The Book of the Courtesans

by Susan Griffin

  Where Jeanne du Barry was adaptable, Elizabeth was tenacious. In her own account, she felt she was spoiled by her ayah. Though, instead of permissiveness, the factor that corrupted her more may well have been that her caretaker was also her servant. And this, too, should be mentioned. She must have developed her determination not only in response to change but also to counter the effects of neglect, the loneliness that is engendered from feeling unloved. The other happier quality Elizabeth developed in the same period, one that can also be the fruit of loneliness, was an independence of mind extraordinary for a young woman of this period. It was a quality that could only have been augmented by her education, one that was exceptional for girls—she studied history and literature as well as the more usual embroidery and dance—an education that, despite whatever she was told about the proper behavior of a lady, she must have wanted to put to use.

  She was, in short, too large for the role in which her mother wanted to contain her. Like the little girl who had seen too much of the world to fit in easily with provincial Scottish life, now her capabilities were too great for her to play the part of a docile bride. The outcome should have been predictable. Tall and willowy, with large blue eyes and raven-colored hair, she was ravishingly beautiful. A lieutenant who had befriended her mother on the journey from India began to take an interest in her. And very soon, they eloped.

  The Craigies were so unhappy with their daughter that in the beginning they shunned her. Thomas James, the man she had married, was not a person of means. For her part, along with the first flush of love, she must have looked on this marriage as a way to achieve more freedom. She had evaded her parents’ plans by it; she was no longer under her parents’ orders at all. But it would not be long before her husband let her know that now he had the upper hand. On the lengthy journey by boat upriver that they made to his station after they returned to India, he busied himself with a notebook where he recorded all her failures as a wife. The marriage did not last long.

  After their separation, she may have wanted to stay in India, but this was deemed improper by her stepfather Craigie and her estranged husband. She was obliged to return to Scotland, where it was decided she would live with Craigie’s brother. But (and by now this too should have been predictable) she never arrived in Scotland at all. Instead, exciting outrage among the other respectable passengers, she took George Lennox as her lover on the steamship home. After the ship landed, she spent the night with Lennox in a hotel in London. And a few days later, she rented a first-floor suite on Ryder Street in a fashionable neighborhood. The affair continued for several months.

  Lennox introduced her to London’s high society, where she cut an impressive figure. This was the life she had dreamed of living. The couple attended a round of parties together and enjoyed the city’s theatres. But these halcyon days were to end quickly. Word reached her husband of her infidelities, the affair with Lennox ended, and her world started to collapse. Seeking revenge, James took both Lennox and Elizabeth to public court, where he sued them for adultery. With no means of support, and her reputation ruined, Elizabeth’s chance for any but the dreariest of futures was too narrow to contemplate. Though she tried to settle quietly with Craigie’s brother, even this recourse was closed to her now. She seemed almost without options.

  Yet for those who are exceedingly charming, fortune often fails to obey convention. From what must have seemed the insurmountable impasse of her life, Elizabeth Gilbert James reinvented herself entirely. She would, she determined, earn her living as a performer. Since she had shown some talent for dance at school, she decided she would become a dancer. But what kind of dance could she do? Ballet was not possible, of course; she was too old. Then, perhaps drawn even if unconsciously by the warmth of another Southern culture that had to have evoked the early days in India, she settled on the idea of Spanish dance, a style that was particularly popular since it had been introduced into ballet by Fanny Elssler and Marie Taglioni. This was how she would begin a new life.

  After studying boleros and chacuchas in Cádiz, the young woman returned to London with an entirely new identity. To everyone she met, she introduced herself as Lola Dolores de Porris y Montez, the daughter of a noble Spanish family, exiled by the Carlist war. The new persona served her in several ways. Given her lack of experience as a dancer, Lola Montez was an infinitely greater draw at the box office than an Irish divorcée named Elizabeth would have been. And by the same transformative stroke, she had evaded, or at least so she thought, the public embarrassment Elizabeth had suffered in the court of public opinion. As Lola Montez, all her past, the pain of the trial, and perhaps everything that had made her suffer, seemed to vanish.

  But the reprieve would only be fleeting. Her past continued to haunt her. Her debut at Her Majesty’s Theatre, London’s most prestigious stage, was triumphant. Though her skill at dancing was minimal, she had a formidable magnetism that held her audience spellbound as she paraded ominously around the stage in her mantilla. But unfortunately she was recognized by several gentlemen who had met her as Elizabeth James through Lennox, and they were quick to inform the manager and later the press of both her duplicity and her indiscretion. Not only was the engagement at Her Majesty’s Theatre canceled, but the public controversy continued until finally she resolved to leave England for the continent.

  Now she embarked on a labyrinthine journey, filled with many performances, more scandals, and several love affairs, including a brief tryst with the composer Franz Liszt, that was to bring her to Bavaria. In Berlin, after she performed on stage to mixed reviews and at a private party for the king of Prussia, who was entertaining the visiting tsar, an incident occurred which we can read as a foreshadow of the melodrama that would take place one day between Lola and the Bavarian king. The morning after the royal party, during ceremonies in Berlin arranged to honor the tsar, she arrived on horseback alone and tried to enter a section of the parade grounds reserved for royalty and nobility. Since as Lola Montez she had invented a noble family for herself, she must have decided that she was entitled to enter this exclusive compound. When a Prussian policeman ordered her to leave the area, she refused to do so. After he grabbed the reins of her horse, she struck him with her riding whip. It was the first public display of her violent temper recorded by the press. She was forced to leave the city.

  Would her temper have continued to escalate no matter what life brought her? There is ultimately no way to second-guess history. Yet it is more than possible that a loss she sustained in Paris only deepened a rage. Though her performances received mixed reviews, she was welcomed in Paris by several celebrated members of the demi-monde, including Alexandre Dumas fils. The writer Théophile Gautier, who started by being critical, became her fan. She began to establish a viable stage career in the city. And she had fallen in love with a man who returned her love passionately. Alexandre Dujarier was a very handsome Creole, a charming man, a respected journalist as well as publisher of the influential La Presse, part of a vital, sometimes glamorous world of Parisian literati. As his mistress, Lola accompanied him to restaurants, theatres, and cafés, and hosted gatherings of his friends. Once again she had the life she wanted.

  Yet, as she had experienced before so many times, the sweetness of this moment was to be cut prematurely short. One night, Dujarier did not come to her bed. In the morning a note was delivered to her in his handwriting telling her that if anything happened to him, he wanted her to know that he loved her. He had already left for a duel in the Bois de Boulogne, an event for which Lola knew he was ill prepared. She was a far better shot than he. In vain she tried to find him, hoping to dissuade or help him. Finally, a coach pulled up in the street below her apartment, but when she opened the door, his lifeless body, bloodied by a fatal wound to his face, fell into her arms.

  The second death that she suffered must have reminded her of the first loss of her father. For a period, Lola was prostrated with grief. But she could hardly afford prostration. Her engagement at the Thèâtre
de la Porte Saint- Martin, which Dujarier had helped obtain for her, was canceled. And perhaps also she could not afford to let feelings continue that may have threatened the sense she had built for herself of a strength impervious to misfortune. Following a trial of Dujarier’s assailant, during which she was interrogated roughly, Lola Montez went on the road again.

  She decided to stop in Munich on her way to Vienna. Counting on the ability to charm powerful men that was by now famous, she asked to have a brief audience with the Bavarian king to discuss the terms of her appearance at the Royal Court Theatre in Munich. As with seemingly every other decision in his kingdom, Ludwig had the final word in these negotiations. Yet though Ludwig, who was a great admirer of beauty, found Lola beautiful, he was not particularly impressed on the day he met her. Doubtless to get her way, she tried to appear submissive and to flatter the king. But it was not these conventional traits that interested him. Instead, the monarch’s fascination for Lola began to grow when, upon inquiring about the nature of the disturbances she had caused in other countries, he learned that she had broken a glass over a man’s head when he made unwelcome advances, brandished a whip at a policeman, and made provocative gestures to an audience that had been hissing her performance. It was when finally he saw her dance that he was won over by what he perceived to be her fiery spirit.

  Her ferocity, her willfulness, her tempestuous nature, even her violent temper were all qualities that Ludwig shared. A well-loved monarch, he had accomplished a great deal, cutting unnecessary expenditures, establishing a great university in Munich, building the royal library, fostering commerce. But he had a less sanguine side. Hard of hearing, often misunderstanding what was said to him, he would fly easily into a rage if he felt, as he did too frequently, that someone was being disloyal to him. Like Lola, he was known to suspect treacheries where there were none. And like her too, whenever he was opposed, he became even more determined to prevail. He boasted often that he had an iron will.

  The natural empathy that occurs between people who are similar would have been enhanced by the fact that they both had charm. Lola’s considerable charm must have attracted Ludwig for the simple reason alone that charm is a form of power. Having power over others, Lola could penetrate the unique loneliness that accompanies autocrats in a way almost no one else was able to do. And there was another factor that must have brought them closer. Like courtesanry, more than all other forms of rule, monarchy relies on charm.

  With a power that is not elected but conferred, monarchs must constantly convince their subjects that they have the right to rule. In part, they do this through various rituals which put their subjects into a trance. Royal pomp casts a powerful spell. Under this influence, the inhabitants of a nation will relinquish their own power to a ruler who claims that through bloodlines, or because of other signs (such as the pronouncements of august men dressed in impressive robes), this right has been conferred by divine will. The most absolute of monarchs, Louis XIV, understood the importance of ceremony very well, which is why he held so many charming fêtes at Versailles. Instead of tending their estates, noblemen who might otherwise have opposed him were kept constantly competing with each other for invitations to the countless splendid events the king hosted. Gilded palaces, flourishes and bows, royal robes, a crown and scepter (recalling a wizard’s hat and wand) along with the countless minor rites that punctuated the monarch’s day, served to frame the perception that the king’s power was legitimate.

  But one more enigma remains. How is it possible that a king as strong as Ludwig would have allowed his power to be destroyed by a liaison with a courtesan? To come even close to an answer we must recall that the charm of both lovers was not isolated but, like everything that is monumental, belonged to history. The very qualities that drew the monarch toward Lola alienated the burghers of Bavaria so severely that in the end her very presence incited riots. That she broke all the rules by which society was ordered, that she did not behave as a proper lady should, but instead acted as if she had been given the prerogatives of a man, would have angered the crowds. She would go out unaccompanied or, even worse, accompanied by attractive young men, whom she entertained at her apartment, or later in the house that Ludwig built for her. Rarely modest, she was often arrogant, bragging about her affair with the king, demanding the privileges she felt should belong to an official mistress. She brazenly displayed the expensive jewels Ludwig gave her. Indeed, she often acted as if not only did the prerogatives of nobility belong to her but of royalty, too. At the opera, when he visited her box, she failed to stand when he entered. And then there was the question of her violent temper. She would shout, slap, brandish her whip and was witnessed gesticulating defiantly at the crowds which, in the end, assembled under her windows to protest her presence in Bavaria.

  Her behavior, self-destructive as it was, bears all the marks of psychosis. Responding to the loss she had suffered in Paris, repeating the loss of her father at an early age, instead of grieving, she built a citadel of power for herself. It is interesting to note that, as is often the case with mental disturbance, her delusions were strangely prophetic. A hundred years hence, women began to win many of prerogatives once belonging exclusively to men, and the distinctions between aristocrats and commoners had also begun to lose their hold over the public imagination.

  But in 1846, these distinctions still mattered. Ludwig’s downfall most likely began when he finally assented to Lola’s constant pleas to make her a countess. The break in protocol outraged the sensibilities of most Munichers. There is, of course, a contradiction here between the public’s complaint against a commoner becoming a countess and the demand for a more democratic rule that was to follow. Yet on an emotional level, the contradiction reveals a deeper logic. Though commoners had been given titles before, Lola did not behave according to the rules. Thus, her elevation would lead to disillusionment. The royal spell had been broken. If once Ludwig’s right to rule with absolute power had appeared to be irreversible, a destiny dictated by God, suddenly that fate began to seem less divine. Now as well as seeming arbitrary, it appeared to be eminently reversible.

  We might object here that Louis XV took two commoners as his official mistresses and gave them both titles without losing his crown. But here we recall that these actions led to disillusionment too, albeit one that occurred at a slower pace. The royal son, Louis XVI, ultimately paid the price for his father’s indiscretions with his head. Of course there were other reasons; the history is far more complicated. And, to be fair to the courtesans in question, they were the symbolic targets for the rage of a populace that, conflicted about monarchy, found it easier to take out its ire on favorites than on kings.

  By a strange twist of fate, the queen, Marie-Antoinette, wife of Louis XVI, who had been severely disapproving of Madame du Barry and who herself was faultless according to the strictest standards of chastity and fidelity, was slandered by the Paris mobs, too, who accused her of being a whore nonetheless. In the end, both Marie-Antoinette and Madame du Barry shared the same fate. They were executed in the Place de la Concorde that Pompadour had helped to design, and where the statue of Louis XV she had commissioned was pulled from its pedestal to make room for the guillotine.

  So that we do not end these charming stories on such a lurid note, let us add one more observation. Both Louis XV and Ludwig I of Bavaria had fallen under another spell altogether. It was perhaps one of the reasons why the monarchs were attracted to commoners in the first place. They were moved beyond convention by a charm that belongs to none of us in particular but instead to all at once. The charm of new winds, of fresh ideas that can shift fate in an instant with the siren call of transformation.

  The Invisible

  My very existence was illegal.

  —Quentin Crisp, The Naked Civil Servant

  They were supposed to be invisible. Indeed, according to the conventional wisdom of the American South during the nineteenth century, quadroons were not supposed to exist at all. Perhaps
since to speak of these children was to invoke the image of their lineage, they were never mentioned in polite society. Their very existence proved what the principles of plantation aristocracy held to be unthinkable: that unions took place between masters and slaves, which would imply love and desire where it was not supposed to exist. And of course there were other implications, too. Infidelity, rape and how masters, bosses, and all kinds of white men used power.

  The children who came of such unions were thus a source of embarrassment. Yet, despite the prohibition against knowledge and perhaps because of the strong passion the mind has for locution, a strange nomenclature developed: categorization by fractions of blood. One black parent: mulatto; one black grandparent: quadroon; one black great-grandparent: octaroon. A system that moved by degrees through a hierarchy whose crowning achievement would be the erasure of any hint of scandal.

  But as is often the case with the vocabulary of injustice, an irony soon developed. The words “mulatto,” “quadroon,” “ octaroon” took on a power of their own. To pronounce them at all was to conjure a powerful fascination. That these words were allied with all that was forbidden gave them a certain inalienable force (such is the justice of language).

  Thus the same words that were used to pinion and shame children into invisibility also made for a narrow opening, a door through which a few could escape the harsh conditions of the times. In New Orleans, for instance, sometimes right next to the debutante dances, an event would be held called the Quadroon Ball. Here, just as at the Bal Mabille in Paris, a young woman born to difficult circumstances and designated quadroon might meet a wealthy man who would keep her in a very fine style.