Erotic Exchanges: The World of Elite Prostitution in Eighteenth-Century Paris by Kushner Nina

Author:Kushner, Nina [Kushner, Nina]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Cornell University Press
Published: 2013-12-24T00:00:00+00:00

Execution of the Contract

The central assumption to which all parties assented when forming an agreement was that sexual services were to be rendered only in exchange for money or goods and, unlike many other business transactions, they would not be delivered on credit. The first sexual engagement traditionally occurred only after a patron had provided his future mistress with an initial gift or her first honoraires. The two transactions might take place on the same night, or within days of each other. Money, then sex. Moreover, were the patron to stop paying, his mistress would owe him nothing, regardless of what had transpired between them. This was demonstrated clearly in the case of a man Inspector Marais identifies as the Russian prince Belonsiski, who, over the course of a few months, had spent as much as eighty thousand livres on dresses and furnishings for his mistress, Jeanne Tellefert (Demoiselle Lacour), a singer in the Opéra. When he found himself out of both money and credit, Lacour “completely dismissed him.” According to Inspector Marais, who had taken a specific interest in the prince, there was little the latter could do about it; Lacour’s behavior was “by the rules.” Marais paid a visit to the prince and asked him how he found “French manners,” to which the prince supposedly replied, “I would be charmed…if she were to take another lover. I was not made to be with her forever. I advised him [the new lover] myself in order to ease the way. I see her now only rarely.”69

The expectation that kept women would only have sex for money also was shown in a battle over some jewelry between the dancer Demoiselle Deschamps and her patron, Denis-Joseph de La Live d’Épinay, husband of the writer and educational theorist Louise d’Épinay, who was Rousseau’s protector. According to Inspector Marais, Monsieur d’Épinay had been charged by a relative to buy a particular piece of diamond jewelry worth sixty thousand livres. Deschamps convinced her patron to let her wear it to the Opéra, after which she refused to give it back. D’Épinay thought of having a police commissioner forcibly retrieve it, but the fact that he was sleeping with Deschamps complicated matters, as did d’Épinay’s history as a patron. He was a well-known figure in the demimonde, having supported numerous opera singers and dancers at such expense that d’Épinay’s father sent him from Paris to stop the financial hemorrhage. D’Épinay had bejeweled his previous mistress, Demoiselle Briseval, yet offered Deschamps nothing. All this constructed the loaned object into a gift, and hence payment for services rendered. D’Épinay eventually negotiated a resolution with Deschamps. The jewelry was to count as her étrennes.70 Deschamp’s nineteenth-century biographer claimed the dancer bragged about her exploit.71

The understanding of sex as a commodity was in evidence not only in interactions of dames entretenues and their patrons, it was explicitly theorized in satire. The Mémoires secrets published a letter supposedly, though doubtfully, from Marie-Claude Saron in which the Opéra dancer explained why having had sex with a notary should have canceled the debt of eighteen hundred livres she owed him.

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