I discovered this book earlier this year during one of my haphazard click-throughs on the New York Times website, and was very intrigued that it has survived for over 100 years (who purchased the book? Who preserved it?). Alison Leigh Cowan of the NYT blog, City Room describes it:

Only this palm-sized book, published in 1870 and long hidden away at the New-York Historical Society, did not confine its anonymous critique to the quality of wines or the ambience of the 150 establishments listed between its covers. Rather, it defined its role as delivering “insight into the character and doings of people whose deeds are carefully screened from public view.”

…Readers of the book, “The Gentleman’s Directory,” learned that “an hour cannot be spent more pleasantly” than at Harry Hill’s place on 25 East Houston Street. And they learned that Ada Blashfield of 55 West Houston Street had “8 to 10 boarders both blondes and brunettes,” playing host to “some of our first citizens.” The book also divulged that Mrs. Wright’s place at 61 Elizabeth Street had “everything that makes time pass agreeably,” and that Miss Jennie Creagh had spared “neither expense nor labor” at 17 Amity Street, a onetime Manhattan address, to conjure a “palace of beauty forever” out of French mirrors, rosewood furniture and fine bedding.

Belle Epoque France was relatively free of the hypocrisy of Edwardian England, and there, the courtesan flourished. The exploits, the rivalries, the fashion, the lovers, and the wealth of Les Grand Horizontals were given equal coverage as the doings of Tout Paris, and in fact, where the courtesans led, the smartest of the smart set usually followed. Such was the status courtesans commanded within Parisian society, their presence was expected in certain settings that were the prerogative of the upper class. They drove in the Bois every afternoon during the Paris Season, they attended the races at Auteuil and Longchamps, they watched the polo matches at Bagatelle, they participated in charity bazaars, made an appearance at the Opera on Mondays, and even supped at the same after-theater restaurants as the aristocracy. In short, the courtesan was as close to an aristocracy in their own milieu as possible.

The three most notorious courtesans of the age–known as the Les Grandes Trois–were Emilienne d’Alençon, Liane de Pougy, and Caroline Otero, called “La Belle Otero.” Like many other top courtesans and middling prostitutes, the three women earned the bulk of their infamy as actresses in such places as the Folies Bergère. Ironically, while this gave them a measure of respectability, it also reinforced the idea that all actresses were prostitutes!

Liane de Pougy was the trio’s undisputed star, and her cool beauty and faultless manners earned her the moniker “Notre courtisane nationale.” Like many courtesans, her origins were humble (father was an army officer), and an early and unwanted marriage lingered in her past. A divorcee by the age of nineteen, young Liane (then Anne-Marie Pourpe) supported herself by giving piano and English lessons until she realized life was more glamorous and lucrative as a prostitute. She snatched the public’s attention when she watched the Grand Prix with the Marquis MacMahon by her side, but she solidified her career when, on her first night at the Folies Bergère, she sent a note to the visiting Prince of Wales to watch her make her Paris debut. He did, and his approval made her an overnight sensation with the Jockey Club set. Jewels, carriages, homes, and art came pouring in, and the new era of the courtesan began.

Liane’s bitterest rival was Caroline Otero, a Spanish dancer who was known to “jump up on a table at Maxim’s and go into a writhing fandango so sensual that every man in the room felt she was making love to him.” La Belle Otero, the illegitimate child of a Greek nobleman and a Cadiz gypsy, began her career as a dancer at age twelve, and her career as a prostitute at fourteen. By fifteen, she juggled three Andalusian grandees and an Italian husband who was, in Caroline’s words, “as handsome as Bizet’s Toreador.” However, she soon abandoned this handsome husband and began performing in Marseilles caf-concs before making her way to Monte Carlo. She won a small fortune at the tables and quickly set herself up in style in Paris. La Belle Otero also made her way to the Folies Bergère in the 1890s, where she blazed a sensuous path to stardom.

Emilienne d’Alençon’s career was much quieter, but also much more lucrative, being the object of obsession for King Leopold II of the Belgians and Jacques d’Uzès, son of the Duchesse d’Uzès, heiress to the Veuve Clicquot fortune. So besotted was the King, he invited her to accompany him on his royal visits and introduced her to Edward VII as the Countess Songeon. So besotted was young Jacques, he gave her the Uzès family jewels. The latter liaison ended when the Duchesse packed her son off to the Congo, where he died in 1893. Emilienne, born Émilie André, began her career at fifteen when she ran away from home with a gypsy violinist. She managed to enter the Paris Conservatory with aspirations to be an actress, but left after a year, later appearing at the Circus d’Ete in an act with trained rabbits. This act earned her a place at the Folies Bergère, where her rabbits were tinted bright pink and wore paper ruffs. She of course became more than a mere rabbit tamer, embarking upon her career with the aforementioned gentlemen. Incidentally, she was also the lover of Etienne Balsan when the dashing sportsman met a young Gabrielle Chanel in the mid-1900s.

The most important element of a courtesan’s reputation was her jewelry, and they owned a lot of it. During the duration of their time at the top, a courtesan could expect to collect millions, if not tens of millions of francs, worth of diamonds, pearls, sapphires, gold, rubies, and emeralds. They were mounted in the typical settings of the day–dog collars, stomachers, tiaras, bracelets, necklaces, parures, earrings, etc–but obviously much more ostentatious than that worn by a duchess or a princess. The most startling display of wealth was a showdown in Maxim’s between Liane de Pougy and Caroline Otero. This restaurant was a courtesan’s domain, where no respectable woman was allowed or would even admit to acknowledging its existence, and the right entrance signaled one’s place in the hierarchy. One night, La Belle Otero entered Maxim’s  in an evening gown with a plunging neckline and her entire collection of jewels. They blazed at her neck and ears, in her hair, on her bosom, her arm, hands and waist, and one or two sparkled on her ankles. The crowd was stunned, but they were even more stunned with Liane–tipped off by a friend–entered a few minutes later in simple white evening gown. In her wake was her lady’s maid who carried a velvet cushion weighted with jewels. She won that round.

Despite the glamor and mystique that surrounded the courtesan, her life was not easy. Many aspired to the rank, but ended up in bitter poverty, and even those who reached the pinnacle of this career could find themselves cast off at the whim of their lover, or worse, bankrupt by a spendthrift protector. Nevertheless, this class of women were able to live a public life of luxury and notoriety for however long they captured the public’s attention, and for many women, this was preferable to a gray, dull life of toil and obscurity.

Further Reading:

Grandes Horizontales: The Lives and Legends of Four Nineteenth-Century Courtesans by Virginia Rounding

The Book of the Courtesans: A Catalogue of Their Virtues by Susan Griffin

Elegant wits and grand horizontals: a sparkling panorama of “la belle epoque,” its gilded society, irrepressible wits and splendid courtesans by Cornelia Otis Skinner

Marguerite Steinheil

When Madame Marguerite Steinheil paid an illicit call on President Félix Faure at the Palais de l’Élysée, no one could have predicted a scandal–and a farce–beyond imagination. Had Mme. Steinheil been your average concerned French citizen, the afternoon appointment with the portly statesman would have aroused little attention save a mention of the woman’s attractiveness. But it was not to be, for within moments of Madame Steinheil’s entrance into President Faure’s office, the bell was rung for his servants, who quickly gathered around the dead body of their master and ruler while the fatale Madame Steinheil adjusted her clothing.

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The sexual appetites of King Edward VII are well known: from the scandal of Nellie Cliffden, which Victoria blamed for her beloved Albert’s death, to the perfumed bosoms of aristocratic French ladies and courtesans, to Sarah Bernhardt and Lillie Langtry, to his long-time mistresses, Daisy Warwick and Alice Keppel, Bertie was very much a ladies’ man. His reputation and exploits not only opened the doors for the sophisticated spouse-swapping of the Marlborough House Set, but were so notorious, women openly propositioned him when he traveled to Europe to visit heads-of-state and to take the waters at Homburg or Marienbad. However renowned was his appetite or his mistresses, His Royal Highness preferred to take his pleasures in the exclusive Parisian brothels, particularly La Chabanais, the most exclusive of them all.

La Chabanais was founded in 1878 by the Irish Madame Kelly, and operated near the Louvre at 12 rue Chabanais. Madame Kelly was shrewd, aligning her brothel with the Jockey-Club de Paris and selling shares of the incredibly profitable business to wealthy, but anonymous investors. The interior was lavish, each bedroom styled in its own theme–Hindu, Pompeii, Japanese, Moorish, Louis XVI–at a cost rumored to be 1.7 million francs. Bertie was a frequent visitor during the 1880s and 1890s and was allotted his own chamber, decorated with his coat of arms. The most interesting features of the bed room were the copper tub decorated with a half-swan-half-woman, in which Bertie liked to bathe with a prostitute or two in champagne, and a chair, a siège d’amour (love seat) actually, in which the overweight Prince of Wales could do…well…whatever he wished with the cocotte of his choice.

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In the summer of 1885, Karl Pearson founded The Men and Women’s Club with the aim to discuss “all matters…connected with the mutual position and relation of men and women.” Pearson drew his members from middle-class liberals, socialists, and feminists, and over the lifespan of the club (1885-1889), discussions ranged from sexual relations in Periclean Athens to the position of Buddhist nuns, to sexuality and its relation to marriage, prostitution, and friendship. In essence, The Men and Women’s Club existed to challenge the long-held norms for male and female interaction as well as notions of “proper” sexuality. In late Victorian England, where sexuality was seen by many as “base” and “animal” and ignorance of women’s bodies and all things concerning sex was widespread, discussion of such issues was indeed radical.

In 1885 Karl Pearson was twenty-eight, and an ardent eugenicist who believed that women were the key to national progress. In the club’s inaugural paper, “The Woman’s Question,” he reflected on what changes would occur should women gain access to education, professions and political representation. His treatise was ironically reflected in the make-up of the club, for many of the women felt themselves to be intellectually inferior to the men, who were of Pearson’s background: “radical liberal or socialist in their politics, and employed as lawyers, doctors, or university lecturers. They shared similar public school and Oxbridge backgrounds and were further linked through membership of the same West End men’s clubs: the Saville, the National Liberal Club, the Athenaeum.” Although a number of the female members were economically independent as teachers, writers or journalists, only one had been to university, and all but two were single.

The club’s constitution declared that it would meet monthly, consist of no more than twenty members, and be composed of equal numbers of men and women. They met in each others’ homes, although generally at the house of a male member, with half of the club’s thirty-six meetings taking place at the house of club’s President, Robert Parker, a barrister living in Brunswick Gardens, Kensington, the heart of respectable London. Once at the meetings, the men and women found it difficult to reconcile their gender privileges and marginalization, particularly on the subjects of the role of religion, emotion, and a woman’s individual rights and social obligations.

The club’s most famous female member was Olive Schreiner, a missionary’s daughter whose fictionalized account of her life in South Africa, The Story of an African Farm, made her a celebrity overnight. Schreiner was vocal in her challenge of commonly-held conceptions of female sexuality. Her belief that women experienced sexual pleasure intrigued the male members and horrified the female members. Pearson did propose that sex, even among animals, was never solely for procreation, but was also a “physical pleasure like climbing a mountain, but his support of uninhibited female sexuality fell short: like most “New Men,” who criticized and heralded the end of the patriarchal era but looked with fear towards the new feminist order, and was terrified and disoriented by any signs of female sexual agency in the flesh. Another bone of contention between the men and women was the former’s avoidance of taking responsibility for male sexuality vs the women’s attempt to encourage accountability. Not surprisingly, club members were not sexually adventurous and showed little enthusiasm for free-love doctrines.

The Men and Women’s Club disbanded in 1889, mainly due to the dissatisfaction of the men in the women members. In the eyes of Pearson and his peers, the women proved incapable of the level of scientific work the men demanded, they were serious but did not go very deep, and they were frustrating adversaries. By the end of the club’s existence, club meetings became increasingly deadlocked and stalemated, and neither side found satisfaction in the tone and objective of discussions. While most of the group drifted apart, crossing paths due only to their common social and political circles, Pearson went on to become the premiere voice on the “Woman Question” during the 1890s. His writings were read in Britain and America, and feminists on both sides of the Atlantic viewed him with much respect, using much of his rhetoric to push for legislative reform for women. Despite the short-lived club, its very existence was radical and startling, and very much a product of the late nineteenth century, a time when long-held assumptions and social norms were being challenged by men and women of all walks of life. The topic of female sexuality and gender roles remain today, but for this time, it was extraordinary that a small group of men and women could come together for four years to shatter norms.

Further Reading:
Science, feminism and romance: The Men and Women’s Club 1885-1889 by Judith R. Walkowitz
The real facts of life: feminism and the politics of sexuality, c1850-1940 by Margaret Jackson
City of dreadful delight: narratives of sexual danger in late-Victorian London by Judith R. Walkowitz
Banishing the beast: feminism, sex and morality by Lucy Bland
The facts of life: the creation of sexual knowledge in Britain, 1650-1950 by Roy Porter & Lesley A. Hall
Scandalous Lovers by Robin Schone