The Mistress of Paris: The 19th-Century Courtesan Who Built an Empire on a Secret by Catherine Hewitt (review)

In 1881, Valtesse de La Bigne, one of Paris's pre-eminent courtesans, attended a performance of the stage adaptation of Zola's Nana despite her profound objections: as the supposed inspiration for the eponymous character, the sophisticated Valtesse felt as though Zola had betrayed her — she sensed little kinship with his vulgar creation. However, like Anna Wintour at the 2006 premiere of The Devil Wears Prada, Valtesse — a fashion icon in her own right — attended the play in order to reassert control of her own image and claim superiority over her literary double. Zola's unmitigated failure that night proved to be her absolute triumph. These questions of identity and aesthetic production are at the heart of Catherine Hewitt's captivating new biography, a portrait of a fascinating woman who became one of the best-known grandes horizontales of her day. The daughter of an impoverished laundress turned prostitute, Louise Delabigne rechristened herself Valtesse (a portmanteau of 'Votre Altesse') de La Bigne in 1866 at the age of eighteen. In adopting a royal address and the aristocratic particule, Valtesse laid bare the social ambitions that belied her humble origins — the 'secret' of the book's title. While many of Valtesse's contemporaries chose similarly colourful monikers, Hewitt convincingly shows that Valtesse's name was as much a nom de plume as a nom de guerre: Valtesse was an author as well as a muse, and her life was her greatest work of fiction. A model for painters such as Manet, Detaille, and Gervex, Valtesse took up the brush for her own cheeky painting in an avant-garde gallery, and even commissioned portraits of fake aristocratic ancestors, thereby reverse-engineering a pedigree to justify her assumed title of Countess. Publishing under the pen name 'Ego', Valtesse also authored a highly circulated (and highly autobiographical) novel called Isola (Paris: Dentu, 1876). Hewitt's adept synthesis of diverse media — literature, correspondence, newspapers — shows how Valtesse was an expert manipulator of her public image. Of particular note is Hewitt's explanation of the intertwined industries of fashion and prostitution in nineteenth-century France: many of the women employed in the clothing industry became purveyors of both finery and flesh, and Valtesse's rise through the ranks from lingère to lionne is a testament to her ambition, intellect, and gift for self-reinvention. Although Hewitt deftly transforms primary materials into an engaging narrative, the reader may wonder if she occasionally overreaches in describing the mental or emotional states of her subjects. About whether Valtesse would accord Zola a sexual favour during his visit: 'There was no predicting how she would react, and Valtesse knew it. She relished the power that brought' (p. 148). On a stylistic note, Hewitt's repeated references to women as 'females' enacts a subtle dehumanization that is at odds with the book's attempt to explore the complicated humanity of its protagonist. All things considered, Hewitt's monograph is a valuable contribution to our understanding of the complex lives of the great nineteenth-century courtesans, and proves to be a textual encounter much like, according to the rapturous descriptions in Hewitt's book, an evening spent with Valtesse herself — both pleasurable and edifying.