Читать книгу Sex in the Cities. Volume 3. Paris - Hans-Jürgen Döpp - Страница 7

The historian Leopold von Ranke once said about the time of Henri II: “If you wish to learn about the ideas and opinions of contemporary France, you must read Rabelais.” Anyone who wishes to learn about the times of Charles IX and Henri III must read Brantôme.

In the Paris of François Rabelais (1483–1553), as in that of Villon’s time, public incitation to depravity was just as much on the agenda. Prostitutes and pimps, as well as male and female procurers, offered their services in broad daylight. Whilst public procuresses exercised more or less strict supervision over the brothels, private procuresses advertised their wares vigorously in all conceivable places – especially in churches. It is no wonder that prostitution – albeit in a primitive form – was already booming. After sunset, remarks Grand-Carteret, Paris no longer belonged to the King of France but to the roi des Ribauds (king of the ribalds; officer of the royal household, overseeing the policing of prostitution in Paris) and the “priestesses of Venus”.

In his novels, Gargantua and Pantagruel, François Rabelais, the supreme master of crude satire, depicts the vices and immorality of his contemporaries. He shows the unrestrained sexual life of his times as vulgar as it actually was, never deviating from depicting repulsive words or images. Nor did he spare the female gender his coruscating mockery, being shown as lustful and shameless. They never got tired of the “stick”. He doesn’t shrink from any kind of exaggeration. On his wanderings, Pantagruel meets women whose clitorises, the laborator naturae, are so highly developed that they could wrap them around their bodies several times and use them as spears if they needed a weapon. With unsurpassed humour, Rabelais castigates the shortcomings of the Church and the monks, as well as their scandalous lives. In his Psychology of French Literature (1884), even the prudish literary historian Eduard Engel is forced to confess that:

Consistently and without any scruples whatsoever does he use the most offensive word in the language for the appropriately offensive action, and he often seems drunk on the vulgarity of his vocabulary. Many chapters in Gargantua and Pantagruel are complete dictionaries of pornography – more complete than anything else in the wide territory of French literature. But he does not take pleasure in doing so – using such passages for no other purpose than for the accurate depiction of uncouth characters in scurrilous situations.

Towards the end of the 16^th century, coarseness in morals slowly began to fade away. Uncouth prostitution began to give way to gallantry. A dense network of royal castles was built around Paris. The Court and its courtiers practically settled in Paris, and the reflected glory of its splendour and magnificence soon gave Paris the character of the animated and luxurious metropolis, which gradually became the central focus of Europe. Brantôme remarks:

As far as our lovely French women are concerned, in the past they have been extremely uncultivated – contenting themselves with a clumsy form of love. However, over the last 50 years, they have acquired from other nations so many forms of beauty and flattery, charms and outstanding qualities, and learnt so much in terms of clothing, grace, and lasciviousness, either acquiring these things naturally or taking the trouble to teach themselves, that now one must say that they surpass all others in every way. I have also heard strangers say that they are far worthier than others, except insofar as unchaste words sound much more lascivious, more exciting, and more melodious from a French mouth than any other.

For a long time, there were rivalries between Parisiennes and the women of Lyon and Rouen. Yet now – as a result of the Renaissance – there began a form of competition against those women skilled in the most sophisticated arts of love – the Italians. As Grand-Carteret writes: “The influence exercised by women from Genoa, who were ‘of wondrous beauty’, and those from Milan ‘with looks worthy of Venus’ on French women was so enormous that genuine rivalry broke out between them and Parisiennes, or, to be more exact, French women in general. The letters sent by the Venetian Ambassador, which are valuable documents about the moral history of this period, give convincing testimony of the admiration which even the most listless city-dwellers and socialites accorded to Paris, in terms of being the international centre of culture and pleasure. What was the ideal beauty in this period? Chestnut brown hair and golden-brown, lively, and mischievous eyes were lauded. Piquant little faces, with animated features and blazing eyes seem to have been characteristic for Parisiennes even in those days. A cheeky smile, cherry lips, and a little mouth that promised more than it haughtily rejected were prized even then as signs of amorous delight. Calmness and tenderness were especially desired in women.

The art of emphasising one’s charms and underlining them through fashion became increasingly widespread. Ladies of the Court as well as gallant ladies set the example which Parisiennes followed. Parisian fashion started to become international. It is the Court, along with all its accompanying unrestricted freedom of morals to which Paris owes its reputation.

In the work Vie des Dames Galantes, by Pierre de Bourdeille, Sieur de Brantôme (1540–1614) can be regarded as the Chronique scandaleuse of the late 16^th century. It provides a revealing picture of the court life of its day. The author’s gaze is fixed on the title-tattle at court, on affairs, intrigues, and amours. “Natura non sunt turpia” (“What nature is cannot be damaging”) was the motto with which he prefaced his book.

Lucas Cranach the Elder, The Judgement of Paris, 1528.

Oil on lime wood, 84.7 × 57 cm. Kunstmuseum Basel, Basel.

Robinet Testard, The Gaze of Desire, illustration for The Book of Love’s Failures, by Évrart de Conty, 1496–1498.

Bibliothèque nationale, MS. Fr. 143, fol. 198v°, Paris.

Brantôme writes “about the ladies who cultivate love and make their husbands cuckolds”. He posed the question: “Which gives the greatest delight in love – the feelings, the face, or the words?” He gives an account of “lovely legs and their charms” and “of older ladies, who cultivate love just as much as young ones”. He claims: “The beautiful and estimable ladies love brave men, and these love courageous women.” He warns gossipers: “which is why one should never speak ill of ladies because of the consequences that may arise”. And he compared “married women, widows, and girls – to discover which is most ardent in love”. Brantôme’s work prefigured the Rococo era. He was a light-hearted and sensual early crusader for the freedom of the female gender – in bed. For him, the chastity of young girls and the faithfulness of married women were outmoded concepts, prejudices that did not accord with women’s social standing and which the nobility must abandon if it wished to perpetuate its delightful way of life. The customs of an outmoded sense of morality were, as Brantôme recounts with some satisfaction, already no longer adhered to.

According to Brantôme, a libertine lifestyle was certainly not considered a drawback for les grandes dames (high-society ladies). He believed that the only women to be branded prostitutes were those who gave themselves to ordinary men, whereas intercourse with royal personages, especially the King, was considered absolutely honourable. In his view there was not one unspoilt woman in the whole court. At court anything could be discussed without embarrassment. Brantôme heard about a grande dame who one day saw a young nobleman who had very white hands, and she asked him how that had come about. He answered laughingly in jest that it was because he washed them so often in sperm. “I’m less fortunate,” rejoined the grande dame, “I’ve been washing my little casket in that for the past sixty years and it’s still as black as before. Even though I wash it in that every day.” The same distinguished lady, who became famous as the Queen of France and a mother – Catherine de’ Medici – did not shy away from taking part in a competition with her ladies-in-waiting to describe the finest details of their most intimate charms. It took place so that the other gentlemen present could, for their part, declare quite openly to which ladies’ favour they owed the state of their male members. Catherine de’ Medici, whose father and mother died of syphilis before she married the future King Henri II when the two were fourteen, spoke frankly about her vagina. “I carry three lovely colours there at the same time: black, white, and red. For that mouth down there is as red as coral, the curly hair round about it as black as ebony, and my skin as white as alabaster.”

Just as Catherine de’ Medici showed no restraint in describing her charms, so Brantôme showed none either when criticising a lack of modesty amongst women. He treated readers to another lady’s witty complaint in the following words: “She complained that her vulva was like hens who, when they don’t drink enough water, get roup and die. Thus, her vulva would get roup if she didn’t get enough to drink, but she needed something other than well-water!” Another lady said “that she had the makings of a good garden for which the rain from heaven was not enough – she also needed a gardener in order to be fruitful”. In this respect, Brantôme had no intention of being malicious. He was an observer and reporter of the exuberant sensuality at the court of the French Kings, who not only had sexual intercourse indiscriminately with every woman who attracted them, but also wanted to hear and see anything that seemed likely to stimulate their lust.

Even ordinary objects at the royal court were calculated to arouse the senses. On platters and plates orgiastic scenes were engraved as “reflections of love”. On a goblet in the form of an enormous male member, which graced the king’s table, Brantôme writes:

This goblet was the cause of miraculous events. The ladies set their lips upon it, enfolding it tenderly. For they realised that the mouth is good for more than speaking and kissing. When a beautiful woman drinks lovingly she is demonstrating her love.

Brantôme then goes on to write that one of the ladies depicted in the book came to see it but was not in the least offended – on the contrary, she was extremely excited. Obscene conversations were perfectly normal, so that people saw nothing unusual in them. Brantôme never missed the opportunity to describe the ladies who took part in such conversations as “very honourable ladies”.

Erotica dominated both the thinking and the feeling of that period. In the world of the courts and the aristocracy, shame was virtually unknown. Since time immemorial, the French court had been the “figurehead of the nation’s morals”. “If one wishes to gain authentic information about a nation’s way of life and morality,” writes Jean Hervez in his contribution to The Moral History of Paris (1926), “then one only needs to study attentively the accounts contemporary authors give of their rulers.” The fact that the French example was also the model for the very smallest princedoms in Germany comes as no surprise, though most of them lacked the material basis for this kind of dissolute life.

Fragment with Renaissance motif, c. 1550.

Heinrich von Ramberg, 1799. Coloured lithograph.

In the course of the 17^th century, for court circles in particular, the social postulate of emotional control gained absolute credence, and influenced the way in which one gender treated the other. Increasingly, gallantry and coquetry came to determine the manner in which love was expressed, with the result that it became harder “… to distinguish real from feigned love”. Jean de la Bruyère formulated this problem in a pointed way in Les Caractères ou les Moeurs de ce siècle: “It sometimes happens that a woman conceals from a man all the passion she feels for him, whereas he for his part feigns everything he does not feel.”

Nevertheless, lovers at the time still managed without recourse to complex hermeneutics, or interpretations, of love. They confessed their love without prevaricating. We hear an echo of this in the works of Brantôme. Neither men nor women – of whatever social stratum – show any compunction about expressing their feelings. “A careful weighing up, consideration, or a subtle assessment of the other’s feelings – which characterises 17^th century erotic literature, defined as amour passion – plays no part in erotic novels of the Renaissance period,” writes Hiltrud Gnüg in her study, Der erotische Roman (The Erotic Novel). In his Illustrated History of Morals, Eduard Fuchs explores the “mutual forms of courtship” in the Renaissance:

At the beginning of the Middle Ages, the forms of courtship were extremely primitive in almost all classes and nearly all countries, and thus consisted largely of what was called the primitive forms of gallantry. In other words, both genders paid each other homage almost exclusively in the unambiguous terms of “hands-on” intimacies. Eyes and hands assumed and were given every right. Certainly, procedure was coarser and more direct in peasant than in middle-class or aristocratic circles; and, again, German nobles were more uncouth than those from Italy or Spain, but in all cases one was concerned with differences of degree, not of character.

He closes with this conclusion: “To sum up, love on both sides followed the principle of the swiftest possible procedure.”

It was the evolution of civilisation which produced ever stricter controls on the expression of emotion, and that encompassed love in all its manifestations. By the 18^th century, erotic libertinism no longer meant openly admitting to one’s erotic inclinations, the direct and undisguised expression of one’s desire. From this point on what was demanded was the art of indicating feelings without settling on one particular form of expression.

François Boucher, Blonde Odalisque, 1752. Oil on canvas, 59 × 73 cm. Alte Pinakothek, Munich.