The Book of the Courtesans (30 page)

Her Golden Voice

Bernhardt could turn the utmost banality into Homeric poetry
with her famous Golden Voice which seemed to float about her.
—Cornelia Otis Skinner,
Elegant Wits and Grand
Horizontals

Together with nuances too subtle for words, a great speaking voice manages
to express what is so often concealed by language, the unspoken thoughts,
secret histories, and even censored desires which, carried by intonation, can
make any utterance far more truthful than it appears to be. We can only imagine
the effect Sarah Bernhardt’s famous voice had on her audiences when she
played Marguerite in
La Dame aux camélias
. She made her first
appearance in this role on the New York stage. Astonished by the performance,
Henry James wrote that the play was “all champagne and tears—fresh
perversity, fresh credulity, fresh passion. . . .”

Though
Camille
, as it was called in England and America, was
almost forty years old at the turn of the century, it was new to American
audiences. Since the original play that had opened in Paris at mid-century was
viewed by American promoters as too scandalous, another script, called
Heart’s Ease
, had been performed in its stead, one which, to avoid
shocking audiences in the United States, substituted the courtesan with a flirt.

By the time Bernhardt brought the uncensored version of the play to New York,
the Parisian audience, used to the brazen atmosphere of the approaching fin-de-
siècle, found the play somewhat old-fashioned. As early as
1880
, the comte de Maugy had declared that Marguerite
Gautier “would only provoke a smile of incredulity among the bon
viveurs” of his day. Yet, by one of those delicious ironies with which
history often surprises us, the great success of Bernhardt’s performance in
the New World revived an interest in it in Paris, where the play became a great
success once again. And, as opposed to the relative innocence of the American
public, here audiences were able to appreciate the fine points of a performance
that reflected a knowledge that, in the words of the critic Sarcey, “only
a . . . worldly woman, born and bred in Paris,” would
have. To say Bernhardt was uniquely qualified to play the role is an
understatement. As she faithfully spoke the lines Dumas
fils
had
written, she would have been able to layer the script with countless memories.

She was born in
1844
, just three years before the real
Marguerite, Marie Duplessis, died. Like Marie, Sarah’s mother, an unmarried
immigrant from Amsterdam named Youle Bernard, had started life as a seamstress.
Demanding work at a grueling pace for long hours and little pay, it was the
kind of profession that shortened many women’s lives, a fate Youle was
determined to escape. At night she attended the public balls of Paris with the
intent of meeting men who might give her an entry to another life. She hoped
against hope that like a fortunate few before her, she might edge her way into
the
demi-monde
.

With a small daughter to support and a low-paying job, little money for fancy
clothing, and only a smattering of education, neither probability nor
circumstance was on her side. Yet her determination must have been great
because, against all odds, she reached her goal by the time Sarah was six years
old. It was no small accomplishment that eventually Youle’s salon was
regularly attended by Alexandre Dumas
père
, Rossini, the duc de
Morny, and the baron Dominique, once Napoléon’s military surgeon.
Sarah, however, did not enter this ribald atmosphere until she was older. Sent
as an infant to a wet nurse in Brittany, she pined after her mother, who on her
rare visits seemed like visiting royalty to her.

One day, after a visit from her aunt, overcome by despair, the child hurled
herself out of the window. That her arm was broken by the fall hardly mattered
to her: she knew her fate was changed. Yet, though Youle took her home to Paris,
the time with her mother was to be brief. Before the year had ended, Youle,
who found her daughter too willful, had enrolled Sarah in a fashionable
boarding school for girls known as the Institute Fressard, where for two years
she learned to read and write, embroider, and practice all the manners expected
of refined women. Then, at the age of nine, she was moved again. And this time,
despite the fact that Youle was Jewish, she sent her daughter to a convent.

The choice was well considered. Grandchamps was the school where the daughters
of all the best families in Paris were sent to be educated. Sarah protested the
move almost violently, climbing a tree to avoid capture and then throwing
herself in the mud, but she was to come to love the convent. It was the Mother
Superior, Mère Sainte-Sophie, who wisely won her over, giving the child a
little plot of ground to garden, treating her with tender solicitude. At first
Sarah distinguished herself as the class clown, imitating the gestures of the
bishop as he gave a solemn funeral oration, laughing at the lessons the girls
were given in how to remove a glove or carry a handkerchief. But finally she
embraced the dramatic mysteries of the church—the flickering candlelight,
the haunting incantations, the awesome presence of the tabernacle, at whose
feet she dreamed of throwing herself in sacrifice, to be covered, she
fantasized, by a black velvet cloak embellished starkly with a shining white
cross.

Her reverie soon came to an end. By the age of fifteen, Sarah had decided to
become a nun; but her mother had different plans for her. She had not sent her
daughter to the convent for religious training, but for the upper-class
refinement she would receive. Now it was time for Sarah to contribute her share
to the household. Once again Sarah rebelled, this time against her mother’s
attempts to initiate her as a courtesan. Because Sarah’s resistance most
likely had the same strength her mother had displayed years earlier, as she had
fought her way out of poverty, the two soon had reached what looked like an
unsolvable impasse. But the duc de Morny came up with a brilliant compromise.
Sarah had played the role of an angel in a play at the convent with great
success. Perhaps her powerful moods and her talent at self-expression would
serve her best in the theatre. Hoping to turn her in the direction of the stage,
Alexandre Dumas took Sarah and her mother to see a play at the Comédie-
Française. The plan worked. Sitting in his box, Sarah found herself moved
to tears and laughter, won over, enthralled. As she wrote in her autobiography:
“When the curtain went up I thought I would faint. It was the curtain of
my life that had risen before me.”

Although there are many elements contained in this story that mixed with the
right magic helped to create Sarah’s golden voice, the concept of
duende
may help us to better understand the process. The term is used
in the tradition of flamenco to describe that quality of a singer’s voice
which rather than range or amplitude depends on an understanding of the nature
of life that can only be gained with experience. Put simply, the singer must
have suffered. But suffering is seldom simple. Even if what we have suffered is
loss, the feeling will be tinged with the inevitable conflict between desire
and circumstance. Though conflict itself is a form of suffering, too.

In the fifteen years of her childhood, Sarah experienced both loss and
conflict—the repeated loss of her mother, her departure from the Institut
Fressard, her rejection of the convent, followed by her decision to be a nun,
and the conflict she felt with her mother’s plans for her. Pulled in two
directions, between Mère Sainte-Sophie and her own more worldly mother,
devoted as she was to the theatre, her ambivalence was only mitigated by the
choice she made to be an actress. She could not have discarded her earlier
devotions so easily. And as the modern Polish director Jerzy Grotowski writes,
“the words ’actress’ and ’courtesan’ were once synonymous.
” What was true for many others in this career held for Sarah, too. Even
after she became famous in Paris, until in fact she had made a fortune with her
tours to the American continent, she supplemented her relatively small salary
with income from a retinue of protectors.

But the work an actor does on the stage, what Grotowski calls a “
penetration into human nature,” offered another solution to the conflict.
Along with her loneliness as a child, her tantrums and her rages, her powerful
will and her bitter knowledge of defeat, each conflict she had suffered only
made her performances more faithful to reality. All that she witnessed, all
that she felt—her mother’s transgressions, the passion of the nuns,
her dreams of piety, her great talent for seduction, the triumphs of her spirit
together with its humiliations, all the pleasures of her body and the purity of
her soul—could exist side by side, undiluted and uncompromised, in her
voice.

As an actress, she had extraordinary powers. The incantatory powers at her
command redolent with the liturgies of church and boulevard alike, gave a new
life to the role of the dying courtesan. As Marguerite flirted and laughed,
cynically dismissed Armand’s proposal of love, then succumbed, fell more
deeply in love, and finally sacrificed herself for him, Sarah’s great voice
would have conjured the real story that lay beneath the sentimental narrative.
Had we been in the audience, we might have heard it all: the ferocious strength
of a young woman trying to survive, the odds arrayed against her, the fate of
all those who had failed to escape, worked to an early old age, begging in the
streets, carted off to a prison or an asylum for indigence, her defiance, and
all she saw as she fought to live, the backsides of the grandest men, the
betrayals of others and herself, audible in the undertone, along with the
unexpected kindness she encountered, and the tenderness, even her own, would
have been there too as all the while the voice would have wooed us, taking us
deep into the territory of desire, so that as we listened, we would have known
for certain that the sound of all we heard was, in its own inexorable way, holy.

DETAIL FROM MUCHA’S
les saisons

Afterglow

(THE SEVENTH EROTIC STATION)

When he thought of Ellen Olenska it was abstractly, serenely, as one
might think of some imaginary beloved in a book or a picture; she had become
the composite vision of all that he had missed.—Edith
Wharton,
The Age of Innocence

T
HE REVERIE COMES
later. Perhaps he has
left her sleeping so that he can walk home through the park in the cool morning.
Or perhaps a few years have passed. Either way, the shadows under the trees
are fresh with memory. More than once, he strolled with her here. They came to
the edge of these trees after their first lunch in the café under the
arcade. Even then he must have known, without being able to say it in words,
what it was he wanted. He was so taken with the hem of her skirt and the froth
that curled at its edge as she walked. That and the playful rhythm of her gait,
the intense green of the braid lining her collar, the blush in her cheeks that
was nearly unacceptable, the shock of her frankness, the dazzling speed of her
responses, and the way her hand would gesture with countless small enthusiasms,
all swept him past reason. He was charmed. But now as he hears the sound of a
slight breeze carrying a leaf to the ground and is reminded of the way her
voice whispered in his ear, he is beginning to understand his own desire.
Remembering the way the soft vibrations of her whisper moved through his body,
he suddenly knows. The petals of the flowers in the beds here, still wet with
the morning dew, the way they open now to the sunlight, remind him. It was this
that drew him, not just to imagine how she felt but to feel what she did, as
her body responded, opening like ruffled petals, like a sea creature widening
in a wave.

The water of the fountains beginning to arch, and ripple, the waiter’s
low laugh as he places the first table outdoors, the sudden flap of a bird’
s wings, all converge on the desire he is startled to claim as his own, though
it makes him laugh too because he cannot help but see now that the feeling is
reflected everywhere—in the gardens, the clothes of the ladies strolling
here, the curling ornaments on the columns, the splendor in the shop
windows—all spreading a sweetness through the atmosphere along with a
subtly raucous invitation to move past boundaries which, he knows now, are only
imagined as real.

ALICE OZY

Epilogue

In the End

W
ITH A COARSELY
wrought tale, the end of the
story often serves as a simple morality lesson. Those who are good, the
narrative seems to say, will die well, just as those who have been bad will
meet a bad end. But, as with a well-told story, reality is far more complicated,
filled with surprises and ironies, rises and falls, sudden turns, descents and
ascents that seem to occur somewhat independently from justice. If in the
nineteenth century working-class girls were warned that the life of a courtesan
ended in sorrow, the truth is that in the end
cocottes
seem to have
flourished or floundered at about the same rate as anyone else. Yet the dire
prophecies of the self-righteous could at times be self-fulfilling.

BEFORE MOGADOR MARRIED
Lionel de Chabrillan, he had
already lost his own fortune and been disowned by his family. To save his
estate, he planned to marry a wealthy woman. But instead, still in love with
Mogador, he sailed to Australia to join the gold rush when he lost what little
he had left. After he returned to Paris to marry Mogador, the couple sailed
together to Australia, where this time Lionel would serve as the French consul
general. Yet his salary was meager. Though the couple were not destitute, they
faced severely reduced circumstances. Thus in order to supplement their income,
Mogador took up a new career; in the course of four years she wrote three
bestselling novels. Severely ill, however, she was forced to return to Paris.
After Lionel joined her in Paris, he tried to obtain a diplomatic posting in
Europe. But the scandal of their marriage shadowed them both. When he sailed
for Australia again, stricken with a sudden illness, he died.

Penniless and mourning for her husband, she revived her career on the stage.
Though the first night was a brilliant success, the show was terminated when a
series of articles appeared, reminding the public of her notorious past. But
calling once more on her formidable determination to survive, she took the play
that Dumas had based on her novel
Les Voleurs d’Or
on tour, making
a small fortune. And once again she took up writing, producing altogether
twenty-six plays, twelve novels, and seven operettas. Always generous, she
moved her mother to her châlet at Vesinet, founded a women’s ambulance
corps during the Prussian War, and no doubt remembering the terrors of her own
childhood, offered to build a home for war orphans on her land. But because of
the scandal that followed her until her death, she was forced to hide behind a
tree as she watched the girls at the orphanage hand bouquets of flowers to the
more respectable patrons. Finally, after moving to an old people’s home in
Montmartre, she died at the age of eighty-five.

WHEN CORA PEARL
faced a different kind of
scandal, the consequences were far worse. Shunned by the
demi-monde
as
well as society, she was eventually financially ruined, too. She had become an
object of scorn after a former lover, Alexandre Duval, son of a famous
restaurateur, wounded himself severely. He had intended to aim his bullet at
Cora but the gun went off in his hand instead. While he hovered for several
days between life and death, the story of what transpired between them
circulated through the city. He had spent all of his fortune on lavish gifts
for her. But when the money was gone, she dismissed him coldly.

Neither the fact that he had planned to murder her, nor his subsequent
return in full health to his old life on the boulevards, mitigated public
opinion. No longer able to find protectors, slowly all Cora’s resources
dwindled. Once known for receiving as much as
10
,
000
francs a night, she was grateful now for
5
louis. Yet she never lost her spirit. Before she died
at the age of fifty-one from stomach cancer, she spent time promulgating an
invented universal language, and she wrote and published two versions of her
life story, books that are still being read today.

MARIE DUPLESSIS DID
not die as utterly
alone as
La dame aux camélias
portrayed. Though the crowd of
suitors thinned considerably, her maid stayed with her until the end, as did
some loyal friends, among them her erstwhile husband, Edouard Perregaux. She
died well cared for, in the comfortable surroundings of her luxurious apartment.
The physician, whom Liszt had sent to care for her, was the doctor most highly
esteemed among society women of the day. Yet ironically he probably hastened
her death by giving her experimental doses of arsenic. The loyalty of her maid
came as much from friendship as from employment. Having been born to the
working class herself, Duplessis was known not only to be kind but also
inordinately generous to working women. Her estate was auctioned after her
death. Even after all her bills were paid, there remained a considerable sum,
which she gave to her sister in Normandy.

ARETINO DID NOT
depict the death of his
character, the first fictional Nanna. We only see her as she grows older,
passing on her knowledge to her daughter Pippa. The Nana we know best now, the
heroine of Zola’s novel, was supposed to be based on the life of Blanche
d’Antigny. After seducing and ruining a string of lovers, Nana dies of
smallpox alone in a room at the Grand Hôtel in Paris. Describing her
suffering vividly, Zola gives the impression that she is getting a just reward.

SUPERFICIALLY, BLANCHE D’ANTIGNY,
whom Zola
used as a model for Nana, suffered a similar death. Some say she died of
smallpox, some typhoid, some tuberculosis, which she would have caught while
nursing Luce, the man she loved. But due to the kindness of another courtesan,
Caroline Letessier, Blanche was well cared for when she died. And in stark
contrast with Zola’s cold and unfeeling heroine, since Blanche’s
spirits as well as her economic health had been broken by her lover’s
illness and death, it is not unreasonable to say that she died of love. After
her death, Théodore de Banville, who had always admired her, wrote
touchingly: “Blanche d’Antigny has taken with her one of the smiles
of Paris.”

APOLLONIE SABATIER WAS
thirty-eight years old
when her chief benefactor, Alfred Mosselman, suffered financial ruin. He
offered her
500
francs a month, but she declined,
trusting her independent efforts instead. She took up painting—four of
her miniatures were shown in the Salon of
1861
—as
well as restoring the paintings of others. Unable to make a living doing this,
she auctioned some of the valuable objets d’art she had been collecting for
years, raising
43
,
000
francs.
Moving to a smaller apartment, she began to do her own cooking. Yet we would be
mistaken here to think that because she was aging, Sabatier’s career was
over. Beauty was not her only asset. Even in reduced circumstances, she was
spirited. As Judith Gautier described it, she sang as she cooked. In the same
year she began a new liaison with Richard Wallace, natural son of the marquess
of Hertford, who promised that if ever he became wealthy, he would take care of
her. True to his word, when at his father’s death he inherited a fortune,
he gave her
50
,
000
francs and a
monthly income. She spent her last years at Neuilly, in very comfortable
surroundings. Having outlived many of her companions, she was lonely for them.
Yet this is always the price for having had many beloved friends. She died
peacefully on the last day of
1889
, at the age of sixty-
seven.

JEANNE DUVAL HAD
many other lovers in addition
to Baudelaire, one of them a woman who lived with her for many years. Over
several years she held a lively salon in her own rooms. But she struggled with
a degenerative illness, which eventually paralyzed her. After they parted as
lovers, she and Baudelaire remained friends. During the last years of her life
and through her hospitalization, he continued to support her.

FLORA, A VERY
successful and wealthy courtesan
in ancient Rome, was eventually made into a goddess and as such is still alive
and well today.

THE DAUGHTER OF
an army officer, Liane de Pougy
married a naval officer herself. When, because she was unhappy in this union,
she left him, he shot her; she had two bullets in her thigh until her death.
For a short period she taught piano, but her life as a courtesan was launched
when she appeared in an open carriage with the marquis de MacMahon at
Longchamps. Her career as an entertainer was launched when the Prince of Wales
became her fan, introducing her to his friends who were members of the Jockey
Club. During her years as a courtesan she had many protectors, including Prince
Strozzi in Florence, Maurice de Rothschild, Roman Potocki, Baron Bleichroder in
Berlin, and Lord Carnarvon in London. In her thirties, she retired from this
life to enter a Dominican order of nuns in Lausanne. As a postulate, she took
the name of Sister Anne-Marie Magdalene. But she was back in Paris again after
a year.

One of her lifelong friends was Jean Lorrain, the acerbic critic, known to
be gay, who went about the boulevards wearing rouge, his hair dyed blond.
Because he had given her a bad review, when they met by coincidence in the Bois
du Boulogne, she went after him with a horse whip. But he admired her fortitude
and they became good friends. For many years one of her most ardent supporters
in the press, finally he wrote a play for her. That they were both gay must
only have deepened their rapport. When the American heiress Natalie Barney came
to court Pougy dressed as a Renaissance page, the two women became lovers, and
remained amorous friends for many years.

Along with Emilienne d’Alençon, who was also at one time her lover,
Pougy spent much of her time in the informal society that surrounded Barney,
women who loved women or poetry or art. And usually all three. The circle
included Renée Vivien, Anna de Noailles, Lucie Delarue-Mardrus, Marcel
Proust, Dolly Wilde, niece of Oscar, and Colette. Along with her extensive
journals, she wrote and published several popular romans à clef about her
amorous pursuits, including the popular
Idylle sapphique
, a novel
whose heroine is based on Natalie Barney. Barney hoped to rescue her from
courtesanry, but instead, at the age of
39
, Pougy became
the lover of Prince George Ghika of Romania, who was at the time
24
years old. Within two years they were married, and
except for a short separation when George had an affair with his secretary, the
prince and princess lived happily together until his death. Known for her good
works in the later part of her life, she never forsook her religious feelings.
At the age of seventy-three she joined the third order of Saint Dominique (a
lay order) as Soeur Anne-Marie de la Pénitence and began to devote much of
her time to good works. After Georges died, she spent hours in her rooms at the
Hotel Carlton in prayer, prompting her spiritual guide, Mère Marie-Xavier
to comment, “
La soeur à pénitence a devenu la soeur à
prière
” (The sister of good works has become the sister of
prayer). She died in
1950
at the age of eighty.

BY THE TIME
she was in her forties, having
lost her beauty, and since doubtless her audacity was less becoming in maturity,
Harriet Wilson had fallen from her position as a favorite of high society. No
longer able to make her living as a courtesan, she became a writer instead. Yet
she was reaping profits from her former trade. Before the publication of her
memoirs as well as several subsequent works, she would blackmail former lovers
with the material she had written about them. Though she herself must have
turned a good profit, apparently her last novel,
Clara Gazul
, suffered
so much from the resulting cuts that it was too boring to sell more than a few
copies. After
1832
, history records almost nothing about
her; she is said to have died in England, in
1846
, at the
age of fifty.

ESTHER GUIMOND KEPT
entertaining way past her
prime, giving her dinner guests ample portions of wit along with their food.
She is said to have served as an unwitting inspiration for
La Dame aux
camélias
. Having known kindness from Guimond as a child, Dumas
fils
was sitting by her bed while she was suffering from an episode of
typhoid, when suddenly he jumped up, declaring, “Now I have my fifth act!
” But unlike his heroine, Esther did not expire. She died several decades
later, of cancer. The day after her death, her good friend Girardin, who along
with many of the men she knew feared exposure from the extensive papers she
kept, spent hours alone in her library. It is thought that he destroyed the
eight hundred letters she had preserved. Given that she tried to blackmail him
with these letters, we cannot blame him. Nevertheless, it is unfortunate for us
that his own history as well as hers is now lost.