The Book of the Courtesans (9 page)

“It was a quiet quarter,” wrote Edith Wharton, who herself lived
for a period on the rue de Varenne, “in spite of its splendor and its
history.” The splendor was not lost on Marie, who by now had adopted the
name her schoolfriends had given her, Blanche, because of her radiantly white
skin. She knew the power of her own beauty. And day after day, as she handled
bolts of damask and silk and velvet and tulle, she dreamed of how she might
augment the effect.

The story is of course open to interpretation. But here, where convention would
point out how well Blanche began to use her beauty to her advantage, we can
also see that the lustrous fabrics she handled must have captivated her,
channeling her dreams in an aesthetic direction. She would not have been the
first to be so affected by handling beautiful cloth. The great designer Charles
Frederick Worth, the man considered the father of
haute couture
, began
his career as an assistant in a draper’s shop.

For different reasons, Blanche was soon to become just as famous. Though her
elevation was relatively swift, it was more perilous. Like many dreamers, she
was far from calculating. She was instead almost alarmingly naive. One night,
she accompanied a young shop assistant to the Closerie des Lilas. There, under
the flickering light of gas lamps, a new world opened up to her. Laughter was
as profuse and scintillating as the abundant champagne she was offered while
she sat with a table of young men, caught up as they were in the music. Perhaps
because she lost herself in a particularly lusty execution of the cancan, she
did not take much notice when her companion left. Since the man who eventually
seduced her that night was a Romanian, a few weeks later she found herself in
Bucharest.

It was because her Romanian lover brought her to a seedy hotel where they lived
a somewhat sordid life that she decided to leave this arrangement to travel and
perform with a band of Gypsies. We can easily see why the art of Gypsy music
and dance appealed to her. But she was badly treated, and hence chose to escape
this life, too. What followed was a short period of despair during which she
contemplated joining a convent. But instead she became the mistress of an
archbishop. From there she advanced to a prince, who introduced her to the
cream of Romanian society, who found her beauty, adorned now with a splendid
wardrobe and the glittering gems conferred on her by her distinguished lovers,
irresistible.

Though she was at the pinnacle of this world, it was not her own. She began to
feel weary, then ill, and all the while her longing to return to Paris grew
more intense. It was not just homesickness, the desire to be surrounded by the
language of her childhood, or to walk under the chestnut trees in the gardens
of the Luxembourg Palace, or to stand on the Pont-Neuf and look back toward the
great cathedral of Notre Dame which, from that vantage point, seems almost like
a majestic ship, floating in the Seine. Bucharest of course had its own beauty.
Even its foreignness would have been exhilarating, at least in the beginning.
But just before she left Paris, she had begun a new life there, entering for
only the briefest time the world of sparkling wit, late night champagne,
rousing dances, glittering gowns and gaslight, which, though it was known as
the
demi-monde
, must have seemed more alive to her than any world she
had witnessed before.

Once in Paris, she would have to find a livelihood again. Should it surprise us
that, not wanting to live with her mother, she moved in with a friend who sold
used wardrobes? The match was perfect. Ambroisine, sharing Blanche’s love
of extravagance, urged her on toward what now with the advantage of hindsight
we can call her destiny. If in the beginning she may have been somewhat
guileless, within the means available to her and in her own way Blanche was
already composing a life for herself—a life in which her ideas for
creating beauty would have little restraint.

Like Mogador two decades before her, she started her journey by dancing at the
Bal Mabille. She well knew, as did any young woman in her position, that this
was a good place to be noticed. Her moment came when, with the encouragement of
a journalist she met that night, she broke out into the popular dance called,
appropriately, a
galop
. The sight of her flouncing around the ballroom
floor caused a minor sensation. In just a few days she had signed a contract to
appear in a play at the Théâtre de la Porte Saint-Martin. Since she
performed the part of a living statue of Helen of Troy, she neither moved nor
spoke. But it hardly mattered. The casting was appropriate enough. The beauty
of the woman she portrayed was said to have launched a thousand ships.

During a career of many such performances, in which, if and when she actually
spoke any lines, her acting would be forgiven for other qualities, what she
launched was wave after wave of an almost orgiastic enthusiasm. While Jules
Janin once spoke of her harmonious form, others were more heated with their
praise: “[H]er sensual lips are made to be kissed and to empty glasses of
champagne.” It was almost as if she had the power to evoke fields and
grass, rainfall, sunsets, the river Seine itself, together with the good wine
and food to be had along its banks. “Under the electric lights and the
trained opera glasses,” wrote one admirer, “she represented the
apotheosis of Matter.”

One can see why, a few years after Blanche’s death, when Zola was looking
for a life on which to model the character of his heroine, Nana, he settled
upon this courtesan. The sheer corpulence of her presence suited his purpose,
which was to cast a cold eye on the corruptions of the Second Empire. But he
never knew the real woman, and those who did felt his portrait to be nothing
like her. Unlike the icily calculating Nana, in the early days of her career,
Blanche was as naive as she was guileless. She would, for instance, fall into
such a sound sleep after making love that any man with whom she spent the night
could easily slip away without leaving her any recompense at all. The solution
she finally adopted to this problem is symbolic; it points in the direction of
the real focus of her labors. Before she fell asleep, she would sew her
lover’s nightshirt to her dressing gown.

She was not unique among courtesans in her love of clothing. A lavish wardrobe
was required for the daily round of events (many of which seemed almost as if
they were staged like small fashion shows) that punctuated a courtesan’s
life. Like society ladies,
demi-mondaines
were expected to wear a
different dress for each occasion, and this meant that they might change their
clothing as many as eight times a day. For some women, the requirement must
have seemed tedious. To return to the closet time after time in the course of
the day, peeling off layers one after the other, first a cloak or coat or shawl,
then a dress, and then shoes. Perhaps stockings would have to be changed to go
with a new dress, and all the accessories: different ribbons, bracelets, rings,
even requiring at times, if the skirt were fuller or the bodice shaped
differently, for instance, a change of lingerie, all with the aid of a maid,
and then finally the hair restyled to match the whole. The necessity would have
prevented some women from going out much at all. But to Blanche, this was not
just a duty. What she wore was a source of pleasure and perhaps, at times, the
very reason she wanted to go out. To show off her wardrobe.

There were peignoirs she could put on for receiving at home, dresses and shoes
suitable for walking in the Tuilerie Gardens, clothes to wear at cafés
along the Grands Boulevards in midmorning, when, for instance, she would meet
her first lover of the day, and the dresses she would wear for what Joanna
Richardson has called “the regulation drive” in the Bois de
Boulogne. She would perhaps want to change into still different clothes if she
chose to take an apéritif in the early evening, and then change yet again,
this time into diamonds and furs, if she wanted to attend the theatre. But she
was glad for the requirement. Every occasion gave her one more opportunity to
display her talent for dressing.

The stage provided a perfect arena for her extraordinary ability. Not only her
beauty but her costumes compensated for the talent she lacked as an actress.
They were usually extravagant and hence monumentally expensive. In one
production,
Le Château à Toto
, she entered the second act to
the accompaniment of Offenbach’s music wearing a dress that cost
15
,
000
francs (a small fortune in
the nineteenth century); this creation was followed in the next act by a
transparent peignoir trimmed with Belgian lace valued at
6
,
000
francs. In another
performance she was so thickly covered in diamonds that one critic wrote:
“This is not an actress we see on the stage before us but a jewelry store.
” The size of her personal wardrobe was legendary, too. The journalist
Callias tells us that her departure for a tour to Baden caused a traffic jam
when the thirty-seven coaches required to carry her dresses and hats obstructed
the rue Ecuries-d’Artois.

But size and expenditure were only part of the story. The fabrics and gems, the
colors, cuts, flounces, and feathers that she draped, pinned, and arranged
around her body touched and moved a nascent spirit in her audience. You can
sense this in the enthusiasm with which Théodore de Banville describes the
dress Antigny wore in the brief comedy,
On demand des ingénues
.
“Green, the color of waves . . . it does not seem to
have been cut and stitched . . . but trimmed and tossed
into shape by the delicate hands of a fairy.” By his account, the dress
excited perception itself to action: “[I]n every little corolla of green
crepe . . . a diamond shines and glitters and sparkles in
sidereal whiteness, and the light audaciously comes and kisses it.” Of
course, gowns and jewels cannot create such effects by themselves. Blanche’
s passionate love for beauty was behind it all, an insatiable desire that
against so many odds was fed again and again in increasingly lavish proportions.

If de Banville was to write after her death that she “wore fiery diamonds
and rich clothes like the natural accessories of her triumph,” the
triumph was collective. Using the magic of couture and her own elegant carriage,
she created a beauty made to be shared and shared bountifully. Her decorated
body offered and gave “all that could be desired,” as de Banville
wrote, “for the pleasure of the eyes.” A cup overflowing with sweet
salaciousness, she embodied a fantasy of realization, of wishes immediately
satisfied—one that was cherished by many successful men during the
prosperous days of the Second Empire. She became, in the words of another
critic, “the Venus who characterized an age.”

The character in question, however, was given multiple readings. No matter how
fervently satisfaction was sought, still the age was ambivalent about its
pleasures. In a famous painting for which she was the model, though Paul Baudry
partially revealed her lush body and captured the opulent style of her clothing
by draping her hips in a swath of shiny azure fabric, he fashioned her as a
repentant Magdalen, newly awakened to the holiness of chastity. Zola went in
the other direction. As depicted through his heroine, Nana, the courtesan
became a femme fatale, leading one man after another to financial ruin.

But Blanche was neither. She did not repent. Nor did she have cold blood
running in her veins. In the end, she ruined her career for passionate love.
Which should not be entirely surprising if we consider how much erotic love
resembles the love of beauty. Like eros, beauty opens the heart, softening not
only the gaze but intent itself. Under either the influence of beauty or love,
induced to linger, as we sink into the realm of feeling, we forget to calculate
our losses.

When she fell in love with Luce, a tenor who performed at the Folies
Dramatiques, Blanche dismissed her most wealthy benefactor so that she could
spend all her time with her new lover. He was a short, round man, described by
one observer as resembling a small ball. Perhaps it was the beauty of his voice
that drew her to him. Yet their time together was to be brief. Already ill from
consumption, he died within two years.

She was stricken then not only with grief but with poverty. During the period
when she was faithful to Luce, and therefore without benefactors, Blanche lost
her savings, her credit, her extravagant collection of jewelry, and every one
of the carriages that had once transported her in style along the Champs-
Elysées. She tried with some success to regain her career in the theatre,
until soon after her mother died. She fell seriously ill and found herself
alone in a hotel room while her fever rose dangerously. But she was not the
only courtesan with a heart. It was because of the kindness of another
cocotte
, Caroline Letessier, who dispatched a carriage to carry her to
her own luxurious mezzanine apartment on the boulevard Haussmann, that Blanche
lived out her last days in relative comfort. She was still beautiful when she
died at the age of thirty-four.

We might be tempted here to make death itself the moral of the story, if it
were not for the fact that all of us die. This is a peril that beauty promises
us, even with the first sight of a tree in blossom, a green field, an
innocently beautiful face; though we may not be fully aware of the thought, we
consider time, and the effects of age, of death. In the contemplation of beauty,
no matter how quickly the knowledge of mortality passes through consciousness,
a thread of subtle and almost sweet sadness will be embroidered there.

A Collaboration

Against a background of hellish light, or if you prefer an aurora borealis—red, orange, sulfur yellow, pink (to express an idea of ecstasy and frivolity) . . .
 there arises the protean image of wanton beauty.—Baudelaire
,
The Painter of Modern Life