The Art of Seduction

The study of courtesans is the study of illusion. How does one describe such concepts as beauty and seduction when beauty and seduction are tricks of appearance and emotion? Indeed, how can one ever know what makes one man or woman appeal to another man or woman?

Courtesans render such questions impossible to answer because courtesans were taught to appeal to all things. A courtesan’s life was redolent of different values from the so-called real world, values which could be summed up in the word, desire: the desire she infused into her lovers and the desire that the very idea of her aroused.

There have been many attempts to imagine the complex world of the courtesan. “La Dame aux Camelias,” a play by Alexandre Dumas fils magically spins the bare facts of the life and death of Marie Duplessis into an unfathomable web. Giuseppe Verdi turns the material into “La Traviata” (1853); Greta Garbo adds her veiled performance in the film “Camille”(1936) and Franco Zeffirelli adds his lavish decor in a later film version of the opera. Puccini transforms Henri Murger’s “Scenes de la Via Boheme” (already a transformation) into the much-beloved opera “La Boheme” (1896). The immortality of courtesans, their eternal celebrity status, is partly the result of the temptation to create never-ending stories about the nature of desire.

Poet and feminist writer Susan Griffin is understandably dazzled by the courtesans of history. In “The Book of the Courtesans,” she has taken almost a how-to approach, attempting to analyze their allure, dividing her study into chapters devoted to what she believes are the virtues of courtesans: Timing, Beauty, Cheek, Brilliance, Seduction, Charm and, alas, How It All Ended. Griffin takes us on a mad roller-coaster ride through the narratives of courtesan existence during four centuries. The result is a panoramic introduction for readers who do not know much about the subject.

She is an excellent retailer of stories. In just a few pages, she presents the intense, melodramatic life of Blanche d’Antigny, real-life model for French author Emile Zola’s fictional “Nana,” from her experiences in convent school to her flight to Romania with a count, to her education as a seductress in dance halls and the theater, to the doomed love of a tenor, impoverishment and early death from tuberculosis. We catch glimpses of Lola Montez (mistress of Mad King Ludwig II of Bavaria) strutting on stage in her flamenco outfit, barely reining in her terrible temper; we see the diamond-studded belt shown off by La Belle Otero. We rehearse the intriguing lives at court of Madam du Barry and Marquis de Pompadour.

Griffin does not, however, add to our knowledge of the nature of desire, nor does she penetrate the secrets of seduction; for that one had best turn to Celeste Mogador’s “Memoirs of a Courtesan in Nineteenth-Century Paris,” translated for the first time into English by Monique Fleury Nagem. Reading them, we see the open heart of Violetta of “La Traviata” and Mimi of “La Boheme,” rendered as confessions. They contribute to our understanding of how desire was presented and consumed in 19th-century Paris. “I am going to try to recount, as chastely as possible, the most unchaste life in the world,” she writes at the outset.

Mogador (born Celeste Venard in 1824) was the queen of the Bal Mabille and gained her fame in Parisian dance halls and as an equestrienne , a daring circus rider, at the Hippodrome. Her life, exemplary of bohemian Paris in the 1840s and 1850s, bridges the periods of the Second Republic and the Third Empire. Alfred de Musset, one of her lovers, met her in a rather squalid brothel. Gradually gaining status, she became friendly with Alexandre Dumas pere and fils. After a great deal of suffering in relation to “a great passion,” Mogador eventually became a countess.

“The heart of a girl like you is like a disreputable inn,” writes her husband, Count Lionel de Chabrillan, who ruined himself financially for Mogador but also had a self-destructive streak. “The honest wayfarer who inadvertently enters endures the sneers of the regular guests.” In the half-century she lived after the death of her beloved Lionel, whom she had followed to Australia, where he hoped to exploit the gold rush, Mogador became a novelist and playwright, living off her earnings.

Publication of her memoirs had perturbed a marriage with this nobleman, the prelude to which had been endless decades of wrangling, passionate re-encounters, accusations, remorse, joys and even self-exile. But after a lifetime spent in the shifting erotic arts, she found a true second calling. Refreshing details of daily life are everywhere in these pages, as she tells us what was in a bouquet and what she and others wore. She recounts the feints, slights and homage experienced at a ball, the fevers of the gambling tables, the drama of a boar hunt in the countryside on a nobleman’s estate.

Astonishingly, she appears to become an integral part of culture and society while never ceasing to be a member of that bright shadow world, the demimonde. She models for Thomas Couture’s painting “Roman Orgy (Musee d’Orsay).” A plaster cast of her hand is on display at the Musee Carnavalet in Paris. Yet another national heroine for the French who risked being a martyr to eros, this self-educated woman who longed for the company of intelligent and creative men managed to have a very good time as well as the satisfaction of having appeared on the scene--on the stage--of her epoch.

The settings of social life, high and low, in 19th-century Paris are etched in many memorable passages. Mogador describes a reformatory, Saint-Lazare Prison, where she was briefly interned: “Later I would recognize many of these women, elegant and proud, whom I had seen in this sad and shameful uniform! There were some old ones, disfigured by scars and illness, and there were some very young, very pretty ones. Among the latter, almost all had a certain stylishness. Some wore a lace bonnet under their uniform bonnet.”

A precious passage describes how the Mabille dance-hall became transformed into a fantasy palace “lined with gold, velvet and mirrors,” and she names the dances she learned to excel in there. When a baron sends her to the opera, she describes the elaborate seating arrangements and notices with dismay the attention given to her.

Voluptuousness is all around her. Although Mogador tells us nothing about sexual techniques, her sheer strength, resilience and endurance are remarkable. This was her allure, what men discovered in her at the equestrian circus or when she danced the quadrille in public or appeared (mediocre actress that she admits to having been) behind the footlights at the Folies-Dramatiques. Throughout, Mogador takes for granted the splendors and miseries of courtesan existence, and it is as if life itself were complicit with her drive for survival.

Perhaps it is the lack of fantasy that is most striking in these memoirs. Mogador does not dream of becoming anything more than she is. When she is flattered, moneyed and fed, she is radiant. She knows exactly how to employ the money and jewels. But she has no illusions and, in this sense, no ambitions other than to stay alive and to make a decent appearance in society. Of course, this entails a lot of material investment.

Her struggle, her conquests, her defeats are all the more understandable today after the tugs of war of feminism: how to be tough without sacrificing fragility, how to enjoy and be secure in that enjoyment without relinquishing independence, how to honor one’s own beauty without forever placing it on the marketplace. The botched suicide attempts (for passion), the duels, the star-studded entrances to balls, the silken surreys waiting on the cobbled streets are there for decoration, reminding us that this was another time and place, with its own picturesque color and codes.

As for strategy, sometimes it is so lucid and clear as to be startling. Early on, when she has begun to enjoy her first great success at the Hippodrome, Mogador writes: “I was neither so kind nor so stupid as to give myself. I quickly realized that gallantry is like war; to win one must employ tactics. I have always been capricious & proud. Among the women who are prone to say ‘yes,’ no one enjoys saying ‘no’ more than I. That is why the men who obtained the most from me were the ones who demanded the least.”