delanceyplace.com 2/4/08 - the parisian demi-monde
In today's excerpt - the demimonde. Demimonde is a 19th century euphemistic term that referred to a class of women on the fringes of respectable society supported by wealthy lovers—usually several. The term is French, and means literally 'half-world', implying those who existed on the fringes of the 'real world.' The defining aspects of the demimonde were an extravagant lifestyle of fine food and fine clothes, easily surpassing that of most other wealthy women of their day, simply because of the steady income they made in both cash and gifts from their various lovers. The waggish term grandes horizontales was coined to refer to those women at the upper crust of the Parisian demimonde at the time of the glitteringly decadent Second Empire (1852-1870). As Daphne Merkin wrote, 'Their ability to wind men around their fingers while picking up a chateau or two on the side was legendary. ... To this end, they happily hitched up their skirts for the men they ensnared, who in return were prepared to open their pockets—and in rare instances, their hearts':
"The moral tone of the Second Empire was far from elevated. ... From top to bottom Paris was obsessed with love in all its varieties. ... [When] some of the foremost intellects of the day congregated, few evenings went by without someone like Sainte-Beuve discoursing on sex in an almost schoolboy vein.
"The most notable of the grandes horizontales, 'La Paiva,' once asked Ponsard the playwright to write some lines in celebration of her grand new staircase (in which is now the Traveller's Club on the Champs-Elysees), and he came up up with an adaptation from Phedre: 'Ainsi que la vertu, le vice a ses degres' (Vice, like virtue, has its steps both up and down). This was entirely true of the Second Empire, where everything was precisely ordered. Everyone had their place, his own step on the staircase. A married woman, forced to leave home when some indiscretion became known, could set herself up at one of several levels within the demi-monde without actually descending into prostitution.
"At the top of the social staircase, vast sums could change hands. Even Egyptian beys could be reduced to ruin in weeks. Louis Napoleon himself reportedly bestowed on the Comtesse de Castiglione a pearl necklace worth 422,000 francs and added 50,000 francs a month in pin-money; while Lord Hertford, supposedly the most tight-fisted man in Paris, gave her a million for the joys of one night in which she promised to abandon herself to every known volupte (afterwards, it is said, she was confined to bed for three days). La Paiva, who adopted the admirably punning motto of 'Qui paye y va' (Who pays gets there), herself spent half a million francs on her table. ...
"This depiction of rampant hedonism under the Second Empire had its unsavory underside. Syphilis was rife, and still more or less incurable. Many of the great men of the age were to die of it, among them [Guy] de Maupassant, Jules Goncourt, [Alexandre] Dumas fils, [Charles] Baudelaire and [Edouard] Manet. [Pierre-Auguste] Renoir once lamented that he could not be a true genius, because he alone among his friends had not caught syphilis. This dreadful disease was symptomatic of the whole Second Empire: on the surface all brightness and high spirits; beneath, darkness, decay and ultimately death."
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