Memoirs of a Courtesan in Nineteenth-Century Paris (review)

The Parisian prostitute in her many guises - grisette, lorette, courtisane, demi-mondaine - is a well-recognized fixture in nineteenth-century French literature. From the physiologies of the 1830s and '40s, to Hugo's Marion de Lorme, Balzac's Les Splendeurs et misères des courtisanes, Maupassant's La Dame aux camélias, Maupassant's La Maison Tellier, the Goncourts' La Fille Elisa and Zola's Nana, the prostitute took her place in the French cultural consciousness in a form almost entirely mediated through the imaginations of male writers and painters (Manet, Toulouse-Lautrec, Gervex, Degas). In her incarnations on the page and the stage, on canvas and in the popular press in caricature and illustration, she became a potent symbol for a multitude of contemporary (male) anxieties: the dangers of trans-gressing the hierarchies of gender and class; the threat of female sexuality; the power of the working woman; the mystifying forces of capital and capitalism; and the ambiguous role of the nineteenth-century artist himself shilling his work in the bourgeois marketplace, to name but a few.

Much important and interesting work has been done on the historical realities of sex workers in the nineteenth century - Alain Corbin's Filles de noce: Misère et prostitution (1978; translated as Women for Hire: Prostitution and Sexuality in France after 1850 in 1990) and Charles Bernheimer's Figures of Ill Repute: Representing Prostitution in Nineteenth-Century France (1989; 1997) - being just two of the most influential studies. But little focus has fallen on the first-hand experience of the prostitute herself. The ventriloquized voices of Esther, Marguerite, Rosanette, Nana, and their fictional sisters give us at best a mediated vision of this significant segment of Parisian society; at worst they reflect the misogynistic fantasies of a culture at odds with its own desires.

Céleste Mogador's Memoirs of a Courtesan in Nineteenth-Century Paris, first published as Adieux au Monde in 1854, presents a useful and entertaining corrective to this single-sided portrait of the nineteenth-century prostitute. Writing in a lively and literate first person, Mogador traces her own story from an unhappy childhood with an abusive step-father to her entry into a brothel, registration as a prostitute and rise from a dance hall celebrity to a well-known courtesan and finally a Countess. Mogador's Memoirs are a product of the age at a number of levels. Stylistically, the text wavers between a Realist fascination with social detail, physiognomy, clothing, law, money and violence and a high Romantic tone, filled with storms and passion, star-crossed lovers, reversals of fortune, duels, death-bed scenes and suicides. Moreover, the trajectory of Mogador's action-packed life (1824-1909) takes place against the background of some of the major events of the period. As a child laborer she is first-hand witness to the Lyon insurrection of 1831; she watches neighbors ignite the watchman's shed while her lover tears down the barricades during the February Revolution of 1848 and is shot at repeatedly as she crosses the city in search of her mother during the bloody June Days later that year. Born Céleste Venard, even her nom de guerre reflects contemporary politics, for she is nicknamed Mogador after a Moroccan city bombarded by the French fleet in 1844. During a festive evening at the Bal Mabille her dance partner proclaims "It would be easier for me to defend Mogador than my dancer . . . I name you Mogador."

As a cultural document, Memoirs of a Courtesan in Nineteenth-Century Paris paints a vivid portrait of popular entertainment in the July Monarchy and the Second Empire from the perspective of those who were active participants in the spectacle. Like many of her contemporaries, Camille established her reputation at the Bal Mabille, one of the...