Seductress (15 page)

The beauty chase is a wild-goose chase, leading us to look for love in all the wrong places. Salons, spas, gyms, boutiques, and ORs can take us only so far; without self-cultivation and amorous artistry we’re lunch meat in the mating wars. While plastic surgery soars to over a million cases a year and feminine self-esteem sinks proportionally (80 percent of women report disliking their looks), we’re slip-sliding romantically, unable to get a grip on men or our love lives.

Belles laides
suggest a better way. They lassoed the top-of-the-line lovers and held them, without body work or personal compromise. They didn’t sand down their edges. Faithful to their prehistoric style, they were audacious sex mahatmas who defied social norms and dared to be themselves. All but Wallis Simpson and La Paiva (you have to be careful of the metamorphosis you wish for) brewed the love philter of personal excellence and self-actualization. At the same time, they cultivated their primordial attractions, finessed seduction, and restyled themselves into
belles des belles.
They prove the hoary adage that beauty is subjective, an experience rather than an objective quality.

Washington Irving, an old hand with women, recognized this. “Divinity within,” he said, “makes divinity without.” The
belles laides’
divinity was no angel. She was the masked Neolithic sex deity in her grotesque, zoomorphic form: death bringer, life regenerator, cosmic superpower, and goddess of a thousand faces. She’s the Loathly Lady of the folktale that preserved her myth through the ages, the ugly Lady Ragnall, who zeroes in on the handsomest knight, subjects him to character tests, then turns into a nubile beauty when he measures up and grants her sovereignty.

Naomi Wolfe wrote that “stories don’t happen to women who are not beautiful.” But Zsa Zsa Gabor came closer when she said, “There are no ugly women.” Just those who don’t know the story, the one about the primeval beaked goddess with her numinous powers, metamorphoses, cosmic sex appeal, and triumphant plots of conquest and seduction.

CHAPTER FOUR

Old women must take on anybody, for no one will have them.
—KATHY ACKER

 

 

 

The hell of women is old age.
—LA ROCHEFOUCAULD

 

An old hen doth make better broth.
—PROVERB

 

How many men there be which do love old women for many reasons better than young.
—SEIGNEUR DE BRANTÔME

 

Oh, there’s life in the old girl yet.
—GRAHAM GREENE

 

 

 

A
bigail Adams, the young wife of future President John Adams, received a rude shock when she first arrived in Paris. At Benjamin Franklin’s suggestion she attended a dinner party to meet one of the legendary French seductress
-salonnières.
Imagine her horror, she wrote, when a shriveled old lady in moth-eaten finery bounded in and carried on like a “very bad”
fille de joie.

“Where’s Franklin?” the brazen creature bawled out, then raced over and planted three kisses on his cheeks and forehead. At dinner she hogged the entire conversation, lacing and unlacing her fingers with Franklin’s and sometimes throwing her arm on the back of Mr. Adams’s chair! Worse followed. She flopped on a settee, “showed more than her foot,” and proceeded to kiss her lapdog on the mouth. When the dog peed on the floor, she reached down—mid-sentence—and wiped it up with her petticoat. “I own,” wrote the indignant Abigail, “I was highly disgusted, and never wish for an acquaintance with any ladies of this cast.”

Ladies of this cast, like Franklin’s “bad”
salonnière,
were—unbeknownst to Abigail—the height of fashion in prerevolutionary France. They captured the choice men with their conversational brilliance and mature charms and decided important questions of state at their influential salons. Debutantes powdered their hair white to emulate these Silver Foxes, just as seniors today color up to look young.

Contrary to myth, elder seductresses have never gone out of style. The powers of fascination in a fascinating woman only potentiate with time. In maturity women gain formidable allures denied to the young. They cast perhaps the biggest spells of all—the aphrodisiacs of a fully developed character, an enriched mind, sexual freedom and experience, maternal mana, status, money, and a what-the-hell closing time joie de vivre.

They’re surprisingly populous. Ancient Greek chroniclers list dozens, and the sixteenth-century Brantôme recounts the exploits of at least fifty “old vixens.” Most great seductresses bewitched men until they died. The aged Jane Digby, for example, held a young Bedouin prince captive for twenty-five years, and Isabella Stewart Gardner had a fan club of Museum Boys who swarmed around her like “flies to honey.” As the French (historically predisposed to eldersirens) say, “At vespers the feast is sweetest.”

If so, why the universal animus against older women? For centuries in Western culture, postchildbearing women have been stigmatized as repulsive hags, morphing at the stroke of menopause into grizzled Ma Joads, asexual frumps, and comedy club figures of fun. “What’s ten, nine, eight, seven, six? Bo Derek growing old.” Or: “What’s wrong with being Grandpa? Having to sleep with Grandma.”

It doesn’t take a genius to see the motive behind this mudslinging. Older women unnerve younger female rivals and alarm men. Like seductresses in general, they menace their hegemony. Besides their innate sexual magnetism, senior
amoureuses
have a dangerous liberty, the freedom of the postreproductive female to flit about and fornicate and escape domestic captivity. Unlike their male counterparts, they lose none of their libidinous marbles. They’re hotter to trot, if anything, often rendered raunchier by a testosterone boost to their sex drives. As a recent survey discovered, women between sixty and ninety-one reach orgasm 72 percent of the time, as opposed to 50 percent for their younger counterparts. The mature woman, in short, is too big for masculine comfort—too free, too strong, too orgasmic, too mom-run-wild and must pay for it. Demonized as a crone and Miami gargoyle, she must be cut from the dance, with her daughters and granddaughters seconding the motion.

Ironically, however, she belongs at the head of the dance, enthroned on the royal dais, queen of the mythic prom. The mature sex goddess was a powerhouse; “crone” and “crown” share the same etymology. She incarnated motherhood and the accumulated knowledge of existence and possessed a volcanic libido. Prepatriarchal societies invested her with an aggressive “active sexuality” and surrounded her in their myths with an honor guard of young, lusty hunks. She was so dynamic, so potent in her final form that she could metamorphose in a flash, transforming herself into cats, birds, and beautiful young women.

Since the goddess represented an active life-and-death continuum rather than a static entity, she didn’t convey the usual linear idea of senescence and decline. Instead the old lunar deity was a font of regeneration that magically resurrected the dead in her cosmic cauldron and restored them to new life. She possessed the secret of the fountain of youth, conferring immortality and eternal rejuvenescence.

Men, then, to their intense confusion and fear, are attracted to older women at a deep, archetypic level. They can’t help themselves; it’s soldered into the inherited structure of the psyche. Beneath their seamed faces, Silver Foxes serve them a straight-up
goblet d’amour,
the concentrated charms of the seductress at her peak and the primordial pull of the senior goddess with her potent enchantments: wisdom, plentitude, maternal nurture, seismic sexuality, and the power of rebirth and the elixir vitae.

With Minette Helvétius, Franklin’s beloved Silver Fox, the prevailing charm was her contagious, restorative cosmic vitality. Like Demeter, the old fertility goddess who transformed Pelops into a handsome young hero in her cauldron, Minette had a magical effect on men—She turned back the clock and gave them back their youth. Around her the seventy-year-old Franklin felt “like a little boy,” as did the other infatuees who flocked to her Auteuil salon on the edge of the Bois de Boulogne. At sixty-one, covered in wrinkles and moles, Minette looked both raddled and “no longer young.” She “didn’t know it,” though, and carried on as if she were a grisette.

Her weekly salon was a jamboree. Statesmen, philosophers, historians, poets, and “the wittiest and most sought-after talkers” in France poured through the gates of her walled garden into a large blue and white parlor overrun by twenty Angora cats in ribbons and sateen coats. At the center of the hubbub stood Minette in girlish short petticoats, greeting men with shrieks of joy.

After a boisterous supper, guests repaired to the aviary, carved mottoes in the furniture, and milled in and out of the dining room, where the conversation continued full cry. “Gaiety” resounded until deep into the night, with Minette’s comic anecdotes ringing “through the whole house.”

Minette’s life seemed little calculated to inspire gaiety. Born the tenth of twenty-one children to an impoverished noble family, she grew up hungry, neglected, and uneducated. On the plus side, she escaped the pernicious consequences of eighteenth-century education, the instruction in female timidity, obedience, silence, and artificiality. Still, she faced the likelihood of lifelong dogwork and destitution.

Early hardship, however, a common siren theme, often steels the siren’s soul, especially when combined with a redemptive mentor. For Minette the mentor was a fairy godmother unimaginably ahead of her time. A rabid advocate of women’s rights, Françoise de Graffigny wrote for a living, cultivated such seductresses as the brilliant Émilie du Châtelet, and crusaded for a new system of feminine education that instilled “strength of character,” independence, and “accomplishments of the mind” in women.

When a patron offered Françoise lodgings at the court of Lorraine, she invited two of her nieces along. The ten-year-old Minette was her favorite. For five years, while Françoise occupied herself with salons, balls, and polyamorous intrigues, Minette developed into a
charmeuse.
As “cunning and smart as a cat,” she roguishly flashed her calves at cavaliers and looked like a diminutive Catherine Deneuve, with blond braids coiled at the back of her neck and wide sapphire eyes.

But before she could put her powers to a test, Minette was placed in a convent, compliments of a charitable cardinal. Life sentence to a spinning wheel would have been preferable. An expensive club for abandoned ladies and
laiderons
(girls scarred by smallpox), these cloistered retreats were stultifying sinks of domestic drudgery, masses, embroidery, and parlor readings. Miraculously, however, Minette survived with her spirits intact.

When she reemerged fifteen years later at the cardinal’s death, she bewitched all Paris with her fetching joie de vivre. Christened the “light of the house” of her aunt’s Left Bank salon, she infatuated men and women alike. (Queen Marie Leszczynska found her so delightful she gave her an expensive dress and a purse of louis d’or.) Her first beau, a handsome student seven years younger, became one of the greatest French statesmen. But at the time the twenty-three-year-old Anne Robert Jacques Turgot was too poor to marry her and contented himself with an
amour platonique.

The man she did accept surpassed even Turgot. Claude Adrien Helvétius, the reigning male pinup of Paris, was the stuff of ancien régime wet dreams. Philosopher, writer, actor, self-made millionaire, and winner of twenty duels, he plowed through women like
petites madeleines.
Every morning his valet brought him his “service girl,” and every afternoon and evening he worked his way through the aristocracy, ending with the famous actress Mademoiselle Gaussin.

The thirty-year-old Minette, however, stopped him in his tracks. Proclaiming her his “icon,” and “divinity,” he forsook his paramours and lived with her in perfect marital fidelity and devotion for twenty years. They moved to a country estate, practiced philanthropy, and lived at the height of gaucherie, treating each other with bourgeois intimacy and raising their two daughters democratically.

At forty Minette presided over their weekly salon in the city and broke hearts again. Still a
ravisseuse,
still the life of the party, she pitched gamely into highbrow debates (despite her lack of formal education), and jollied suitors along—too kind to say no. Her most serious conquest, the ninety-year-old Enlightenment celebrity Bernard de Fontenelle saw her seminude at her toilette by accident and sighed, “Ah Madame, if only I were eighty years old.” Ex-flame Turgot visited her every day.

When Helvétius died unexpectedly in 1771, the fifty-two-year-old Minette bounced back and created herself anew. She gave her homes to her daughters, bought a cozy estate in the Paris suburbs, and threw herself into senior seduction with gusto. Reconstituting her salon on newer, more ambitious lines, she turned her Auteuil residence into a “sacrosanct chapel” for the intellectual and political elect of the day. The best minds, as Franklin said, gravitated to her “as straws about a fine piece of amber.” In time it became an underground command post for both the French Revolution and the later Republic.