The Book of the Courtesans (27 page)

If this mixture of innocence and experience seems an unlikely achievement to us
today, in the eighteenth century it must have seemed miraculous. Yet, looking
back at her childhood, the provenance of the mix becomes easier to explain. We
have only to begin with the simple fact that her father was a monk. And when we
add to this that at the age of four she moved with her mother into the home of
her mother’s lover, which was shared with his principal lover, a courtesan,
the answer becomes almost obvious. Especially when we consider that it was a
courtesan, Francesca, who arranged for Jeanne to be sent to a convent school.
And that soon after leaving the protection of the nuns, her mother arranged for
her to live with a man who planned to sell her sexual favors to the most
distinguished members of society.

Not only did Jeanne know the backside of polite society, she was raised to be
so familiar with it that nothing of this order shocked her, including her own
past. She was, in short, unashamed. Neither her parentage, her upbringing, nor
anything she had done to survive in the past embarrassed her. She accepted all
that had occurred in her life as if it were ordinary.

That at the convent she attended, she must have heard more than one lecture
condemning the way that both her mother and Francesca lived, hardly undermined
her convictions but instead must have given her sensibility another level of
complexity that would help her in the future. Rather than weep or wonder over
the contradictions in her life, Jeanne accepted contradiction as part of the
natural order. What was said in church did not necessarily have to apply to
what was done outside church. After all, by the time she was a young woman, her
father had become a priest ministering to upper-class ladies at Saint-Eustache
in Paris.

The ability to ignore conflict must have accounted for her great adaptability.
She learned the manners and language of Versailles more easily than had
Pompadour. Louis arranged for her to be married to Jean du Barry’s brother.
Though this may seem odd to us now, the marriage made her seem more respectable,
and especially since she was a countess now, eased the way for her move to
court. Louis designed a coat of arms for her. And soon she was living above him
in the bedrooms once occupied by the late Dauphine.

As they had with Pompadour, many of the king’s ministers and courtiers
waited for du Barry to make some fatal mistake, but the king only fell more and
more deeply in love with her. And in the light of our conjecture, perhaps,
finally one can see why. If, for instance, as Louis had implied once to
Richelieu, he was suffering in his older age from some sexual dysfunction,
Jeanne would have given him just what he needed, not only her skills, but her
cheerful, unclouded attitude. The stunning absence of shame she displayed must
have relieved the burden of his own guilt, inculcated by years of religious
training together with the judgments from many at court, and from the public,
too, over his infidelities, a guilt which must have had an inhibiting effect.

Despite, or perhaps because of, Louis’ evident pleasure with his mistress,
the judgments continued. The citizenry of Paris, angry about how much money
Louis spent on her, circulated verses about the countess describing her as a
slovenly whore. It was thus more to defend herself than for any other reason
that Jeanne became involved in intrigue. Despite the fact that many opposed her,
she was also well liked. It was her smile again, which she distributed without
prejudice to the highest and lowest born alike. She was known to be kind. The
journalist Brissot told the story of her that the day he first visited Voltaire,
he encountered her descending the stairs of the great man’s house, and
because she smiled at him, he took the risk of asking her if Voltaire was
receiving visitors. “Very few,” she replied; but immediately she
escorted him up the stairs and gave him the introduction he needed.

Beginning as the lover of the most powerful man in France, she became a very
powerful woman. She was known to have dictated the letter Louis signed asking
his brother, the king of Spain, not to risk war with England over the Falkland
Islands. She succeeded in bringing down her enemy, Choiseul. Louis dismissed
him and he was exiled to the provinces. At her urgings, her good friend the duc
d’Aiguillon was appointed minister of foreign affairs. Moreover, once he
was in place, she used her influence with him regarding the appointment of
ambassadors. At her urging, the baron de Breteuil, whom she felt had snubbed
her, was dismissed from his post in Vienna, only to be replaced with the
largely incompetent Louis de Rohan, who was among her admirers. At the height
of her tenure, her salon would often be crowded with petitioners, including
many among the
fermiers généraux
, asking for her help or
wanting to tell her their opinions on various affairs of state.

Many men would have been threatened by such potency in a lover. But far from
objecting, Louis seems to have been eager to spend even more time with her
during this period. A woman who, from her youngest days, was aware of the
formidable effect that her beauty and her charms had on others, would well have
been able to understand and empathize with the burdens of a king, himself
surrounded so much of the time by sycophantic admirers. That the lovers had
this experience in common would have made for a strong attraction. The
courtesan’s charm has often been described as a dangerous form of power.
Yet rarely, if ever, has it been admitted how forcefully powerful men are drawn
to powerful women.

A Fatal Attraction

I am no more than the shadow of a king.—King Ludwig of
Bavaria

Passion is often a weathervane for change in the political atmosphere. As
the idea of monarchy came under assault in Europe, the romantic liaisons
between kings and their lovers became more tumultuous. A hundred years after
Louis XV succumbed to the charms of Jeanne du Barry, King Ludwig I of Bavaria
fell deeply in love with a courtesan. Lola Montez had such a disquieting effect
on Bavaria and its king that before the affair had ended, she would be forcibly
ejected from the country and Ludwig would give up his crown.

Where Madame du Barry was adaptable, Lola Montez was imaginative. Though
she claimed to be the daughter of Don Carlos, a Spanish aristocrat killed in a
noble cause, this story was only part of an elaborate fable she created about
herself. She was, in fact, born in Ireland under the name of Elizabeth Rosanna
Gilbert. Her mother Eliza, the natural child of a landed gentleman and his
mistress in County Cork, was a seamstress when she met Lola’s father,
Edward Gilbert, an ensign with the British army.

As with most fiction, however, there was a seed of truth to Lola’s story.
When she was just two years old, her father successfully petitioned for a post
to Bengal in India and thus for three years she lived in a lushly tropical
setting. And as in her story, she had witnessed her father’s death. Only a
few weeks after the family arrived, Gilbert succumbed to cholera.

The mother and daughter stayed on in India, and within a year Eliza Gilbert had
married again, this time to an officer named Craigie. Lola’s new stepfather,
it turned out, would be far more attentive to her than her mother was. But
still she felt neglected. While Craigie was out on his command, she was largely
left to the care of an ayah who pampered her, bathing her twice a day in the
Houghly River, letting her run barefoot in the village. Late in her life, when
in her memoir she reclaimed this past, she recalled being fascinated by the
parade of exotic birds and monkeys, and by the dancers and holy men who were
part of the outdoor village life. Was it memories of Southern climates that
eventually pulled her to study flamenco dance in Spain?

What is taken away from us suddenly or by force will have a strong appeal for
years afterward, stronger than if we had relinquished whatever we loved more
naturally, over the course of time. When the child was five, Craigie, who was
concerned that Lola was too wild, arranged for her to be sent to England, where
she could receive a proper education. The decision was reached and acted upon
quickly. She was handed over to friends of Craigie’s, Lieutenant Colonel
Innes and his family, who were returning to England themselves. The shock must
have been great. Her mother and father, the ayah who raised her, the scents of
the flowers, the feel of the river, the luxury of bare feet, of moving blithely
through warm air, were all suddenly gone. And the manner in which she was
raised also changed. The Innes family, who were strangers to her, were kind but
far more strict in their habits. As it grew colder and colder and the ship
moved further and further away from all she had known, the mood of the child
grew more stormy. For the rest of her life she would be famous for a raging
anger that could be triggered by even the smallest incident.

She was not to see her mother again until she was fifteen years old. Her life
could not have seemed secure to her. Along with her tumultuous emotions, there
were several more moves. For four years, Elizabeth lived with Craigie’s
mother and father in a small Scottish town, whose inhabitants regarded the
manners she had learned in India as exotic. Still another series of moves came
when she was ten, at which time she traveled with Craigie’s sister and
brother-in-law to England, where she stayed with them for a year before being
settled for a few months with Craigie’s commanding officer, Major General
Sir Jasper Nicolls, who, before returning to England, had agreed to find a
proper school for her. Elizabeth’s temperament could only have been
exacerbated by the fact that Sir Jasper did not like his headstrong charge. She
was described, even at this age, as having an “iron will.” Finally
at eleven, she was sent to a boarding school run by the Misses Aldridge in Bath.

It was an excellent school. She had been well provided for, except that she
must have still felt abandoned. Sir Jasper, who liked her mother even less than
he liked her, complained that when he needed answers to his questions about the
daughter’s education, Mrs. Craigie failed to answer the letters he sent
either often or punctually enough. The failure must have made Elizabeth wonder
if her mother cared about her. But this did not stop her from longing to see
her family again. At last, when she turned fifteen, the date at which it was
generally agreed a young woman should be prepared for marriage, knowing that
only she could handle this, Mrs. Craigie arrived in England.

But the long-awaited reunion between mother and daughter did not go very well.
After such a long absence, Elizabeth scarcely knew her mother any longer.
According to her later memories, when at their first meeting she
enthusiastically threw her arms around her mother, Mrs. Craigie withdrew,
commenting, “My child, how badly your hair is dressed!” The scene
corresponds to the description Montez would write later of her mother as a vain,
self-centered woman, who liked parties and balls above all else and was more
focused on her own appearance than on her daughter.

According to Lola again, the Craigies had already settled on a husband for her.
Was he an older man in his sixties, as she said? As with many courtesans, the
truth of Lola’s telling cannot be trusted; indeed, the propensity to
stretch the truth for the sake of a good story was not a small part of the
courtesan’s charm. Yet given the humor of the times, during which marriages
of convenience were commonly made, this story is not unlikely. In any case, it
does not take any great act of imagination for us to understand that after so
many years of being moved without her consent from one place and one family to
another, to be carried off forcibly to spend the rest of her life with a man
she did not know would have disturbed her.

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.