The Book of the Courtesans

by Susan Griffin

  We do not know precisely how she came to be so brazen. The history has been lost. But it is clear that once she crossed the barrier against using the word “courtesan,” she accelerated her transgression with a kind of glee. In this she was part of a larger insurrection against propriety in language, the same joyous revolution that can be felt in Rimbaud’s “Chant de Guerre Parisian” where he writes “Oh May, What delirious bare asses. ”

  Like Rimbaud, Guimond’s verbal rebellions were not only defiant but talented. The sharpness of her tongue was remarkable enough that, in a Paris full of famous wits, she was famous for her repartee. A lover of the journalist Emile de Girardin for many years, she was known to have contributed more than once to his work. And when, after the popular revolts of 1848, Girardin was on the verge of being executed for conspiracy, she saved his life with her sharp wit. Approaching Cavaignac, the chief executive officer in charge of Girardin’s case, a man who was also a friend, she ridiculed the accusation. “Conspiracy?” she cried. “What nonsense! He can’t conspire. No one ever shares his opinions. ”

  Her talent for piercing through illusion had a less happy side. Guimond was cynically practical. Early in her career, she made a small fortune by blackmailing other courtesans with letters she had teased from their former lovers. This perfidy, however, shares a certain ground with the brazenness of her speech. She was determined to survive at all costs. Willpower often comes from an early experience of destitution. Of Esther’s life before she became a courtesan very little is known. It is almost as if, before her appearance on the boulevards of nineteenth-century Paris, she did not exist. Still, we do know that she was a grisette. Like

  Duplessis, she would have worked twelve to sixteen hours a day in a

  sweatshop for wages too meager to keep life and limb together. “ Dressmaking,” she once said dryly, “didn’t suit me.”

  That one’s spirit can be crushed by such a life need hardly be said. The process may be invisible and slow. Faced with such conditions, and little or no alternative, many seem resigned. Given the prospect of being worked to death, one can imagine giving up and at the same time retreating from all that is vivid in oneself. But there are always some who will try to escape this kind of fate no matter how desperate the odds. It is an attempt that requires the summoning of an extraordinary will, strengthened in turn by the exceptional clarity that can arise in response to the many large and small insults, humiliations, and indignities that quickly accumulate in such a life but are so often unnamed or even denied by society.

  If, over time, Guimond entered another class, becoming one of the more esteemed women in Paris, the host of a salon that included not only Girardin but Dumas fils, Nestor Roqueplan, Saint-Beuve, Guizot, and Prince Napoléon, her past may not have been immediately apparent during her ascension, except that she was quick to perceive an injustice—and even quicker to respond accordingly. In his Confessions, the boulevardier Arène Houssaye recalls an episode that has become famous. It took place at Longchamps. Breaching protocol, several grandes cocottes, Guimond among them, were escorted by a group of fashionable playboys into the grandstand usually reserved for the best families. Outraged, a cabal of society matrons, including the comtesse de Courval, sent the master of ceremonies to tell the courtesans to leave. But true to her character, Guimond stood her ground. She was there by the will of the gentlemen who had accompanied her, she said, and nothing short of bayonets would make her withdraw.

  But the story does not end there. Returning to Paris after the races, her behavior became far more incendiary. Paying her driver a louis to race neck-and- neck with the coach of the comtesse de Courval, as they drove along side by side, she tossed the countess flowers and sang her a ribald song that she improvised in thirty-six couplets. It was Houssaye who referred to it as “ a masterpiece of impertinence.” Soon, all Paris was singing the same song. “That,” Esther Guimond used to say, “is how I made my entrance into society.”

  An Outrageous Proposal

  It was in 1906 that the beautiful actress and demi-mondaine known as Lanthélme received Misia Sert into her drawing room. Among the many ironies of this meeting, Sert knew that only recently the elegant home on the rue Fortuny, so close to the fashionable Parc Monceau, as well as the eighteenth-century furniture that filled it, had been given to Lanthélme by Alfred Sert, her husband. Misia, a theatrical producer and powerful presence herself, studied Alfred’s lover closely. Copying her style of dress, she had rehearsed a dramatic appeal. “You have a woman’s heart,” she planned to say, before she demanded, “Give him back!” But she was never able to deliver her lines.

  That she failed to grasp entirely the worldly ways of her rival is understandable. Born as Mathilde Fossey, Lanthélme, the daughter of a prostitute, was raised in her mother’s brothel, where she was put to work at fourteen. All her life she had shown an extraordinary and fierce independence. Rejecting the profession that fate had chosen for her, she applied to study acting at the Conservatoire. When, after a few years, her great talent became evident and she was offered a position at the Comédie- Française, she rejected this, too, choosing instead to perform at the more popular theatres on the boulevards of Paris. She quickly became a sensation, followed by an avid audience especially interested in the fact that she was known to take both men and women as lovers.

  Admitted to the salon only after being searched for weapons by Lanthé lme’s maid, and after waiting in the drawing room under a chic portrait of the stunningly beautiful actress painted by Boldini, Misia was disarmed once again by her rival’s entrance. Immediately, Lanthélme showered her lover’s wife with compliments, and after brightly discussing the theatre season, asked if she could help Misia in any way. Flustered, Misia simply said she had come to speak about her husband.

  “There is nothing at all to worry about,” Lanthélme began; “he hardly interests me.”

  But then she changed her approach.

  “My dear, you can really have him—on three conditions: I want the pearl necklace you’re wearing, one million francs—and you.”

  Shocked, Misia removed her necklace immediately and, ignoring the last request, promised that Lanthélme would receive a million francs from her in a few days. But moments after she returned to her hotel, she received a package containing the necklace. Inside was a note written on cyclamen-colored paper, in which Lanthélme proposed, “I have decided to forget the money and return the necklace. I am holding you only to the third condition.”

  Her Garter Belt

  The spirit of lingerie is fashion and this phenomenon becomes even more interesting when along with dress codes it reverses received ideas.— Marie Simon, Les Dessous

  If clothing tells one story, lingerie provides the tale with another layer of meaning. When a woman strips away her outer clothing, lingerie is what remains. Providing an architectural foundation for every erotic facade, the practical structures that hold up breasts, mold hips and bellies, and smooth legs are also signs in themselves. Beneath more muted, somber, modest shades and fabrics, suddenly we find red or black or purple, framing all the forbidden sights with silk and lace. As a woman undresses, a froth of sensuousness suddenly appears close to the skin, steamy with sweat and secretions.

  No wonder then that lingerie is not meant to be displayed in public. But at the end of the Second Empire, that is exactly what La Belle Otero did. The photograph is sepia-toned yet clear. With both hands she pulls each side of a split skirt apart to reveal her garter belt for the camera. Her expression goes beyond brazenness. As her chin tilts up in the smile of a trickster, Otero has all the élan of a pilot in the early days of flying—dashing, daring, impressively insouciant, ready to ascend.

  But as if her expression were not enough, what distinguishes her from just another tart showing her wares is the nature of the garter belt itself. Made of precious stones, it was designed by the celebrated house of Boucheron, where throughout the Second Empire and Belle Epoque the titled and the rich came for their jewelr
y, everyone from Empress Eugénie and Queen Isabella II of Spain to the Vanderbilts. Born illegitimate and poor in a small village in Spain, were it not for her cheekiness, Otero would never have set foot in Boucheron. Thus, the image of her garter belt is doubly insolent, a sparkling effrontery, audacity mingling luxuriantly with seduction.

  LA PAïVA

  Arousal

  (THE THIRD EROTIC STATION)

  . . . as the years went by without bringing her either position or fortune, she firmly resolved that she would win them both.

  —comte Horace de Viel-Castel, Mémoires sur le Régne de Napoléon III

  THE QUESTION BEING, what made her so desirable to all the men from whom she got finally what she wanted? Especially since, though Païva was known as “the Queen of Paris,” what she inspired in some was only indignant anger. Jules and Edmond de Goncourt, habitués and historians of literary and artistic Paris, wrote of her often, almost always in a disapproving tone. The house she built on the Champs- Elysées, which she promised would be the most beautiful in Paris, was ridiculously ostentatious; the parties she hosted there were overshadowed by her immense pride; and furthermore she was not a great beauty herself, the brothers said. Still, anger, even when elegantly phrased and placed at a neat critical distance, is a strong response. Certainly, in their own way, the brothers were aroused.

  Dining at her table one night, both men were especially offended when she described her own climb to wealth and status. “Circumstance means nothing, ” she said. “One creates the circumstances of one’s life through pure will.” The magnitude of her willpower is clear in her history. Like so many of her contemporaries who ascended from rags to riches, though she was born poor and untitled, she became a marquise with a great fortune. Her father, who was a refugee from pogroms in Poland, had settled along with his family in Moscow. As the daughter of a weaver, the future Païva was raised with very modest expectations. Following in the footsteps of her mother, she married a tailor when she was just seventeen years old, giving birth to a son soon after. But while working long hours, cutting and stitching in the small basement apartment the three of them shared, she found herself dreaming of escape, until one day, abandoning her spouse and her young son, she fled.

  Though we may find it hard to forgive the coldness of her resolve, the force of will evident in this story is breathtaking. Few options would have been open to her. Not educated enough to become a governess, had she become a working woman she would have had to endure a poverty far more severe than the one she had endured with her husband and son. But she did have some resources. Despite the disparaging description of the Goncourt brothers, her figure was thought beautiful and she had what was called a Grecian neck, thick reddish hair, and intensely appealing eyes. But there is also her formidable energy to consider, too—a force that could sustain her while, alone and without protection and penniless, she waited to be chosen at the public balls and cafés she frequented.

  Imagining this energy, we can perhaps begin to perceive what must have been almost a kind of tropism that certain men felt in their bodies, as they moved toward the heat of her extraordinary vitality. Let us think for example of the first days that she spent with Henri Herz, the prosperous pianist and composer who was to introduce her to the Parisian world of arts and letters. After searching many great cities—Constantinople, Berlin, Vienna—for the man she needed, she met Herz at the German resort known as Ems. Thirteen years her senior, Herz was perhaps hoping that the country air would act as a kind of tonic, renewing his appetite for life.

  In such a mood, her presence would have seemed all the more remarkable. She was not there to rest. Instead of a tired animal put out to pasture, she had more the air of a military horse, all muscle, the air nearly visible with each breath, ready to charge. Cooped up for hours in a small, dark space, she was hungry for life, and no one, nothing would stop her again. Herz would have been able to see this in the way she walked across a room. Through the finished veneer of the gait more fitting to a lady that she had observed and learned to imitate, he must have sensed the blistering pace of which she was well capable, a pace all the more compelling when glimpsed through the veil of her transitory restraint.

  Now, as she stands in front of him, he can read the whole story in her posture, the lusty greed she has for everything in life, the indomitable energy, even the inflated estimation she has of herself that moves toward the edge of derangement. Is it at this moment that he begins to see the future? He is perhaps startled for an instant at her directness, when she takes him by the hand, leading him toward his bed. But just as he is startled, his body responds in another way too. He is, after all, used to creating his own circumstances. A musician and composer who established his own piano factory, he is also a successful entrepreneur. Since most often he is the one in command, no one would have guessed, himself least of all, how appealing the thought of this momentary relinquishment would be. As he feels himself yield to the idea, another part of his body grows hard with anticipation.

  VERONICA FRANCO

  Chapter Four

  Brilliance

  The bodily eye can scarcely bear the splendor of her brow.

  —VERONICA FRANCO, “By an unknown author in Praise of Verona,

  where Franco is staying”

  BENEATH A THIN veneer of intellectual associations, “brilliance” is fundamentally a sensual word. Whether applied to the taste of vintage wine, a musical performance, a scientific theorem, a witty remark, or a quality of intelligence, the metaphor evokes a particular kind of light—a light that not only reveals whatever lies in its path but is also pleasing, even thrilling, in itself. We think, for instance, of a garden in the late afternoon, when rays of light, alternating with shadow, have a remarkable intensity, one that makes leaves and flowers and vines all seem as if they have been newly blessed.

  In this sense, it can be said of almost any successful courtesan that she was remarkably brilliant. Whether entering a grand ballroom or her private box at the opera, she had to shine. Many of the images that have been drawn of her preserve this radiance. Paintings by Titian as well as Veronese and Giorgione, or two centuries later by Boucher and Fragonard, and still later by Manet, have all captured this characteristic luminescence. Not only does the courtesan’ s hair shine; her eyes are shining, too, and wherever flesh is revealed, whether her breasts, her arms, or legs (or as in Boucher’s L’ Odalisque, her buttocks), her body seems to give off light.

  Where her body is not revealed, she is covered with reflective surfaces, adorned with shiny silks and glowing velvet, glittering sequins and beads sewn into the bodice or hem of her dress, a sparkling gem gleaming on her hand or suspended above the intriguingly dark line of her cleavage, lustrous pearls dangling from her ears, a diamond tiara settled on the top of her head, a gold chain circling her ankle. In Nadar’s early photographs of Sarah Bernhardt, who, when she was still young and following her mother’s plans for her, performed as a courtesan as well as an actress, light ripples over the cloth draped around her bare shoulders. And in almost all the photographic records we have of La Belle Otero, she is dripping in sparkling jewelry.

  The courtesan’s shine was so bright it appeared to fall on everything around her. The effect was stunningly simulated in the courtesan’s drawing room that appears in La Traviata, as filmed by Franco Zefferelli; it is suffused with a shimmering light that, reflected off crystal, silver, and as well a seemingly infinite number of mirrored surfaces, bathes the eyes in a warm and exciting brilliance. A similar gleam can be found in the decor of Maxim’s, the restaurant made famous by the continual presence of courtesans and their benefactors, where each room is wrapped in necklaces of vibrant mirrors that serve to intensify the incandescence of its patrons.

  If the effect of shimmering light is known to inspire desire, perhaps this is because the experience of love often feels filled with light. Accordingly, those who have newly fallen in love are said to glow. Likening this state of mind to the process of crystalliza
tion, Stendhal describes a practice in Salzburg in which a tree branch would be thrown into a salt mine and retrieved two or three months later so “covered with sparkling crystallizations” that the original branch was no longer recognizable. In this sense the beloved is not only a source of light; she is also a mirror reflecting back not just her lover’s desire but the resplendent beauty of eros altogether.

  Eros and Aphrodite came back into fashion during the Renaissance, which was, not coincidentally, the same period during which courtesans rose to prominence. Countless images were painted in this period of Venus, the goddess of love, accompanied by éclats—dramatic, rosy bursts of light— surrounding her like aureoles of dawn or misty haloes diffusing into the atmosphere. The men who made these images were the same great masters who had begun to paint courtesans. Indeed, the likeness of a courtesan is often preserved in an image of Venus; a figure of Danaë; as one of the Three Graces; or as Diana or Galatea, for whom she would have served as a model.

  We have pointed out earlier the pragmatic nature of this choice. Unlike a proper lady, a courtesan would have been free to pose without her clothing, and afterward to let this image of her nude body be publicly displayed. But the conflation of courtesan and goddess was more than practical. In this time of transformation, it was through pagan mythology that bodily desire was being reclaimed in all its glory.

  In the Sala del Maggior Consiglio of the Palazzo Ducale in Venice, two seemingly contradictory allegories, pagan and Christian, reside side by side in harmony. On the high ceiling, Veronese has painted Venus as she assumes her powers, casting and encircled by blazing light. And underneath this image, against the vast wall where the doges sat as they received foreign dignitaries, Tintoretto has painted a flock of saints and godly Venetian souls floating upward into the soft and luminous light of heaven. The painters were not from opposing camps. Veronese portrayed his fair share of religious subjects, and though Tintoretto’s best work is religious, he was a friend of Veronica Franco and painted her portrait as well as his own versions of Venus.