Immediately after Baudelaire's amazing portrait comes another extremely striking Nadar image. It's a studio nude of Christine Roux, a cafe singer and minor-league courtesan who ran in the Murger circle and was talked out of her clothes by Nadar in 1855. She also features as "Musette" in Murger's *Scenes de la Vie de Boheme,* in which she is the mistress of "Marcel," himself said to be based partially on Nadar. Christine stands in a conventional model's art-posture, weight on one leg, torso slightly twisted, but her face is hidden in the crook of her raised right elbow, rendering her effectively anonymous, a luscious icon for the male gaze.
Murger's fictional treatment of Musette is friendly and tolerant, but more than a little contemptuous. The fictional Musette is the standard hooker with a heart of gold; but Murger's indulgence doesn't hide the fact that the Paris Bohemia was a society that specialized in treating women as hired meat. Here's Nadar himself, a man of wide tolerance, a man of unquestionable psychological insight, describing Baudelaire's favorite mistress, the small-time actress and courtesan Jeanne Duvaclass="underline"
"A tall, almost too tall girl. A negress, or at least a mulatto: whole packets of ricepowder could not bleach the copper of the face, neck and hands. A beautiful creature in fact, of a special beauty which owed nothing to Phidias. A special dish for the ultrarefined palate. Beneath the impetuous luxuriance of her ink-black and curling mane, her eyes, large as soup-plates, seemed blacker still; her nose was small, delicate, the nostrils chiselled with exquisite delicacy; her mouth Egyptian.... the mouth of the Isis of Pompeii, with splendid teeth between prominent and beautifully designed lips. She looked serious, proud, even a bit disdainful. Her figure was long-waisted, graceful and undulating as a snake, and especially remarkable for the exuberant, exceptional development of the breasts. And this abundance, which was not without grace, gave her the look of a branch overloaded with ripe fruit."
Jeanne Duval's sexy as hell. She's a special dish, she's a soup-plate, she's a statue, she's a snake, she's a fruit tree; she's anything but a human being. This is the rhetoric one has to emit in order to treat women the way women were treated in Bohemian Paris. In FLOWERS OF EVIL, Baudelaire gloats over Jeanne Duval with a lipsmacking contempt that is truly painful to witness, declaring her a beast, a tramp, trash, carrion, and then wallowing in her at length. One can't help but conclude that Baudelaire would like Jeanne even better if her head were severed, although that might reduce the ugly satisfaction he takes in blaming her for the existence of his own libido.
Musette, her photo placed rather too aptly on page 69, is a poisoned dish. You have to buy her, and if you catch anything from her, it's as much as your life is worth. There's no birth control to speak of, so you may well end up supporting bastard children or, worse yet, not supporting them. There will be no meeting of minds here; it's true Musette can sing a bit, but to marry her would be an utter disaster, a mesalliance reducing you to a social laughing-stock. This is skin for money, with a nice brain-eating tang of Russian roulette tossed in for spice. And by the way, it's also a mortal sin, which is no small deal in mid-nineteenth century Catholic France.
Are you really going to do this? Are you going to spend the money to buy Musette, and take that dire risk of all that potential misery and hurt, to yourselves and to her and to your parents and to the next generation, and to God Himself and the Savior and all the saints and angels for that matter, merely in order to emptily and temporarily possess the anonymous female body depicted on page 69?
Fuck yes you are. Of course you are. I mean, just *look* at it!
In the all-too-immortal words of the Brothers Goncourt: "Men like ourselves require a woman with little breeding, small education, gay and natural in spirit, to charm or please us as would an agreeable animal to which we might become attached. But if a mistress had a veneer of breeding, or art, or of literature, and wanted to talk on an equal footing with us about our thoughts and our feeling for beauty; if she were ambitious to become the companion of our taste or of the book gestating within us, she would become for us as unbearable as a piano out of tune -- and very soon antipathetic."
Nadar reports his last view of Jeanne Duval in 1870, her graceful undulating exotic tasty carcass propped on crutches from the ravages of syphilis. Musette died in a shipwreck in 1860, at age 25.
Here's Theophile Gautier on page 113. He was an extremely hip and happening guy, Gautier. There's a lot to be learned from him. He looks very much like a bouncer in a biker bar. This beefy dude is the ultrarefined escapist lily-clutching Romantic aesthete who coined the dictum "only what is useless is beautiful" in his *Mademoiselle Maupin,* one of the great indecent books of the nineteenth century. Gautier was a major pioneer of fantasy as a genre, an arty arch-Romantic who wrote about Orientalism and female vampires and mystically revived female mummies and tasty female succubi who jump off the embroidery in ancient tapestries to fuck the brains out of undergraduate XIXth-cent. lit-majors, and yet Nadar's portrait makes it utterly clear that Gautier is a guy who could swiftly kick the shit out of nine men out of ten.
At age nineteen, Gautier led the howling Romantic contingent at the premiere of Victor Hugo's *Hernani* in 1830, the public brawl that marked the end of NeoClassicism as a theatrical doctrine; and you can see from his portrait that Gautier wasn't doing anything so mild as "marking" the end of classicism, he was publicly breaking its back and was proud and happy to do it.
Gautier's table-talk is the best stuff in the famously gossipy *Journals* of the Brothers Goncourt. By the 1860s Gautier had become the most powerful critic in Paris; a man who wrote operas and ballets and plays and short stories and novels and travel books and poetry and about a million crap newspaper columns, and yet he found the time to eat hash and dominate salons and throw monster parties at the house of his common-law wife that had, among other attractions, actual Chinese people in them. Gautier was writing for the government organ *Le Moniteur* as a theatre critic and he was the lion of Mathilde Bonaparte's circle, Mathilde being Napoleon III's cousin and the Second Empire's officially sanctioned token bluestocking liberal. Having reached the height of Bohemian public acceptance Gautier ground out his copy in public and in private he lived in open scandal and bitched about the government every chance he got. The stuff he says is unbelievable, it's a cynical head-trip torrent worthy of Philip K. Dick.
Picture this: it's 1860. Civil War is just breaking out in the USA. Meanwhile, Theophile Gautier's at a literary dinner in the rue Taitbout in a sumptuous drawing-room lined with padded pigeon-blood silk. He's drinking twenty-two-year-old champagne and discussing the immortality of the soul. Gautier addresses a right-wing Catholic. "Listen, Claudin, " he says, "assume the Sun was inhabited. A man five feet tall on Earth would be seven hundred and fifty leagues high on the Sun. That is to say, the soles of your shoes, assuming you wore heels, would be two leagues long, a length equal to to the depth of the ocean at its deepest. Now listen to me, Claudin: and along with your two leagues of boot soles you would possess seventy-five leagues of masculinity in the natural state."
Claudin, shocked, babbles something eminently forgettable.