She didn’t speak in the low, dulcet strains of feminine modesty. She paraded her knowledge and pulled out the oratorical stops. Men traveled throughout Europe to see her and fell in love with her by the score. Nearly every important figure of the day numbered among her lovers, and she could name her price and men.
Veronica’s educational background baffles every axiom of female achievement. Rather than with supportive parents and kid glove instruction, she grew up in an impoverished bourgeois family with a courtesan mother, a worthless father, and no schooling beyond what she picked up secondhand from her three brothers.
Unlike the movie, her mother never took her by the hand and ushered her into a vaulted library. Determined to “educate herself and follow scholarly pursuits,” she scrounged what she knew through sheer rage to learn. Hardly out of adolescence, she married a local doctor, but by eighteen she was already ensconced as a courtesan, wielding her brains and sex appeal with the panache of another Inanna.
She was beautiful in the preferred cinquecento style—an oval face with a widow’s peak, auburn curls, large, soulful eyes, and a bowed, bee-stung mouth—but she gilded the lily. She braided her dyed blond hair in an artful crested wreath, softened her skin with sugared alum and ass’s milk, and hung dangling gold earrings from rouged earlobes. She wore embroidered high clogs and ornate, impearled gowns of satin, silk, and crushed velvet.
A maestra of the seductive arts, she threw marvelous parties: gondola sing-alongs through the canals and cozy suppers where she sang, played the harpsichord, and dined “without pomp and ceremony.” She prided herself on her boudoir skills. She bragged that she performed so well “in bed” that all her “singing and writing [were] forgotten.”
No one, however, forgot her voice for long. Early in her career she infiltrated the all-male literary ridotto, which served as her university, public forum, and personal fraternity house. Shrewdly plotting her career moves, she befriended Domenico Venier, the intellectual kingpin of Venice, and joined his elect salon of leading scholars and writers. At the ridottos, Veronica honed her mind and eloquence and established her persona as the “Honest Courtesan.”
Rather than be a decorative accessory, she took the high ground and the offensive. In her poems, debates, speeches, and letters, she demolished courtesan stereotypes and positioned herself as a moral paragon, social critic, and patriot nonpareil. In masked contests she competed with and bested male poets with her erudition and flashing wit. Domenico’s patronage ensured that she got published and heard, the rarest feat for a woman.
Instead of intimidating men, however, as popular wisdom would have it, Veronica’s in-your-face verbal brilliance did just the opposite. She scored her wins with such rhetorical charm—ironic wordplay, humor, homey idioms, erudition, and erotic allusions—that men didn’t know what hit them and lined up ten deep.
An “expensive mouthful,” whose kiss alone cost five scudi, she drew the glitterati of the day. (Each of her six children was fathered by a different magnifico.) When the future French king Henri III visited in 1674, he only wanted to see her. Two hundred dancing girls in diaphanous white dresses had been procured for his pleasure, but he spent the entire time with Veronica, discussing literature and making love. He left with her portrait and two sonnets she’d written in his honor.
These verses, like much of her work, address the theme of eros—subversively so. Her sonnets to Henri rewrite the myth of Zeus and Danaë so that instead of a rape, the coupling is mutual, and Danaë, an active, equal participant.
All her poems proclaim her erotic authority loud and clear. She’s the one in charge, the archsiren who taunts a heel-dragging beau with her “charm,” “beauty,” and list of “noble” suitors. Playboys, with their perfidious cruelties, get short shrift. She challenges one miscreant to a life-and-death combat in her bedroom, where she goes on the attack and wins:
I’d not give in to you even an inch;
instead, to punish you for your rotten ways,
I’d get on top and in the heat of battle,
as you grow hotter still defending yourself,
we’d die together shot down by one shot.
Later, in a series of elegies, she envisions a revolutionary solution to the battle of the sexes. At Fumane, a lover’s country estate, she imagines an erotic earthly paradise where lascivious murals decorate the walls, desire and friendship merge, and the sexes live in equality and sensuous harmony. In such a utopia the courtesan redeems society with the “positive power of her love.”
But by 1580, in the wake of plague and war, courtesans had lost their prestige and become social scapegoats and pariahs. Veronica was arraigned before the Inquisition on charges of witchcraft, whoredom, and satanic love spells. She mounted a brilliant suit in her own defense. Through calculated about-faces, artful counterattacks, faux sub-missions, and an array of rhetorical coups, she swayed the jury and won a reprieve.
She died not long after of fever at forty-five. In her will, written with her customary flair and colloquial frankness, she displayed characteristics not usually associated with seductresses. Devoted to her children and extended family, she divided her assets among them and included a handsome provision in the event of a granddaughter.
Although abhorred and shunned by her sex, she cared deeply about the plight of women. She bequeathed part of her estate to poor, undowered girls and twice petitioned the government with plans for a home for fallen women. One letter urged a friend to keep her daughter from courtesanry at any cost. “Of all the world’s misfortunes,” she wrote, “this is the worst.”
But it was not the worst. Had Veronica married the biggest swell in Venice, she would have been shackled, gagged, and lobotomized. Despite the occupational hazards of her job (which were considerable), she was able to slip the feminine traces and reinvent herself as a suprema. With her silver tongue and seductive moxie, she scaled the Venetian heights, attaining independence, acclaim, and a mind and deluxe identity of her own. Not least, she entranced the whole city. Her devotees called her “divine,” a “goddess.” They little knew how nearly she approximated the first one, the cosmic queen of lust and “words of power.”
Ninon de Lenclos, 1623-1705
The imperious Louis XIV was notoriously indifferent to the views of his advisers and peers, but he never changed a mistress without asking, “What does Ninon say?” In seventeenth-century Paris, Ninon de Lenclos was the last word in the court of public opinion, the high arbiter of manners, morals, and behavior. Like Inanna’s alter ego, the wise, sexy Nimsum who ruled contests between sacred kings, Ninon possessed the gift of judgmental acumen, “the making of decisions.”
The tastemaker of her times and lady of the level head, Ninon earned equal renown as a “priestess of Venus.” So celebrated were her seductive exploits that for years after her death the women of Versailles petitioned her beribboned skull for erotic success in a secret chapel. The most distinguished men of the
grand siècle
found her irresistible and awaited (often unsuccessfully) her “caprice.” They also bowed to her brains, stepped to her intellectual measure, and lapped up her “magnificent erudition.”
Such a power mix did not come naturally to seventeenth-century women, two-thirds of whom could not sign their names. Silence, docility, chastity, piety, and vacuous domesticity defined the compass of proper femininity. Ninon was born in 1620 into the most proper of circumstances. Her genteel family belonged to the minor nobility of Touraine, and her mother personified female orthodoxy.
Ninon blew the feminine mold to flinders. As a child she sided with her fun-loving, libertine father against her mother and persuaded him to educate her as a boy. She learned languages, science, history, philosophy, and lute playing and rode with him through the Bois de Boulogne in breeches and doublet. By thirteen Ninon was a hardened blasphemer. She sequestered Montaigne in her prayer book at church and once brought the service to a horrified standstill by singing a bawdy ballad in the middle of a Holy Week sermon. When the curé scolded her, the independent-minded Ninon “saw clearly that religions are nothing but inventions” and washed her hands of organized Christianity. A few years later she discarded the last shreds of feminine modesty. Defying her hysterical mother, she dressed in flimsy, décolleté gowns and promptly “ruined” herself with one of the most notorious rakes in Paris.
At that point Ninon’s life veered off into uncharted territory. Rather than the traditional recourse of compromised ladies—marriage or convent—she struck out as a free agent, deciding that since men had “a thousand privileges that men do not enjoy,” she “would turn [herself] into a man.” And no ordinary man, but an
honnête homme,
the beau ideal of honor, gallantry, and truth. A feminist trailblazer, she invented herself from scratch, without paradigms or role models. She moved to Paris, ditched the double standard, and put her philosophy into practice, choosing lovers for pleasure and wealthy
payeurs
(to whom she denied boudoir privileges) for profit.
Ironically, she got her start in society through her unprepossessing appearance. Although she became a byword for beauty (with Ninon creams and powders peddled throughout the nineteenth century), she gained access to Marion de Lorme’s famous salon because she posed no threat to the famous courtesan. Even her flattering portraits portray Ninon with a long nose, heavy Joan Crawford brows, and a double chin. Her most besotted beaux admitted that “her mind was more attractive than her face and that many would escape her toils if they confined themselves to just looking at her.”
Yet few escaped. With her uncommon mental and erotic fascinations, Ninon soon eclipsed and superseded the glamorous Marion. At barely twenty, she spellbound the salon with her fund of knowledge and wisdom. She engaged in Latin repartee with the Great Condé, skewered received truths, and expounded her philosophy, an Epicurean skepticism based on the pleasure principle and golden mean.
Ninon, though, confounded every she-pedant cliché. Unlike the priggish, affected
précieuses
of the day, she was a full-blooded voluptuary who believed, with Kierkegaard, that “it is not enough to be wise, one must be engaging.” Her “enchanting” conversation was considered the wittiest, freest in town.
Toute le monde
repeated her quips, such as her dig at a minister who ennobled his mistress like Caligula “when he made his horse consul.” Queen Christina visited her just to hear her talk, and a poet apostrophized her:
Your conversation is magnetic
I find nothing to equal it,
It could console a king
For the loss of a battle.
A live wire, she believed the “joy of spirit was the measure of its power.” She presided over gay parties, where she danced, played her lute, and dined until all hours on gourmet cuisine. During one merry feast a guest threw a chicken bone out the window and hit a passing priest on the head. No less uninhibited than her guests, she swam nude and talked about sex as openly as a libidinous Dr. Ruth, once asking a friend to recommend a “spicy” bedmate.
She reportedly brought into play a refined and “prodigious erotic technique.” “The bed is a battlefield,” she once said, “where victories are won only at great cost.” But her biggest sexual secret may have been less about vaginal love locks than cleanliness; when bathing was considered heretical, Ninon washed precoitally with soap and water and applied a light lemon scent.
She also broke with tradition by taking the lead in love. Cavalier-style, she cruised the Cours-la-Reine (a one-mile promenade ground) each day in her silk sedan chair, selected the keepers, and propositioned them with billets-doux. True to her inner sex goddess, she required numbers and variety. “Love with passion but only for a few minutes,” she preached, and limited her amours to three months, always ending the affair at full boil.
Contrary to modern playgirls, though, she put her conquests in her power, entangling them in her love nets. Most of the desirables of the day adored her: three generations of the Sévigné family, Gaspard de Coligny, the war hero duc d’Enghien, seigneur de Charleval, Le Grand Madrigalier, and scores of other notables. She was, penultimately, “the type that left and was not left.”
Mid-career, however, Ninon about-faced and became monogamous for three years. Too much her own person to seek self-completion in another, she chose a nonintellectual Adonis and found mental stimulation elsewhere. The man was the marquis de Villarceaux, the “slim-hipped wolf” and premier womanizer of the realm. Physically magnetized by each other and equally matched in spirit and libido, they retired to the country, where Ninon studied the “articles of her belief” with a resident scholar while Villarceaux hunted. They had a son together, whom Ninon (in another surprise move) loved tenderly and promoted throughout her life.
When Villarceaux’s lowbrow interests wore thin, Ninon moved back to Paris, with her spurned lover hard on her heels. He took a house across the street and fell into a fever when he saw a light on in her bedroom and suspected rivals. To hasten his recovery, Ninon cut off her hair and presented it to him, creating a national vogue for the short bob,
cheveux à la Ninon.
He remained unappeased and unconsoled but eventually, like all her lovers, forgave her and became her loyal friend.
The Paris Ninon encountered on her return in 1655 had changed since the libertine glory days of the regency and succumbed to a wave of puritanical zeal. As usual in these cases, courtesans paid the price. A coalition of the church and Ninon’s numerous female enemies mobilized and succeeded in sentencing her to a convent for wayward women for eight months. But Ninon swayed the nuns in her favor and stage-managed a protest demonstration by her beaux outside the walls that forced the king to rescind the decree.
After a triumphal reentry into Paris Ninon reopened her salon and secured her position as the city’s intellectual and moral touchstone and courtesan queen. The major figures of the day—Racine, La Rochefoucauld, Saint-Évremond, Jean-Baptiste Lully, and Molière—flocked to her exquisite parlor and sought her imprimatur. Molière tried out all his plays on her first and credited his “Leontium,” the Epicurean courtesan of ancient Greece, with the inspiration of
Tartuffe.
Her version, he claimed, was superior to his.