The Book of the Courtesans (7 page)

The hilarity of the prank, of course, depended on good timing. For one thing,
her guests had already been fed and so they were not distracted by hunger. Then,
by saying she wanted to supervise the presentation of the dessert, she had
inspired anticipation. And finally, because the platter was covered, her
presence was discovered suddenly, creating an element that is indispensable to
comedy: surprise.

It may be interesting and more than a diversion here for us to consider another
story from the annals of humor. This one is about Gracie Allen. Indeed, Burns
and Allen started in vaudeville, which was once a popular venue for courtesans,
and thus, though Gracie was by no means a
cocotte
, it is more than
possible that the comic timing of courtesans was still part of the atmosphere
in which she learned her art. So it is significant in more than one way that in
1940
, when Gracie Allen mounted a comic campaign to
become the president of the United States, she announced she was running as the
head of a new political party called, she said, “the Surprise Party.
” Asked the provenance of the name, she replied that her mother was a
Democrat and her father a Republican, but she had been born a surprise.

Like all humor, the joke reveals a deeper layer of meaning that is not
immediately evident. Surprise is at the heart of sexuality: not only the
surprise of conception, but the unpredictable nature of arousal itself. And
lurking close behind conception, the surprise of mortality is due to appear
soon, too, because like it or not, the arrival of the next generation signals
the demise of our own. But laughter, since it whisks us off toward immortality,
redeems the prediction.

And there is this, too. If the conversion of mortality into immortality is
confounding, it might be helpful to know that according to the Greeks, comedy
returns us to the timeless center of existence, a place of mystic nothingness
in which all that we habitually believe and practice is reversed. Which is
important here because in a sense, Cora Pearl’s dessert constitutes a
reversal of many events and conditions, including the story of how she fell
from grace, the fall that led her to become a courtesan in the first place.

Cora was not born to poverty. Still, she claimed that she was forced into her
profession by what, according to modern standards, would be considered a rape.
The story she cites in her memoirs as determining her fate resembles the
cautionary tales told to young girls during the Victorian age. Though if we are
to understand her decision, a few facts from her childhood will be necessary,
too. It is not insignificant that when she was still a child her father
abandoned the family. Nor that shortly thereafter, her mother sent her to a
convent in France. The pattern of abandonment continued when, after graduating,
she returned to London. Instead of taking her daughter back, her mother sent
her to live with her own mother. Though Cora’s grandmother was kind, she
was overprotective. Following the years she spent in the French convent, where
Cora claims to have received a very liberal education from the other girls,
this atmosphere must have felt stifling. Made to read books aloud to the old
woman for hours on end, Cora seldom went out, except to go to church on Sunday.
But one Sunday, when the maid who always accompanied her home did not appear,
she set off into the streets of London by herself. Soon she discovered she was
being followed by an older man named Saunders, who eventually persuaded her to
go with him into a “drinking den” where after tasting what he gave
her, she lost consciousness, regaining her awareness only the next morning when
she found herself in a bed upstairs.

There is no way now to determine the validity of this tale. The memoirs of
courtesans were often embellished with fantasy and fiction. Generally, Cora
Pearl was known to be very honest. Indeed, during the Second Empire, when a
certain kind of deception was thought preferable in women to frankness, she was
often described as vulgar. And there is also the fact to consider that the
practice of spiking a young woman’s drink, thus rendering her an easy prey
to rape, is still in use today.

Decades later, when she told this story in her memoirs, she said that as
Saunders helped her to her room, she was aware of his intentions and hoped
“that at last I might be about to discover the pleasure of lying with
someone of the opposite sex.” The next morning, however, she remembered
nothing, which, in one version of her life story, she claimed was her only
regret. In another version, she wrote that the incident left her with “an
instinctive horror of men.”

Whatever the truth was, on the first morning she woke up in his bed, she knew
she could never go home again. Though the modern reader may simply shrug her
shoulders at this slightly sordid initiation to sexuality, in that period, Cora
was ruined. Which is to say, she would never be able to make a respectable
marriage.

Whichever version we read, she must have felt at least a moment of fear, when
waking disoriented in a strange room, she realized what had happened to her.
Both versions of her memoirs, written to raise money, have the exaggerated
style of a book written to be salacious. But there must be a seed of truth in
each description. She was spirited even as a young woman. Which is to say that
she would not have let the moment grow into despair but instead moved within
herself, in a timely fashion, to leaven her despondency with humor and resolve.
If on seeing the five pounds Mr. Saunders had left her she felt tempted toward
shame, she did not allow the mood to take hold, but swiftly calculated instead
how much more income she had just gained, more than a milliner would earn over
several weeks.

The young courtesan managed the new profession that fate had thrust upon her
with a vengeance. Her first lover, Robert Bignell, who was the owner of the
Argyll Rooms in London, a “notorious pleasure haunt,” supported her
well. But she was not satisfied. And from the day that Bignell suggested she
accompany him to France, her life was to take on a momentous change.
Masquerading as husband and wife, they toured Paris and the French countryside,
traveling afterward to the spa at Baden-Baden in Germany, where she spent
200
,
000
francs of Bignell’s
money. Still, at the end of the trip, she sent him back to London alone. She
preferred life in Paris, where she quickly became a favorite of the most
powerful and wealthy men; soon she was wealthy herself, her private collection
of jewelry alone worth a fortune. Over time, more than one man exhausted his
inheritance for the love of her. If once a single man had had the power to ruin
her, now she was coolly ruining many men.

That she served herself as dessert could easily be read as an extreme form of
servility. But this reading of the event would be too simple. As she records
the incident in her memoirs it is clear that she took enormous pleasure in her
seductive powers. She tells us that even as the prank was being prepared, one
of her servants was taking great interest in the chef’s work, “and
the state of his breeches proclaimed that his attitude to his employer was one
of greater warmth than respect.” She reveled even more in the awe she
struck when her footman raised the silver lid that concealed her body. “I
was rewarded,” she wrote later, “by finding myself the centre of a
ring of round eyes and half open mouths.” Her memoirs make the power of
her presence evident. “M. Paul,” she tells us, “was the first
to recover,” after which her dinner guests, in the posture of petitioners
paying homage to a goddess, kneeled “on their chairs or on the table 
. . . their tongues busy at every part of me as they lifted and
licked the sweetness from my body.” The reversal is clear. If once she
had been abandoned by her father and mother, now she was the undisputed center
of attention. If she had been seduced by a gentleman, now she was the seducer
of many; if once she had been fed a drink that made her lose her better
judgment, now she herself was the libation that drove men to a frenzy of desire,
while calmly she enjoyed the effect.

Her Blue Dress

Nana dazzled him and he rushed over to stand on the step of her
carriage.—Emile Zola,
Nana
I was able to start a high fashion shop because two gentlemen were
outbidding each other over my hot little body.—Coco Chanel

Let us return to the party of 1906 with which our exploration of this
virtue began. This was a pivotal moment in the life of that woman with such
good timing, called Gabrielle. Like many courtesans, she was born poor.
Abandoned by her father, she was raised in an orphanage. And as was also true
for many
cocottes,
she began her life as a
grisette.
But
though she liked trimming hats, she did not want to live out her days working
long hours in the cramped quarters of a dimly lit room. So eventually, she
began to sing in cafés, which is where she met her lover, the very wealthy
Etienne Balsan. He was in the audience when she performed. The simple fact that
he kept her would in another time have immediately classified her as a
courtesan. Indeed, when she lived with him on his estate near Compiègne,
she shared both his bed and his mansion with another woman who was already
attracting public attention. Usually dressed in raspberry pink, witty, and
often outrageous, Emilienne d’Alençon was a famous courtesan during
the Belle Epoque. Far from jealous, the two women admired each other, though
more for their differences than what they had in common.

The difference was clear in the way they dressed. While d’Alençon,
one of the last
grandes horizontales,
had a lavish style, Gabrielle
wore simple, almost boyish, clothing. The choice was less accidental than
portentous. Instead of developing a career as a courtesan, she went into
another business. Convincing Balsan to lend her his apartment, she set up a hat
shop in Paris. Emilienne did her friend an inestimable favor when she appeared
both at Maxim’s and the races in the Bois du Boulogne wearing one of
Gabrielle’s creations.

At the turn of the century, Longchamps was well established as a premiere
showplace for new fashions. Zola, who well appreciated the significance of
fashion in the lives of courtesans, describes in exacting detail what his
heroine, Nana, wore to the Grand Prix there. She was dressed in blue and white,
he wrote. The silk bodice she wore, cut close to her body, was blue. And even
for an age of enormous skirts, her crinoline was exaggerated. Over this she
wore a white satin dress. The white sash that stretched diagonally across her
chest was adorned with silverpoint lace that seemed to glitter in the sunlight.
And finally her hat, a toque, was also blue except for the single white feather
she had placed on top.

The outfit, of course, was designed not only to please the eye, but to be read
for meaning. The colors she chose belonged to the stable owned by her
benefactor’s family. Her toque resembled a jockey’s cap. The size of
her crinoline, which was daring, emphasized the size of her hips (or, read
another way, libido). The sash implied that she was a conqueror (which, in a
certain sense, she was). Silk and satin served to remind everyone who gazed in
her direction of her wealth as well as the way she had made it. The glitter and
shininess of it all reflected the powers she possessed to attract and fascinate.
And the feather? On the one hand a bird, wildness itself, the voluptuousness
of nature, and on the other, the hunt—the urge to capture, ravish,
possess.

Clothing is not just practical. What we wear on our bodies speaks to others,
expressing intent and mutual understandings, while acting as a public calling
card, telling others, even strangers, who we are, or at least who we pretend to
be. But that is not all dress does. Aside from protection and expression,
clothing can also be read as a sign that reveals the
Zeitgeist
of a
culture, a spirit that is always changing. Indeed, fashion is one of the
principal signatures of time. What is desirable at one moment will not be
acceptable at the next. To know what color to choose, at what length to measure
your hem, which shoes you should wear for what occasion, requires an acute
awareness of the present moment.

It should not surprise us then that the word
chic
came into use in
association with courtesans. For these women, not only was it imperative to be
à la mode, the successful courtesan had to stand out among fashionable
women. She could never afford to be boring. Her timing had to be such that she
was always just a few steps ahead. Perhaps this is why the great courtesans
were known for having set styles. If in the eighteenth century, Madame de
Pompadour, the mistress of Louis XV, was so skillful at making alterations to
the designs of her tailors that she entered the history of couture, the
courtesans of the Second Empire followed suit. It was Alice Ozy, for example,
who introduced the custom of wearing all one color. Collectively courtesans
popularized the crinoline. Indeed, all through the nineteenth century and two
decades into the twentieth,
grandes horizontales
set the style in
Paris. Charles Worth, who inaugurated the tradition of
haute couture,
was eager to design dresses for women who were courtesans. His clientele
included not only the Empress Eugénie and the most prestigious families of
France, but Cora Pearl, Païva, and the Countess de Castiglione. The
notoriety of these clients made his designs even more notable. Since, as with
the clothes film or rock stars wear today, what the
grandes horizontales
wore was news; columnists who wrote weekly about their exploits included
detailed descriptions of their wardrobes. And there was another reason for
their popularity among designers. Like movie stars or rock stars, as outsiders
they could take more risks, a bravado that allowed couturiers to be more
creative.