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
I have come to recognize that in Baudelaire’s work, Jeanne [Duval] is often depicted as a mirror of the Voudou goddess, Ezili. . . .
—Randy Conner, Mirror of My Love
As with everything that is fabled, the famous beauty of courtesans continues to haunt us today. Even when no image remains, the words of witnesses, recorded in memoirs or letters from the times, tempt us with what we can no longer see. In the portraits we have of Marie Duplessis, for instance, where her smiles all have an air of sadness, her mouth remains closed. Thus, we can only try to imagine the dazzling white teeth that were so often mentioned in the descriptions we have of her.
Yet some of the words which have been written about courtesans far outshine any physical likeness. Think for instance of the sculpture of Madame Sabatier that can be found on the ground floor of the Musée d’Orsay. It is called La Femme piqué par un serpent. From the expression on her face, it is easy to guess what kind of snake did the deed. She is in a swoon. But as successful as the sculpture may be, Jean-Baptiste Clésinger’s stone is no match for the lines Baudelaire wrote about Sabatier in Les Fleurs du mal:
Your head, your mood, the way you move,
With a beauty like the beauty of the countryside
As laughter plays across your face
Like fresh wind in a clear sky.
If it is in the epistemological nature of all perception to be subjective, this is especially so where the perception of beauty is concerned. When he wrote those lines, Baudelaire was obsessed with Sabatier. He would have a friend leave the poems he addressed to her at the door of her apartment.
Apollonie Sabatier, or Aglaé-Joséphine Savatier, as she was named by her mother, was the natural child of a vicomte and a seamstress. It was because the vicomte, who was also the prefect of the Ardennes, was able to arrange a marriage between her mother and a sergeant in the 47th Infantry, André Savatier, that she was christened with his name. The family lived in Mézières and Strasbourg, before finally moving to Paris, where, since Aglaé showed promise as a singer, she was sent to study with a great performer, Madame Cinti. Indeed, she seemed destined for a career as a concert artist or opera singer, until at a charity concert she was introduced to a former Belgian diplomat, the industrialist Alfred Mosselman. Captivated by a beauty soon to be legendary and by her light, charming manner, he set Aglaé up as his mistress in an apartment on the rue Frochot, in quartier Bréda, on the slopes of the hill that rises up into Montmartre, an area thick with artists, writers, and courtesans. (There were so many lorettes living there that they were named after the local church, Notre Dames des Lorettes.)
Because Mosselman was married, he used Fernand Broissard as a messenger between himself and his lover, and it was through this man that the young woman met a wider circle of friends. Broissard invited her to the monthly dinners he gave at the Hôtel Pimodan, where he lived on the Ile-Saint-Louis. Soon she was also attending meetings of the Club des haschichins, which met at Théophile Gautier’s apartment in the same building. Balzac, Gautier, Flaubert and Maxine du Camp, and Baudelaire are only a few among those who have become illustrious who attended these events. By then, Aglaé had changed her name to the more elegant Apollonie Sabatier. And because of the electric effect of her presence at these gatherings, which seemed to fuse all who were present into a more generous body, she was also given another name: la Présidente. Soon she was entertaining the same men, together with Delacroix, Berlioz, Gérard de Nerval, Henri Murger (whose novel inspired La Bohème), and Arsène Houssaye at her own apartment.
Sabatier’s presence also contributed a distinct aesthetic pleasure to the gatherings. Like Blanche d’Antigny, la Présidente loved fashion. She dressed with such a striking originality that the artists she knew began to involve themselves with her wardrobe. As well as making creative suggestions regarding her apparel, some of them even designed clothing for her. Both dressed and undressed she was sculpted by Jean-Baptiste Clésinger twice; Ernest Meissonier did several paintings of her. Ernest Feydeau made her the central figure in his novel, Sylvie.
The love affair she had with Baudelaire was notoriously short. In the beginning, Sabatier did not return the poet’s love. But after Les Fleurs du mal was published, she offered herself to him as an homage. They spent only one night as lovers, after which she fell in love with him and he fell out of love with her. Though she came to love the poet as well as hi
s words, Baudelaire, as it turns out, loved the ideal he had created of her more than the breathing reality. “A few days ago,” he wrote, “you were a deity, which is so convenient, so noble, so inviolable. And then there you are, a woman.” Instead of lovers, they became friends.
There were many bonds between them, but perhaps the strongest was that they were both captivated by beauty. Just as Baudelaire, who wrote a great deal about the images being created by his friends, collected and studied art, la Présidente, who had been a singer and still loved music, also surrounded herself with artists and their work, even painting, herself, in her later years. They both loved literature. In the beginning it was above all Baudelaire’s poetry that had impassioned Sabatier. And in different ways they were both creators of beauty. What he described in words, she knew how to embody. Sharing the love of beauty as they did, they were collaborators in the creation of an aesthetic sensibility, giving shape to the astonishingly fecund atmosphere of the nineteenth century.
Gustave Courbet captured a moment in the process of this creation with his celebrated painting L’Atelier du peintre. In the middle of the canvas, a half-finished painting sits on an easel. Before the easel stands a model, who watches Courbet paint a landscape in which, curiously, no likeness of her can be found. Aligned with her and witnessing the process, too, Sabatier is prominent in the circle that, surrounding the work, seems almost to generate the painting. She is dressed in black, a Kashmiri shawl draped over her shoulder, her back turned to Baudelaire, who, sitting, turns his attention to the pages of a book.
In Courbet’s mind, all those who had contributed to the chemistry of his art must have been there, even if only symbolically. Was it a conscious decision on his part to make the shawl Sabatier wore so prominent? With this article of clothing he had included much that, though absent in one sense, was present in another. Of course the Kashmiri shawl, being such a critical part of a lady’s wardrobe, would have recalled the world of fashion. And since this coveted item of clothing cost more than a working woman could earn over a decade, in a subtle way, as with the presence of Sabatier herself, the existing difference between classes had been conjured. And then there was the provenance of the scarf itself, made by women paid very little for their labor, in another country, India, which signified, as well as the exigencies of the empire Europe was building, all the worlds and even world views to be found outside Europe.
The original painting contained one more figure, the woman who more than any other had evoked the exotic realities described by Baudelaire in his poetry. Yet for some reason still unknown to us, Baudelaire requested that Courbet excise the image of Jeanne Duval from his painting. Perhaps she did not like her portrait, or perhaps he feared the jealousy of Sabatier, who, after being rejected by Baudelaire, referred to Baudelaire’s mistress sarcastically as “his ideal.”
The remark was laden with an unstated prejudice. Jeanne, whose skin was lightly brown, and who was born in Santo Domingo, had been the object of disparaging remarks that slyly referred to race more than once. Even Baudelaire, who loved her passionately, was not entirely free of the attitude which penetrated his culture. Yet in his case there is far more to the story. Between the lines of his poems and letters, we can sense a struggle between the world view into which he was born and the one that drew him to Jeanne. Although she was described by many, including Théodore de Banville and Nadar (who was her lover for a period) as very beautiful, there is every reason to believe that it was also the way she saw the world that Baudelaire found compelling.
As Randy Cooper suggests, it is easy to see the mark of African philosophies, particularly Voudou, in the poems Baudelaire wrote to Jeanne. Can it be an accident that in La Chevelure in which Baudelaire tells us “ Africa burns,” Jeanne’s hair is described as blue, the color of the Voudou goddess Ezili? Reading “Sed Non Satiata” the influence is wrapped in a subtle ambivalence:
Strange deity, obscure as nights
that smell of musk and smoke from Havana,
work of some obi, Faust of the Savannah,
sorceress hemmed by ebony, daughter of every dark midnight.
Yet though his ambivalence is sometimes stronger (when for instance he refers to Jeanne as a “demon without pity”), Baudelaire is perpetually drawn in the direction of her philosophy. We begin to understand more about the nature of this attraction when in “Sed Non Satiata” we read the line “the elixir of your lips where love struts,” a phrase which recalls the image of a Voudou priestess.
Perhaps here Zora Neale Hurston’s account of an exchange in Voudou ritual will explain the deeper meaning that stands behind the metaphor. As Hurston tells us, at the moment when the priestess is asked by the celebrants, “ What is the truth?” she responds by throwing back her veil to reveal her body. A body which, according to the Voudou view of the cosmos, is the source of all life and thus also the answer to all mystery.
But whether or not it is Jeanne’s knowledge of the religion of Voudou reflected here, Baudelaire makes it clear that the view of the world he has received through his mistress enriches his own vision, giving him an experience of existence which, even while it feels strange, also seems as if it had always belonged to him. “You return to me,” he writes in La Chevelure, “the blue sky, immense and round.” Though he was frightened and scandalized by her, through her eyes the world could be reborn to him each day with new beauty.
Her Portrait
When he wanted to draw or paint some figure, and had before him a real woman or man, that object would so affect his sense of sight and his spirit would enter into what he was representing so that he seemed conscious of nothing else.—Persio, on witnessing Titian at work
. . . So it seems to me that in Titian’s colors God placed the paradise of our bodies.—Tullia d’Aragora, Dialogue on the Infinity of Love
The model for the painting is unknown to us. It is only because the woman portrayed here holds a bouquet of flowers that the work was named Flora a century after it was painted. Flora, the goddess of flowers, was a courtesan herself before she became a deity. But that the sitter was a courtesan is clear for other reasons, too. In the sixteenth century, it was fashionable to paint the cortigiana in just this manner, torso and head filling the frame, the subject facing the painter, her hair cascading over one shoulder. Each of these details would have been read as a sign. A respectable woman of this period would never have allowed herself to be seen in public with her hair down. And certainly she would not have appeared as this woman does, only half-clothed, wearing a long white undershirt, the ancestor of our camisoles, called a camicia, a garment that, with its light- catching folds, is pulled down on the right by the same hand that holds the sumptuous dress the model is no longer wearing.
The painting is famous for the contrasts rendered, thus, the shiny embroidered surface of her dress placed next to the bare skin of her breast, making both textures more intense. You feel almost as if you were gliding your fingers over the fabric and then her skin. Yet the effect is subtle. She is not fully revealed. Is that a shadow cast by her hand or just the upper edge of her nipple that we can barely see above the resplendent fabric? Since we cannot say for certain, after all, whether it is nipple or shading, the uncertainty creates a compellingly sensual mystery. An opacity which mirrors the atmosphere the courtesan knew how to create as part of the practice of seduction. The same subtlety can be seen in the expression on her face. Her eyes askance, she appears almost modest in the way that she avoids the direct scrutiny of the painter. Though he was known for his skill at artifice, the expression must have been one Titian observed as well as created. A quality possessed by the sitter. A certain honesty. You can see it in the complexity of the presence the painter has captured. It is authenticity that makes her expression so compelling. Though reticent, she does not hide the reticence she feels. She lets herself be seen as she is. In this sense, her underdress is symbolic. Unlike those with lesser talents who would conceal or pretend, she is accustomed to using her real f
eelings in her profession. This is how she achieves the intimate moments for which she is so esteemed. And yet even this presence, like Titian’s painting, is not without artifice. Intimacy is her art. And like the painter, she knows well how to create a moving composition from elements of truth.
No wonder Titian chose to paint her. Kindred souls, they both inhabit the space that hovers between reality and artifice, a territory informed by telling details and evocative glimpses. Is it just the hint of makeup with which she adorns herself, the layers of fine clothing so artfully assembled, the rich colors with which she surrounds herself, or is it something else, too, that inspires him as he paints? Perhaps complexity itself. Her modesty, for instance, is not simple. She turns her gaze away in a definitive manner, while at the same time, her strong presence, the luster of her hair, her body, which is neither withdrawn nor fearful but instead calmly sensate, charges the canvas.
Her beauty has pushed Titian past the limits of his art. In order to reflect the quality that so fascinates him, he has had to augment his craft. Like Bellini before him, who turned to oil paints to capture the quality of the courtesans he wanted to portray, Titian, using oil, too, paints one color on top of another before the first is dry. It is all there in the layers—the fusion of seeming opposites, the sense of a history beneath the surface, of a knowledge not exactly hidden but nevertheless a carefully guarded resource.
The Book of the Courtesans Page 8
