Memoirs of a Courtesan in Nineteenth-Century Paris Read Free Page B

conquests, anticipating a night of pleasure.
    It was at Mabille that Céleste acquired her famous name of Mogador. Mogador, a city in Morocco today called Essaouira, was the site of a notable French victory. The event so captured the imagination of the French that numerous mementos were sold with the name Mogador on them. So when Céleste’s dancing partner had to fend off other suitors to dance with the beautiful young woman, he remarked that it would be easier to defend Mogador than his partner. And thus, Céleste Vénard was christened Céleste Mogador, queen of the Bal Mabille. There was, however, another queen, just as admired, la Reine Pomaré, so named because the wild air about her reminded the dancers of the new Queen Pomaré of the French possession Tahiti. La Reine Pomaré was the illfated Lise Sergent, whose short and gaudy life epitomized the period: at one time she had lived with the poet Baudelaire; she made it a habit to shock the bourgeois establishment, sometimes dressing like a man; and she wore thick, exaggerated makeup. Now Mabille had two reign-ing monarchs, each with her own supporters organized in clans like political parties; arguments and debates would ensue. Poets vied with each other to compose poems extolling the glories of the queens. Paris was having fun.
    The author of the memoirs is silent on her means of support in those days, but we can assume she found young suitors only too delighted to provide her with a livelihood in return for her favors. She is not so silent, although subtly discreet, on the more well-to-do or famous suitors who would enter her life later. Once she acquired notoriety at the Bal Ma-xvi

    Translator’s Introduction
    bille, and later as a fearless equestrienne at the circus, her name was on everyone’s lips; she was recognized in public and was therefore the ideal adornment for a young, or not so young, dandy.
    There were many men in Céleste’s life, and the majority of them were nothing more to her than a means to an end. Men like the rich Italian Duke of Ossuma or the Dutch baron would set her up in an apartment and furnish it for her; they would give her carriages and sometimes money. If on a whim she wanted a piano, she would get one and lessons to go with it. Some men were sincere in their professed love for her. A famous Italian tenor, although he could barely speak French, fell in love with Céleste and finally stopped seeing her only after she forced him to hide in a cubicle by her bed one day when the duke paid her an impromptu visit. The tenor, sickened by the vaudevillian scene he had been forced to play, could not forgive Mogador’s callousness. Others were fatuous dolts like Léon, a shy admirer of her triumphant deeds as a circus rider, who fought a duel over her, but who, to her great embarrassment, ignominiously abandoned her in the street the moment he saw his mother and his grandfather walking toward them. In their eyes, to be seen walking with Céleste Mogador was scandalous.
    Céleste was easily impressed by the literary and artistic set. She yearned for the company of intelligent and witty people, and through her association with Lionel, she finally met such people. She became friends with Alexandre Dumas père and, much later, with his reticent son. She caught the eye and captured the heart of Thomas Couture, the painter, who used her as a model for his important painting Roman Orgy, which now hangs in the Musée d’Orsay, and who did a plaster cast of her hand, today on display at the Musée Carnavalet in Paris. She had come a long way from the days at the brothel, when she was the plaything of the poet Alfred de Musset. She met him not long after the breakup of his love affair with the writer George Sand. Musset, about to turn thirty, already famous, had replaced Sand with the famous actress Rachel. That relationship did not prevent him from spending most of his time in pursuit of other pleasures. He was frequently seen at various Parisian