The Book of the Courtesans (12 page)

We do not know precisely how she came to be so brazen. The history has been
lost. But it is clear that once she crossed the barrier against using the word
“courtesan,” she accelerated her transgression with a kind of glee.
In this she was part of a larger insurrection against propriety in language,
the same joyous revolution that can be felt in Rimbaud’s “Chant de
Guerre Parisian” where he writes “Oh May, What delirious bare asses.
”

Like Rimbaud, Guimond’s verbal rebellions were not only defiant but
talented. The sharpness of her tongue was remarkable enough that, in a Paris
full of famous wits, she was famous for her repartee. A lover of the journalist
Emile de Girardin for many years, she was known to have contributed more than
once to his work. And when, after the popular revolts of
1848
, Girardin was on the verge of being executed for
conspiracy, she saved his life with her sharp wit. Approaching Cavaignac, the
chief executive officer in charge of Girardin’s case, a man who was also a
friend, she ridiculed the accusation. “Conspiracy?” she cried.
“What nonsense! He can’t conspire. No one ever shares his opinions.
”

Her talent for piercing through illusion had a less happy side. Guimond was
cynically practical. Early in her career, she made a small fortune by
blackmailing other courtesans with letters she had teased from their former
lovers. This perfidy, however, shares a certain ground with the brazenness of
her speech. She was determined to survive at all costs. Willpower often comes
from an early experience of destitution. Of Esther’s life before she became
a courtesan very little is known. It is almost as if, before her appearance on
the boulevards of nineteenth-century Paris, she did not exist. Still, we do
know that she was a
grisette
. Like

Duplessis, she would have worked twelve to sixteen hours a day in a

sweatshop for wages too meager to keep life and limb together. “
Dressmaking,” she once said dryly, “didn’t suit me.”

That one’s spirit can be crushed by such a life need hardly be said. The
process may be invisible and slow. Faced with such conditions, and little or no
alternative, many seem resigned. Given the prospect of being worked to death,
one can imagine giving up and at the same time retreating from all that is
vivid in oneself. But there are always some who will try to escape this kind of
fate no matter how desperate the odds. It is an attempt that requires the
summoning of an extraordinary will, strengthened in turn by the exceptional
clarity that can arise in response to the many large and small insults,
humiliations, and indignities that quickly accumulate in such a life but are so
often unnamed or even denied by society.

If, over time, Guimond entered another class, becoming one of the more esteemed
women in Paris, the host of a salon that included not only Girardin but Dumas
fils
, Nestor Roqueplan, Saint-Beuve, Guizot, and Prince Napoléon,
her past may not have been immediately apparent during her ascension, except
that she was quick to perceive an injustice—and even quicker to respond
accordingly. In his
Confessions
, the
boulevardier
Arène
Houssaye recalls an episode that has become famous. It took place at Longchamps.
Breaching protocol, several
grandes cocottes
, Guimond among them,
were escorted by a group of fashionable playboys into the grandstand usually
reserved for the best families. Outraged, a cabal of society matrons, including
the comtesse de Courval, sent the master of ceremonies to tell the courtesans
to leave. But true to her character, Guimond stood her ground. She was there by
the will of the gentlemen who had accompanied her, she said, and nothing short
of bayonets would make her withdraw.

But the story does not end there. Returning to Paris after the races, her
behavior became far more incendiary. Paying her driver a louis to race neck-and-
neck with the coach of the comtesse de Courval, as they drove along side by
side, she tossed the countess flowers and sang her a ribald song that she
improvised in thirty-six couplets. It was Houssaye who referred to it as “
a masterpiece of impertinence.” Soon, all Paris was singing the same song.
“That,” Esther Guimond used to say, “is how I made my
entrance into society.”

An Outrageous Proposal

It was in
1906
that the beautiful actress and
demi-mondaine
known as Lanthélme received Misia Sert into her
drawing room. Among the many ironies of this meeting, Sert knew that only
recently the elegant home on the rue Fortuny, so close to the fashionable Parc
Monceau, as well as the eighteenth-century furniture that filled it, had been
given to Lanthélme by Alfred Sert, her husband. Misia, a theatrical
producer and powerful presence herself, studied Alfred’s lover closely.
Copying her style of dress, she had rehearsed a dramatic appeal. “You
have a woman’s heart,” she planned to say, before she demanded,
“Give him back!” But she was never able to deliver her lines.

That she failed to grasp entirely the worldly ways of her rival is
understandable. Born as Mathilde Fossey, Lanthélme, the daughter of a
prostitute, was raised in her mother’s brothel, where she was put to work
at fourteen. All her life she had shown an extraordinary and fierce
independence. Rejecting the profession that fate had chosen for her, she
applied to study acting at the Conservatoire. When, after a few years, her
great talent became evident and she was offered a position at the Comédie-
Française, she rejected this, too, choosing instead to perform at the more
popular theatres on the boulevards of Paris. She quickly became a sensation,
followed by an avid audience especially interested in the fact that she was
known to take both men and women as lovers.

Admitted to the salon only after being searched for weapons by Lanthé
lme’s maid, and after waiting in the drawing room under a chic portrait of
the stunningly beautiful actress painted by Boldini, Misia was disarmed once
again by her rival’s entrance. Immediately, Lanthélme showered her
lover’s wife with compliments, and after brightly discussing the theatre
season, asked if she could help Misia in any way. Flustered, Misia simply said
she had come to speak about her husband.

“There is nothing at all to worry about,” Lanthélme began;
“he hardly interests me.”

But then she changed her approach.

“My dear, you can really have him—on three conditions: I want the
pearl necklace you’re wearing, one million francs—and you.”

Shocked, Misia removed her necklace immediately and, ignoring the last request,
promised that Lanthélme would receive a million francs from her in a few
days. But moments after she returned to her hotel, she received a package
containing the necklace. Inside was a note written on cyclamen-colored paper,
in which Lanthélme proposed, “I have decided to forget the money and
return the necklace. I am holding you only to the third condition.”

Her Garter Belt

The spirit of lingerie is fashion and this phenomenon becomes even
more interesting when along with dress codes it reverses received ideas.—
Marie Simon
,
Les Dessous

If clothing tells one story, lingerie provides the tale with another layer
of meaning. When a woman strips away her outer clothing, lingerie is what
remains. Providing an architectural foundation for every erotic facade, the
practical structures that hold up breasts, mold hips and bellies, and smooth
legs are also signs in themselves. Beneath more muted, somber, modest shades
and fabrics, suddenly we find red or black or purple, framing all the forbidden
sights with silk and lace. As a woman undresses, a froth of sensuousness
suddenly appears close to the skin, steamy with sweat and secretions.

No wonder then that lingerie is not meant to be displayed in public. But at
the end of the Second Empire, that is exactly what La Belle Otero did. The
photograph is sepia-toned yet clear. With both hands she pulls each side of a
split skirt apart to reveal her garter belt for the camera. Her expression goes
beyond brazenness. As her chin tilts up in the smile of a trickster, Otero has
all the
élan
of a pilot in the early days of flying—dashing,
daring, impressively insouciant, ready to ascend.

But as if her expression were not enough, what distinguishes her from just
another tart showing her wares is the nature of the garter belt itself. Made of
precious stones, it was designed by the celebrated house of Boucheron, where
throughout the Second Empire and Belle Epoque the titled and the rich came for
their jewelry, everyone from Empress Eugénie and Queen Isabella II of
Spain to the Vanderbilts. Born illegitimate and poor in a small village in
Spain, were it not for her cheekiness, Otero would never have set foot in
Boucheron. Thus, the image of her garter belt is doubly insolent, a sparkling
effrontery, audacity mingling luxuriantly with seduction.

LA PAïVA

Arousal

(THE THIRD EROTIC STATION)

 . . .
 as the years went by without bringing her either
position or
fortune, she firmly resolved that she would win them both.
—comte Horace de Viel-Castel
, Mémoires sur le Régne de
Napoléon III

T
HE QUESTION BEING,
what made her so
desirable to all the men from whom she got finally what she wanted? Especially
since, though Païva was known as “the Queen of Paris,” what
she inspired in some was only indignant anger. Jules and Edmond de Goncourt,
habitués and historians of literary and artistic Paris, wrote of her
often, almost always in a disapproving tone. The house she built on the Champs-
Elysées, which she promised would be the most beautiful in Paris, was
ridiculously ostentatious; the parties she hosted there were overshadowed by
her immense pride; and furthermore she was not a great beauty herself, the
brothers said. Still, anger, even when elegantly phrased and placed at a neat
critical distance, is a strong response. Certainly, in their own way, the
brothers were aroused.

Dining at her table one night, both men were especially offended when she
described her own climb to wealth and status. “Circumstance means nothing,
” she said. “One creates the circumstances of one’s life
through pure will.” The magnitude of her willpower is clear in her
history. Like so many of her contemporaries who ascended from rags to riches,
though she was born poor and untitled, she became a marquise with a great
fortune. Her father, who was a refugee from pogroms in Poland, had settled
along with his family in Moscow. As the daughter of a weaver, the future
Païva was raised with very modest expectations. Following in the footsteps
of her mother, she married a tailor when she was just seventeen years old,
giving birth to a son soon after. But while working long hours, cutting and
stitching in the small basement apartment the three of them shared, she found
herself dreaming of escape, until one day, abandoning her spouse and her young
son, she fled.

Though we may find it hard to forgive the coldness of her resolve, the force of
will evident in this story is breathtaking. Few options would have been open to
her. Not educated enough to become a governess, had she become a working woman
she would have had to endure a poverty far more severe than the one she had
endured with her husband and son. But she did have some resources. Despite the
disparaging description of the Goncourt brothers, her figure was thought
beautiful and she had what was called a Grecian neck, thick reddish hair, and
intensely appealing eyes. But there is also her formidable energy to consider,
too—a force that could sustain her while, alone and without protection
and penniless, she waited to be chosen at the public balls and cafés she
frequented.

Imagining this energy, we can perhaps begin to perceive what must have been
almost a kind of tropism that certain men felt in their bodies, as they moved
toward the heat of her extraordinary vitality. Let us think for example of the
first days that she spent with Henri Herz, the prosperous pianist and composer
who was to introduce her to the Parisian world of arts and letters. After
searching many great cities—Constantinople, Berlin, Vienna—for the
man she needed, she met Herz at the German resort known as Ems. Thirteen years
her senior, Herz was perhaps hoping that the country air would act as a kind of
tonic, renewing his appetite for life.

In such a mood, her presence would have seemed all the more remarkable. She was
not there to rest. Instead of a tired animal put out to pasture, she had more
the air of a military horse, all muscle, the air nearly visible with each
breath, ready to charge. Cooped up for hours in a small, dark space, she was
hungry for life, and no one, nothing would stop her again. Herz would have been
able to see this in the way she walked across a room. Through the finished
veneer of the gait more fitting to a lady that she had observed and learned to
imitate, he must have sensed the blistering pace of which she was well capable,
a pace all the more compelling when glimpsed through the veil of her transitory
restraint.

Now, as she stands in front of him, he can read the whole story in her posture,
the lusty greed she has for everything in life, the indomitable energy, even
the inflated estimation she has of herself that moves toward the edge of
derangement. Is it at this moment that he begins to see the future? He is
perhaps startled for an instant at her directness, when she takes him by the
hand, leading him toward his bed. But just as he is startled, his body responds
in another way too. He is, after all, used to creating his own circumstances. A
musician and composer who established his own piano factory, he is also a
successful entrepreneur. Since most often he is the one in command, no one
would have guessed, himself least of all, how appealing the thought of this
momentary relinquishment would be. As he feels himself yield to the idea,
another part of his body grows hard with anticipation.