The Book of the Courtesans (6 page)

Is it surprising then that very soon Céleste began to dream that one day
she would perform on a stage herself? It was not just the proximity of the
theatres, but that, along with many others among the poor of Paris, she saw the
melodramatic events of her own life reflected there. Even today, on any given
night in the theatre, a pulse can be felt to vibrate back and forth between the
stage and the audience, as the players strike a chord, a situation or a feeling
that members of the audience recognize and to which they respond. The resonance
of their feeling rebounds to the stage, inspiring the actors to even greater
intensity.

In Céleste’s life, this pulse would have continued after she left the
theatre, as she realized that the heroism of the players reflected her
mother’s heroism and her own when they were confronted with violence and
the threat of death. The images she saw would have dignified this victory,
giving the spirit within her a new strength. In this way, imagination must have
played a crucial role early in her life.

Perhaps it was the ability to imagine herself as heroic that helped her survive
the next chapter in her life. Her mother soon took a new lover, a fair-haired,
blue-eyed young man from whom her daughter was to face still another peril.
Almost from the beginning, Céleste disliked Victor. Rough and moody, he
was at times resentful of her, and perhaps she sensed, in the way that children
can, the side of his character that was to emerge later. It was after she
became an adolescent, the beginnings of a woman’s body newly visible,
during a period when her mother was visiting her own father in Fontainebleau,
that Victor attempted to rape her. Céleste fought him off, and for the
third time in her life escaped. But now, alone in the streets of Paris, without
her mother, she had nowhere to go.

Yet here is where her history began to form another pattern, one that could
easily have given her the illusion of predictability. For again a prostitute
was to come to her rescue. Céleste had slept for four nights in a hayloft
and wandered the streets of Paris by day in search of food when finally she
broke down weeping. There, just in front of the massive entrance to the Eglise
Saint-Paul, a streetwalker named Thérèse found Céleste and took
her home for the night to her own room. It was an act of extraordinary kindness,
especially since a prostitute caught keeping a child on her own premises could
be sent to jail for six months. In fact, when they were walking together in the
streets a few days later, a policeman took Céleste away from Thé
rèse, incarcerating her, as was a common practice for the protection of
homeless girls, in the women’s prison named after St. Lazare.

Soon afterward, Thérèse found Céleste’s mother and told her
where her daughter was. But a month passed before Anne came to bring her home.
In that time Céleste began her education, an introduction to another world,
one that for most working women was always perilously close to their own. A
world of last resorts, but also a world of dreams. Her time in the jail was
softened by the friendship she made with a girl called Denise, hardly older
than herself, who would tell her about the fine clothes a young prostitute
would be given in a brothel and the good money she could earn there. “I
saw myself rich and covered with lace and gems,” Céleste wrote later
in her memoirs.

When she finally returned home, nothing had changed. Her mother did not listen
to her when she tried to tell her why she had left. Victor kept trying to
molest her. In the way that it can only for an adolescent, her life seemed
hopeless. Another girl might perhaps have waited, languished in the atmosphere
that was eating away at her. But from the two earlier escapes she had made with
her mother and the one she had made herself, Céleste had learned well the
lessons of urgency. And though later she would come to regret bitterly the
decision she made, the logic of association is clear. Since she had already
been saved twice by kind prostitutes, it makes perfect sense that at the age of
sixteen she would have become a prostitute herself.

In jail, Denise had given her the address of one of a handful of the very
fashionable brothels that catered to a wealthier clientele. Madame welcomed her
with ample sustenance and the finery Céleste would need to ply her new
trade—clothes, perfume, jewelry. It was only later that Céleste
began to understand the consequences of the agreement she had made. All that
she was given, including her room and board, was to come from her earnings. She
would not be able to leave until she had paid what she owed. As she sank deeper
and deeper into debt, she realized she would never be free. She had simply
fallen into another trap.

“To have to laugh when you want to weep,” she would write later;
“to be dependent and humiliated.” In the brothel, nothing belonged
to her, not even her own body. When even the beating of your heart, the breath
you take, is not simply under surveillance but summoned and marshaled,
continuously made to march according to someone else’s rhythms, you will
lose touch with the pace of your own soul. The spirit that sustains you will
begin to die.

Perhaps her despair made her more susceptible to illness or perhaps it was
simply contagion, but soon Céleste fell very ill. Yet she was to be
rescued once again, this time by a client who, alarmed to see her so sick, paid
off the debt she owed to Madame and took her to his own apartment. But the
story of this escape does not end here, for a doctor was soon summoned, who
diagnosed smallpox. Though he said she could not be moved, as soon as she was
left alone, she dressed and descended to the street, where she called a cab to
take her to the Hôpital Saint-Louis.

Thinking of the force of will it must have taken to drag her weakened and
fevered body into the streets brings to mind the way she danced the polka. In
the structure of the music, within each four beats, every third beat will be
emphasized. It is not hard to imagine her moving to this pattern, landing hard
on the third beat, and afterward rising higher with great emphasis, as if she
were taking the great galloping force of the music into her body and making it,
in every instant, her own.

But the will Céleste exhibited was not simply the will to survive. She was
proud. And that this quality was reflected in her dance can easily be
deciphered from the rest of her story. As she tells us, it was in the hospital
while she was recovering that she fell in love with a medical student called
Adolphe. Yet though he appeared to be in love with her, she soon discovered she
was naïve to trust him. He invited her to attend a ball with him at
Versailles, but when they arrived she found he had another mistress with him, a
woman well known as a
lorette
. In the sexual economy of nineteenth-
century France, the
lorette
existed somewhere between a prostitute and
a courtesan. She was kept, but only modestly so. And though she could dress
well enough to attend some public balls, she was generally neither educated,
mannered, nor celebrated enough to mingle with high society as courtesans did.

Chances are Adolphe would have set Céleste up as a
lorette
were
not the mistress he already had too jealous. Seeing him enter the ball with
Céleste, Louisa Aumont ridiculed her—the unsuitability of her dress,
her manners so clearly lower class. In a loud voice, in front of Céleste,
she harangued Adolphe on his bad taste for having brought this embarrassing
young woman with him. Céleste walked back from Versailles alone, a journey
that took her all night. The incident was etched in her memory. After she
became famous as Mogador, and the wayward Adolphe began to pursue her again, it
is understandable that she would be quick to score her triumph. She promised to
take him back only if Louisa Aumont would apologize to her in public.

You would have been able to see the quality in the posture and the timing of
her dance, a robust assertion of pride punctuating every step. And something
else less easy to name would have been present, too. Something she knew—
what she had learned, in a sense, from dancing with the many unpredictable
events she encountered in her young life. The brutality of her mother’s
first lover, his attempt to kidnap her, his sudden death, her return to Paris,
Victor’s attempts to rape her, the nights she spent homeless in the streets
of Paris, the weeks in the prison at St.-Lazare, a nearly fatal brush with
smallpox. Whether dancing with fate or a mortal partner, she had learned well
to perceive even the smallest alterations in a pattern and respond quickly with
a brilliance of her own to the most subtle signals. And eventuating from this
knowledge that life is always in motion, that nothing ever remains the same,
there must have been an aura, invisible to the eye, but even so a halo of a
kind, surrounding all her movements; she had witnessed the constant change that
lies at the heart of the universe.

The unpredictability of Céleste’s life continued. After the summer
months, the Bal Mabille would close. Soon she found work performing at the
Théâtre Beaumarchais. But as luck would have it, after acting there
for a few weeks, it, too, would close. Yet, by another turn of chance, she was
hired again, this time by one of the Franconi brothers, who had just erected
the new Hippodrome. Appearing in a horse race with five other girls on Bastille
Day, July
14
,
1845
, at the opening
of the circus, her timing was superb again. Winning the race with the same
exuberance and pride with which she had executed the polka, her equestrian
feats became the toast of Paris.

Now Mogador could enter the prestigious world that glittered nightly at certain
cafés and certain addresses in Paris. She was welcomed and celebrated at
the Maison Dorée and at the Café Anglais, where newly wealthy
bourgeois men, aristocrats, and royalty came, amid the flotillas of courtesans
who hung on their arms, or flitted and flirted about the tables, making the
atmosphere flutter with their presence. Soon she became the mistress of the
duke of Ossuna, who set her up in a comfortable apartment on the rue de l’
Arcade, not far from the Place Vendôme, where the extravagant jewelry
could be purchased that she wore when she visited the cafés on boulevards
nearby. She took many lovers, including an Italian tenor, before her felicitous
career came suddenly to an end. She had fallen from her horse, and
unfortunately the fall was bad. One leg was broken. There would be weeks in bed.
It was too dangerous for her to ride ever again.

But the unpredictable nature of events did not fail her. Just around the bend
of this disaster, only days after she was allowed to go out again and had made
her return to the high life, as she was leaving the Café Anglais, Cé
leste chanced to meet a young man, Lionel de Chabrillan, descended from one of
the most illustrious families in France. They fell in love. That first meeting
did not, of course, end the whirlwind of events that characterized her life.
After several more quick turns of fate, during which Lionel showered her with
jewels and horses and cashmere shawls, exhausting his inheritance, he decided
to leave her because of scandal. Mourning his loss, she came close to marrying
another man, in the meantime profiting from the scandal when, because of her
newly aggrandized fame, she was given a role in a production at the Thé
âtre des Variétés. Still, when all was said and done, she landed
well. She married the man she loved, and finally became the comtesse de
Chabrillan.

Her Surprise

Prince Gortschakoff used to say that . . . he would have tried to
steal the sun to satisfy one of her whims.—Gustave Claudin, prominent
Boulevardier

Comic timing, which depends on surprise, is an ineffable skill, difficult
to teach or even describe. This is an appropriate quality if you remember that
laughter itself, being made of mere air and fleeting sounds, weighs almost
nothing. In accordance with its ephemeral nature, there are even some who
associate mystical experience with laughter. The air of laughter is, as Barry
Saunders writes, “risible,” and according to the Greeks, who
believed that laughter could make the soul immortal, it rises toward heaven.
The route, however, was reversed during the Christian centuries during which
laughter was thought of as a sure path to hell. No wonder then that it was
during the Renaissance, when classical ideas were embraced again, that
courtesans should come into vogue. Women from this profession have always been
associated with mirth.

If, as the Greeks believed, laughter buoys us on toward timelessness, we
might question why timing should be so critical to humor. But it is. Whether
you are hearing a joke or witnessing a prank, just a fraction of a second in
the timing can determine whether or not you will laugh. But once you are
laughing, it is as if you have been transported, instantly lifted out of your
present circumstances into a larger realm. The experience can be intoxicating,
as while you laugh, the moment expands until finally both the past and the
future have, at least for a moment, disappeared.

This must be why laughter ameliorates suffering. It is hardly a coincidence
therefore that courtesans, most of whom began life facing difficult
circumstances and who thus knew well what it was to fear the future, seemed to
be so good at inducing laughter. Cora Pearl, courtesan of the Second Empire, is
a case in point. She was known to have a particularly earthy humor. Some of the
social commentators who wrote about courtesans even found her crude. But this
opinion did not lessen her popularity at all. Among her many illustrious lovers
was Prince Napoléon.

One evening during the height of her powers, Pearl played a prank on her dinner
guests that has become legendary. Like many courtesans, she entertained
frequently, to quote one version of her memoirs, “in the finest style.
” One night, after all the courses had been served except dessert, she
excused herself, telling her guests that she wanted to supervise the
presentation of the final dish. She went to the kitchen and, shedding her
clothes, stepped onto a chair and positioned herself on a huge silver platter
she had borrowed from the prince d’Orléans. Then, “with that
deftness and artistry for which he is so famed,” her pastry chef,
Salé, began to decorate her “naked body with rosettes and swathes of
creams and sauces.” After placing a single unpeeled grape in the dint of
her navel, he surrounded her with several meringues and then gave her a
generous dusting of powdered sugar before lowering a vast silver cover over her.
Then two footmen carried her down the passage to the dining room and set the
platter on the table.