Ballerina
Page 5
As if her bed weren’t already crowded enough, around 1772 Guimard also commenced a sexual affair with the powerful Louis-Sextius de Jarente de La Bruyère, Bishop of Orléans, one of the Catholic hierarchy’s most highly placed officials. At a time when members of the theater were denied the last rights and forbidden to be buried on church ground (a fate suffered by the great Molière, for one), Guimard’s intimate partnership with a member of the ecclesiastical elite was nothing short of a tour-de-force. It perhaps explains why, one time when she was ill, a sermon was delivered from the pulpit of Notre Dame on her behalf, in which the faithful were urged to pray for the ballerina’s speedy recovery, their Hail Marys incongruously spent on bolstering the spirits of the larger-than-life Mary Magdalene in their midst.
But the people probably would have prayed for her without being asked. She was known for her generosity with the poor, going door to door to give food to the destitute during the harsh winter of 1768, a good deed commemorated in an etching that survives of the dancer as a gorgeously frocked Saint Madeleine, entitled Terpsichore charitable, ou Mademoiselle Guimard visitant les pauvres.106 Such a self-serving portrait might have been an eighteenth-century version of spin; the dancer’s notorious backstage life was popular gossip, and perhaps the same people who had advised her to legalize her name had also suggested she develop a persona of Virtue to counter the image of Vice that fired the imaginations of all who knew her name. She was also respected by many of her peers, having on several occasions raised the issue of dancers’ rights with management, including parity in salary for female dancers. She enjoyed the protection of those associated with the court and did as she pleased, knowing she was immune from persecution.
Guimard organized a dancers’ revolt against the Opéra administration, targeting Jean-Georges Noverre (1727–1810), a ballet reformer and former Sallé pupil who then was the company’s director. Guimard had danced in Noverre’s work and the choreographer had openly praised her: “Mlle Guimard... never courted difficulties, a noble simplicity dominated her dancing,” he said. “She danced tastefully and put expression and feeling into all her movements.”107 But together with her peers, namely Gardel and Dauberval, she disliked Noverre’s pompous way of delegating and was responsible for getting him ousted. Those who feared her called her “La belle damnée.”108 Those who admired her did so cautiously: “Everyone acknowledges her talents,” Denis-Pierre-Jean Papillon de La Ferté, the superintendent in charge of ceremonies within the king’s household and at court, said in 1783. “She still looks very young on the stage; if her technique is not outstanding, her gracefulness makes up for it; she is very good in action ballets and pantomime, is enthusiastic and works hard, but she is an enormous expense to the Opéra, where her wishes are obeyed with as much respect as if she were the director.”109
Guimard’s power extended beyond the Opéra and into the heart of the French, where she held sway as the beguiling hostess of one of the most daring salons in pre-Revolutionary Paris. The men of rank who served, simultaneously, as her various lovers were united with her in an enterprising business arrangement, with their mistress emerging as creative director, if not CEO. The enterprise consisted of a series of pornographic theaters built expressly for Guimard by members of the power elite. The first of these so-called Temples of Terpsichore (named for Guimard’s first star turn on the Paris Opéra stage) appeared in 1768, a classically designed edifice built into one of Soubise’s mansions at Pantin, with generous financial support by Laborde.
Demi-elliptical in shape, the 240-seat theater boasted blue-marble Ionic columns, rose-and-cream-colored wall panels, and elaborate vases full of flowers.110 The stage was about twenty-one feet wide, with a lush blue curtain that was barely fifteen feet high and an orchestra pit that lay almost two feet below. Surrounding the stage were grilled loges and curtained vestibules; spectators could watch the pornographic presentations, which frequently appeared along with dancers, singers, and actors recruited from the Comédie-Française and the Paris Opéra, in private and with impunity. These sequestered boxes were also large enough for patrons to indulge their own erotic fantasies, should they desire; the shows were intended to be interactive. According to the anonymous Mémoires secrets, an erotic diary of the day, when the audience became excited by what they saw on stage, the “orgies which often celebrate this nymph, ‘La Guimard,’ ” passed into legend.111
But five years into the enterprise, Soubise wanted out; he felt the theater was distracting him from developing the careers of other protégées within the Paris Opéra and so withdrew his support. Guimard next turned to her other lover, the Bishop of Orléans, convincing him to bankroll a second and much more elaborate five-hundred-seat pornographic theater inside a custom-built mansion, this one on the rue de la Chaussée-d’Antin, nearer the center of Paris. Built in 1772 in the rococo style, it was designed by Louis XV’s own architect, Claude Nicolas Ledoux, and decorated on the interior by a series of famous artists, among them Jean-Honoré Fragonard and François Boucher, both of whom contributed original paintings and sculptures. The structure had a marble colonnade, as at Pantin, but the interior was even more elaborate: “a sculpted fresco of Apollo crowning Terpsichore, ‘galant but not indecent’ tapestries, silver ropes, a salon opening onto a small winter garden, a dining hall with terrace, a bathing apartment, and grilled loges that were ‘delicious boudoirs.’ ”112
Guimard’s new residence epitomized the luxury and frivolity of the age: “The entire salon is painted with murals,” observed the author Friedrich Melchior, Baron von Grimm, in a letter written in 1773, “and Mademoiselle Guimard appears in them as Terpsichore with all the qualities that can show her off in the most seductive way in the world.”113 The porno shows were an extension of the salon; Guimard made herself continually desirable by ensuring that everyone who was anyone would want to sit at her table. She accomplished this by hosting three suppers a week, with entertainment, at her sumptuous new residence. One supper was for highly placed members of court and government; a second supper was for artists, writers, and scholars; the third was, to quote the Mémoires secrets, “a veritable orgy, where one found the most seductive and lascivious women and where luxury and debauchery attain their zenith.”114
But nothing good lasts forever, not even good sex; by 1785, Guimard was facing financial difficulties and was forced to sell the Temple of Terpsichore to make ends meet. Ever resourceful, she came up with the idea of auctioning off the property through a lottery. She sold 2,500 tickets at 120 livres a piece, two examples of which are conserved in the Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris.115 She raised nearly 300,000 livres from the lottery, but the Comtesse de Lau, who was the winner, immediately sold the Temple Terpsichore for double the money to the French banker Jean-Frédéric Perrégaux, also Guimard’s friend. There were no hard feelings; Guimard and Perrégaux maintained a warm relationship, especially after 1787, when her money woes seemed well behind her.116 Louis XVI had that year granted her a 6,000 livres annual pension in recognition of her contributions to Parisian society (and doubtless in more ways than one). His wife, Marie Antoinette (1755–1793), was a fan of the dancer, calling on her for fashion and beauty advice, Guimard being a well-known clotheshorse with a taste for simple gowns of pastel shades made from expensive materials. In a single year, 1779, her stage wardrobe alone had cost 30,000 livres.117 But when the French Revolution struck the following year, the pension disappeared and so did the extravagant wardrobe.
Although a well-loved artist, Guimard also represented all the corruption, debauchery, and blasé privilege of the ancien régime. She had no more protectors: Soubise and Laborde both lost their heads to the rabble. Guimard had to go into hiding. She retreated with Despréaux to an out-of-the-way attic apartment in Montmartre, where soldiers were said to be too lazy to climb the hill to get her.118 There, she lived a little like Marie Antoinette playing milkmaid at Versailles; she became a gardener and grew her own vegetables. Yet the lure
of the theater remained strong. Her health was weak; she had survived smallpox, which reportedly marred the face on which she had so studiously practiced the art of maquillage.119 With Despréaux’s assistance, she devised a third pornographic theater, featuring marionettes, whose doors she opened to only a very small circle of her former habitués.120 She appears not to have danced again.
When Guimard died, on May 4, 1816, the public had already forgotten her. She was buried without notice. A brief obituary made no mention of her accomplishments.121 It was up to her husband, who had called her his best friend, to correct the record. Seven months following his wife’s death, he wrote a letter to a friend extolling her virtues: “Among women dancers Mme. Guimard-Despréaux was superior to all the others because nature had endowed her with intrinsic, and one might say, spiritual grace.”122 It was easy for him to say; the Temples of Terpsichore, those theaters of the erotic which Guimard had so expertly managed, disappeared along with the ancien régime. Time would be the ultimate judge of her accomplishments, and indeed time has been kind to the dancer who once made herself look youthful by making up her face each morning in imitation of the painterly images of her as the Muse of the Dance that once decorated her more opulent surroundings. Today, her likeness is preserved in a bust that sits inside the Palais Garnier, casting an eye over the generations of ballerinas who have followed in her wake. Guimard remains a reminder of ballet’s traditions as well as its darkest secrets.
That Guimard’s memory is immortalized within the gilt-edged halls of the Paris Opéra, shrine to the art of ballet, shows that in her time the ballerina-courtesan was not a social pariah; nor was she a victim. Ballerinas like Guimard, together with Camargo and Prévost before her, were singular sensations whose remarkable dancing talents encouraged a sensualizing of the female body, which previously had been denied by the Platonic ideals demonstrated by processional ballets at court. When seen frontally on a stage, the first professional ballerinas excited emotions within their spectators. They were adulated, adored, and desired; for ballerinas like Guimard, Camargo, and Prévost, such attention was ultimately empowering. Sallé found it intrusive and shunned the advances of her male patrons, choosing to relish her sexuality on her own terms. For the most part, she was allowed to do so, living out her days with a female companion as she had wanted.
Eighteenth-century ballerinas enjoyed freedoms denied other women by dint of performing at a time when ballet was a major concern of the state. Some benefited greatly from being able to live as they chose, free from persecution by the law and the constraints of an absolutist society. This is not to deny that sexual exploitation of the ballerina existed at this time. Rather, ballerinas gave as much as they got: they were wily creatures who knew how to manipulate their public image for private gain. A dancer like Guimard was subverting convention at a most dangerous time, the eve of the French Revolution, and could very well have lost her head for dallying in decadence. But she survived, saving herself with typical aplomb and a wicked sense of humor: hats off to her. While the kings of France exploited their people, enslaving them to poverty and hardship, Louis XIV gave women dancers, especially those of low birth, a way out of their misery. It wasn’t a perfect world; prostitution did, and does, have a dark side. But to deny these women their due because they chose to barter their bodies for social advancement would be a disservice to their legacy as pioneering ballerinas. The ballet might have operated as a seraglio, but for the dancers who made the system work for them, it was a source of salvation. These ballerina-courtesans gained independence and fame, dancing their desires.
But not everyone was as fortunate.
2. Pimps, Poverty, and Prison
The Corps de Ballet in Nineteenth-Century France
By the end of the eighteenth century, the ground in ballet had shifted. The ancien régime had been replaced by a new class of ballet patron eager to emulate the privileges and entitlements that had been the birthright of their social predecessors. The rise of the bourgeoisie in the nineteenth century produced an audience composed of a new mercantile class of industrialists, financiers, and lawyers, the parvenus of Parisian society. They created a new wave of theatrical entertainment at the Paris Opéra, which increasingly was being bankrolled by private money and not by the state, as had been the case in Lully’s time. Ballets of this era were expected to be emotionally uplifting and cleansing; ballet moved away from the noble dancing style of Guimard, Sallé, and Prévost and toward a new virtuosity that was more ideally feminine than that embodied by Camargo.
Women during this era were to be protected and adored; they were set up high on pedestals, embodying such virtues as chastity, piety, and fidelity with respect to marriage, a highly valued institution among the new middle class. Art mirrored these bourgeois concerns, in particular the Romantic ballet, which flourished in France during the first half of the nineteenth century and showcased works where the ballerina was cast in the new role as the ideal woman. This idealization operated as a subterfuge to what was really going on behind the scenes, where ballerinas, for the most part, were poor, hungry, and desperate for social advancement. But they put on a good show, skillfully hiding the sins of their profession. They were the whores who helped the wives look worthy of enshrining.
Works of this period were intended to be morally instructive and included the seminal La Sylphide, an 1832 ballet that depicted a young man who, after choosing sensual adventure over the promise of conjugal bliss, is punished by losing not only his object of desire (the otherworldly Sylph in the title) but also his status within society, which turns its back on him, leaving him alone and isolated, a Byronic figure of Romantic suffering. The Swedish-born ballerina Marie Taglioni (1804–1884) danced the first performance of La Sylphide, which had been choreographed by her ballet-master father, the Italian-born Filippo Taglioni (1777–1871). He had created the principal female role with her in mind, using it as a vehicle for his daughter’s unique strengths as a ballerina able to rise to the tips of her toes while dancing, a relatively new phenomenon. He also gave her wings, creating choreography that highlighted her innate buoyancy. Marie Taglioni had perfected a technique of seeming to hold onto the air while jumping, a feat of extreme breath control, creating the illusion of flight. It was a remarkable achievement, and it turned Taglioni into the poster girl for the era. Terre-à-terre dancing was no longer the goal for women dancers. The demand was for aerial flights of fancy, the idea being that women were unconnected to the mundane matters of the earth; they had become sublime creatures of the air.
Robert le Diable, originally produced in 1831, was the work that gave birth to ballet’s new wave; at the center of the five-act grand opera was La Valse infernale, a crazed dance for a troupe of ghostly nuns led by Taglioni, again dancing choreography created by her father. Emerging from their tombs, their bodies and limbs spiraling and undulating to the swooning melodies of Giacomo Meyerbeer’s haunting score, these white-clad ballerinas gave birth to the ballet blanc, a new genre of ballet in which female dancers became spectral images of themselves: vapors more than real women. Ballet became so ethereal an art that male dancers in the new century began to look out of place. Their virile capering, which had so dominated in the eighteenth century, was suddenly out of fashion; in a world constructed from tulle and satin ribbons, male dancers were perceived at best as effeminate and at worst, disgusting.1 A host of male dance critics helped fuel the increased feminization of ballet in the nineteenth century, among them Jules Janin (1804–1874) and Théophile Gautier (1811–1872). Their highly subjective prose-poem critiques rated a dancer’s sex appeal along with her technique. Their writings appeared frequently in the popular press and were widely read, fanning emotions, including amorous desire, among a growing audience for ballet.2
Women were now the leading exponents of a ballet whose feminine values of lightness, buoyancy, and delicacy started pushing it into new and unchartered artistic territory: the exodus of men from ball
et was met by legions of young women lining up at the theater door, ready to take their place. Most came from the ranks of the poor, who looked on ballet as an attainable job and a relief from the drudgery of their every-day lives.
There were so many girls applying to enter the ballet that they began taking over parts formerly reserved for men, performing en travesti as men had once done early on in ballet history when there had been a shortage of women. The roles were most certainly reversed: “Once this fragile woman had access to center stage, the image of robust heroism was disarmed, and the mythic areas ballet could tap were enlarged: now the real world, whether courtly or rustic, interpenetrated with an ideal world, each word with its own hierarchy of positive and negative forces.”3
This was the era not only of the great Marie Taglioni but also of Carlotta Grisi (1819–1899), the first Giselle, and Lucile Grahn (1819–1907), the first star ballerina of Copenhagen. Following immediately in their footsteps were the equally brilliant ballerinas of the Second Empire: Fanny Cerrito (1817–1909), Carolina Rosati (1826–1905), Léontine Beaugrand (1842–1925), and finally, Marie Taglioni’s student Emma Livry (1842–1862), said to be the last of the Romantic ballerinas. Each was a celebrity in her day, well loved and well paid. But the popularity and success of this new generation of winged dancers belied an even coarser backstairs reality than may have existed in the eighteenth century, when the ballerina was still under the protection of the king.
In the nineteenth century, ballerinas increasingly became the pawns of wealthy entrepreneurs, many of them members of the Jockey Club de Paris, a gathering of the elite of nineteenth-century France, who, just as they did with horses, traded dancers for sport, swapping them among each other as sexual partners, as illustrated by an amusing anecdote that survives today: a young member of the corps de ballet is seen to be pregnant and when a member of the Paris Opéra administration asks her who was responsible for putting her in the family way, the girl innocently replied, “Some men you don’t know.”4 Gentlemen of the Jockey Club kept boxes at the Paris Opéra, using them as salons and places for sexual encounters. They were a powerful social group who saw to it that no opera featured a ballet in the first act, so as to enable them to linger over their dinners and chat up the ballerinas in the wings before their entrances. They ensured that the practice of ballerina-courtesans continued to flourish; but where eighteenth-century ballerinas like Guimard could wrest control of their situation, in the nineteenth century it seems that many more could not. The Opéra’s murky backstage world had become more officially a place of institutionalized prostitution. French author Ludovic Halévy documented the phenomenon in a trilogy of fictionalized stories based on his observations of the desperados he routinely met backstage at the Opéra. Published in 1883 as one volume under the title Les Cardinals, the plot followed the exploits of Madame Cardinal, a fictional woman of the concierge class, who sells her two young daughters, Virginie and Pauline, both members of the corps de ballet of the Opéra, to a pair of wealthy Jockey Club admirers, with her husband’s consent. The parents are the main focus of the tale; the daughters are more a sideshow existing on the margins, just as real prostitute-dancers of the corps de ballet might have been perceived at that time. Their feelings, thoughts, desires didn’t matter; they did as they were told.