Word: courtesans
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...They reveal an astonishing life. A noblewoman of beauty and wealth, Mme. de Sévigné was widowed at 25, when her libertine husband died in a duel over a courtesan. A crush of suitors quickly moved in: Nicolas Fouquet, Louis XIV's ill-fated superintendent of finance; Marshal de Turenne, the outstanding military hero of the era; Prince Armand de Bourbon, a member of the royal family. The widow refused them all. Her deepest affections were held in reserve for her daughter. The occasion for most of the Sévigné letters was the daughter...
...impotence. "We laughed uproariously," she writes her daughter. "I told him that I was delighted that he had been punished for his sins at the precise point of origin." She could not resist communicating the dictum that was pronounced upon Charles by Ninon de 1'Enclos, the celebrated courtesan: "His soul is made of mush, his body of wet paper and his heart is like a pumpkin fricasseed in snow...
...Mick Jagger is like an aging but still energetic courtesan: he gives pleasure so expertly it hardly matters that his heart and guts may not be in his work. Hal Ashby's slapdash film record of the Rolling Stones' 1981 U.S. tour reveals the old showman parading his tricks with skill and snazz. Against a pointillist backdrop of thousands of shirts and faces, Jagger skip-sprints across the huge stage, towels off his crotch with his jacket, executes arabesques and aerobics, drapes himself in chiffon or Stars and Stripes or next to nothing. He sings too, though...
...Pope Joan (Selina Cadell), who is said to have ascended the throne of St. Peter around A.D. 855 and who was later stoned to death. Also joining the party are Isabella Bird (Deborah Findlay), an intrepid 19th century Scottish traveler; Lady Nijo (Lindsay Duncan), a 13th century Japanese courtesan who became a Buddhist nun; Dull Gret (Carole Hayman), who led an avenging legion of women into the precincts of hell in Brueghel's painting Dulle Griet; and finally, Patient Griselda (Lesley Manville), made famous in Boccaccio and Chaucer as the model of a loyal, submissive wife...
...assurance, in itself and in the woman who, through will power and muscle power, has created it. It is not yet, and may never be, for everybody, but for many men this feminine physical assurance can be galvanizing; there can be an allure to equality. Women, liberated from the courtesan's need to entice, have become more enticing. To be in condition is not only healthy, it is sexy ? and inseparable from a strength of the self and the spirit...