The cocottes of Paris

Casino de Paris. Plenty of stylish cocottes here, in whom Tertia and Lizzie [his sisters] were tremendously interested. Which reminded me of C’s saying, about the married woman’s way of remarking, ‘Ça dit être une cocotte’ [that must be a whore]. But Tertie and Lizzie now confess their interest, and insist on going to another music-hall on Monday night in order to see more cocottes. Yet when I told them of the idea I had discussed with Frank, of writing a handbook or practical guide for cocottes, for the private joy of friends, they were certainly startled. I can always tell when they are really a little shocked. - Saturday, October 31^st 

 I was told today that, as I thought, the most distinguished of the music-hall cocottes went to the Casino de Paris; and also that they did business comparatively infrequently, but what they did was very remunerative. This latter statement I regarded with suspicion, as also the following: that a particular woman, tall, very distinguished, and very well dressed and well jewelled, who I had often admired in various resorts, had an absolute minimum of 250 francs. It seems she goes about in a pair-horse carriage in the evening, by some sort of arrangement with the coachman. I was told that many cocottes pay their coachmen either partly or wholly in love. This woman, by the way, sometimes brings to the Casino her young child, of 7 or 8 years old perhaps, I have seen them together there, and the effect was certainly effective. - Tuesday, November 3^rd 

                                                                                         -   from the Journals of Arnold Bennett, 1903

The cocottes of Paris

Casino de Paris. Plenty of stylish cocottes here, in whom Tertia and Lizzie [his sisters] were tremendously interested. Which reminded me of C’s saying, about the married woman’s way of remarking, ‘Ça dit être une cocotte’ [that must be a whore]. But Tertie and Lizzie now confess their interest, and insist on going to another music-hall on Monday night in order to see more cocottes. Yet when I told them of the idea I had discussed with Frank, of writing a handbook or practical guide for cocottes, for the private joy of friends, they were certainly startled. I can always tell when they are really a little shocked. - Saturday, October 31^st 

 I was told today that, as I thought, the most distinguished of the music-hall cocottes went to the Casino de Paris; and also that they did business comparatively infrequently, but what they did was very remunerative. This latter statement I regarded with suspicion, as also the following: that a particular woman, tall, very distinguished, and very well dressed and well jewelled, who I had often admired in various resorts, had an absolute minimum of 250 francs. It seems she goes about in a pair-horse carriage in the evening, by some sort of arrangement with the coachman. I was told that many cocottes pay their coachmen either partly or wholly in love. This woman, by the way, sometimes brings to the Casino her young child, of 7 or 8 years old perhaps, I have seen them together there, and the effect was certainly effective. - Tuesday, November 3^rd 

                                                                                         -   from the Journals of Arnold Bennett, 1903

Marrying a girl

Saturday, November 7^th – I dined at Mrs D.’s, and her sister Mrs L. was there. They were talking about an old lady who had fallen violently in love with a young man, really very violently. He wouldn’t marry her, because he was too proud to have it said that he, a poor young man, had married a rich old woman for her money. On the other hand she wouldn’t have an irregular liaison. So they live together platonically in the same house. It was understood that if he left her the desertion would kill her. At the moment the old lady is dying, not expected to recover.

   They both said that they could see no more objection to a man taking money from a woman than a woman taking it from a man. They could not understand a man marrying a girl; it was too disgusting, cruel, etc. For ‘girl’ read ‘young virgin’. (I said nothing would induce me to marry a girl.) Yet Mrs L. told me that at 16½ she had run away with her present husband, she being then engaged to another man. She said, ‘Passion and all that sort of thing has vanished  long since. All I can say, with regard to my feeling for my husband, is that when he comes into the room I always feel soothed. I could not imagine myself being able to live with any other man.’ I met Mr L. at  Mrs D.’s some months ago, and I was quite sure that intellectually and imaginatively he is decidedly his wife’s inferior.

                                                                      Arnold Bennett's Journal - Saturday, November 7th 1903

Parisiean Pimp

At the restaurant in the Hippodrome I saw the notorious ‘Pipe-en-bois’ with two young and naïve and rather ugly girls, sisters. ‘Pipe-en-bois’ is a corset-maker in a large and successful way of business, and a shareholder in many Parisian theatres. He is a perfectly ordinary common-looking man, quite without chic, a long spreading auburn beard, and bad necktie, rough hair, short of stature. He has keen eyes. He is a coureur [a chancer]; enjoys himself every night. Known in all the coulisses [back-stage at the theatres] of which he has the run; favourite of all the chorus girls. He gets hold of beginners, dines and sups them, and loves them without further payment. I should say, very shrewd and rusé [smart] under that frank air of simple joyousness. They say he is extremely keen in business, and a grudging task-master. His wife takes a large share in the management of the business. They understand each other, these two, and go their own separate ways. Certainly a ‘type’, this man. Age between 45 and 50.

                                                                    Journals of Arnold Bennett - Friday, November 27, 1902

The corps de ballet

We went to see Faust at the Opéra. A performance exquisitely free from any sort of distinction. But between the acts, from the balcony, we had amazingly good views of the illumination of the Avenue de l’Opéra for the King and Queen of Italy. It was only a trial illumination and was ‘out’ at 11 p.m. The only part of the opera that we enjoyed was the ballet. I noticed the business-like air and habits of the corps de ballet; how they calmly tested shoes and hair in the middle of the stage; and the enormous potential activity of their legs – strong, muscular, and elegant, but not exactly pretty, animals. And how the whole ‘convention’ of the piece was changed, and cleared of all sentimentality and make-believe, and sickliness, while the ballet lasted. As if the corps said: ‘Now understand, no mistake, no pretence, this is a ballet and nothing else, a thing by itself, complete in itself, and we shall execute it regardless of everything except the rules and convention of the ballet. You must forget Faust for a while.’ I was much struck with this.

                                                                Journals of Arnold Bennett - Wednesday, October 14th 1904

Observing the Nude

At the press view of the New English Art Club, Egyptian Hall. About 10 people, half women, in the one gallery sparsely hung with eccentric landscapes imitative of early Italian and Dutch work, a few soft hazy portraits, a few intelligent originalities, a few sterile meaningless absurdities, and one striking, shouting, insistent, dominant nude by Wilson Steer. In the centre of the gallery a table with sandwiches, wines and cigarettes, which everybody carefully avoided in spite of whispered invitations from a middle-aged male attendant.

   Seated in front of the nude - a slim woman of 30, with full and red cheeks sitting up in a very large bed – were a man and a woman talking In loud Kensington tones which outraged the prim silence of the gallery. After a long time he joined in the conversation of the other two, and they began even more loudly to discuss the nude, dispraising it in a few light easy sentences of condemnation. It certainly was not a masterpiece with its hard, laboured, unreal flesh-painting, but the manner of this condemnation almost made me like it.

   When I next turned round the art critic had withdrawn and the other man was elaborately raising his silk hat from his grey head to the departing woman. She left him to talk to another woman in a corner and then stood alone staring around the gallery. She was a tall, well-developed woman of 34 or less, with the face and bearing of a Sunday-school teacher; her thick mouth worked in that calculating contemplative way that I have noticed in Sunday-school teachers with a passion for gossip at sewing meetings. To see her in the street no-one would have dreamt that she was a professional art critic, capable of discussing – however foolishly – an uncompromising nudity with her male acquaintance for half an hour at a time.

                                                                           Journals of Arnold Bennett - Friday, November 13th 

Reading Habits

The appearance today of the first volume of a new edition of Boswell’s Johnson, edited by Augustine Birrell, reminds me once again that I have read but little of that work. Does there, I wonder, exist a being who has read all, or approximately all, that the person of average culture s supposed to have read, and that not to have read is a social sin? If such a being does exist, surely he is an old, a very old man, who has read steadily that which he ought to have read 16 hours a day, from early infancy. I cannot recall a single author of whom I have read everything  - even of Jane Austen. I have never seen Susan and The Watsons, one of which I have been told is superlatively good. Then there are large tracts of Shakespeare, Bacon, Spenser, nearly all Chaucer, Congreve Dryden, Pope, Swift, Sterne, Johnson, Scott, Coleridge, Shelley, Byron, Edgeworth, Ferrier, Lamb, Leigh Hunt, Wordsworth (nearly all), Tennyson, Swinburne, the Brontës, George Eliot, W. Morris, George Meredith, Thomas Hardy, Savage Landor, Thackeray, Carlyle – in fact very classical and most good modern authors, which I have never even overlooked. A list of the masterpieces I have not read would make a volume. With only one author can I call myself familiar, Jane Austen. With Keats and Stevenson I have an acquaintance. So far of English.  Of foreign authors I am familiar with Maupassant and the Goncourts. I have yet to finish Don Quixote.

   Nevertheless I cannot accuse myself of default. I have been extremely fond of reading ever since I was 20, and since I was 20 I have read practically nothing (except professionally, as a literary critic) but what was ‘right’. My leisure has been  moderate, my desire strong and steady, my taste selection certainly above the average, and yet in 10 years I seem scarcely to have made an impression upon the intolerable multitude of volumes which ‘everyone is supposed to have read’.

Journals of Arnold Bennett - Thursday, October 15th 1896