The Book of the Courtesans (15 page)

Yet inward as her landscape is, she does not diminish the visceral reality of
love. It is her lover’s “golden shaft” that penetrates her
heart. A viscerality not foreign to the painter, who no matter how mystical his
theme, was stunningly accurate as he rendered the turn of a shoulder, the
lowering of a head, the raising of eyes, hands frozen in a gesture of wonder.
The same devotion to material existence can be seen in the portrait he painted
of Franco, her lips redolent with feeling, the lace around her shoulders
exquisitely detailed, her reddish hair capturing bits of glistening light in
delicate curls, even her beautiful eyelids, brows, finely rendered, her eyes
casting an intelligent gaze that, like the painting itself, seems to regard
both inner and outer worlds at the same time.

But she herself says this best in the letter she wrote thanking Tintoretto for
his portrait: “You concentrate entirely on methods of imitating—no,
rather of outdoing—nature, not only in what can be imitated by modeling
the human figure, nude or clothed, adding color, shading, contour, features,
muscles movements, actions, postures . . . but by
expressing emotional states as well.”

And this, too, should be added to the background of their friendship. They had
both risen to prominence by the same path. A century earlier, when the shared
imagination was still turned away from the material world, painters, whose
works were often anonymous, were considered no better than craftsmen, and
courtesans were hidden. But now that the tenor of the times had changed, the
brilliance that each brought to earthly existence made both of them famous. The
qualities Franco shared with the artist, a careful attention to the fine points
of carnality, a sensitivity to emotional life, the intelligence with which she
probed feeling, an attraction to mystical experience, explain why she was not
only an honored courtesan but the most honored of her time in a city renowned
for this profession. Certainly, mere mechanical pleasures could be found for
far less money. The desire she met was instead for the larger dimensionality of
pleasure, the spirit within experience. Like Tintoretto, she rendered both the
moment and a mirror of the moment.

Imagine, then, the quality of a caress as profound in its own way as any great
work of art. It is not just the effect of her touch but of her eyes, too. All
your responses, including the ones you are used to hiding from others and at
times even from yourself, would be reflected in this regard. Perhaps she
notices a slight movement as desire moves into your hand. Thus, knowing that
she is your witness, your body quickens as she strokes your fingers. And when,
smiling, she sees this, too, the feeling is suddenly so intense that you have
the sensation of swimming in the

candlelight that shimmers over her body. And now, beyond whatever she knows of
you, revelation itself charges the atmosphere. As you take her, you are taken
into a mythic realm, as if you yourself had become a god, your body a source of
insight now, more alive than you thought possible, though this was all along
what you desired. It was what you wanted to know.

Wit

Her contradictions preserve urbanity.—Louis XIV, speaking of
Ninon de Lenclos

In the realm of intelligence, wit occupies a narrow but nonetheless very
effective position. Sometimes kind, it is at other times malicious. At once sly
and straightforward, subtle and pointed, polite and rude, sensitive and brazen,
it exists on a razor’s edge between heretical insight and what is
acknowledged to be true. No wonder then that Oscar Wilde, famous for residing
between one sex and the other, was a master of an art which, if only
temporarily, allows manners and boundaries of all kinds to be transgressed with
grace, and while revealing the hypocrisies of the established order, makes
those who might otherwise be shocked laugh.

Like the laughter it causes, wit rises; it lightens the mood. Yet it is
also true that in order to be witty, one must already have risen, at least to a
point sufficiently above the fray to see the humor in the human foibles that
lie beneath. As Cupid does, when the witty inflict small wounds to every form
of complacency, exciting levity along with love, they send their arrows from
aloft. The perspective was indispensable to courtesans, who, living just
outside propriety, were at the same time intimate with the most respected
members of society.

Ninon de Lenclos was famous for having wit in a witty time. One of the greatest
courtesans of any period, she was born in
1620
to a
family which belonged to the often impoverished and usually obscure lesser
nobility of France. When she was fifteen years old, her father, forced into
exile, abandoned Ninon and her mother. Hence, after the death of her mother a
few years later, Ninon was left nearly penniless. There were no prospects for
marriage, and in any case, from her father she had inherited a distinct lack of
enthusiasm for the institution. Thus it was that she decided to take up one of
the few professions open to her. She was well equipped for the work. Though she
was beautiful, it was her intelligence that made her exceptionally attractive.
Not only was she bright, she was unusually well educated for a woman of her
time. Her father had given her lessons in philosophy, mathematics, Italian, and
Spanish. As a girl, she loved books and read widely, including the work of
Descartes. She had even managed to attend one play by Corneille. Highly
perceptive even as a child, by the time she reached maturity she had developed
a sophisticated sense of humor. All of which, in the early days of the period
known as the Enlightenment, made her very popular. As the playwright Paul
Scarron was to write of her:

Oh beautiful, charming Ninon,

whose wishes no one can decline

so great being the power of one

with both beauty and wit.

She soon found herself at the center of Parisian society, where she
remained throughout her long life. She was admired by the young Voltaire;
hosted a famous salon at which Molière first read the manuscript of his
new play,
Tartuffe
; and became the lover of countless illustrious men,
including two members of the royal family, the duc d’Enghien, eldest son of
the Condé branch of the Bourbons, and the duc de Vendôme, natural son
of Henri IV, also a prince of the blood.

Some examples of her extraordinary wit are still with us today. It was she, for
instance, who said, “We should never speak ill of our enemies. They are
the only people who do not deceive us.” She is also famous for having
said, “My mother was a good woman with no sensory feeling. She procreated
three children, scarcely noticing it.” As amusing as these comments are,
they give us some insight into the painful circumstances of her childhood,
which no doubt contributed, as trials and tribulations often do, to the
development of her genius.

Her mother and father’s marriage was not made in heaven. It was rather a
marriage of convenience made between a man and woman who were, as it turned out,
incompatible. Henri, her father, was a freethinker—skeptical,
irreligious, worldly; a man of lusty appetites, who loved learning, bawdy talk,
music, carousing, all of which his wife, Marie-Barbe de la Marche, timid,
devout, and unworldly, disapproved. Ninon, the last child of this unfortunate
union, was caught in the middle, the manner of her upbringing a battleground
between two parents, both of whom she loved deeply. While her father brought
her to the Palais d’Orléans to see a painting by Rubens, introduced
her to works by authors such as the skeptical priest Charon, and taught her to
play the lute, an instrument considered too licentious for a proper young lady,
her mother, taking the opposite tack, made her read sacred books, ordered her
to cover her beautiful hair in a scarf, and forced her into dresses made from
muted, dark fabrics, the bodices cut so that they would flatten her breasts.

Though she preferred her father’s way of life, ultimately choosing to live
in a world more like his, when she learned of her father’s infidelity, she
felt fiercely protective of her mother. Moreover, Henri’s affair with a
woman who was also married finally led to a violent episode for which, because
he had murdered a man, he was forced to leave Paris. Ninon remained by her
mother’s side, attempting to fill her father’s shoes. Though she
continued on her own to pursue the liberal education her father had introduced,
she did not defy her mother’s attempts to raise her as a pious woman, but
instead dutifully attended Mass with her (albeit diverting her attention to the
beautiful and sumptuous gowns that so many women who lived in the fashionable
neighborhood of the Place Royale wore to services). Somehow, throughout all the
tortuous turns of the ill-conceived marriage between her parents, Ninon managed
to remain a loving and loyal daughter to both of them. This was a great
accomplishment in itself, and more significantly to this history, one that
would have required that she be able to extricate herself constantly from
battle.

To survive in the atmosphere of hostility that existed for such a prolonged
period between the two people she loved most in the world, she would have had
to cultivate a certain distance from the passionate recriminations they aimed
at each other, as well as from the extremities of passion itself. From this
perspective, it is easy to understand how the daughter of a woman betrayed by
her husband, a man so in love with his mistress that he risked his own life and
took the life of another, would have a jaundiced perspective on the delirium of
love. And we can easily see, too, why, given her mother’s blind devotion,
she would have remained aloof from religious passion. Even the heated political
controversies of the period left her unshaken; though sharply discerning, she
stayed calmly outside the fires. The fruit of this distance, of course, was the
illuminating accuracy of her celebrated wit.

In an age that valued wit highly, the gift was especially advantageous. Not
only were the men and women who possessed it considered more attractive, they
were also more esteemed, even rising in rank because of it. Louis XIV, called
the Sun King, who was born when Ninon was eighteen years of age, was known to
favor wit. “You know,” he confided to his brother’s wife,
“I like clever, amusing people.” Were he not destined to rule, he
probably would have married the niece of the man who had been his regent, the
late Cardinal Mazarin. Marie Mancini was known to be very intelligent. But
using marriage to consolidate the power of his kingdom, he chose Marie-Thé
rèse, the not very attractive and somewhat dull Spanish infanta, instead.

Pleased with her submissiveness, he made up for her shortcomings with his
mistresses. The beautiful Louise de la Vallière was a lady-in-waiting to
his sister-in-law, Henriette, with whom he carried on a scandalous flirtation.
He got to know her only after Henriette suggested that, to cover their affair,
he pretend to be courting Louise. The pretense soon became reality. He had her
declared the royal titular mistress, a custom started by an earlier king,
Charles VII, who in the fifteenth century had declared Agnès Sorel his
ma"tresse en titre
. But after a while the dewy-eyed and rather elusive
ways that once enchanted him lost their charm. Bored again, he turned to
Louise’s best friend, a woman who often

accompanied her at court, the marquise de Montespan. Françoise-

Athénaïs, daughter of the marquis de Mortemart, was one of four
siblings treasured for their social brilliance. They were fond of laughing and
had the gift of inspiring mirth in others. As Nancy Mitford writes, “
Their lazy, languishing, wailing voices would bring up an episode, piling
unexpected exaggerations upon comic images until the listeners were helpless
with laughter.” Montespan was, in short, very entertaining.

Amusement was just what the king needed. Though Louis ruled absolutely, his
reign was filled with trouble. The conditions of the period in France were not
unlike those that Ninon faced in her discordant family life. The realm was
divided not only between Protestants and Catholics but also between Jansenists
and Jesuits, the Church jostling with the state for power, the rise of secular
philosophies that implicitly questioned an order based on divine right; even
the royal desire for pleasure was daily pitted against religious values. The
only respite was laughter.

In the end, religious drama could not be kept from Louis’ court. Though
witty and intelligent herself, his last mistress did her best to save him from
sin. Following the pattern of his earlier conquests, Louis had met Franç
oise de Scarron through the marquise de Montespan. Together, both mistresses
were prized as being among the liveliest members of court society. Before she
became Louis’ mistress, Madame Scarron was married to a freethinking and
very secular playwright, Paul Scarron, a close friend of Ninon. Often together
at the gatherings of writers and philosophers that took place at Scarron’s
apartment, the two women became good friends. When Françoise was left
penniless after Scarron’s death, Ninon provided shelter for her in her own
apartment. Indeed, because they shared a bed for several months, the rumor was
that they had become lovers. But Ninon continued her profession, and in time,
saying that she wanted to distance herself from such licentious behavior,
Madame Scarron left Ninon’s lodgings.

Indeed, in later years Scarron liked to describe her own behavior as above
reproach. Her piety only became more exaggerated with time. As she grew closer
to the monarch, gradually replacing Montespan, she did her best to convince the
king that since Montespan was married, his affair with her was doubly
adulterous and hence doubly immoral. Soon Scarron was made the marquise de
Maintenon with her own estate, and after a scandal involving poison, Montespan
retreated. Then, the queen died. And finally the marquise was free to tell the
king that she did not want to live in a state of sin herself. Thus eventually,
as most scholars agree, devotion won the day. In a marriage that took place
covertly in the alcove of his bedroom, the king’s last favorite became his
secret wife.