Delving into the world of Parisan courtesans

By Judith Maas, Globe Staff, 9/24/2003

Grandes Horizontales: The Lives and Legends of Four Nineteenth-Century Courtesans, by Virginia Rounding, Bloomsbury, 352 pp., illustrated, $25.95

They were the celebrities of their day. Artists enshrined their image in plays, poems, and sculpture. Diarists mocked their social pretensions, and moralists denounced their decadence. The legends that swirled about the 19th-century Parisian courtesans, the most highly paid among the city's thousands of prostitutes, reflect the human propensity to embellish, Virginia Rounding says. Her ``Grandes Horizontales'' sets out to distinguish fact from fiction in the lives of four stars of the French demimonde, the shadowy terrain between the worlds of the street prostitute and the upper classes.

Rounding brings skepticism and sympathy to the task, cutting through the sentimentality that riddles tales of fallen women, sorting out what happened and didn't happen, and taking up the thorny question of what we can know about these women once the legends are stripped away. Above all, these are stories of striving and upward mobility. Each of Rounding's subjects - Marie Duplessis, the model for the heroines of Alexandre Dumas's novel ``La Dame aux Camelias'' and Verdi's opera ``La Traviata''; the Russian-Jewish La Paiva, fiercely ambitious and famed for her spectacular mansion on the Champs Elysees; Apollonie Sabatier, salon hostess and muse of poet Charles Baudelaire; and the English-born Cora Pearl, renowned for her skill in juggling multiple lovers - came from a humble background and exercised considerable cunning and imagination in reinventing herself and advancing her career.

What made the rise of the courtesans possible was the climate of Paris during the Second Empire (1852-70), a city on a pleasure spree. Rounding describes efforts to regulate prostitution based on the belief in its inevitability; the extremes of wealth and poverty; and the frivolity among the well-to-do. Well-chosen quotations from contemporary observers convey the giddy, freewheeling atmosphere. Said one memoirist, ``One can hardly mention the reign of Napoleon III without mouths puckering in malicious smiles.''

Especially intriguing are the affinities Rounding identifies between the demimonde and high society. Though clear barriers separated the two worlds - while men might move from one to the other, a courtesan would be shunned by polite society - they were akin in theatricality, pomp, and hedonism. The disdain with which the elite viewed the demimonde perhaps reflected the recognition that their own lifestyles were not far removed from those of society's disreputable elements.

Rounding devotes much of her study to exploring the courtesans' day-to-day lives: the intricacies of their relationships with men; their lavish spending and financial travails; the lively salons over which they presided; the sumptuous decor of their apartments. Ultimately, she assesses the gains and losses they experienced.

Arguing that the men had the upper hand, Rounding nevertheless refuses to reduce her subjects to hapless victims; the courtesans used the men in their lives as much as they were used by them. If the men viewed the women as status symbols, then discarded them at will, the courtesans managed to find pleasure, freedom, and social prominence where they could. They even enjoyed an occasional ``amant de coeur,'' a genuine affair of the heart.

Even as Rounding seeks to distinguish lives from legends, she acknowledges the obstacles to doing so. Those who wrote about the courtesans were highly biased, and the courtesans themselves were nothing if not self-dramatizing. While Rounding explores these women's choices with sensitivity, we see her subjects mainly from the outside and wonder finally who they really were. Did they know or care where their notoriety ended and their real selves began? What price did they pay for so thoroughly disowning their pasts? Did whatever power and independence they attained ease the fears and hardships that fueled their rise? More surmising on such questions would have been welcome. Nonetheless, Rounding captures the distinct experience of each of these women and offers a vivid portrait of their world, in both its splendor and its seaminess.