The Book of the Courtesans Read Online Free PDF Page A

Chevalier’s partner,
was encouraged at one point by the Second Empire courtesan named Alice Ozy.
Fréhel, the working-class singer who preceded Piaf as a great favorite in
the public eye, wore a gown in her first performances that was given to her by
La Belle Otero. Laure Hayman introduced Marcel Proust to contemporary artists
and gave him an education in worldly ways at the salon she hosted in Paris.
    The lineage continues. The good timing and cheekiness of courtesans, the
graceful way they leaped and slinked and kicked their way past boundaries,
their implicit and explicit androgyny, their wit, their luminescence, their
aesthetic sensibilities, their capacity to fascinate and enchant, all have been
continued by a lineage of actresses, film stars, comediennes, singers, dancers,
who though not courtesans, studied and learned their virtues. Josephine Baker,
Greta Garbo, Marlene Dietrich, Mae West, Gracie Allen, Elizabeth Taylor, Susan
Sarandon, Madonna, and Chloë Sevigny reshape and continue what is even now
a living legacy, an inheritance which has been handed down to all of us.
    If the role the great courtesans were supposed to play was to please the lovers
who sustained them, within the seemingly narrow compass of that task they
discovered a kind of magic. In the unpredictable realm of eros, that which
pleases most is not simple submission. The secret they discovered is a paradox:
Those who would dominate are soon bored by their own powers. And
correspondingly, desire is excited by the presence of a spirited soul—
independent, unpredictable, incandescent with the mysteries of a separate being.
Perhaps in this way desire mirrors the incandescence of life, which is by
nature submissive only to an inner order, an order quickened by changes of
every kind, tuned to a mandate of transformations beyond our powers to fathom
or command.
    Here, then, are the virtues.

MARIE DUPLESSIS
    Flirtation
    (THE FIRST EROTIC STATION)
    I assisted at the birth of that most significant word,
flirtation
, which dropped from the most beautiful mouth in the world.
—Earl of Chesterfield
    W
E CAN SEE all the elements of
timing, not only rhythm but also a talent for both comedy and fashion, at work
in flirtation. This is an art that relies far more on good timing than one
would ordinarily suppose. Let us go to still another party, the one held in 1841 at the old opera, la Salle Peletier in Paris, on the
night that comte Edouard de Perregaux met Marie Duplessis (the courtesan on
whose short life both
La Traviata
and
Camille
were based), to
illustrate the process. Though Duplessis was born to a poor peasant family and,
like Chanel, had worked for a short while as milliner’s assistant at wages
too low to keep anyone alive, she was at this moment already a kept woman. She
had learned how to dress and do her hair, how to speak correct French with a
Parisian and not a Norman accent. She was popular with the Jockey Club, that
aristocratic organization devoted both to horse races and to chasing women. But
she was yet to achieve the even greater heights of elegance and luxury which
for a great courtesan was both the mark of having arrived and her reward.
    Of course, once again we can only try to imagine the scene between
Duplessis and the count, the man whom, just five years hence, in 1845 , she would marry. History has not given as much
detail here as the observation of the courtesan’s skill requires. But that
is why fiction exists—so we may see the undocumented moments that would
otherwise pass out of history, and thus out of our understanding, unwitnessed.
    Yet good fiction also requires much that is accurate surrounding it. Thus, it
is important to know that a few years before this period in Paris, a ball at
the Opéra was a very exclusive event, which only members of aristocratic
or very wealthy families attended. They were dazzling affairs at which one
looked forward to being seen and to seeing. To