre, the place reserved for the poor that was called, ironically, “Paradise,” perhaps to watch the woman who was George Sand’s favorite actress, Marie Dorval, perform a suicide with such alarming accuracy that while she was sinking to her nightly death, the members of the audience scarcely breathed. Indeed, she was not breathing either. To achieve the effect of realism, she nearly asphyxiated herself for each performance.

  Is it surprising then that very soon Céleste began to dream that one day she would perform on a stage herself? It was not just the proximity of the theatres, but that, along with many others among the poor of Paris, she saw the melodramatic events of her own life reflected there. Even today, on any given night in the theatre, a pulse can be felt to vibrate back and forth between the stage and the audience, as the players strike a chord, a situation or a feeling that members of the audience recognize and to which they respond. The resonance of their feeling rebounds to the stage, inspiring the actors to even greater intensity.

  In Céleste’s life, this pulse would have continued after she left the theatre, as she realized that the heroism of the players reflected her mother’s heroism and her own when they were confronted with violence and the threat of death. The images she saw would have dignified this victory, giving the spirit within her a new strength. In this way, imagination must have played a crucial role early in her life.

  Perhaps it was the ability to imagine herself as heroic that helped her survive the next chapter in her life. Her mother soon took a new lover, a fair-haired, blue-eyed young man from whom her daughter was to face still another peril. Almost from the beginning, Céleste disliked Victor. Rough and moody, he was at times resentful of her, and perhaps she sensed, in the way that children can, the side of his character that was to emerge later. It was after she became an adolescent, the beginnings of a woman’s body newly visible, during a period when her mother was visiting her own father in Fontainebleau, that Victor attempted to rape her. Céleste fought him off, and for the third time in her life escaped. But now, alone in the streets of Paris, without her mother, she had nowhere to go.

  Yet here is where her history began to form another pattern, one that could easily have given her the illusion of predictability. For again a prostitute was to come to her rescue. Céleste had slept for four nights in a hayloft and wandered the streets of Paris by day in search of food when finally she broke down weeping. There, just in front of the massive entrance to the Eglise Saint-Paul, a streetwalker named Thérèse found Céleste and took her home for the night to her own room. It was an act of extraordinary kindness, especially since a prostitute caught keeping a child on her own premises could be sent to jail for six months. In fact, when they were walking together in the streets a few days later, a policeman took Céleste away from Thé rèse, incarcerating her, as was a common practice for the protection of homeless girls, in the women’s prison named after St. Lazare.

  Soon afterward, Thérèse found Céleste’s mother and told her where her daughter was. But a month passed before Anne came to bring her home. In that time Céleste began her education, an introduction to another world, one that for most working women was always perilously close to their own. A world of last resorts, but also a world of dreams. Her time in the jail was softened by the friendship she made with a girl called Denise, hardly older than herself, who would tell her about the fine clothes a young prostitute would be given in a brothel and the good money she could earn there. “I saw myself rich and covered with lace and gems,” Céleste wrote later in her memoirs.

  When she finally returned home, nothing had changed. Her mother did not listen to her when she tried to tell her why she had left. Victor kept trying to molest her. In the way that it can only for an adolescent, her life seemed hopeless. Another girl might perhaps have waited, languished in the atmosphere that was eating away at her. But from the two earlier escapes she had made with her mother and the one she had made herself, Céleste had learned well the lessons of urgency. And though later she would come to regret bitterly the decision she made, the logic of association is clear. Since she had already been saved twice by kind prostitutes, it makes perfect sense that at the age of sixteen she would have become a prostitute herself.

  In jail, Denise had given her the address of one of a handful of the very fashionable brothels that catered to a wealthier clientele. Madame welcomed her with ample sustenance and the finery Céleste would need to ply her new trade—clothes, perfume, jewelry. It was only later that Céleste began to understand the consequences of the agreement she had made. All that she was given, including her room and board, was to come from her earnings. She would not be able to leave until she had paid what she owed. As she sank deeper and deeper into debt, she realized she would never be free. She had simply fallen into another trap.

  “To have to laugh when you want to weep,” she would write later; “to be dependent and humiliated.” In the brothel, nothing belonged to her, not even her own body. When even the beating of your heart, the breath you take, is not simply under surveillance but summoned and marshaled, continuously made to march according to someone else’s rhythms, you will lose touch with the pace of your own soul. The spirit that sustains you will begin to die.

  Perhaps her despair made her more susceptible to illness or perhaps it was simply contagion, but soon Céleste fell very ill. Yet she was to be rescued once again, this time by a client who, alarmed to see her so sick, paid off the debt she owed to Madame and took her to his own apartment. But the story of this escape does not end here, for a doctor was soon summoned, who diagnosed smallpox. Though he said she could not be moved, as soon as she was left alone, she dressed and descended to the street, where she called a cab to take her to the Hôpital Saint-Louis.

  Thinking of the force of will it must have taken to drag her weakened and fevered body into the streets brings to mind the way she danced the polka. In the structure of the music, within each four beats, every third beat will be emphasized. It is not hard to imagine her moving to this pattern, landing hard on the third beat, and afterward rising higher with great emphasis, as if she were taking the great galloping force of the music into her body and making it, in every instant, her own.

  But the will Céleste exhibited was not simply the will to survive. She was proud. And that this quality was reflected in her danc
e can easily be deciphered from the rest of her story. As she tells us, it was in the hospital while she was recovering that she fell in love with a medical student called Adolphe. Yet though he appeared to be in love with her, she soon discovered she was naïve to trust him. He invited her to attend a ball with him at Versailles, but when they arrived she found he had another mistress with him, a woman well known as a lorette. In the sexual economy of nineteenth- century France, the lorette existed somewhere between a prostitute and a courtesan. She was kept, but only modestly so. And though she could dress well enough to attend some public balls, she was generally neither educated, mannered, nor celebrated enough to mingle with high society as courtesans did.

  Chances are Adolphe would have set Céleste up as a lorette were not the mistress he already had too jealous. Seeing him enter the ball with Céleste, Louisa Aumont ridiculed her—the unsuitability of her dress, her manners so clearly lower class. In a loud voice, in front of Céleste, she harangued Adolphe on his bad taste for having brought this embarrassing young woman with him. Céleste walked back from Versailles alone, a journey that took her all night. The incident was etched in her memory. After she became famous as Mogador, and the wayward Adolphe began to pursue her again, it is understandable that she would be quick to score her triumph. She promised to take him back only if Louisa Aumont would apologize to her in public.

  You would have been able to see the quality in the posture and the timing of her dance, a robust assertion of pride punctuating every step. And something else less easy to name would have been present, too. Something she knew— what she had learned, in a sense, from dancing with the many unpredictable events she encountered in her young life. The brutality of her mother’s first lover, his attempt to kidnap her, his sudden death, her return to Paris, Victor’s attempts to rape her, the nights she spent homeless in the streets of Paris, the weeks in the prison at St.-Lazare, a nearly fatal brush with smallpox. Whether dancing with fate or a mortal partner, she had learned well to perceive even the smallest alterations in a pattern and respond quickly with a brilliance of her own to the most subtle signals. And eventuating from this knowledge that life is always in motion, that nothing ever remains the same, there must have been an aura, invisible to the eye, but even so a halo of a kind, surrounding all her movements; she had witnessed the constant change that lies at the heart of the universe.

  The unpredictability of Céleste’s life continued. After the summer months, the Bal Mabille would close. Soon she found work performing at the Théâtre Beaumarchais. But as luck would have it, after acting there for a few weeks, it, too, would close. Yet, by another turn of chance, she was hired again, this time by one of the Franconi brothers, who had just erected the new Hippodrome. Appearing in a horse race with five other girls on Bastille Day, July 14, 1845, at the opening of the circus, her timing was superb again. Winning the race with the same exuberance and pride with which she had executed the polka, her equestrian feats became the toast of Paris.

  Now Mogador could enter the prestigious world that glittered nightly at certain cafés and certain addresses in Paris. She was welcomed and celebrated at the Maison Dorée and at the Café Anglais, where newly wealthy bourgeois men, aristocrats, and royalty came, amid the flotillas of courtesans who hung on their arms, or flitted and flirted about the tables, making the atmosphere flutter with their presence. Soon she became the mistress of the duke of Ossuna, who set her up in a comfortable apartment on the rue de l’ Arcade, not far from the Place Vendôme, where the extravagant jewelry could be purchased that she wore when she visited the cafés on boulevards nearby. She took many lovers, including an Italian tenor, before her felicitous career came suddenly to an end. She had fallen from her horse, and unfortunately the fall was bad. One leg was broken. There would be weeks in bed. It was too dangerous for her to ride ever again.

  But the unpredictable nature of events did not fail her. Just around the bend of this disaster, only days after she was allowed to go out again and had made her return to the high life, as she was leaving the Café Anglais, Cé leste chanced to meet a young man, Lionel de Chabrillan, descended from one of the most illustrious families in France. They fell in love. That first meeting did not, of course, end the whirlwind of events that characterized her life. After several more quick turns of fate, during which Lionel showered her with jewels and horses and cashmere shawls, exhausting his inheritance, he decided to leave her because of scandal. Mourning his loss, she came close to marrying another man, in the meantime profiting from the scandal when, because of her newly aggrandized fame, she was given a role in a production at the Thé âtre des Variétés. Still, when all was said and done, she landed well. She married the man she loved, and finally became the comtesse de Chabrillan.

  Her Surprise

  Prince Gortschakoff used to say that . . . he would have tried to steal the sun to satisfy one of her whims.—Gustave Claudin, prominent Boulevardier

  Comic timing, which depends on surprise, is an ineffable skill, difficult to teach or even describe. This is an appropriate quality if you remember that laughter itself, being made of mere air and fleeting sounds, weighs almost nothing. In accordance with its ephemeral nature, there are even some who associate mystical experience with laughter. The air of laughter is, as Barry Saunders writes, “risible,” and according to the Greeks, who believed that laughter could make the soul immortal, it rises toward heaven. The route, however, was reversed during the Christian centuries during which laughter was thought of as a sure path to hell. No wonder then that it was during the Renaissance, when classical ideas were embraced again, that courtesans should come into vogue. Women from this profession have always been associated with mirth.

  If, as the Greeks believed, laughter buoys us on toward timelessness, we might question why timing should be so critical to humor. But it is. Whether you are hearing a joke or witnessing a prank, just a fraction of a second in the timing can determine whether or not you will laugh. But once you are laughing, it is as if you have been transported, instantly lifted out of your present circumstances into a larger realm. The experience can be intoxicating, as while you laugh, the moment expands until finally both the past and the future have, at least for a moment, disappeared.

  This must be why laughter ameliorates suffering. It is hardly a coincidence therefore that courtesans, most of whom began life facing difficult circumstances and who thus knew well what it was to fear the future, seemed to be so good at inducing laughter. Cora Pearl, courtesan of the Second Empire, is a case in point. She was known to have a particularly earthy humor. Some of the social commentators who wrote about courtesans even found her crude. But this opinion did not lessen her popularity at all. Among her many illustrious lovers was Prince Napoléon.

  One evening during the height of her powers, Pearl played a prank on her dinner guests that has become legendary. Like many courtesans, she entertained frequently, to quote one version of her memoirs, “in the finest style. ” One night, after all the courses had been served except dessert, she excused herself, telling her guests that she wanted to supervise the presentation of the final dish. She went to the kitchen and, shedding her clothes, stepped onto a chair and positioned herself on a huge silver platter she had borrowed from the prince d’Orléans. Then, “with that deftness and artistry for which he is so famed,” her pastry chef, Salé, began to decorate her “naked body with rosettes and swathes of creams and sauces.” After placing a single unpeeled grape in the dint of her navel, he surrounded her with several meringues and then gave her a generous dusting of powdered sugar before lowering a vast silver cover over her. Then two footmen carried her down the passage to the dining room and set the platter on the table.

  The hilarity of the prank, of course, depended on good timing. For one thing, her guests had already been fed and so they were not distracted by hunger. Then, by saying she wanted to supervise the presentation of the dessert, she had inspired anticipation. And finally, because the platter was covered, her presence w
as discovered suddenly, creating an element that is indispensable to comedy: surprise.

  It may be interesting and more than a diversion here for us to consider another story from the annals of humor. This one is about Gracie Allen. Indeed, Burns and Allen started in vaudeville, which was once a popular venue for courtesans, and thus, though Gracie was by no means a cocotte, it is more than possible that the comic timing of courtesans was still part of the atmosphere in which she learned her art. So it is significant in more than one way that in 1940, when Gracie Allen mounted a comic campaign to become the president of the United States, she announced she was running as the head of a new political party called, she said, “the Surprise Party. ” Asked the provenance of the name, she replied that her mother was a Democrat and her father a Republican, but she had been born a surprise.

  Like all humor, the joke reveals a deeper layer of meaning that is not immediately evident. Surprise is at the heart of sexuality: not only the surprise of conception, but the unpredictable nature of arousal itself. And lurking close behind conception, the surprise of mortality is due to appear soon, too, because like it or not, the arrival of the next generation signals the demise of our own. But laughter, since it whisks us off toward immortality, redeems the prediction.

  And there is this, too. If the conversion of mortality into immortality is confounding, it might be helpful to know that according to the Greeks, comedy returns us to the timeless center of existence, a place of mystic nothingness in which all that we habitually believe and practice is reversed. Which is important here because in a sense, Cora Pearl’s dessert constitutes a reversal of many events and conditions, including the story of how she fell from grace, the fall that led her to become a courtesan in the first place.