They might have climbed the hill up to Montmartre, where not far away at the Moulin Rouge the cancan was being performed until the early hours of morning, or gone east on the boulevards to the Folies-Bergère, where one could watch the stage while drinking or eating as tableaux and parades of extravagantly costumed women appeared, some of them legendary. It was here that Colette performed half nude; Liane de Pougy, Cleo de Mérode, and La Belle Otero danced, and Emilienne d’Alençon presented the talents of her famous pink rabbits, all to be followed at the end of the era by performers still fabled in modern memory—Mistinguett, Josephine Baker, Maurice Chevalier, and Charlie Chaplin.
But the performance would be only a prelude to what must have seemed an infinite spectacle. Leaving the theatre, they would rejoin the crowds heading toward the Café Turc, the Café Anglais, the Café des Mauresques, the Café Riche, or Le Napolitain, to drink and dine and continue the party. And of course, they could easily have chosen instead the established center of gaiety, that golden place known as Maxim’s, to dine under the glass roof designed by Lalique, drink the best champagne to be had in Paris, and then dance through the early hours of the morning to the music of the house orchestra.
In the Belle Epoque, Maxim’s was synonymous with the high life of the fin-de-siècle. It was here in a room that held the bar called “The Omnibus,” that demi-mondaines, actresses, dandies, flâneurs, and boulevardiers regularly assembled. Courtesans could always be found here. Maxim’s was the place for everyone to be seen and where anyone could be seen. Emilienne d’Alençon would come when she finished performing at the Folies-Bergère, leaving her rabbits with Ursula, the caretaker of the ladies’ room. Mata Hari and La Belle Otero came, too, and Liane de Pougy along with Cléo de Mérode, both pursued by Leopold of Belgium. His would not be the only royal presence; the Prince of Wales entertained here often. And of course the presiding royalty of the arts could be found here, too, including the playwright Feydeau, Marcel Proust, and Sarah Bernhardt.
More than once, the frivolity reached fevered pitch, as when, for instance, Maurice Bertrand ushered in four pall bearers who were carrying a casket that, when opened, revealed a case of champagne. And whenever in the natural course of a night anyone’s capacity for folly began to ebb, the celebrant had only to look in the sinuously beautiful Art Nouveau mirrors that wrapped each room in luminescence to be inspired once more by the sight of someone else laughing, flirtatious, seduced, or all three, and in the process producing delicious gossip.
But there was another kind of reflection which captured the same rooms with ghostly doubles to all the festivities that were produced by artists and writers who took their inspiration from the restaurant. The reputation of Maxim’s was so forceful that it migrated into the imagination of an Austrian man who had never been to Paris at all: Franz Lehar set the entire act of an opera in the restaurant he had never seen. Nevertheless, he caught the spirit. “I go off to Maxim’s,” Prince Danilo sings, “ Where fun and frolic beams. With all the girls I chatter. I laugh and kiss and flatter.” Thousands of curious visitors, intrigued by The Merry Widow, would follow the hero there.
Everywhere along the boulevards the festivities were enlarged and intensified by glittering images and thrilling legends, which danced and sang along with the crowds, calling out like sirens inviting pilgrims from far and wide to join the party. If you strolled in the Passage des Panoramas, Zola’s heroine Nana, who loved to look at the fake jewelry in the shop windows there, would be walking beside you. Listening to a concert in the Tuileries, you would be haunted by the painting Manet made of a group of famous boulevardiers, sitting where you are sitting. Your expectations of a ball at the Opéra would be heightened by his painting of a masked ball held there; and certainly approaching the bar at the Folies-Bergère, you would be accompanied by another of his luminous paintings.
In the first foyer of the Opéra, the gathering would remind you of the opening scene of Balzac’s The Splendor and Misery of the Courtesan. In the corridors of any theatre you would remember Flaubert’s description of students parading their mistresses during intermissions. Inside the auditoriums, the images continue in intricate layers, as you recall several paintings of ladies and gentlemen in their boxes, as well as Daumier’s rendering of the section called Paradise in the upper balcony where the poorer members of the audience are packed.
Entering the street again, your impression would be shaped by Béraud’s painting of the boulevard Montmartre in front of the theatre you have just left. Strolling over to a café, the men in silk hats you encounter might have stepped from paintings by Caillebotte, just as so many women you see resemble Manet’s La Parisienne. And as the next century begins, you would think to yourself that it is here on the boulevard that Colette’s character, Chéri, mourning for the loss of the courtesan he loved, spent night after night in drunken dissolution. As when reaching Tortoni’s, you would know that Proust’s hero, Swann, searched desperately and in vain for the courtesan Odette here.
And all about you while you watch or dine or drink or dance, stories and images are being newly coined. The boulevardiers, fond of witty remarks, publish and repeat them. One way or the other, sooner rather than later, everyone has heard Feydeau’s famous quip at Maxim’s. (After being served a lobster with only one claw, he answered the waiter’s explanation, that lobsters often fight and injure each other in the tank, by demanding “Well, then, take this one away and bring me the victor.”) And everyone repeats the story of when Caroline Otero, forced to give up her seat at the Comédie-Française to make room for the tsar of Russia and his retinue, threatened: “All right, I’ll leave. But I’ll never eat caviar again!”
Just as all the stories are being repeated, Nadar is photographing Sarah Bernhardt, Labiche, Dumas and Dumas fils, the Goncourt brothers— all principal players in this gaiety. And if now, looking back, the effect of these portraits seems somewhat elegaic, it is perhaps because although the pleasure is multiplied in both space and time, each event
mirrored in succeeding reflections yielding the sense of an infinite progression, this moment of eternity will come to an end like any other. It is an inevitability folded into every joy. As is the eventual comprehension, if you glance for more than a moment in the mirror, that what you see there is not just happiness. Each night innumerable catastrophes advance toward the region.
The abundance so evident on the boulevards has a hidden cost. Lives cut short, impoverished, bodies maimed, tortured in Africa and Asia. The violence spent in the colonies will soon come home. The First World War is in the making. Soon French soldiers will be marching along the boulevards on their way to battle. The Dreyfus case, with its thinly veiled anti-Semitism, augurs the terrors of the second war that will follow. The unceasing abundance displayed on the boulevards is matched by a terrible poverty just a few streets away, in the recent memory of many of those who take part in the golden prosperity. And even as the party continues, there are among the celebrants men and women who are dying of the contagious diseases that, fed by poverty, also prosper.
Many, of course, come here only to escape. Drinking or gambling too much, they use pleasure as a path toward oblivion. But pleasure is not by its nature ignorant. During any given moment of delight, the mind starts to expand the circumference of its attention, here taking in the colored glass paperweights in a shop window, there the chestnut tree that has just come into bloom, then the frayed collar and pale face of the young man walking listlessly on the opposite side of the street, together with the look of desperation that clouds the face of a young prostitute as she leaves the notorious bar next door. Among the revelers, there are those who are watching closely, and they leave nothing out.
For gentlemen fleeing the boredom of high society, that this is the meeting place of those who dare to broach forbidden subjects is one of the attractions. It is at the Café Durand that Zola will write J’Accuse!, calling the French government’s prosecution of Alfred Dreyfus unjust. In these cafés, one can talk op
enly about subjects banned from polite drawing rooms, not just politics and disease but the ever-fascinating sex and money. “What if instead of these indecent rags,” Baudelaire writes of a beautiful girl he observes begging on the street, “the splendid train of a brocade gown rustled at your heels.” The air is brisk with forbidden realities.
The perspective can have a prejudicial slant, as when Zola or the Goncourt brothers create a moral distance between their own pleasures and the pleasures of women. Still, as with an ancient carnival, this is a party where the old distinctions dissolve temporarily. Everyone changes roles. Poor women become powerful as rich men beg for favors. And despite every separation, the mood on the Grands Boulevards, shared as it is by multitudes, will inevitably sweep its inhabitants toward union, when for the duration of the vast ritual every fate seems to converge. Hence in the second half of the century, a gentleman and his mistress could pass by the Church of the Madeleine which anchors one end of the Grands Boulevards, where the memory of the large funeral held there for Marie Duplessis still lingers.
And since death anchors every life, subtle signs of this destiny can be found everywhere on the boulevards. Even the most earnest attempts at undiluted frivolity include signs that evoke a vast underworld of meaning. If, between the two world wars, for instance, a man were to take his mistress, one of the last courtesans, to the Folies-Bergère, they may see a fan of feathers crowning the head of Gaby Deslys as she parades the length of the stage, or five diamond-studded fans framing Josephine Baker’s face, matching the large diamond spirals hanging from her ears, or a mane of furlike feathers trailing from a golden helmet worn by Edmond Guy, or a python wrapped around Mademoiselle Floriane’s arms. Thus, however subtly, on this night of pleasure, Inanna, Isis, and Venus will be evoked, not only inspiring thoughts of love but also revealing the larger mysteries for which pleasure is just one of the stations.
Yet this station is formidable. If, on any given night, the pleasures of Paris have not already, as De Amicis says, “conquered” its visitors, here in the territory of the courtesan they will finally be possessed. Drowning in the strange sensation that past, present, and future have fused, now in this time out of time, while every sensible thought they have is disarmed by a wave of intense tastes, odors, scents, sounds, visions, the pilgrims worshipping here will be subsumed and carried toward abandon by a common stream, rich with the history of desire.
Her Swing
For this and that way swing The flux of mortal things—Matthew Arnold, “Westminster Abbey”
When, at the Folies-Bergère or the Ziegfeld Follies, a star such as Josephine Baker descended toward the stage perched on a swing, to some the vision would have evoked an earlier image. The original model for this setting can be found in a painting from the eighteenth century commissioned by Monsieur de Saint-Julien as a portrait of his mistress. It was his idea that she be suspended from a swing, and he who asked that his own likeness be placed beneath her where he could admire her legs. At first Saint-Julien requested that the painter Gabriel-François Doyen to accept his commission; but Doyen, feeling the project too frivolous, passed it on to a younger, more obscure man who, as it turned out, had a strong feeling for the subject matter. When the painting, called Les Hasards Heureux de L’Ecarpolette— The Happy Risks of the Swing—appeared, it caused a sensation that made its creator, Jean-Honoré Fragonard, famous.
In the painting, both gentleman and mistress are surrounded by a verdant landscape. It is a pastoral scene, the tree from which the swing is suspended almost mythically beautiful, the gentleman below literally wreathed in a bower of leaves and flowers. Though this background has a unique character, it also partakes of an even earlier tradition—the habit of painting amorous scenes, sometimes with courtesans, sometimes with goddesses (who were usually unclothed), set in the countryside. The fête galante, as the form is known, can perhaps most easily be recognized by today’s audiences in Manet’s Dejeuner sur l’Herbe, which when it was painted shocked society by replacing nude goddesses with modern women who sit sharing a picnic lunch with men who are fully dressed. Later, though the version she painted is less famous, Suzanne Valadon took the image into a far more radical dimension when she depicted both men and women at the picnic unclothed.
Next to these examples, The Swing, in which both lovers are fully clothed, may appear to be tame. Fragonard can seem foolishly sentimental, except when you understand that his best subject was ecstasy. The vibrant motion of the young woman on the swing, echoed in the billowing pink silk of her dress, which is caught in the light dancing over her, her face, her breasts, and which falls across his face, too, turned toward her, the adoring expression, the joyful ardor of his hand stretched toward her feet, his feeling extended into the tree which also reaches, less with effort than the pure effect of delight, toward a misty, blushing resolution in the deeper landscape—are all expressions of bliss, the frivolous yet nevertheless powerful feeling that merges countryside and lovers together into one buoyant vision.
Of course, the painting captures only one moment in the arc of pleasure. The pendulum will of necessity swing back and away; though the pink shoe that is suspended in midair above him will soon be his, the lover will never seize his mistress’s stockinged foot. And yet the feeling of the painting is not one of frustration but rather of a joy that is at that moment being realized. It is as if swing, skirt, trees, blushing sky, taken together were tropes for the nature of sexual passion, which will move through your body like a wave, dissolving your reserve, bringing you to union with forces of life beyond your comprehension, before it recedes, as all things must inevitably do. Though while you are immersed in this motion, you will be too happy to care.
ALICE OZY
Rapture
(THE FIFTH EROTIC STATION)
The real merit of these eyes, their only originality, lay in something naive and constantly astonished. . . . —Edmond About, Madelon
ALICE OZY WAS known for combining the wide- eyed innocence in her character with a fair measure of cleverness and guile. The resulting mix must have been surprisingly delightful. The duc d’Aumale, son of the citizen king, Louis Philippe, was devoted to her. The toast of Paris for decades, she was depicted in novels and poetry by Edmond About and Thé ophile Gautier, painted and sculpted by Chassériau and Doré. Her naïveté could be startling. Once, when she was told in jest that a Gruyère cheese mine had been discovered in Montmorency which would provide employment for the poor, she responded by clapping her hands in joy. But her famous gullibility could not have come from any deficiency of mind. Instead of diamonds, she habitually asked that her lovers give her shares in the railway company. She became a wealthy woman rather early in her life.
As is true for all of us, the source of some of her qualities can be found in her childhood. Her father was not poverty-stricken; he was a jeweler. But both her mother and father had other lovers and, disinterested in each other, they soon became disinterested in her, too. After leaving her with a foster mother for several years, when she reached the age of ten, they decided Alice should earn her own living. Thus, she spent three years of her childhood in the dark backroom of a fabric shop bent over a needle and thread as she executed intricate patterns of embroidery.
Those who have been deprived of a childhood sometimes lack the ability either to be playful or to take pleasure in life. Yet just as often, those who have had their childhoods stolen from them retain an almost childlike joy in life. It is as if at every moment they experience release from a dim prison and are astonished and elated by everything and everyone they encounter.
Ozy’s career as a courtesan began in a way that was conventional for the nineteenth century. At age thirteen, she was reprieved from her backroom indenture when her manager, estimating the effect of her beauty, thought she would be better suited to working behind the counter. But considering her innocence, this new position left her vulnerable to a second calamity. Very soon after her promotion, she was seduced by the shop’s owner. Now
the marriage proposal from a country doctor which seemed imminent could not be accepted.
Her dilemma did not last long. Falling in love with the gifted actor Paul-Louis Brindeau, she eloped with him. And like so many compromised women before her, she entered the theatre, too. At the age of twenty, having made her first appearance in the Théâtre des Variétés, she was already earning 1,200 francs a year. But she was not to stay with Brindeau long. By turn of fate the Variété had been commanded to present the play in which she was performing, Le Chevalier du Guet, at the royal palace in the Tuileries. The performance was arranged to honor the return of Louis Philippe’s son, the duc d’ Aumale, who fell in love with Alice at first sight. Doubtless understanding the fortunate nature of such a connection, and perhaps from a certain restlessness that also must have been engendered by her childhood, she left Brindeau easily. Just as easily as, after a period, she would leave the duke, who since he did not have control of his own money yet, could give her far less than her next lover, the comte de Perregaux.
It is a testament to both the duke and the courtesan that Aumale was not resentful when she left. Still her friend when both of them were aging, he visited her at the château she owned on Lake Enghien in Switzerland, where, it is said, she would take the petals of the roses she grew and scatter them throughout the rooms. Did the scent remind the duke of all the nights he spent with her in her apartment above the Maison Dorée? Many men dreamed of joining her in the rosewood bed encrusted with Sevre Medallions depicting Cupid, and draped in lace. The great womanizer Victor Hugo was very disappointed that he was merely shown her bedroom but not invited to stay. In his novel Madelon, Edmond About hints obliquely at what the experience of staying might have been like. “When you saw her,” he says, “ it was like smelling a bunch of heliotrope or tasting some delicious fruit; you felt something complete and superabundant, which made your heart overflow. ”
The Book of the Courtesans Page 16
