The Book of the Courtesans (29 page)

So that we do not end these charming stories on such a lurid note, let us add
one more observation. Both Louis XV and Ludwig I of Bavaria had fallen under
another spell altogether. It was perhaps one of the reasons why the monarchs
were attracted to commoners in the first place. They were moved beyond
convention by a charm that belongs to none of us in particular but instead to
all at once. The charm of new winds, of fresh ideas that can shift fate in an
instant with the siren call of transformation.

The Invisible

My very existence was illegal.
—Quentin Crisp,
The Naked Civil Servant

They were supposed to be invisible. Indeed, according to the conventional
wisdom of the American South during the nineteenth century, quadroons were not
supposed to exist at all. Perhaps since to speak of these children was to
invoke the image of their lineage, they were never mentioned in polite society.
Their very existence proved what the principles of plantation aristocracy held
to be unthinkable: that unions took place between masters and slaves, which
would imply love and desire where it was not supposed to exist. And of course
there were other implications, too. Infidelity, rape and how masters, bosses,
and all kinds of white men used power.

The children who came of such unions were thus a source of embarrassment.
Yet, despite the prohibition against knowledge and perhaps because of the
strong passion the mind has for locution, a strange nomenclature developed:
categorization by fractions of blood. One black parent: mulatto; one black
grandparent: quadroon; one black great-grandparent: octaroon. A system that
moved by degrees through a hierarchy whose crowning achievement would be the
erasure of any hint of scandal.

But as is often the case with the vocabulary of injustice, an irony soon
developed. The words “mulatto,” “quadroon,” “
octaroon” took on a power of their own. To pronounce them at all was to
conjure a powerful fascination. That these words were allied with all that was
forbidden gave them a certain inalienable force (such is the justice of
language).

Thus the same words that were used to pinion and shame children into
invisibility also made for a narrow opening, a door through which a few could
escape the harsh conditions of the times. In New Orleans, for instance,
sometimes right next to the debutante dances, an event would be held called the
Quadroon Ball. Here, just as at the Bal Mabille in Paris, a young woman born to
difficult circumstances and designated quadroon might meet a wealthy man who
would keep her in a very fine style.

Accordingly, a neighborhood came to exist in New Orleans that, like a region of
the mind kept separate from waking thoughts, was, if not as invisible as its
inhabitants, in disguise. The area of the city where the highly educated
African-American mistresses of wealthy men were kept by white southern
gentlemen had a fancy name, one that only regular visitors would be able to
understand. It was called the Marigny Quarter. By using her brother’s name,
the term made a sly reference to the most famous of all the courtesans, La
Pompadour.

Here a woman might live in her own cottage. When she went out, dressed in the
finest clothing, of course, she would be driven in her own coach with a
splendid pair of horses. And though the sum must be large, no one has counted
all the friends and members of her family who, along with being better fed,
were saved from unnamed cruelties when she did what she could to influence fate
through her not inconsiderable charms.

Do with Me What You Please

Though Marie Duplessis gave the impression of belonging to a more elegant
tradition that was waning, she was also a harbinger of what was to come.
Looking back, we can see that her famous charm was comprised of the
complexities that characterized the times, the fourth decade of the ninteenth
century, a period in which the ruler of France, Louis Philippe, was known
paradoxically as the Citizen King. Her beauty, grace, wit, and enthusiasm for
life were all wrapped in a remarkably supple style. To her lovers, she gave the
impression that she was the opposite of willful. It was said of her that if
Lola Montez could not make friends, Marie Duplessis could not make enemies. One
drawing made of her in this period captures the vaunted impression. She is
rendered with such softly contoured lines, it seems as if she would bend to the
wind of any man’s desire.

This was, in the end, the way Dumas
fils
portrayed Marie, first in
the novel, and then in the play that would make her, if not immortal, at least
a fixture in the European mind for over a century as the character Marguerite.
Those of us who attend the opera still encounter the same character today as
Violetta Valéry in Verdi’s
La Traviata
and filmgoers will
recognize her in the character Greta Garbo portrayed in George Cukor’s
Camille
. But in order to create such a compliant character, the
playwright had to change the narrative of Duplessis’s life.

It is true that after they met one night at the Théâtre des Varié
tés, the two had a torrid affair. This was one of those liaisons for which
courtesans did not charge. Marie claimed to be in love with Dumas
fils.
He was in love too and wanted her for himself alone. He resented the
evenings when because she was entertaining one of her protectors the door was
locked against him. But they both knew he could not afford to support her in
the style to which she had become accustomed. And most likely she understood
that he would never marry her. Not because, as in the play, his father would
have objected. The playwright’s father, Alexandre Dumas, was a famous
womanizer (a lover briefly of Lola Montez). Rather, it was the son’s own
ambition that would not have allowed such a marriage to take place. When he did
finally marry, it was to an aristocrat.

Duplessis did not sacrifice herself, as Marguerite does in the play, leaving
her lover Armand in order to preserve his reputation. Rather, because Dumas
fils
was tired of sharing her with others, and since she refused to
sacrifice her only income, it was he who left her. Nor did Duplessis pine for
him the way Marguerite does so movingly. Instead, after he left her, motivated
in no small part by her own ambition, she married her longtime protector, comte
Edouard de Perregaux. Because his family never accepted the marriage, it was
annulled and they never lived together. But this did not prevent her from
retaining the title of countess. She had her stationery and a set of china
embellished with the Perregaux family crest.

Far from languishing in grief over either Dumas
fils
or Perregaux,
Duplessis took one more lover still before she died, the composer and pianist
Franz Liszt. What was to be the last was probably also her most passionate
affair. An offer she made to him has been cited as evidence of her acquiescent
nature. “Take me, lead me wherever you like,” she said. “I
will be no trouble to you. I sleep all day, go to the theatre in the evenings
and at night you can do with me whatever you please.” Yet here we can see
the great effect of her particular charm at work. While asking for what she
wanted, she was able to create the illusion of suppliance.

Reading more closely, we can see that reversing the roles assigned to men and
women in courtship, she is the one to suggest that they go off together. Though
protesting that she will be no trouble, she gracefully suggests that she will
not change her own eccentric habits while she is with him. And since she had
already experienced what Liszt liked to do with her at night and indeed seems
to have liked very much, what seems a generous offer is in reality a graceful
expression of her own desire.

Yet, if those who loved her were encouraged to feel that it was they rather
than she who were in control, there was a seed of truth to the illusion. She
had relinquished control in an area where many of us never choose to succumb.
Chronically ill from tuberculosis, though she sought the best medical advice,
including that of Liszt’s own doctor, and made the rounds of several spas
more than once, she had the sense that she would not live long. She seemed to
accept this verdict with a kind of equanimity. She was not bitter. Her only
complaint was boredom. She found it intolerable to be bored for any length of
time. A suitor who failed to interest her would be treated with open yawns or
banished from her presence. Not only regarding sexual desire but in this sense
too she was a harbinger of a new order. Where before men demanded that the
courtesans they supported be entertaining, now she demanded to be entertained
by her lovers.

She was kind, it is true, giving money generously to women less fortunate than
herself, but she did not contort herself to try to please her lovers. It is
also true that she made up stories about her life which made her slightly more
glamorous. But her intent was not to hide her past. She was remarkably frank
about her origins: the poverty she had endured as the daughter of an itinerant
salesman, her father’s brutal attacks on her mother, the fact that he sold
her into prostitution when she was barely thirteen years old. She concealed
none of this. She once said, “Lying keeps your teeth white,” a
remark that gives us a clue to a deeper motive. She was entertaining herself.

It was something else that made her so extraordinary: her awareness of
mortality. Passionately in love with life, exuberant at times, by turns free of
constraints and yet well trained in all the manners of polite society,
exquisitely refined, she possessed the composure that can only come from
detachment. Was this what Dumas
fils
was aiming for in his portrait of
her? It is a quality that saints share with the dying, a sense that artists
have only when they are practicing their art. This must have been what Liszt
meant when he wrote that being with her put him in the vein of poetry and music.

The Blue Angel

Moreover she will endeavor to enchant thee partly with her melodious
notes that she warbles out upon her lute . .
 . and partly with that heart-tempting voice of
hers.—Thomas Coryat,
1608

In the ancient world all flutes were halfway to being magic ones.
—James Davidson,
Courtesans and Fishcakes

A few years before the film called
The Blue Angel
appeared in
1930
, the old codes had already begun to lose their power.
Here and there, more and more women born to respectable families were going
out alone, daring to show their legs and smoke, and among them was the young
actress whom the world would one day know as Marlene Dietrich. Seen often on
Berlin’s Kurfurstendam at night, she moved from one cabaret to another,
studying the techniques of showgirls as she partied. Soon she was appearing as
a showgirl herself, and then in minor parts of plays.

She is not called a courtesan, though in an earlier age she might have been.
Years later at dinner parties given by her friend, the director Billy Wilder,
she would entertain his guests by listing all the lovers, both men and women,
she had had as a young woman in Berlin. In
1924
, at the
height of her revels, she married Rudolf Sieber and lived with him for more
than five years; yet she continued her affairs. In the meantime, Sieber, who
was a casting director for UFA film studios, was able to get her several small
roles in movies.

Then, like Pompadour, who left her husband for Louis XV (or Alice Ozy, who
abandoned hers for the duc d’Aumale), though Dietrich remained married to
Sieber until he died, she left both him and Berlin for the man who made her
famous, the director Josef von Sternberg. Before bringing her to Hollywood,
Sternberg cast her in a film about cabaret life. She became an overnight
success in the role of a singer who lures a man to his doom.

In the fading imagery of the old film, we watch as a story that reflects the
downfall of an old order is told. An ageing professor hectors his students,
lecturing against the seductive powers of a popular nightclub singer. This
voice will lure you to damnation, he warns them. Thus we know he is making a
mistake when he decides to witness her for himself. Especially since the club
is called the Blue Angel. “Blue,” the word for drunkenness in
German, is also the color of moonlight, of the waters over which the siren’
s voice wails, of nighttime thoughts and haunting melodies. Will she enchant
him with her throaty voice? How could it be otherwise? Eventually, he will even
consent to dance with her on the stage.

We have seen this story many times before. The same tale has been told for
millennia. The thrilling powers of the Queen of the Night; the insinuating
charm of music. As far back as ancient Greece, the same powerful lure was used
by Dionysus and the Furies and by the sirens, too, and the auletrides, the
flute-girls who played and danced at feasts, beguiling all those who listened
(including the great warrior Alexander who, according to legend, under the
influence of music so lost his bearings that he ran for his sword). A music
continued by the courtesans of Venice, by Ninon with her lute, and still going
strong two hundred years later as charming women sang in the music halls that
lined the boulevards of Paris. What is happening here in this little café
in Berlin is nothing new.

Though we are glad even now to see the self-righteous professor fall, we are
saddened by the humiliation into which enchantment has led him. But this does
not prevent us from listening. The low and alluring tone of the singer’s
voice summons a mysterious mood in the mind, a dangerous but also oddly
familiar place that lurks between one thought and another. As this woman, in
her top hat, with a voice like a man, sings a song about love, we ourselves are
drawn away from the straight course we had charted. We cannot help it. We are
falling in love again.