Young ballerinas were expected to be seductive; it was built into their daily instruction. “My good friends, be charming, sensual,” instructed Auguste Vestris, the brilliant ballet-dancer-turned-ballet-master, to the young dancers in his charge. “Indicate through movement the greatest transports of passion. It is imperative that during and after your variations you inspire love and the box and orchestra and seat holders should want to carry you off to bed.”5
The identification of the ballerina with prostitution was so pronounced at this time that when Danish dancer and choreographer August Bournonville went to Paris in the 1840s seeking to advance his career, he wrote letters home in which he referred frequently to the moral depravity encountered backstage at the Opéra, lamenting its detrimental influence on the art of ballet. Observing that poverty bred desperation, on his return to Copenhagen to direct the Royal Danish Ballet he resolved to pay his dancers, male and female, a fair and equitable wage to keep them from having to prostitute themselves, thereby elevating the moral worth of ballet (at least in Denmark). In this way, Bournonville, a churchgoing Lutheran and devoted family man, created a school and style of ballet in stark contrast to that found in Paris, one based, unusually, on non-sexist and egalitarian values. Meanwhile, in France, at least where the ballet was concerned, it was business as usual.
After the old Opéra on the rue Le Peletier had burned to the ground in 1873, Charles Garnier had designed a new building to replace it. Opening its doors, the new Palais Garnier was custom-built for both theatrical spectacles and sexual sport. There, under the gilded rooftop decorated with statues dedicated to Apollo, Harmony, and Poetry, fortunes were squandered, reputations sullied, and affairs brazenly carried out in the exalted name of the ballet. Napoléon III, head of the Second Empire, was such a backstage regular at the Opéra that he kept a private room there.6 Baron Georges-Eugène Haussmann, the city planner who had redeveloped Paris with a view to keeping filth from clogging the sewers, kept as his mistress the Paris Opéra dancer Francine Cellier, housing her in a series of increasingly expensive apartments on the boulevard Malesherbes. His indiscretion was well known and served as gossip for the tabloids until 1877, when the ballerina mysteriously vanished from history.7
Haussmann might have fared better had he conducted his affair as other men of his social class did—within the confines of an ornately decorated room especially made for close encounters of the amorous kind as practiced by French ballerinas and their top-hatted patrons.
The foyer de la danse, as this room was called, of the Palais Garnier was ostensibly an open studio where dancers came to take class and rehearse. But that was just the outside view. In writing about the new building, Garnier himself explained that “above all, the Foyer is intended as a setting for the charming swarms of ballerinas, in their picturesque and coquettish costumes.”8 Lined with gilt-edged mirrors and hung with chandeliers, the room was where wealthy male patrons or subscribers known as les abonnés came to watch and mingle with the dancers on display, eyeing them as if they were show ponies. These predatory men, “Adonises-over-forty,” as the French social-realist writer Honoré de Balzac once called them,”9 were an elite group, exclusively male, who paid dearly for the benefit of wandering at will through the backstage corridors of the Opéra. The cheapest abonnements were a little under 1,000 francs a year for a single seat one night a week; a more coveted loge in the avant-scène cost almost 30,000 francs a year. A 1991 study done of the nearly five hundred names listed for the 1892 and 1893 season reveals that “around a quarter of the subscriptions were held by major financiers and two out of every five belonged to members of the nobility, while other groups included industrialist and commercial magnates (9 percent), the liberal professions (21 percent), and public officials (10 percent).”10 These prominent Opéra spectators used the foyer de la danse for social display, business deals, and private liaisons. The last they accomplished by flirting with the dancers in the coulisses, or wings, watching them closely in rehearsals and besieging them in their dressing rooms both before and after performances; nothing and no one interfered with their pleasure. Their money is what enabled the theater, operating since 1830 as a financial enterprise beyond state control, to enrich its coffers.11 The Opéra was a private club for those privileged by fortune.12
Omnipresent and omnipotent in the backstage world of the Paris ballet, these men were almost impossible to ignore. In spite of their fatigue, young dancers before, during, and following a performance were encouraged to smile and flirt to win themselves an abonné, often by their own mothers. “I heard a singular lecture made by the mother of an artist to her daughter,” writes Dr. Louis Véron, a medical professional appointed director of the Opéra in 1831, in his memoirs. “She reproached her for acting too coldly toward those who admired her. ‘Be kinder, more tender more eager! If not for the sake of your child or mother, at least for the sake of your carriage!’ ”13
Acquiescing to the advances of an abonné was often the difference between a life of penury and one of privilege for dancers at the Paris Opéra, from the highest ranking to the lowest. Some dancers who participated in the sexual intrigues that were part and parcel of ballet at that time came from the upper reaches of the Paris Opéra company’s dancing hierarchy; among them, Taglioni’s archrival, the Austrian-born Fanny Elssler (1810–1884), a sensual dancer (Gautier, who adored her, called her a “pagan”), became the mistress of Leopold, Prince of Salerno, son of King Ferdinand of the Two Sicilies, with whom she bore an illegitimate son. The great Taglioni (whom Gautier said was a “Christian dancer”) tended to keep a low profile with regards to matters of the heart, but there were hints that she, too, indulged in illicit affairs behind the screen of her pure-as-snow public persona. But few were fooled. The popular press openly discussed her carriages and teams of fine horses, her treasure chests bursting with jewels, and the opulent surroundings of her palatial home on the shores of Lake Como in Italy—all code for the spoils of the courtesan life. Taglioni also had a child out of wedlock, whom she bore in seclusion after begging time off from the Opéra, allegedly for a bad knee. She used the nonexistent injury to cover her pregnancy and, when found out, reportedly laughed about it.14
But illegitimacy and other consequences of pursuing social advancement while lying on their backs was no laughing matter for ballet’s rank and file, paraded into the foyer de la danse for the voyeuristic pleasure of this behind-the-scenes audience. They occupied the company’s lowest rung and were among the anonymous members of the corps de ballet; there were hundreds of them, supporting the illusion of splendor that danced before the footlights.
These were the “gutter sylphs,” as Dr. Véron called them,15 and they were culled from among the city’s most wretched poor, street urchins for whom the ballet represented an opportunity for advancement. But scores of these bedraggled, malnourished, sexually exploited girls in the corps de ballet had almost no real chance of dancing out of the misery they were born into. They were popularly known as les petits rats, for how they seemed to gnaw at everything in sight, desperately hungry for life and its material goods.
Gautier is credited with being the first to use the metaphor of a rodent to describe the young dancers scurrying about the Paris Opéra in his essay, “Le Rat,” a piece of piquant writing devoted to these poor children of the theater. He applies an affectionate tone when describing these “eminently feminine” creatures in the wings, mockingly explaining how they came to get their name: “Nous pensons que le rat a été appelé ainsi, d’abord à cause de sa petitesse, ensuite à cause de ses instincts rongeurs et destructifs” (We think the rat got her name first off because of her smallness and second, because of her gnawing and destructive tendencies), wrote Gautier in the paper published in his 1865 collection of Paris-inspired essays, Quand on voyage.16 “Comme son homonyme, il aime à pratiquer des trous dans les toiles, à élargir les déchirures des décorations, sous prétexte de regarder la scène ou la salle,
mais au fond pour le plaisir de faire du dégât” (Like its namesake, the rat likes to practice making holes in the curtains, expanding on the rips already there in the decor, under the pretext of watching the stage or the audience, but really just doing so for the pleasure of doing damage).
But elsewhere in the essay, Gautier suggests that the Paris Opéra rats are more the victims of other people’s destructive pursuits of pleasure, calling them “poor girls” and “frail creatures” offered up as sacrifices to the Minotaur that is Paris, city of insatiable desire, “qui dévore chaque année les vierges par centaines sans que jamais aucun Thésée vienne à leur secours!” (which each year devours its virgins by the hundreds with no hope of a Theseus coming to save them!).17 Behind Gautier’s flowery language lurks a grim truth about the reality faced by these young dancers.
Typically, les petits rats came from poor backgrounds and single-parent families. Enrollment records of the Paris Opéra reveal that around 1850, “more than half the certificates of engagement at the school of dance indicate that the children had no known father and that their mothers were concierges, [or] laundresses.”18 Other young dance students “were daughters of the common people, of hired hands from the workshop, the shop or the office, retired or humble performers, concierges.”19
Many came on foot to the Opéra from as far away as Montmartre, Batignolles, or the Hôtel-de-Ville neighborhoods for their dance lessons, rehearsals, and performances. They returned past midnight to these far-off areas in rain or snow, driven by need. “I paid many compliments to one mother on her young daughter, whose beauty was growing every day,” writes Dr. Véron. “‘We are very unfortunate, nonetheless,’ she told me, ‘and I have to give her to whoever wants her, just to have enough to eat.’”20
Although many girls applied, not all were chosen. The Paris Opéra had standards; potential dancers had to have the right body type to get in. Throughout their time in the school, they also had to give evidence that they were developing their muscles in a way conducive to performing the rigorous steps and balances of French ballet. Dancers were routinely scrutinized from a medical point of view to ensure that they had the right physique: “I often had to put a stop to lessons for those sickly, feeble children, already looking like little old men, for whom such exercise was debilitating rather than fortifying,” Dr. Véron continues. “The mothers and their allies the ballet masters respectfully fought my opinion, but a sense of justice made me obdurate.”21
Girls who passed the initial examination could advance themselves on the basis of talent, and that was the hope that made them endure an often grueling regimen meant to take them out of the gutter and onto the world’s stage. The exercises used to mold scraggly rats into alluring symbols of airborne femininity were said to be especially punishing in the late 1800s. An anonymously penned memoir by “un vieil abonné” (an old subscriber), now known to be the novelist Paul Mahalin,22 records some of the barbaric practices used to break in young bodies. He itemizes “boxes, rings, straps and bars... an entire torture apparatus,” before elaborating on how a dancer/student “imprisons her feet in one of those grooved boxes. There, her heels back-to-back and her knees turned out, she accustoms her poor martyred feet to remaining, by themselves, in a straight line.”23
Young dancers were also obliged to attend class regularly or else face stiff fines or dismissal. Protocol, as established between 1870 and 1900, was strict. Students as young as five trained at the dance conservatory until they passed the examinations that allowed them a spot in the corps, usually between the ages of twelve and fourteen. Depending on training, dedication, and capacity for attracting influential patrons, dancers could progress steadily through the five ranks defining the dancing hierarchy within the Paris Opéra: premier or deuxième quadrille (classifications assigned dancers in the corps), followed by coryphée (minor soloist), and next by sujet (equivalent to second soloist) and premier sujet. The ultimate designation was première danseuse or étoile, the highest level for a female dancer at Paris Opéra. (The same hierarchy applies to the Opéra ballet company today.) Rigorous annual and biannual examinations determined advancement, with appropriate adjustments made to dancers’ pay as they rose through the ranks.24
If and when a young dancer graduated from the school and into the parent company, her financial situation didn’t improve much: junior members of the corps de ballet were never well paid. Their monthly salaries were between seventy-five and eighty francs. Persistent poverty forced many members of the corps de ballet to become prostitutes just to make ends meet, if not to afford the fifteen-franc tarlatan skirts and six-franc satin pointe shoes required for taking daily class at the Opéra. This often meant finding a generous protector “who would ensure them a decent existence.”25
In exchange, the little rat yielded unquestioningly to her patron; she was putty in the hands of the wealthy and more powerful, allowing herself to be shaped according to another’s will: “I have a passion for novices, ‘little rats’ still in poverty,” declared Richard O’Monroy, the Paris-born novelist and apparent connoisseur of the ballet, in 1893. “I like to be the patron who discovers newborn talents, who, in spite of pronounced collarbones and red hands, prerogatives of their awkward age, reveal future curves that facilitate the first steps in the career from the beginning in a quadrille set all the way up to the principal ballerina.”26
The road to the top was hard, paved with pain and deprivation; dancers took class every day, six days a week, often arriving hungry. The concierges who manned the rear entrance sometimes fed them soup to keep them from fainting. Daily class was usually followed by a full day of rehearsal, plus performances at night. The hard work and long hours, often on an empty stomach, made the dancers appear “exhausted, almost dead, puffing like a steam engine,” according to one eyewitness, Opéra enthusiast Charles de Boigne, who observed the dancers in class.27 This image of the ballerina as physically spent and machine-like contrasted sharply with her popular image as a delicate fairy, winging toward eternity. Other ballet observers were able to see the disconnect between the public’s idealized perception of the ballerina and the brute realities of her everyday existence: “We cannot imagine the courage, patience and incessant work required to become a talented dancer,” wrote the French composer and music writer Albert Vizentini in 1868. “The true dancer is obsessed with her art and sacrifices everything to it. At sixteen as at thirty, she must undergo the same painful exercises; stretching at the barre, lifting oneself at the knees, pliés, écartés, leaning back until the limbs creak in unison, exhausting oneself, making oneself continuously hoarse, accepting neither fatigue or sluggishness, these are the daily routines of the dancer who, after attending classes from nine until one, and rehearsal from one until four, appears in the evening with a smile on her lips to perform as a sylph as if nothing had happened.”28
Working conditions endangered dancers’ health. A document from the time, a letter of complaint to a public health official in London, where life for young ballet dancers was no different than for those in Paris, drew the inspector’s attention to venues whose cramped, dirty gaslit rooms were overrun by rats and other insalubrious features. In each of these rooms, the letter writer observed, up to a dozen girls at a time, “all perspiring from strenuous dancing have to spend the evening to earn a living. These conditions are liable I should say to lead to consumption and other illnesses.”29
Corps de ballet members tended to suffer in silence, rarely protesting against a system that fed off their youth and labor. What made the life tolerable was the sense of belonging to a community of other dancers, each driven by a shared loved of dance and the hope for a better life. The company felt like family, all the girls rooting for each other—a situation not uncommon among members of today’s corps de ballets. There was solidarity in numbers, producing what social scientists refer to as “collective effervescence,” a feeling shared by members of a like-minded group of individuals who manag
e to transcend obstacles by being united in a common cause. “Luxury and poverty hold hands,” says Dr. Véron. “The one came in a carriage, the other in sandals; but a spirit of camaraderie pervades their little world. She who is penniless does not grovel; she who is possessed of luxury is not arrogant.”30
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