The Book of the Courtesans (16 page)

From the distance of time, one might be led to believe that Maintenon’s
religious scruples were suspiciously self-serving. But even if this were so, it
could not have been the whole story. After she married Louis, her zeal only
increased. If her growing fanaticism troubled many, none were more affected by
this conversion than the hapless students of Saint-Cyr, the school for girls
that she had started with Louis’ help. In the beginning, this academy was
meant to give the daughters of the lesser nobility an education. They were to
be prepared with the skills necessary to enter society—cultivation in the
arts, including literature and needlepoint—the manners expected at court.
The marquise even commissioned Racine to write a play for the girls to perform.

It was the memory of her own circumstances that led her to establish the school.
When, as a young woman, Françoise was brought, badly dressed and hardly
tutored, to a soirée at Scarron’s apartments, she was so aware of her
deficiencies that she was reduced to tears by the embarrassment. But Scarron,
who was a kind man, took a liking to her. And when he learned that having no
means she was to be sent to a nunnery and thus was in despair, he offered to
marry her. He was neither physically attractive nor capable of consummating a
marriage. Afflicted by illness, unable to walk unaided, he was described by
everyone including himself as being shaped like the letter “Z.” Yet
he fed and clothed her, and just as important, gave her an informal education
and an entrance into Parisian society. A scintillating presence, she proved a
gracious hostess at Scarron’s gatherings and was soon sought and admired by
Parisian society in her own right.

Though she never regretted her marriage to Scarron, it was her painful
awareness of the terrible choices women were forced to make that had inspired
her to establish the school at Saint-Cyr. Yet, reflecting the temper of the
times, the conflict shadowed everything she did. Though the school had been
established so that girls would not be forced into nunneries, when Franç
oise saw her students becoming worldly, attracting the attention of the young
men of the court, she made the school into a convent. If they wished to stay,
the students, most of whom had spent many years at Saint-Cyr and therefore had
no other place to go, were forced to take perpetual vows.

It is not hard to imagine what they must have felt. They were by now
sophisticated, well read,
au courant
with the latest trends; they had
learned to converse eloquently, to argue reasonably. They were habituated to an
elegantly sensual life, and through a constant stream of celebrated visitors,
for years they had been at the center of a very worldly society. Now all that
was to vanish, replaced with the harsh deprivations of their new vows of
poverty and the dead silence of the cloister.

Though they were both engaged in the struggle between secular and religious
values, the marquise de Maintenon and Ninon de Lenclos eventually landed on
different sides of the conflict. Yet they remained friends. It was through her
friendship with the former Madame Scarron that Ninon had her only meeting with
the king. Hoping Maintenon’s influence could win an appointment for a
friend, Ninon wrote asking for help. When Françoise brought the matter up
to Louis, he said that he had always wanted to meet Ninon and suggested that
Françoise arrange a meeting at Versailles. He had heard stories of the
famous courtesan since he was a child, and now as her fame had grown, her
witticisms and opinions were repeated all over Paris. It is said that whenever
the king could not reach a decision about an important matter, he would ask his
ministers, many of whom were familiar with the courtesan, “What does
Ninon think?”

According to Athénaïs Montespan’s journals, Louis hid in a closet
in Maintenon’s rooms while the two women met. After expressing her dislike
of the strictness of court manners, Ninon tried to persuade her old friend to
return to Paris, where she promised she would be surrounded “by those
delicate and sinuous minds that used to applaud your agreeable stories, your
brilliant conversation.” When Louis finally came out of his hiding place,
he bantered with Lenclos, accusing her in jest of trying to deprive him of his
lover. Knowing Maintenon would not be tempted to leave him, he was hardly
threatened. Later he said that he liked Ninon’s intelligent frankness.

She
was
telling the truth. Though many prominent women envied
Maintenon’s position at court, for Ninon the sacrifice of “brilliant
conversation” would have been too great. From her childhood, Ninon loved
learning, books, discourse. Nor would she have been happy to be at the beck and
call of the king. Early on, she rejected the passive role women were more often
than not required to play. When she was eleven years old, she wrote her father
a letter which announced: “I inform you now that I have decided to be a
girl no longer, but to become a boy.” Thus she requested that he give her
“the education needed for my new sex.”

Her father, who was clearly charmed by the note, had his tailor make her a
doublet and breeches of pale blue velvet, a short riding coat of burgundy
velvet, and commissioned a
cordonnier
to make her a pair of riding
boots as well as a
chappellerie
, on the Place Royale, to fashion her a
beaver hat with one red plume. Dressed appropriately, she learned to ride and
fence. Soon becoming the darling of the guardsmen, she quickly picked up the
rough slang spoken in the stables, the mastery of which, given the mysterious
power language has over the mind, doubtless made her feel as entitled as any of
her other accomplishments.

When, many years later, she decided to meet one of her lovers on the
battlefield, it must have felt familiar to her to travel dressed as a man, a
sword at her side. She was to repeat her vow not to be fettered by the
limitations society placed on the members of her sex many times in her life. To
one of her lovers, Boisrobert, she wrote: “Men enjoy a thousand
privileges which women never have. From this moment, I have become a man.”
True to her vow, she was reputed by many, including Voltaire, to pray each
morning: “God please make me an honest man but never an honest woman.
”

By the account of “Madame,” the wife of the king’s brother, who
wrote extensive letters (deemed now almost as interesting as the letters of
Madame de Sévigné), those who knew Ninon generally agreed that there
was “no more honest man to be found than she.” And though in one
way the achievement is extraordinary for one who has not been born a man, in
another sense the integrity and authority of her behavior, including what she
said and the brilliant way she said it, would have been fostered by the very
fact that she straddled the boundaries between the two sexes.

Wit is an androgynous art. A certain humorous distance from the protocol is
required and nurtured by the refusal to obey it. Cross-

dressing reveals the absurdity of strict dress codes. Behaving outside the
proscriptions of gender makes the comedy of such manners apparent. Moreover, to
exist on the edge of disapproval hones the sharpness of observation essential
for wit. And that also requires a delicate sense of balance, part of the
diplomacy that is the soul of wit—a form of humor that, to be practiced
safely, is close to but not beyond the point of outrage. The witty can say
exactly what is forbidden and get away with it.

And there is this, too. No less a brilliant conversationalist than La
Rochefoucauld, famous for his
Maxims
, said that he preferred the
conversation of intelligent women over that of men. “There is a certain
suavity in their talk which is lacking in our sex,” he said. Putting
together the finesse that many women are encouraged to develop with the
intelligence fostered in men, we would have an excellent recipe for wit.

In essence all courtesans, no matter how rouged and bejeweled they were, had to
have the virtues of both men and women. By turns independent, tough, assertive,
courageous, and bold, they were also sensuous. They were not only emotionally
aware, but also privy to many intimate secrets, sophisticated in the ways of
the heart; and though not always so, at certain crucial moments they could be
patient, nurturing, and sensitive. Rather than labor to fit themselves into the
constricted roles played by either sex, they censored none of their abilities,
developing qualities called masculine or feminine in a complex mix that had to
be especially attractive to those bound by social convention.

Yet we should be careful not to deceive ourselves in this regard. Courtesans
were by no means entirely free of the strictures that define sexuality. If the
terrain at the fringe of acceptability was exciting, it could also be dangerous.
As admired, for instance, as Ninon de Lenclos was by many powerful men, even
she had her enemies. At the height of her popularity, the Compagnie Gé
nérale du Saint-Sacrament petitioned the queen, Anne of Austria, to punish
her for ridiculing marriage, as well as for suggesting that women should have
the same rights as men. Ninon was confined to a convent in Paris. And when it
looked as if Ninon’s champions might try to rescue her, she was sent to
another convent further off in the countryside. Nevertheless, even outside the
city walls, she had a steady stream of visitors. And she was not to be confined
for long. After visiting her there, Queen Christina of Sweden obtained her
release by writing to Mazarin that by Ninon’s absence, “the court
lacked its greatest ornament.”

This brief imprisonment was the exception in a life that was, for this period,
exceptionally unbounded. During the greater part of her existence, Ninon
negotiated her freedom with extraordinary success, and in this wit was one of
her best instruments. Her diplomatic triumphs in the battle of distinctions
between men and women are illustrated by two remarks that have survived their
creator by over three centuries. When her friend Boisrobert protested that the
talk among a group of men visiting Ninon had become inappropriate for the
presence of a lady, she replied that she was too much of a gentleman to mind.
She made another famous remark when a lover, called Tambonneau, wished to have
his wife hear Ninon play the lute, which he felt she did beautifully. Afraid of
exposing his wife to a courtesan, he proposed a solution to the dilemma. Why
not hang a tapestry in front of his wife, behind which Ninon, concealed from
view, would play, he suggested. On hearing this idea Ninon responded, “
Which do you think will give her greater immunity, a Flemish or a Gobelins
tapestry?”

Of course, the veil of laughter that protected Ninon was in the end a far less
foolish device. Depending on the angle of your vision, it could be considered
opaque, translucent, or reflective, but it was always brilliant.

Housekeeping

I am a marvelous housekeeper. Every time I leave a man I keep his
house.
—
Zsa Zsa Gabor

This catalogue would be remiss and certainly unrealistic if still another
aspect of the brilliance of courtesans were not mentioned here, and that is the
way they handled money. As is true of all the virtues, some were better endowed
with this skill than others. But most enjoyed a financial independence that had
eluded women of every class until well into the twentieth century. The wealth
they acquired did not come to them automatically. Like any successful
businessman or -woman, a courtesan had to be able to understand the value of
what she offered, to read the climate of the market, to be self-reliant,
trusting her own sense of how to proceed; and as with talented investors, have
the courage to take certain educated risks in order to realize a larger gain.

The extraordinary story of La Belle Otero affords an example of a brilliant
rise from rags to riches. Brutally raped at the age of eleven, after surgery
and several months in the hospital, she said good-bye to her mother and left
the small village of Valga in Spain at the age of twelve with only a few
pesetas in her possession. For two years she wandered in search of handouts,
from one man to another, exchanging sex for a place to sleep and something to
eat. Eventually, she met a Catalán called Paco who taught her to dance and
sing. Acting as her manager and partner, he performed with her in a string of
small, sometimes sleazy nightclubs. Like many women who worked in the theatre,
she supplemented their small earnings by sleeping with men from the audience
who would appear at the stage door after their performances. The possibility of
ending this way of life presented itself when Paco, already her lover, wanted
her to quit every other liaison and marry him. But she refused. No doubt she
did not want to repeat the destitution of her childhood. And from the
occasional generosity of the men who followed her off the stage, she had a
growing sense of what was possible. She recognized the arrival of this
possibility when an American impresario saw her in Marseille and, falling in
love with her, asked her to perform at the prominent club he managed in New
York.

Just a few years later, having made a fortune from a series of eminent
protectors, she owned a beautiful home designed for her by the architect
Adolphe Vieil, in the fashionable neighborhood of the Parc Monceau in Paris.
Her rooms were filled with luxurious possessions, fine furniture, a wardrobe
the envy of royalty, and a collection of jewelry that at the turn of the
century was worth
2
to
3
million
francs.

She was not as good, however, at keeping her money as she was at acquiring it.
A serious vice occluded her financial genius, one that we might describe as the
shadow side of her talent at making money: She loved to gamble. Over the many
years of her professional life, she made regular and frequent trips to Monte
Carlo. When she was young, if she lost more than she won, her income could
absorb the deficit. But as she aged and her income began to wane, this vice
took its inevitable toll. Perhaps it was a mistake for Otero to retire to Nice,
so close to the gaming tables at Monte Carlo. In a short time, she had lost her
comfortable villa. But her ending was not as miserable as it might have been.
The legend is that when once again, in the last years of her life, having
pawned all her jewelry, she was destitute, the casinos where she had gambled
and lost most of her money gave her a modest pension, which kept her housed and
fed until she died.