But the morality of constructing beauty is less relevant here than the simple fact that the courtesan’s beauty was not just given, it was also made. Even what was given, whether it be a beautiful face or body, would have needed to be enhanced as well as properly framed. For this reason alone, if we are to grasp the true dimensions of the second virtue of courtesans, we must understand that legendary beauty is created with considerable skill.
The arts women have employed to create beauty are ancient. The hetaerae of Greece, women who were priests and courtesans at the same time, were also healers. They were known to use herbal formulas devised to nourish skin and hair, as well as sustain the vitality which is so much a part of beauty. That during the Renaissance courtesans also used such recipes must have contributed to the perception that, like many women who were herbalists, they were practicing witchcraft. Among courtesans, the recipes were often handed down from mother to daughter. Pietro Aretino depicts this transmission in his Dialogues, in which he renders a fictional account of a Renaissance courtesan he calls Nanna. Though he wraps his description in misogynistic judgments, he has preserved a portrait for us of an old craft. By his own account, he was well familiar with courtesans and their skills.
Before Nanna makes her debut in Rome, her mother, who had once been a courtesan herself, takes great care preparing her daughter for her first appearance. Aretino tells us that Nanna and her mother were Tuscans who had recently moved to Rome for the express purpose of launching Nanna’s career, and that in anticipation of this event, Nanna’s mother had applied a formula daily to her daughter’s face, known to make the skin soft. And since Nanna’s hair is described as golden, a color rarely natural in this region, most probably in the weeks before their departure, her mother would have been employing another procedure, too. After using a wash of honey, citrus, and marigold petals on Nanna’s hair, she would have given her daughter a hat without a top but with a wide brim over which her hair could be spread before she sat in the sun for hours until it turned blond, the color preferred in this period.
Doubtless the other strategies Aretino describes would have been handed down through generations, too, including the way Nanna’s mother staged her daughter’s first public appearance. Because word had traveled about the city that a great beauty had come to Rome, men began to congregate outside the house where the mother and daughter were staying. But Nanna’s mother would not let her appear in public, nor even stand where she was visible in the window. Instead, she let anticipation grow until she judged the moment efficacious. Only then did she begin to braid her daughter’s hair into encircling strands so that it came finally to seem like spun gold that had been plaited.
Choosing what her daughter should wear, the older courtesan knew well how to heighten the drama of this effect. Like many artists of the period who understood the powerful repercussions of placing gold next to red, she dressed her daughter in a gown made of crimson satin. From this detail alone, her talent is evident. Satin, with a subtle gloss, one that did not outshine Nanna’s hair but still had the compelling luminosity of a precious stone, would have been the right fabric.
Here we should remember that recognizing beauty is crucial to enhancing it. Thus, knowing that her daughter’s arms were beautiful, Nanna’s mother chose a design that was sleeveless. And as with the completion of any art, Nanna’s mother also knew when to leave well enough alone. Thus, Nanna wore no makeup, which served to accentuate her youth. Still, the dramatic impact of her natural coloring was heightened by another formula, handed down through generations of women, designed to make the skin seem very white and fresh, with which her mother washed her before she dressed.
The labor of preparation went on for several hours—and all to create a particularly ephemeral result. Because carefully washed, coiffed, and costumed as she was, Nanna stood for just a minute or two in the window until she caught the eye of a young man who soon came searching for her. The beauty he glimpsed had fired his imagination. Her gold hair blazing almost like a vision in the lowering light, the deep luster of red following the mysterious curve of her hips, ignited a strange but powerful alchemy in him. Certain in his heart that he had to have this treasure for his own, he hardly had time to realize that he himself was already possessed.
The Pleasure of the Eyes
What poet would dare, in depicting the pleasure caused by the appearance of a great beauty, separate the woman from her dress.
—Charles Baudelaire, The Painter of Modern Life
Although conventional wisdom tells us that courtesans made themselves beautiful in order to attract wealthy men, the reverse was also true. Many sought wealth precisely because they wanted to create and possess beauty. Given the profundity of the experience, it is no wonder that regardless of circumstance, whether male or female, educated or not, we all seek what is beautiful. No wonder then again that when, as a small child, Marie-Ernestine Antigny was summoned by her mother to leave the beautiful countryside around Mézières-sur-Brenne, the little girl hid in the attic. At the age of ten, she must have known the subterfuge would not work. But a desperate longing to stay in the country propelled her to try nevertheless. Ever since she was seven, when her mother departed in search of her philandering husband, she had lived with her aunt in this region famous for its lushness that is fed by tributaries from the Loire. She spent long hours wandering in the fields or riding on horseback along a web of trails that wound with slow charm and sudden drama through this stunning landscape filled with wide open spaces, punctuated by lakes, heather, and chestnut forests.
Paris in the middle of the nineteenth century could be a cold, dark place for the poor. But very soon the child found consolation. Her mother did housework and sewing for some of the most prominent families of Paris, including the Gallifets. The marquise de Gallifet, who must have been uncommonly kind, helped to send Marie to the very prestigious Couvent des Oiseaux, a convent school where she was exposed to the wealth and sophistication of her classmates while she learned to speak and carry herself like a lady. But what Marie loved best about the school were the Catholic services—the organ music, the singing, the intense drama of the rituals and the prayers.
Even today, throughout Paris, the beautiful churches are as great a draw for travelers seeking beauty as are the fashion shows. The splendors of even the more modest chapels are at least equally if not more sensual. The changing hues of daylight streaming through ancient cut-glass windows alone are stunning. And then there are the paintings in each alcove; the soaring buttresses of central naves; the altar of course, dressed lovingly in lace and velvet; Jesus’ tortured body also beautifully composed along the lines of a cross. And here the golden robes of priests, the red-robed choristers, the smell of incense, the incantatory poetry of the Mass—all would have fused together, as in a countryside, into one experience of beauty that was more than the sum of its parts.
Marie dreamed of becoming a nun. But that was not to be. Still another disappointment, another loss, was in store for her. When the marquise died suddenly, Madame Antigny, having no means to continue her daughter’s education, sent Marie to work as a salesgirl. Just as the fields and the chestnut trees had before, the church and its rituals vanished from her life. From now on, she would be allowed to immerse herself in this beauty for only two hours on Sundays. For the rest of the week, she dutifully appeared at a draper’s shop on the rue du Bac, where for twelve hours a day she measured and sold bolts of fabric and clothing.
Yet beauty was not entirely absent from the new life into which she had been thrust. These were the first years of the Second Empire in France. Though poverty was still evident, certain neighborhoods in Paris were newly filled with the evidence of wealth. Luxury shops were opening everywhere, with sumptuously arranged windows, rivaling the work of any artisan. There were windows filled with Kashmir shawls, intricately woven in India, or with hats piled with the feathers of rare birds, windows with embroidered bed linens, with lacy corsets, with beaded evening purses, filigreed f
ans, with scented candles, dozens of roses and bouquets of violets, exquisite perfumes in crystal bottles, pairs of elegant gloves cut gracefully from brown or red or black or white leather, with tiny ivory buttons at the wrist. There were windows displaying hundreds of varieties of chocolate, moving in precisely calibrated range from strong and bitter to milkily sweet.
And because of its location, the rue du Bac had its own charms. Even now, the quarter has the patina of old wealth. Curving from the rue de l’ Université to the rue de Sèvres, it crosses two streets lined with elegant old mansions. Built in the eighteenth century, these impenetrably elegant white buildings with neoclassical facades seem to loom over you as you walk by, as if chastening you into submissive silence with that air of unassailable pedigree that only a certain kind of beauty can confer.
“It was a quiet quarter,” wrote Edith Wharton, who herself lived for a period on the rue de Varenne, “in spite of its splendor and its history.” The splendor was not lost on Marie, who by now had adopted the name her schoolfriends had given her, Blanche, because of her radiantly white skin. She knew the power of her own beauty. And day after day, as she handled bolts of damask and silk and velvet and tulle, she dreamed of how she might augment the effect.
The story is of course open to interpretation. But here, where convention would point out how well Blanche began to use her beauty to her advantage, we can also see that the lustrous fabrics she handled must have captivated her, channeling her dreams in an aesthetic direction. She would not have been the first to be so affected by handling beautiful cloth. The great designer Charles Frederick Worth, the man considered the father of haute couture, began his career as an assistant in a draper’s shop.
For different reasons, Blanche was soon to become just as famous. Though her elevation was relatively swift, it was more perilous. Like many dreamers, she was far from calculating. She was instead almost alarmingly naive. One night, she accompanied a young shop assistant to the Closerie des Lilas. There, under the flickering light of gas lamps, a new world opened up to her. Laughter was as profuse and scintillating as the abundant champagne she was offered while she sat with a table of young men, caught up as they were in the music. Perhaps because she lost herself in a particularly lusty execution of the cancan, she did not take much notice when her companion left. Since the man who eventually seduced her that night was a Romanian, a few weeks later she found herself in Bucharest.
It was because her Romanian lover brought her to a seedy hotel where they lived a somewhat sordid life that she decided to leave this arrangement to travel and perform with a band of Gypsies. We can easily see why the art of Gypsy music and dance appealed to her. But she was badly treated, and hence chose to escape this life, too. What followed was a short period of despair during which she contemplated joining a convent. But instead she became the mistress of an archbishop. From there she advanced to a prince, who introduced her to the cream of Romanian society, who found her beauty, adorned now with a splendid wardrobe and the glittering gems conferred on her by her distinguished lovers, irresistible.
Though she was at the pinnacle of this world, it was not her own. She began to feel weary, then ill, and all the while her longing to return to Paris grew more intense. It was not just homesickness, the desire to be surrounded by the language of her childhood, or to walk under the chestnut trees in the gardens of the Luxembourg Palace, or to stand on the Pont-Neuf and look back toward the great cathedral of Notre Dame which, from that vantage point, seems almost like a majestic ship, floating in the Seine. Bucharest of course had its own beauty. Even its foreignness would have been exhilarating, at least in the beginning. But just before she left Paris, she had begun a new life there, entering for only the briefest time the world of sparkling wit, late night champagne, rousing dances, glittering gowns and gaslight, which, though it was known as the demi-monde, must have seemed more alive to her than any world she had witnessed before.
Once in Paris, she would have to find a livelihood again. Should it surprise us that, not wanting to live with her mother, she moved in with a friend who sold used wardrobes? The match was perfect. Ambroisine, sharing Blanche’s love of extravagance, urged her on toward what now with the advantage of hindsight we can call her destiny. If in the beginning she may have been somewhat guileless, within the means available to her and in her own way Blanche was already composing a life for herself—a life in which her ideas for creating beauty would have little restraint.
Like Mogador two decades before her, she started her journey by dancing at the Bal Mabille. She well knew, as did any young woman in her position, that this was a good place to be noticed. Her moment came when, with the encouragement of a journalist she met that night, she broke out into the popular dance called, appropriately, a galop. The sight of her flouncing around the ballroom floor caused a minor sensation. In just a few days she had signed a contract to appear in a play at the Théâtre de la Porte Saint-Martin. Since she performed the part of a living statue of Helen of Troy, she neither moved nor spoke. But it hardly mattered. The casting was appropriate enough. The beauty of the woman she portrayed was said to have launched a thousand ships.
During a career of many such performances, in which, if and when she actually spoke any lines, her acting would be forgiven for other qualities, what she launched was wave after wave of an almost orgiastic enthusiasm. While Jules Janin once spoke of her harmonious form, others were more heated with their praise: “[H]er sensual lips are made to be kissed and to empty glasses of champagne.” It was almost as if she had the power to evoke fields and grass, rainfall, sunsets, the river Seine itself, together with the good wine and food to be had along its banks. “Under the electric lights and the trained opera glasses,” wrote one admirer, “she represented the apotheosis of Matter.”
One can see why, a few years after Blanche’s death, when Zola was looking for a life on which to model the character of his heroine, Nana, he settled upon this courtesan. The sheer corpulence of her presence suited his purpose, which was to cast a cold eye on the corruptions of the Second Empire. But he never knew the real woman, and those who did felt his portrait to be nothing like her. Unlike the icily calculating Nana, in the early days of her career, Blanche was as naive as she was guileless. She would, for instance, fall into such a sound sleep after making love that any man with whom she spent the night could easily slip away without leaving her any recompense at all. The solution she finally adopted to this problem is symbolic; it points in the direction of the real focus of her labors. Before she fell asleep, she would sew her lover’s nightshirt to her dressing gown.
She was not unique among courtesans in her love of clothing. A lavish wardrobe was required for the daily round of events (many of which seemed almost as if they were staged like small fashion shows) that punctuated a courtesan’s life. Like society ladies, demi-mondaines were expected to wear a different dress for each occasion, and this meant that they might change their clothing as many as eight times a day. For some women, the requirement must have seemed tedious. To return to the closet time after time in the course of the day, peeling off layers one after the other, first a cloak or coat or shawl, then a dress, and then shoes. Perhaps stockings would have to be changed to go with a new dress, and all the accessories: different ribbons, bracelets, rings, even requiring at times, if the skirt were fuller or the bodice shaped differently, for instance, a change of lingerie, all with the aid of a maid, and then finally the hair restyled to match the whole. The necessity would have prevented some women from going out much at all. But to Blanche, this was not just a duty. What she wore was a source of pleasure and perhaps, at times, the very reason she wanted to go out. To show off her wardrobe.
There were peignoirs she could put on for receiving at home, dresses and shoes suitable for walking in the Tuilerie Gardens, clothes to wear at cafés along the Grands Boulevards in midmorning, when, for instance, she would meet her first lover of the day, and the dresses she would wear for what Joanna Richardson has
called “the regulation drive” in the Bois de Boulogne. She would perhaps want to change into still different clothes if she chose to take an apéritif in the early evening, and then change yet again, this time into diamonds and furs, if she wanted to attend the theatre. But she was glad for the requirement. Every occasion gave her one more opportunity to display her talent for dressing.
The stage provided a perfect arena for her extraordinary ability. Not only her beauty but her costumes compensated for the talent she lacked as an actress. They were usually extravagant and hence monumentally expensive. In one production, Le Château à Toto, she entered the second act to the accompaniment of Offenbach’s music wearing a dress that cost 15,000 francs (a small fortune in the nineteenth century); this creation was followed in the next act by a transparent peignoir trimmed with Belgian lace valued at 6,000 francs. In another performance she was so thickly covered in diamonds that one critic wrote: “This is not an actress we see on the stage before us but a jewelry store. ” The size of her personal wardrobe was legendary, too. The journalist Callias tells us that her departure for a tour to Baden caused a traffic jam when the thirty-seven coaches required to carry her dresses and hats obstructed the rue Ecuries-d’Artois.
But size and expenditure were only part of the story. The fabrics and gems, the colors, cuts, flounces, and feathers that she draped, pinned, and arranged around her body touched and moved a nascent spirit in her audience. You can sense this in the enthusiasm with which Théodore de Banville describes the dress Antigny wore in the brief comedy, On demand des ingénues. “Green, the color of waves . . . it does not seem to have been cut and stitched . . . but trimmed and tossed into shape by the delicate hands of a fairy.” By his account, the dress excited perception itself to action: “[I]n every little corolla of green crepe . . . a diamond shines and glitters and sparkles in sidereal whiteness, and the light audaciously comes and kisses it.” Of course, gowns and jewels cannot create such effects by themselves. Blanche’ s passionate love for beauty was behind it all, an insatiable desire that against so many odds was fed again and again in increasingly lavish proportions.
The Book of the Courtesans Page 7