Abstract
This chapter explores examines male writers’ motives for reworking the courtesans’ stories in phony memoirs. Indeed, riding the popularity of de Chabrillan’s Adieux and hoping to cash in on the overnight fame Marguerite Rigolboche enjoyed, Ernest Blum and Louis Huart penned the Mémoires de Rigolboche (1860). Because these Mémoires enjoyed tremendous popularity and made Rigolboche even more famous, several authors wrote back against them. In a parallel case, Victor Joze wrote Les Usages du demi-monde (1909) to counter several bestsellers by de Pougy. Likely envious of the success the courtesan fiction enjoyed, these male authors co-opted the personas of demi-mondaine to earn money and to cast doubt on courtesan authorship.
Parts of this chapter were presented at the Writing the Taboo Conference at the University of Edinburgh (Spring 2000) and at the 39th Annual Nineteenth-Century French Studies Colloquium in Richmond, Virginia (Fall 2013).
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Notes
- 1.
For a view of the portrait, see http://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k58098860/f5.image.
- 2.
Huart, according to the Grand Dictionnaire universel, came up with the idea of the “petites Physiologies” and even penned some of them, often writing the text that accompanies the comical caricatures.
- 3.
See the quote “Moi, ce qui m’a fait rouler” at the beginning of the chapter (17).
- 4.
See the book summary of Gaddis Rose’s translation of the novel entitled Lui: A View of Him (1986). I subsequently paraphrase the “Author’s Preface” of this edition.
- 5.
Recall that Mogador released her Mémoires in 1854 before she became the Comtesse de Chabrillan.
- 6.
See Gaddis Rose viii–x.
- 7.
See Beizer for Flaubert’s efforts to discredit Colet by even “unwriting” her in Madame Bovary (321).
- 8.
The 1877 Catalogue de la Bibliothèque théatrale de M. Léon Sapin gives the reader a good idea about what tomes a theater connoisseur collected during the Rigolboche heyday. This estate sale catalogue lists under the “Rigolboche” category six volumes (all published in 1860): Les Mémoires de Rigolboche, A bas Rigolboche, Rigolboch’s question, Polichinelle aux champions de Rigolboche, par Barillot, Rigolboche et Garibaldi, par Pélin, and Rigolbochiana, par Dalès.
- 9.
To view the images described in this section of the chapter, please go to http://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/btv1b52501775g. The page numbers where the reader will find the image in the Gallica document are listed in parentheses after each caption.
- 10.
In a clin d’œil to George Sand’s portrayal of courtesans in Leïla, one wife is called Pulchérie, the courtesan sister in the work.
- 11.
Bamboche is supposed to recall Rigolboche, but recall from Chap. 2 that that it also refers to debauchery.
- 12.
He is a friend of lights, a play on the Siècle des Lumières of the eighteenth century, and his class would make him anything but enlightened.
- 13.
At least four editions of A Bas Rigolboche [Down with Rigolboche] were published.
- 14.
See Chap. 1 in Ill Repute and Chap. 1 of Classification.
- 15.
De Neuville also criticizes the livres roses that hope to also capture the public’s interest in the lives of prostitutes. He claims that these works are dangerous, because they put a price on love and they risk also dragging wives and mothers into the mire (22–23). Then in the next five chapters, de Neuville goes on to explain how lower-class women “fall” into prostitution.
- 16.
The Bibliothèque Nationale de France’s Catalogue général and the Catalogue Général de la Librairie Française (Tome Vingt-Troisième) published in 1912 list Victor Joze as the author of Les Usages.
- 17.
For more on the project, see Chap. 1 of Classification.
- 18.
For a useful summary of the characteristics that mark each of the three levels of prostitutes, see Mix (201–202).
- 19.
Writers and journalists often employed “demi-mondaine” during the Second Empire after Dumas fils wrote Le demi-monde, used “cocotte” during the 1870s, and moved to “grande horizontale” during the Belle Époque. See the introduction and Chaps. 1 and 2 of Classification for more on the ranking of prostitutes.
- 20.
See Classification for more on a Bourdieusian interpretation of the demi-monde.
- 21.
According to Leah Chang, the “crossed-dressed” text is “written by men in the voice of a woman in a type of poetic ventriloquization […]” (243).
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Sullivan, C. (2016). Co-opting the Courtesan Persona in the Faux Mémoires de Rigolboche and the Les Usages du demi-monde . In: The Evolution of the French Courtesan Novel. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-59709-0_4
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