The Book of the Courtesans (2 page)

But this state of being could also easily prove her downfall. A descent of this
kind has been painfully captured by Edith Wharton. In her great novel
The
House of Mirth
, Wharton depicts the financial and sexual naïveté
of Lily Bart, a young woman who is upper class by birth, with only a small
inheritance, whose ignorance leads her to commit several social follies that
leave her both penniless and unmarriageable. By painful degrees of descent, she
meets the worst fate imaginable for a woman born to privilege—she is
forced to begin life as a working woman.

The fact that throughout centuries of European history the majority of women
had to work is often omitted even from accounts that purport to focus on
women’s lives. Peasant families depended on the labor of women and children
alike to eke out a living. And among those who lived and worked in the city,
apart from the nobility or the wives of the professional classes and the
bourgeoisie (who only began to grow to significant numbers in the eighteenth
century), whether women took in laundry, worked as chambermaids, charwomen,
seamstresses, or weavers, they were wage earners. Married or not, the income
they earned was necessary to their own survival as well as that of their
families, yet they could earn only a fraction of what men could. In Paris in
the early nineteenth century, for example, when peasant economies in France
began to collapse and the cities, especially Paris, were flooded with refugees
from the countryside seeking employment, even the salaries of workingmen were
barely sufficient for survival. Though they worked long hours, often sixteen
hours a day, many women could not live on the salaries they were paid.

Thus the word for a woman working in the garment industry, the most common form
of employment for women,
grisette
, which derived from the dull gray of
the muslin dresses she wore, acquired a second meaning. Even into the mid-
twentieth century, dictionaries still defined the
grisette
as “a
woman of easy virtue.” Earning
1
to
1
.
5
francs a day for work that was
seasonal, the garment worker had to turn to other sources for her income. Some
walked the streets; some lived with casual lovers, oftentime students, who
helped to pay the bills; others attended the many public balls that were
popular then in Paris to search for wealthier men who might pay for their
favors for a night.

It was for this reason that so many courtesans began as
grisettes
. If
they were lucky enough or extraordinary in some way, they could climb the rungs
of a ladder that could lead them further and further away from penury and a
grueling schedule of hard work. At a public dance hall, a young woman might
meet a man who would set her up in an apartment. A woman who had this good
fortune was called a
lorette
, the word for a would-be courtesan, a
woman who was kept only modestly. She did not habituate the elevated circles in
which courtesans traveled, though she was a social fixture of the bohemian
world. Mimi in Henri Murger’s
Scènes de la Vie Bohème
was a
lorette
. But the story is better known as Puccini’s opera
La Bohème
.

Only the few who were the most talented among
lorettes
would ever
become courtesans. The heroine of another famous opera, Violetta Valéry in
Verdi’s
La Traviata
, was modeled after Marie Duplessis, a real
woman who started as a
grisette
, became a
lorette
soon after,
only to ascend with remarkable rapidity to the rank of courtesan. Her story is
typical of the rags-to-riches ascent that was both as desirable and improbable
then as is the dream of becoming a sports hero today. Born to near poverty in
Normandy, Marie’s mother died early. After a period in which her alcoholic
father, an itinerant salesman, hauled her with him about the countryside,
offering his daughter at least once as merchandise, and after being abandoned
by the same father to distant and unwelcoming cousins in Paris, she began work
as a
grisette
. That she was poverty-stricken during this period is
verified by the testimony of Nestor Roqueplan, director of the Opéra, who
spotted her a year before she became famous, on the Pont-Neuf, dressed in dirty,
ragged clothing, begging for a taste of the
pommes frites
that were
sold on the bridge. It did not take her long to meet a restaurateur who
established her as a
lorette
in her own apartment. But this tenure was
equally brief. She rose quickly to become one of the highest-ranking courtesans
of her time. Well fed and housed, considered to be the best dressed woman in
Paris, the woman known as “the divine Marie” had acquired great
fame, not to speak of a title, before her death from tuberculosis at the age of
twenty-three.

Class is an essential ingredient in the history of courtesans for many reasons,
including the dramatic transformation that occurred in the life of a woman who
was elevated thus. According to accounts from the eighteenth century, Madame du
Barry, who herself experienced a spectacular rise from
grisette
and
sometime prostitute to become the favorite of Louis XV, spoke far better French
than his previous mistress, Madame de Pompadour. Since the celebrated Pompadour
had been educated by her bourgeois family, she spoke a French that was at least
passable at court. But because Barry’s working-class language was entirely
unacceptable, she was compelled to learn an upper-class grammar that was far
more correct than that of her predecessor.

Still, the plot thickens. The issue of class cannot be understood apart from
issues of morality. For several centuries in European cultures, with some
variations, it was thought that a woman should be chaste before marriage, and
if not absolutely faithful, she should at least behave with enough discretion
to protect her reputation. The requirement was not uniform. In certain periods
and places, especially those in which the poor were driven to desperate
measures, a woman’s chastity had less significance among working people
than it did for the aristocracy. But this division of sentiments was not
consistent. The peccadilloes and open liaisons of nobles, kings, and emperors
were known to incite wrath from the less privileged public.

What remains relevant to this history, however, is another condition that
fostered the tradition of courtesans, the simple fact that as with Edith
Wharton’s character Lily Bart, a wellborn woman could fall, and in falling
not only lose any chance for marriage but be shunned by society as well. In
that case, one of the better options open to her would be to become a courtesan.
There were so many women who chose this solution in Paris at the turn of the
century that a special word was used for them: they were referred to as
demicastors
. Because of a scandal that had ruined her reputation, one
such woman, Laure Hayman, was ostracized until she made her way back into
society in another role, as a courtesan. She counted among her lovers many
powerful men, including Louis Weil, the uncle of Marcel Proust. It was probably
because Proust had known her since he was a boy that he took Hayman as a model
for Odette Crécy, the fictional courtesan whose story threads through
A la recherche du temps perdu
.

The tangled skein of double standards regarding both sex and money, gender and
class, creates an interesting controversy over whether or not certain
historical figures ought to be classified as courtesans. Agnès Sorel,
favorite of Charles VII of France, is generally not considered a courtesan, nor
is Alice Keppel, longtime mistress to the Prince of Wales, though both were
given financial aid by the monarchs who loved them. One might answer that they
did not take money from any other lovers. Except that Pompadour, who took
remuneration from no other lovers either, is called a courtesan by almost
everybody, probably for the sole reason that she came from the bourgeoisie.
Rather than probe the justice of this reasoning, the hope is that these
controversies might be resolved by the chapters to follow, which in general use
the term “courtesan” as a favorable designation.

Yet it should not be construed that
The Book of the Courtesans
attempts to argue that its subjects were virtuous in a moral sense. No effort
will be made here either to defend or condemn their behavior. Rather, the
virtues in the title take their definition from an older usage—one that
was once applied exclusively to men, but which, though it has been out of
fashion since the Renaissance, this book revives and applies now to women. In
this older definition, virtue has nothing at all to do with chastity. It refers
rather to the strengths and attributes that characterize as well as distinguish
a person.

Though circumstances must and will be summoned so that these stories can be
better understood, the emphasis here will be on the creative response each
woman showed to the conditions she confronted. For this phenomenon to be
entirely explained, we must explore the considerable magic of human ingenuity
here. There are so many kinds of genius to be found in these stories that were
we not to place our focus on virtue, we would be squandering a treasure that
belongs to all those who are the inheritors of this history.

For history it is. Although the many virtues that courtesans possessed were
employed to defy circumstances, the role they played depended on the same
circumstances over which they triumphed—conditions which today,
fortunately for modern women, no longer exist. At least within modern European
cultures women are not expected to be virgins before they marry, nor do they
have to be dependent on husbands, brothers, or fathers for their economic
survival.

And there is still another reason for the disappearance of this tradition. The
temper of the times has shifted, too. Technically speaking, many women today do
what courtesans did; it is quite common still for a married man to support his
mistress, and a whole population of highly cultivated and elegant women serve
today as escorts, call girls, and modern hetaerae. But just as surely as the
role of the courtesan was created by historical conditions, she was also
inextricably linked to a historical mood that had come to an end by the third
decade of the last century. In
1948
, after visiting La
Belle Otero, Anne Manson wrote: “When Otero departs there will depart
with her the last symbol of an epoch, superficial, light and at the same time
virtuous and cynical, covetous toward others yet madly extravagant in its
pleasures, full of faults but not without its splendors.”

To become a courtesan, a woman required a setting. Though she was center stage,
she was not alone. Nor was she hidden. Almost by definition, she was surrounded
by scintillating activity. She was inseparable from the
demi-mondes
she inhabited—slightly rebellious, risqué, or naughty worlds,
alternate societies where a certain sophistication, including carnal knowledge
that was banned from proper society, was allowed to thrive. The Belle Epoque,
the period that Otero symbolized, was famous not only for its writers, artists,
playwrights, and actors but also for the glittering social scene which was
staged almost continuously on the Grands Boulevards in Paris, the epicenter of
the atmosphere, and the stage on which the courtesan played a vital and charis-
matic role.

In this, she was part of a tradition that stretches back over centuries. The
Belle Epoque may have been the last period in which the courtesan reigned, but
it was by no means the first. For at least a hundred years before the end of
the Belle Epoque, Paris had been a magnet for courtesans, would-be courtesans,
and men seeking the magic of their company. Indeed, the Second Empire, earlier
in the century, was so dominated by this presence that Balzac seemed almost to
be stating a simple truth when he wrote, “Paris is a courtesan.”

But what took place in the Second Empire was also a continuation. In the
seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the alternative life with courtesans that
aristocrats, princes, and kings conducted at the courts, places, and fine
houses of France was called
galanterie
. Several famous courtesans from
this period are still remembered, among them Ninon de Lenclos and La Pompadour.
And in turn, French
galanterie
was inspired by an even earlier history.
Venice during the Renaissance is the only place and time that can be said to
rival nineteenth-century Paris for its courtesans. Just as Balzac likened Paris
to a courtesan, the seventeenth-

century English poet James Howell took this figure as the metaphor of Venice.
“Syren-like on Shore and Sea, Her Face,” he writes, “Enchants
all those whom once she doth embrace.” The reputation of Venice’s
courtesans was once one of its chief attractions. “So infinite are the
allurements of these amorous Calypsos,” another Englishman, Thomas Coryat,
wrote of the courtesans he encountered when he visited the city, “that
the fame of them hath drawn many to Venice from some of the remotest parts of
Christendom.” At one point among scarcely more than
100
,
000
inhabitants, there was said
to be over
10
,
000
cortigiana
, or
10
percent of the population,
though only a portion of these would have been courtesans for whom the
honorific title
cortigiane oneste
was used. Among those who were
honored in this way,
210
women were listed in a catalogue
(
Catalogo di Tutte le Principali Pià Honorate Cortigiane di
Venezia
) available for the more affluent visitor.

The antecedents for the word “courtesan” first appear in fourteenth-
century Rome, where
cortigiano
, or “courtier,” evolved
into a female form with a somewhat different meaning. It was from this Italian
word that the French
courtisane
developed, the term that finally
inspired the English “courtesan.” But by a different name,
centuries before courtesans appeared in early Renaissance Rome, the tradition
of the
hetaera
was a fixture in ancient Rome and Greece.