The Book of the Courtesans by Susan Griffin Page B

would come to regret bitterly the
decision she made, the logic of association is clear. Since she had already
been saved twice by kind prostitutes, it makes perfect sense that at the age of
sixteen she would have become a prostitute herself.
    In jail, Denise had given her the address of one of a handful of the very
fashionable brothels that catered to a wealthier clientele. Madame welcomed her
with ample sustenance and the finery Céleste would need to ply her new
trade—clothes, perfume, jewelry. It was only later that Céleste
began to understand the consequences of the agreement she had made. All that
she was given, including her room and board, was to come from her earnings. She
would not be able to leave until she had paid what she owed. As she sank deeper
and deeper into debt, she realized she would never be free. She had simply
fallen into another trap.
    “To have to laugh when you want to weep,” she would write later;
“to be dependent and humiliated.” In the brothel, nothing belonged
to her, not even her own body. When even the beating of your heart, the breath
you take, is not simply under surveillance but summoned and marshaled,
continuously made to march according to someone else’s rhythms, you will
lose touch with the pace of your own soul. The spirit that sustains you will
begin to die.
    Perhaps her despair made her more susceptible to illness or perhaps it was
simply contagion, but soon Céleste fell very ill. Yet she was to be
rescued once again, this time by a client who, alarmed to see her so sick, paid
off the debt she owed to Madame and took her to his own apartment. But the
story of this escape does not end here, for a doctor was soon summoned, who
diagnosed smallpox. Though he said she could not be moved, as soon as she was
left alone, she dressed and descended to the street, where she called a cab to
take her to the Hôpital Saint-Louis.
    Thinking of the force of will it must have taken to drag her weakened and
fevered body into the streets brings to mind the way she danced the polka. In
the structure of the music, within each four beats, every third beat will be
emphasized. It is not hard to imagine her moving to this pattern, landing hard
on the third beat, and afterward rising higher with great emphasis, as if she
were taking the great galloping force of the music into her body and making it,
in every instant, her own.
    But the will Céleste exhibited was not simply the will to survive. She was
proud. And that this quality was reflected in her dance can easily be
deciphered from the rest of her story. As she tells us, it was in the hospital
while she was recovering that she fell in love with a medical student called
Adolphe. Yet though he appeared to be in love with her, she soon discovered she
was naïve to trust him. He invited her to attend a ball with him at
Versailles, but when they arrived she found he had another mistress with him, a
woman well known as a
lorette
. In the sexual economy of nineteenth-
century France, the
lorette
existed somewhere between a prostitute and
a courtesan. She was kept, but only modestly so. And though she could dress
well enough to attend some public balls, she was generally neither educated,
mannered, nor celebrated enough to mingle with high society as courtesans did.
    Chances are Adolphe would have set Céleste up as a
lorette
were
not the mistress he already had too jealous. Seeing him enter the ball with
Céleste, Louisa Aumont ridiculed her—the unsuitability of her dress,
her manners so clearly lower class. In a loud voice, in front of Céleste,
she harangued Adolphe on his bad taste for having brought this embarrassing
young woman with him. Céleste walked back from Versailles alone, a journey
that took her all night. The incident was etched in her memory. After she
became famous as Mogador, and the wayward Adolphe began to pursue her again, it
is understandable that she would be quick to score her