The Evolution of the French Courtesan Novel

From de Chabrillan to Colette

Courtney Sullivan

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781137597090
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Modern Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

'Sullivan's outstanding book is the first to show how French courtesans were fully-fledged masters of the pen as well as proverbial ladies of the night. We learn how their rewriting of classics such as The Lady of the Camellias and their response to a male "backlash" inspire Colette in previously unseen ways.' — Nicholas White, University of Cambridge, UKThis book is about the autobiographical fictions of nineteenth-century French courtesans. In response to damaging representations of their kind in Zola and Alexandre Dumas' novels, Céleste de Chabrillan, Valtesse de la Bigne, and Liane de Pougy crafted fictions recounting their triumphs as celebrities of the demi-monde and their outcries against the social injustices that pushed them into prostitution. Although their works enjoyed huge success in the second half of the nineteenth century, male writers penned faux-memoirs mocking courtesan novels, and successfully sowed doubt about their authorship in a backlash against the profitable notoriety the novels earned these courtesans. Colette, who did not write from personal experience but rather out of sympathy for the courtesans with whom she socialized, innovated the genre when she wrote three novels exploring the demi-mondaine's life beyond prostitution and youth.

© The Author(s) 2016

Courtney SullivanThe Evolution of the French Courtesan Novel10.1057/978-1-137-59709-0_1

Begin Abstract

1. Introduction

Courtney Sullivan¹

(1)

Arts & Sciences, Washburn University, Topeka, KS, USA

Abstract

The introduction begins with Valtesse de la Bigne’s critical response to La Dame aux camélias, then introduces Céleste de Chabrillan and Liane de Pougy, the two other courtesan writers examined in this book. After a brief overview of the male discourse on demi-mondaines against which these women wrote, it examines the three writers’ responses to Nana. The introduction summarizes Peter Brooks, Charles Bernheimer, and Rachel Mesch’s critical readings of Zola’s work and introduces de Pougy’s engagement with his novel.

Keywords

Valtesse de la Bignecourtesan novel La Dame aux camélias NanaCéleste de ChabrillanLiane de Pougydemi-monde

End Abstract

In a controlled adieu to her glamorous and luxurious vie mondaine ¹ in Paris and in direct dialogue with the famous first chapter of La Dame aux camélias [The Lady of the Camellias], Valtesse de la Bigne, famed demi-mondaine, organized a sale of her precious works of art (including the iconic 1879 portrait of her by Manet), furniture, jewelry, silver, and other objets d’art that took place in her palatial hôtel particulier (June 2–June 7, 1902). This would not be the first time de la Bigne referenced Dumas fils’s famous 1848 novel. In fact, in Isola, the courtesan novel she had penned some 25 years earlier, her protagonist complains about the unrealistic portrayal of Marguerite Gautier, and de la Bigne purposely writes her novel in a way that counters the conventional but damaging representations of courtesans in male-authored French literary works of the second half of the nineteenth century. The deliberately arranged 1902 sale then, like her novel Isola (1876), engages with La Dame aux camélias in a way that illustrates the dialectic between de la Bigne and the other too-often-neglected courtesan novelists of late nineteenth-century France and the male authors of the period. The sale, a parting shot at the likes of Dumas fils, the Goncourt brothers, and Zola, reveals that courtesans did not remain silent in the face of the contemporary novels that so maligned them.

Instead of dying in poverty like the self-sacrificing Marguerite Gautier, who, at least in La Dame aux camélias, finds herself doomed to a lonely, painful death in desperate poverty as punishment for her sins, de la Bigne organized a sale eight years before her death so that she could leave a Paris she now found too noisy and smelly. She would finish her life in an elegant manor in Ville-d’Avray surrounded by peaceful nature. Unlike the ill-fated Marguerite who spent her last days consumed by thoughts of dying and hounded by the creditors who arranged an infamous sale within days of her death, de la Bigne downsized her belongings herself so that she could finish her life in cozy comfort. In fact, the two pages that precede the catalogue of objects de la Bigne offered at her sale flatter both de la Bigne’s own upscale tastes and those of a curious clientele she hoped would attend and purchase her goods. The publication of this catalogue seems to have been a conscious effort on de la Bigne’s part, not only to publicize the sale but also to restage Marguerite’s auction in a more positive context.² Finally, since de la Bigne’s sale preceded her death, it not only defied social propriety but also offered the pretext for her to be discussed one last time by the Parisian public. As the text in the catalogue acknowledges, although the sale was risky business and it was painful for de la Bigne to part with such lovely treasures, the occasion afforded her the pleasure of hearing people voice their admiration of her good taste: “Il y a le bruisement doux comme une caresse, de l’admiration d’autri” [there is the murmur, as gentle as a caress, of the admiration of others] (II). She could also watch them covet her luxurious lifestyle and even fight over her belongings, or the “merveilles lentement rassemblées” [marvels so slowly collected] (II). If de la Bigne was trying to build up momentum to the sale in publishing the catalogue, she also, in one last dialogue with Dumas fils’s novel, took a final jab at the myth of the harlot with the heart of gold who must die to redeem herself from her wicked ways: she escaped from Paris, despite her courtesan past, with her finances, dignity, and health intact.

The Evolution of the French Courtesan Novel: From de Chabrillan to Colette argues that de la Bigne uses her protagonist to write against the demi-mondaine as a femme fatale in a way that strives to carve a place outside of a discourse dominated by male writers such as Dumas fils, Edmond and Jules de Goncourt, Eugène Sue, and Émile Zola. In La Dame aux camélias, Dumas fils

portrays the demi-monde as glamorous, fun, and intoxicating. It is easy to forgive Marguerite Gautier’s wanton sexuality and transgressions – because she, like Marie Duplessis, the woman on whom the novel and play are loosely based, dies young, beautiful and repentant. Her threat of negatively influencing any bourgeois women seeking adventure outside of marriage is sealed off when she is buried in a coffin.³

The aforementioned male writers, “throughout the nineteenth century,” I argue, “centered their ambivalence to changes brought about by capitalism, modernity, revolution as well as evolving gender roles on the figure of the prostitute, fantasizing that these problems could be eradicated through her destruction, containment or punishment. Only in keeping the actions of the marginalized prostitute in check could some sense of order be restored.”⁴ As a result, the Goncourts in their La Lorette (1853) and Sue in his short story “La Lorette” (1854) strove to contain the unruly prostitute in their novels “that also anticipate misogynist portrayals of the prostitute as dirty, infectious, depraved, and the man-eating depictions of prostitutes by writers in the later part of the nineteenth century, most notably Émile Zola’s creation of Nana [1880]”⁵ (Sullivan 247). However, demi-mondaines such as Céleste de Chabrillan, in memoirs and novels, wrote back against the misogynist myths spun by male authors. Although during the Second Empire de Chabrillan began the battle to defend her kind and to write against the cruel stereotypes of courtesans formulated to discredit their intellect and suppress their points of view, de la Bigne continued the fight through her intertextual references to classic and contemporary works some 20 years later.

De Chabrillan, de la Bigne, and her protégé, Liane de Pougy, had their own reasons for telling their stories and thus became courtesan novelists, as I will explain in Chap. 2. De Chabrillan began her Mémoires first as a way of defending herself against creditors and then kept writing since she wanted to earn her living in a “legitimate” fashion, selling her stories, not her body. De la Bigne wanted to settle some scores in regard to the hypocritical double standard of the times, but also shrewdly marketed herself as tough, smart, and not anyone to vex. De Pougy, a courtesan writing at the fin de siècle, was the sharpest of the bunch in terms of marketing her brand through her associations with journalists who publicized her exploits in popular columns. She delicately straddled the line between her need to write to express her vibrant intellect and creative impulses and her desire to promote herself to earn more fame and money. A palpable tension exists between the often harsh reality these women faced thanks to their actual prostitution—such as the abuse they often endure from the very men who pay them for their services—and the ways they represent themselves as renegade women free to write, think, socialize, dress, and spend as they please. In some ways, they seem liberated in comparison to the bourgeois women reined in by marriage and motherhood; yet this very freedom means that society will always consider them anathema.

The prostitute’s ubiquity in novels and paintings created by men, Charles Bernheimer asserts in Figures of Ill Repute, stems from both her “prominence as a social phenomenon” and her “function in stimulating artistic strategies to control and dispel her threat to male mastery” (2). To borrow a concept from Bernheimer outlining the ways male artists and writers negotiated between the “historical reality of prostitutional behaviors and the formal procedures of representation,” the courtesan novelists, put “a spin on the story” in their narratives in a way that parallels how their male contemporaries manipulate stories about harlots (ix). While male writers, in their spin on the story, transform prostitution “into a trope for male creativity,” de Chabrillan, de la Bigne, and de Pougy “despin” or counter these narratives with their own versions of the prostitute’s story (ix). Bernheimer laments the lack of “real” accounts of the average prostitute’s lived experiences since he notes “with the exception of a few autobiographical writings by great courtesans of the period, we have no nineteenth-century accounts written by French prostitutes themselves” (3). In this book, I demonstrate that while they certainly put “spins” on their autobiographies and fictions since they were clever marketers of their own brands, de Chabrillan, de la Bigne, and de Pougy did not become elite demi-mondaines overnight. In their works, they bear witness to the very real psychological and financial struggles they faced while climbing their way to the top (in de Pougy’s regard, this is done rather coyly). In essence, they tell the type of stories Zola’s Nana censures when she dismisses a novel about a prostitute as “faux” [false] and part of a lowly genre (344).

Although in the contemporary Anglophone world, Nana, with its canonical status, appears quite frequently on French literature syllabi as the go-to text on prostitution in the nineteenth century, the three courtesan writers examined in this tome focus on La Dame aux camélias, the popular culture reference on prostitution par excellence in the second half of the century. In the case of de Chabrillan and de la Bigne, since they penned their novels before Zola authored Nana, they could not reference his work, but that did not stop them from expressing their negative opinions of it later once it was published. In fact, Nana so upset de Chabrillan in its cruel portrayal of her old friend Lise Sergent, known as la Reine Pomaré, that she publicly protested it. As Monique Fleury Nagem explains, even though Lise died at 21 of tuberculosis, Zola portrays Pomaré 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” (xiii). Nagem reports that de Chabrillan, wounded by Zola’s “insult to her old friend,” “shouted protests about the courtesan’s depiction” at one of the first performances of the theatrical adaption of Nana (xiii). Just as she had 25 years earlier in her memoirs, de Chabrillan once again contested the insulting portrayal of her kind (Sullivan, “Pour nous” 198).

Before delving into de la Bigne’s opinion of Nana, it is worth briefly noting the influence of both de la Bigne and her fictional alter ego had on Zola’s portrait of Nana. For starters, Nana sports the same scintillating golden-red coif as Isola, and in Chap. 1, we also see that Isola’s admirers call her “Rayon d’or” (Golden Ray) while Nana’s initial detractor—the journalist Fauchery—crowns her the “Mouche d’or” (Golden Fly). While Isola opens with demi-mondaines posturing for battle over admirers at a theater premiere, Nana also begins with male theatergoers gossiping about courtesans, namely anticipated debut of Nana in La Blonde Venus, a parody of Offenbach’s La belle Hélène (Brooks 125). Zola’s contemporaries would have known that de la Bigne won fame in Offenbach’s La Romance à la rose and La Diva and became his mistress at the end of the Second Empire (Valtesse 53; 58).

Even if they may share the same beautiful hair, performance history, and notoriety as the mistress of powerful figures in the artistic world, Nana and Isola do not share any similarities in regard to intelligence and sophistication. In fact, many of Zola’s contemporaries viewed Zola’s depiction of Nana as stupid as highly flawed. Indeed, he refers to Nana as a bête ⁶ well over 20 times in the novel. Valtesse reports that “Mme de la Bigne” herself frowned upon Nana as “écrit de tant d’incohérences” [written with so many inconsistencies] since no courtesan as stupid as Nana could gain entry much less ascension in the demi-monde (121). She also resented Zola’s portrayal of her as a “vulgaire catin” [vulgar strumpet] (119). No one who knew the author of Isola viewed her as so lacking in intellect, wit, or sophistication, and de la Bigne cites Arsène Houssaye’s defense of the courtesan he admired so greatly as proof: “Valtesse est spirituelle et c’est précisément le tort de M. Zola qui s’est servi d’elle pour créer le type de Nana, de n’avoir pas compris que pour triompher, il faut à une femme une certaine intelligence qui s’affine par des relations” [Valtesse is witty and that is precisely where Zola went wrong when using her as model for Nana since he did not understand that to prevail it takes a woman of a certain intelligence who only becomes more refined by her circle] (121–122). Houssaye indicates that through their numerous conversations with educated lovers and chatty artists and writers who frequented their soirées, demi-mondaines acquired elegant manners and sophisticated rhetorical skills. To paraphrase Georges Ohnet, if Zola failed to accurately portray Nana’s society, it was because he merely consulted concierges in apartments and hotels (Valtesse 118). In short, certain of Zola’s contemporaries such as Ohnet insisted that Zola did not accurately depict the demi-monde or the grand monde because he lacked the money and connections to gain access to them.

Critics have also suggested that Zola’ own biased agenda prevented him from describing the demi-monde with any objectivity. Rachel Mesch claims that he “blatantly ignores” the intelligence courtesans needed to succeed in the demi-monde since in Nana the courtesan’s intellect and ability “to see, and thus to know” is as threatening as her sexual wantonness (36–37). Although courtesans such as de la Bigne lived as much off their wit as their beauty, throughout the majority of the novel, Nana seems incapable of any critical thinking. In an extreme example, Nana is so happy about the length of the extremely unflattering Fauchery article portraying her as a “Golden Fly” that she fails to see how hostile it is to her lower-class status and sexuality. Although Nana’s stupidity and semi-illiteracy render her incapable of understanding the insults Fauchery hurls at her in his article, toward the end of the novel, Zola unexpectedly depicts her as a scrutinizing reader. It is as though Zola suddenly remembers that elite courtesans often advised their highly ranked politician/lovers on p...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Frontmatter
• 1. Introduction
• 2. The Case for the Courtesan Novel Sub-Genre: Counter-Discourse and Intertextuality in de Chabrillan, de la Bigne, and de Pougy
• 3. De Pougy’s Innovative Courtesan Fiction
• 4. Co-opting the Courtesan Persona in the Faux Mémoires de Rigolboche and the Les Usages du demi-monde
• 5. Colette’s Courtesan Fiction: The Final Evolution
• 6. Conclusion
• Backmatter