The Book of the Courtesans (21 page)

ALICE OZY

Rapture

(THE FIFTH EROTIC
STATION)

The real merit of these eyes, their only originality, lay in
something naive and constantly astonished. .
 . . —Edmond About,
Madelon

A
LICE OZY WAS
known for combining the wide-
eyed innocence in her character with a fair measure of cleverness and guile.
The resulting mix must have been surprisingly delightful. The duc d’Aumale,
son of the citizen king, Louis Philippe, was devoted to her. The toast of Paris
for decades, she was depicted in novels and poetry by Edmond About and Thé
ophile Gautier, painted and sculpted by Chassériau and Doré. Her
naïveté could be startling. Once, when she was told in jest that a
Gruyère cheese mine had been discovered in Montmorency which would provide
employment for the poor, she responded by clapping her hands in joy. But her
famous gullibility could not have come from any deficiency of mind. Instead of
diamonds, she habitually asked that her lovers give her shares in the railway
company. She became a wealthy woman rather early in her life.

As is true for all of us, the source of some of her qualities can be found
in her childhood. Her father was not poverty-stricken; he was a jeweler. But
both her mother and father had other lovers and, disinterested in each other,
they soon became disinterested in her, too. After leaving her with a foster
mother for several years, when she reached the age of ten, they decided Alice
should earn her own living. Thus, she spent three years of her childhood in the
dark backroom of a fabric shop bent over a needle and thread as she executed
intricate patterns of embroidery.

Those who have been deprived of a childhood sometimes lack the ability either
to be playful or to take pleasure in life. Yet just as often, those who have
had their childhoods stolen from them retain an almost childlike joy in life.
It is as if at every moment they experience release from a dim prison and are
astonished and elated by everything and everyone they encounter.

Ozy’s career as a courtesan began in a way that was conventional for the
nineteenth century. At age thirteen, she was reprieved from her backroom
indenture when her manager, estimating the effect of her beauty, thought she
would be better suited to working behind the counter. But considering her
innocence, this new position left her vulnerable to a second calamity. Very
soon after her promotion, she was seduced by the shop’s owner. Now the
marriage proposal from a country doctor which seemed imminent could not be
accepted.

Her dilemma did not last long. Falling in love with the gifted actor Paul-Louis
Brindeau, she eloped with him. And like so many compromised women before her,
she entered the theatre, too. At the age of twenty, having made her first
appearance in the Théâtre des Variétés, she was already
earning
1
,
200
francs a year. But
she was not to stay with Brindeau long. By turn of fate the Variété
had been commanded to present the play in which she was performing,
Le
Chevalier du Guet
, at the royal palace in the Tuileries. The performance
was arranged to honor the return of Louis Philippe’s son, the duc d’
Aumale, who fell in love with Alice at first sight. Doubtless understanding the
fortunate nature of such a connection, and perhaps from a certain restlessness
that also must have been engendered by her childhood, she left Brindeau easily.
Just as easily as, after a period, she would leave the duke, who since he did
not have control of his own money yet, could give her far less than her next
lover, the comte de Perregaux.

It is a testament to both the duke and the courtesan that Aumale was not
resentful when she left. Still her friend when both of them were aging, he
visited her at the château she owned on Lake Enghien in Switzerland, where,
it is said, she would take the petals of the roses she grew and scatter them
throughout the rooms. Did the scent remind the duke of all the nights he spent
with her in her apartment above the Maison Dorée? Many men dreamed of
joining her in the rosewood bed encrusted with Sevre Medallions depicting Cupid,
and draped in lace. The great womanizer Victor Hugo was very disappointed that
he was merely shown her bedroom but not invited to stay. In his novel
Madelon
, Edmond About hints obliquely at what the experience of
staying might have been like. “When you saw her,” he says, “
it was like smelling a bunch of heliotrope or tasting some delicious fruit; you
felt something complete and superabundant, which made your heart overflow.
”

And as if this were not tantalizing enough, he adds a comment that is even more
revealing: “She took possession of a man if she touched him with the tips
of her fingers.” But this, of course, would lead to rapture—the
tips of her fingers, fully sensate and fully aware, taking you in and touching
you as if her fingers had never touched before, so that you yourself begin to
experience touch as something entirely new.

One can imagine the duke being seduced this way, her hand perhaps grazing the
side of his leg as they walk side by side down the boulevard des Italiens. By
the time they reach her apartment, he has forgotten every worry, every
responsibility; even his own expectations and plans for pleasure begin to
vanish when her mouth opens into his mouth as she discovers all over again what
it is to kiss him.

As he glides his hand around the arc of her hips, over her belly, up the curve
of her breasts, she takes her pleasure fully and with a cry of surprise, too,
as if this particular stroke were unpredictably pleasurable, fresh. In her
intense presence, he feels himself dissolving until, entering her mood entirely,
he abandons himself to each ensuing moment of bliss.

MADAME DE POMPADOUR

Chapter Six

Grace

I learned then that there are no minor roles. They are all major
roles and it’s what the dancer does that makes it major.
—JUDITH JAMISON,
Dancing Spirit

A
LMOST ANY ACTIVITY
will be transformed
into something extraordinary when it is done with grace. The virtue is
especially evident in movement. Imagine, for instance, the way that the actress
and famous
demi-mondaine
Lanthélme entered a room. The languidly
slouching manner of her walk was imitated by women all over Paris. Or think of
Taglioni, the first ballerina to dance on her toes, spinning across the stage
of the Opéra in Paris as if for a few breathless moments she were more
spirit than flesh. Or envision Nijinsky, leaping and then pausing in midair
before he descended, only to bend toward the earth slowly like a serpent.

But if the essence of all grace is movement, the forms of the motion are
manifold. The same virtue, for instance, describes the symbolic gestures we
call graciousness, a quality that includes generosity, as well as the grace of
the hostess who puts you at ease. A feeling which can extend into her
surroundings, when if they are pleasantly decorated, the rooms where she
receives you will be described as gracious, too.

And then there is also the divine grace, which moves from the mysterious will
of gods and goddesses who occasionally favor us with their blessings. One need
not be religious to experience it. Even an atheist feels touched by a state of
grace when, for instance, an astonishing insight seems to come out of nowhere.

Given the complexity of this virtue, it makes sense that the Greeks would have
represented grace with three figures instead of one. The Three Graces are young
women, handmaidens of Venus, who share many of her attributes, including beauty,
joy, the ability to inspire desire, and an inclination toward games of chance.
As well as having the habit of appearing either nude or in transparent clothing,
along with the Hours, they helped Aphrodite to change her garments whenever
the seasons changed. And there is this, too. Apropos of our subject, they are
abidingly associated with love in every aspect, including fulfillment. A
fullness which in an earlier aspect of Venus, as a goddess of fertility, was
linked to the cycles of earthly life.

Thus it should not surprise us that no matter how weightless the effect may be,
this virtue requires a certain earthiness. While grace greases the wheels of
almost any endeavor, it is by nature erotic. The way Lanthélme walked, for
instance, has been called insinuating. What was insinuated, of course, as she
proceeded—limbs loose, movements slow, shoulders curved forward, chest
concave (as if she were pausing in a seductive undulation), hips forward—
was desire. The thought of a continuing wave, her body softening against yours,
would have entered your mind, just as you found your soul caught in the sway of
the motion you would have been following so closely with your eyes. For it is
difficult to ignore grace.

“The Call of the Wild”

The call of adventure, the call of the wild, was in most of them, no
matter what they were doing.—Maud Parrish, dance hall girl

I was never a gold digger. The men threw their gold at my feet when my
dances pleased them.—Klondike Kate

Her dance was famous. She would begin in the center of the stage,
statuesque and still, with over two hundred yards of gauze wound tightly around
her, as if she were wrapped in a cocoon. The audience was made up mostly of
miners who came in to Dawson to stake their claims or refill supplies,
hopefully taking a night of luxury and leisure before they would return to
rough camps in the muddy fields and hills where they worked themselves to
exhaustion every day looking for gold. Though with a successful claim a man
might become a millionaire, this miracle more often than not eluded him. But
here at the Palace Grand Theater, he could be transported to what seemed like
heaven for the small price of admission and a few drinks, as somehow with
uncommon grace Kate would unwrap herself nightly, suspending two hundred yards
of diaphanous fabric in the air while she danced.

“She was forgetfulness of hardship and homesickness,” one man
said later. Of course, the light, airy image she produced would have erased the
memory of dark mine shafts and bodies aching with fatigue for a few hours. It
was not just a strip show she offered. Though along with her audiences he found
her very appealing, the owner of the theater hired her because she was a good
choreographer. And she also had, he said, a “French flair.”

She was talented at evoking fantasy. Perhaps the roots of this ability lay in
her childhood. Despite the modest means of her parents, her mother a waitress,
her father a railroad telegraph operator, she was raised with an air of
refinement as well as dreams of a better life. The atmosphere of her first
years was permeated by her mother’s desire for something more. A larger,
more glittering life seemed to beckon her perennially. Already married once
earlier, after five years of marriage with Kate’s father, she divorced him,
too, only to marry her lawyer, a former legislator. When this man became a
successful judge and the family moved from Oswego, Kansas, to Spokane,
Washington, Kate was swept into a different life, filled with every possible
luxury. But the dream did not last long. Soon her stepfather lost all of his
money; he died less than a year later, leaving Kate and her mother impoverished
once again.

She did not enter her trade by choice. It was to prevent her mother from
working in a shirtwaist factory that Kate began to look for employment herself.
But at sixteen the only job she could find was in the chorus line at a Coney
Island honky-tonk. In the beginning, her mother kept a close watch on her,
especially after shows. But when Kate moved back to Spokane, Washington, and
began work in a club there, she was taught to induce the customers to buy her
drinks after each performance. It was here that, just after she moved her
mother west to be closer to her, she heard the first news of the Klondike rush.
After sixty-eight miners arrived in San Francisco carrying gold worth
$
1
.
5
million and the
Seattle
Post Intelligencer
sent over
200
,
000
copies of a special Klondike edition with the
headline “A Ton of Gold!” to newspapers all over the country,
thousands of people—including the woman who would soon be known as “
Klondike Kate”—began to pour into the Yukon territories.

At first she avoided the saloons where women were expected to take customers to
the upstairs bedrooms. But once she became famous and had a private room of her
own upstairs, she did not hesitate to accumulate her own fortune this way. And
like all the showgirls in northwestern saloons, she would sit and drink with
miners after the shows. She excelled here, too. Almost as famous for her
sympathetic ear as for her magnetic performances, she was gracious as well as
graceful. According to one of her biographers, “she spent many sleepless
nights wrestling with the problems of some raw-boned sourdough” down on
his luck. On occasion she would even grubstake a miner to a claim.

Here it would serve us to recall that the Three Graces also symbolize the
eternal movement of the gift—a movement that, like all of life, is
circular. What gifts she gave came back to her. As is evident in the story that
a young miner named Ed Lucas has left us, something in Kate’s generous
nature inspired generosity. After he reached into his pocket to show her the
cache of gold nuggets he had worked so hard to obtain, he said that with no
forethought he found himself offering one of them to her. She chose the largest.
During her first year in Dawson alone, she accumulated
$
30
,
000
, a small fortune then.

One reason for her popularity must have been that she shared a great deal with
the miners. Like them, she had known hard times, and like them, too, she loved
the exhilarating mood of the Klondike. Since she arrived before the railway had
a line into Dawson, she had come by boat up the five rapids. But because the
river was thought to be dangerous for ladies, there was a law against women
taking this ride. Thus to avoid the Mounties, she dressed in boy’s clothes
and jumped just as the boat pulled out, hitting the water before she was pulled
aboard. Still, she found the journey, she said later, “perhaps the most
exciting trip I ever made.” A tomboy as a girl, she loved driving her
team of dogs over the frozen snow and in the summer months riding “
wildly” on horseback out into the meadows.

From her famous flame dance, it is easy to guess that there was something else
Kate must have shared with the miners. The elation that pervaded the Yukon had
another cause, more subtle, but still just as powerful as the desire for money.
Gold is an old alchemical symbol. Perhaps because of its shine and the labor
required for retrieving it, the metal is a metaphor not only for all that is
superior but for the process of becoming better. Indeed, even the wish for a
fortune is, on one level, the desire for a metamorphosis. Once wealthy, you
believe, everything will change. Your spirit finally will glitter, too.

This would have been the vision Kate evoked as the drinking miners, tired from
their work but happy to be in town, watched while she emerged from her cocoon,
gauze suspended above her like wings, and cheered while they imagined divine
grace had coupled with them, their spirits charged by the belief that they, too,
were in the midst of transformation, their wildest dreams airborne.

Ecstasies of Elevation

From the stage to the auditorium . . . invisible threads criss-cross
between . . . dancer’s legs and men’s opera glasses, in a network of
arousal and liaison.—Edmond and Jules de Goncourt,
Journal

Since at least the fourteenth century, dancers in the European tradition
have been aiming themselves toward the sky. From the mannered ladies and
gentlemen of the court, who often danced on their toes, to the masters of the
pirouette and the leap, to Loie Fuller, who, like Klondike Kate, succeeded in
floating her cloudlike clothing over her head, the general aspiration of
dancers has been, if not to fly, then certainly to appear as if they are in
flight.

The resulting illusion is even greater than it seems. For the sense is that
the dancer is free not only of gravity but of earthly existence altogether and
thus while moving into the more ephemeral realm of air becomes ephemeral
herself. Fittingly, as she fuses with the heavens above, she takes on a
metaphorical significance, too. Thus, Loie Fuller, who was described in an
astronomical simile by one witness as “a sun standing in a shower of
stars,” was understood by the Symbolist poet Mallarmé to be less a
woman than pure force, writing “with her body . . . a
poem liberated from any scribe’s instrument.”

Though graceful movements have been associated with lightness, the idea of the
dancer as a vision of purity had its apotheosis in the figure of the ballet
dancer Marie Taglioni. It was her role as the Sylph in the Romantic ballet
Les Sylphides
which made her famous. Soon after the opening of this
ballet at the Paris Opéra, women all over the city were fashioning their
hair as she did in a style called
à la Sylphide
. The story of
this ballet, set in what was, to a French audience, the exotic Scottish
countryside, appropriately wreathed in mist, appealed to the sensibilities of
the times. Seated comfortably before his hearth, the hero is approached by a
Sylph who has fallen in love with him. At last, forgetting the woman to whom he
is betrothed, he succumbs to the spirit’s delicate approaches, and pursues
her impulsively into the forest. We can guess at the ending already, as in so
many other Romantic tales, his passion will lead to doom. On his way into the
woods, he is given a potent scarf by a witch who claims he can use it to
capture the Sylph. But the scarf is cursed. When he wraps it around her, the
Sylph dissolves sweetly into pure air. And making his tragedy complete, while
she dies, the sound of far-off wedding bells can be heard, telling the hero
that at this moment, the woman he had abandoned has just married his best
friend. He has lost not just one lover but love itself.

The role was created for Taglioni. She was well suited to play a Sylph, who is
above all a spirit of the air. Taglioni was famous for lending her movements a
light, ethereal quality. When she danced, she seemed, as Lincoln Kirstein tells
us, as if she were enclosed within “an envelope of fairy remoteness and
chaste flirtations.” That she danced on point only increased the effect.
Though dancing on point had been seen on stage several decades earlier,
Taglioni succeeded in making the technique as quiet and graceful as it had
seemed loud and athletic before. Silent movement was a Romantic preference. One
of Taglioni’s teachers, the great Coulon, the man who developed what became
known as the
style Romantique
, found a way to make noisy pirouettes
and jumps silent by replacing the tapping heel of the eighteenth century with
satin slippers. To her own graceful execution of this skill, Taglioni added the
innovation of the tutu, with its gauzy transparency creating an even greater
impression of airiness. Through her dance, she succeeded in creating an
impression of purity that was unsurpassed.