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Memoirs of a Courtesan in Nineteenth-Century Paris
Antioch Review, The, Spring, 2002 by Katherine Gantz
Memoirs of a Courtesan in Nineteenth-Century Paris by Celeste Mogador, tr. Monique Fleury Nagem. University of Nebraska Press, 330 pp., $55.00 ($24.95 paper). For years, the fiction of such celebrated authors as Baudelaire and Zola has sparked lasting intrigue with depictions of the seamy side of nineteenth-century Paris. Every bit as brazen, Mogador's text is all the more extraordinary simply because it is not fiction, but autobiography. Rarely are readers allowed an authentic peek into the brothels, ramshackle cabarets, and asylums of the age. Indeed, the rags-to-riches story recounted in these memoirs would seem implausible had not the author's rise to fame been so public. More than a century later, we are invited to follow the complex path of Celeste--a barely literate prostitute who transforms herself into an acclaimed bohemian writer, and later finds even greater publicity in her unlikely marriage to a French aristocrat.
The earliest part of the author's life is replete with page-turning drama (e.g., the disastrous marriage of her widowed mother to an abusive con man, or Mogador's ultimate flight from her home into a house of ill repute). The most engaging recollections, however, encompass her days as a young performer, initially in the dance halls and later in the circus. The reader is privy to two simultaneous voyeuristic pleasures: first, a behind-the-scenes tour of mid-nineteenth-century theaters at the height of the Decadent age; and second, the subtle evolution of a struggling, impoverished young woman into a worldly and confident creative force. One might be tempted to make comparisons here with Colette's romans a clef, whose treatment of this same subject matter admittedly offers a more sophisticated prosaic style. Yet while Colette chose to coyly shroud her own history in fiction, Mogador's bold work is compelling precisely for its willingness to stake its claim as the unabashed account of an extraordinary life.
COPYRIGHT 2002 Antioch Review, Inc.
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