The Book of the Courtesans

by Susan Griffin

  We might propose that Aretino, who was a close friend of Titian, was aiming at the same complexity when he wrote of his character, the Roman courtesan Nanna, as she appeared at the window, trying to arouse desire, when he said that she affected the innocence of a nun and yet looked down with the assurance of a married woman playing the prostitute. But next to Titian’s canvas, this description seems oddly empty. Since Aretino depicts only contrivance, his work seems contrived.

  Titian, on the other hand, gives us density. The innocence he depicts seems real. She appears to be young, no more than nineteen, probably younger. Since in that period Venetian women married at fourteen, the age at which Aretino claims Nanna started her career, her youth alone would not have argued innocence. Certainly the stereotypical idea adopted by Aretino toward his subject, a concept that is alive even today, is that women who are not virgins have lost their innocence. Yet most women know that innocence is not entirely dependent upon sexual knowledge. Did Titian know this, too? Or was it simply that he loved what he saw and wanted to capture it faithfully? We are moved even unwillingly by this image.

  Of course he captures artifice as well, and here, since he makes no moralizing comment, the power of it to sway us is unabated. It is a mannered honesty he presents us with, inextricable from the beauty that wells up out of his color, the fine lines rendered by his brush, and the light—here dazzling, there somber, here gracefully bright, there burnished but penetrating—soaked into the canvas as it is into our eyes. We cannot separate ourselves from the sitter. Looking, we are lost wherever she is lost, triumphant with her triumph, shaken by her splendor, desirous, calculating and reticent, innocent and wise with worldliness.

  And there is this, too. Gazing at her portrait, we are staring into another time and place. You can almost hear the waters of Venice washing against the sides of the canals as, hair streaming, camicia billowing, Flora fairly overflows from the canvas.

  For some reason not entirely understood, many painters have been able to capture the spirit of an age by depicting the bodies of courtesans. Doubtless there are numerous other reasons why so many painters would have chosen to portray them. Some were practical. What other women besides courtesans and prostitutes would allow themselves to be depicted in such a frankly sensual manner? Certainly, too, the image of the courtesan would have conjured the erotic force that gives birth to social and artistic movements. That the cortigiana was not only a transgressor but symbolic of transgression itself would only have increased the effect.

  But the paintings themselves, even this painting entitled Flora, speak of reasons beyond this reasoning. We need only to think of the desire that often can be found sequestered within the wish to make love to a courtesan. Notice how, though with one hand Flora offers flowers to her beholder and with the other pulls down her shirt, almost revealing a nipple, her eyes tell another story. The message is evident. If you seek a night with her, or even several nights, most likely you will be given what you want. But though you have every success in the world, every means of power, including wealth, though you are a doge, for instance, and have recently built a grand palazzo along the Grand Canal, something in her will still prove elusive, tempting you to try to reach that which seems forever beyond you, though every effort you make to get closer only unravels the garments of your own composure. Until, if you are wise, you learn what the painter already seems to know: what you have found so compelling is exactly this, that in a glimpse of the grandeur you cannot possess, for a fraction of an instant, you can see that beneath the dense patina of appearances, what you have been calling yourself is constantly being created, made from a mixture of art and innocence, of what already exists and what is now just being imagined.

  LIANE DE POUGY

  Suggestion

  (THE SECOND EROTIC STATION)

  THIS IS HOW Jean Lorrain described the image that greeted all Liane’s visitors: “Taller, slenderer, more refined than ever, with that transparent complexion and those bluish circles round her great frightened doe-eyes.” Liane de Pougy would stretch her willowy frame over the white satin chaise-lounge for which she was justly famous. As if pouring from the glistening satin and fur trimming, the sumptuous dress she wore had wide and flowing sleeves of white brocade, and both the fabric and the lining of the dress were patterned with lilies. Which was fitting, because she herself must have seemed like a fragrant flower, her long neck, encircled with six strands of pearls, bending forward as she received each guest.

  She had a talent for creating visual effects. Whether you were the librettist Henri Meilhac, who wrote the lyrics for Offenbach’s operas (and who had paid Liane 80 million francs just to contemplate her nude body), or the American heiress Natalie Barney, who was for a time Liane’s lover, the various settings Liane arranged for herself would have been irresistibly enchanting.

  The color white can create a cold, almost sanitized atmosphere, but it can also conjure fantasies of another kind entirely. Under its influence, worlds of delicacy and grace will arise in your mind, realms peopled with diaphanous beings whose arms (or is it wings?) glow as they rush past your ears. Your dream becomes almost real as you swear you can taste icy strawberries crushed in your mouth, and is it because your eyes are brimming with a child’s tears of delight that everything around you seems to shimmer? Then, suddenly returned to the present as Pougy moves just slightly toward you, the sight of her hands framed by filigrees of shining thread suggests a touch so soft and subtle that even in the midst of a snowdrift, you will begin to melt. And while she speaks to you now, it seems that, like the sweet pistils of the thousand lilies that dance over her body, her tongue has begun to flicker in and out of your mouth.

  LA BELLE OTERO

  Chapter Three

  Cheek

  I like restraint, if it doesn’t go too far.

  —MAE WEST

  WHILE TRUE CHEEKINESS contains a mixture of bravado and insolence, it suffers from the drawbacks of neither. Where bravado hints of fear lying just beneath the surface and where insolence can express bitter or even rancid resentments, cheek has none of these shadowy resonances. It has, rather, a bracing but enlivening effect, which even as it startles charges the atmosphere with all the drama of a bolt of lightning.

  Though not every courtesan possessed this virtue in the same measure, almost all of them had to have some degree of cheek. A wellborn woman who was no longer marriageable because of scandal would have to navigate an atmosphere filled with whispered judgments, not simply with her head held high but with a kind of sparkling élan, a manner whose very force would make what was said against her seem negligible. And for those who were not wellborn there was a stronger current to face, not just passing reprimands over impropriety but the resistance against the implicit challenge their very presence made to society’s deepest sense of order.

  Yet, formidable as social disapproval can be, it also serves to develop cheek. Partly from desperation, and partly due to solitude, which even if forced upon her, nurtures insight, a woman suffering from the pain of society’s rejection might come to detect a certain hollowness in the arguments that she should live under a more strict sexual code than men. Moreover, once fallen, the spotless conduct and the rules by which she had been carefully taught to behave would now, ironically, precisely because of society’s censure, be proven unnecessary.

  The harsher circumstances faced by women who were not born to the upper classes only made their perceptions correspondingly more penetrating. It is clear, for instance, that in the seventeenth century, over a hundred years before the French Revolution, the celebrated courtesan Marion Delorme had already seen through distinctions of rank which separated one citizen from another. “ Without his biretta and his scarlet robes,” she is famous for saying, “a Cardinal is a very little man.” She was speaking of Richelieu, a man who virtually ruled France for decades. But that she had been intimate with him would have put the dimensions of his power in a very different perspective.

  And there is thi
s to consider. Doubtless, such entitlements were less imposing to a woman whose existence was not recognized by the social order, an order that could easily have seemed a charade to her. Since a courtesan who was not wellborn had to learn late all the manners that aristocratic children are taught from birth, she understood perhaps better than most how much social position is both expressed and maintained by performance. It was a skill which, in the end, allowed many courtesans to surpass all others. When Edwige Feullière was criticized in London for playing the courtesan Marguerite in La Dame aux camélias as if she were a grande dame, she responded by saying, “The courtesans of France were the only grandes dames.” Indeed, it was the great actress Rachel, a courtesan like so many women of her profession, who taught the empress Eugénie how to curtsy while scanning an audience with her eyes.

  But there was an element Eugénie cannot have learned. Not only were the daily performances the great courtesans gave infused with the delightful humor that can only come from understanding that we are all merely players on the stage of life, but their gestures were fired by the considerable bravura required to pull off the whole charade. Thus we can easily see why, in the heat of such victories, these particular players were found so irresistible.

  Wellington’s Surrender

  When people talk to me about the weather, I always feel they mean something else.—Oscar Wilde

  Imagine, then, how it would have felt at the very beginning of the nineteenth century to the fledgling courtesan Harriet Wilson, the daughter of a Swiss watchmaker in Mayfair, when she made her first entrance into high society. Her family was respectable enough, but tradesmen and their children were not welcomed into the circles she had entered. Yet even if she were greeted by a chill, we would find no trembling in her demeanor. Cheek, which she had in great abundance, carried her through as surely as a blazing fire on a very cold night.

  In a few short years Wilson became the most popular woman among those who were called “the fashionable impure” of the Regency. Her success cannot be credited to beauty, for which she was not known. Rather, it was cheek itself, which only deepened over time, that made her so attractive. She had, in the words of Sir Walter Scott, “the manner of a wild schoolboy.” She was in the fullness of her powers when she met the celebrated Duke of Wellington. And in a sense, so was he. Since defeating Napoléon at the battle of Waterloo, all of England sat at his feet.

  However, at least in the account she recorded in her memoirs, Wellington was no match for her. According to Wilson, she sensed the weakness of her suitor immediately. Having paid Mrs. Porter, who was a procurer, 100 guineas to arrange an introduction with Harriet, and promised the same amount to her for a short meeting, he arrived punctually, and bowing, thanked her for agreeing to see him. But as he tried to take her hand, she withdrew hers, chiding him. “Really, for such a renowned hero you have very little to say for yourself.”

  Elaborately polite himself, cosseted by the rules of polite society, like many great soldiers, the duke was oddly inept socially. But he must have been especially flustered on first meeting Harriet, because after uttering the phrase “beautiful creature,” he immediately asked after her current lover, who was also a friend of his. “Where is Lorne?” the duke said.

  Reacting to the inappropriateness of his question, which made her feel, in her words, “out of all patience with his stupidity,” she asked him directly, “Good gracious, what come you here for, Duke?”

  To which, apparently still transfixed and somewhat at a loss for words, the duke blurted out, “Beautiful eyes, yours!”

  The compliment did not soften her attitude.

  “Aye man!” she answered him quickly. “They are greater conquerors than ever Wellington shall be.” To which she added, even more impudently, “But, to be serious, I understood you came here to try to make yourself agreeable.”

  If then the duke finally lost his temper, demanding, “What, child, do you think I have nothing better to do than to make speeches to please ladies?, ” still he stayed. Offended as he may have seemed, Wellington was to become one of Harriet’s lovers. The affair between them lasted many years, during which time he resolved her debts and contributed generously to her support. Perhaps he was charmed by her apparently effortless ability to insult him, which is illustrated by a brief excerpt from a later dialogue. Trying no doubt to be romantic, the duke told her, “I was thinking of you last night after I got into bed.” To which, without missing a beat, Harriet responded, “How very polite to the Duchess.”

  If the appeal of such rudeness is mysterious, an engraving found in the first edition of her memoirs illustrating her account of their first meeting reveals another side to the story. Here the great soldier is depicted hat in hand, in a lackluster posture, less a bow than an odd gesture of hesitancy and defeat. In sympathy for his plight, he was not known to be handsome. Wilson commented that he looked to her like a rat, and though she was impressed by his accomplishments, she found him essentially boring. He was decidedly not a ladies’ man, and this must have made him uncertain of himself, even in the role of a paying suitor. Yet the engraver has captured another quality, less shyness than a curious kind of collapse. His arms hang beside him like dead weights.

  Sitting in a straightback chair, Harriet’s demeanor is altogether different. Her arms, one curled in her lap, the other slung over the back of the chair, are relaxed comfortably in an almost modern way. There is a blush to her cheeks. Her breasts seem to fill the room less with size than with the exuberant implication of sexuality. One foot edges forward, not nervously, but instead aware and ready. Though her head, covered with dangling curls, is tilted to one side, this is clearly not, as is often the case with so many women, a gesture of obedience, but rather a teasing pose. In striking contrast to the duke, the consummate effect of her presence is of vitality.

  One can only imagine the causes of the duke’s relative deflation. Perhaps battle has tired him. And then again, perhaps off the battlefield, without such clear demarcations of danger and victory, life has lost its meaning for him. Confused by domestic intrigue, he only vaguely grasps this terrain, which is why he clings so tenaciously to the manners he performs with rote dullness. And since he is usually surrounded by so many admirers, some of them even sycophants, none of whom will ever risk saying anything disagreeable to him, he is probably used to being bored.

  No wonder then that the young woman sitting across the drawing room captivates him so. She does not indulge in small talk. With an easy wit, she cuts through the stuffy air of politeness and the wooden manner of his entrance to tell him exactly what is transpiring between them, even spelling out his own desires. She is, he suddenly realizes, breaking the soporific pattern that has become familiar to him. Far from sycophantic, her words, though amusing, seem more like an assault. Finding himself on the battlefield once more, his nerves begin to quicken and he feels alive again.

  We must note here that to be truly effective, cheek must be accompanied by an educated intelligence. It is not just that Harriet is ignorant of manners but rather that she understands the purpose of them very well. And for this reason she never allows herself to be treated without the respect of proper protocol. (She was known to have banished a prince from her presence because he failed to remove his hat.)

  Far from ignorant of manners, Harriet is particularly adept at revealing the meanings of protocol. In the world to which the duke was born, where raw power is veiled by title, tradition, and pomp, public events, meetings, and conversations have a strangely empty quality, as if reality had been banished. But Harriet allows nothing to be veiled. It is not only that her gown is cut low across her breasts, nor that she sees the emperor’s proverbial nakedness; the empire, too, with every euphemism, and all its secret dealings, seems to shed its clothing in her presence.

  Perhaps this is why it is not just Wellington who is drawn to her. Indeed, it seems as if all the great men of the British Empire come eventually to sit at her feet. Along with the Marquess of Lorne, heir o
f the Duke of Argyll, she has enlisted the attention of the Marquess of Worcester, heir of the Duke of Beaufort; Lord Frederick Bentinck, son of the Duke of Portland; the Duke of Leinster; Lord Craven, Lord Alvanley, and Henry Brougham, a member of Parliament. The poet Byron is her good friend. And along with the most powerful ladies and gentlemen in London, she is invited to all the fashionable parties.

  Certainly, such a guest presents a formidable risk. Though polite silence can be fatally dull, even without trying, almost any courtesan supplies a vivid reminder of what everyone knows but cannot mention. Stories of lust and desire, of gain and loss and accumulation, the source of so much significance so carefully hidden now perched at the edge of her tongue. She is like a jack-in- the-box, a flying fish, a roman candle about to burst into sparkling plumes of light. You can never tell what she will say or do next. But you can certainly count on her to deliver you from boredom.

  “A Masterpiece of Impertinence”

  Shut your mouths, I’m opening mine.

  —the singer Fréhel to her

  audience at a cabaret in Paris

  There is more to say about brazenness itself. The audacity that fuels cheek reveals a spirit not merely willing but very eager to tell the truth. A good example is afforded us by the brief dialogue that took place when the courtesan Esther Guimond, traveling through Naples, was stopped for a routine examination of her passport.

  “What is your profession?” the official in charge asked her.

  “A woman of independent means,” she answered discreetly.

  But when she saw that the official, who looked bewildered, did not seem to understand her, she cried out impatiently, “Courtesan—take care you remember it.”

  To which, probably fired by the energy of her own speech, she added, widening her audacity. “And go and tell that Englishman over there.”