The Book of the Courtesans (31 page)

LANTHéLME WENT OFF
with Misia’s husband.
But the affair did not last long. While on a pleasure cruise, she either fell
or was pushed from the open window of her stateroom. Her body was recovered
hours after she had drowned.

SINCE LA BELLE
Otero blew her fortune at the
tables on the Riviera, she would have been destitute had not the owners of the
casinos where she lost all her money given her a pension. But then again, if we
were to make a list of all the disasters that might have befallen her during
her lifetime, it would be very long. She lived simply but comfortably in Nice
until her death. She never lost her style. Even in an altered, elderly shape,
when she entered a room, heads turned.

AFTER PAïVA HAD
her marriage with the
penniless marquis who had given her a title annulled, she married one of the
wealthiest men in Europe, Henckel de Donnersmark. The ostentatiously
resplendent Hôtel Païva, which still exists today on the Champs-
Elysées (now the home of an exclusive men’s club called the Players),
was a gift from him. He also bought her the Château de Pontchartrain,
situated on the route from Paris to Dreux, the palace made famous two centuries
earlier by the amorous visits of Louis XIV and his favorite Louise de la
Vallière. Since Henckel was a Prussian count, however, with the advent of
the Prussian War, the couple was forced to leave France and settle instead on a
family estate in Silesia. When Païva died at the age of sixty-one, she had
amassed the largest fortune ever owned by a courtesan.

IT HAS BEEN
supposed by some that Veronica
Franco repented late in life, but most scholars agree that the evidence for
this is slim. In a letter she wrote to a friend who was considering turning her
daughter into a courtesan, Franco wrote: “You can do nothing worse in
this life . . . than to force the body into such
servitude . . . to give oneself in prey to so many, to risk
being despoiled, robbed or killed. To eat with someone else’s mouth, to
sleep with the eyes of others, to move as someone else desires, and to risk the
shipwreck of your faculties and your life—what fate could be worse?”

In fact, the impassioned tone of her letter does not contradict the
passionate defense she made of courtesanry, but instead outlines the perils
courtesans faced, especially when they were not among the most successful. In
the end, she herself was to join the ranks of the less privileged in her
profession. The last years of her life, during which she was supporting her
brother’s children as well as her own, were not prosperous. Circumstances
took their inevitable toll. She died of fever at the age of forty-five.

IN 1531, WHEN
she was barely twenty years
old, Tullia D’Aragona was the reigning courtesan of Rome. But by
1535
, she and her mother, the courtesan Giulia Campana,
moved to Adria, perhaps to conceal the birth of a daughter, Penelope,
officially listed as Giulia’s child but widely thought to be Tullia’s.
In the ensuing years, in several
different cities, including Venice, Ferrara, and Florence, Tullia flourished
both as a courtesan and as an intellectual. Her friendship with the respected
philosopher Benedetto Varchi furthered her ca-reer.

As Tullia entered her late thirties, she tried to fashion a new life, free
of her most profitable vocation. She founded an academy in Florence, where she
organized debates and provided musical entertainment on the lute, at which she
was famously skilled. When her academy achieved great success, she became one
of the most notable figures in Renaissance Florence. But this glory was
interrupted after potentially scandalous charges of violating the sumptuary
laws required for courtesans were brought against her. The law would have
prohibited her from wearing silks or jewels, at the same time requiring that
she wear the scarf with a yellow border used to identify prostitutes. Along
with Varchi, Eleanora de Toledo, the duchess of Florence, came to her aid, and
Tullia was acquitted and freed from the sumptuary requirements. And hence she
began a flurry of writing and publishing, which included the
Dialogue on
the Infinity of Love
.

But her intellectual pursuits did not pay her bills. She was forced to leave
Florence, a man she loved passionately, and her patron Varchi. In Rome, Tullia,
her mother, and Penelope rented small lodgings in a fashionable part of the
city, probably hoping to finance their household when Penelope, nearing
fourteen, was presented as a courtesan. But the child’s career as well as
her life was short. She died in
1549
. Tullia’s
history is lost to us now. We find her again only in
1555
,
as she writes her will in a room, in the Trastevere, which she rented from a
former maid Lucrezia and her husband, Matteo. What little she had to
leave—furniture, jewelry, clothing—was carefully apportioned to a
son, Celio; Lucrezia and Matteo; her young maid, Christofara; and the
percentage that the church required from courtesans when they died. Apparently
devoting herself to good works at the end of her life, she had made her peace
with the church. She requested that no one attend her funeral except members of
the Company of the Crucifix, to which she belonged at the time of her death.

NINON DE LENCLOS
remained uncertain about
religion all her life, though this uncertainty did not prevent an abbé
from falling in love with her when she was eighty years old. In her inimitable
fashion, she continued to enjoy life and inspire admiration until her last
breath at the ripe old age of eighty-five. True to her lucidly honest character
to the end, just before her death, asking for pen and paper, she wrote:

Let no vain hope be held out to make my courage waver.

I am of an age to die, what is there left for me to do here?

After which she closed her eyes and died.

WE HAVE ALREADY
described Imperia’s
death. But we have not yet told the famous story of what happened to her
daughter several years later. Lucrezia was known to be as beautiful as her
mother. Probably for this reason, when Cardinal Raphael Petrucci, accompanied
by troops, arrived in the town in Tuscany where Lucrezia and her husband lived
in
1522
, he had Archangelo arrested on trumped-up charges.
His plan was to bargain for Lucrezia’s sexual favors with Archangelo’s
freedom. But when his messengers summoned her, saying simply that she wanted to
change her clothes, Lucrezia, as her mother once did, took poison. This story
however has a happier ending. Lucrezia recovered, and the tale of how she saved
her honor was repeated for generations throughout Italy.

AFTER AN ESTIMABLE
career as an entertainer and
courtesan, Emilienne d’Alençon married an aristocratic army officer
and thus like many courtesans before her gained the title of countess. From
this new position, she hosted a literary salon and wrote a book of poems
herself, called
The Temple of Love
. But the marriage was short-lived.
Soon after, she became the lover of the famous jockey, Alec Carter. After he
was killed in World War I, she became part of the circle that gathered in
Natalie Barney’s rooms on the rue Jacob, where she devoted herself to the
love of women and poetry, as well as experimentation with drugs. Earlier the
lover of Liane de Pougy, she was also the lover of the poet Renée Vivien,
who had been Barney’s lover, Valtesse de la Bigne, and Madame Brazier, the
proprietress of the lesbian bar Le Hammaton, with whom she was depicted sitting
in a box in the theatre by Toulouse-Lautrec. She was last sighted in
1940
at a casino in Monte Carlo, at age seventy, still
looking good.

MARION DAVIES CONTINUED
to act, sing, and dance in
film until she made her last movie in
1939
. After the
death of Hearst’s mother and his separation from his wife, Hearst and
Davies divided their time between San Simeon, the older estate at Mount Shasta
called Wyntoon, and Southern California. They continued as lovers for thirty-
nine years, until Hearst died in
1951
after an extended
illness. In a codicil to his will, he had left his longtime lover thirty
thousand shares of preferred stock, yielding her an annual income of
$
150
,
000
. Six weeks after his death,
when she was fifty-four years old, Marion married Horace Gates Brown III, an
old friend of her sister, and frequent visitor to San Simeon, a man who was
said to bear a remarkable resemblance to Hearst. They remained married for the
rest of her life.

She augmented her already considerable real estate holdings with several
purchases. But though more than comfortable, her last years were quiet. That
she was still a hard drinker did little to mitigate the fact that gaiety is
harder to summon in isolation than in a crowd. Many of her fellow revelers gone,
in a sense there was no one left to party with, though her old friend Joseph
Kennedy did what he could. She attended the wedding of Jacqueline Bouvier to
John F. Kennedy and she was an honored guest at Kennedy’s inauguration.
Three years later, a life of heavy drinking having caught up with her, she
suffered a minor stroke, and soon after at the age of sixty-four, she succumbed
to cancer.

PROSPEROUS TO THE
end, Alice Ozy multiplied
her resources several times by investing successfully on the Bourse. Of her
talent to make money grow, Gautier once said, “If I had a sack of
diamonds I would trust them with Alice Ozy. She would soon give me back more
than I had left with her.” Gustave Doré was her last lover. At fifty
years of age, with a fashionable apartment on the boulevard Haussmann and her
own château facing Lake Enghien in Switzerland, she was able to say,
“I am growing old with dignity.” By sixty-five, having changed her
name back to Madame Pilloy and become respectable, she had grown somewhat stout
and unhappy in her aging solitude; but at least she understood what she was
missing. And she must have remembered the hard times of her childhood, too,
when, before she died at seventy-two years of age, she wrote a will leaving all
of her fortune,
2
,
900
,
000
francs, to a society for the nurturing and education
of the children of impoverished actors.

WHILE SHE WAS
building and maintaining a
successful career as a performer, Klondike Kate fell in love with the
businessman, Alexander Pantages, whose name would later become a household word
due to the string of vaudeville and movie houses he owned. After she invested
in his first theatre, she went on tour, only to find that in her absence he had
married a much younger woman. She sued him for breach of promise but won only a
small settlement.

Kate returned briefly to the stage before marrying a cowboy, but the
marriage did not last long. Then she suffered a decline for a period, making
money by bootlegging and possibly also procuring. But a few years later, when
Pantages was sued and convicted for raping a seventeen-year-old actress he
employed at one of his theatres, Kate gained some notoriety by testifying
against him at his trial.

Her former lover was sentenced to fifty years in prison, which must have
improved her mood, because shortly thereafter her life took an upward turn
again. Still attractive and lively at fifty-seven, when she decided she wanted
to marry, she found she had two choices. She fixed on Johnny Matson, a
successful miner who had worshipped her from a distance during the old Klondike
days. Reading of her in the newspaper accounts of the Pantages trial, he looked
her up and began to court her. They were happily married for thirteen years,
until his death in
1945
.

Two years later, at the age of seventy-two, she married the second man who had
been courting her, William L. Van Duren. During the ceremony, her seventy-one-
year-old groom commented, “Time is of the essence.” Kate replied,
“I was the flower of the North, but the petals are falling awfully fast,
honey.” The last petal fell eight years later. She died peacefully and,
as she had told a reporter a year earlier, “with no regrets.” A
portrait of her remains with us in the character of Cherry Malotte, the heroine
of Rex Beach’s
Silver Horde
.

ONLY A MONTH
into a shipboard romance,
Nijinsky precipitously married an admirer and fellow ballet dancer, Romola
Pulszky. His former lover, Diaghilev, felt betrayed and eventually responded by
dismissing the dancer from the Ballets Russes. After a hiatus, Diaghilev
brought the dancer back into the company, with which he continued his legendary
work. Psychologically fragile, his despair and irrational rages began to worsen,
undermining his work, his marriage, and finally everything he did. Creative
even in madness, he wrote an extraordinary diary that records his state of mind.
Though Romola had other erotic liaisons, she remained loyal to him for the
rest of his life. Nijinsky’s illness prevented him from performing as a
dancer or a choreographer ever again. After years of breakdowns and attempts at
recovery, he died at the age of sixty-one.

ALWAYS OF FRAGILE
health, La Pompadour was cast into
mourning by two deaths in the royal family, those of Madame Infante and the ten-
year-old duc de Bourgogne. Her mood had already been dampened by the Seven
Years’ War, which she feared would tarnish the king’s glory. “If
I die,” she said, “it will be of grief.” Thus, at the end of
her life, she and the king reversed roles. Now it was Louis who tried to cheer
her up. Hoping that time spent in a more intimate space away from the worries
of the palace might revive her spirits, he commissioned the Petit Trianon. But
it came too late. By the time she died, only the outer walls had been raised.