The Book of the Courtesans

by Susan Griffin

  Though Tintoretto is the true conjuror, simulating light to make visible what, by lesser hands, is seldom depicted—the mystical states that are experienced by those struck with religious awe. It is this emotion that seems to fascinate him most and he shows it by showing what the devout see—a world energized by luminosity.

  We find a similar bedazzlement in the poetry of Veronica Franco. Her subject was, of course, more worldly. But though in some circles even today sacred and profane love are opposed, the Renaissance was waking to a certain rapport between the two. What is portrayed in Titian’s famous painting Sacred and Profane Love is not conflict but harmony. Together, the writers and artists from this period were reclaiming the conjoined mysteries of eros.

  This was Veronica Franco’s subject, what she calls, in one poem, “the supernatural miracles of love.” Like Tintoretto, she was drawn to inner states. She explores the awe which lovers feel, an emotion not dissimilar to religious awe. Indeed, she compares Henri III to a god:

  As from heaven down to a humble roof

  Beneficent Jove descends to us here below

  Since this king had ascended both the thrones of Poland and France by divine right, the comparison seems especially appropriate. But the practice of depicting lovers as gods was common to an age eager to explore the divinity not only of love but of erotic pleasure. The amorous descent of Jove was often chosen as a subject by painters, among them Correggio and Titian. In these paintings, following the ancient myth, Jove enters the chamber of Danaë as a cloud that empties a golden shower on her. Thus are both semen and sexual pleasure shown as sacramental, the gold here, no less than in the Basilica of St. Mark’s, a sign of spiritual illumination.

  Franco portrays the king’s amatory prowess similarly, but with a more diplomatic delicacy. “He shone such a ray of divine virtue,” she writes, coupling luminosity with potency, “that my innate strength completely failed me.” Light is everywhere in her poetry. Here, another lover is like a burning sun, there a light more beautiful than the sun. Her own passion is a spark ignited. She herself shines: in fact, the “bodily eye can scarcely bear the splendor of her brow.” And also like Tintoretto, the real source of illumination in her work is inward. When she writes that “like snow in the sun you vanished in tears,” it is the inner experience of love she is tracking, what we would call today the psychology of eros.

  Yet inward as her landscape is, she does not diminish the visceral reality of love. It is her lover’s “golden shaft” that penetrates her heart. A viscerality not foreign to the painter, who no matter how mystical his theme, was stunningly accurate as he rendered the turn of a shoulder, the lowering of a head, the raising of eyes, hands frozen in a gesture of wonder. The same devotion to material existence can be seen in the portrait he painted of Franco, her lips redolent with feeling, the lace around her shoulders exquisitely detailed, her reddish hair capturing bits of glistening light in delicate curls, even her beautiful eyelids, brows, finely rendered, her eyes casting an intelligent gaze that, like the painting itself, seems to regard both inner and outer worlds at the same time.

  But she herself says this best in the letter she wrote thanking Tintoretto for his portrait: “You concentrate entirely on methods of imitating—no, rather of outdoing—nature, not only in what can be imitated by modeling the human figure, nude or clothed, adding color, shading, contour, features, muscles movements, actions, postures . . . but by expressing emotional states as well.”

  And this, too, should be added to the background of their friendship. They had both risen to prominence by the same path. A century earlier, when the shared imagination was still turned away from the material world, painters, whose works were often anonymous, were considered no better than craftsmen, and courtesans were hidden. But now that the tenor of the times had changed, the brilliance that each brought to earthly existence made both of them famous. The qualities Franco shared with the artist, a careful attention to the fine points of carnality, a sensitivity to emotional life, the intelligence with which she probed feeling, an attraction to mystical experience, explain why she was not only an honored courtesan but the most honored of her time in a city renowned for this profession. Certainly, mere mechanical pleasures could be found for far less money. The desire she met was instead for the larger dimensionality of pleasure, the spirit within experience. Like Tintoretto, she rendered both the moment and a mirror of the moment.

  Imagine, then, the quality of a caress as profound in its own way as any great work of art. It is not just the effect of her touch but of her eyes, too. All your responses, including the ones you are used to hiding from others and at times even from yourself, would be reflected in this regard. Perhaps she notices a slight movement as desire moves into your hand. Thus, knowing that she is your witness, your body quickens as she strokes your fingers. And when, smiling, she sees this, too, the feeling is suddenly so intense that you have the sensation of swimming in the

  candlelight that shimmers over her body. And now, beyond whatever she knows of you, revelation itself charges the atmosphere. As you take her, you are taken into a mythic realm, as if you yourself had become a god, your body a source of insight now, more alive than you thought possible, though this was all along what you desired. It was what you wanted to know.

  Wit

  Her contradictions preserve urbanity.—Louis XIV, speaking of Ninon de Lenclos

  In the realm of intelligence, wit occupies a narrow but nonetheless very effective position. Sometimes kind, it is at other times malicious. At once sly and straightforward, subtle and pointed, polite and rude, sensitive and brazen, it exists on a razor’s edge between heretical insight and what is acknowledged to be true. No wonder then that Oscar Wilde, famous for residing between one sex and the other, was a master of an art which, if only temporarily, allows manners and boundaries of all kinds to be transgressed with grace, and while revealing the hypocrisies of the established order, makes those who might otherwise be shocked laugh.

  Like the laughter it causes, wit rises; it lightens the mood. Yet it is also true that in order to be witty, one must already have risen, at least to a point sufficiently above the fray to see the humor in the human foibles that lie beneath. As Cupid does, when the witty inflict small wounds to every form of complacency, exciting levity along with love, they send their arrows from aloft. The perspective was indispensable to courtesans, who, living just outside propriety, were at the same time intimate with the most respected members of society.

  Ninon de Lenclos was famous for having wit in a witty time. One of the greatest courtesans of any period, she was born in 1620 to a family which belonged to the often impoverished and usually obscure lesser nobility of France. When she was fifteen years old, her father, forced into exile, abandoned Ninon and her mother. Hence, after the death of her mother a few years later, Ninon was left nearly penniless. There were no prospects for marriage, and in any case, from her father she had inherited a distinct lack of enthusiasm for the institution. Thus it was that she decided to take up one of the few professions open to her. She was well equipped for the work. Though she was beautiful, it was her intelligence that made her exceptionally attractive. Not only was she bright, she was unusually well educated for a woman of her time. Her father had given her lessons in philosophy, mathematics, Italian, and Spanish. As a girl, she loved books and read widely, including the work of Descartes. She had even managed to attend one play by Corneille. Highly perceptive even as a child, by the time she reached maturity she had developed a sophisticated sense of humor. All of which, in the early days of the period known as the Enlightenment, made her very popular. As the playwright Paul Scarron was to write of her:

  Oh beautiful, charming Ninon,

  whose wishes no one can decline

  so great being the power of one

  with both beauty and wit.

  She soon found herself at the center of Parisian society, where she remained throughout her long life. She was admired by the young Voltaire; hos
ted a famous salon at which Molière first read the manuscript of his new play, Tartuffe; and became the lover of countless illustrious men, including two members of the royal family, the duc d’Enghien, eldest son of the Condé branch of the Bourbons, and the duc de Vendôme, natural son of Henri IV, also a prince of the blood.

  Some examples of her extraordinary wit are still with us today. It was she, for instance, who said, “We should never speak ill of our enemies. They are the only people who do not deceive us.” She is also famous for having said, “My mother was a good woman with no sensory feeling. She procreated three children, scarcely noticing it.” As amusing as these comments are, they give us some insight into the painful circumstances of her childhood, which no doubt contributed, as trials and tribulations often do, to the development of her genius.

  Her mother and father’s marriage was not made in heaven. It was rather a marriage of convenience made between a man and woman who were, as it turned out, incompatible. Henri, her father, was a freethinker—skeptical, irreligious, worldly; a man of lusty appetites, who loved learning, bawdy talk, music, carousing, all of which his wife, Marie-Barbe de la Marche, timid, devout, and unworldly, disapproved. Ninon, the last child of this unfortunate union, was caught in the middle, the manner of her upbringing a battleground between two parents, both of whom she loved deeply. While her father brought her to the Palais d’Orléans to see a painting by Rubens, introduced her to works by authors such as the skeptical priest Charon, and taught her to play the lute, an instrument considered too licentious for a proper young lady, her mother, taking the opposite tack, made her read sacred books, ordered her to cover her beautiful hair in a scarf, and forced her into dresses made from muted, dark fabrics, the bodices cut so that they would flatten her breasts.

  Though she preferred her father’s way of life, ultimately choosing to live in a world more like his, when she learned of her father’s infidelity, she felt fiercely protective of her mother. Moreover, Henri’s affair with a woman who was also married finally led to a violent episode for which, because he had murdered a man, he was forced to leave Paris. Ninon remained by her mother’s side, attempting to fill her father’s shoes. Though she continued on her own to pursue the liberal education her father had introduced, she did not defy her mother’s attempts to raise her as a pious woman, but instead dutifully attended Mass with her (albeit diverting her attention to the beautiful and sumptuous gowns that so many women who lived in the fashionable neighborhood of the Place Royale wore to services). Somehow, throughout all the tortuous turns of the ill-conceived marriage between her parents, Ninon managed to remain a loving and loyal daughter to both of them. This was a great accomplishment in itself, and more significantly to this history, one that would have required that she be able to extricate herself constantly from battle.

  To survive in the atmosphere of hostility that existed for such a prolonged period between the two people she loved most in the world, she would have had to cultivate a certain distance from the passionate recriminations they aimed at each other, as well as from the extremities of passion itself. From this perspective, it is easy to understand how the daughter of a woman betrayed by her husband, a man so in love with his mistress that he risked his own life and took the life of another, would have a jaundiced perspective on the delirium of love. And we can easily see, too, why, given her mother’s blind devotion, she would have remained aloof from religious passion. Even the heated political controversies of the period left her unshaken; though sharply discerning, she stayed calmly outside the fires. The fruit of this distance, of course, was the illuminating accuracy of her celebrated wit.

  In an age that valued wit highly, the gift was especially advantageous. Not only were the men and women who possessed it considered more attractive, they were also more esteemed, even rising in rank because of it. Louis XIV, called the Sun King, who was born when Ninon was eighteen years of age, was known to favor wit. “You know,” he confided to his brother’s wife, “I like clever, amusing people.” Were he not destined to rule, he probably would have married the niece of the man who had been his regent, the late Cardinal Mazarin. Marie Mancini was known to be very intelligent. But using marriage to consolidate the power of his kingdom, he chose Marie-Thé rèse, the not very attractive and somewhat dull Spanish infanta, instead.

  Pleased with her submissiveness, he made up for her shortcomings with his mistresses. The beautiful Louise de la Vallière was a lady-in-waiting to his sister-in-law, Henriette, with whom he carried on a scandalous flirtation. He got to know her only after Henriette suggested that, to cover their affair, he pretend to be courting Louise. The pretense soon became reality. He had her declared the royal titular mistress, a custom started by an earlier king, Charles VII, who in the fifteenth century had declared Agnès Sorel his ma"tresse en titre. But after a while the dewy-eyed and rather elusive ways that once enchanted him lost their charm. Bored again, he turned to Louise’s best friend, a woman who often

  accompanied her at court, the marquise de Montespan. Françoise-

  Athénaïs, daughter of the marquis de Mortemart, was one of four siblings treasured for their social brilliance. They were fond of laughing and had the gift of inspiring mirth in others. As Nancy Mitford writes, “ Their lazy, languishing, wailing voices would bring up an episode, piling unexpected exaggerations upon comic images until the listeners were helpless with laughter.” Montespan was, in short, very entertaining.

  Amusement was just what the king needed. Though Louis ruled absolutely, his reign was filled with trouble. The conditions of the period in France were not unlike those that Ninon faced in her discordant family life. The realm was divided not only between Protestants and Catholics but also between Jansenists and Jesuits, the Church jostling with the state for power, the rise of secular philosophies that implicitly questioned an order based on divine right; even the royal desire for pleasure was daily pitted against religious values. The only respite was laughter.

  In the end, religious drama could not be kept from Louis’ court. Though witty and intelligent herself, his last mistress did her best to save him from sin. Following the pattern of his earlier conquests, Louis had met Franç oise de Scarron through the marquise de Montespan. Together, both mistresses were prized as being among the liveliest members of court society. Before she became Louis’ mistress, Madame Scarron was married to a freethinking and very secular playwright, Paul Scarron, a close friend of Ninon. Often together at the gatherings of writers and philosophers that took place at Scarron’s apartment, the two women became good friends. When Françoise was left penniless after Scarron’s death, Ninon provided shelter for her in her own apartment. Indeed, because they shared a bed for several months, the rumor was that they had become lovers. But Ninon continued her profession, and in time, saying that she wanted to distance herself from such licentious behavior, Madame Scarron left Ninon’s lodgings.

  Indeed, in later years Scarron liked to describe her own behavior as above reproach. Her piety only became more exaggerated with time. As she grew closer to the monarch, gradually replacing Montespan, she did her best to convince the king that since Montespan was married, his affair with her was doubly adulterous and hence doubly immoral. Soon Scarron was made the marquise de Maintenon with her own estate, and after a scandal involving poison, Montespan retreated. Then, the queen died. And finally the marquise was free to tell the king that she did not want to live in a state of sin herself. Thus eventually, as most scholars agree, devotion won the day. In a marriage that took place covertly in the alcove of his bedroom, the king’s last favorite became his secret wife.

  From the distance of time, one might be led to believe that Maintenon’s religious scruples were suspiciously self-serving. But even if this were so, it could not have been the whole story. After she married Louis, her zeal only increased. If her growing fanaticism troubled many, none were more affected by this conversion than the hapless students of Saint-Cyr, the school for girls that she had started with Louis�
�� help. In the beginning, this academy was meant to give the daughters of the lesser nobility an education. They were to be prepared with the skills necessary to enter society—cultivation in the arts, including literature and needlepoint—the manners expected at court. The marquise even commissioned Racine to write a play for the girls to perform.

  It was the memory of her own circumstances that led her to establish the school. When, as a young woman, Françoise was brought, badly dressed and hardly tutored, to a soirée at Scarron’s apartments, she was so aware of her deficiencies that she was reduced to tears by the embarrassment. But Scarron, who was a kind man, took a liking to her. And when he learned that having no means she was to be sent to a nunnery and thus was in despair, he offered to marry her. He was neither physically attractive nor capable of consummating a marriage. Afflicted by illness, unable to walk unaided, he was described by everyone including himself as being shaped like the letter “Z.” Yet he fed and clothed her, and just as important, gave her an informal education and an entrance into Parisian society. A scintillating presence, she proved a gracious hostess at Scarron’s gatherings and was soon sought and admired by Parisian society in her own right.