The Book of the Courtesans (10 page)

I have come to recognize that in Baudelaire’s work, Jeanne [Duval]
is often depicted as a mirror of the Voudou goddess, Ezili. 
. . . 
—Randy Conner
, Mirror of My Love

As with everything that is fabled, the famous beauty of courtesans
continues to haunt us today. Even when no image remains, the words of witnesses,
recorded in memoirs or letters from the times, tempt us with what we can no
longer see. In the portraits we have of Marie Duplessis, for instance, where
her smiles all have an air of sadness, her mouth remains closed. Thus, we can
only try to imagine the dazzling white teeth that were so often mentioned in
the descriptions we have of her.

Yet some of the words which have been written about courtesans far outshine
any physical likeness. Think for instance of the sculpture of Madame Sabatier
that can be found on the ground floor of the Musée d’Orsay. It is
called
La Femme piqué par un serpent
. From the expression on her
face, it is easy to guess what kind of snake did the deed. She is in a swoon.
But as successful as the sculpture may be, Jean-Baptiste Clésinger’s
stone is no match for the lines Baudelaire wrote about Sabatier in
Les
Fleurs du mal:

Your head, your mood, the way you move,

With a beauty like the beauty of the countryside

As laughter plays across your face

Like fresh wind in a clear sky.

If it is in the epistemological nature of all perception to be subjective,
this is especially so where the perception of beauty is concerned. When he
wrote those lines, Baudelaire was obsessed with Sabatier. He would have a
friend leave the poems he addressed to her at the door of her apartment.

Apollonie Sabatier, or Aglaé-Joséphine Savatier, as she was named
by her mother, was the natural child of a vicomte and a seamstress. It was
because the vicomte, who was also the prefect of the Ardennes, was able to
arrange a marriage between her mother and a sergeant in the
47
th Infantry, André Savatier, that she was
christened with his name. The family lived in Mézières and Strasbourg,
before finally moving to Paris, where, since Aglaé showed promise as a
singer, she was sent to study with a great performer, Madame Cinti. Indeed, she
seemed destined for a career as a concert artist or opera singer, until at a
charity concert she was introduced to a former Belgian diplomat, the
industrialist Alfred Mosselman. Captivated by a beauty soon to be legendary and
by her light, charming manner, he set Aglaé up as his mistress in an
apartment on the rue Frochot, in quartier Bréda, on the slopes of the hill
that rises up into Montmartre, an area thick with artists, writers, and
courtesans. (There were so many
lorettes
living there that they were
named after the local church, Notre Dames des Lorettes.)

Because Mosselman was married, he used Fernand Broissard as a messenger between
himself and his lover, and it was through this man that the young woman met a
wider circle of friends. Broissard invited her to the monthly dinners he gave
at the Hôtel Pimodan, where he lived on the Ile-Saint-Louis. Soon she was
also attending meetings of the
Club des haschichins
, which met at
Théophile Gautier’s apartment in the same building. Balzac, Gautier,
Flaubert and Maxine du Camp, and Baudelaire are only a few among those who have
become illustrious who attended these events. By then, Aglaé had changed
her name to the more elegant Apollonie Sabatier. And because of the electric
effect of her presence at these gatherings, which seemed to fuse all who were
present into a more generous body, she was also given another name:
la
Présidente
. Soon she was entertaining the same men, together with
Delacroix, Berlioz, Gérard de Nerval, Henri Murger (whose novel inspired
La Bohème
), and Arsène Houssaye at her own apartment.

Sabatier’s presence also contributed a distinct aesthetic pleasure to the
gatherings. Like Blanche d’Antigny,
la Présidente
loved
fashion. She dressed with such a striking originality that the artists she knew
began to involve themselves with her wardrobe. As well as making creative
suggestions regarding her apparel, some of them even designed clothing for her.
Both dressed and undressed she was sculpted by Jean-Baptiste Clésinger
twice; Ernest Meissonier did several paintings of her. Ernest Feydeau made her
the central figure in his novel,
Sylvie
.

The love affair she had with Baudelaire was notoriously short. In the beginning,
Sabatier did not return the poet’s love. But after
Les Fleurs du
mal
was published, she offered herself to him as an homage. They spent
only one night as lovers, after which she fell in love with him and he fell out
of love with her. Though she came to love the poet as well as his words,
Baudelaire, as it turns out, loved the ideal he had created of her more than
the breathing reality. “A few days ago,” he wrote, “you were
a deity, which is so convenient, so noble, so inviolable. And then there you
are, a woman.” Instead of lovers, they became friends.

There were many bonds between them, but perhaps the strongest was that they
were both captivated by beauty. Just as Baudelaire, who wrote a great deal
about the images being created by his friends, collected and studied art,
la Présidente
, who had been a singer and still loved music, also
surrounded herself with artists and their work, even painting, herself, in her
later years. They both loved literature. In the beginning it was above all
Baudelaire’s poetry that had impassioned Sabatier. And in different ways
they were both creators of beauty. What he described in words, she knew how to
embody. Sharing the love of beauty as they did, they were collaborators in the
creation of an aesthetic sensibility, giving shape to the astonishingly fecund
atmosphere of the nineteenth century.

Gustave Courbet captured a moment in the process of this creation with his
celebrated painting
L’Atelier du peintre
. In the middle of the
canvas, a half-finished painting sits on an easel. Before the easel stands a
model, who watches Courbet paint a landscape in which, curiously, no likeness
of her can be found. Aligned with her and witnessing the process, too, Sabatier
is prominent in the circle that, surrounding the work, seems almost to generate
the painting. She is dressed in black, a Kashmiri shawl draped over her
shoulder, her back turned to Baudelaire, who, sitting, turns his attention to
the pages of a book.

In Courbet’s mind, all those who had contributed to the chemistry of his
art must have been there, even if only symbolically. Was it a conscious
decision on his part to make the shawl Sabatier wore so prominent? With this
article of clothing he had included much that, though absent in one sense, was
present in another. Of course the Kashmiri shawl, being such a critical part of
a lady’s wardrobe, would have recalled the world of fashion. And since this
coveted item of clothing cost more than a working woman could earn over a
decade, in a subtle way, as with the presence of Sabatier herself, the existing
difference between classes had been conjured. And then there was the provenance
of the scarf itself, made by women paid very little for their labor, in another
country, India, which signified, as well as the exigencies of the empire Europe
was building, all the worlds and even world views to be found outside Europe.

The original painting contained one more figure, the woman who more than any
other had evoked the exotic realities described by Baudelaire in his poetry.
Yet for some reason still unknown to us, Baudelaire requested that Courbet
excise the image of Jeanne Duval from his painting. Perhaps she did not like
her portrait, or perhaps he feared the jealousy of Sabatier, who, after being
rejected by Baudelaire, referred to Baudelaire’s mistress sarcastically as
“his ideal.”

The remark was laden with an unstated prejudice. Jeanne, whose skin was lightly
brown, and who was born in Santo Domingo, had been the object of disparaging
remarks that slyly referred to race more than once. Even Baudelaire, who loved
her passionately, was not entirely free of the attitude which penetrated his
culture. Yet in his case there is far more to the story. Between the lines of
his poems and letters, we can sense a struggle between the world view into
which he was born and the one that drew him to Jeanne. Although she was
described by many, including Théodore de Banville and Nadar (who was her
lover for a period) as very beautiful, there is every reason to believe that it
was also the way she saw the world that Baudelaire found compelling.

As Randy Cooper suggests, it is easy to see the mark of African philosophies,
particularly Voudou, in the poems Baudelaire wrote to Jeanne. Can it be an
accident that in
La Chevelure
in which Baudelaire tells us “
Africa burns,” Jeanne’s hair is described as blue, the color of the
Voudou goddess Ezili? Reading “Sed Non Satiata” the influence is
wrapped in a subtle ambivalence:

Strange deity, obscure as nights

that smell of musk and smoke from Havana,

work of some obi, Faust of the Savannah, 

sorceress hemmed by ebony, daughter of every dark midnight.

Yet though his ambivalence is sometimes stronger (when for instance he
refers to Jeanne as a “demon without pity”), Baudelaire is
perpetually drawn in the direction of her philosophy. We begin to understand
more about the nature of this attraction when in “Sed Non Satiata”
we read the line “the elixir of your lips where love struts,” a
phrase which recalls the image of a Voudou priestess.

Perhaps here Zora Neale Hurston’s account of an exchange in Voudou ritual
will explain the deeper meaning that stands behind the metaphor. As Hurston
tells us, at the moment when the priestess is asked by the celebrants, “
What is the truth?” she responds by throwing back her veil to reveal her
body. A body which, according to the Voudou view of the cosmos, is the source
of all life and thus also the answer to all mystery.

But whether or not it is Jeanne’s knowledge of the religion of Voudou
reflected here, Baudelaire makes it clear that the view of the world he has
received through his mistress enriches his own vision, giving him an experience
of existence which, even while it feels strange, also seems as if it had always
belonged to him. “You return to me,” he writes in
La
Chevelure
, “the blue sky, immense and round.” Though he was
frightened and scandalized by her, through her eyes the world could be reborn
to him each day with new beauty.

Her Portrait

When he wanted to draw or paint some figure, and had before him a
real woman or man, that object would so affect his sense of sight and his
spirit would enter into what he was representing so that he seemed conscious of
nothing else.—Persio, on witnessing Titian at work

 . . .
 So it seems to me that in Titian’s colors God
placed the paradise of our bodies.—Tullia d’Aragora,
Dialogue on the Infinity of Love

The model for the painting is unknown to us. It is only because the woman
portrayed here holds a bouquet of flowers that the work was named
Flora
a century after it was painted. Flora, the goddess of flowers,
was a courtesan herself before she became a deity. But that the sitter was a
courtesan is clear for other reasons, too. In the sixteenth century, it was
fashionable to paint the
cortigiana
in just this manner, torso and
head filling the frame, the subject facing the painter, her hair cascading over
one shoulder. Each of these details would have been read as a sign. A
respectable woman of this period would never have allowed herself to be seen in
public with her hair down. And certainly she would not have appeared as this
woman does, only half-clothed, wearing a long white undershirt, the ancestor of
our camisoles, called a
camicia
, a garment that, with its light-
catching folds, is pulled down on the right by the same hand that holds the
sumptuous dress the model is no longer wearing.

The painting is famous for the contrasts rendered, thus, the shiny
embroidered surface of her dress placed next to the bare skin of her breast,
making both textures more intense. You feel almost as if you were gliding your
fingers over the fabric and then her skin. Yet the effect is subtle. She is not
fully revealed. Is that a shadow cast by her hand or just the upper edge of her
nipple that we can barely see above the resplendent fabric? Since we cannot say
for certain, after all, whether it is nipple or shading, the uncertainty
creates a compellingly sensual mystery. An opacity which mirrors the atmosphere
the courtesan knew how to create as part of the practice of seduction. The same
subtlety can be seen in the expression on her face. Her eyes askance, she
appears almost modest in the way that she avoids the direct scrutiny of the
painter. Though he was known for his skill at artifice, the expression must
have been one Titian observed as well as created. A quality possessed by the
sitter. A certain honesty. You can see it in the complexity of the presence the
painter has captured. It is authenticity that makes her expression so
compelling. Though reticent, she does not hide the reticence she feels. She
lets herself be seen as she is. In this sense, her underdress is symbolic.
Unlike those with lesser talents who would conceal or pretend, she is
accustomed to using her real feelings in her profession. This is how she
achieves the intimate moments for which she is so esteemed. And yet even this
presence, like Titian’s painting, is not without artifice. Intimacy is her
art. And like the painter, she knows well how to create a moving composition
from elements of truth.

No wonder Titian chose to paint her. Kindred souls, they both inhabit the space
that hovers between reality and artifice, a territory informed by telling
details and evocative glimpses. Is it just the hint of makeup with which she
adorns herself, the layers of fine clothing so artfully assembled, the rich
colors with which she surrounds herself, or is it something else, too, that
inspires him as he paints? Perhaps complexity itself. Her modesty, for instance,
is not simple. She turns her gaze away in a definitive manner, while at the
same time, her strong presence, the luster of her hair, her body, which is
neither withdrawn nor fearful but instead calmly sensate, charges the canvas.