Ballerina Read online

  Her sexual reputation had been established early, in 1728, when eighteen-year-old Marie was abducted, along with her thirteen-year-old sister, Sophie, by the Comte de Melun, the governor of Abbeville; he apparently was an overzealous admirer of Camargo’s celebrated virtuosity,68 following her from Rouen to Paris, ostensibly to watch her dance. The ballerina’s father, Ferdinand-Joseph de Cupis Camargo, an itinerant violinist said to have been descended from the nobility, petitioned the French prime minister, saying his daughters were of high birth and should be treated as girls of good breeding, released back into his care or else married. His protests might have been part of an elaborate ruse to make Camargo respectable, if not socially well-placed.69 No wedding took place. While Sophie was released back into the care of her anxious father, Camargo refused to leave her kidnapper’s château, apparently having formed an attachment to her new and luxurious surroundings.

  An illegitimate child was born of this dramatic escapade, whom Camargo never publicly acknowledged.70 She later had other bastard offspring from her liaison with Louis, Comte de Clermont, the third and youngest son of Louis de Bourbon, Prince de Condé, whose mistress she became in 1736. He was an abbé of Saint-Germain-des-Près and a military officer who was also Grand Master of the Grand Lodge of France, the supreme Masonic authority in France. Other than bedding the king himself, Camargo could not have climbed the social ladder any higher than she did when she attached herself to this member of the illustrious Bourbon family. She stayed with Clermont for at least five years, from 1735 until 1740, during which time she retired from dancing, apparently at her lover’s request, and bore him two children. They do not figure greatly in her story; it is doubtful they even survived her. Camargo made no mention of any children in her will.71 She appears not to have been the mothering type. Innovations she introduced to ballet are what she wanted to be known for; these she carefully nurtured and jealously guarded. She was aware of her own talent and was determined to leave a legacy of ballerina boldness.

  With Camargo, it was definitely a case of what-you-see-is-what-you-get. Although a trailblazer in her art, at heart she was just another fille d’Opéra with a string of lovers to keep her both sexually satisfied and wealthy. Camargo was quite openly a concubine, neither reserved nor subtle, and happy to drop her clothes when the occasion called. One such incident took place on June 15, 1731, at the Hôtel de l’Académie Royale on the rue Saint-Nicaise, headquarters of the Opéra’s administration. Known as “the shop,” it housed a rehearsal theater and studios, a library, and offices. It was also where many an after-party was said to be held, to the pleasure of the Opéra’s high-ranking patrons.72 This is where, at two in the afternoon, through windows opened wide to the street, Camargo was seen cavorting nude with other undressed ballerinas at a party organized by then director of the Paris Opéra, Maximilien-Claude Gruer, for some of his well-connected ballet patrons. Camargo was reportedly playing Venus, and to the letter, as captured by the French statesman and memoirist Comte de Maurepas, who wrote the following verse:

  Lorsque La Camargo, se montrant toute nue,

  Ah! Pour les spectateurs qu’elle agréable vue!

  Fit voir à qui voulut ce lieu plein de beauté

  Que l’on prive du jour sans qu’il l’eût mérité!73

  Then that time when Camargo appeared completely naked,

  What a sight for those who saw!

  Anyone who wanted could see a kind of beauty

  That beforehand had been off limits!

  Word of the party got back to Louis XV, who, at first, was amused. But public outcry led him soon after to relieve Gruer of his duties, not for acting the pimp, but for doing so without discretion. Ballet’s prestige rested on it being perceived as an outward show of propriety and good manners; its reputation needed protecting.

  Significantly, Marie Sallé (1707?–1756), appears to have been invited to participate in a similar, if not the same, orgy.74 But she had refused, a moral stance misconstrued as insubordination, which in 1730 lead to an altercation with Claude-François Le Boeuf, another high-ranking Opéra administrator, ending in blows.75 The prolific writer and ecclesiastic Antoine François Prévost d’Exiles (no relation to the dancer), who was Sallé’s contemporary, alludes to an indecent proposal involving large sums of money, which Sallé declined, compelling her to seek patronage outside France. Assisting her flight from sexual harassment was the celebrated French philosopher Voltaire, who wrote for Sallé personal letters of introduction that she would use in London to secure patronage for her art. “If you ask me what they hoped to obtain from her by such a rich reward,” Prévost writes, “I can best answer your question by avoiding an answer. The adventure... created an admirable impression in a country where virtue is ranked immediately below guineas.”76

  Ostracized from the Paris Opéra for refusing to yield her will (and body) to the whims of management, Sallé quit Paris for London, where she had family and well-connected English patrons, notably the Duke and Duchess of Devonshire, who bankrolled her productions. In London, Sallé enjoyed more artistic freedom, as well as higher wages, than was possible within the stifling atmosphere at the Paris Opéra. London is where she had first established an illustrious reputation, having made her mark there in 1716 at the age of nine as a child performer alongside her brother, Francis.77

  When Sallé returned to Paris in early 1720, she became a favorite student of Prévost, who suggested that Sallé be her replacement in a 1721 production of Les Fêtes vénitiennes, the ballet providing Sallé with her Paris Opéra debut. Sallé was noticeably different from Prévost’s other star student, and not just because she was fair where the other was dark. Sallé was known more for the nuanced expressiveness of her graceful gestures, in addition to her ability to inject a Prévostian sense of emotional verisimilitude into her dancing, rather than for the pyrotechnics displayed by her rival. She also differed from Camargo in that she choreographed her own works, often in collaboration with some of the greatest musical artists of her day, Rameau and George Frideric Handel (1685–1759) among them. The disparity in their approach to ballet set off a widespread debate in their day about who was better: Sallé, a cool blonde representing the Apollonian, or classical, strain in art, or Camargo, who was decidedly more Dionysian, or libertine. Not even as sage a man as Voltaire could decide: he apparently loved both ballerinas, praising them equally in his oft-quoted piece of poetry originally published in Le Mercure de France in January 1732:

  Ah! Camargo, que vous êtes brillante,

  Mais que Sallé, grands dieux, est ravissante!

  Que vos pas sont légers et que les siens sont doux!

  Elle est inimitable et vous êtes nouvelle:

  Les Nymphes sautent comme vous,

  Mais les Grâces dansent comme elle.78

  Ah! How brilliant you are, Camargo!

  But Sallé, great gods, how lovely!

  Your steps are so light, hers so smooth!

  She is incomparable, yet you have something new.

  You leap like the Nymphs, but she dances like the Graces.”

  The jury is still out. In fact, athletic prowess and dramatic skill—aesthetic differences that these ballerinas personified—remain the two principal criteria by which ballerinas are judged today. More important, however, is how these two ballerinas of extraordinary and diverse talents were able to shape the future course of ballet by dint of their unique strengths and personalities. The differences in their approach to art mirrored the differences in their approach to sex. Sallé reserved her seductive powers for the stage, where she was reported to dance in a way that was subtly voluptuous; what she did behind the scenes no one really knew. Sallé openly rejected the advances of men and refused to have any part of the sexual orgies that were a regular feature of Opéra life. Consequently, she became known in the press as “the Vestal,” one of the virginal attendants of the mythical goddess Diana, a virgin who also shunned the company of men, prefer
ring to surround herself with girls and women who formed around her a type of Sapphic harem. Having a reputation for being sexually reserved was so unusual among ballerinas of the time that Sallé emerged as an enigma and became more intriguing than Camargo in the public eye. “Her aura of virtue, one of the ‘wonders of the Opéra,’ was a constant source of amazement,” writes one ballet scholar.79 Society painter Nicolas Lancret immortalized Sallé’s identification with Diana by painting a portrait of her as the huntress, an image inspiring verses by Voltaire and Louis de Boissy, praising Sallé’s modesty and virtue.80 Sallé was an untouchable, and so desire for her grew strong among her public, who put her up on a pedestal, almost willing her to fall. And fall she did.

  If she had any sexual affairs, they were covert; there is no record of her ever having had a sexual relationship or any indication of her having been anyone’s mistress, making her unique for her time.81 All of her most intimate relationships were with women. She traveled openly with a female companion whom she had met in 1724 in London, the French dancer Manon Grognet, who had performed alongside Sallé in a number of significant works.82 At the end of her life, she lived in domestic contentment in Paris with an Englishwoman, Rebecca Wick, the “aimable amie” whom her biographer, Émile Dacier, thinks Sallé refers to in one of her letters.83 To her, Sallé bequeathed her entire estate.

  The suggestion that Sallé could be a lesbian did not endear her to the predominantly male ballet goers who had adulated her in poetry and in portraiture. Whether true or not, rumors that she was of the other persuasion came to a head when, on April 16, 1734, Sallé appeared at Covent Garden in drag for a ballet she had created for Handel’s opera Alcina. In the ballet, Sallé played Cupid as a boy; given her need to inject sincerity of expression into her ballet work, Sallé defended her male costume as serving to heighten the veracity of the role she was playing. The audience didn’t buy it; the costume was interpreted as a deliberate spurning of their desire. Affronted, the audience booed her off the stage, and Sallé was subsequently lampooned with coarse language in the press.84 The Abbé Prévost wrote that wearing pants “suited her ill, and was apparently the cause of her disgrace.”85

  The incident upset Sallé greatly, compelling her never to set foot on an English stage again; it also spurred her on to retire early from the stage, which she did in 1740, at the youthful age of thirty-three. By comparison, her teacher, Prévost, danced until well into her fifties. Louis XV, a great admirer of the ballerina’s talents, granted Sallé a sizeable pension and invited her to dance before select audiences at Versailles following her departure from the stage.86 It was a testimony to how respected she had been as an artist, despite refusing to play by the sexual rules of her day.

  When Sallé died on June 27, 1756, the result of an undisclosed ailment that took her life when she was just forty-nine, the passing of this remarkably gifted avant-garde eighteenth-century ballerina was barely noticed. There was no mention of her death in the French press.87 Only the Duc de Luynes, a memoirist during the reign of Louis XV, commented on Sallé’s “consistent and singular sagacity.”88 Presumably, Camargo knew of Sallé’s passing, living at the time in the same quarter as her former rival, but she appears to have made no public statement. When Camargo died just over twenty years later in 1770, age sixty, she was still a household name. She was survived by a menagerie of animals that included six dogs, an equal number of parrots, three budgies, and twenty-two pairs of pigeons.89 Having so many birds suggests that the ballerina never tired of flying.

  Marie-Madeleine Guimard (1743–1816), however, did not just play by the rules; she bent them her way. The celebrated ballerina was not just a concubine but a pornographic priestess who orchestrated erotic performances for her high-class patrons to secure power and prestige within pre-Revolutionary French society. She openly abhorred the vogue established by Camargo earlier in the century for dizzying pirouettes, rapid rises to demi-pointe, and especially the raising of the foot as high as the hip.90 Throughout her twenty-five-year career as a leading Paris Opéra dancer, Guimard advocated a return to the graceful, elegant dancing, the noble style, such as had originated at court. The push for a return to manners in ballet was ironic, given who was doing the pushing.

  Guimard was of lowly birth, the illegitimate child of a woman who early on forced her young daughter into prostitution. But she was blessed with a natural intelligence and a buoyant wit that enabled her to manipulate the sexual marketplace within her ballet world, making it work brilliantly for her. She was, in this regard, the first ballerina-courtesan as entrepreneur, her nose always on the money. In reading Guimard’s story, it is clear she never allowed herself to play the victim. She was determined instead to own a stake in the flourishing backstage sex trade, doing it the only way she knew how, by turning it into an act of the theater.

  Her lifelong striving after material comforts may have been the result of a childhood tethered to want and misery, as outlined in her biography in 1893 by Edmond de Goncourt, member of the esteemed literary publishing family.91 Her mother called herself the Widow Guimard,92 although the man who had fathered her daughter, Fabien Guimard, an inspector of cloth factories from Voiron,93 was very much alive, emerging, conveniently, when the ballerina was at the height of her powers at the Paris Opéra and in need of a good name. He signed the legal papers when she was twenty-one, granting her the legal right to use his name. She was popularly known as La Guimard, an artist no longer as footloose as her backstage reputation for slippery moral conduct suggested. That reputation was established when she was only fifteen, the year her mother consigned her “to a pair of dissolute men who made a practice of helping young girls in order to have them as available as mistresses later on.”94

  These unscrupulous dancer-agents (said to be a Monsieur d’Harnancourt and the Président de Saint-Lubin95) placed Guimard in the corps de ballet of the Comédie-Française in 1758, when the young ballerina, presumably dashing all her mother’s hopes for her, ran off with a penniless dancer by the name of Léger, with whom she had her first child. Throughout her life, Guimard would always have a soft spot for men of her own background. Among the other great loves of her life were the dancer and choreographer Jean Dauberval (1742–1806), creator of La Fille mal gardée (1789), the first full-length ballet about ordinary people, which is still performed by classical dance companies around the world, and the dancer-turned-satirist Jean-Étienne Despréaux (1748–1820), five years her junior, whom she eventually married during the outbreak of the French Revolution. Guimard is known to have also bedded a teacher at the Opéra’s School of Dance.96 Her dancer-lovers were impoverished. But she also had rich ones, whom she used to advance her social ambitions.

  Guimard became acquainted with men of means after joining the Paris Opéra in May 1762, appearing there for the first time as Terpsichore, muse of the dance, in Les Fêtes grecques et romaines. She had been a last-minute replacement for her good friend and neighbor on the rue du Jour, the charming and coquettish Marie Allard (1742–1802), mother of the great nineteenth-century male dancer Auguste Vestris (1760–1842). The Paris Opéra star had injured her foot and was unable to perform. Guimard danced the role well enough that she was brought into the Opéra full-time as a danseuse seule, or soloist. The following year, having shown herself to be a gifted dancer with an abundance of talent and ambition, Guimard was promoted to première danseuse noble.97

  Besides being a classical dancer in the noble style, Guimard early on demonstrated a flair for the dramatic; soon after joining the Paris Opéra, she was dancing demi-caractère roles in ballets by Rameau (Castor et Pollux) and André Campra (L’Europe galante), as well as more than one hundred other roles.98 Her best role was Nicette, the simple farm girl in Maximilien Gardel’s 1778 comic ballet La Chercheuse d’esprit, a part that delighted her audience for being in stark contrast to Guimard’s worldly offstage image.99 At the beginning of her career, Guimard also danced Prévost’s Les Caractères de
la danse, a piece from the old repertory, performing it as Sallé might have done, with an emphasis on natural grace and simplicity of gesture. Her contemporary, the artist Élisabeth-Louise Vigée-LeBrun, wrote that Guimard conveyed “a sort of suggestion, using tiny steps,” and “the audience loved her more than all the other dancers.”100

  Guimard’s rapid rise through the ranks of the Paris Opéra and the ease with which she was able to harness public opinion for her benefit paralleled the speed with which she plowed through a series of high-ranking men as a born-to-it courtesan. She had a discerning eye for protectors and established lasting alliances only with those who could most help her become a powerful figure within the Opéra and in society at large. Thanks to extensive and detailed police reports documenting the comings-and-goings of Opéra employees and their influential patrons, a practice of state spying that had been established by Louis XIV and that continued unabated for more than a century, much is known about Guimard and her remarkably well-placed connections.101 She was not known to have been a beauty. She was unfashionably thin and was parodied in the press as “la squelette des graces” (the skeleton of the Graces).102 And yet powerful men found her irresistible, perhaps drawn by her legendary reputation as a genius of erotic foreplay.

  Her aristocratic lovers included Jean-Benjamin de Laborde, first gentleman-in-waiting to the king, governor of the Louvre, and amateur composer. She became his mistress when she was twenty and stayed with him for ten years. The relationship produced an illegitimate daughter in April 1763, whom Guimard forced Laborde to acknowledge publicly to spare the child the ignominy of her own upbringing.103 While involved with Laborde, in 1768 she also became mistress to Charles de Rohan, Prince de Soubise, who made her an allowance of 6,000 livres a month, in addition to gifts of jewels and gold.104 The two protectors were publicly acknowledged as l’amant utile (the lover with his uses) and l’amant honoraire (the lover bestowing prestige). They not only tolerated each other but made way for another of Guimard’s lovers, Jean Dauberval, known as her gerluchon, the name given to the man who was loved and favored by a woman with a known protector.105