The Book of the Courtesans

by Susan Griffin

  Though she never regretted her marriage to Scarron, it was her painful awareness of the terrible choices women were forced to make that had inspired her to establish the school at Saint-Cyr. Yet, reflecting the temper of the times, the conflict shadowed everything she did. Though the school had been established so that girls would not be forced into nunneries, when Franç oise saw her students becoming worldly, attracting the attention of the young men of the court, she made the school into a convent. If they wished to stay, the students, most of whom had spent many years at Saint-Cyr and therefore had no other place to go, were forced to take perpetual vows.

  It is not hard to imagine what they must have felt. They were by now sophisticated, well read, au courant with the latest trends; they had learned to converse eloquently, to argue reasonably. They were habituated to an elegantly sensual life, and through a constant stream of celebrated visitors, for years they had been at the center of a very worldly society. Now all that was to vanish, replaced with the harsh deprivations of their new vows of poverty and the dead silence of the cloister.

  Though they were both engaged in the struggle between secular and religious values, the marquise de Maintenon and Ninon de Lenclos eventually landed on different sides of the conflict. Yet they remained friends. It was through her friendship with the former Madame Scarron that Ninon had her only meeting with the king. Hoping Maintenon’s influence could win an appointment for a friend, Ninon wrote asking for help. When Françoise brought the matter up to Louis, he said that he had always wanted to meet Ninon and suggested that Françoise arrange a meeting at Versailles. He had heard stories of the famous courtesan since he was a child, and now as her fame had grown, her witticisms and opinions were repeated all over Paris. It is said that whenever the king could not reach a decision about an important matter, he would ask his ministers, many of whom were familiar with the courtesan, “What does Ninon think?”

  According to Athénaïs Montespan’s journals, Louis hid in a closet in Maintenon’s rooms while the two women met. After expressing her dislike of the strictness of court manners, Ninon tried to persuade her old friend to return to Paris, where she promised she would be surrounded “by those delicate and sinuous minds that used to applaud your agreeable stories, your brilliant conversation.” When Louis finally came out of his hiding place, he bantered with Lenclos, accusing her in jest of trying to deprive him of his lover. Knowing Maintenon would not be tempted to leave him, he was hardly threatened. Later he said that he liked Ninon’s intelligent frankness.

  She was telling the truth. Though many prominent women envied Maintenon’s position at court, for Ninon the sacrifice of “brilliant conversation” would have been too great. From her childhood, Ninon loved learning, books, discourse. Nor would she have been happy to be at the beck and call of the king. Early on, she rejected the passive role women were more often than not required to play. When she was eleven years old, she wrote her father a letter which announced: “I inform you now that I have decided to be a girl no longer, but to become a boy.” Thus she requested that he give her “the education needed for my new sex.”

  Her father, who was clearly charmed by the note, had his tailor make her a doublet and breeches of pale blue velvet, a short riding coat of burgundy velvet, and commissioned a cordonnier to make her a pair of riding boots as well as a chappellerie, on the Place Royale, to fashion her a beaver hat with one red plume. Dressed appropriately, she learned to ride and fence. Soon becoming the darling of the guardsmen, she quickly picked up the rough slang spoken in the stables, the mastery of which, given the mysterious power language has over the mind, doubtless made her feel as entitled as any of her other accomplishments.

  When, many years later, she decided to meet one of her lovers on the battlefield, it must have felt familiar to her to travel dressed as a man, a sword at her side. She was to repeat her vow not to be fettered by the limitations society placed on the members of her sex many times in her life. To one of her lovers, Boisrobert, she wrote: “Men enjoy a thousand privileges which women never have. From this moment, I have become a man.” True to her vow, she was reputed by many, including Voltaire, to pray each morning: “God please make me an honest man but never an honest woman. ”

  By the account of “Madame,” the wife of the king’s brother, who wrote extensive letters (deemed now almost as interesting as the letters of Madame de Sévigné), those who knew Ninon generally agreed that there was “no more honest man to be found than she.” And though in one way the achievement is extraordinary for one who has not been born a man, in another sense the integrity and authority of her behavior, including what she said and the brilliant way she said it, would have been fostered by the very fact that she straddled the boundaries between the two sexes.

  Wit is an androgynous art. A certain humorous distance from the protocol is required and nurtured by the refusal to obey it. Cross-

  dressing reveals the absurdity of strict dress codes. Behaving outside the proscriptions of gender makes the comedy of such manners apparent. Moreover, to exist on the edge of disapproval hones the sharpness of observation essential for wit. And that also requires a delicate sense of balance, part of the diplomacy that is the soul of wit—a form of humor that, to be practiced safely, is close to but not beyond the point of outrage. The witty can say exactly what is forbidden and get away with it.

  And there is this, too. No less a brilliant conversationalist than La Rochefoucauld, famous for his Maxims, said that he preferred the conversation of intelligent women over that of men. “There is a certain suavity in their talk which is lacking in our sex,” he said. Putting together the finesse that many women are encouraged to develop with the intelligence fostered in men, we would have an excellent recipe for wit.

  In essence all courtesans, no matter how rouged and bejeweled they were, had to have the virtues of both men and women. By turns independent, tough, assertive, courageous, and bold, they were also sensuous. They were not only emotionally aware, but also privy to many intimate secrets, sophisticated in the ways of the heart; and though not always so, at certain crucial moments they could be patient, nurturing, and sensitive. Rather than labor to fit themselves into the constricted roles played by either sex, they censored none of their abilities, developing qualities called masculine or feminine in a complex mix that had to be especially attractive to those bound by social convention.

  Yet we should be careful not to deceive ourselves in this regard. Courtesans were by no means entirely free of the strictures that define sexuality. If the terrain at the fringe of acceptability was exciting, it could also be dangerous. As admired, for instance, as Ninon de Lenclos was by many powerful men, even she had her enemies. At the height of her popularity, the Compagnie Gé nérale du Saint-Sacrament petitioned the queen, Anne of Austria, to punish her for ridiculing marriage, as well as for suggesting that women should have the same rights as men. Ninon was confined to a convent in Paris. And when it looked as if Ninon’s champions might try to rescue her, she was sent to another convent further off in the countryside. Nevertheless, even outside the city walls, she had a steady stream of visitors. And she was not to be confined for long. After visiting her there, Queen Christina of Sweden obtained her release by writing to Mazarin that by Ninon’s absence, “the court lacked its greatest ornament.”

  This brief imprisonment was the exception in a life that was, for this period, exceptionally unbounded. During the greater part of her existence, Ninon negotiated her freedom with extraordinary success, and in this wit was one of her best instruments. Her diplomatic triumphs in the battle of distinctions between men and women are illustrated by two remarks that have survived their creator by over three centuries. When her friend Boisrobert protested that the talk among a group of men visiting Ninon had become inappropriate for the presence of a lady, she replied that she was too much of a gentleman to mind. She made another famous remark when a lover, called Tambonneau, wished to have his wife hear Ninon play the lute, which he felt she
did beautifully. Afraid of exposing his wife to a courtesan, he proposed a solution to the dilemma. Why not hang a tapestry in front of his wife, behind which Ninon, concealed from view, would play, he suggested. On hearing this idea Ninon responded, “ Which do you think will give her greater immunity, a Flemish or a Gobelins tapestry?”

  Of course, the veil of laughter that protected Ninon was in the end a far less foolish device. Depending on the angle of your vision, it could be considered opaque, translucent, or reflective, but it was always brilliant.

  Housekeeping

  I am a marvelous housekeeper. Every time I leave a man I keep his house.—Zsa Zsa Gabor

  This catalogue would be remiss and certainly unrealistic if still another aspect of the brilliance of courtesans were not mentioned here, and that is the way they handled money. As is true of all the virtues, some were better endowed with this skill than others. But most enjoyed a financial independence that had eluded women of every class until well into the twentieth century. The wealth they acquired did not come to them automatically. Like any successful businessman or -woman, a courtesan had to be able to understand the value of what she offered, to read the climate of the market, to be self-reliant, trusting her own sense of how to proceed; and as with talented investors, have the courage to take certain educated risks in order to realize a larger gain.

  The extraordinary story of La Belle Otero affords an example of a brilliant rise from rags to riches. Brutally raped at the age of eleven, after surgery and several months in the hospital, she said good-bye to her mother and left the small village of Valga in Spain at the age of twelve with only a few pesetas in her possession. For two years she wandered in search of handouts, from one man to another, exchanging sex for a place to sleep and something to eat. Eventually, she met a Catalán called Paco who taught her to dance and sing. Acting as her manager and partner, he performed with her in a string of small, sometimes sleazy nightclubs. Like many women who worked in the theatre, she supplemented their small earnings by sleeping with men from the audience who would appear at the stage door after their performances. The possibility of ending this way of life presented itself when Paco, already her lover, wanted her to quit every other liaison and marry him. But she refused. No doubt she did not want to repeat the destitution of her childhood. And from the occasional generosity of the men who followed her off the stage, she had a growing sense of what was possible. She recognized the arrival of this possibility when an American impresario saw her in Marseille and, falling in love with her, asked her to perform at the prominent club he managed in New York.

  Just a few years later, having made a fortune from a series of eminent protectors, she owned a beautiful home designed for her by the architect Adolphe Vieil, in the fashionable neighborhood of the Parc Monceau in Paris. Her rooms were filled with luxurious possessions, fine furniture, a wardrobe the envy of royalty, and a collection of jewelry that at the turn of the century was worth 2 to 3 million francs.

  She was not as good, however, at keeping her money as she was at acquiring it. A serious vice occluded her financial genius, one that we might describe as the shadow side of her talent at making money: She loved to gamble. Over the many years of her professional life, she made regular and frequent trips to Monte Carlo. When she was young, if she lost more than she won, her income could absorb the deficit. But as she aged and her income began to wane, this vice took its inevitable toll. Perhaps it was a mistake for Otero to retire to Nice, so close to the gaming tables at Monte Carlo. In a short time, she had lost her comfortable villa. But her ending was not as miserable as it might have been. The legend is that when once again, in the last years of her life, having pawned all her jewelry, she was destitute, the casinos where she had gambled and lost most of her money gave her a modest pension, which kept her housed and fed until she died.

  Despite Otero’s example, many courtesans were very good at financial planning. More than a few were able to end their days on this earth in the style to which they had become accustomed. Some, like Marguerite Bellanger, once the lover of Napoléon III, saved and invested their earnings carefully; some such as the comtesse de Loynes, married well. Others, like Païva, did both. Some were set up in millinery shops by their protectors. Still others relied on the generosity of younger courtesans, for whom they arranged liaisons. And from the fifteenth century through the twentieth, another way existed for a courtesan to face old age with dignity. Like any profession, the art was handed down. If she were fortunate enough to have a daughter, a courtesan could train her in all the necessary skills and thus ensure a means of support in her old age.

  If in respect of motherly love this tradition seems wanting, one must remember that, under the weight of the restricted and difficult circumstances that women endured in this period, much of what any mother bequeathed to her daughter was of mixed value. Nevertheless, even if being a courtesan was considered by some as preferable to marriage, there were mothers who did try to avoid passing on their profession.

  In fifteenth-century Rome, the famous courtesan named Imperia took care that neither of her daughters would be forced to take up the profession at which she excelled so brilliantly. She had been trained in the art by her mother. Diana Cognati was not notable among courtesans, and probably for this reason Imperia began to supplement her mother’s income when she was very young. She gave birth to her own first daughter, Lucrezia, when she was barely seventeen years old. (Who the father of this child was is lost to history now.) Then in the year that Imperia turned eighteen, her mother’s undistinguished career came to an end when she married Paolo Trotti, a member of the Sistine Choir. After this union was sanctified, while Imperia’s reputation and income grew, Trotti managed her business affairs, investing in property whose ownership was in his name.

  But soon Imperia grew to distrust her mother and stepfather. Having gained worldly wisdom of more than one kind, by the time she was twenty-nine, she was shrewd enough to sever her finances from them. Soon after, in a brilliant financial move, she sold a lease of land she had recently acquired to the nephew of Pope Pius IV, Piccolomini. Because the deal was so advantageous to her, he is thought to have been one of her lovers. In exchange for the lease, Piccolomini was to build Imperia a house on the property in which she could live until her death. Furthermore, the terms of the lease required that should she die before her daughter, if Piccolomini asked Lucrezia to leave the house, he would have to pay her 300 ducats, the average price of a home in Rome. Thus, at an early age Imperia ensured that not only herself but her daughter would always have a roof over their head.

  Her second daughter, Margherita, born several years later, was the child of Agostino Chigi. Banker to kings, noblemen, and the Vatican, because of his great success in the world of finance, the Sultan of Turkey called him “ the greatest merchant of Christianity.” Julius II gave him the right to call himself “Chigi Della Rovere,” but many called him by the popular title “Il Magnifico.” Like Imperia, whom he loved and supported, he possessed the traits of shrewdness and daring, which he employed in a winning combination. Two sites still exist today in Rome that testify to the greatness of his former powers. One is the family chapel designed for him by Raphael in the Church of Santa Maria del Popolo on the Piazza del Popolo. The second is the Villa Farnesina, once the Villa Chigi, the elegant estate that the banker commissioned Baldassare Peruzzi to build.

  There is no evidence of the intimacy between Chigi and Imperia in the family chapel; but the villa tells another story. Raphael contributed to the design of the loggia and he painted what is now a famous fresco in the Grand Salon, which depicts Galatea as she rises out of the sea—a version of the goddess said to resemble Imperia. A few still believe it is a portrait of her, but the consensus now among most scholars is that since Raphael wanted his Galatea to possess the characteristics of the Renaissance ideal of beauty, he would have been influenced and guided by Imperia, who was thought to be the best living example of that ideal. In the scenes from the myth of Psy
che and Eros which Raphael also painted on the ceiling and in the friezes that border the beautiful loggia opening from the Grand Salon, in the personae of Psyche and the Three Graces, a similar face and figure appear: light hair, refined and harmonious features, a body just slightly more corpulent than is fashionable today, sensual, even strong, yet vaguely ethereal and gracefully rounded, as if the painter’s brush had glided almost effortlessly over the plaster.

  Imperia’s presence can be felt throughout the villa, which is as it should be because she was often there. This was not Chigi’s principal residence; he used it for entertaining. Thus, though the marriage of Psyche and Cupid floating above the gatherings was meant to celebrate Chigi’s marriage, in this villa it was Imperia who presided at the parties attended by business associates, writers, philosophers, painters, dignitaries from the Vatican, and of course courtesans, events which, due to the nature of the evenings, would not have been proper for Chigi’s wife to attend.

  These occasions must have had an air of excitement. It would have felt as if a pantheon of new pleasures, insights, riches, images, beliefs were rising out of a sea of creation, tumultuous with activity. Even the architecture was daring, the loggia itself opening so that the garden seemed to enter the house in an unprecedented way. These were the first salons—indeed, the French word salon would be borrowed from the Italian salone in the following century—the ancient antecedents of café

  society.

  That Chigi was a great patron of the arts only partly explains the exciting mixture of guests who frequented the Villa Chigi. His patronage would have sprung naturally from an affinity between those who, in the process of rising to prominence, were inventing a new world with different lines of power, a new vision and its own distinctions. And from a practical perspective, because with the rise of a new bourgeois class there were simply more walls to decorate, along with more men able to pay for the decoration, artists were not only prospering but, as so often happens with monetary gain, rising in esteem. No longer thought of as craftsmen, they were becoming famous. They were not alone in this process. Financiers and courtesans were being similarly transformed.