Social History: Anne Haverty reviews two admirable accounts of the lives of 19th century courtesans by Virginia Roudning and Katie Hickman.
The concept of the courtesan is more or less obsolete in modern times. However, you could say that the courtesan herself has merely gone underground, that equality of the sexes and our contemporary culture of sentiment simply do not allow her to operate with the openness and frankness she once did. A courtesan of yore would charmingly but plainly let a man know that he could not have her if he could not afford her. Her modern counterpart may be simply more circumspect and more hypocritical when it comes to acquiring the expensive lifestyle her heart desires.
In the hazy intersection of sex, sentiment and money, nothing is clear-cut. What is most striking in these two accounts of women who expertly balanced the potent mix is that much as moralists, such as Zola with his Nana, may seek to make them into stereotypes of depravity who inevitably came to a bad end, they were as different as they were similar.
One of the things they certainly share, however, is a humble background. Often courtesanship was a career that passed from mother to daughter, and a few courtesans were highborn girls who had erred and fallen. But those whose stories are told by Virginia Rounding and Katie Hickman, and who seem to have been the best known and the most celebrated in their day, were ordinary, generally respectable girls with good looks and often great intelligence, but who had an X factor that made them irresistible. What that factor was that brought them wealth, power, and often the hearts and minds of kings and emperors, is not easy to define, although Rounding and Hickman do pretty well in the attempt.
Perhaps, basically, they were consummate entertainers, and the kind of man who liked to be entertained and amused was also the kind of man who was ready to squander his fortune on his amusement.
Sunny, charming, light but never silly, they were no bimbos. Several, such as Cora Pearl and Harriet Wilson, wrote autobiographies of a quality that those of modern celebrities just don't match. An essential part of the job was to be a sparkling conversationalist. Apollonie Sabatier had a weekly salon attended by men like Gautier, Flaubert and Baudelaire as well as her rich "protector" - the man who paid her bills - André Mosselman. Elizabeth Armistead so captivated the Whig politician and intellect of the late 18th century, Charles Fox, that he persuaded her to retire and marry him.
The notion that a courtesan had to relinquish true love and domestic bliss is firmly scotched here. She was as liable to fall in love as anyone else, and, as with anyone, this sometimes resulted in a happy outcome and sometimes it didn't. Marie Duplessis - the Dame Aux Camellias - followed Liszt around Europe. Catherine Walters, known as Skittles, withdrew from the fray to have a love affair with the penniless poet, Wilfred Scawen Blunt, an affair that affected Blunt for life. In this case, Blunt was what was called an amant de coeur, an indulgence that a courtesan allowed herself, but generally they were hard-headed. Soon Skittles dropped Blunt, in the nicest possible way, for a richer protector - an amant en titre - although they always remained friends and correspondents.
In her 40s, La Paiva, a Russian who was the top courtesan in late-19th century Paris, found a soulmate and a husband in a rich Prussian a decade her junior - La Paiva would never settle for a poor amant de coeur. On her death, her husband had her obese, aged body embalmed in a giant glass jar and communed with it in secret, to the dismay of his second wife.
Only Cora Pearl could claim, proudly, that she had never had an amant de coeur and, perhaps significantly, she was one of the few who had the stereotypical courtesan's lonely death.
This hard-headedness, or ruthlessness, combined with charm, was undoubtedly part of the attraction. In the 18th- and 19th-century worlds a woman who moved outside the constraints and limitations of society to make her own autonomous and independent living - although that statement does admittedly beg many a question - was a glamorous, extravagant, and perilous figure of fascination and celebrity. She made herself a trophy. To be chosen by her was an honour, to be able to afford her a demonstration of your wealth. Crowds would gather to watch Skittles or Cora Pearl ride in the bois or the park in the latest perfectly fitting riding habit on the most beautiful thoroughbred, and lapped up gossip about her most recent conquest or the latest young man she had ruined. Wild extravagance was another characteristic common to them all.
Society made the courtesan a star but the position did come with disadvantages. She might be sleeping with the prince but she could not appear at court. She might rub shoulders with duchesses at the rooms of the best dressmaker but she would never be received in their houses or even introduced to them. Her world, apart from her faithful maid or her female friends, was exclusively male.
However, this state of affairs she did not seem to find all that painful. Virginia Rounding finds an interesting male counterpart in the Duc de Morny, who was a kept man but suffered none of the exclusion that his female equivalents did.
In Les Grandes Horizontales Rounding's focus is 19th-century France, while Katie Hickman's in Courtesans is the England of the 18th and 19th centuries. But reading both together, they give the impression of a seamless web. The courtesan is a creature that transcends national cultures. Hickman is more starry-eyed, more ideological on the personal liberation that the courtesan seems to her to represent, while Rounding takes a more sober view, reminding us that "amidst all the glamour . . . there is a tendency to forget that money is being exchanged for sex".
Neither deals quite satisfactorily with the drives or neuroses behind the obsessional extravagance or just sheer greed that was a characteristic of all courtesans, or the willingness of so many men to fund it. The enigma of the courtesan, her primary attraction, indeed perhaps her primary function, remains. But both Rounding and Hickman give admirable accounts of these women's lives and equally of the worlds in which they, contrary to the conventional view, flourished.
Anne Haverty's most recent novel is The Far Side Of A Kiss (Vintage)
Les Grandes Horizontales: The Lives and Legends of Four 19th-Century Courtesans. By Virginia Rounding, Bloomsbury, 337pp, £20
Courtesans. by Katie Hickman, Harper Collins, 363pp, £20