READING THE POETRY OF NORA MAY FRENCH on PROJECT GUTENBERG

 Here's the link! PROJECT GUTENBERG : POETRY OF NORA MAY FRENCH

FROM forest paths we turned us, nymphs, new-made,

And, lifting eyes abashed with great desire

Before high Jove, the gift of souls we prayed.

Whereat he said: “O perfect as new leaves

New glossed and veined with blood of perfect days

And stirred to murmured speech in fragrant eves,

“Still ask ye souls? Behold, I give instead

Into each breast a bird with fettered wings,

A bird fast holden with a silken thread: ........

( read the whole poem at the link!)

MARIE DUPLESSIS : AGENOR DE GUICHE MAKES AN APPEARANCE IN THE TEENAGER'S LIFE AND SHE CHANGES HER NAME FROM ALPHONSINE PLESSIS

Grand Horizontals by Virginia Rounding is a primary reference for this month's post.

Excerpt page 20 : "The women of the uppermost ranks, the most desirable demi-mondaines, were also often referred to by the epithets grands or hautes - grandes cocottes, for instance, rather than simple cocottes. The pseudonymous writer "Zed" refers in his Le Demi-monde sous le Second Empire of 1892 to grandes abandonnees (The great abandoned ones) while Frederic Loliee in his Les Femmes du Second Empire of 1907 uses the term grandes horizontales (literally, great horizontals, or women flat on their backs). Collective expressions for the great demi-mondaines included la jaute glanterie (literally high gallantry, chivalry, or intrigue, and colloquially the top rank of kept women) and la Haute Bicherie..."

What I found interesting is that Agenor De Guiche made an appearance in the lives of many courtesans and seems in Virginia Rounding's book to be credited with being the man who turned Alphonsine Plessis into a grandes horizontales. Although De Guiche's family was aristocratic, they had lost their wealth during the French Revolution and so he was not an especially rich young man. When he met Alphonsine he was 21 years old and she was 16. He had finished a couple years of higher education and wanted to bring her up to his intellectual level, though he was not an especially bright student himself. This young man paid for Alphonsine to have lessons in dancing and piano and improved her reading and writing; she became an avid reader who eventually developed an impressive collection of 200 or so books and held literary and intellectual salons. His interest in her seems to have been sincere. The young man spent about 10,000 francs on her in three months but then, in 1840, went to England and took a break from their relationship. By the time he returned, he was not the only man interested in the budding courtesan. 

According to author Virginia Rounding many a mother feared her son would spend his fortune away and acquire venereal diseases by having sex with prostitutes and courtesans.

Excerpt page 36 : She was not unusual, among the grisettes and courtesans of Louis Philippe's reign, in deciding to change her name; it was also a very common practice among the ranks of ordinary prostitutes.  The choice of a new name could serve both to add a touch of glamour and to depersonalize the prostitute, so that she could feel she was merely performing a role, disconnected from her real self.  There was also often a desire to disconnect from her previous life and from her family, either out of shame or from a desire to escape and not be easily traced...

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MARIE DUPLESSIS : GRAND HORIZONTALES : PARISIAN COURTESANS OF THE NAPOLEAN III ERA

Virginia Rounding's book Grande Horizontales begins with the assumption that Courtesans were prostitutes of the highest quality and because of this, the most expensive. So, her book begins with quite an interesting expose on prostitution in 19th century Paris. Here at Mistress Manifesto - BlogSpot, we yearn to define what being a Mistress means, and I acknowledge that the assumption of prostitution is there along with the idea that a Mistress is Kept for sex - only or primarily for sex. After many years of blogging I still find the question to be one that has many answers, but I think mistresses are in relationships that are more interesting than "just sex." That said, a prostitute can become a mistress and visa versa but exactly at what point does a woman become a Courtesan, since some of these women did "rise up" out of prostitution? Maria Duplessis's story has an answer to when.

Grande Horizontales focuses on four Courtesans, and this month I will focus on Marie Duplessis who died at the young age of twenty-three of tuberculosis. One of her lovers, Alexandre Dumas, based his main character in the novel La Dame Aux Camelias, which was published in 1848. Camelias were Marie's favorite flowers. She was married in 1846 to Count Edouard de Perregauz, until her death.

MARIE DUPLESSIS

"The Virtuous Courtesan"

"La Dame aux Camélias"

Alphonsine Plessis

Countess Edouard de Perregaux (She kept her name Marie Duplessis though.)

1824 - 1847

Her father was the illegitimate son of a priest and a prostitute who was abusive to his wife, Alphonsine's mother. The poor woman took off to Paris hoping to support herself and, eventually, her daughters but she died when Alphonsine was only six. Abandoned into the care of relatives, rumor was that the girl was sexually abused from the age of eleven and a half.  Accused of being a seductress, she was sent back to the father who didn't want her. He left her and her sister to become apprentice laundresses. At thirteen and fourteen years old she was a blanchisseuse. This was the fate of many girls in those days.

Excerpt Page 32 : "Such an apprenticeship involved long hours of hard and repetitive physical labour... First piles of dirty linen would be sorted and washed, the actual washing sometimes done in a communal washroom by a washerwoman, a lower level of work than the blanchisseuse.  Much of the work of the blanchisseuse consisted of ironing, which would be done at a large table covered with a heavy blanket, itself covered with calico.  Several irons were heated on the large cast-iron stove, and it would be the job of the apprentice to keep this stove filled - always being careful not to overfill it - with coke... The blanchissuese herself and her older employees would be busy ironing intricate objects such as caps, shirt-fronts, petticoats, and embroidered drawers, while the apprentice would be put to work on the plain items, the stockings and the handkerchiefs..."

What happened next would shock today. Her father then gave her over to a man who was sixty to seventy years old and might have actually sold her to him. When her employer realized the situation, she was fired. To escape this man Alphonsine took a job as a hotel maid. Her father than gave her over to another man. Marie would not talk about it, but there is a strong possibility that her father than took her for himself, committing rape and incest on his own daughter. In 1839 The father and daughter suddenly upped and went to Paris.

As I read these passages I do wonder if Alphonsine's father intended for her to become a prostitute as his mother had been. As author Rounding describes it, French Parisian culture had an understanding of prostitution, and many prostitutes' were legally registered. In Paris the father again left her with relatives and, now only fifteen, she was placed as an apprentice with a dressmaker. She worked long hours - 7 am to 8 pm six days a week. She attached lace and embroidery to decorate dresses there. A dressmaker did not want apprentices who became prostitutes but it was not unusual for them, due to the low, unlivable pay to become grisettes - a woman who took on a paying lover.

Alphonsine, despite her hard work, may have been going hungry. 

Then one day she and two friends accepted the offer of a day away by the owner of a restaurant who probably knew they were hungry.

Excerpt Page 35: "Quite who seduced whom, who exploited whom, is debatable: Alphonsine, with her precocious sexual experience, was an easy prey for a man with a certain amount of sophistication on the look-out for a young and pretty mistress, while she was quick to realize that, if she played her cards right, Nollet was in a position to offer her a way out of a life of drudgery and relative poverty. Events progressed rapidly. Within a month Monsieur Nollet had installed Alphonsine in a small apartment in the rue de l'Arcade and given her three thousand francs for her initial needs."

Poverty, hard physical labor, and sexual abuse would give Alphonsine motivation to improve her life, quite obviously. Her relatives in Paris, realizing also what she had done, outcasted her. She was alone in the world. Nollet was her first known patron and she soon overspent for his means and took other lovers as well. It was as if she gave in to her fate, or realized there was only one way to survive.

Alphonsine Plessis would fashion herself Marie Duplessis and rise out of poverty and obscurity by becoming an honored Courtesan. To do that she needed the patronage of a man and one known to other Courtesans came into her life. The next seven years or so of her short life would be dramatic and, perhaps because she had to know she was dying, gravely ill, she earnestly sought entertainments.

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Notes: The image on the book is not that of Maria Duplessis.

Here at Mistress Manifesto I've featured a great many Courtesans and Paris seems to have been the epicenter of Courtesan culture. You can click on the tag below to bring up posts such as Paris, or Courtesan.

NATALIE CLIFFORD BARNEY - AN INTERVIEW OF HER AS AN OLD WOMAN

It's 1966 and she is 90 something.  She says loyalty is the most important virtue.  Friends have given her up but she never gives up her friends.

NATALIE CLIFFORD BARNEY THE HEIRESS WITH A FASHIONABLE SALON

When Colette, who Natalie had a relationship with, published the book Claudine s'en va, Natalie's reputation as a lesbian was affirmed. In the book she wrote, Colette depicted Natalie, and in what seems to have been a literary tradition, though disguising her under another character name, and calling the work fiction, readers guessed right. This was the third time that she had appeared as a character in a book and this was not Liane de Pougy's writing but that of a woman of literary strength who well captured Natalie's personality and mannerisms. 

Natalie's mother lived in Washington D.C. and her father lived in Europe. Natalie was still depending on her father's generous hand-outs, when he died in Monte Carlo in 1903.  She had him cremated and traveled to America with his ashes. As it turned out he had split his fortune (which would be about $63 million today) into three parts, one for his wife, Alice, one for Natalie's sister, and one for Natalie, and all in trust, which would prevent any one of them from spending foolishly. Natalie would never have to worry about his rages, his attempts to silence her, or him buying up copies of books so that no one could read them. 

I find it interesting that her father made his will this way, because he could have punished Natalie since he was so conservative and upset about her lesbianism.

Natalie had been living with her lover, beautiful Eva Palmer, for some time when she became an heiress. The women had met at a time when Renee Vivian was involved with an aristocratic and married woman, perhaps the wealthiest woman in Europe, who had already done her duty by providing two children in the marriage. Though not entirely disconnected from Renee, Eva and Natalie had lived in an apartment together, and eventually the two of them bought small houses near each other in Neuilly, near Paris.

Natalie's urge to meet new and fascinating people meant turning her little house into a Salon where the artists, musicians, and other creatives and their admirers could turn up and read their poetry, and otherwise test and show off their skills. She was a wonderful hostess who sometime planned special events to entertain, and Eva participated as an actress in the plays that Natalie scripted for it was her desire to act professionally. ***.

EXCERPT page 154 "The hostess stood serenely in the midst of the crowd. Dressed completely in white, her long hair glinting in the sunlight, she held herself with the straight back and self-assured regality that would still be remarked upon in the tenth decade. She made a point of talking to everyone at least once, focused upon each her ice blue eyes, variously described as kind or cruel, depending on how one felt about her.  She spoke in a soft murmur, never raising her voice and her infectious, melodic, laughter rang out often.

Natalie had other, passionate affairs, beginning immediately.

Perhaps more so than her affairs or her writing, it is her Salons that she is noted for.

*** Isadora Duncan and her brother Raymond came to these events and participated in them.  The names of dozens of creative people and liberals.  February 2016 was devoted to Isadora Duncan, our Mistress of the Month, for her relationship with Paris Singer.

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The primary reference for this book report post is Wild Heart by Suzanne Rodriguez.  My notes were taken especially from pages pages 150, 152, 154.