The Girl Behind The Fan (Hidden Women) (5 page)

I sat back up for a little while and scribbled a few lines in my notebook – the beginnings of a plan for my research – but eventually, the day’s travel and anxious anticipation caught up with me and I drifted into sleep.

In my dream, I lay on a bed in another room. It was a room I felt I knew well, though it existed only in my imagination.

It was the bedroom on the first floor of the Palazzo Donato. The one where Luciana Giordano had spent many long, tumultuous nights with her lesbian lover Ernesta Donato, Marco’s courtesan ancestor. Luciana had described the room in her diaries and I had adopted it for my own dreams, imagining that Marco was now the room’s occupant. Luciana had talked about an impressive four-poster, with sumptuous red velvet curtains that brushed the parquet floor. The sheets, however, were of purest white linen, a virginal backdrop for such devilish debauchery.

I lay on those sheets. I was wearing a white nightgown. My long dark hair was loose. Outside, it was dusk. Not quite night-time. I watched the reflections of the last rays of sunshine on the Grand Canal play on the painted ceiling. I waited for my lover to come.

He arrived. He was wearing, as usual, a mask to cover the top half of his face but his mouth was uncovered and as he crossed the room to the bed, his lips formed the smile of someone anticipating a good meal or a long draught of cool water at the end of a dry, hot day. As he moved, he took off his jacket. He was wearing a white shirt and he unbuttoned it so that I could see his bare chest beneath; his tanned skin and the light covering of dark hair. When he was close enough, I reached up to him and pulled him down towards me so I could trace the curve of his lips with my fingers.

I told him that I’d missed him. He promised he would not be away for so long again.

He lay down beside me and we started to kiss. His mouth on mine was so familiar. His lips were warm and gentle. His delicious tongue fluttered against mine. I immediately felt my whole body opening towards him and pressed myself against him, greedy for his kiss and his touch. I struggled to open those buttons on his shirt that he hadn’t already unfastened.

‘Not yet,’ he said, taking both my wrists and flipping me onto my back with my arms apart so that I was pinned into place. He nuzzled the side of my neck. The sensation was both arousing and ticklish. He kissed his way towards the dent between my collarbones. Sitting across my legs, he pushed my nightgown up to my waist, revealing my belly and the dark triangle of my pubic hair beneath. He smiled when he saw the neatly trimmed arrowhead. Glancing at the front of his trousers, I saw that he was already straining the front of them, as he grew hard in anticipation of what was to come.

He continued to push my nightgown further up my body. I sat up and raised my arms so that he could pull it off over my head, leaving me entirely naked. I flopped back against the pillows in a posture of complete abandon. Playfully, I hooked my little finger in the corner of my mouth and regarded him, daring him to do what he would.

Slipping from the bed to stand on the floor, he took me by both my ankles and pulled me so that my bottom was on the very edge of the mattress with my legs dangling freely. He knelt on the floor between my legs and kissed his way along the inside of my right thigh. The feel of his hot breath on my Venus mound was excruciatingly delightful.

‘Don’t tease me,’ I begged him.

‘I’ll do whatever I want,’ was his response.

Of course he would and I would let him. He already knew that. Carefully, he parted the lips of my vagina and ran his tongue along their shiny insides. He let the tip flicker over my clitoris, sending darts of electricity through me. Slowly, he moved his tongue from side to side. I pushed my pelvis up to meet his mouth, encouraging him to go faster, but he teased me horribly, keeping the pace slow. It was both agonising and completely wonderful.

At the same time as he licked me, letting the intensity build at such a leisurely pace, he put his finger inside me. I felt myself close around him, taking the finger greedily, only reluctantly letting it slide out again. I asked him to finger-fuck me again. He refused with a shake of his head.

Instead he quickened the movement of his tongue. I picked up a pillow and held it over my mouth, biting into it when the pleasure became almost too much for me. Round and round, his tongue traced the outline of my clitoris. With his fingers, he stretched my labia apart to better reach the tiny nub of pleasure that was already throbbing and hot.

I felt my stomach muscles tense. My toes pointed. My breath grew shallow and rapid. I knew I would not be able to hold on for very much longer.

I came, as I always did, in great crashing waves of ecstasy. My body bucked and twisted. I cried out in delight. I ended by laughing out loud.

Afterwards, I lay on the sheets, exhausted but very happy indeed. My masked lover climbed back onto the bed beside me. He ran a finger down the centre of my body, eliciting one last shiver of sheer joy. He slid up the sheets so that we were once again face to face. He kissed me on the lips. I felt the taste of my own skin on his tongue.

‘That was delicious,’ he said. ‘But now it’s my turn.’

Chapter 6

I woke up feeling slightly less rested than I should have done, but all the same, I started work as soon as I’d had some breakfast. Greg Simon had given me quite a short deadline. There was no time to waste.

Fortunately for me, like my thesis subject Luciana Giordano, Augustine du Vert had kept a diary. More accurately, Augustine had written a memoir, about her life in Paris, beginning at the moment she went to work for Arlette Belrose. This Arlette was one of the most celebrated kept women of the age, a courtesan reputed at one time to have been the lover of Prince Napoleon. When she died, Augustine’s memoir was found among Arlette’s most precious treasures. No one knows whether Augustine had ever expected or hoped to see her story printed, but Arlette’s enterprising grandson made a fortune from the tale, which he published early in the twentieth century.

It didn’t take me long to track down the original manuscript of Augustine’s book, which was kept in the Bibliothèque Nationale. Getting access to it was relatively easy; my credentials as an academic and a reference from Nick in Venice helped me in that respect.

Before I began my research, however, I decided I would try to get a more emotional feel for Augustine by visiting the two places in Paris where she still had some sort of real presence. One was the Musée d’Orsay, where her portrait hung in the permanent collection. The other was her grave in the famous Cimetière du Père-Lachaise, where other such great libertines as Oscar Wilde and Jim Morrison were also laid to rest.

I went to the cemetery first. The graveyard at Père-Lachaise was like a small city. I was astonished at the size of some of the tombs, which were almost as big as the last flat I had rented back in London. They were like proper houses for the dead, with doors and – in some cases – glazed windows. Some even had little tables inside. Vagabonds, who stashed their sleeping bags there among the long dried-out floral arrangements, had made some into real homes. Wandering aimlessly, I happened across the stunning Raspail family monument, with its enormous and mysterious veiled statue clinging onto one wall as though ready to fall down in grief. Later I found Oscar Wilde’s fabulous Epstein tomb, with its stony sphinxes now behind a glass screen to prevent overenthusiastic visitors from kissing the white marble away. By comparison, Augustine had a modest gravestone, grey and plain, carved with only her names and the dates of her birth and death. I felt a wave of pity break over me as I realised she had not even made it to my age. Nowhere near. She had died in January 1847 at the age of twenty-four.

But she was obviously not forgotten. Her grave was not covered in graffiti expressions of love and small gifts like Jim Morrison’s, but there was a small posy of peonies in the marble vase by the headstone. They were beautiful flowers, deep pink and almost obscenely vibrant in a place of such timeless solemnity. I wondered who had left them there. I wondered if, assuming the movie I was working on ever got made, Augustine’s admirer would have more competition in the future as people came to love her screen reincarnation and so honoured her memory in this place where her old bones lay.

I took a few photographs of the grave to add to my notes and spent another hour or so wandering around the long alleys of the dead, spotting names I recognised from my A-level French literature class. Away from the celebrity graves and the crowds of morbid tourists, stray cats weaved their way in and out of the tombs. It was a scene that would have appealed enormously to my eighteen-year-old self with all her emo tendencies. It was those Gothic Romantic tendencies that made me choose to be a historian. I supposed they’d also made me susceptible to my great imaginary romance in Venice. I paused by the empty urn that had once contained the mortal remains of the great soprano Maria Callas. There was a woman who knew what it was like to be unlucky in love.

Far more cheering was Augustine’s portrait in the Musée d’Orsay. She found herself there not because of her notoriety or even because of her beauty, but because of the fame of the portrait artist, one Remi Sauvageon.

Remi Sauvageon became famous for his work on the fringes of the Impressionist movement, but his portrait of Augustine was from an earlier period in his career and was striking in its realism. It might have been a photograph. You almost had to put your nose on the painting to see a brushstroke.

He had pictured Augustine standing next to a fireplace, leaning on the mantel with one elegant bare arm. She was wearing a long green dress that revealed her gently rounded porcelain-white shoulders. Her hair was pinned up with two plaits looped around her ears in a style that was fashionable at the time. She was covered in jewels and had three strings of pearls round her neck. I remembered reading somewhere that in the nineteenth century, before the process of culturing pearls was perfected, a string of almost identically sized pearls such as those Augustine sported would be worth way more than diamonds.

On the mantel behind Augustine the artist had painted a representation of another portrait, of a woman who looked strikingly similar to his subject. I wondered if that was because the portrait in the background was in fact a depiction of Augustine too. I wasn’t yet aware of any such painting.

As I stood in front of her, Augustine seemed to be looking right at me but her expression was not as straightforwardly defiant as it had at first appeared. Her eyes were warm but they were also somehow sad and imploring. It was as though she was asking me to make sure this film did her justice.

‘Don’t worry,’ I promised her silently. ‘I think Angelina’s too old for the part.’

I bought a postcard of Augustine’s portrait in the museum gift shop and tucked it inside my notebook to help inspire me later on. Then I walked back to my new apartment, enjoying the warm evening air. All around me, Paris was at her most welcoming. Every bridge, every street corner played host to lovers. Two by two, hand in hand, was the only way to travel in the beautiful City of Light. Walking up the Rue de la Paix and seeing yet more lovers window-shopping at Cartier, I wondered how many people got engaged at the top of the Eiffel Tower in an average day.

Back in the apartment, I made myself some supper and sat down to read a book about courtesans that I had picked up from one of the book stalls that line the quays on the Left Bank. As I read, I decided it didn’t sound like such a bad life. In fact, just like Ernesta Donato, the eighteenth-century Venetian courtesan and lover of Luciana Giordano, compared to their decently married contemporaries, the Parisian courtesans of the nineteenth century seemed to have had a great deal of freedom and power. One courtesan – a woman called ‘La Paiva’ – was born in a Moscow ghetto but by the time she was my age, she had amassed enough wealth to build a mansion on the Champs Elysées.

In his latest email Greg Simon had implied that the apartment I was staying in had once belonged to a woman who modelled herself on La Paiva. I smiled at the thought. It was a beautiful place. The high ceilings and parquet floors breathed quiet luxury. There was such space and light. Compared to any flat I’d stayed in before, it was as glamorous as a wing of the palace at Versailles. If I hadn’t been staying in the apartment for free, I very much doubted I could have raised enough to make the rent by selling my body. Even if I tried selling my kidneys rather than my sexual favours.

That night, I thought about the portrait of Augustine as I drifted into dreams. There was a striking similarity, I thought, between Augustine’s picture and the painting of Ernesta Donato that had hung in the library in Venice. If Marco and I had still been on emailing terms, I might have sent him the postcard, so that he could see the likeness for himself.

I missed that aspect of our relationship especially. Marco had always seemed very interested in my work. It was wonderful to be able to bounce ideas off him. He’d offered a new perspective that helped me to take my work deeper.

There would be none of that this time. I was on my own. If I’m honest, I was a little apprehensive. I knew how to research an academic project but what would a film producer want? Less attention to syntax and more to story, I supposed.

Could I imagine myself into Augustine Levert’s shoes? Though I hadn’t intended to, I had done something of the sort with Luciana Giordano. At first glance, the Venetian teenager and I could not have been more different but, in retrospect, reading about her sexual awakening had perhaps made me more willing to look for an awakening of my own. Young enough to be untroubled by the consequences of her nightly escapes to join her lover Casanova in the underbelly of Venetian society, Luciana had tried everything. She had opened herself up to love affairs with men and with women as her lover encouraged her to see her body as a vessel of pure pleasure.