“No social being is less protected than the young Parisian girl – by laws, regulations, and social customs. – Le Figaro, 1880

Welcome back to The Land of Desire, a French history podcast dedicated to exploring all the weird adventures, mysteries and surprising backstories behind French cultural icons. This week’s episode continues my new series which I’m really excited about: La Belle Époque, the Golden Age of Paris. Today we’ll explore the lives of the women who feature most prominently in the art, literature, and gossip columns of the age: the demi-mondaines. These “half-world” women lived outside the range of social respectability. Ranging from the lowest prostitutes to the grandes horizontales of the finest houses, the demi-mondaines were a tremendously visible part of society in late 19th century Paris and served as muses and models to the world’s most famous creators. Yet these women are rarely discussed in their own right. We’re going to focus this episode on two women whose lives demonstrate the opportunities and calamities available to…”The Belles of the Belle Époque”.

Episode 5: “The Belles of the Belle Epoque”

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Transcript

WARNING – NOT FAMILY FRIENDLY

Bienvenue, and welcome back to the Land of Desire, a podcast about the weird, wacky and wonderful stories from French history. One quick note about today’s show: this particular episode isn’t family friendly. One of my iTunes reviewers mentioned that he loves listening to this show with his kids, and I’m really flattered and want to save you a couple of awkward conversations! There’s no swearing, and I don’t say anything that couldn’t be printed in the New York Times, but this is some heavy subject matter! So save this episode for the treadmill. Alright, let’s get things started.

[TRANSITION]

The first thing to remember about the Belle Époque is that it is, in fact, a memory. A term like “la belle époque” – aka “the golden age” – is the kind of name that a time period receives way on down the line, by an old man, sitting in front of a fireplace, crying into his whiskey and dreaming of the good old days. In this case, it was an entire generation of men, and they forged this kind of nostalgia while they were huddled in trenches, shielding themselves from mustard gas, and trying their best to live through the wretchedness of World War One. After the world had spent four years in the trenches, the previous 40 years were looking like beautiful, shimmering dreams. The Paris of the Belle Époque is one of the most famous dreams of the Western imagination. Consider last week’s episode: when dreaming of Paris, we continue to think of those tall, white, uniform apartment buildings lining big, wide streets. Yet we now know that those buildings and streets came at a terrible cost, isolating the poor and leading to the horrible uprising of 1871. As with so many aspects of the Belle Époque, these downsides fade away from memory, and only the dazzling bits are left. With this in mind, I want to spend this week talking about some of the greatest victims of this historical revisionism: the women of golden age Paris. When the soldiers of World War One closed their eyes and remembered the women of the Belle Époque, they thought of the types of women who had been featured in the art and literature of the age. The soldiers were thinking of young ballerinas twirling around on the stage, but not of the wealthy old men behind stage, waiting for the curtain to drop so they could buy a ballerina for themselves. They were thinking about beautiful barmaids winking at them across the counter, not the sad streetwalkers lurking outside on the sidewalk. The men were dreaming of the can-can dancers of the Moulin Rouge, flashing their heels and petticoats on stage, but never of those same can-can dancers offstage, struggling to afford food and raise their children. All of these women: the barmaids, the dancers, all the way from the streetwalkers to the most elegant courtesans, were part of the demi-mondaine, the “half-world” of those who lived outside the boundaries of respectability. These women were the mascots of the Belle Époque: think of Manet’s Olympia or his barmaid at the Foliés-Bergere, or Degas’s bathing women, or Renoir’s garden party girls. These women were literally the faces of the age, but their stories are all too often forgotten, which is a shame, because their stories are also fascinating. In the shadow world of the demi-mondaine, anything went – there was tragedy, yes, but sometimes, if you were very savvy and very lucky, there was opportunity. This week, let’s take a look at the Belles of the Belle Époque.

By the 1880s, the glory days of ballet had passed. Ballet was a sideshow: an intermission act to keep the attention of bored opera-goers waiting for the next show to begin. The young dancers were admired by the audience, but only for their legs, not for their art. The greatest admirers were the old men waiting backstage, rich men in fur coats and beautiful suits, buying subscriptions to the ballet in exchange for the right to visit the girl of their choice backstage. As one director of the Paris Opera put it, “Attending the Opera was fashionable; keeping a ballet girl even more so.” The old men knew the ballerinas were poor, desperate girls looking for any way to escape life in the gutter. Their dancing wages certainly wouldn’t do it – without a generous male patron, the girls would have starved. If a girl was truly lucky, a patron would pay for apartments, jewels, and carriages – as long as she held up her end of the unspoken arrangement. When a half-blind bearded man with a terrible temper began visiting the Paris Opera backstage in the 1870s, the dancers assumed he was here for the same reasons as the other men, until he began bringing a sketch pad with him. One ballerina remembered, “He used to stand at the top or bottom of the many staircases, drawing the ballerinas as they rushed up and down.” Edgar Dégas was not at the Opera to keep a ballet girl: he was here to sculpt one.

Edgar Degas’ first masterpieces from the ballet were sketches and drawings. He called the ballerinas his petits rats, which was better than their usual nicknames: the sauteuses, meaning “those who leap” as well as those who, let’s just say, leap into bed. Over the course of the rest of his life, Degas had so many little ballerinas traipsing in and out of his studio that even the authorities were alarmed. Yet amongst all these girls, one dancer was singled out for a special project: now that his eyesight was failing and sketching was becoming difficult, Degas wanted to capture the movement of the ballet in a sculpture. In 1881, Degas completed what would eventually become his most famous scuplture: Little Dancer, Aged Fourteen: a young girl standing with her shoulders low, her head high, her foot turned out. The sculpture was a masterpiece. But our story today is not about Degas, it is about the dancer, Marie.

In 1865, a baby girl was born in the 9th arrondissement of Paris. Her parents were Belgian, a father and a laundry woman. The girl was named Marie, after her older sister, who had only survived for 18 days. Shortly after she was born, Marie, her parents and her older sister Antoinette settled into a new apartment on the Rue Notre-Dame de Lorette in the Bréda district. While the nearby Church of Notre Dame de Lorette had stood nearby since 1823, when the locals referred to a “lorette” they were really talking about the neighborhood’s most famous attraction: the prostitutes. Prostitutes were everywhere in this squalid part of town, and even laundry women like Marie’s mother were assumed to rake in a side income the old-fashioned way. For a lot of women, the oldest profession was more of a part-time job, to make ends meet during hard times. Shortly after Marie’s younger sister, Louise, was born, Marie’s father died. Suddenly forced to raise all three girls on her own, Marie’s mother relocated everyone to Montmartre, and it’s safe to assume she spent more and more nights working on her side gig once they had moved. In the meantime, Marie and her sisters kept busy with dance lessons, and this is where she met the grumpy old man who would make her famous.

When Little Dancer, Aged Fourteen debuted in 1881, the crowd assumed Marie was a conquest, with critics saying her face was “imprinted with the detestable promise of every vice.” During the time Degas was sculpting her, Marie was working hard to pass her dance examinations. By the time her likeness went on display, Marie had gained entrance to the corps de ballet at age 15 and made her stage debut. Within two years, she became ….a prostitute.

[TRANSITION]

Prostitution in Belle Epoque Paris took many forms, from the lowest guttersnipe walking the sidewalks and hollering at men passing by, to the elegant courtesans busily bankrupting the richest men of the nation inside luxurious maisons closes, so named because the blinds were always drawn to curious passers-by. Paris alone boasted 224 brothels those days, with an additional 30,000 women who were more like independent contractors – women like Marie’s mother. Cheap brothels charged a single franc – about $7.50, and men would simply take a ticket and join the line. More run-of-the-mill workers would belong to a maison, where they would be inspected by physicians every other week to make sure they weren’t leaving their customers with any unexpected parting gifts. Anyone unfortunate enough to display symptoms of something unpleasant were immediately sent to the hospital, left completely alone in an isolated ward, probably doomed. Some young girls worked at the 19th century equivalent of Hooters, offering themselves up alongside the beer and sausages. The women of the maisons closes were much fancier, and their nicknames would reflect their elegance – they might have gone by “Calliope” or “Olympia” while women on the sidewalks went by such nicknames as “The Beef”. But the greatest prostitutes of the age, the cocottes or, my personal favorite, les grandes horizontales held court over a vast realm of admirers. As one writer summarized, the courtesans were beautiful women “of enormous social influence…customarily kept by a kind of cartel – three millionaires or two dukes – or by one royalty.” The most interesting one of all, if you ask me? The Valtesse de la Bigne.

At first, Louise Delabigne’s life story sounds a lot like that of Marie. Louise was the illegitimate daughter of a laundry woman with a side gig, and her stepfather was a drunk who kicked her around. Like Marie, Louise started earning money very young, working at a candy shop, until the day she was attacked by an old man at the age of 13. Her honor ruined, Louise was forced to enter the oldest profession full-time, on the most disgusting street in Paris. For years, Louise dreamed of a better life, and when she fell in love with a soldier, she thought perhaps happiness was hers. After he broke her heart, Louise decided to break with the past. She cast off her former identity and forged a new name for herself: Valtesse, which is essentially a contracted form of “Your Highness”. Going forward, Valtesse Delabigne spent years transforming herself into an elegant, educated, cultured courtesan. By day, she read books on art, history, and philosophy. By night, she seduced the famous composer Jacques Offenbach. Leaning on Offenbach’s arm, Valtesse met the most famous writers and artists of the day, who painted her portraits and used her in their novels. Up and up she climbed, seducing man after man, perhaps even Napoleon III himself – why else would he bother to make her a countess in the midst of the Franco-Prussian War? After she grew bored of Offenbach, Valtesse moved on to a Polish prince, who set up an apartment which she trashed on her way to the next wealthy lover. That next lover financed an enormous, beautiful house for Valtesse, on the most beautiful street in Paris, bankrupting himself in the process. The only lovers Valtesse exempted from such spending were the artists she admired and often posed for, including Manet, Gervex, Courbet and many more – one of her many nicknames was “The Painter’s Union”. She discussed literature with Mirbeau and Goncourt, she discussed geopolitics with Gambetta. She kept in touch with useful ex-lovers, like the ambassador who would send her news, gossip, and the occasional giant pagoda. Valtesse acquired a breathtaking art collection, but perhaps no piece in her collection was more famous than her extraordinary bed. Immortalized by Emile Zola in his novel Nana, it was “a bed such as had never existed before…a throne, an altar, to which Paris would come in order to worship her sovereign nudity.” When Alexandre Dumas Jr. asked to view the bed, Valtesse politely shook her head and reminded him, “You can’t afford it.” By the time she was an old woman, Valtesse had built a breathtaking villa, where she trained protegées in the art of the courtesan and drove a luxury automobile. She died a wealthy woman, and was buried, mysteriously and fabulously, between two men no one had ever heard of. Crawling from the gutter, the prostitute had died a countess. Her bed now resides in France’s national museum of decorative arts.

The story of Valtesse de la Bigne has the happy ending. Unfortunately, it is not the usual ending.

For Marie, the sculpture by Dégas was not a breakthrough, but a highwater mark. The ballet did not bring fame or fortune, and within a year of her acceptance into the corps de ballet, Marie and her older sister were hanging out in local taverns, nasty places with names like the Dead Rat. A local gossip column alluded as to why: “Her mother….but no, I don’t want to say any more. I’d say things that would make one blush, or make one cry.” Possibly desperate to make ends meet, Marie’s mother put out her own daughters. Soon, Marie was fired for missing too many ballet practices, thanks to her long, sleepless nights. Marie’s younger sister, Charlotte, spent the rest of her life successfully dancing with the Paris Ballet. Marie’s older sister, Antoinette, went to jail after stealing a wallet from a john. But Marie? Marie disappears from the record. After her brief brush with fame, and her initial steps towards professional success, Marie’s story trails off, in a filthy corner of the dirtiest neighborhood in Paris.

Last year, while I was in Paris, the Musée d’Orsay ran an exhibit that I could kick myself for missing. “Splendor and Misery” was an exhibit about prostitution in the visual arts of the late 19th century, and for the first time, curators spent time thinking about not only the artists creating these works, but the women they’re depicting. As one curator of the exhibit asked, “Why was prostitution such a big theme for artists?…The city was slippery. Everything was speeding up, becoming more commercial, more ambiguous, more of a spectacle. How can we be sure this person filled a certain role and not another? Who was who? Was she or wasn’t she? These questions disturbed and fascinated artists.” Valtesse de la Bigne was an elegant, fashionable woman who enjoyed social success while doing essentially, one way or another, the same work as poor Marie. Like Valtesse, other lucky courtesans used their social standing to rebel against the conventions of the age. Nicknamed the “insoumises” or insubordinates, these glamorous and wealthy women did what they wanted without apology, like Louise Bossi, famous for blackmail, or Alice la Provençale, equally comfortable with women or men, and even Léonide Leblanc, an early drag artist. Prostitution could be a pathway to despair, or the only means of survival. For the lucky, savvy few, prostitution could be the ladder to success. For many women, it could be both: even those who acheived fame and status could find themselves cast back into obscurity in an instant after an illness or an accident or just plain aging. It could be a side job, or a career trajectory. The Belle Époque was an age of uncertainty for women, and there was no more uncertain or unpredictable life than one of prostitution.

But the oldest profession was no longer the only profession available to women. Other women were taking advantage of that uncertainty of the hour to push for new opportunities and new careers, ones which had been traditionally off-limits to their entire gender, like Sarah Bernardt, the daughter of a courtesan who became the most famous actress in the world. When the soldiers of World War I looked back on the Belle Époque, the women they remembered were the muses and models of art and literature – not the artists themselves. Yet the time was approaching, when women could move back and forth beyond the canvas. While Degas was sitting backstage at the ballet with his sketchbook, and Manet was painting his masterpiece Olympia, depicting a prostitute reclining on a bed looking unapologetic, there was another artist, friends with both men, developing an entirely different body of work. Berthe Morisot was a muse and a model to the Impressionists, but she was something else as well: a peer. Next week, we’ll explore what happens when women get the chance to sit on the other side of the canvas.

Thanks for listening to The Land of Desire. This week was crazy – we made it to the front page of the iTunes store, and there are about 20 times more listeners this week than there were last week! I’m really honored that you all are willing to set aside your time to listen to me, so I won’t ramble on and take up any more of it, but I wanted to express my thanks and appreciation to each and every one of you. My name’s Diana, and this is a one-woman show: I write, research and produce every episode. If you’ve never checked out the website, at www.thelandofdesire.com, you might not know that I post lots of extra content there – this week, I’ve added portraits of Valtresse de la Bigne (don’t worry, they’re safe for work) along with a bunch of links to other stories about brothels of the Golden Age. Those links…might not be safe for work. Join me again in two weeks for a new episode and in the meantime, you can subscribe to this show on iTunes, Stitcher, and the Google Play store. That’s all for the next two weeks, so until then…au revoir!

 

Further Reading:

“Paris for Perverts: The Erotic Archaeology of the Belle Époque” (Tony Perrottet, Slate, 2011): All kinds of interesting brothel history, including excerpts from a contemporary brothel guidebook.

“Inside the Paris Brothels of the Belle Époque” (Messy Nessy Chic): A great exploration of the maisons closes – including one that’s now been transformed into a themed hotel!

“Drink and Prostitution: The Belle Époque Hooters” (Victorian Paris): Valtesse de la Bigne worked at one of these brasseries des femmes before launching her meteoric career.

“Flowers of the Gutter: Ballet Companies As Brothels from Paris to Russia” (Cathy Marie Buchanon, The Weeklings): The author of a novelization of Marie de Gouthem’s life discusses parallels between 19th century Paris ballet schools and those of modern-day Russia.

The Mistress of Paris: The 19th Century Courtesan Who Built An Empire on a Secret (Catherine Hewitt, 2015): The first English language biography of this remarkable woman!

“The Belle Époque, Heyday of Paris Brothels” (Une Jour de Plus á Paris)

“‘Splendor and Misery: Images of Prostitution,’ Captures a Profession in Paris Through Artists’ Eyes” (Elaine Sciolino, New York Times, 2015): Wish I’d had a chance to view this show – if only to see that infamous chair of Edward VII! Holy moly.

Also, the movie La Vie En Rose, a terrific biopic of the great Edith Piaf, spends a significant portion of time depicting the brothel in which baby Edith was raised. If you need a visual representation of the unglamorous life of a lower-class French prostitute, here you go. Oof.

Sources:

“Degas And The Dancers” (John Richardson, Vanity Fair, 2002)

Dawn of the Belle Époque (Mary McAuliffe, 2011)

“Degas And His Dancers” (Paul Trachtman, Smithsonian Magazine, 2003)

“Valtesse de la Bigne, coucher pour arriver” (Claire Castillon, Paris Match, 2014)