Memoirs of a Courtesan in Nineteenth-Century Paris (2 page)

Like her predecessor in confession, Rousseau, she embroiders on some details or omits others; for instance, she states that she lost her father when she was six years old, when in reality he took off to join the army when her mother was pregnant with her. Although her story has the attributes of a melodrama, she does not sentimentalize her existence nor that of the less fortunate women whom she befriends along the way.

The fierceness of her dedication to her friends is probably Céleste’s most endearing quality. For example, when she first meets one of the xii

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most popular dancers at the Bal Mabille, the fashionable dance hall of the day, she first observes her and studies her. Then, in spite of the rivalry their profession imposes on them, she forms a friendship with her, and over the years stands by her despite the woman’s whimsical and erratic nature. This friend was Lise Sergent, known as la Reine Pomaré, an exotic name given to her by her dancing companions, as was the fashion. Lise Sergent died of tuberculosis at the tender age of twenty-one abandoned by the lover who, as Mogador reports, did not wish to make new sacrifices for someone who had only a month to live. In her naïveté Céleste expected a crowd of mourners at Lise’s funeral, but she was the only one in attendance. Céleste sold one of her lace dresses to purchase a marker for the grave. In his novel Nana, Emile Zola invents a different ending for la Reine Pomaré, portraying her as an old hag living out of the gutter; the degradation of the fallen queen serves as a warning to Nana and her friend Satin. During one of the first performances of the play based on the novel, someone in the audience shouted protests about the courtesan’s depiction. The spectators turned around to see a white-haired woman standing, bravely protesting the insult to her old friend. Everyone recognized this woman as Mogador.

When a friend needed her, or needed some money or some service, Céleste never hesitated to involve herself, even to her own detri-ment. But when she was crossed, she could be vengeful, as with a flighty woman who pretended to be her dear friend but tried to steal her lover.

Céleste doggedly set up a plan to expose the woman for what she was: a double-crosser. Such actions were never undertaken out of mean-ness but out of her sense of justice. When one of her more experienced courtesan friends who had become bitter and cynical resorted to cruelty toward others, Céleste was appalled and in the end rejected this woman who seemed to be such a bad influence on her as well.

On the other hand, the memoirs also reveal a woman who seems candidly shallow and frivolous. As she relates some of the more tragic moments of her life, she does not hesitate to interrupt their retelling to describe at length some opulent setting that she seems to admire and be drawn to. Is this the strategy of a writer who wishes to relieve the narrative tension with a lighter moment, or is this a genuine expression of attraction to glittery display? In view of her inexperience as a writer and her evident fascination with pomp and ostentation, it is more likely that the latter is correct. It is necessary to remember that this woman was still just a young impressionable girl, and the more mature woman recalling her life is keenly aware of her past weaknesses. In her memoirs the soon-xiii

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to-be Mme de Chabrillan does not hesitate to paint herself accurately.

For example, when her lover the Italian duke puts a lovely little surrey at her disposal, Céleste parades up and down the fashionable Champs-Elysées to show off her good fortune. Similarly, when Lionel gives her a carriage driven by a coachman dressed in English style, she is so dazzled by it, she shows it off to her other lover Richard who, needless to say, is not impressed. The memoirist remarks, ‘ Oh, dreadful flightiness! My first reaction was one of vanity. I nodded to him and signaled for him to come closer. But my carriage did not seem to please him as much as it pleased me. He walked away gloomily.’

Her impetuous and fiery nature, however, was the catalyst that determined much of Céleste’s life. Many of Mogador’s decisions were made irrationally, based on whim and desire. She would regret many of her hasty decisions, none more than the one to enter a brothel and have her name entered in the register of prostitutes. She wished to get away from an intolerable home life (which she left at fifteen because her mother’s live-in boyfriend was making sexual advances toward her and once even tried to rape her) and avoid a forced marriage to a dull laborer; based on the conversations she had with a young prostitute, the easy escape appeared to be with these well-dressed women and their glamorous lives.

She had not been at the house twenty-four hours when she regretted her choice. Unfortunately her fate was sealed.

By the time Céleste turned sixteen, prostitution was a well-organized profession. The women were supervised closely—on the streets by the police, and in bordellos by the madams. The customers could avail themselves of a publication that served as a ‘ guide to the gentleman.’

The guide instructed as to prices, places, and specialties. In spite of fears of infections, the recruiting of women was flourishing. The only way a woman could have her name removed from the register of prostitutes was to prove that she had gainful and secure employment. A few times Céleste tried to get her name removed from the register, but the positions she held in the theater or at the hippodrome did not, in the eyes of the police, constitute enough security. When she gave up in this endeavor, she refused to return each year to reregister as the law required, but it meant that she lived in fear of the police, a fear great enough to drive her to attempt suicide rather than face the shame of being arrested.

In keeping with her generous nature, Céleste wanted to adopt her maid Marie’s baby girl when Marie died soon after childbirth. As a prostitute, however, Céleste was not allowed to adopt the baby. She had to xiv

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settle for the title of godmother. It was not until a few days before her marriage to Lionel that, with the help of a powerful friend, Prince Napoléon (who was rumored to have been her lover), number  and the name Céleste Vénard were erased from the register of prostitutes.

Mogador’s impetuousness also accounts for some of the more melo-dramatic moments of her life, at least as she describes them. Her affair with Lionel generated many of them. Like a character in a boulevard drama, a fiercely jealous Céleste gets rid of a rival by storming into her lover’s apartment during his absence and ordering the stunned servants to pack up the belongings of the interim mistress to have them taken to a hotel. And when confronting Lionel about this mistress, she grabs a knife and stabs her lover, then stabs herself in the chest and decorously swoons.

A notable significance of these memoirs is their disclosure of a spe-cific class of nineteenth-century French society from the point of view of one of its members. The year that Céleste received her number, the chief editor at the Figaro coined the term lorette, a euphemism for ‘ prostitute’ that Balzac quickly found useful. To become a courtesan, the lorette must have one main lover; that is, the woman must be talked about as the mistress of

, even though she might discreetly have other lovers. And the difference between the two types of women was formally recognized in this subculture of demimondaines. For example, some salons did not admit lorettes, but they did courtesans. Céleste learned that lesson very early. In the days when she was still innocent enough to believe in love, she became enamored of a young doctor named Adolphe, whom she met when she was still at the brothel. She had not revealed her situation to him, having been told he did not frequent such women, nor had he bothered to let her know he had a mistress, Louisa Aumont, until he took Céleste to a ball at which Mlle Aumont was present. Outraged that Céleste’s kind of woman would be admitted, Mlle Aumont demanded her eviction. Young Céleste found out not only that it is quite customary for a man to have several mistresses, but also about the hierarchy among kept women. As she explains in her memoirs, this event began a process of hardening of her heart. The mortification she suffered would not soon be forgotten.

Ever since her mother had taken her to the theater when she was a child, Céleste had dreamed of becoming a stage actress. She never gave up on her dream, although it appears, when she finally was given some acting roles, she did not have much talent. Her practical side and her desire for beautiful things led her to pursue more realistic means xv

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to make a living. Many young women sought out popular dance halls to meet young men for romance and maybe to obtain monetary support. It was at one of these dance halls that Céleste’s path to becoming a courtesan began.

Present-day chic Avenue Montaigne was then called Allée des Veuves, Widow’s Alley. Because of the lack of street lighting, it was a likely place for trysts and other clandestine meetings. In spite of this reputation, in

 Charles Mabille, a dance teacher, opened an outdoor cafe, then a dance hall that became popular with working young men and women.

Thirty years later, Mabille’s sons improved the locale and turned the Bal Mabille into one of the favorite meeting places for lovers until it closed in . It had gardens, harbors, swings, merry-go-rounds, games, and of course a dance floor under the trees, where new dances were introduced to the sounds of an orchestra composed of candidates for the conservatory. After closing time the young men would wait outside for their conquests, anticipating a night of pleasure.

It was at Mabille that Céleste acquired her famous name of Mogador. Mogador, a city in Morocco today called Essaouira, was the site of a notable French victory. The event so captured the imagination of the French that numerous mementos were sold with the name Mogador on them. So when Céleste’s dancing partner had to fend off other suitors to dance with the beautiful young woman, he remarked that it would be easier to defend Mogador than his partner. And thus, Céleste Vénard was christened Céleste Mogador, queen of the Bal Mabille. There was, however, another queen, just as admired, la Reine Pomaré, so named because the wild air about her reminded the dancers of the new Queen Pomaré of the French possession Tahiti. La Reine Pomaré was the illfated Lise Sergent, whose short and gaudy life epitomized the period: at one time she had lived with the poet Baudelaire; she made it a habit to shock the bourgeois establishment, sometimes dressing like a man; and she wore thick, exaggerated makeup. Now Mabille had two reign-ing monarchs, each with her own supporters organized in clans like political parties; arguments and debates would ensue. Poets vied with each other to compose poems extolling the glories of the queens. Paris was having fun.

The author of the memoirs is silent on her means of support in those days, but we can assume she found young suitors only too delighted to provide her with a livelihood in return for her favors. She is not so silent, although subtly discreet, on the more well-to-do or famous suitors who would enter her life later. Once she acquired notoriety at the Bal Ma-xvi

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bille, and later as a fearless equestrienne at the circus, her name was on everyone’s lips; she was recognized in public and was therefore the ideal adornment for a young, or not so young, dandy.

There were many men in Céleste’s life, and the majority of them were nothing more to her than a means to an end. Men like the rich Italian Duke of Ossuma or the Dutch baron would set her up in an apartment and furnish it for her; they would give her carriages and sometimes money. If on a whim she wanted a piano, she would get one and lessons to go with it. Some men were sincere in their professed love for her. A famous Italian tenor, although he could barely speak French, fell in love with Céleste and finally stopped seeing her only after she forced him to hide in a cubicle by her bed one day when the duke paid her an impromptu visit. The tenor, sickened by the vaudevillian scene he had been forced to play, could not forgive Mogador’s callousness. Others were fatuous dolts like Léon, a shy admirer of her triumphant deeds as a circus rider, who fought a duel over her, but who, to her great embarrassment, ignominiously abandoned her in the street the moment he saw his mother and his grandfather walking toward them. In their eyes, to be seen walking with Céleste Mogador was scandalous.

Céleste was easily impressed by the literary and artistic set. She yearned for the company of intelligent and witty people, and through her association with Lionel, she finally met such people. She became friends with Alexandre Dumas père and, much later, with his reticent son. She caught the eye and captured the heart of Thomas Couture, the painter, who used her as a model for his important painting Roman Orgy, which now hangs in the Musée d’Orsay, and who did a plaster cast of her hand, today on display at the Musée Carnavalet in Paris. She had come a long way from the days at the brothel, when she was the plaything of the poet Alfred de Musset. She met him not long after the breakup of his love affair with the writer George Sand. Musset, about to turn thirty, already famous, had replaced Sand with the famous actress Rachel. That relationship did not prevent him from spending most of his time in pursuit of other pleasures. He was frequently seen at various Parisian cafés drinking his favorite drink, a mixture of absinthe, cognac, English beer, and an egg yolk. He also was a regular at the brothel where Céleste was employed. His acquaintance with the new young prostitute, who, according to her memoirs, was not afraid to contradict and provoke him, revived his indolent disposition. Then one day he took her to a restaurant and for no apparent reason picked up a syphon of seltzer water as if he were going to pour himself something to drink and, aim-xvii

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ing the opening toward her, drenched her from head to toe. When sixty years after her last, and humiliating, encounter with the great man of letters, on the occasion of the inauguration of his statue, a newspaper reporter reminded Céleste of the incident with the seltzer bottle, she stated that she never forgave him.