Paris, Capital of Modernity by Harvey David;

Author:Harvey, David;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2006-03-15T16:00:00+00:00

So what, then, could a single working woman do, living on bread and a little milk and working twelve hours a day? There were, most bourgeois commentators agreed, two basic options: supplement their income through prostitution or establish a liaison (formal or informal) with a man. Prostitution was extremely widespread—thirty-four thousand women were proported to be engaged in the activity in 1850s Paris—and treated with the usual total hypocrisy by the bourgeoisie.7 In regulated establishments—brothels and other licensed places—the activities and health of prostitutes could be monitored by the authorities. The big problem was the large number of women working on their own account who were not registered (there were four thousand or so registered prostitutes in the early 1850s). The term femmes isolées applied (as Scott points out) to unregulated prostitutes as well as to women working independently as dressmakers or seamstresses, thereby suggesting an association between the two.

Prostitution shaded into a wide range of other activities, from the lower-class dance halls to the higher-class opera and theater, and merged into the profession of “mistress.” For the woman, the temptations were enormous, though the probability of parlaying good looks into a share of a banker’s fortune (like Zola’s Nana) was very low. Besides, there was too much competition at the top, since the high points of courtesan and bourgeois life were already well occupied. (Did the Marquis of Hertford really pay a million francs for one night with that exquisite beauty and sometime mistress of Napoleon III, the Countess of Castiglione?) But in a large city like Paris, where a certain anonymity could easily be preserved, all kinds of liaisons were possible, none of them without their dangers. It was customary, for example, for the large numbers of students from the provinces to take mistresses, thus giving rise to the curious profession of grisette. One close English observer of student life, while falling over backward not to condone the condition, ended up conveying a certain admiration for such women. They looked after their students faithfully and well, even managed the budget, in return for relief from dull and ill-remunerated employment. While they might, like the ill-fated Fantine in Hugo’s Les Misérables, be left totally in the lurch when the student returned to provincial responsibilities, and while marriage was out of the question, they sometimes received support for children and perhaps some sort of payoff (being set up with a shop being a favorite—many of the independent women owners got their start this way) in return for their faithful service.

Some regretted the gradual displacement of grisettes by “lorettes.”8 Named after the quarter of Notre Dame de Lorette (where they were presumably concentrated), lorettes were women of pleasure who used their powers of seduction for shorter-term gain (meals, entertainment, and gifts as well as money). Lejeune, in his memoire about life as department store salesboy in the 1850s, provides one instance of how they worked. Called at the last minute to substitute for an older salesman, he took items for sale to a potential customer’s house and was greeted on entry by a woman in a diaphanous negligée.

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