The Book of the Courtesans (20 page)

But the performance would be only a prelude to what must have seemed an
infinite spectacle. Leaving the theatre, they would rejoin the crowds heading
toward the Café Turc, the Café Anglais, the Café des Mauresques,
the Café Riche, or Le Napolitain, to drink and dine and continue the party.
And of course, they could easily have chosen instead the established center of
gaiety, that golden place known as Maxim’s, to dine under the glass roof
designed by Lalique, drink the best champagne to be had in Paris, and then
dance through the early hours of the morning to the music of the house
orchestra.

In the Belle Epoque, Maxim’s was synonymous with the high life of the
fin-de-siècle.
It was here in a room that held the bar called
“The Omnibus,” that
demi-mondaines
, actresses, dandies,
flâneurs
, and
boulevardiers
regularly assembled.
Courtesans could always be found here. Maxim’s was the place for everyone
to be seen and where anyone could be seen. Emilienne d’Alençon would
come when she finished performing at the Folies-Bergère, leaving her
rabbits with Ursula, the caretaker of the ladies’ room. Mata Hari and La
Belle Otero came, too, and Liane de Pougy along with Cléo de Mérode,
both pursued by Leopold of Belgium. His would not be the only royal presence;
the Prince of Wales entertained here often. And of course the presiding royalty
of the arts could be found here, too, including the playwright Feydeau, Marcel
Proust, and Sarah Bernhardt.

More than once, the frivolity reached fevered pitch, as when, for instance,
Maurice Bertrand ushered in four pall bearers who were carrying a casket that,
when opened, revealed a case of champagne. And whenever in the natural course
of a night anyone’s capacity for folly began to ebb, the celebrant had only
to look in the sinuously beautiful Art Nouveau mirrors that wrapped each room
in luminescence to be inspired once more by the sight of someone else laughing,
flirtatious, seduced, or all three, and in the process producing delicious
gossip.

But there was another kind of reflection which captured the same rooms with
ghostly doubles to all the festivities that were produced by artists and
writers who took their inspiration from the restaurant. The reputation of
Maxim’s was so forceful that it migrated into the imagination of an
Austrian man who had never been to Paris at all: Franz Lehar set the entire act
of an opera in the restaurant he had never seen. Nevertheless, he caught the
spirit. “I go off to Maxim’s,” Prince Danilo sings, “
Where fun and frolic beams. With all the girls I chatter. I laugh and kiss and
flatter.” Thousands of curious visitors, intrigued by
The Merry
Widow
, would follow the hero there.

Everywhere along the boulevards the festivities were enlarged and intensified
by glittering images and thrilling legends, which danced and sang along with
the crowds, calling out like sirens inviting pilgrims from far and wide to join
the party. If you strolled in the Passage des Panoramas, Zola’s heroine
Nana, who loved to look at the fake jewelry in the shop windows there, would be
walking beside you. Listening to a concert in the Tuileries, you would be
haunted by the painting Manet made of a group of famous
boulevardiers
,
sitting where you are sitting. Your expectations of a ball at the Opéra
would be heightened by his painting of a masked ball held there; and certainly
approaching the bar at the Folies-Bergère, you would be accompanied by
another of his luminous paintings.

In the first foyer of the Opéra, the gathering would remind you of the
opening scene of Balzac’s
The Splendor and Misery of the Courtesan
.
In the corridors of any theatre you would remember Flaubert’s description
of students parading their mistresses during intermissions. Inside the auditoriums,
the images continue in intricate layers, as you recall several paintings of
ladies and gentlemen in their boxes, as well as Daumier’s rendering of the
section called Paradise in the upper balcony where the poorer members of the
audience are packed.

Entering the street again, your impression would be shaped by Béraud’s
painting of the boulevard Montmartre in front of the theatre you have just left.
Strolling over to a café, the men in silk hats you encounter might have
stepped from paintings by Caillebotte, just as so many women you see resemble
Manet’s
La Parisienne
. And as the next century begins, you would
think to yourself that it is here on the boulevard that Colette’s character,
Chéri, mourning for the loss of the courtesan he loved, spent night after
night in drunken dissolution. As when reaching Tortoni’s, you would know
that Proust’s hero, Swann, searched desperately and in vain for the
courtesan Odette here.

And all about you while you watch or dine or drink or dance, stories and images
are being newly coined. The
boulevardiers
, fond of witty remarks,
publish and repeat them. One way or the other, sooner rather than later,
everyone has heard Feydeau’s famous quip at Maxim’s. (After being
served a lobster with only one claw, he answered the waiter’s explanation,
that lobsters often fight and injure each other in the tank, by demanding
“Well, then, take this one away and bring me the victor.”) And
everyone repeats the story of when Caroline Otero, forced to give up her seat
at the Comédie-Française to make room for the tsar of Russia and his
retinue, threatened: “All right, I’ll leave. But I’ll never eat
caviar again!”

Just as all the stories are being repeated, Nadar is photographing Sarah
Bernhardt, Labiche, Dumas and Dumas
fils
, the Goncourt brothers—
all principal players in this gaiety. And if now, looking back, the effect of
these portraits seems somewhat elegaic, it is perhaps because although the
pleasure is multiplied in both space and time, each event

mirrored in succeeding reflections yielding the sense of an infinite
progression, this moment of eternity will come to an end like any other. It is
an inevitability folded into every joy. As is the eventual comprehension, if
you glance for more than a moment in the mirror, that what you see there is not
just happiness. Each night innumerable catastrophes advance toward the region.

The abundance so evident on the boulevards has a hidden cost. Lives cut short,
impoverished, bodies maimed, tortured in Africa and Asia. The violence spent in
the colonies will soon come home. The First World War is in the making. Soon
French soldiers will be marching along the boulevards on their way to battle.
The Dreyfus case, with its thinly veiled anti-Semitism, augurs the terrors of
the second war that will follow. The unceasing abundance displayed on the
boulevards is matched by a terrible poverty just a few streets away, in the
recent memory of many of those who take part in the golden prosperity. And even
as the party continues, there are among the celebrants men and women who are
dying of the contagious diseases that, fed by poverty, also prosper.

Many, of course, come here only to escape. Drinking or gambling too much, they
use pleasure as a path toward oblivion. But pleasure is not by its nature
ignorant. During any given moment of delight, the mind starts to expand the
circumference of its attention, here taking in the colored glass paperweights
in a shop window, there the chestnut tree that has just come into bloom, then
the frayed collar and pale face of the young man walking listlessly on the
opposite side of the street, together with the look of desperation that clouds
the face of a young prostitute as she leaves the notorious bar next door. Among
the revelers, there are those who are watching closely, and they leave nothing
out.

For gentlemen fleeing the boredom of high society, that this is the meeting
place of those who dare to broach forbidden subjects is one of the attractions.
It is at the Café Durand that Zola will write
J’Accuse
!,
calling the French government’s prosecution of Alfred Dreyfus unjust. In
these cafés, one can talk openly about subjects banned from polite drawing
rooms, not just politics and disease but the ever-fascinating sex and money.
“What if instead of these indecent rags,” Baudelaire writes of a
beautiful girl he observes begging on the street, “the splendid train of
a brocade gown rustled at your heels.” The air is brisk with forbidden
realities.

The perspective can have a prejudicial slant, as when Zola or the Goncourt
brothers create a moral distance between their own pleasures and the pleasures
of women. Still, as with an ancient carnival, this is a party where the old
distinctions dissolve temporarily. Everyone changes roles. Poor women become
powerful as rich men beg for favors. And despite every separation, the mood on
the Grands Boulevards, shared as it is by multitudes, will inevitably sweep its
inhabitants toward union, when for the duration of the vast ritual every fate
seems to converge. Hence in the second half of the century, a gentleman and his
mistress could pass by the Church of the Madeleine which anchors one end of the
Grands Boulevards, where the memory of the large funeral held there for Marie
Duplessis still lingers.

And since death anchors every life, subtle signs of this destiny can be found
everywhere on the boulevards. Even the most earnest attempts at undiluted
frivolity include signs that evoke a vast underworld of meaning. If, between
the two world wars, for instance, a man were to take his mistress, one of the
last courtesans, to the Folies-Bergère, they may see a fan of feathers
crowning the head of Gaby Deslys as she parades the length of the stage, or
five diamond-studded fans framing Josephine Baker’s face, matching the
large diamond spirals hanging from her ears, or a mane of furlike feathers
trailing from a golden helmet worn by Edmond Guy, or a python wrapped around
Mademoiselle Floriane’s arms. Thus, however subtly, on this night of
pleasure, Inanna, Isis, and Venus will be evoked, not only inspiring thoughts
of love but also revealing the larger mysteries for which pleasure is just one
of the stations.

Yet this station is formidable. If, on any given night, the pleasures of Paris
have not already, as De Amicis says, “conquered” its visitors, here
in the territory of the courtesan they will finally be possessed. Drowning in
the strange sensation that past, present, and future have fused, now in this
time out of time, while every sensible thought they have is disarmed by a wave
of intense tastes, odors, scents, sounds, visions, the pilgrims worshipping
here will be subsumed and carried toward abandon by a common stream, rich with
the history of desire.

Her Swing

For this and that way swing
The flux of mortal things—Matthew Arnold,
“Westminster Abbey”

When, at the Folies-Bergère or the
Ziegfeld Follies
, a star
such as Josephine Baker descended toward the stage perched on a swing, to some
the vision would have evoked an earlier image. The original model for this
setting can be found in a painting from the eighteenth century commissioned by
Monsieur de Saint-Julien as a portrait of his mistress. It was his idea that
she be suspended from a swing, and he who asked that his own likeness be placed
beneath her where he could admire her legs. At first Saint-Julien requested
that the painter Gabriel-François Doyen to accept his commission; but
Doyen, feeling the project too frivolous, passed it on to a younger, more
obscure man who, as it turned out, had a strong feeling for the subject matter.
When the painting, called Les Hasards Heureux de L’Ecarpolette—
The Happy Risks of the Swing
—appeared, it caused a sensation
that made its creator, Jean-Honoré Fragonard, famous.

In the painting, both gentleman and mistress are surrounded by a verdant
landscape. It is a pastoral scene, the tree from which the swing is suspended
almost mythically beautiful, the gentleman below literally wreathed in a bower
of leaves and flowers. Though this background has a unique character, it also
partakes of an even earlier tradition—the habit of painting amorous
scenes, sometimes with courtesans, sometimes with goddesses (who were usually
unclothed), set in the countryside. The
fête galante
, as the form
is known, can perhaps most easily be recognized by today’s audiences in
Manet’s
Dejeuner sur l’Herbe
, which when it was painted
shocked society by replacing nude goddesses with modern women who sit sharing a
picnic lunch with men who are fully dressed. Later, though the version she
painted is less famous, Suzanne Valadon took the image into a far more radical
dimension when she depicted both men and women at the picnic unclothed.

Next to these examples,
The Swing
, in which both lovers are fully
clothed, may appear to be tame. Fragonard can seem foolishly sentimental,
except when you understand that his best subject was ecstasy. The vibrant
motion of the young woman on the swing, echoed in the billowing pink silk of
her dress, which is caught in the light dancing over her, her face, her breasts,
and which falls across his face, too, turned toward her, the adoring
expression, the joyful ardor of his hand stretched toward her feet, his feeling
extended into the tree which also reaches, less with effort than the pure
effect of delight, toward a misty, blushing resolution in the deeper
landscape—are all expressions of bliss, the frivolous yet nevertheless
powerful feeling that merges countryside and lovers together into one buoyant
vision.

Of course, the painting captures only one moment in the arc of pleasure. The
pendulum will of necessity swing back and away; though the pink shoe that is
suspended in midair above him will soon be his, the lover will never seize his
mistress’s stockinged foot. And yet the feeling of the painting is not one
of frustration but rather of a joy that is at that moment being realized. It is
as if swing, skirt, trees, blushing sky, taken together were tropes for the
nature of sexual passion, which will move through your body like a wave,
dissolving your reserve, bringing you to union with forces of life beyond your
comprehension, before it recedes, as all things must inevitably do. Though
while you are immersed in this motion, you will be too happy to care.