Memoirs of a Courtesan in Nineteenth-Century Paris (3 page)

The true loves of her life were few. When she was sixteen she fell in love with Adolphe the doctor, until he broke her heart. She seems to have also truly cared for a young talented Jewish musician named Hermann Cohen. By then, however, she was too jaded to recognize his sincere passion for her. When she finally did, it was too late; he had renounced his religion, become a Roman Catholic, and joined a monastery.

The true passion of her life, however, was Lionel. She fell in love with him the night she met him and remained true to him, in her fashion, until she died. Her love for Lionel, like all passions, was complex. Certainly he was a very handsome man; his portrait at the Musée Carnavalet in Paris reveals a dark-eyed young man with an intelligent face and a majestic bearing. He was charming and kind but prone to arrogance and selfishness. She was of course impressed with his title and pedigree, but she had had other aristocratic lovers. She certainly was not loath to carry on an affair with the rich and gentle Englishman, Richard, all the while professing to love Lionel. The comte seemed to have been primarily attracted to her beauty, and his desire for her became an ob-session that seemed to have more to do with lust than love; he could not stay away from her, however much he tried, in spite of his good sense and class responsibilities. Eventually the two lovers matured emotionally, and their physical attraction turned into love. During his absence from Céleste as he panned for gold in Australia, Lionel’s heart grew fonder of the woman for whom he had lost everything: family, reputation, and fortune. Left behind in Paris, Céleste also matured and began to gain more self-respect as she struggled to defend herself against the de Chabrillan family, so that upon his return from Australia a few years after their first meeting and the drama of their stormy relationship, they were married and remained devoted to each other.

The de Chabrillans were of course opposed to such a marriage, so the wedding took place on  January  in London with French citizens residing in England as witnesses. It was a triple wedding, possibly so there would be no doubt as to the legality of this marriage. There was a ceremony before the registrar, a second at the Church of Saint-Paul, and a third at the French chancellery. Half a century later, the Comtesse de xviii

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Chabrillan would recall that Queen Victoria, curious about this celebrity in her city, wanted to see her. She is supposed to have remarked to a friend that she thought the French beauty was lovelier than the Empress Eugénie.

The marriage was fraught with adversity. Lionel, who had been able to obtain a post of French consul in Melbourne, Australia, sailed with his bride and her godchild, Solange, to find upon their arrival that his wife’s reputation had preceded them. The publication of her memoirs had made Céleste even more notorious. She had tried to stop their publication before her departure but had been unsuccessful. From Australia, she wrote to all her friends begging them to burn the books. Because the memoirs caused such a scandal, they were eventually seized and banned from further publication, but it was too late to put out the wildfire they had ignited. Yet Céleste’s desire to continue writing was not dampened. The two years she spent in Australia were not idle. In spite of, or because of, her social ostracism by the French and English community, she used her time wisely, including trying to learn English and writing another set of memoirs that would eventually be published in  under the title Un Deuil au bout du monde, suite des mémoires de Céleste Mogador (translated in  by Patricia Clancy and Jeanne Allen as The French Consul’s Wife: Memoirs of Céleste de Chabrillan in Gold-Rush Australia). And so it is in Australia that Mogador’s career as a writer began in earnest. The second memoirs not only describe her impressions of the wild frontier life in Australia and the few years after her return from the faraway continent, but also depict the love she and Lionel shared.

With her usual indomitable energy and vivid imagination, Céleste also began writing novels; her first one, the  Les Voleurs d’or (translated as The Gold Robbers by Lucy and Caroline Moorehead in ), a novel on the struggles of pioneers in the new world, met with much success back in France. In his review of the novel, Alexandre Dumas père stated that the book was not a chef-d’oeuvre but was certainly one of the most moving and interesting novels of the year. This was the beginning of thirty years of writing novels, plays, operettas, poems, and songs.

Becoming ill in the inhospitable climate of Australia, possibly also nostalgic for the city she loved and the social life she lacked, Céleste returned to Paris after two years in Melbourne. Lionel took a leave of absence and joined her a few months later, but regretfully had to go back to his post after a few months. During the long and arduous voy-xix

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age back, he became ill and died very soon after his arrival. He was forty years old. At a crossroads between Poinçonnet and the forest of Châteauroux, Céleste de Chabrillan had two large iron crosses erected with marble plaques on which is inscribed: ‘ To the memory of Comte Lionel de Chabrillan, born in Paris  December , deceased in Melbourne  December . Pray for him!’’

The widow survived her husband by half a century. During those years Mogador continued to struggle for financial security and social stability. Although her literary publications met with much success and several of her plays were hits, she still had to fight the de Chabrillan family, who wanted her to abandon the Chabrillan name. The family offered to pay her two thousand francs a year, guaranteed, if she renounced the name Chabrillan. They sent her such emissaries as Ferdinand de Lesseps and Sainte-Beuve. She threw them out. Lionel’s brother was sent next. He reproached her, not so much for having been Prince Napoleon’s lover, but for spending the night before going to London for her wedding at his house. In spite of these strong-arm tactics, she refused their offer and always made it a point to use her husband’s name, and to do so proudly.

With the money she had earned from the theatrical performance of a version of her first novel, she bought a lot in the fashionable Le Vésinet suburb of Paris and had an Australian style country villa built, which she called Châlet Lionel. The war of , however, brought many changes, not only in the widow’s life, but also for the country; the empire was coming to an end. Never one to remain idle, on  September

, with patriotic fervor, she organized an egalitarian organization of women to care for soldiers and orphans called Les Soeurs de France (Sisters of France). She wrote and sang sentimentally patriotic songs.

When the Prussians occupied Paris, she disbanded the group and returned to Le Vésinet only to find that Châlet Lionel had been ransacked by the Prussians. Her godchild, Solange, who had been a difficult child but to whom she remained devoted, ran off with a Prussian soldier and was never heard from again. Four years later Céleste’s mother died.

The remainder of Mogador’s life was spent scrimping to survive financially. In the end she was admitted to La Providence, a retirement home run by the Sisters of Charity and subsidized by the Ministry of the Interior. She died there on  February , at the age of eighty-five, surrounded by souvenirs of her life as Céleste Mogador. Her funeral services were discreet according to her wishes, and she was buried next to her mother at the cemetery of Pré-Saint-Gervais. On the grave stone xx

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appears just her name, ‘ Céleste,’ and above is a marble plaque with the crown of a comtesse. (In  her remains were moved to le Poinçonnet, a few miles south of Châteauroux.) Today, no one remembers the name Chabrillan, but when most French people hear the name Mogador, they readily recognize it. Not far from the cross she had erected in memory of her dear Lionel, there is an oak that the villagers call ‘‘Mogador’s Oak.’

Céleste Vénard, both in spite of herself and because of her courage and her spirit, transformed herself into a true nineteenth-century heroine. Were it not for her memoirs, however, she would be just a footnote in other people’s recollection and history books.

    

The first edition of the memoirs appeared in  in  volumes bearing the title Adieux au monde, mémoires de Céleste Mogador (Farewell to the world, memoirs of Céleste Mogador); the second edition appeared in  in  volumes with the shortened title of Mémoires de Céleste Mogador (Memoirs of Céleste Mogador); and the third edition appeared under the same shortened title in  in  volumes. These editions are of course all out of print and can be found only in a few libraries around the world. The author herself made a few changes and additions to the editions following the first one, including a preface in which she defends herself, claiming that it was not her intention to make her kind of life attractive to other young women, but to show the perils of such a life. Her main desire in this painful endeavor had been to confess her life to avoid losing the love of the one who had so generously given his life to her. This translation is based on the  republication of the first memoir by Les Amis de l’Histoire. This edition differs from the original in a few respects. First, some passages that could have appeared redun-dant were omitted; so were her direct addresses to her attorney. Second, subtitles were added to each chapter title as well as to the title of the memoirs, giving the whole a romance novel style. And finally, where Mme de Chabrillan used the name Robert, the  edition substituted the real name Lionel, and his château is identified by name, le Magnet.

  

Readers wishing additional information on Céleste Mogador and her times can consult the following works, which were examined for the above introduction. Françoise Moser, the author of the  French biography of Céleste Mogador, claims in her introduction to have had in her possession several notebooks in Céleste’s handwriting of unpub-xxi

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lished memoirs covering the latter part of her life. According to the translators of Mogador’s second set of memoirs, these notebooks have not been traceable.

 

Clancy, Patricia and Jeanne Allen. Introduction. The French Consul’s Wife: Memoirs of Céleste de Chabrillan in Gold-rush Australia. Melbourne: Miegunyah Press, .

Haldane, Charlotte. Daughter of Paris. London: Hutchinson, .

Leclercq, Pierre-Robert. Céleste Mogador, Une reine de Paris. Biogra-phie. Paris: La Table Ronde, .

Marrone, Claire. ‘‘Male and Female Bildung: The Mémoires de Céleste Mogador,’’ Nineteenth-Century French Studies , nos.  &  (spring–

summer ): –.

Moser, Françoise. Vie et aventures de Céleste, fille publique, femme de lettres et comtesse (–). Paris: Albin Michel, .

Richardson, Joanna. The Courtesans: The Demi-Monde in Nineteenth Century France. London: Weidenfeld & Nicholson, .

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   

in Nineteenth-Century Paris

1

o

My Stepfather

A Dreadful Individual—Toward the Unknown—Storm on the Saône—

First Friend—Refuge in a Bawdyhouse—Saved!

     say out loud, I am going to put down on paper. I do not plan to transform my life into a novel, and I do not intend to try to clear my name or pretend to be a heroine. As I describe what I have suffered, what ill or good I might have done, I shall tell all without holding back, and you will see that I need great courage to face my past.

I was six years old when I lost my father. He was a kind and honest man who, before dying, would have killed me if he had had any notion that a few years later I would be called Mogador.

We were living in Paris, on Rue du Puits.1 My mother was busy with her thriving shop. As for me, as long as my hair was in pretty curls and my mother dressed me in a lovely frock, the rest was not important to me. And so by the time I was ten, I still did not know how to read.

There was no way to force me to learn anything, and as soon as there was talk of sending me to school, I would start to cry and scream. I would always eventually get my way.

We were hatters. There were always five or six employees coming and going in the workroom. These employees transferred the affection they had had for my father to me. I was a very fortunate child.

A tall man often came to the shop. I hated him. It would please me to say unpleasant things to him, which was often. But instead of getting angry, he would give me lots of little presents and would marvel at my beauty.

All this fuss over me was futile. There is no denying the fact that children and dogs can sense who really loves them and who pretends to.

G

was a thirty-five-year-old man from Lorraine. He was at least



My Stepfather

five feet seven inches tall, had broad-shoulders, dark hair, rather large, slightly recessed eyes, very thick eyebrows that seemed darker than his hair, a round head, a flat face, a pale complexion, a pinched nose, and lips that were so thin their red part could only be seen when he spoke.

His dark sideburns blended with his silk tie. I never saw him wear a shirt collar, and most of the time his frock coat was buttoned up, which made me say that he looked like a spy.

When he wanted to play with me the way one plays with a little girl, or he wanted to give me something, or take my hand or kiss me, I always ran off, and I did not come back to the house until I was certain he was gone.

Almost a year had gone by. I did not like M. G

, but I had be-

come used to him. When I was scolded, he would defend me. When I wanted something, I would ask for it in front of him, and if I was told I could not have it, he would bring it to me the next day.

I later learned that M. G

had already asked Maman to marry

him and that, without saying yes or no, Maman had answered, ‘‘I shall see later. If I am going to give my daughter a stepfather, I must be certain that he will make her happy.’

That was the reason for all those acts of kindness toward me. My intuition as a child had not been wrong.