The Book of the Courtesans (32 page)

No doubt she was worn out, too, by what she called her “perpetual
combat” to keep the king’s affections. She had not been his lover for
years, and now his attention was straying toward a Mademoiselle Romains, who
bore him a son and whom he had set up in a house in Passy.

He soon wearied of the young woman, however, and Pompadour was not replaced.
When, in
1763
, she made her last public appearance at the
ceremonies held to celebrate the placement of an equestrian statue of Louis in
the center of the newly designed Place de la Concorde, for which she had been
responsible, the woman who would one day take her place, the young Jeanne du
Barry, was in the crowds. But Pompadour would not live to see another
ma"tresse en titre
enter Versailles. In the following year while she
was at Choisy, she had an attack of illness so severe it became clear she would
die soon. She was just forty years old.

Despite the rule that only royal family members were allowed to die in the
rooms of Versailles, the king brought her back to her rooms at the palace where,
because her lungs were filled with fluid, to make her breathing easier, she
sat up a chair and received the last visits of her friends. The king stayed by
her side for days, until, because her doctors said that she was dying, a priest
was sent for so that she could give her confession. The king could not be in
her presence after this, and thus the priest was alone with her when she died.
Her last words were addressed to him as he prepared to leave the room. “
One moment, M. le Curé,” she said to him. “We’ll go
together.” And then she died.

For propriety’s sake, the king could only follow her funeral cortège
with his eyes. As her body was borne off to Paris, he watched from his balcony
until she had left the range of his vision. When he turned away, tears were
seen pouring from his eyes. “
Elle avait de la justesse dans l’
esprit et la justice dans le coeur,”
“She had rightness in her
spirit and justice in her heart,” wrote Voltaire. “We shall miss
her every day. . . . It is the end of a dream.”

WE DO NOT
know exactly when or how Phyrne
died. We do know that her image was sculpted more than once by Praxiteles, and
by that Botticelli took this image as inspiration for his
Birth of
Venus
. She became so wealthy that after the Macedonians destroyed the city
of Thebes, she offered to pay for the walls to be rebuilt, providing they bore
the inscription: “Alexander may have knocked it down, but Phyrne the
hetaera got it back up again.”

BETWEEN THE DEATH
of Louis XV and her own, Jeanne du
Barry lived several lives. Her story recalls the wisdom of certain folk tales
meant to show that fortune, which is never predictable, often turns out to be
the opposite of what it seems to be at first. Risking exposure to smallpox, she
sat faithfully by the king’s bedside for days as he grew more ill; but just
before he died, in an act of repentance for his sins, he asked that his
mistress leave Versailles. She spent several nights in a château belonging
to the duc d’Aiguillon before the king died, when she was ordered to enter
the Abbaye de Pont-aux-Dames. She never learned that it was her own lover who
had decreed this fate. To be banished to this decrepit convent, which was dark
and damp, must have felt like an unjust punishment. But reverting to the modest
demeanor she had before she became the king’s favorite, the countess soon
won the friendship of the abbess, Madame de la Roche Fontenelles, with whom she
spent many hours in conversation. When, after a year, she was allowed to leave
the convent, the other nuns wept at her departure.

Slowly she regained some of the wealth she had accumulated at Versailles.
With her collection of jewelry, said to be the most valuable in Europe, the
properties she owned, and the rents she received from shops in Paris, in
addition to the annual income left to her by the king, she was not poor. After
living for a time in a newly acquired, very large estate, Saint-Vrain, she was
able to move the extraordinary paintings by Greuze, Fragonard, Vernet, and Van
Dyke, and the elegant furniture she had acquired under Louis’ patronage,
back to her estate at Louveciennes. Soon she became the lover of her neighbor,
Lord Henry Seymour, nephew of the Duke of Somerset, but this affair ended badly.
Henry, who was married, was given to jealousy, and objected to her friendships
with other men. Though she tried unsuccessfully to regain Seymour’s
affections, he steadfastly snubbed all her attempts, peavishly sending back her
miniature portrait with the words “Leave me alone” written across
it.

But good luck often disguises itself as misfortune. It was because Seymour was
so rejecting that Jeanne became the lover of the duc de Brissac. With his wife
seemingly indifferent to his conduct, Brissac and du Barry became a devoted
couple, dividing their time between her estate at Louveciennes and his hô
tel on the rue de Grenelle. Wealthy himself, Brissac supported her in the style
in which she had been indulged as the king’s favorite. And paradoxically,
as his mistress, she was more acceptable to the aristocracy than she had been
as the king’s favorite. She became a beloved figure in aristocratic society.
Over time, she even gained the approval of the royal family.

Though Brissac was loyal to the crown, it was under his influence that she
began to read the
Encyclopédistes
and to entertain liberal ideas.
Because of her generosity, du Barry was well liked in the village near her
estate, but to revolutionaries the king’s favorites were symbols of royal
corruption. And in the end, as the Revolution unseated the king and proceeded
toward more and more violence, both Brissac and du Barry sided with the
royalists. In the chaos of change, her great collection of jewelry was stolen
from her. But this, as it turned out, was to be the least of her losses. After
Brissac was arrested, he was killed by a mob who rushed to Louveciennes with
his head on a stick to parade in front of the comtesse’s windows. We might
suppose that fortune finally favored her again when her jewels were discovered
in London. But just as good fortune arrives disguised as bad luck, the reverse
is also true. She made several trips to England—first to identify the
collection and then to appear in court—and it was during these trips that
she began to lend support to royalist émigrés in London.

It is supposed that she fell in love with one of Brissac’s old friends
there, because after he returned to France, despite evident dangers, she
returned to France, only to be arrested, accused of treason, and after several
months in prison, condemned to death. Over a lifetime she had showed remarkable
courage on many occasions, but at the end her bravery deserted her. Perhaps her
pluck came from an intense love of earthly pleasures. Somewhat portly now, her
hair gray, clearly aging, still she did not go quietly, but rather wept and
struggled as she was carried to the guillotine. Perhaps it was because at this
moment she so little resembled the popular picture of her as an arrogant whore
that crowds in the Place de la Concorde did not cheer at her death.

LOLA MONTEZ EVENTUALLY
landed in America,
where she toured in a play based on her life called
Lola Montez in
Bavaria
. She settled for a while in Grass Valley, Nevada, where she was
well liked. But though she had mellowed somewhat, her life was still tumultuous.
While on tour, when her company was sailing to South America, one of her
lovers disappeared into the Pacific Ocean. Later, though the American press
reported that she had married an Austrian prince during a tour of Europe, it
was he who jilted her. She covered the damage, however, with her own version of
events, claiming that she left him because he had taken up with a singer.

In her last years Montez shifted her profession from actress to lecturer,
including among her topics “The Comic Aspects of Love,” “Wits
and Women of Paris,” and “Gallantry.” The publication of her
letters proved so successful that she followed this with
The Arts of Beauty,
or Secrets of a Lady’s Toilet, with Hints to Gentlemen on the Art of
Fascinating
. Prosperous for a while, at her home in upper New York State
she hosted a small salon, masterfully inciting and guiding witty conversation
while she smoked cigars. Though her disregard for the truth continued unabated,
in her last years she tried to become what was then called “a good
Christian.” But financial need forced her onto the lecture circuit again.
For the first time since her childhood, she returned to Ireland, and later
spoke in Britain as an expert on America. Returning to America, she lectured
throughout the country on England.

Finally she had earned enough respect and success to feel certain of her future.
Yet within a few months, on a very hot day in New York, she suffered a stroke.
With her formidable will, she struggled back to health, even walking again with
a cane. She seemed on the road to full recovery and spent some time at the New
York Magdalene Society counseling women who were trying to give up prostitution.
But on Christmas Day, a walk in the cold windy air proved fatal. Stricken with
pneumonia, she did not recover. She was forty years old when she died,
listening as, at her request, a friend read her passages from the Bible.

THE GREAT SARAH
BERNHARDT
was able to give up
galanterie
after
she made millions from her tours in the New World. Her leg had to be amputated,
yet she continued with her brilliant career, carried onto the stage, seated in
a chair or propped up. She traveled to the front to entertain soldiers during
World War I, and performed in the theatre through her late seventies. One of
her last appearances was organized to benefit Madame Curie’s laboratory.
When her failing body forced her to give up the stage, she appeared in a film.
“There was nothing left of her,” the young actress Mary Marquet
wrote. But when the director shouted “Camera!” suddenly she rose
from her torpor. As Marquet remembered it, “her face lit up, her eyes
were shining, and she demanded, ’What should I do?’ in a voice that
seemed suddenly strong and young. She had just dropped thirty years.” A
few months later, at the age of seventy-nine, her health finally failed.

Colette has given us a portrait of her at the end. “I record here one
of the last gestures of the tragedienne approaching her eightieth year: a
delicate faded hand offering a full cup; the cornflower blue of her eyes, so
young, caught in a web of wrinkles; the laughing interrogative coquetry of the
turn of her head. And that indomitable, endless desire to charm, to charm again,
to charm even unto the gates of death.”

As if proving the truth of Colette’s words, on her deathbed she asked her
son Maurice to make certain that her coffin was covered in lilacs. As the
funeral cortège, followed by one of the largest crowds ever seen in modern
France, moved from the Church of Sainte-Françoise-de-Sâles to Pè
re Lachaise, the mourners stopped for a moment of reverent silence in front of
the Théâtre Sarah Bernhardt, transfixed by the memory of her golden
voice.

Glossary

les abonnés:
subscribers to the ballet, and also
men who pursued dancers and courtesans

Accademia:
gatherings of men and women in Rome, Venice, and
Florence during the Renaissance who met to share a meal and discuss art and
ideas; occasions which wives could not attend but at which courtesans often
were present

les agenouillées:
literally, the kneeling ones, slang for
courtesans who did have occasion to kneel at times

les amazones:
the word used for the masculine riding costume
women wore and for the women who wore it; also a code word for courtesans who,
even if they were not always androgynous in manner, took the prerogatives of
men

auletrides:
young women who played the flute for hire at
banquets for men in ancient Rome. In addition to playing the flute at the
beginning of the evening, they would often engage in prostitution at its
end

le Beau Monde:
literally, the beautiful world; fashionable
society, which included courtesans

les belles petites:
term for courtesans

les biches:
a term for courtesans and
lorettes;
using
the image of a doe, the term expresses and projects the animality that men
associated with courtesans

le bon ton:
good taste; the fashionable crowd

le boulevard:
“The Paris of the Parisians,” wrote
Cornelia Otis Skinner, “began at the Madeleine and ended at Tortoni’s.
 . . .”

boulevardier: “
The term boulevardier was now invented to
describe men whose principal accomplishment consisted in appearing at the
proper moment in the proper café,” writes Roger Shattuck. As Roger
Moréas described, this moment went on for hours. “In the old days, I
arrived around one in the afternoon . . . stayed until
seven and then went to dine. At about eight we came back and didn’t leave
until one in the morning.”

camélias:
another code word for courtesans, derived from
the play by Alexandre Dumas
fils, La Dame aux camélias

cocodès:
in English in the
1920
s
and
1930
s, the translation would have been “
swells”—men out for a good time who were willing and able to pay
for it

cocodette:
a déclassé society woman, excluded from
high society because of scandal or divorce, who lived the life of a courtesan
while preserving her upper-class manners. Thus, according to Philippe Perrot,
helping to blur the demarcations between “zones of social hierarchy”

cocotte:
literally, hen; a slang term used for both
prostitutes and courtesans

coquette:
a flirt

cortigiana:
Italian term originally coined in Rome to mean
courtesans who learned many of the skills of courtiers; it came to apply to
prostitutes as well

cortigiana oneste:
in Italy, particularly Venice, an honored
courtesan as distinct from a prostitute

cortigiano:
Italian for courtier

courtisane:
French for courtesan

dames galantes:
see
femmes galantes

dégrafée:
unhooked, unclasped, unbuttoned; another
term for a courtesan

demi-castor:
a word for a particular kind of courtesan, a
middle-class or bourgeois woman, often unmarriageable due to scandal, who
instead of being supported directly would be given expensive gifts by her
lovers. Laure Hayman, the mistress of Marcel Proust’s uncle, whom Proust
used as a model for Odette Crécy in
A la recherche du temps perdu
,
was considered a
demicastor

demi-mondaines:
women in the
demi-monde
, not all of
whom were courtesans. KiKi of Montparnasse, for instance, was a
demi-
mondaine
but not a courtesan

demi-monde:
the alternative world of gentlemen, artists,
writers, social rebels, actors, courtesans, and
lorettes
which existed
in Paris throughout the nineteenth century. The word was coined by Alexandre
Dumas
fils
in his play
Le Demi-Monde
, though the definition
changed

demi-reps:
British term for wellborn women who became
courtesans

deshabillés:
literally, undressed, partly undressed, or
undressing; a term for courtesans

diseur de mots:
a witty man, usually to be found in a café
on one of the Grand Boulevards

the fashionable impure:
since purity meant chastity in a woman,
the impure were women who were not chaste but were fashionable. Usually but
not always courtesans

favorites:
the women chosen or “favored” and kept
by French kings and emperors

femmes galantes:
most often courtesans, living a life of
galanterie
; the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century analogue of the
demi-mondaines

femmes honnêtes:
respectable women; but the term
honnête
came to mean authentic in the seventeenth and eighteenth
centuries, and as such was applied to both Ninon de Lenclos and Jeanne du
Barry

femmes légères:
women who take moral lessons lightly;
courtesans

fille d’amour:
a young woman who was either a courtesan or
a potential one

filles de marbres:
courtesans and
lorettes
; taken
from a popular play of the nineteenth century,
Les Filles de
Marbre

galanterie:
the sensual and amorous life led by aristocrats in
France in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries; also used for the pursuit
of pleasures, especially amorous and especially with courtesans in the
nineteenth century

galants:
men who were well mannered and elegant, often
pursuing women while they led fashionably debauched lives

garde-robe:
wardrobe, an essential word in the lexicon of the
courtesan

gay:
the word now used for homosexual once implied the
presence of courtesans, hence gaiety

Gay Nineties:
the Belle Epoque, famous for its courtesans and
their wild behavior, whose epicenter was Paris, and within Paris, Maxim’
s

“Gay Paree”:
the risqué world of courtesanry,
artistic rebellion, and general mischief that attracted initiates and tourists
from around the world

grandes horizontales:
a term for courtesans that was
especially popular in the Belle Epoque and the fin-de-siècle

les Grandes Trois:
Liane de Pougy, Caroline Otero, and
Emilienne d’Alençon, the three most sought-after courtesans of the
Belle Epoque

le grand monde:
high society, the upper classes;
le
petit monde:
the working classes

les Grands Boulevards:
the great boulevards in Paris that run
from the eleventh arrondissement to the first, from the Bastille to the
Madeleine, including boulevard des Italiens, boulevard Montmartre, boulevard
Haussmann, boulevard Bonne-Nouvelle, boulevard du Crime, boulevard du Temple,
etc.

le Grand Seize:
the private room reserved for royalty and the
courtesans they invited upstairs at the Café Anglais

grisette:
literally, milliner’s assistant, but the word
applied to seamstresses and shopgirls too. Since these women were paid so
little and had few prospects, many engaged in casual prostitution, hence the
meaning: a woman of “easy virtue.” Madame du Barry began as a
grisette
, as did Marie Duplessis and Alice Ozy

hetaera:
courtesan in ancient Greece; sometimes also a
priestess of Aphrodite

high life:
in French, as taken from English, “le high
life” (pronounced to rhyme with “fig leaf”). It meant an
elegant good time filled with almost constant revelry

honnête homme:
one of several names by which Ninon de
Lenclos was called in Paris—
Il n’y a point de plus honnête
homme que Mlle Lenclos
(There is no more honest man than Mademoiselle
Lenclos). Among other names, she was known as
la belle courtisane
and
la vieille courtesan

impure:
not chaste; courtesan

Jockey Club:
the club, founded by Lord Seymour, father of
Richard Wallace, Alice Ozy’s famous protector, whose aristocratic members
shared an enthusiasm for the British custom of racing horses. They were also
famous for their enthusiasm for courtesans

jolies filles:
beautiful girls—applied to
grisettes
,
lorettes
, courtesans, and
demi-mondaines
alike

joyeuse:
blithe and gay; also the term for a courtesan

libertinage:
philosophically, the attempt to reconcile
Epicureanism with Christianity, led by Pierre Gassendi; also refers to the
activities of libertines, who indulged freely in sensual pleasure

libertine:
a man who practices libertinage, the equivalent of
sex, drugs, and rock and roll during the Ancien Régime

lion:
as in social lion, for whom, at least in Paris, keeping
a courtesan was de rigueur, and belonging to the Jockey Club almost equally
obligatory

lionne:
pursued, chased, and kept by one or more
lions

lorette:
a kind of minor league courtesan, part of the gay
life along the boulevards, supported but not in the grandest style, usually
hoping for advancement. So many lived in the neighborhood of the church called
La Dame des Lorettes in the ninth arrondissement that the
boulevardier
Nestor Rocqueplan christened them “
lorettes.
” “A marvelous lorette of the tall sort,”
Delacroix wrote in a letter to George Sand, “all clad in black satin and
velvet . . . when alighting from her cabriolet let me see
up her leg to her belly, with the nonchalance of a goddess”

ma"tresses en titre:
the semiofficial mistresses of French
kings, who were presented at court and entertained at various royal palaces

mangeuse d’homme:
the direct translation would be man-
eater, but in French
mangeuse
connotes a woman with a large sexual
appetite, hence a term for a courtesan

monde entier:
the whole world, but also society (as in tout
Paris)

mot juste:
as with
bon mot
, a witty remark or
response

“notre courtisane nationale”:
“our national
courtesan”—Liane de Pougy

précieuses:
aristocratic women of the seventeenth and
eighteenth centuries who cultivated romantic love in a highly refined way, so
refined that they shunned its more bodily expressions

restaurant discret:
a restaurant that provides
salons
particulières,
where private meetings or parties can be held with
courtesans. Famous among such restaurants was the Café Anglais, which had
a room,
le Grand Seize
, often reserved for royalty and their friends.
The Parisian restaurant Lapérouse has retained its
salons
particulières

ruelle:
intellectual gathering in eighteenth-century Paris

salon:
writers, artists, and philosophers gathered with their
friends in the
grands salons,
or great rooms of private residences, to
discuss their work, listen to performances, hear music. A number of these
salons were conducted by courtesans—notably, Ninon de Lenclos, Marion
Delorme, Sabatier, Jeanne Duval, and Alice Ozy. The custom was earlier
practiced in Renaissance Italy

salone:
Renaissance Italian word for salon

salon particulière:
a private room in a restaurant where
gentlemen could dine and spend much of the evening with the courtesans they
escorted

souper et galant:
to dine with a
femme galante
,
followed by
galanterie
, often conducted in the
salon
particulière
of a
restaurant discret
—a tradition
initiated by Philippe d’Orléans, regent of France after Louis XIV

tendresses:
yet another euphemism for courtesans and
lorettes

the Three Graces:
aside from the mythological figures who
assisted Aphrodite both sartorially and with the seasons, there have been two
sets of famous women given this name in the French history of courtesanry: the
three Mailly sisters, daughters of the marquis de Nesle, all lovers,
sequentially, of Louis XV; and the trio celebrated during the Belle
Epoque—Liane de Pougy, La Belle Otero, and Emilienne d’Alenç
on

vigna:
villas in Renaissance Rome and outside Venice in whose
beautiful gardens gatherings of artists, writers, philosophers, and courtesans
were held. “Oh when I think back to those times gone by,” Jacobo

Sadoleto writes, “how often I recall those suppers and our frequent
meetings . . . how after our homely banquets, spiced more with
wit than gluttony, we used to recite poetry and make speeches. To the great
satisfaction of all, because though they revealed a lofty spirit, they were
delivered with gaiety and grace.”