What distinctions, what shades, what different names to express
almost one and the same thing! From the haughty fair in a brilliant
equipage, figuring, like a favourite Sultana, with "all the pride,
pomp, and circumstance" of the toilet, down to the hunger-pinched
female, who stands shivering in the evening at the corner of a
street, what gradations in the same profession!
Before the revolution, there were reckoned in Paris eight or ten
thousand women to whom the rich nobility or financiers allowed from a
thousand pounds a year upwards to an almost incredible amount. Some
of these ladies have ruined a whole family in the short space of six
months; and, having nothing left at the year's end, were then under
the necessity of parting with their diamonds for a subsistence.
Although many of them are far inferior in opulence to the courtesans,
they are less depraved, and, consequently, superior to them in
estimation. They have a lover, who pays, and from whom they, in
general, get all they can, at the same time turning him into
ridicule, and another whom, in their turn, they pay, and for whom
they commit a thousand follies.
These women used to have no medium in their attachments; they were
either quite insensible to the soft passion, or loved almost to
distraction. On the wane, they had the rage for marrying, and many of
them found men who, preferring fortune to honour, disgraced
themselves by such alliances. Some of these ladies, if handsome, were
not unfrequently taken by a man of fortune, and kept from mere
ostentation, just as he would sport a superlatively elegant carriage,
or ride a very capital horse; others were maintained from caprice,
which, like Achilles's spear, carried with it its own antidote; and
then, of course, they passed into the hands of different keepers. It
cannot be denied, however that a few of these connexions were founded
on attachment; and when the woman, who was the object of it, was
possessed of understanding, she assumed the manners and deportment of
a wife. Indeed, now and then a keeper adopted the style of oriental
gallantry.
Beaujon, the banker of the court, who had amassed an immense fortune,
indulged himself in his old age, and, till his death, in a society
composed of pretty women, some of whom belonged to what was then
termed good families, among which he had diffused his presents. In an
elegant habitation, called _la Chartreuse_, which he erected in the
_Faubourg du Roule_, as a place of occasional retirement, was a most
curious apartment, representing a bower, in the midst of which was
placed a bedstead in imitation of a basket of flowers: four trees,
whose verdant foliage extended over part of the ceiling, which was
painted as a sky, seemed to shade this basket, and supported drapery,
suspended to their branches. This was M. Beaujon's Temple of Venus.
The late Prince of Soubise, for some years, constantly kept ten or a
dozen ladies. The only intercourse he had with them, was to breakfast
or chat with them twice or thrice a month, and latterly he maintained
several old stagers, in this manner, from motives of benevolence. At
the end of the month, all these ladies came in their carriages at a
fixed hour, in a string, as it were, one after the other. The steward
had their money ready; they afterwards, one by one, entered a very
spacious room furnished with large closets, filled with silks,
muslins, laces, ribbands, &c. The prince distributed presents to
each, according to her age and taste: thus ended a visit of mere
ceremony, interspersed with a few words of general gallantry.
Such was the style in which many women were kept by men of fortune
under the old _régime_. At the present day, if we except twenty or
thirty perhaps, it would be no easy matter to discover any women
supported in a style of elegance in Paris, and the lot of these seems
scarcely secured but from month to month. The reason of this mystery
is, that the modern Croesuses having mostly acquired their riches in
a clandestine manner, they take every possible precaution to prevent
the reports in circulation concerning their ill-gotten pelf from
being confirmed by a display of luxury in their _chères amies_. On
this account, many a matrimonial connexion, I am told, is formed
between them and women of equivocal character, on the principle, that
a man is better able to check the extravagant excesses of his wife
than those of his mistress.
We now arrive at that class of females who move in a sphere of life
the best calculated for making conquests. I mean