The Book of the Courtesans (17 page)

Despite Otero’s example, many courtesans were very good at financial
planning. More than a few were able to end their days on this earth in the
style to which they had become accustomed. Some, like Marguerite Bellanger,
once the lover of Napoléon III, saved and invested their earnings
carefully; some such as the comtesse de Loynes, married well. Others, like
Païva, did both. Some were set up in millinery shops by their protectors.
Still others relied on the generosity of younger courtesans, for whom they
arranged liaisons. And from the fifteenth century through the twentieth,
another way existed for a courtesan to face old age with dignity. Like any
profession, the art was handed down. If she were fortunate enough to have a
daughter, a courtesan could train her in all the necessary skills and thus
ensure a means of support in her old age.

If in respect of motherly love this tradition seems wanting, one must remember
that, under the weight of the restricted and difficult circumstances that women
endured in this period, much of what any mother bequeathed to her daughter was
of mixed value. Nevertheless, even if being a courtesan was considered by some
as preferable to marriage, there were mothers who did try to avoid passing on
their profession.

In fifteenth-century Rome, the famous courtesan named Imperia took care that
neither of her daughters would be forced to take up the profession at which she
excelled so brilliantly. She had been trained in the art by her mother. Diana
Cognati was not notable among courtesans, and probably for this reason Imperia
began to supplement her mother’s income when she was very young. She gave
birth to her own first daughter, Lucrezia, when she was barely seventeen years
old. (Who the father of this child was is lost to history now.) Then in the
year that Imperia turned eighteen, her mother’s undistinguished career came
to an end when she married Paolo Trotti, a member of the Sistine Choir. After
this union was sanctified, while Imperia’s reputation and income grew,
Trotti managed her business affairs, investing in property whose ownership was
in his name.

But soon Imperia grew to distrust her mother and stepfather. Having gained
worldly wisdom of more than one kind, by the time she was twenty-nine, she was
shrewd enough to sever her finances from them. Soon after, in a brilliant
financial move, she sold a lease of land she had recently acquired to the
nephew of Pope Pius IV, Piccolomini. Because the deal was so advantageous to
her, he is thought to have been one of her lovers. In exchange for the lease,
Piccolomini was to build Imperia a house on the property in which she could
live until her death. Furthermore, the terms of the lease required that should
she die before her daughter, if Piccolomini asked Lucrezia to leave the house,
he would have to pay her
300
ducats, the average price of
a home in Rome. Thus, at an early age Imperia ensured that not only herself but
her daughter would always have a roof over their head.

Her second daughter, Margherita, born several years later, was the child of
Agostino Chigi. Banker to kings, noblemen, and the Vatican, because of his
great success in the world of finance, the Sultan of Turkey called him “
the greatest merchant of Christianity.” Julius II gave him the right to
call himself “Chigi Della Rovere,” but many called him by the
popular title “Il Magnifico.” Like Imperia, whom he loved and
supported, he possessed the traits of shrewdness and daring, which he employed
in a winning combination. Two sites still exist today in Rome that testify to
the greatness of his former powers. One is the family chapel designed for him
by Raphael in the Church of Santa Maria del Popolo on the Piazza del Popolo.
The second is the Villa Farnesina, once the Villa Chigi, the elegant estate
that the banker commissioned Baldassare Peruzzi to build.

There is no evidence of the intimacy between Chigi and Imperia in the family
chapel; but the villa tells another story. Raphael contributed to the design of
the loggia and he painted what is now a famous fresco in the Grand Salon, which
depicts Galatea as she rises out of the sea—a version of the goddess said
to resemble Imperia. A few still believe it is a portrait of her, but the
consensus now among most scholars is that since Raphael wanted his Galatea to
possess the characteristics of the Renaissance ideal of beauty, he would have
been influenced and guided by Imperia, who was thought to be the best living
example of that ideal. In the scenes from the myth of
Psyche and Eros
which Raphael also painted on the ceiling and in the friezes that border the
beautiful loggia opening from the Grand Salon, in the personae of Psyche and
the Three Graces, a similar face and figure appear: light hair, refined and
harmonious features, a body just slightly more corpulent than is fashionable
today, sensual, even strong, yet vaguely ethereal and gracefully rounded, as if
the painter’s brush had glided almost effortlessly over the plaster.

Imperia’s presence can be felt throughout the villa, which is as it should
be because she was often there. This was not Chigi’s principal residence;
he used it for entertaining. Thus, though the marriage of Psyche and Cupid
floating above the gatherings was meant to celebrate Chigi’s marriage, in
this villa it was Imperia who presided at the parties attended by business
associates, writers, philosophers, painters, dignitaries from the Vatican, and
of course courtesans, events which, due to the nature of the evenings, would
not have been proper for Chigi’s wife to attend.

These occasions must have had an air of excitement. It would have felt as if a
pantheon of new pleasures, insights, riches, images, beliefs were rising out of
a sea of creation, tumultuous with activity. Even the architecture was daring,
the loggia itself opening so that the garden seemed to enter the house in an
unprecedented way. These were the first salons—indeed, the French word
salon
would be borrowed from the Italian
salone
in the
following century—the ancient antecedents of café

society.

That Chigi was a great patron of the arts only partly explains the exciting
mixture of guests who frequented the Villa Chigi. His patronage would have
sprung naturally from an affinity between those who, in the process of rising
to prominence, were inventing a new world with different lines of power, a new
vision and its own distinctions. And from a practical perspective, because with
the rise of a new bourgeois class there were simply more walls to decorate,
along with more men able to pay for the decoration, artists were not only
prospering but, as so often happens with monetary gain, rising in esteem. No
longer thought of as craftsmen, they were becoming famous. They were not alone
in this process. Financiers and courtesans were being similarly transformed.

The resulting alliance was more than practical. Economic change almost always
carries with it, for better or worse, a vision. The locus of meaning shifts.
New avenues of thought as well as transaction suddenly appear. In the best of
these changes, life seems revitalized. And wherever there is new life, there is
also eros. The energy between Imperia and Chigi, two giants of pleasure and
profit, would have been as palpable as was the precise and detailed reflection
they found in each other.

Business is as much about relationship as it is mathematics. They both knew how
intimately conviviality and dividend are related. They understood that trust
and pleasure engender largesse, that creating a mood of abundance encourages
abundance. Chigi was famous for the night that he served his guests dinner on
gold and silver plates. Arranging the festivities in a loggia that faced the
Tiber, after the dinner was completed, the banker threw his own plate into the
water and encouraged his guests to do the same. This was not only a theatrical
gesture, it was in itself a drama, symbolic of the liberation from old orders
that Chigi and his guests were enjoying.

Nevertheless, both Chigi and Imperia knew that certain earthly laws must still
be obeyed. The priceless plates were retrieved the next day from a net Chigi
had hidden in the river earlier. Like her protector, though she gave off an air
of careless extravagance, Imperia thought of the future, too. It was no doubt
at her insistence that Chigi acknowledged Margherita as his daughter, and most
probably because of Chigi’s influence at the Vatican, Pope Leo X
legitimized her birth. Eventually she married into the ducal family of Carafa.

Near the end of Imperia’s life, once again with Chigi’s help, she was
able to ensure that her first daughter, Lucrezia, was also married. Despite the
unwritten law that whenever a courtesan falls in love, it is at her own peril,
Imperia had fallen in love with a man named Angelo del Bufalo. Her admiration
was understandable. He was sophisticated, handsome, socially graceful, with an
attractively wild streak that did not prevent him from being well respected.
But the liaison would prove her downfall. Bufalo, who was married, began to
favor another mistress. Imperia felt him pull away from her by degrees, before
finally, after telling her that he had fallen out of love with her, he ended
the affair. She drank poison.

Her death would be agonizing. But over the several days that she was still
alive, she wrote the will that left her property to her first daughter,
Lucrezia. Appointing Chigi her executor, as her dying wish she extracted from
him the promise that he find a husband for Lucrezia. Thus, ten months after
Imperia’s death, her first daughter was wedded to a spice merchant from
Chigi’s native Siena. In the light of the miraculous nature of Imperia’
s last accomplishment, the salvation of her daughter, the name of the groom,
Archangelo Colonna, was suitable. And even more miraculously for this period of
history so unfavorable to women, the arrangement proved more than practical.
Apparently this newly married couple fell in love with each other.

Her Pink Rabbits

Still one more aspect of the courtesans’ brilliance must be mentioned
here. They were natural mimics. Though their ability to act did not always
translate well to the theatre, off the stage, in what is called real life, they
were talented performers. Usually born to either poor or middle-class families,
not only did they have to have cheek to travel in
upper-class circles, they also had to be able to imitate the manners of upper-
class ladies. A performance, we might add, which since in some circumstances
they were required to pretend they were not courtesans, while in others they
were expected to make it clear that they were, they had to turn off and on at
will.

As we have already noted, Emilienne d’Alençon was one of the most
celebrated among
grandes cocottes
of the Belle Epoque. Along with
Liane de Pougy and La Belle Otero, she was part of a popular trio known in
Paris as
le Grand Trois
. Before her rise to fame she had actually
studied acting at the Conservatoire. But probably because classical French
drama hardly suited her, she only lasted for one year. The circus was more her
metier. And it was this career that established her. Eventually, she could
count the sons of more than one aristocratic family among her lovers. In turn,
she was among the many lovers of King Leopold II of Belgium. In this company
there were times when she had to appear well bred even if part of her
attraction was that she was not. For her brief visit to Britain, she created an
entirely fictitious role for herself as the comtesse de Beaumanoir (translated
as the “Countess House Beautiful”). She made a great impression as
this personage, temporarily adopting what Cornelia Otis Skinner called “
crooked little-finger refinement.” That she spoke no English doubtless
made her even more admirable.

But by far her greatest performance debuted at the Cirque d’Eté,
before eventually she brought it to the Folies-Bergère, in which
ostensibly she simply played herself. The popular act was built around a troupe
of rabbits, which she had dyed shocking pink and outfitted with paper ruffles.
Dressed in this way, the rabbits were almost like accessories to their mistress.
Blond, with a rosy, dimpled complexion, she was fond of wearing pink taffeta
with lace trimming. The writer Jean Lorrain describes her as resembling
raspberry ice. What she did with the rabbits is unclear from this distance,
though one can easily imagine that they were made to jump through hoops at her
bidding. The whole color-coordinated effect must have been hilarious.

The humor was not only intended but the result of several comedic abilities,
which, along with the all-important virtue or timing, included mimicry. In this
case, though, what d’Alençon mirrored so brilliantly was an idea
instead of a reality. Molding herself to a classic type in the repertoire of
feminine roles, she played the dumb blonde with clever dexterity. Paradoxically,
it takes more than average intelligence to play the part of a bimbo. Imitating
life is one thing, but giving lifeblood to a fantasy is quite another.

Though on one level the act must have been charmingly silly, that there would
have been a more complex side becomes evident when one observes any modern
comedienne adept at playing this type. Whenever Gracie Allen, Marilyn Monroe,
Elaine May, or Goldie Hawn has played an empty-headed woman, as with the
invisible wires that hold up a marionette, a quality of intelligence can be
felt beneath the masquerade, which gives the performance a subversive meaning,
almost opposite to the picture officially presented. That at times, considering
the unequal power women have been given, they cannily pretend to be stupid in
order to manipulate men is the double entendre of such performances at which
everyone, men and women alike, are invited to laugh.

Along the lines of this double meaning, clearly d’Alençon’s act
was making a comic allusion to the power that courtesans had to commandeer
favors from their wealthy lovers. That the rabbits, belonging as they do to a
species known for reproductive prowess, seemed eager to please their mistress
was part of the appeal. Emerging from the stereotype of a naive young woman,
foolish enough to play with rabbits, an entirely different story was told by
these obedient animals, tamed and collared by their mistress.