The Book of the Courtesans (11 page)

Her beauty has pushed Titian past the limits of his art. In order to reflect
the quality that so fascinates him, he has had to augment his craft. Like
Bellini before him, who turned to oil paints to capture the quality of the
courtesans he wanted to portray, Titian, using oil, too, paints one color on
top of another before the first is dry. It is all there in the layers—the
fusion of seeming opposites, the sense of a history beneath the surface, of a
knowledge not exactly hidden but nevertheless a carefully guarded resource.

We might propose that Aretino, who was a close friend of Titian, was aiming at
the same complexity when he wrote of his character, the Roman courtesan Nanna,
as she appeared at the window, trying to arouse desire, when he said that she
affected the innocence of a nun and yet looked down with the assurance of a
married woman playing the prostitute. But next to Titian’s canvas, this
description seems oddly empty. Since Aretino depicts only contrivance, his work
seems contrived.

Titian, on the other hand, gives us density. The innocence he depicts seems
real. She appears to be young, no more than nineteen, probably younger. Since
in that period Venetian women married at fourteen, the age at which Aretino
claims Nanna started her career, her youth alone would not have argued
innocence. Certainly the stereotypical idea adopted by Aretino toward his
subject, a concept that is alive even today, is that women who are not virgins
have lost their innocence. Yet most women know that innocence is not entirely
dependent upon sexual knowledge. Did Titian know this, too? Or was it simply
that he loved what he saw and wanted to capture it faithfully? We are moved
even unwillingly by this image.

Of course he captures artifice as well, and here, since he makes no moralizing
comment, the power of it to sway us is unabated. It is a mannered honesty he
presents us with, inextricable from the beauty that wells up out of his color,
the fine lines rendered by his brush, and the light—here dazzling, there
somber, here gracefully bright, there burnished but penetrating—soaked
into the canvas as it is into our eyes. We cannot separate ourselves from the
sitter. Looking, we are lost wherever she is lost, triumphant with her triumph,
shaken by her splendor, desirous, calculating and reticent, innocent and wise
with worldliness.

And there is this, too. Gazing at her portrait, we are staring into another
time and place. You can almost hear the waters of Venice washing against the
sides of the canals as, hair streaming,
camicia
billowing, Flora
fairly overflows from the canvas.

For some reason not entirely understood, many painters have been able to
capture the spirit of an age by depicting the bodies of courtesans. Doubtless
there are numerous other reasons why so many painters would have chosen to
portray them. Some were practical. What other women besides courtesans and
prostitutes would allow themselves to be depicted in such a frankly sensual
manner? Certainly, too, the image of the courtesan would have conjured the
erotic force that gives birth to social and artistic movements. That the
cortigiana
was not only a transgressor but symbolic of transgression
itself would only have increased the effect.

But the paintings themselves, even this painting entitled
Flora
, speak
of reasons beyond this reasoning. We need only to think of the desire that
often can be found sequestered within the wish to make love to a courtesan.
Notice how, though with one hand Flora offers flowers to her beholder and with
the other pulls down her shirt, almost revealing a nipple, her eyes tell
another story. The message is evident. If you seek a night with her, or even
several nights, most likely you will be given what you want. But though you
have every success in the world, every means of power, including wealth, though
you are a doge, for instance, and have recently built a grand palazzo along the
Grand Canal, something in her will still prove elusive, tempting you to try to
reach that which seems forever beyond you, though every effort you make to get
closer only unravels the garments of your own composure. Until, if you are wise,
you learn what the painter already seems to know: what you have found so
compelling is exactly this, that in a glimpse of the grandeur you cannot
possess, for a fraction of an instant, you can see that beneath the dense
patina of appearances, what you have been calling yourself is constantly being
created, made from a mixture of art and innocence, of what already exists and
what is now just being imagined.

LIANE DE POUGY

Suggestion

(THE SECOND EROTIC STATION)

T
HIS IS HOW
Jean Lorrain described the
image that greeted all Liane’s visitors: “Taller, slenderer, more
refined than ever, with that transparent complexion and those bluish circles
round her great frightened doe-eyes.” Liane de Pougy would stretch her
willowy frame over the white satin chaise-lounge for which she was justly
famous. As if pouring from the glistening satin and fur trimming, the sumptuous
dress she wore had wide and flowing sleeves of white brocade, and both the
fabric and the lining of the dress were patterned with lilies. Which was
fitting, because she herself must have seemed like a fragrant flower, her long
neck, encircled with six strands of pearls, bending forward as she received
each guest.

She had a talent for creating visual effects. Whether you were the
librettist Henri Meilhac, who wrote the lyrics for Offenbach’s operas (and
who had paid Liane
80
million francs just to contemplate
her nude body), or the American heiress Natalie Barney, who was for a time
Liane’s lover, the various settings Liane arranged for herself would have
been irresistibly enchanting.

The color white can create a cold, almost sanitized atmosphere, but it can also
conjure fantasies of another kind entirely. Under its influence, worlds of
delicacy and grace will arise in your mind, realms peopled with diaphanous
beings whose arms (or is it wings?) glow as they rush past your ears. Your
dream becomes almost real as you swear you can taste icy strawberries crushed
in your mouth, and is it because your eyes are brimming with a child’s
tears of delight that everything around you seems to shimmer? Then, suddenly
returned to the present as Pougy moves just slightly toward you, the sight of
her hands framed by filigrees of shining thread suggests a touch so soft and
subtle that even in the midst of a snowdrift, you will begin to melt. And while
she speaks to you now, it seems that, like the sweet pistils of the thousand
lilies that dance over her body, her tongue has begun to flicker in and out of
your mouth.

LA BELLE OTERO

Chapter Three

Cheek

I like restraint, if it doesn’t go too far.
—MAE WEST

W
HILE TRUE CHEEKINESS
contains a
mixture of bravado and insolence, it suffers from the drawbacks of neither.
Where bravado hints of fear lying just beneath the surface and where insolence
can express bitter or even rancid resentments, cheek has none of these shadowy
resonances. It has, rather, a bracing but enlivening effect, which even as it
startles charges the atmosphere with all the drama of a bolt of lightning.

Though not every courtesan possessed this virtue in the same measure,
almost all of them had to have some degree of cheek. A wellborn woman who was
no longer marriageable because of scandal would have to navigate an atmosphere
filled with whispered judgments, not simply with her head held high but with a
kind of sparkling
élan
, a manner whose very force would make what
was said against her seem negligible. And for those who were not wellborn there
was a stronger current to face, not just passing reprimands over impropriety
but the resistance against the implicit challenge their very presence made to
society’s deepest sense of order.

Yet, formidable as social disapproval can be, it also serves to develop cheek.
Partly from desperation, and partly due to solitude, which even if forced upon
her, nurtures insight, a woman suffering from the pain of society’s
rejection might come to detect a certain hollowness in the arguments that she
should live under a more strict sexual code than men. Moreover, once fallen,
the spotless conduct and the rules by which she had been carefully taught to
behave would now, ironically, precisely because of society’s censure, be
proven unnecessary.

The harsher circumstances faced by women who were not born to the upper classes
only made their perceptions correspondingly more penetrating. It is clear, for
instance, that in the seventeenth century, over a hundred years before the
French Revolution, the celebrated courtesan Marion Delorme had already seen
through distinctions of rank which separated one citizen from another. “
Without his biretta and his scarlet robes,” she is famous for saying,
“a Cardinal is a very little man.” She was speaking of Richelieu, a
man who virtually ruled France for decades. But that she had been intimate with
him would have put the dimensions of his power in a very different perspective.

And there is this to consider. Doubtless, such entitlements were less imposing
to a woman whose existence was not recognized by the social order, an order
that could easily have seemed a charade to her. Since a courtesan who was not
wellborn had to learn late all the manners that aristocratic children are
taught from birth, she understood perhaps better than most how much social
position is both expressed and maintained by performance. It was a skill which,
in the end, allowed many courtesans to surpass all others. When Edwige
Feullière was criticized in London for playing the courtesan Marguerite in
La Dame aux camélias
as if she were a
grande dame
, she
responded by saying, “The courtesans of France were the only
grandes
dames
.” Indeed, it was the great actress Rachel, a courtesan like so
many women of her profession, who taught the empress Eugénie how to curtsy
while scanning an audience with her eyes.

But there was an element Eugénie cannot have learned. Not only were the
daily performances the great courtesans gave infused with the delightful humor
that can only come from understanding that we are all merely players on the
stage of life, but their gestures were fired by the considerable bravura
required to pull off the whole charade. Thus we can easily see why, in the heat
of such victories, these particular players were found so irresistible.

Wellington’s Surrender

When people talk to me about the weather, I always feel they mean
something else.
—
Oscar Wilde

Imagine, then, how it would have felt at the very beginning of the
nineteenth century to the fledgling courtesan Harriet Wilson, the daughter of a
Swiss watchmaker in Mayfair, when she made her first entrance into high society.
Her family was respectable enough, but tradesmen and their children were not
welcomed into the circles she had entered. Yet even if she were greeted by a
chill, we would find no trembling in her demeanor. Cheek, which she had in
great abundance, carried her through as surely as a blazing fire on a very cold
night.

In a few short years Wilson became the most popular woman among those who
were called “the fashionable impure” of the Regency. Her success
cannot be credited to beauty, for which she was not known. Rather, it was cheek
itself, which only deepened over time, that made her so attractive. She had, in
the words of Sir Walter Scott, “the manner of a wild schoolboy.”
She was in the fullness of her powers when she met the celebrated Duke of
Wellington. And in a sense, so was he. Since defeating Napoléon at the
battle of Waterloo, all of England sat at his feet.

However, at least in the account she recorded in her memoirs, Wellington was no
match for her. According to Wilson, she sensed the weakness of her suitor
immediately. Having paid Mrs. Porter, who was a procurer,
100
guineas to arrange an introduction with Harriet, and
promised the same amount to her for a short meeting, he arrived punctually, and
bowing, thanked her for agreeing to see him. But as he tried to take her hand,
she withdrew hers, chiding him. “Really, for such a renowned hero you
have very little to say for yourself.”

Elaborately polite himself, cosseted by the rules of polite society, like many
great soldiers, the duke was oddly inept socially. But he must have been
especially flustered on first meeting Harriet, because after uttering the
phrase “beautiful creature,” he immediately asked after her current
lover, who was also a friend of his. “Where is Lorne?” the duke
said.

Reacting to the inappropriateness of his question, which made her feel, in her
words, “out of all patience with his stupidity,” she asked him
directly, “Good gracious, what come you here for, Duke?”

To which, apparently still transfixed and somewhat at a loss for words, the
duke blurted out, “Beautiful eyes, yours!”

The compliment did not soften her attitude.

“Aye man!” she answered him quickly. “They are greater
conquerors than ever Wellington shall be.” To which she added, even more
impudently, “But, to be serious, I understood you came here to try to
make yourself agreeable.”

If then the duke finally lost his temper, demanding, “What, child, do you
think I have nothing better to do than to make speeches to please ladies?,
” still he stayed. Offended as he may have seemed, Wellington was to
become one of Harriet’s lovers. The affair between them lasted many years,
during which time he resolved her debts and contributed generously to her
support. Perhaps he was charmed by her apparently effortless ability to insult
him, which is illustrated by a brief excerpt from a later dialogue. Trying no
doubt to be romantic, the duke told her, “I was thinking of you last
night after I got into bed.” To which, without missing a beat, Harriet
responded, “How very polite to the Duchess.”

If the appeal of such rudeness is mysterious, an engraving found in the first
edition of her memoirs illustrating her account of their first meeting reveals
another side to the story. Here the great soldier is depicted hat in hand, in a
lackluster posture, less a bow than an odd gesture of hesitancy and defeat. In
sympathy for his plight, he was not known to be handsome. Wilson commented that
he looked to her like a rat, and though she was impressed by his
accomplishments, she found him essentially boring. He was decidedly not a
ladies’ man, and this must have made him uncertain of himself, even in the
role of a paying suitor. Yet the engraver has captured another quality, less
shyness than a curious kind of collapse. His arms hang beside him like dead
weights.

Sitting in a straightback chair, Harriet’s demeanor is altogether different.
Her arms, one curled in her lap, the other slung over the back of the chair,
are relaxed comfortably in an almost modern way. There is a blush to her cheeks.
Her breasts seem to fill the room less with size than with the exuberant
implication of sexuality. One foot edges forward, not nervously, but instead
aware and ready. Though her head, covered with dangling curls, is tilted to one
side, this is clearly not, as is often the case with so many women, a gesture
of obedience, but rather a teasing pose. In striking contrast to the duke, the
consummate effect of her presence is of vitality.

One can only imagine the causes of the duke’s relative deflation. Perhaps
battle has tired him. And then again, perhaps off the battlefield, without such
clear demarcations of danger and victory, life has lost its meaning for him.
Confused by domestic intrigue, he only vaguely grasps this terrain, which is
why he clings so tenaciously to the manners he performs with rote dullness. And
since he is usually surrounded by so many admirers, some of them even
sycophants, none of whom will ever risk saying anything disagreeable to him, he
is probably used to being bored.

No wonder then that the young woman sitting across the drawing room captivates
him so. She does not indulge in small talk. With an easy wit, she cuts through
the stuffy air of politeness and the wooden manner of his entrance to tell him
exactly what is transpiring between them, even spelling out his own desires.
She is, he suddenly realizes, breaking the soporific pattern that has become
familiar to him. Far from sycophantic, her words, though amusing, seem more
like an assault. Finding himself on the battlefield once more, his nerves begin
to quicken and he feels alive again.

We must note here that to be truly effective, cheek must be accompanied by an
educated intelligence. It is not just that Harriet is ignorant of manners but
rather that she understands the purpose of them very well. And for this reason
she never allows herself to be treated without the respect of proper protocol.
(She was known to have banished a prince from her presence because he failed to
remove his hat.)

Far from ignorant of manners, Harriet is particularly adept at revealing the
meanings of protocol. In the world to which the duke was born, where raw power
is veiled by title, tradition, and pomp, public events, meetings, and
conversations have a strangely empty quality, as if reality had been banished.
But Harriet allows nothing to be veiled. It is not only that her gown is cut
low across her breasts, nor that she sees the emperor’s proverbial
nakedness; the empire, too, with every euphemism, and all its secret dealings,
seems to shed its clothing in her presence.

Perhaps this is why it is not just Wellington who is drawn to her. Indeed, it
seems as if all the great men of the British Empire come eventually to sit at
her feet. Along with the Marquess of Lorne, heir of the Duke of Argyll, she has
enlisted the attention of the Marquess of Worcester, heir of the Duke of
Beaufort; Lord Frederick Bentinck, son of the Duke of Portland; the Duke of
Leinster; Lord Craven, Lord Alvanley, and Henry Brougham, a member of
Parliament. The poet Byron is her good friend. And along with the most powerful
ladies and gentlemen in London, she is invited to all the fashionable parties.

Certainly, such a guest presents a formidable risk. Though polite silence can
be fatally dull, even without trying, almost any courtesan supplies a vivid
reminder of what everyone knows but cannot mention. Stories of lust and desire,
of gain and loss and accumulation, the source of so much significance so
carefully hidden now perched at the edge of her tongue. She is like a jack-in-
the-box, a flying fish, a roman candle about to burst into sparkling plumes of
light. You can never tell what she will say or do next. But you can certainly
count on her to deliver you from boredom.

“A Masterpiece of Impertinence”

Shut your mouths, I’m opening mine.
—the singer Fréhel to her
audience at a cabaret in Paris

There is more to say about brazenness itself. The audacity that fuels
cheek reveals a spirit not merely willing but very eager to tell the truth. A
good example is afforded us by the brief dialogue that took place when the
courtesan Esther Guimond, traveling through Naples, was stopped for a routine
examination of her passport.

“What is your profession?” the official in charge asked her.

“A woman of independent means,” she answered discreetly.

But when she saw that the official, who looked bewildered, did not seem to
understand her, she cried out impatiently, “Courtesan—take care you
remember it.”

To which, probably fired by the energy of her own speech, she added, widening
her audacity. “And go and tell that Englishman over there.”