SARAH BERNHARDT
Chapter Seven
Charm
Some of the wildest men make the best pets.
—MAE WEST in Belle of the Nineties (1934)
THE SEVENTH VIRTUE is enigmatic. Charm, as the dictionary explains, is the ability to please, a definition which may seem simple until, examining the question more closely, we realize almost nothing has been said about its nature. Yet in a sense the mysterious composition of charm is part of the appeal the ability has for us. The virtue seems magical. In fact, as the dictionary also tells us, the word can be used to denote an amulet, an object that possesses magical powers. And the word is also used for certain songs that when recited cast a spell. Thus, when we say that a man has been charmed, we may mean either that he has been pleased or that he has been placed under a state of enchantment. Or, as is often the case, both.
Faced with a charming woman, for instance, you will feel yourself ceding control almost immediately. Suddenly, your body seems to have a mind of its own. Perhaps you sense a spreading feeling of warmth and then an excitement, one that enlivens both body and soul, almost as if you were being reborn. It hardly surprises you therefore that soon you find yourself letting down your guard. You may reveal to her what you never intended to reveal to anyone or laugh at what you never found humorous before. Then you realize you have agreed to what, in different company, you might have found to be rather wild propositions. And all the time you feel looser somehow in your limbs, closer to liquid than substance. Have you become putty in her hands? Even if this were true, the pleasure is too delicious for you to worry about any such consideration. On the contrary, you are more than happy to stay in her hands for as long as it is conceivably possible and by any means necessary.
That despite every impediment to and prejudice against their sex so many women have triumphed through charm has caused alarm among men for centuries. Perhaps this is why the virtue has often been linked to danger and fatality. Ironically, this idea was more dangerous to women than charm ever was to men. In a period when women accused of witchcraft were being burned at the stake, the association between witchcraft and the courtesan’s charm was more than etymological. When, in the early seventeenth century, Thomas Coryat warned the traveler to Venice, “thou must fortify thine eares against the attractive enchantment of their plausible speeches,” he was not speaking metaphorically. Just as the judges of the Inquisition frequently accused witches of inspiring lust, courtesans were often accused of using witchcraft. Though she was acquitted, even the respected Veronica Franco was tried as a witch.
Nor should we be surprised that a battle would be fought at the nexus between magic and sexuality. The lines of the conflict can be traced back to ancient Greece, where the courtesan was often thought to possess sacred powers. Like the witches who were to come later, the hetaerae practiced healing arts, prescribing herbs or acting as midwives. It was even believed by some that, through lovemaking, these women could initiate men into the mysteries of Venus. Mysteries that are often the source of unpredictable if not tumultuous transformations.
Revelation
. . . mystery is the visible, not the invisible.
—Oscar Wilde
History has commended Hyperides for understanding the limits of reason. Though the arguments he made in defense of his client, the hetaera known as Phyrne, were brilliant, he knew that even his best powers of persuasion could not win the case. The failure is understandable. The dispute in question centered less on logic than belief. Phyrne, who was not just a courtesan but also a priestess of Aphrodite, stood accused of sacrilege. She had, it was said, invented a god, an act of imagination absolutely forbidden to mortals.
To understand the atmosphere in which this trial was conducted, the contemporary mind must reach back to a time when religion and government were not separated, and hence worship was at the heart of civic life. Under these circumstances, the investiture of a new god could alter the cohesive fabric of society. Thus, the creation of a new deity would give considerable political power to the creator.
Neither the defendant nor the lawyer could dispute the simple facts of the charge; Phyrne had indeed created an original god. All that was left for her defense would be to claim that her right to do so was legitimate. The argument Hyperides made was that as a priestess, Phyrne had been channeling Aphrodite. The goddess herself, he reasoned, was expressing her will through Phyrne. But the argument by itself failed to impress the court.
It is easy to see why mere words would not work in this case. Ordinary discourse grows pale when faced with religious belief. Faith, reverie, prayer, vision, passion, and ecstasy are less the products of reason than of experience. This is why religious teachings are so often rendered through metaphor: the body of Christ eaten symbolically in the ritual of communion, the unleavened bread spread with symbolic mortar during Passover, the fasts and feasts so important to Islamic practice. To be kept alive, a religion must be felt with both soul and body.
Having been raised in a religious culture, Hyperides knew that to win his case, he had to present the court with a revelation. So it was that while Phyrne was standing in the witness box, he asked her to remove her clothing. The strategy worked. According to reports that have come down to us through the ages, awestruck by what they saw, the jurors quickly declared that the presence of Aphrodite was the only possible explanation for such beauty.
In the more secular perspective of contemporary consciousness, Hyperides’ strategy appears to have been aimed at carnal appetite rather than the soul. By this standard, the court’s better judgment was simply undermined. But this is to ignore the fact that what the jurors declared was correct. Even if we view Aphrodite as an archetype or metaphor for erotic love, it is clear that her formidable force was present at these proceedings. If the jurors’ vision was clouded, it was through another means altogether. Though what they thought they were seeing was simply beauty, while they studied Phyrne’s body, the jurors were being charmed.
To understand what occurred, it is necessary to state what is obvious, that there are two fundamentally different, if not opposite, categories of nudity. Images of the first kind of nude, in which the body is objectified, are so widely distributed and popular that they often obscure the existence of the second kind, in which the body is a subject, which is to say, aware.
Self-reflection is a desire felt by the body as well as the soul. As dancers, healers, and saints all know, when you turn your attention toward even the simplest physical process—breath, the small movements of the eyes, the turning of a foot in midair—what might have seemed dull matter suddenly awakens. Being a courtesan, of course, Phyrne had a highly refined awareness of her body. That she was fully conversant with her self showed in the way she walked across a room, the movement of her thighs, hips, belly, and shoulders redolent with the body’s wisdom. Yet she did not have to move through space for the effect to be felt. Even sitting still in the witness box, it was as if all her flesh, not just skin, muscle, and bone but even the atoms themselves, joined in a subtle harmonious motion. An alchemical dance so in tune with the essence of life that to witness it was to fall into a trance.
This was an art with which she was familiar. As a priestess of Aphrodite, she knew how to induce trance. She was famous, in fact, for using the sight of her own body for this purpose. Once a year, she would immerse herself in the sea from which Aphrodite was said to have sprung. The sight of Phyrne as she emerged must have stunned those who worshipped at her temple. She was not unclothed, but her wet clothing clung to her body so that even the subtlest movement became visible.
Here, of course, the metaphor became reality. But we must remember that metaphor is always real. When Sappho speaks of the purple robes of love, imagining the lush color and the feel of the smooth fabric, those who listen to her words are enjoying a pleasure that is as real as any other. That the meaning is layered only makes the pleasure deeper. So it was when Phyrne arose from the sea. Her beauty, the vitality of her
flesh, the flow of the water, would evoke all beauty, all life, all seas, including the waters of our cells and the inner waters of dreams.
And there is the nature of symbolism to consider too. Metaphor itself as a device tends to evoke connection, showing how one thing echoes and evokes another, leading us toward a particularly sensual understanding: knowledge that we are all part of one body. That this spiritual lesson is of its nature erotic belongs to the wisdom of the goddess who is sometimes called Aphrodite the courtesan. Among her many attributes was a golden chain, which she used both to join lovers and to bind all life together. In this lustrous light, Hyperides’ argument that Phyrne was expressing the will of Aphrodite when she created a new god seems even more plausible, especially when we learn that the new idol in question was the god of sharing.
The court agreed with Hyperides and acquitted Phyrne of all charges. And so the story ends and we would end here, were we not concerned with charm. On this account, one more observation must be added. It is only possible to grasp the great powers of Phyrne’s virtue when we consider the conflict that acquitting her must have stirred among the jurors. Even if Phyrne had been obeying the will of Aphrodite, by this acquittal, the court had decreed that a mortal had created an immortal. Yet, according to the philosophy which at the time must have ordered all their thoughts, mortality was carefully set apart from immortality, an opposite to and even a corruption of the glories of infinity.
But perhaps through her image they were pulled by earlier philosophies, not in private memory so much as inherited from ancient figures and rhymes, part of Aphrodite’s own past, when she was known as Astarte or Ishtar, from a time when it was said that eternity is made from mortality through the unending cycles of life in which we all take part.
As if to prove that the court was right in the end, Phyrne herself has received a kind of immortality. The most famous among the many sculptures done by her lover Praxiteles was modeled after her body. Considered the finest sculptor of antiquity, according to testimony, he was able to capture her extraordinary vibrancy brilliantly. Though his Aphrodite of Cnidus has been lost, its powers were apparently so great that the sculpture established what was to be the classic form for nude sculptures of women, especially those of Venus, over many centuries. When we think of the realm of Aphrodite today, it is still Phyrne’s body that we see, tempting us toward her mysteries.
Bewitched at First Sight
King Louis was bewitched at first sight of that lovely smiling face, so singularly pure and innocent, on which all her sordid experiences had left not a trace.—Joan Haslip, Madame du Barry, the Wages of Beauty
That Madame du Barry had a charmed life is indisputable, though it is also inarguable that in the beginning this outcome would have been nearly impossible to predict. Jeanne du Barry, as she came to be known, had what the eighteenth century called a low birth. Less elevated in station than Pompadour, her family was neither wealthy nor part of the respectable bourgeoisie. There had been, however, a faint brush with nobility. Before he met her grandmother, her handsome grandfather, Fabien Bécu, was married to a countess. But because he was a commoner, when this noblewoman married him, she lost her hereditary privileges. Still, that he remained a commoner did not prevent him from squandering all her money. Thus, after she died at an early age, he was forced to return to his old profession as a cook. It was while he was serving as the chef in a château that he met Jeanne’s grandmother, a lady’s maid.
The barest hint of a foreshadow can be seen in the fact that as is often the case with those who live a more privileged life for a limited period, Fabien had learned refined manners, and he passed these on to his daughter Anne, Jeanne’s mother. She also inherited his beauty. She too would have been taken into the employment of a noble house were it not for her rebellious nature. Even if the cost was a less comfortable life, she preferred her independence. In the beginning luck was against her. She was working as a seamstress in Vaucouleurs, a town at the edge of the Lorraine, when she became pregnant with Jeanne. Seduced and abandoned by a handsome monk called “ Brother Angel,” who because of the scandal was dismissed from his order and dispatched to Paris, Jeanne and her mother were left to fend for themselves in Vaucouleurs.
Yet, notwithstanding the fact that almost everything in this chapter of the story leans toward a modest if not sad end, when Jeanne was just four years old, Anne’s fate took a happy turn. When she gave birth to a second child by another lover, she was not abandoned. Instead, Monsieur Billard-Dumonceaux, who was a man of means, well positioned and somewhat powerful as a paymaster of Paris and inspector of the army commissariats, summoned the small ménage to Paris. He put the family in separate lodgings for a few months, but when the little boy he had fathered died, he decided to move Anne and Jeanne into his own grand and luxurious home.
Here, what was no doubt a misfortune for her mother would, in hindsight, be fortunate for Jeanne. Dumonceaux already had a lover, a woman who lived with him. The identity of this woman can hardly have seemed as auspicious to Jeanne, then just four years old, as it clearly seems to us today. The mistress of Dumonceaux’s household was an Italian courtesan, well known in the world of galanterie as Madame Frédérique, but known to Jeanne, who came to love her, simply as Francesca.
Francesca, as it turned out, loved the little girl, too. Jeanne was often allowed into her bedroom, which with its velvet chairs, taffeta bedcovers, and scented pillows must have seemed as seductive as the voluptuous courtesan herself. Jeanne loved Francesca’s toiletries, the golden brushes and handmirrors, the perfume bottles, her clothing, her jewels; in turn, Francesca loved dressing the very pretty little girl in beautiful clothes. The details have not survived, but small garments of lace and velvet come to mind. She was taught to dance and in other ways entertain the guests who came to the house. And Dumonceaux, who was a bit pretentious where art was concerned, painted her as a nymph in the manner of Boucher.
For two years, Jeanne was the adored center of this unconventional household. But fate took still another turn. Yielding to admonitions from her family to lead a more respectable life, Anne Bécu married a plain man who, because he had a small annuity, was able to provide for her. Any reluctance he might have had over this union was quickly dispelled by the fact that Dumonceaux arranged a lucrative position for him at the army commissariat in Corsica. In the same year, Francesca, perhaps wishing to retain her influence over Jeanne, convinced Dumonceaux to send the child to Saint-Aure’s, a convent designed to prepare respectable girls for modest employment in the domestic trades.
The change cannot have been easy. The romantic atmosphere Jeanne had grown used to was absent here. All her pretty dresses were taken from her, replaced with a plain uniform and a plain black veil that completely hid the golden hair so often admired by Francesca. But the child had a basically sunny disposition. And understandably, given the unstable nature of her past, she was good at adapting to different climates. She obeyed all the new rules she had been made to learn, recited her catechisms and prayers, kneeled and rose at the right times, all with an air of insouciance that charmed even the Mother Superior.
Fate, of course, is only one element guiding the course of a life. To every circumstance there are many possible responses. Even at the beginning of what would in the end be a nine-year tenure in the convent, Jeanne’s character had begun to emerge. For the rest of her life, she would be known not only as beautiful but as charming. The alchemy of this virtue can be observed in her early years, years filled, as we have said, with constant change, but also admiration. An effective means to meet, and even at times control, fate was handed to her young. It remained for her to put her own stamp on the ability.
After she left the convent at the age of fifteen, the narrative of her life unfolded swiftly. Francesca, whom she rushed eagerly to meet, was not happy to receive such a beautiful young woman. Jeanne had turned into a potential rival. No further help could be expected now from either Francesca or Dumonceaux. Jeanne was forced to fin
d employment. Her mother’s sister knew a hairdresser who needed an apprentice, so the problem of her support seemed, at least for a time, solved. Yet, almost too predictably, she and the hairdresser fell in love. And after they began living together, his mother, who had a better match in mind, threatened to send Jeanne to Salpêtrière, the asylum where wanton women were imprisoned.
To prevent her daughter’s imprisonment, Anne took the hairdresser to court with the accusation that he had corrupted a minor. And here we can already find the evidence of an ingredient essential to the charm by which Jeanne would one day win the king of France as her lover. She seemed innocent, far too innocent to the judges to be anything but the victim of a young man’s advances. Thus, to avoid prison, her lover had to flee to London.
What followed was a period as companion to the wealthy widow of a fermier général,*2 which ended because of the many intrigues in the household she attracted, the somewhat welcome attention of the lady’s two sons, who were both married, and the unwelcome advances of one of the widow’ s daughters-in-law, who was attracted to Jeanne, too.
Because of the scandal, she was dismissed. But she did not leave empty-handed. Among the wealthy men Jeanne had met in this château, there were some who habituated a shop in Paris so famous for its luxurious fashions that it was virtually a meeting place for courtesans and libertines. For a brief period she was happily employed at Labille’s “A La Toilette,” a glamorous place with a heady mix of great ladies, noblemen, officers, courtiers, and courtesans, all of whom came for the painted fans and feathers, ribboned hats, and elegant sword knots. But this too would be just one more way station on her trajectory toward an unlikely destination. Tall and blond, with almond-shaped blue eyes sparkling from a sweetly delicate complexion, Jeanne was a stellar attraction among the grisettes working for Labille, most of whom traded their attentions for gifts they received from a clientele that included wealthy bankers, merchants, and government officials. For a period Jeanne lived with various lovers, but though she was offered a shop and house of her own more than once, she kept her independence.
The Book of the Courtesans Page 20
