In fact, the impassioned tone of her letter does not contradict the passionate defense she made of courtesanry, but instead outlines the perils courtesans faced, especially when they were not among the most successful. In the end, she herself was to join the ranks of the less privileged in her profession. The last years of her life, during which she was supporting her brother’s children as well as her own, were not prosperous. Circumstances took their inevitable toll. She died of fever at the age of forty-five.
IN 1531, WHEN she was barely twenty years old, Tullia D’Aragona was the reigning courtesan of Rome. But by 1535, she and her mother, the courtesan Giulia Campana, moved to Adria, perhaps to conceal the birth of a daughter, Penelope, officially listed as Giulia’s child but widely thought to be Tullia’s. In the ensuing years, in several different cities, including Venice, Ferrara, and Florence, Tullia flourished both as a courtesan and as an intellectual. Her friendship with the respected philosopher Benedetto Varchi furthered her ca-reer.
As Tullia entered her late thirties, she tried to fashion a new life, free of her most profitable vocation. She founded an academy in Florence, where she organized debates and provided musical entertainment on the lute, at which she was famously skilled. When her academy achieved great success, she became one of the most notable figures in Renaissance Florence. But this glory was interrupted after potentially scandalous charges of violating the sumptuary laws required for courtesans were brought against her. The law would have prohibited her from wearing silks or jewels, at the same time requiring that she wear the scarf with a yellow border used to identify prostitutes. Along with Varchi, Eleanora de Toledo, the duchess of Florence, came to her aid, and Tullia was acquitted and freed from the sumptuary requirements. And hence she began a flurry of writing and publishing, which included the Dialogue on the Infinity of Love.
But her intellectual pursuits did not pay her bills. She was forced to leave Florence, a man she loved passionately, and her patron Varchi. In Rome, Tullia, her mother, and Penelope rented small lodgings in a fashionable part of the city, probably hoping to finance their household when Penelope, nearing fourteen, was presented as a courtesan. But the child’s career as well as her life was short. She died in 1549. Tullia’s history is lost to us now. We find her again only in 1555, as she writes her will in a room, in the Trastevere, which she rented from a former maid Lucrezia and her husband, Matteo. What little she had to leave—furniture, jewelry, clothing—was carefully apportioned to a son, Celio; Lucrezia and Matteo; her young maid, Christofara; and the percentage that the church required from courtesans when they died. Apparently devoting herself to good works at the end of her life, she had made her peace with the church. She requested that no one attend her funeral except members of the Company of the Crucifix, to which she belonged at the time of her death.
NINON DE LENCLOS remained uncertain about religion all her life, though this uncertainty did not prevent an abbé from falling in love with her when she was eighty years old. In her inimitable fashion, she continued to enjoy life and inspire admiration until her last breath at the ripe old age of eighty-five. True to her lucidly honest character to the end, just before her death, asking for pen and paper, she wrote:
Let no vain hope be held out to make my courage waver.
I am of an age to die, what is there left for me to do here?
After which she closed her eyes and died.
WE HAVE ALREADY described Imperia’s death. But we have not yet told the famous story of what happened to her daughter several years later. Lucrezia was known to be as beautiful as her mother. Probably for this reason, when Cardinal Raphael Petrucci, accompanied by troops, arrived in the town in Tuscany where Lucrezia and her husband lived in 1522, he had Archangelo arrested on trumped-up charges. His plan was to bargain for Lucrezia’s sexual favors with Archangelo’s freedom. But when his messengers summoned her, saying simply that she wanted to change her clothes, Lucrezia, as her mother once did, took poison. This story however has a happier ending. Lucrezia recovered, and the tale of how she saved her honor was repeated for generations throughout Italy.
AFTER AN ESTIMABLE career as an entertainer and courtesan, Emilienne d’Alençon married an aristocratic army officer and thus like many courtesans before her gained the title of countess. From this new position, she hosted a literary salon and wrote a book of poems herself, called The Temple of Love. But the marriage was short-lived. Soon after, she became the lover of the famous jockey, Alec Carter. After he was killed in World War I, she became part of the circle that gathered in Natalie Barney’s rooms on the rue Jacob, where she devoted herself to the love of women and poetry, as well as experimentation with drugs. Earlier the lover of Liane de Pougy, she was also the lover of the poet Renée Vivien, who had been Barney’s lover, Valtesse de la Bigne, and Madame Brazier, the proprietress of the lesbian bar Le Hammaton, with whom she was depicted sitting in a box in the theatre by Toulouse-Lautrec. She was last sighted in 1940 at a casino in Monte Carlo, at age seventy, still looking good.
MARION DAVIES CONTINUED to act, sing, and dance in film until she made her last movie in 1939. After the death of Hearst’s mother and his separation from his wife, Hearst and Davies divided their time between San Simeon, the older estate at Mount Shasta called Wyntoon, and Southern California. They continued as lovers for thirty- nine years, until Hearst died in 1951 after an extended illness. In a codicil to his will, he had left his longtime lover thirty thousand shares of preferred stock, yielding her an annual income of $150,000. Six weeks after his death, when she was fifty-four years old, Marion married Horace Gates Brown III, an old friend of her sister, and frequent visitor to San Simeon, a man who was said to bear a remarkable resemblance to Hearst. They remained married for the rest of her life.
She augmented her already considerable real estate holdings with several purchases. But though more than comfortable, her last years were quiet. That she was still a hard drinker did little to mitigate the fact that gaiety is harder to summon in isolation than in a crowd. Many of her fellow revelers gone, in a sense there was no one left to party with, though her old friend Joseph Kennedy did what he could. She attended the wedding of Jacqueline Bouvier to John F. Kennedy and she was an honored guest at Kennedy’s inauguration. Three years later, a life of heavy drinking having caught up with her, she suffered a minor stroke, and soon after at the age of sixty-four, she succumbed to cancer.
PROSPEROUS TO THE end, Alice Ozy multiplied her resources several times by investing successfully on the Bourse. Of her talent to make money grow, Gautier once said, “If I had a sack of diamonds I would trust them with Alice Ozy. She would soon give me back more than I had left with her.” Gustave Doré was her last lover. At fifty years of age, with a fashionable apartment on the boulevard Haussmann and her own château facing Lake Enghien in Switzerland, she was able to say, “I am growing old with dignity.” By sixty-five, having changed her name back to Madame Pilloy and become respectable, she had grown somewhat stout and unhappy in her aging solitude; but at least she understood what she was missing. And she must have remembered the hard times of her childhood, too, when, before she died at seventy-two years of age, she wrote a will leaving all of her fortune, 2,900, 000 francs, to a society for the nurturing and education of the children of impoverished actors.
WHILE SHE WAS building and maintaining a successful career as a performer, Klondike Kate fell in love with the businessman, Alexander Pantages, whose name would later become a household word due to the string of vaudeville and movie houses he owned. After she invested in his first theatre, she went on tour, only to find that in her absence he had married a much younger woman. She sued him for breach of promise but won only a small settlement.
Kate returned briefly to the stage before marrying a cowboy, but the marriage did not last long. Then she suffered a decline for a period, making money by bootlegging and possibly also procuring. But a few years later, when Pantages was sued and convicted for raping a seventeen-year-old actress he em
ployed at one of his theatres, Kate gained some notoriety by testifying against him at his trial.
Her former lover was sentenced to fifty years in prison, which must have improved her mood, because shortly thereafter her life took an upward turn again. Still attractive and lively at fifty-seven, when she decided she wanted to marry, she found she had two choices. She fixed on Johnny Matson, a successful miner who had worshipped her from a distance during the old Klondike days. Reading of her in the newspaper accounts of the Pantages trial, he looked her up and began to court her. They were happily married for thirteen years, until his death in 1945.
Two years later, at the age of seventy-two, she married the second man who had been courting her, William L. Van Duren. During the ceremony, her seventy-one- year-old groom commented, “Time is of the essence.” Kate replied, “I was the flower of the North, but the petals are falling awfully fast, honey.” The last petal fell eight years later. She died peacefully and, as she had told a reporter a year earlier, “with no regrets.” A portrait of her remains with us in the character of Cherry Malotte, the heroine of Rex Beach’s Silver Horde.
ONLY A MONTH into a shipboard romance, Nijinsky precipitously married an admirer and fellow ballet dancer, Romola Pulszky. His former lover, Diaghilev, felt betrayed and eventually responded by dismissing the dancer from the Ballets Russes. After a hiatus, Diaghilev brought the dancer back into the company, with which he continued his legendary work. Psychologically fragile, his despair and irrational rages began to worsen, undermining his work, his marriage, and finally everything he did. Creative even in madness, he wrote an extraordinary diary that records his state of mind. Though Romola had other erotic liaisons, she remained loyal to him for the rest of his life. Nijinsky’s illness prevented him from performing as a dancer or a choreographer ever again. After years of breakdowns and attempts at recovery, he died at the age of sixty-one.
ALWAYS OF FRAGILE health, La Pompadour was cast into mourning by two deaths in the royal family, those of Madame Infante and the ten- year-old duc de Bourgogne. Her mood had already been dampened by the Seven Years’ War, which she feared would tarnish the king’s glory. “If I die,” she said, “it will be of grief.” Thus, at the end of her life, she and the king reversed roles. Now it was Louis who tried to cheer her up. Hoping that time spent in a more intimate space away from the worries of the palace might revive her spirits, he commissioned the Petit Trianon. But it came too late. By the time she died, only the outer walls had been raised.
No doubt she was worn out, too, by what she called her “perpetual combat” to keep the king’s affections. She had not been his lover for years, and now his attention was straying toward a Mademoiselle Romains, who bore him a son and whom he had set up in a house in Passy.
He soon wearied of the young woman, however, and Pompadour was not replaced. When, in 1763, she made her last public appearance at the ceremonies held to celebrate the placement of an equestrian statue of Louis in the center of the newly designed Place de la Concorde, for which she had been responsible, the woman who would one day take her place, the young Jeanne du Barry, was in the crowds. But Pompadour would not live to see another ma"tresse en titre enter Versailles. In the following year while she was at Choisy, she had an attack of illness so severe it became clear she would die soon. She was just forty years old.
Despite the rule that only royal family members were allowed to die in the rooms of Versailles, the king brought her back to her rooms at the palace where, because her lungs were filled with fluid, to make her breathing easier, she sat up a chair and received the last visits of her friends. The king stayed by her side for days, until, because her doctors said that she was dying, a priest was sent for so that she could give her confession. The king could not be in her presence after this, and thus the priest was alone with her when she died. Her last words were addressed to him as he prepared to leave the room. “ One moment, M. le Curé,” she said to him. “We’ll go together.” And then she died.
For propriety’s sake, the king could only follow her funeral cortège with his eyes. As her body was borne off to Paris, he watched from his balcony until she had left the range of his vision. When he turned away, tears were seen pouring from his eyes. “Elle avait de la justesse dans l’ esprit et la justice dans le coeur,” “She had rightness in her spirit and justice in her heart,” wrote Voltaire. “We shall miss her every day. . . . It is the end of a dream.”
WE DO NOT know exactly when or how Phyrne died. We do know that her image was sculpted more than once by Praxiteles, and by that Botticelli took this image as inspiration for his Birth of Venus. She became so wealthy that after the Macedonians destroyed the city of Thebes, she offered to pay for the walls to be rebuilt, providing they bore the inscription: “Alexander may have knocked it down, but Phyrne the hetaera got it back up again.”
BETWEEN THE DEATH of Louis XV and her own, Jeanne du Barry lived several lives. Her story recalls the wisdom of certain folk tales meant to show that fortune, which is never predictable, often turns out to be the opposite of what it seems to be at first. Risking exposure to smallpox, she sat faithfully by the king’s bedside for days as he grew more ill; but just before he died, in an act of repentance for his sins, he asked that his mistress leave Versailles. She spent several nights in a château belonging to the duc d’Aiguillon before the king died, when she was ordered to enter the Abbaye de Pont-aux-Dames. She never learned that it was her own lover who had decreed this fate. To be banished to this decrepit convent, which was dark and damp, must have felt like an unjust punishment. But reverting to the modest demeanor she had before she became the king’s favorite, the countess soon won the friendship of the abbess, Madame de la Roche Fontenelles, with whom she spent many hours in conversation. When, after a year, she was allowed to leave the convent, the other nuns wept at her departure.
Slowly she regained some of the wealth she had accumulated at Versailles. With her collection of jewelry, said to be the most valuable in Europe, the properties she owned, and the rents she received from shops in Paris, in addition to the annual income left to her by the king, she was not poor. After living for a time in a newly acquired, very large estate, Saint-Vrain, she was able to move the extraordinary paintings by Greuze, Fragonard, Vernet, and Van Dyke, and the elegant furniture she had acquired under Louis’ patronage, back to her estate at Louveciennes. Soon she became the lover of her neighbor, Lord Henry Seymour, nephew of the Duke of Somerset, but this affair ended badly. Henry, who was married, was given to jealousy, and objected to her friendships with other men. Though she tried unsuccessfully to regain Seymour’s affections, he steadfastly snubbed all her attempts, peavishly sending back her miniature portrait with the words “Leave me alone” written across it.
But good luck often disguises itself as misfortune. It was because Seymour was so rejecting that Jeanne became the lover of the duc de Brissac. With his wife seemingly indifferent to his conduct, Brissac and du Barry became a devoted couple, dividing their time between her estate at Louveciennes and his hô tel on the rue de Grenelle. Wealthy himself, Brissac supported her in the style in which she had been indulged as the king’s favorite. And paradoxically, as his mistress, she was more acceptable to the aristocracy than she had been as the king’s favorite. She became a beloved figure in aristocratic society. Over time, she even gained the approval of the royal family.
Though Brissac was loyal to the crown, it was under his influence that she began to read the Encyclopédistes and to entertain liberal ideas. Because of her generosity, du Barry was well liked in the village near her estate, but to revolutionaries the king’s favorites were symbols of royal corruption. And in the end, as the Revolution unseated the king and proceeded toward more and more violence, both Brissac and du Barry sided with the royalists. In the chaos of change, her great collection of jewelry was stolen from her. But this, as it turned out, was to be the least of her losses. After Brissac was arrested, he was killed by a mob who rushed to Louveciennes with his
head on a stick to parade in front of the comtesse’s windows. We might suppose that fortune finally favored her again when her jewels were discovered in London. But just as good fortune arrives disguised as bad luck, the reverse is also true. She made several trips to England—first to identify the collection and then to appear in court—and it was during these trips that she began to lend support to royalist émigrés in London.
It is supposed that she fell in love with one of Brissac’s old friends there, because after he returned to France, despite evident dangers, she returned to France, only to be arrested, accused of treason, and after several months in prison, condemned to death. Over a lifetime she had showed remarkable courage on many occasions, but at the end her bravery deserted her. Perhaps her pluck came from an intense love of earthly pleasures. Somewhat portly now, her hair gray, clearly aging, still she did not go quietly, but rather wept and struggled as she was carried to the guillotine. Perhaps it was because at this moment she so little resembled the popular picture of her as an arrogant whore that crowds in the Place de la Concorde did not cheer at her death.
LOLA MONTEZ EVENTUALLY landed in America, where she toured in a play based on her life called Lola Montez in Bavaria. She settled for a while in Grass Valley, Nevada, where she was well liked. But though she had mellowed somewhat, her life was still tumultuous. While on tour, when her company was sailing to South America, one of her lovers disappeared into the Pacific Ocean. Later, though the American press reported that she had married an Austrian prince during a tour of Europe, it was he who jilted her. She covered the damage, however, with her own version of events, claiming that she left him because he had taken up with a singer.
The Book of the Courtesans Page 25
