The Book of the Courtesans (25 page)

SARAH BERNHARDT

Chapter Seven

Charm

Some of the wildest men make the best pets.
—MAE WEST
in
Belle of the Nineties
(
1934
)

T
HE SEVENTH VIRTUE
is enigmatic. Charm,
as the dictionary explains, is the ability to please, a definition which may
seem simple until, examining the question more closely, we realize almost
nothing has been said about its nature. Yet in a sense the mysterious
composition of charm is part of the appeal the ability has for us. The virtue
seems magical. In fact, as the dictionary also tells us, the word can be used
to denote an amulet, an object that possesses magical powers. And the word is
also used for certain songs that when recited cast a spell. Thus, when we say
that a man has been charmed, we may mean either that he has been pleased or
that he has been placed under a state of enchantment. Or, as is often the case,
both.

Faced with a charming woman, for instance, you will feel yourself ceding
control almost immediately. Suddenly, your body seems to have a mind of its own.
Perhaps you sense a spreading feeling of warmth and then an excitement, one
that enlivens both body and soul, almost as if you were being reborn. It hardly
surprises you therefore that soon you find yourself letting down your guard.
You may reveal to her what you never intended to reveal to anyone or laugh at
what you never found humorous before. Then you realize you have agreed to what,
in different company, you might have found to be rather wild propositions. And
all the time you feel looser somehow in your limbs, closer to liquid than
substance. Have you become putty in her hands? Even if this were true, the
pleasure is too delicious for you to worry about any such consideration. On the
contrary, you are more than happy to stay in her hands for as long as it is
conceivably possible and by any means necessary.

That despite every impediment to and prejudice against their sex so many women
have triumphed through charm has caused alarm among men for centuries. Perhaps
this is why the virtue has often been linked to danger and fatality. Ironically,
this idea was more dangerous to women than charm ever was to men. In a period
when women accused of witchcraft were being burned at the stake, the
association between witchcraft and the courtesan’s charm was more than
etymological. When, in the early seventeenth century, Thomas Coryat warned the
traveler to Venice, “thou must fortify thine eares against the attractive
enchantment of their plausible speeches,” he was not speaking
metaphorically. Just as the judges of the Inquisition frequently accused
witches of inspiring lust, courtesans were often accused of using witchcraft.
Though she was acquitted, even the respected Veronica Franco was tried as a
witch.

Nor should we be surprised that a battle would be fought at the nexus between
magic and sexuality. The lines of the conflict can be traced back to ancient
Greece, where the courtesan was often thought to possess sacred powers. Like
the witches who were to come later, the hetaerae practiced healing arts,
prescribing herbs or acting as midwives. It was even believed by some that,
through lovemaking, these women could initiate men into the mysteries of Venus.
Mysteries that are often the source of unpredictable if not tumultuous
transformations.

Revelation

. . . 
mystery is the visible, not the invisible.
—Oscar Wilde

History has commended Hyperides for understanding the limits of reason.
Though the arguments he made in defense of his client, the hetaera known as
Phyrne, were brilliant, he knew that even his best powers of persuasion could
not win the case. The failure is understandable. The dispute in question
centered less on logic than belief. Phyrne, who was not just a courtesan but
also a priestess of Aphrodite, stood accused of sacrilege. She had, it was said,
invented a god, an act of imagination absolutely forbidden to mortals.

To understand the atmosphere in which this trial was conducted, the
contemporary mind must reach back to a time when religion and government were
not separated, and hence worship was at the heart of civic life. Under these
circumstances, the investiture of a new god could alter the cohesive fabric of
society. Thus, the creation of a new deity would give considerable political
power to the creator.

Neither the defendant nor the lawyer could dispute the simple facts of the
charge; Phyrne had indeed created an original god. All that was left for her
defense would be to claim that her right to do so was legitimate. The argument
Hyperides made was that as a priestess, Phyrne had been channeling Aphrodite.
The goddess herself, he reasoned, was expressing her will through Phyrne. But
the argument by itself failed to impress the court.

It is easy to see why mere words would not work in this case. Ordinary
discourse grows pale when faced with religious belief. Faith, reverie, prayer,
vision, passion, and ecstasy are less the products of reason than of experience.
This is why religious teachings are so often rendered through metaphor: the
body of Christ eaten symbolically in the ritual of communion, the unleavened
bread spread with symbolic mortar during Passover, the fasts and feasts so
important to Islamic practice. To be kept alive, a religion must be felt with
both soul and body.

Having been raised in a religious culture, Hyperides knew that to win his case,
he had to present the court with a revelation. So it was that while Phyrne was
standing in the witness box, he asked her to remove her clothing. The strategy
worked. According to reports that have come down to us through the ages,
awestruck by what they saw, the jurors quickly declared that the presence of
Aphrodite was the only possible explanation for such beauty.

In the more secular perspective of contemporary consciousness, Hyperides’
strategy appears to have been aimed at carnal appetite rather than the soul. By
this standard, the court’s better judgment was simply undermined. But this
is to ignore the fact that what the jurors declared was correct. Even if we
view Aphrodite as an archetype or metaphor for erotic love, it is clear that
her formidable force was present at these proceedings. If the jurors’
vision was clouded, it was through another means altogether. Though what they
thought they were seeing was simply beauty, while they studied Phyrne’s
body, the jurors were being charmed.

To understand what occurred, it is necessary to state what is obvious, that
there are two fundamentally different, if not opposite, categories of nudity.
Images of the first kind of nude, in which the body is objectified, are so
widely distributed and popular that they often obscure the existence of the
second kind, in which the body is a subject, which is to say, aware.

Self-reflection is a desire felt by the body as well as the soul. As dancers,
healers, and saints all know, when you turn your attention toward even the
simplest physical process—breath, the small movements of the eyes, the
turning of a foot in midair—what might have seemed dull matter suddenly
awakens. Being a courtesan, of course, Phyrne had a highly refined awareness of
her body. That she was fully conversant with her self showed in the way she
walked across a room, the movement of her thighs, hips, belly, and shoulders
redolent with the body’s wisdom. Yet she did not have to move through space
for the effect to be felt. Even sitting still in the witness box, it was as if
all her flesh, not just skin, muscle, and bone but even the atoms themselves,
joined in a subtle harmonious motion. An alchemical dance so in tune with the
essence of life that to witness it was to fall into a trance.

This was an art with which she was familiar. As a priestess of Aphrodite, she
knew how to induce trance. She was famous, in fact, for using the sight of her
own body for this purpose. Once a year, she would immerse herself in the sea
from which Aphrodite was said to have sprung. The sight of Phyrne as she
emerged must have stunned those who worshipped at her temple. She was not
unclothed, but her wet clothing clung to her body so that even the subtlest
movement became visible.

Here, of course, the metaphor became reality. But we must remember that
metaphor is always real. When Sappho speaks of the purple robes of love,
imagining the lush color and the feel of the smooth fabric, those who listen to
her words are enjoying a pleasure that is as real as any other. That the
meaning is layered only makes the pleasure deeper. So it was when Phyrne arose
from the sea. Her beauty, the vitality of her flesh, the flow of the water,
would evoke all beauty, all life, all seas, including the waters of our cells
and the inner waters of dreams.

And there is the nature of symbolism to consider too. Metaphor itself as a
device tends to evoke connection, showing how one thing echoes and evokes
another, leading us toward a particularly sensual understanding: knowledge that
we are all part of one body. That this spiritual lesson is of its nature erotic
belongs to the wisdom of the goddess who is sometimes called Aphrodite the
courtesan. Among her many attributes was a golden chain, which she used both to
join lovers and to bind all life together. In this lustrous light,
Hyperides’ argument that Phyrne was expressing the will of Aphrodite when
she created a new god seems even more plausible, especially when we learn that
the new idol in question was the god of sharing.

The court agreed with Hyperides and acquitted Phyrne of all charges. And so the
story ends and we would end here, were we not concerned with charm. On this
account, one more observation must be added. It is only possible to grasp the
great powers of Phyrne’s virtue when we consider the conflict that
acquitting her must have stirred among the jurors. Even if Phyrne had been
obeying the will of Aphrodite, by this acquittal, the court had decreed that a
mortal had created an immortal. Yet, according to the philosophy which at the
time must have ordered all their thoughts, mortality was carefully set apart
from immortality, an opposite to and even a corruption of the glories of
infinity.

But perhaps through her image they were pulled by earlier philosophies, not in
private memory so much as inherited from ancient figures and rhymes, part of
Aphrodite’s own past, when she was known as Astarte or Ishtar, from a time
when it was said that eternity is made from mortality through the unending
cycles of life in which we all take part.

As if to prove that the court was right in the end, Phyrne herself has received
a kind of immortality. The most famous among the many sculptures done by her
lover Praxiteles was modeled after her body. Considered the finest sculptor of
antiquity, according to testimony, he was able to capture her extraordinary
vibrancy brilliantly. Though his
Aphrodite of Cnidus
has been lost,
its powers were apparently so great that the sculpture established what was to
be the classic form for nude sculptures of women, especially those of Venus,
over many centuries. When we think of the realm of Aphrodite today, it is still
Phyrne’s body that we see, tempting us toward her mysteries.

Bewitched at First Sight

King Louis was bewitched at first sight of that lovely smiling face,
so singularly pure and innocent, on which all her sordid experiences had left
not a trace.—Joan Haslip
, Madame du Barry, the Wages of
Beauty

That Madame du Barry had a charmed life is indisputable, though it is also
inarguable that in the beginning this outcome would have been nearly impossible
to predict. Jeanne du Barry, as she came to be known, had what the eighteenth
century called a low birth. Less elevated in station than Pompadour, her family
was neither wealthy nor part of the respectable bourgeoisie. There had been,
however, a faint brush with nobility. Before he met her grandmother, her
handsome grandfather, Fabien Bécu, was married to a countess. But because
he was a commoner, when this noblewoman married him, she lost her hereditary
privileges. Still, that he remained a commoner did not prevent him from
squandering all her money. Thus, after she died at an early age, he was forced
to return to his old profession as a cook. It was while he was serving as the
chef in a château that he met Jeanne’s grandmother, a lady’s maid.

The barest hint of a foreshadow can be seen in the fact that as is often
the case with those who live a more privileged life for a limited period,
Fabien had learned refined manners, and he passed these on to his daughter Anne,
Jeanne’s mother. She also inherited his beauty. She too would have been
taken into the employment of a noble house were it not for her rebellious
nature. Even if the cost was a less comfortable life, she preferred her
independence. In the beginning luck was against her. She was working as a
seamstress in Vaucouleurs, a town at the edge of the Lorraine, when she became
pregnant with Jeanne. Seduced and abandoned by a handsome monk called “
Brother Angel,” who because of the scandal was dismissed from his order
and dispatched to Paris, Jeanne and her mother were left to fend for themselves
in Vaucouleurs.