James lived for family, but even he could scarcely resist the Parisian phenomenon of the courtesan. In Splendeurs et misères des courtisanes – one of Balzac’s last novels before he died of overwork and coffee-poisoning – the Rothschildian baron de Nucingen pays to sleep with the adorable but fragile Esther. More than James, the emperor’s brother the duc de Morny became the arbiter of pleasure, finance and fashion. Napoleonic luxury was sybaritic and sultanic, but so was the venality in a city of grinding and miserable poverty, crowded with thousands of street prostitutes and middle-ranking grisettes. But the richer courtesans, the grandes horizontales, often ex-prostitutes or actresses who were paid for their favours by aristocrats, plutocrats and playboy cocodès, became celebrities – appearing on stage, their pictures, using the new medium of photography, sold as postcards, their antics recounted in newspapers. They were viciously exploited from childhood, their lives often ending tragically, yet they were also defiantly independent, mocking the restrictions of respectable women. It was a world with music, art and literature, but the horizontales were centre stage. Jacques Offenbach, son of a synagogue cantor from Cologne, was the empire’s trademark composer, with librettos by Ludovic Halévy. In 1855, when Napoleon opened his Exposition Universelle, visited by over five million people, Offenbach launched his first opéras bouffes, debuting Hortense Schneider, who became La Snéder, the personification of Parisian beauty and pleasure. The courtesans starred in his operas, particularly Orphée aux enfers, in which the ‘Galop infernal’ – the can-can – became the theme of its time. La Snéder started as one of Offenbach’s mistresses and became the paramour of Napoleon, Morny and a succession of princes. The brashest horizontale was British: the daughter of Irish musicians from Plymouth, Cora Pearl (real name Emily Crouch) appeared half naked as Cupid in Orphée.*
Novelists and artists were fascinated by the drama and tragedy of the girls’ lives. In 1863, at the Salon des Refusés, created by Napoleon specifically for innovative artists, Édouard Manet exhibited his painting Olympia of a bold, nude courtesan, modelled by Victorine Meurent, who was his lover and an artist, accompanied by her fully clothed black maid, based on a model named Laure. It shocked the bourgeois but helped launch a new genre that was criticized as too ‘impressionistic’: the name caught on.
The sensitive, talented doyenne of the courtesans, Valtesse de La Bigne, nicknamed Rayon d’Or, was friend and lover of Manet and Offenbach, patroness of painters and writers, actress and author of a novel Isola, but it was her magnificent gilded, canopied bed – still displayed in the Musée des Arts Décoratifs – for which she is best known. A young half-Italian critic, Émile Zola, at the age of twenty-eight launched a series of novels inspired by Balzac chronicling a single family in Napoleonic Paris, Les Rougon-Macquart – a seminal work of family history: ‘I want to explain how a family, a small group of regular people, behaves in society … Heredity has its own laws, just like gravity.’ After interviewing Valtesse and viewing her bed, he created the first novel about celebrity sex appeal, personified by the irresistibly destructive Nana, that ‘good-natured child’ who rises to wealth in her palatial bed, ‘a throne, an altar where Paris came to admire her sovereign nudity’ – a dazzling erotic meteor like the empire itself. Valtesse hated Nana, calling its heroine ‘a stupid vulgar whore’.*
In 1853, the delights of Paris changed the life of an impressionable visitor from south America, the heir to the dictator of Paraguay, who was entertained by Napoleon and fell in love with a courtesan who would become the most powerful woman in south America and the world’s biggest landowner.
ELIZA LYNCH AND QUEEN VICTORIA: TWO FEMALE POTENTATES
Francisco Solano López was the son of the ruler of the small, isolated, socially and racially egalitarian republic created by the Grand Lord, Dr Francia, who had ruled for twenty-six years until his death in 1840. After a short interlude, he was succeeded by his cousin Carlos Antonio López; ‘this great tidal wave of human flesh, a veritable mastodon’, based his hopes on his eldest son Francisco, whom he dispatched to Europe to buy arms for his outsized army. Francisco, twenty-eight years old, ordered British ships and French artillery, and while in Paris in 1854 ‘gave full rein to his naturally licentious propensities and plunged into the vices of that gay capital’ – until he met the nineteen-year-old Eliza Lynch, red-haired courtesan daughter of an Irish naval doctor.
