The Book of the Courtesans

by Susan Griffin

  Accordingly, a neighborhood came to exist in New Orleans that, like a region of the mind kept separate from waking thoughts, was, if not as invisible as its inhabitants, in disguise. The area of the city where the highly educated African-American mistresses of wealthy men were kept by white southern gentlemen had a fancy name, one that only regular visitors would be able to understand. It was called the Marigny Quarter. By using her brother’s name, the term made a sly reference to the most famous of all the courtesans, La Pompadour.

  Here a woman might live in her own cottage. When she went out, dressed in the finest clothing, of course, she would be driven in her own coach with a splendid pair of horses. And though the sum must be large, no one has counted all the friends and members of her family who, along with being better fed, were saved from unnamed cruelties when she did what she could to influence fate through her not inconsiderable charms.

  Do with Me What You Please

  Though Marie Duplessis gave the impression of belonging to a more elegant tradition that was waning, she was also a harbinger of what was to come. Looking back, we can see that her famous charm was comprised of the complexities that characterized the times, the fourth decade of the ninteenth century, a period in which the ruler of France, Louis Philippe, was known paradoxically as the Citizen King. Her beauty, grace, wit, and enthusiasm for life were all wrapped in a remarkably supple style. To her lovers, she gave the impression that she was the opposite of willful. It was said of her that if Lola Montez could not make friends, Marie Duplessis could not make enemies. One drawing made of her in this period captures the vaunted impression. She is rendered with such softly contoured lines, it seems as if she would bend to the wind of any man’s desire.

  This was, in the end, the way Dumas fils portrayed Marie, first in the novel, and then in the play that would make her, if not immortal, at least a fixture in the European mind for over a century as the character Marguerite. Those of us who attend the opera still encounter the same character today as Violetta Valéry in Verdi’s La Traviata and filmgoers will recognize her in the character Greta Garbo portrayed in George Cukor’s Camille. But in order to create such a compliant character, the playwright had to change the narrative of Duplessis’s life.

  It is true that after they met one night at the Théâtre des Varié tés, the two had a torrid affair. This was one of those liaisons for which courtesans did not charge. Marie claimed to be in love with Dumas fils. He was in love too and wanted her for himself alone. He resented the evenings when because she was entertaining one of her protectors the door was locked against him. But they both knew he could not afford to support her in the style to which she had become accustomed. And most likely she understood that he would never marry her. Not because, as in the play, his father would have objected. The playwright’s father, Alexandre Dumas, was a famous womanizer (a lover briefly of Lola Montez). Rather, it was the son’s own ambition that would not have allowed such a marriage to take place. When he did finally marry, it was to an aristocrat.

  Duplessis did not sacrifice herself, as Marguerite does in the play, leaving her lover Armand in order to preserve his reputation. Rather, because Dumas fils was tired of sharing her with others, and since she refused to sacrifice her only income, it was he who left her. Nor did Duplessis pine for him the way Marguerite does so movingly. Instead, after he left her, motivated in no small part by her own ambition, she married her longtime protector, comte Edouard de Perregaux. Because his family never accepted the marriage, it was annulled and they never lived together. But this did not prevent her from retaining the title of countess. She had her stationery and a set of china embellished with the Perregaux family crest.

  Far from languishing in grief over either Dumas fils or Perregaux, Duplessis took one more lover still before she died, the composer and pianist Franz Liszt. What was to be the last was probably also her most passionate affair. An offer she made to him has been cited as evidence of her acquiescent nature. “Take me, lead me wherever you like,” she said. “I will be no trouble to you. I sleep all day, go to the theatre in the evenings and at night you can do with me whatever you please.” Yet here we can see the great effect of her particular charm at work. While asking for what she wanted, she was able to create the illusion of suppliance.

  Reading more closely, we can see that reversing the roles assigned to men and women in courtship, she is the one to suggest that they go off together. Though protesting that she will be no trouble, she gracefully suggests that she will not change her own eccentric habits while she is with him. And since she had already experienced what Liszt liked to do with her at night and indeed seems to have liked very much, what seems a generous offer is in reality a graceful expression of her own desire.

  Yet, if those who loved her were encouraged to feel that it was they rather than she who were in control, there was a seed of truth to the illusion. She had relinquished control in an area where many of us never choose to succumb. Chronically ill from tuberculosis, though she sought the best medical advice, including that of Liszt’s own doctor, and made the rounds of several spas more than once, she had the sense that she would not live long. She seemed to accept this verdict with a kind of equanimity. She was not bitter. Her only complaint was boredom. She found it intolerable to be bored for any length of time. A suitor who failed to interest her would be treated with open yawns or banished from her presence. Not only regarding sexual desire but in this sense too she was a harbinger of a new order. Where before men demanded that the courtesans they supported be entertaining, now she demanded to be entertained by her lovers.

  She was kind, it is true, giving money generously to women less fortunate than herself, but she did not contort herself to try to please her lovers. It is also true that she made up stories about her life which made her slightly more glamorous. But her intent was not to hide her past. She was remarkably frank about her origins: the poverty she had endured as the daughter of an itinerant salesman, her father’s brutal attacks on her mother, the fact that he sold her into prostitution when she was barely thirteen years old. She concealed none of this. She once said, “Lying keeps your teeth white,” a remark that gives us a clue to a deeper motive. She was entertaining herself.

  It was something else that made her so extraordinary: her awareness of mortality. Passionately in love with life, exuberant at times, by turns free of constraints and yet well trained in all the manners of polite society, exquisitely refined, she possessed the composure that can only come from detachment. Was this what Dumas fils was aiming for in his portrait of her? It is a quality that saints share with the dying, a sense that artists have only when they are practicing their art. This must have been what Liszt meant when he wrote that being with her put him in the vein of poetry and music.

  The Blue Angel

  Moreover she will endeavor to enchant thee partly with her melodious notes that she warbles out upon her lute . . . and partly with that heart-tempting voice of hers.—Thomas Coryat, 1608

  In the ancient world all flutes were halfway to being magic ones.

  —James Davidson, Courtesans and Fishcakes

  A few years before the film called The Blue Angel appeared in 1930, the old codes had already begun to lose their power. Here and there, more and more women born to respectable families were going out alone, daring to show their legs and smoke, and among them was the young actress whom the world would one day know as Marlene Dietrich. Seen often on Berlin’s Kurfurstendam at night, she moved from one cabaret to another, studying the techniques of showgirls as she partied. Soon she was appearing as a showgirl herself, and then in minor parts of plays.

  She is not called a courtesan, though in an earlier age she might have been. Years later at dinner parties given by her friend, the director Billy Wilder, she would entertain his guests by listing all the lovers, both men and women, she had had as a young woman in Berlin. In 1924, at the height of her revels, she married Rudolf Sieber and lived with him for more than five years; yet she conti
nued her affairs. In the meantime, Sieber, who was a casting director for UFA film studios, was able to get her several small roles in movies.

  Then, like Pompadour, who left her husband for Louis XV (or Alice Ozy, who abandoned hers for the duc d’Aumale), though Dietrich remained married to Sieber until he died, she left both him and Berlin for the man who made her famous, the director Josef von Sternberg. Before bringing her to Hollywood, Sternberg cast her in a film about cabaret life. She became an overnight success in the role of a singer who lures a man to his doom.

  In the fading imagery of the old film, we watch as a story that reflects the downfall of an old order is told. An ageing professor hectors his students, lecturing against the seductive powers of a popular nightclub singer. This voice will lure you to damnation, he warns them. Thus we know he is making a mistake when he decides to witness her for himself. Especially since the club is called the Blue Angel. “Blue,” the word for drunkenness in German, is also the color of moonlight, of the waters over which the siren’ s voice wails, of nighttime thoughts and haunting melodies. Will she enchant him with her throaty voice? How could it be otherwise? Eventually, he will even consent to dance with her on the stage.

  We have seen this story many times before. The same tale has been told for millennia. The thrilling powers of the Queen of the Night; the insinuating charm of music. As far back as ancient Greece, the same powerful lure was used by Dionysus and the Furies and by the sirens, too, and the auletrides, the flute-girls who played and danced at feasts, beguiling all those who listened (including the great warrior Alexander who, according to legend, under the influence of music so lost his bearings that he ran for his sword). A music continued by the courtesans of Venice, by Ninon with her lute, and still going strong two hundred years later as charming women sang in the music halls that lined the boulevards of Paris. What is happening here in this little café in Berlin is nothing new.

  Though we are glad even now to see the self-righteous professor fall, we are saddened by the humiliation into which enchantment has led him. But this does not prevent us from listening. The low and alluring tone of the singer’s voice summons a mysterious mood in the mind, a dangerous but also oddly familiar place that lurks between one thought and another. As this woman, in her top hat, with a voice like a man, sings a song about love, we ourselves are drawn away from the straight course we had charted. We cannot help it. We are falling in love again.

  Her Golden Voice

  Bernhardt could turn the utmost banality into Homeric poetry with her famous Golden Voice which seemed to float about her. —Cornelia Otis Skinner, Elegant Wits and Grand Horizontals

  Together with nuances too subtle for words, a great speaking voice manages to express what is so often concealed by language, the unspoken thoughts, secret histories, and even censored desires which, carried by intonation, can make any utterance far more truthful than it appears to be. We can only imagine the effect Sarah Bernhardt’s famous voice had on her audiences when she played Marguerite in La Dame aux camélias. She made her first appearance in this role on the New York stage. Astonished by the performance, Henry James wrote that the play was “all champagne and tears—fresh perversity, fresh credulity, fresh passion. . . .”

  Though Camille, as it was called in England and America, was almost forty years old at the turn of the century, it was new to American audiences. Since the original play that had opened in Paris at mid-century was viewed by American promoters as too scandalous, another script, called Heart’s Ease, had been performed in its stead, one which, to avoid shocking audiences in the United States, substituted the courtesan with a flirt.

  By the time Bernhardt brought the uncensored version of the play to New York, the Parisian audience, used to the brazen atmosphere of the approaching fin-de- siècle, found the play somewhat old-fashioned. As early as 1880, the comte de Maugy had declared that Marguerite Gautier “would only provoke a smile of incredulity among the bon viveurs” of his day. Yet, by one of those delicious ironies with which history often surprises us, the great success of Bernhardt’s performance in the New World revived an interest in it in Paris, where the play became a great success once again. And, as opposed to the relative innocence of the American public, here audiences were able to appreciate the fine points of a performance that reflected a knowledge that, in the words of the critic Sarcey, “only a . . . worldly woman, born and bred in Paris,” would have. To say Bernhardt was uniquely qualified to play the role is an understatement. As she faithfully spoke the lines Dumas fils had written, she would have been able to layer the script with countless memories.

  She was born in 1844, just three years before the real Marguerite, Marie Duplessis, died. Like Marie, Sarah’s mother, an unmarried immigrant from Amsterdam named Youle Bernard, had started life as a seamstress. Demanding work at a grueling pace for long hours and little pay, it was the kind of profession that shortened many women’s lives, a fate Youle was determined to escape. At night she attended the public balls of Paris with the intent of meeting men who might give her an entry to another life. She hoped against hope that like a fortunate few before her, she might edge her way into the demi-monde.

  With a small daughter to support and a low-paying job, little money for fancy clothing, and only a smattering of education, neither probability nor circumstance was on her side. Yet her determination must have been great because, against all odds, she reached her goal by the time Sarah was six years old. It was no small accomplishment that eventually Youle’s salon was regularly attended by Alexandre Dumas père, Rossini, the duc de Morny, and the baron Dominique, once Napoléon’s military surgeon. Sarah, however, did not enter this ribald atmosphere until she was older. Sent as an infant to a wet nurse in Brittany, she pined after her mother, who on her rare visits seemed like visiting royalty to her.

  One day, after a visit from her aunt, overcome by despair, the child hurled herself out of the window. That her arm was broken by the fall hardly mattered to her: she knew her fate was changed. Yet, though Youle took her home to Paris, the time with her mother was to be brief. Before the year had ended, Youle, who found her daughter too willful, had enrolled Sarah in a fashionable boarding school for girls known as the Institute Fressard, where for two years she learned to read and write, embroider, and practice all the manners expected of refined women. Then, at the age of nine, she was moved again. And this time, despite the fact that Youle was Jewish, she sent her daughter to a convent.

  The choice was well considered. Grandchamps was the school where the daughters of all the best families in Paris were sent to be educated. Sarah protested the move almost violently, climbing a tree to avoid capture and then throwing herself in the mud, but she was to come to love the convent. It was the Mother Superior, Mère Sainte-Sophie, who wisely won her over, giving the child a little plot of ground to garden, treating her with tender solicitude. At first Sarah distinguished herself as the class clown, imitating the gestures of the bishop as he gave a solemn funeral oration, laughing at the lessons the girls were given in how to remove a glove or carry a handkerchief. But finally she embraced the dramatic mysteries of the church—the flickering candlelight, the haunting incantations, the awesome presence of the tabernacle, at whose feet she dreamed of throwing herself in sacrifice, to be covered, she fantasized, by a black velvet cloak embellished starkly with a shining white cross.

  Her reverie soon came to an end. By the age of fifteen, Sarah had decided to become a nun; but her mother had different plans for her. She had not sent her daughter to the convent for religious training, but for the upper-class refinement she would receive. Now it was time for Sarah to contribute her share to the household. Once again Sarah rebelled, this time against her mother’s attempts to initiate her as a courtesan. Because Sarah’s resistance most likely had the same strength her mother had displayed years earlier, as she had fought her way out of poverty, the two soon had reached what looked like an unsolvable impasse. But the duc de Morny came up with a brilliant compromis
e. Sarah had played the role of an angel in a play at the convent with great success. Perhaps her powerful moods and her talent at self-expression would serve her best in the theatre. Hoping to turn her in the direction of the stage, Alexandre Dumas took Sarah and her mother to see a play at the Comédie- Française. The plan worked. Sitting in his box, Sarah found herself moved to tears and laughter, won over, enthralled. As she wrote in her autobiography: “When the curtain went up I thought I would faint. It was the curtain of my life that had risen before me.”

  Although there are many elements contained in this story that mixed with the right magic helped to create Sarah’s golden voice, the concept of duende may help us to better understand the process. The term is used in the tradition of flamenco to describe that quality of a singer’s voice which rather than range or amplitude depends on an understanding of the nature of life that can only be gained with experience. Put simply, the singer must have suffered. But suffering is seldom simple. Even if what we have suffered is loss, the feeling will be tinged with the inevitable conflict between desire and circumstance. Though conflict itself is a form of suffering, too.

  In the fifteen years of her childhood, Sarah experienced both loss and conflict—the repeated loss of her mother, her departure from the Institut Fressard, her rejection of the convent, followed by her decision to be a nun, and the conflict she felt with her mother’s plans for her. Pulled in two directions, between Mère Sainte-Sophie and her own more worldly mother, devoted as she was to the theatre, her ambivalence was only mitigated by the choice she made to be an actress. She could not have discarded her earlier devotions so easily. And as the modern Polish director Jerzy Grotowski writes, “the words ’actress’ and ’courtesan’ were once synonymous. ” What was true for many others in this career held for Sarah, too. Even after she became famous in Paris, until in fact she had made a fortune with her tours to the American continent, she supplemented her relatively small salary with income from a retinue of protectors.