The Book of the Courtesans

by Susan Griffin

  And as if this were not tantalizing enough, he adds a comment that is even more revealing: “She took possession of a man if she touched him with the tips of her fingers.” But this, of course, would lead to rapture—the tips of her fingers, fully sensate and fully aware, taking you in and touching you as if her fingers had never touched before, so that you yourself begin to experience touch as something entirely new.

  One can imagine the duke being seduced this way, her hand perhaps grazing the side of his leg as they walk side by side down the boulevard des Italiens. By the time they reach her apartment, he has forgotten every worry, every responsibility; even his own expectations and plans for pleasure begin to vanish when her mouth opens into his mouth as she discovers all over again what it is to kiss him.

  As he glides his hand around the arc of her hips, over her belly, up the curve of her breasts, she takes her pleasure fully and with a cry of surprise, too, as if this particular stroke were unpredictably pleasurable, fresh. In her intense presence, he feels himself dissolving until, entering her mood entirely, he abandons himself to each ensuing moment of bliss.

  MADAME DE POMPADOUR

  Chapter Six

  Grace

  I learned then that there are no minor roles. They are all major roles and it’s what the dancer does that makes it major.

  —JUDITH JAMISON, Dancing Spirit

  ALMOST ANY ACTIVITY will be transformed into something extraordinary when it is done with grace. The virtue is especially evident in movement. Imagine, for instance, the way that the actress and famous demi-mondaine Lanthélme entered a room. The languidly slouching manner of her walk was imitated by women all over Paris. Or think of Taglioni, the first ballerina to dance on her toes, spinning across the stage of the Opéra in Paris as if for a few breathless moments she were more spirit than flesh. Or envision Nijinsky, leaping and then pausing in midair before he descended, only to bend toward the earth slowly like a serpent.

  But if the essence of all grace is movement, the forms of the motion are manifold. The same virtue, for instance, describes the symbolic gestures we call graciousness, a quality that includes generosity, as well as the grace of the hostess who puts you at ease. A feeling which can extend into her surroundings, when if they are pleasantly decorated, the rooms where she receives you will be described as gracious, too.

  And then there is also the divine grace, which moves from the mysterious will of gods and goddesses who occasionally favor us with their blessings. One need not be religious to experience it. Even an atheist feels touched by a state of grace when, for instance, an astonishing insight seems to come out of nowhere.

  Given the complexity of this virtue, it makes sense that the Greeks would have represented grace with three figures instead of one. The Three Graces are young women, handmaidens of Venus, who share many of her attributes, including beauty, joy, the ability to inspire desire, and an inclination toward games of chance. As well as having the habit of appearing either nude or in transparent clothing, along with the Hours, they helped Aphrodite to change her garments whenever the seasons changed. And there is this, too. Apropos of our subject, they are abidingly associated with love in every aspect, including fulfillment. A fullness which in an earlier aspect of Venus, as a goddess of fertility, was linked to the cycles of earthly life.

  Thus it should not surprise us that no matter how weightless the effect may be, this virtue requires a certain earthiness. While grace greases the wheels of almost any endeavor, it is by nature erotic. The way Lanthélme walked, for instance, has been called insinuating. What was insinuated, of course, as she proceeded—limbs loose, movements slow, shoulders curved forward, chest concave (as if she were pausing in a seductive undulation), hips forward— was desire. The thought of a continuing wave, her body softening against yours, would have entered your mind, just as you found your soul caught in the sway of the motion you would have been following so closely with your eyes. For it is difficult to ignore grace.

  “The Call of the Wild”

  The call of adventure, the call of the wild, was in most of them, no matter what they were doing.—Maud Parrish, dance hall girl

  I was never a gold digger. The men threw their gold at my feet when my dances pleased them.—Klondike Kate

  Her dance was famous. She would begin in the center of the stage, statuesque and still, with over two hundred yards of gauze wound tightly around her, as if she were wrapped in a cocoon. The audience was made up mostly of miners who came in to Dawson to stake their claims or refill supplies, hopefully taking a night of luxury and leisure before they would return to rough camps in the muddy fields and hills where they worked themselves to exhaustion every day looking for gold. Though with a successful claim a man might become a millionaire, this miracle more often than not eluded him. But here at the Palace Grand Theater, he could be transported to what seemed like heaven for the small price of admission and a few drinks, as somehow with uncommon grace Kate would unwrap herself nightly, suspending two hundred yards of diaphanous fabric in the air while she danced.

  “She was forgetfulness of hardship and homesickness,” one man said later. Of course, the light, airy image she produced would have erased the memory of dark mine shafts and bodies aching with fatigue for a few hours. It was not just a strip show she offered. Though along with her audiences he found her very appealing, the owner of the theater hired her because she was a good choreographer. And she also had, he said, a “French flair.”

  She was talented at evoking fantasy. Perhaps the roots of this ability lay in her childhood. Despite the modest means of her parents, her mother a waitress, her father a railroad telegraph operator, she was raised with an air of refinement as well as dreams of a better life. The atmosphere of her first years was permeated by her mother’s desire for something more. A larger, more glittering life seemed to beckon her perennially. Already married once earlier, after five years of marriage with Kate’s father, she divorced him, too, only to marry her lawyer, a former legislator. When this man became a successful judge and the family moved from Oswego, Kansas, to Spokane, Washington, Kate was swept into a different life, filled with every possible luxury. But the dream did not last long. Soon her stepfather lost all of his money; he died less than a year later, leaving Kate and her mother impoverished once again.

  She did not enter her trade by choice. It was to prevent her mother from working in a shirtwaist factory that Kate began to look for employment herself. But at sixteen the only job she could find was in the chorus line at a Coney Island honky-tonk. In the beginning, her mother kept a close watch on her, especially after shows. But when Kate moved back to Spokane, Washington, and began work in a club there, she was taught to induce the customers to buy her drinks after each performance. It was here that, just after she moved her mother west to be closer to her, she heard the first news of the Klondike rush. After sixty-eight miners arrived in San Francisco carrying gold worth $1.5 million and the Seattle Post Intelligencer sent over 200, 000 copies of a special Klondike edition with the headline “A Ton of Gold!” to newspapers all over the country, thousands of people—including the woman who would soon be known as “ Klondike Kate”—began to pour into the Yukon territories.

  At first she avoided the saloons where women were expected to take customers to the upstairs bedrooms. But once she became famous and had a private room of her own upstairs, she did not hesitate to accumulate her own fortune this way. And like all the showgirls in northwestern saloons, she would sit and drink with miners after the shows. She excelled here, too. Almost as famous for her sympathetic ear as for her magnetic performances, she was gracious as well as graceful. According to one of her biographers, “she spent many sleepless nights wrestling with the problems of some raw-boned sourdough” down on his luck. On occasion she would even grubstake a miner to a claim.

  Here it would serve us to recall that the Three Graces also symbolize the eternal movement of the gift—a movement that, like all of life, is circular. What gifts
she gave came back to her. As is evident in the story that a young miner named Ed Lucas has left us, something in Kate’s generous nature inspired generosity. After he reached into his pocket to show her the cache of gold nuggets he had worked so hard to obtain, he said that with no forethought he found himself offering one of them to her. She chose the largest. During her first year in Dawson alone, she accumulated $30,000, a small fortune then.

  One reason for her popularity must have been that she shared a great deal with the miners. Like them, she had known hard times, and like them, too, she loved the exhilarating mood of the Klondike. Since she arrived before the railway had a line into Dawson, she had come by boat up the five rapids. But because the river was thought to be dangerous for ladies, there was a law against women taking this ride. Thus to avoid the Mounties, she dressed in boy’s clothes and jumped just as the boat pulled out, hitting the water before she was pulled aboard. Still, she found the journey, she said later, “perhaps the most exciting trip I ever made.” A tomboy as a girl, she loved driving her team of dogs over the frozen snow and in the summer months riding “ wildly” on horseback out into the meadows.

  From her famous flame dance, it is easy to guess that there was something else Kate must have shared with the miners. The elation that pervaded the Yukon had another cause, more subtle, but still just as powerful as the desire for money. Gold is an old alchemical symbol. Perhaps because of its shine and the labor required for retrieving it, the metal is a metaphor not only for all that is superior but for the process of becoming better. Indeed, even the wish for a fortune is, on one level, the desire for a metamorphosis. Once wealthy, you believe, everything will change. Your spirit finally will glitter, too.

  This would have been the vision Kate evoked as the drinking miners, tired from their work but happy to be in town, watched while she emerged from her cocoon, gauze suspended above her like wings, and cheered while they imagined divine grace had coupled with them, their spirits charged by the belief that they, too, were in the midst of transformation, their wildest dreams airborne.

  Ecstasies of Elevation

  From the stage to the auditorium . . . invisible threads criss-cross between . . . dancer’s legs and men’s opera glasses, in a network of arousal and liaison.—Edmond and Jules de Goncourt, Journal

  Since at least the fourteenth century, dancers in the European tradition have been aiming themselves toward the sky. From the mannered ladies and gentlemen of the court, who often danced on their toes, to the masters of the pirouette and the leap, to Loie Fuller, who, like Klondike Kate, succeeded in floating her cloudlike clothing over her head, the general aspiration of dancers has been, if not to fly, then certainly to appear as if they are in flight.

  The resulting illusion is even greater than it seems. For the sense is that the dancer is free not only of gravity but of earthly existence altogether and thus while moving into the more ephemeral realm of air becomes ephemeral herself. Fittingly, as she fuses with the heavens above, she takes on a metaphorical significance, too. Thus, Loie Fuller, who was described in an astronomical simile by one witness as “a sun standing in a shower of stars,” was understood by the Symbolist poet Mallarmé to be less a woman than pure force, writing “with her body . . . a poem liberated from any scribe’s instrument.”

  Though graceful movements have been associated with lightness, the idea of the dancer as a vision of purity had its apotheosis in the figure of the ballet dancer Marie Taglioni. It was her role as the Sylph in the Romantic ballet Les Sylphides which made her famous. Soon after the opening of this ballet at the Paris Opéra, women all over the city were fashioning their hair as she did in a style called à la Sylphide. The story of this ballet, set in what was, to a French audience, the exotic Scottish countryside, appropriately wreathed in mist, appealed to the sensibilities of the times. Seated comfortably before his hearth, the hero is approached by a Sylph who has fallen in love with him. At last, forgetting the woman to whom he is betrothed, he succumbs to the spirit’s delicate approaches, and pursues her impulsively into the forest. We can guess at the ending already, as in so many other Romantic tales, his passion will lead to doom. On his way into the woods, he is given a potent scarf by a witch who claims he can use it to capture the Sylph. But the scarf is cursed. When he wraps it around her, the Sylph dissolves sweetly into pure air. And making his tragedy complete, while she dies, the sound of far-off wedding bells can be heard, telling the hero that at this moment, the woman he had abandoned has just married his best friend. He has lost not just one lover but love itself.

  The role was created for Taglioni. She was well suited to play a Sylph, who is above all a spirit of the air. Taglioni was famous for lending her movements a light, ethereal quality. When she danced, she seemed, as Lincoln Kirstein tells us, as if she were enclosed within “an envelope of fairy remoteness and chaste flirtations.” That she danced on point only increased the effect. Though dancing on point had been seen on stage several decades earlier, Taglioni succeeded in making the technique as quiet and graceful as it had seemed loud and athletic before. Silent movement was a Romantic preference. One of Taglioni’s teachers, the great Coulon, the man who developed what became known as the style Romantique, found a way to make noisy pirouettes and jumps silent by replacing the tapping heel of the eighteenth century with satin slippers. To her own graceful execution of this skill, Taglioni added the innovation of the tutu, with its gauzy transparency creating an even greater impression of airiness. Through her dance, she succeeded in creating an impression of purity that was unsurpassed.

  Yet nothing on earth will ever be purified of its origins. Though her impressive elevations and the feathery delicacy of her landings were not illusory, her art depended on long hours of experience with gravity. Born to an Italian family that had produced dancers for three generations, Taglioni was trained by her father. By all accounts, he drove her mercilessly. Once the premier danseur in Italy, while he performed, composed, and produced ballet in Europe’s major cities, he was eager to ready his daughter to follow in his footsteps. The practice which eventually made her appear to be so light in fact required prodigious labor. She would exercise and dance for six hours a day, sometimes collapsing with exhaustion in the middle of a session, only to be bathed by her mother, dressed in clean clothes, and made to return to her exercise. “If I ever heard my daughter dance,” her father once said, “I would kill her.” Along with her lightness and grace, to produce silence required an uncommon prowess, a muscular strength not usually included in the Romantic picture of feminine fragility.

  But such is the nature of life on earth. Whatever exists will usually be coupled with its opposite. Gravity and grace are less antagonists than lovers. And delicacy is not a static state but instead a moment in a continuum that must also include, if one is to survive, strength and daring. During the years when Romantic ballet was prominent, the fragile-looking dancers who twirled about in ephemeral tutus were actually risking their lives. More than one died from burns when their highly flammable costumes brushed too close to the gaslights at the edge of the stage. Taglioni’s student, Emily Livry, whom she had been carefully training to take her place one day, died of the burns she suffered in this way.

  But there is this, too. The image of chastity that Taglioni emanated was at one end of a pendulum that swung just as often in the other direction. That the dancer Fanny Elssler, who soon rivaled Taglioni’s popularity, became celebrated for her sensually suggestive movements was only part of the story. Even while Taglioni seduced her audiences with exulted sighs of motion, backstage, countless scenes of a far coarser nature were taking place. To raise interest in and hence funds for the ballet performances, Dr. Veron, who was the director of ballet at the Paris Opéra, allowed a select group of men to enter the foyer de la danse where the dancers practiced, warmed up, and rested after performing. Climbing a staircase installed at the left of the stage, gentlemen from the audience would give their names to an assistant, who had a list of those who we
re to be admitted. Once inside, they would watch the dancers work, most fascinated less by art than by anatomy, particularly legs. At the end of a performance, many men would leave with a young dancer, sometimes stealing her away from her mother’s protective eyes, and at other times bargaining with a mother for the cost of an evening.

  As was true for actresses, although ballet dancers were paid more than grisettes, the salary was small. It allowed for only the most meager existence. Unless she were a star, after basic expenses, nothing was left to support her mother or save for retirement, which for a dancer comes early. Thus, as also was true for actresses, dancers were often courtesans. The fashion for keeping dancers all through the nineteenth century was so common that the euphemism still used for keeping a mistress, “Il a sa danseuse, ” was coined in this period. Aristocrats and wealthy entrepreneurs, artists and writers, even heads of state shared a passion for dancers. Napoléon III, emperor of the Second Empire, was such a frequent visitor backstage that he kept a private room there. Baron Haussmann, the architect the emperor had commissioned to redevelop the city, kept the dancer Francine Cellier, who, in order to avoid scandal, dressed like his daughter whenever they went out together. A dancer called Finette was kept by the American painter James Whistler. Some, like Cléo de Mérode, were more famous as courtesans than dancers. And a very few such as Lolotte, for instance, who became the comtesse d’Hérouville, were courtesans only temporarily, before they ascended into the aristocracy.