The Book of the Courtesans (5 page)

In one of the posters Toulouse-Lautrec designed for the Moulin Rouge, he
portrays La Goulue with an expression that is neither bawdy nor frivolous. As
she balances on one leg and lifts her right leg high, she stares intently into
space, as if concentrating on her art. She is clearly a woman serious about her
work. Of course, even if at other moments she laughed, she had to be focused at
this moment. She was earning her living. But Lautrec has captured another
energy altogether in the lower half of her body. La Goulue, whose name means
“glutton,” was known for her appetite. Below her waist, a froth of
lace and lingerie gushes forth, as if out of a hidden source within her,
threatening to fill the room.

Perhaps had we been at the Bal Mabille, we would have been able to detect waves
of energy from Céleste’s dance filling the crowded room. It was a
force that seemed to belong more to working-class women than to the refined and
wealthy men who sought them. Even the dances they performed, like the cancan or
the polka, seemed to be wilder, part of an earthier past that most Parisians
had left behind. Imported from Bohemia, the polka conjured images of beer
barrels and peasants and hay. To perform it took a great deal of raw physical
energy; the word that comes to mind here is “robust.”

Before Céleste began to attend the Bal Mabille, a woman known as
La
Reine Pomaré
was the most favored dancer. She was named after the
queen of Tahiti, whom she was thought to resemble. Given the reputation she had
for energetic dancing, it is surprising to learn that during the years she
reigned she was suffering from tuberculosis. In fact, TB, at least until its
terrible final stages, did not prevent the afflicted from dancing. “
It’s not me who is dancing too fast,” Marie Duplessis once said,
“it’s the violins that play too slowly.”

This is understandable from the point of view of the one who is ill. As your
energy waxes and wanes, life itself seems to appear and disappear. Released
once more from the confines of the sickroom, side by side with gratitude a kind
of hunger arises, the urge to gobble every possible morsel of experience before
the inevitable returns. Certainly this desire would have given La Reine
Pomaré’s polka an evocative quality, as if she were dancing away death
and sweeping up life with each wide and forceful step.

From this short exploration, perhaps we can begin to imagine something of
appeal of her dance. Since it was the lower half of her body keeping time with
the music, her movements would have been especially erotic. Added to this would
have been the desire to survive, which is of its nature erotic, too. The wish
to forget every fear of privation, which remained nevertheless as if in every
fiber of her body, would have made her dance especially vibrant. And all this
would have been harnessed like a giant horse to the tempo of the polka, a horse
that seemed to be able to fly.

Pomaré’s illness, however, finally outpaced her formidable spirit.
When the effects began to be visible, Brididi, her dance partner, the man who
had both masterminded and profited from her career, started to look for a
replacement—another hungry young woman who might fill the Bal Mabille
with gentlemen eager to see her dance the polka. That was how Céleste got
her start.

On the night that Brididi asked Céleste Vénard to dance a quadrille
with him, there must have been many hopeful young women waiting at the popular
dance hall on the allée des Veuves hoping to be chosen. During the
ninteenth century, countless young and single women who were looking for sugar
daddies and lovers flocked to the public dance halls scattered all over Paris.
Wealthy or titled men, young and old, came to the same places, looking for
partners for the evening, perhaps to take home for the night, or if the desire
was strong enough, to set up in an apartment. Dancing well would command the
right attention and thereby increase a woman’s chances. And if, through
talent and good fortune, she were among the elect, chosen to be elevated as a
mistress, she would have to cut an elegant figure at the parties and balls to
which she would be ushered by her new protector.

When at last Brididi ushered her onto the dance floor, Céleste knew she
was being auditioned. There would have to have been a brief moment of timidity,
a fainthearted feeling. So much would be riding on her success. But again a
good sense of timing would have saved her.
Don’t think of anything else
but the music,
she could tell herself, and then let the music convey her
where it might, her fear, her own resolve to survive, her lust for life,
transformed in the alchemy of rhythm. Brididi was convinced enough by her
talent to spend five hours over the next day teaching her the polka. It is not
only in fairy tales that good fortune can arrive swiftly with almost no
forewarning. Céleste had her debut the same night.

What must La Reine have thought while she watched a pretender to her throne
capture the attention of the ballroom? Céleste was given a new name that
evening, a formative event in the life of a young courtesan, the christening
that signaled her arrival in the fashionable underworld of Paris. As men
crowded around her, eager to ask her to dance, Brididi cried: “It would
be easier to defend Mogador than my new partner.” From that moment on,
Céleste Vénard would be known by the same name as the Moroccan
fortress that had just been captured by French troops.

For a while, Pomaré and Mogador were a double attraction at the Bal
Mabille. Should it surprise us that they became good friends? Who else would
have had so much in common? In
1845
, when Pomaré
died at the age of twenty-one, Mogador was one of the few who attended her

burial in the cemetery of Montmartre. It was she who paid for the marker, which
bore a farewell to her friend chiseled in stone. From this we can begin to
guess how important the preservation of memory was to her. Perhaps we might
even say that she valued history (which is, of course, simply another facet of
time). This conjecture seems almost self-evident when we read of the anger that
Mogador expressed years later toward Zola for creating a portrait of Pomaré
as an old and wretched woman selling secondhand clothes. “Is this what
Naturalism is?” she asked angrily of her friend Georges Montorgueil.
“Is this their idea of precise detail?”

The passion Mogador had for setting the record straight must have helped her
with her memoirs. This remains true even if the tone of her autobiography takes
a decided slant of regret. “I was defending myself,” she said later.
“I did not want to excite poor creatures to copy me, to follow in my
steps; I wanted to show them the perils of this kind of life. . .
 .” Though this regret may have been hard to detect as she
fought her way to success in the
demi-monde
, like truth itself,
autobiography is fluid. It depends as much on a sense of timing as does dance.
Whatever ideas you may have about yourself and your history are, of necessity,
always shifting. This is not due to dishonesty so much as the creative nature
of what is called “the self.” Over time, the stories you tell about
your life will alter slightly, reflecting the attitudes of whomever you have
more recently become. During the time that Mogador wrote her
Memoirs
,
she had fallen in love with a young man, the comte de Chabrillan. As gradually
it seemed more likely that she would marry him, she came to regret her past.

But it was not only her past that she would end up regretting. The fact that
she had written about it caused her grief, too. On the eve of her marriage, she
tried to retrieve the book from publication. Yet her publisher, knowing he had
a great literary success within his grasp, refused to relinquish the book.
Mogador’s fears were not unfounded. The book came close to preventing her
marriage. In this sense, we might say her timing was not good. Yet we could
also say that in a larger sense her timing was perfect. The
Memoirs
were a sensation. They quickly joined that pantheon of notable works filled not
only with great literature but also with books that capture the spirit of the
time in which they are written.

Among children who have been abandoned or endangered, it is often the case that
when they come of age they find a home in history. After all, it was
Mogador’s prominence in the public eye that had allowed her to survive,
flourish, and meet the man she loved. Céleste could have remained silent
and written no memoir at all, thereby if not erasing her past entirely, at
least avoiding so much scrutiny. Or, if the urge to write was irresistible, at
least as the prospect of marriage grew more real, she could have refrained from
submitting the manuscript to her publisher. Yet, though she was in love and
longed for a more respectable life, she must have found it difficult to discard
altogether the fame that had saved her. Even under the influence of a great and
tender passion it is difficult, if not unwise, to give up all that has
sustained you in the past. Especially when what has sustained you is as
precious and rare as the gift of celebrity—a gift which, in Cé
leste’s case, had come to her in much the same way as the miraculous
reprieve that saves the heroine of a fairy tale from the direst circumstances.
In a part of her soul that was perhaps less visible to herself at this moment,
could it be that Mogador knew her story belonged to time?

If this is so, we can only be grateful, for time has given us her story, a
compelling tale, which depicts her rise from rags to riches, filled with the
grimmest circumstances along with glamour and romance. Because she rose from a
perilous position as the illegitimate child of a working woman to become first
a famous performer, then a countess, the two poles of her life—splendor
and misery—could not have been further apart, although in another sense
these opposites cannot really be disentangled. Misery was there in her memory,
along with splendor, in its nascent form the night that, under the many
beautiful gas lamps in the famous gardens that belonged to the Bal Mabille, she
incited fire in the eyes of the gentlemen who watched her dance, just as
splendor and misery are present in our minds most of the time, if only as fear
and desire.

Céleste never knew her father. He abandoned her mother, Anne, before
Céleste was born. Soon after this, because of the shame she brought on
them, Anne’s parents turned her out of the house when she was still
carrying Céleste. If, after this fateful decision, the story of Cé
leste’s childhood is in any way predictable to us because we can look back
and say calmly,
Yes, that is how it was in that time
, to Céleste
these events must have been as unpredictable as they were harrowing. Since in
that century without welfare, when wages for working women were so low a single
woman could not survive on what she earned, it is easy to see why Anne would
stay with the man who was the first lover she found, even though he would often
drink until he could hardly stand and then return home to beat her. It was only
when he beat her so badly she had to be brought to the police station on a
stretcher, and after he threatened to kill her along with her daughter, that
Anne finally decided to leave him.

She managed to get as far as Lyon, where she took a job in a milliner’s
shop; but he followed her there, and while he was searching for her, found
Céleste alone in the street one day. He kidnapped the child and brought
her to a brothel, where he held her hostage. She was saved only because a kind
and quick-witted prostitute locked her in her own room and secretly sent for
the mother. Together, all the women in the brothel held him at bay, while
mother and child made still another escape.

It must have been a terrible time in Céleste’s life. But hearing the
story, we should take note of the rush of energy that fills these two episodes.
There are so many narrow escapes in her story. She is so often rushing with her
mother through the streets of Paris or Lyon, around the corner, or to a railway
station, moving breathlessly to the sound of doors slamming and cries of
threatened violence, barely eluding capture. As, years later, Céleste
whirled about the dance hall to the insistently jubilant sounds of the small
band that accompanied polkas and quadrilles, the exhilaration of these two
escapes must have livened her steps.

The exuberance might have been dampened but still not erased when Anne’s
lover finally caught up with them once again. He promised to behave better when
Anne, probably as much from exhaustion as love, took him back. Soon she found
out he had joined a gang of thieves, but before she could make still another
escape, fate stepped in with an unpredictable ending. He was killed suddenly in
a riot in Lyon. With some money that her father had sent her, Anne returned
with her daughter to Paris, taking a room on the boulevard du Temple.

But now, even while destiny was robbing Céleste of any sense of safety,
like the careening rise and fall of the polka, it also conspired to tempt her
with something grander than simple security. A glittering life, sparkling with
the same celebrity to which the young girl was soon destined, dominated the
boulevard du Temple. All the great popular theatres were nearby: La Ga"té,
L’Ambigu, the Variétés, the café-theatre Bosquet. Peddlers
and showmen set up booths outside, and occasionally, actors performed in the
street. Inside the Théâtre des Funambules, on the same bill that also
featured acrobats and animals, the great mime Debaru performed as the sad-faced
clown Pierrot. In the Variétés there were vaudeville acts, comedians,
dancers, and musicians following each other onto the stage.

The melodrama to be seen at the Ambigu or the Théâtre de la Porte
Saint-Martin was perhaps the form that was most beloved, by common audiences
and critics alike. Because of the great many scenes of murder and mayhem acted
out in the neighborhood, the boulevard du Temple was also called the boulevard
of crime. According to Dumas
fils
, Frédéric Lema"tre was
capable of inspiring real cries of terror among the members of his audience.
For a small fee, you could sit in the highest balcony of the theatre, the place
reserved for the poor that was called, ironically, “Paradise,”
perhaps to watch the woman who was George Sand’s favorite actress, Marie
Dorval, perform a suicide with such alarming accuracy that while she was
sinking to her nightly death, the members of the audience scarcely breathed.
Indeed, she was not breathing either. To achieve the effect of realism, she
nearly asphyxiated herself for each performance.