"Cauteriser la plaie": the Lorette as social ill in the Goncourts and Eugene Sue. (2024)

Throughout the nineteenth century, French writers centered their ambivalence to changes brought about by capitalism, modernity, revolution as well as evolving gender roles on the figure of the prostitute, fantasizing that these problems could be eradicated through her destruction, containment or punishment. Only in keeping the actions of the marginalized prostitute in check could some sense of order be restored. The figure of the lorette was no exception. Indeed, Edmond and Jules de Goncourt, in their physiologie La Lorette (1853), and Eugene Sue in his short story "La Lorette" (1854),"strive to seal off the prostitute's threat in their writing by exposing her menace to society as the contagious purveyor of social ills" (Sullivan 195). She is the metaphorical festering wound whose infectiousness must be contained with what the Goncourt brothers call the "fer chaud" of their harsh words. (1) The Goncourt brothers proclaim themselves the first writers to dispute the lorette's glorification in an epigraph preceding the title page of La Lorette (Second edition, 1853). (2) They assert: "Les dates sont quelque chose dans un livre, si petit que soit ce livre. Nous prions donc le lecteur de vouloir bien faire attention aux dates de publication de ces six articles. Il verra ainsi qui, le premier, a proteste contre l'assomption de la Lorette." (3) It should be noted that only a decade before, writers and caricaturists celebrated the lorette as the new "it" girl who eclipsed the figure of the grisette and that indeed, these short texts by the Goncourts and Sue mark a pivotal point in the way mid-nineteenth-century French writers changed the way they portrayed the harlot. Though the Romantics such as Victor Hugo in Marion de Lorme portrayed the prostitute as the harlot with a heart of gold, (4) the Goncourts and Sue's characterization of the lorette heralded not only a backlash against this figure, but also anticipate the misogynist portrayals of the prostitute as dirty, infectious, depraved, and man-eating depictions of prostitutes by writers in the later part of the nineteenth-century, most notably Emile Zola's creation of Nana.

In order to contextualize the Goncourts and Sue's denigration of the lorette, I will briefly outline the history of this literary figure. What the Goncourt brothers call the "assumption" of the lorette began when Nestor Roqueplan coined the fashionable neologism" lorette" to capture the novelty of the district near the Notre-Dame-de-Lorette church and the new money associated with the artists and prostitutes who haunted this ninth district neighborhood in the early 1840s. Up to this point in the July Monarchy, the grisette had prevailed in Paris. During the 1830s, grisette referred to a struggling seamstress, who, in contrast with the streetwalker, lived in the Latin Quarter with her sole lover--normally a financially strapped law student or bohemian. Writers praised her for her industriousness, naivety, and cheerfulness in times of hardship. Throughout the 1840s, writers portrayed the "lorette" as a sort of popular muse in plays, poems, songs and articles, and paired her in their works with impoverished artists and bohemians, store clerks and law students. Indeed the diminutive "ette" of her name reinforced her humble economic and social status. (5) The "lorette" denoted a kept woman who lived in relative luxury in the new apartment buildings constructed near Notre-Dame de Lorette. More cunning, competitive, and ambitious than the grisette, she sought to increase her financial and social position by entertaining several lovers at one time.

In this article, I argue that for several writers, the lorette embodies the important societal and financial changes of the period. As the 1840s progressed, the stock market gained ground, the bourgeoisie grew richer from the factories and railroads in an increasingly industrialized France, and the neighborhood around Notre-Dame de Lorette blossomed and boomed. In fact, Nestor Roqueplan coined the fashionable neologism "lorette" to capture the novelty of the district and the new money associated with it. Thus, the shift in focus from the grisette to the lorette reflected the social and economic changes of the 1840s.

Historically, the advent of the lorette marks a key shift in the myths of illicit sexuality, for her arrival signals a transition between the opposing fictions of the harlot with a heart of gold and the demi-mondaine as the personification of prurient sexuality and political misconduct. More specifically, at the beginning of her reign, writers idealized the lorette in the same way that they had the courtisane and the grisette in the romantic works penned in the 1830s. Indeed, the earliest representations of the lorette, as sketched by Gavarni and outlined by Nestor Roqueplan, characterize her as alluring, charming, and amusing. By casting her as the symbol of Breda, the new neighborhood in the ninth arrondissem*nt, they praise the lorette's novelty and associate her with modernity. Nevertheless, in later texts by Maurice Alhoy and Alexandre Dumas, while the writers appreciate the lorette's charm, they are nonetheless wary of her sketchy background and her unprincipled pursuit of wealth. For this reason, Alhoy and Dumas not only link the lorette to social climbing and scheming, but also to capitalism. These writers use the lorette as a screen upon which they project their fears and frustrations about the rapid social transformations taking hold as industrialization pushed France toward modernization. Indeed, Dumas claims in his Filles, lorettes et courtisanes that because the lorette is "presque un objet de terreur," her social, political, and intellectual relations should be examined if her threat is to be diffused (60).

As Rita Felski has suggested in The Gender of Modernity, the fact that writers made the lorette their "collective screen" is typical of tales of the modern era (60). (6) Though she does not address the phenomena of the lorette per se, her theory about the need to concretize historical processes in the form of an individual certainly holds true for representations of the lorette. Felski asserts: "The prostitute, the actress, the mechanical woman--it is such female figures that crystallize the ambivalent responses to capitalism and technology which permeated nineteenth-century culture" (20).

Felskis's theory, when applied to the lorette, interprets the artists' and writers' characterizations of her as a manifestation of their own conflicted desire to earn money without compromising their artistic originality. Indeed, the privileging of commodity over a single work of genius in exchange for currency often guaranteed them coveted financial security, and oftentimes, wealth. Such artists, however, frequently equated selling their works to the highest bidder with the act of prostitution in which a public woman sold herself to the client who provided her the money she demanded. (7) At its simplest level, writers and artists created the mythical image of the lorette to entertain their readers; nonetheless, the curious vocabulary they used and the quirky anecdotes they recounted signal a fascination and repulsion with prostitutes and the modern changes they represented.

On the one hand, this fascination may be read in part as a curious faith in the future, despite the ugliness and uncertainty brought about by revolution and instability. Dumas claims in Filles, lorettes et courtisanes that the lorette was responsible for society's ills. According to Dumas, the lorettes gained notoriety by the "ravage que celles qui les portaient (the name "lorette") firent bientot dans la societe" (60). On an unconscious level, however, the artists were drawn to the prostitute because they needed to have a figure to embody the multiple forces over which they had no control. In directing their attention to the prostitute, they compressed their uncertainty into one figure and in their fantasies managed to master this figure and thus experienced a sense of relief. Indeed, of the lorette, Dumas writes "On voulut la connaitre pour la combattre, l'etudier pour se defendre" (60). Thus in his view, society could master the lorette so long as it studied her. On the other hand, the disgust with the prostitute not only stems from apprehensions about female sexuality (fear of castration), but also from the terror of decomposition, decay, and contagion that haunted the French psyche throughout most of the nineteenth century. (8) Beginning with the deadly cholera outbreak in the early 1830s and increasing with scientific positivism in the second half of the century, the threat of degeneracy permeated the texts and influenced the treatment of prostitution in novels, plays, short stories, paintings, and caricatures.

In a word, throughout the social and financial tumult of France, both the grisette and the lorette function as social constructions that embody the anxieties and ideologies of their respective periods. The lorette represents fears about rapid economic change in the 1840s. Indeed, as Lucette Cyzba contends in her article "Paris et la Lorette" the lorette stands for the changes industrial capitalism and real estate speculation brought on bourgeois social customs and spending habits, as well as the transformations it caused the city's urban layout. (9) Cyzba's analysis of the influence Gavarni had on stereotyping the lorette, and the manner in which she highlights the objectification of this kept woman adds much to the scholarship on prostitution. I will nonetheless argue that the texts examined in this article that treat the lorette depict her as more than an empty sexual object who enlivens a bourgeois's stifling marriage as Cyzba has claimed. While it is interesting to examine how the lorette's expensive eating habits and luxurious clothes reflect the increasing bourgeois consumption of goods, I assert that what the lorette emblematizes is more than the superficial trappings of wealth and the immoral sexual habits of the bourgeois made possible by capitalism: she embodies anxieties about modern social transformations spurred by what Cyzba calls 'Tessor du capitalisme industriel et de la speculation immobiliere" (107).

Indeed, the lorette captivated writers and figured prominently in literature because she emerged in response to their reactions to the fascinating social transformations of the period. According to the Grand Dictionnaire Universel du XIXe siecle,

 La lorette, en sa qualite fascinatrice, a exerce une notable influence sur la litterature; les moralistes ont analyse et explique ses moeurs, ces dessinateurs ont fait apparaitre sa silhouette a toutes les pages de leurs albums. Qu'on feuillette l'album de Gavarni, les Partageuses, les Fouberies de femmes, le Carnaval, les Lorenes, on verra quelle place tenait la lorene dans les preoccupations du moment, du 1840 a 1850. C'est la qu'elle est etudiee sous toutes les faces, par un esprit eminemment observateur.

Although the passage from the Grand Dictionnaire indicates a specific time period, it does not detail in full the lorene's "qualite fascinatrice" that so intrigued the writers and caricaturists who recorded her manners and customs. These modern "preoccupations du moment" included fluctuations in the social order, technological advances, and an increasing emphasis on the pursuit of wealth.

To be sure, ambiguity about social standing ruled the period, as individuals like the lorette profited from the anonymity of the city, invented fictions about their cultural status, and used wealth to purchase prestige. Questions of class legitimacy played out against the backdrop of urban transformations of Paris, as the city increased in size due to the large influx of provincial workers looking for employment in the city's new factories. The hidden worlds within Paris, particularly the realm of underground crime depicted in Balzac (Vautrin's seedy associations in Illusions perdues, le Pere Goriot, and Splendeurs et miseres des courtisanes), in Eugene Sue (les Mysteres de Paris), in Victor Hugo (Notre Dame de Paris), fascinated writers throughout the nineteenth century. (10) The neighborhood around Notre-Dame de Lorette was no exception. According to the Grand Dictionnaire, the lorettes flocked to this neighborhood because "les proprietaires ne furent pas d'abord tres exigeants sur le chapitre des loyers et toutes la boheme galante vint y installer ses nids" As a result, young artists, in search of cheap rent and pretty models, joined the lorette in her neighborhood. In this new section of Paris, several classes intersected. Upstart bourgeois furnished apartments for lorettes to flaunt their new wealth and even the socially distinguished Goncourt brothers inhabited the same building as a prostitute as they note in their November 10, 1856 Journal entry: "Une putain du nom de Garcia, qui loge au second--appartement de douze cents francs--envoie emprunter par sa bonne a Rose 'la moindre des choses, cinq francs.. "" (216). Stockbrokers, who were sometimes ruined aristocrats and sometimes upperclass bankers, wandered into the nearby neighborhood in search of sex. In some cases, grisettes who had graduated into lorettes, sneaked their student paramours into their furnished apartments while their lovers were out. Because the lorette juggled lovers from several different social backgrounds, she came to symbolize the mingling of classes so frequent in the district.

Moreover, Felski purports that the prostitute's body suggests "the breakdown of social hierarchies in the modern city" (19). Indeed, the lorette best emblematizes the confusion over the scrambling for social class validation, at least according to Dumas's accounts, for she serves as a sort of social leveler, exploiting lovers from all classes. According to Dumas, "En effet, art et fnance, bourgeoisie parvenue et aristocratie ruinee, fils de banquiers, fils de famille, fils de prince, fils de roi, tout se jeta dans la Lorette (60)." A popular song entitled "La Lorette" by G. Nadaud, confirms the lorette's social promiscuity in the name of wealth and ambition. The narrator in the song is a lorette who announces: "Arriere, arriere Pauvrete fiere/Je suis lorette et je regne a Paris." (11) The gifts and furniture she receives from her lovers tell the story of her life. In addition to ageing French deputies, the lorette in Nadaud's song frequents men of all nationalities, haughtily claiming: "Mieux que Guizot, de ma diplomatie/Je sais partout etendre les filets." Her ability to circulate among the classes makes her dangerous, for she fools others about her origin in order to extract wealth from them.

In their physiologie La Lorette, which was first published under the title of "Les lepres modernes" in 1852 in L'Eclair, the Goncourts take issue with the lorette's wantonness which threatens male mastery and corrodes social mores. According to Robert Kopp, they published the work to deflate the lorette's influence by countering the manner in which Dumas fils romanticized the harlot with the heart of gold in La Dame aux camelias (xxvi). As the Goncourts have argued, "il est des plaies qu'on ne peut toucher qu'au fer chaud," and prostitution is one of them; indeed, an acerbic tone colors their 60-page physiologie which they call in their preface "quelques lignes du cru, du brutal meme." (12) To be sure, they paint a merciless portrait of the lorette, exhorting her beastly comportment, her immoral means of securing money, "her inferiority to the courtesans of the past, her capacity to dominate, degrade, and corrupt, as well as her lowly, violent background" (Sullivan 194). Following in the tradition of Alexandre Parent-Duchatelet's 1837 De la prostitution dans la ville de Paris, these brief quips by the Goncourts in their "Lorette" chapter emphasize her animality, her uncouthness, her stupidity, her lack of manners, and her boisterousness when they aver:

 Elle mange comme une vivandiere. Elle est bete. Elle est impertinente comme la betise. Celle-la, dans un dejeuner du bal masque, s'ecrie: "Quatre heures! Maman epluche des carottes!" Il est des Lorette reputees droles. Celles-la cassent les verres du dessert, les glaces du vin chaud, chantent du Beranger au garcon, ou font le grand ecart. Toutes n'ont ni esprit, ni gorge, ni coeur, ni temperament. Toutes ont meme dieu: le dieu Cent Sous (11-13).

Though in many ways they are rehashing stereotypes established by Alhoy, Dumas, and Gavarni, their terse, sarcastic sentences deflate any airy idealistic image of the lorette. As for the illicit manner in which she earns her living, the Goncourts avoid the euphemisms and jeu de mots employed by Dumas and Alhoy; rather they directly name her ignoble pursuit of riches:

 Elle fait l'amour pour se faire rentiere. Elle n'aime pas qu'on la caresse, parce que cela chiffonne sa robe. Elle ne veut pas boire, parce que cela pourrait amener la livraison avant paiement (11).

The direct references to her being paid to deliver sex are daring, albeit not as explicit as the Goncourts' graphic description of their trips to bordellos as outlined in a Journal entry from 1853. (13) It should be noted that their Journal reveals their fear of being taken back to the Police correctionnelle for indecency as they had been the previous year for allegedly composing an immoral "quatrain" describing a nude by Diaz (79).

Despite their "realistic" candor about the prostitute selling her body, the Goncourts nonetheless fall back on the romantic myth of the glorious ancient courtesan who could never be surpassed by the vulgar contemporary lorette. They assert:

 Venez voir, vous qui viviez votre vie sans savoir ou elle vous menait, o vous qui jetiez le fond de votre coupe a l'avenir, et votre couronne fanee aux soucis qui s'empressent, et votre tete a toutes ivresses, et votre coeur a tous les vents, et vos levres a toutes les bouches, venez voir le vice avare de lui-meme, et cette maigre carottiere: la Lorette! (14)

As this quote illustrates, the Goncourts extol the ancient hetaera, opposing the selfless and generous love of the courtesan with the crude egoism of the lorette in order to further scar the modern prostitute's reputation.

According to the Goncourts, the lorette's illicit sexual behavior must be curtailed because she inflicts sex role reversals on her clients that vanquish male virility. Indeed, the riches her lovers spoil her with only exacerbate her desire to dominate, for in the chapter that ridicules the cuckolded "Vieux Monsieur" who lusts after her, another frightening image of woman on top emerges. In a scene that anticipates Zola's portrayal of Nana asking Muffat to act like a horse or dog on all fours for her in chapter thirteen, the Goncourt recount the ridicule old men expose themselves to by submitting to the whims of their mistresses. The Goncourts, through the voice of a certain Champfort, recount the misadventure of the duc de La Valliere:

 La petite Lacour,- dit Champfort,- traitait ainsi le duc de La Valliere. Elle lui otait son cordon bleu, le mettait a terre, et lui disait:--Mets-toi a genoux la-dessus, vieille ducaille! Ainsi il se met a genoux sur sa vieillesse, le miserable vieillard! Rive au pieu, ce mot terrible dont l'argot a baptise le lit des sales amours, il a fait de ses cheveux blancs le hochet de la Lorette; et puis, vient un jour oU la femelle, rentee par lui, lui crache, brutale et cynique, ses degouts a la face: 'Eh bien, vas en trouver une autre, pour aimer un homme qui sent le rance!' (31-32)

The lorette demands that the "vieille ducaille" get down on his knees--only to later be spit upon later by the prostitute who complains about his musty odor. In this harsh anecdote, the pathetic submission of the old man is almost as contemptible as the heartless behavior of the lorette. This decrepit patriarch "qui sent le rance" is not above the Goncourt's severe judgment because he allows himself to be dominated--and hence emasculated by a vulgar woman of inferior social standing who reduces a duke into the pseudo-feminine "ducaille" Even worse, he neglects his daughter--a woman with significant social status--in order to boost his weak ego with a prostitute.

The Goncourts further condemn the lorette's illicit sexuality by exposing the way it infiltrates the spirit of her inferiors, just as it has destroyed the life of the superior "ducaille" Thanks to her mistress's promiscuity, her maid, muse the Goncourts, has developed the genius of facilitating the entrances and exits of all the lorette's lovers. Though her adeptness for lies, her fondness for lowbrow Paul de Kock, and her drinking in the morning are amusing, the fact that "La bonne a l'ambition d'etre MME" underscores the vicious influence the lorette has over her (54). The Goncourt write: "La bonne fait le lit de Madame sans rougir, et, en se baissant, sa petite croix de la Jeannette sautille les draps fripes" (54). In effect, the lorette's lasciviousness has contaminated her maid to the point of impiety and sacrilege by instilling in her the desire to lead the same vulgar life.

The authors' blunt sentences leave no room for any fluffy embellishments associated with the romantic faith in the harlot with the heart of gold. Rather, as precursors of naturalism, the Goncourts focus on the social and hereditary factors that shaped the lorette that they will further explore in Germanie Lacerteux and La Fille Elisa. Consequently, the brief anecdotes they provide oversimplify the factors that drive her to prostitution and reiterate in a sharper, more lethal tone the platitudes about the lorette as a "type social" in the physiologies by Dumas and Alhoy. Nonetheless, their terse dismissal of the lorette marks an important turning point in nineteenth-century French literature in signaling an unrestrained backlash against her figure. This move opens the floodgate to a new genre of literature treating the containment of the prostitute that continued throughout the rest of the century and which is now hailed as canonical.

THE DEVIL VS. THE LORETTE

Eugene Sue's 1854 "La Lorette" dovetails with the Goncourts' work and shares the same objective. However, Sue employs different narrative strategies that are even less subtle than the Goncourts' method. Sue warns the reader in the introduction, that his "recits ne seront pas sans moralite" (10). Indeed, his narrative serves as a pretext to warn readers about the dangers of the lorette and the capitalism she is aligned with, whereas the Goncourts' work critiques the lorette and her society without offering any sort of morals. It is important to note that Sue was influenced by Fourier and is considered by critic Armand Lanoux as promoting socialism, whereas the Goncourt brothers were staunchly aristocratic.

"La Lorette" appears in the first tome of Sue's Diable medecin series that the renowned feuilletoniste invented to rival Balzac's all-inclusive depiction of Paris. The diabolical-looking doctor is a "medecin des femmes" who entertains women with his knowledge of occult sciences. Subsequently, he annoys men jealous enough of his popularity with the ladies to snidely refer to him as the devil. Much like Balzac's Vautrin, he is able to penetrate every social class and to expose the secrets of "les types les plus tranches de la femme contemporaine" (10). Though contemporary readers are well acquainted with the epic struggle between good and evil in Sue's nearly canonical Mysteres de Paris, I believe that the obscurity of the present tale calls for a concise summary of it. Sue sets the scene with a portrait of Georges Ducantal, whom he depicts as a hard working and economical courtier de commerce who is saving both for his daughter's dowries and for his retirement. Despite his miserly habits and vulgar manners, he is a good man at heart who loves his wife and his two daughters. Sue launches the narrative with Ducantal's fall from grace: his petit bourgeois trajectory is interrupted when he catches the "fievre d'or" after learning one of his friends earned a hefty sum from the stock market. Ducantal was inspired by his friend's luck, and risks his 20 years of savings (60,000 francs) and takes away 600,000 from his investment. Instead of giving his daughters large dowries and retiring early, Ducantal continues betting. Not wanting to spoil his wife and daughters, he hides his fortune from his family and turns himself over to a world of "faiseurs" "agioteurs and femmes perdues"--a prototype of Dumas fils's 1855 Demi-monde.

To further accentuate the heedless greed of the lorette who will ruin Ducantal, Sue juxtaposes Ducantal's decadent but secret existence with the misery his saintly wife and humble daughters endure at home. In one scene, they sew shivering by candlelight, too afraid to waste money by throwing another log on the tire. Sue focuses on the wife's weekly money-saving sacrifices that require her to brave the cold as well as the unsavory individuals at Les Halles. As such, Sue contrasts her virtue with the "bad" woman the wife secretly frets has turned Ducantal against his family.

The wicked woman is none other than Emilia Lambert, one of the most fashionable lorettes in Paris. Though Ducantal neglects his family to furnish a sumptuous apartment for this cold, haughty beauty, she complains that her rival Helene has more money. Sue warns the reader early on that she is not to be trusted: the description of Emilia's brown hair is suspect, because it clashes with her fair eyes, and she has not only changed her name but also hidden a love affair with a store clerk. When the Diable medecin arrives at Emilia's home to treat her cough, he is immediately appalled by her behavior and lectures the lorette on her rudeness and ingratitude. Our introduction to her ends with Ducantal's fortune continuing to augment. In order to keep his richer rival, Malicorne, at bay, Ducantal gives in to Emilia's desire to conquer Helene with a more sumptuous hotel.

In order to dramatize the way the deviant lorette is harming the honest bourgeoise, Sue features a scene in which Madame Ducantal is trampled by Emilia's carriage horses. As a result Ducantal's daughters learn at the scene of the accident that their father is indeed rich and supporting the lorette who nearly killed their mother. The dutiful daughters say nothing, but the injured wife scolds Ducantal, saying: "Votre fille et moi, nous avons manque d'etre ecrasees par la voiture d'une femme que vous entretenez" (270). As further proof of Ducantal's degeneration, Sue depicts Ducantal as ready to hit his wife rather than repent for his immoral behavior.

His wife's ailing health does not stop Ducantal from hosting an "orgie" at the Maison-Doree. The revelers' idea of wealth and "superflu" horrifies the doctor, who cannot believe the amount of luxury items they waste in an impromptu soup they concoct of champagne, pheasants, pineapples, candles, oysters, out-of-season strawberries and peas, and a chef's hat. Their watering of the asphalt with the 20 bottles of champagne that remain equally scandalizes the doctor, who interrupts the orgy with a lecture on why the rich should invest their money in crops and farms to benefit society. Moreover, through the voice of the doctor, Sue the socialist condemns the vulgar gests of wealth the stock brokers and lorettes as "improductives, steriles, egoistes, ruineuses, signes certains de l'avilissem*nt et de la corruption des moeurs publiques" (293) Soon after, Ducantal learns of his ruin. Distraught that he no longer has any money to support Emilia or his wife and daughters, he is at first horrified by his shameful actions. He locks himself in a study and ignores the pleas of his forgiving wife and daughters. He boosts: "Bah, j'ai joui,' then shoots himself.

Unfazed by Ducantal's death, Emilia schemes after Malicorne, but she is interrupted by the Diable medecin, who tells her that he knows her true identity: she is the thief Madeline Froquet who escaped from a prison in Montpellier in which he once treated her. When he threatens to turn her in unless she pays him 100,000 francs, she begrudgingly gives him the money, which he, in turn, offers to Ducantal's wife and daughters, thereby providing them with enough money to live comfortably the rest of their lives. In punishing the transgressions of the bourgeois and lorette with death and financial ruin at the end of the tale, and in rewarding the dutiful, thrifty bourgeois Ducantal women, Sue reestablishes the bourgeois values weakened by prostitution and capitalism. Throughout his story, Sue insists that capitalism is a contagious and dangerous illness. Moreover, the "fievre d'or" that infects Ducantal is a euphemism for capitalism, a force that Sue labels the "epidemie regnante" of the era. This fever makes Ducantal prey to the sycophant Emilia, who, blinded by greed, ruins Ducantal and his family. Sue maintains that her wicked behavior is contagious and that it must be monitored to prevent it infesting itself as jealousy among the proper bourgeois women who, blinded by riches and opulence, might be tempted to take the immoral path of the lorette. As the "pretresses" "du luxe" the lorettes enjoy the separation of public and private spheres which not only keeps their rivals at home, but grants them special status as the privileged few to possess "le vice et le chic!" (285-86). The get-rich-quick schemes of opportunists and their lorettes threaten the patriarchy in two ways: 1) such scams wrongly convince arrivistes like Ducantal into believing that "la speculation charrie des flots d'or" and that making money and wasting it on a lorette for fun is more important than supporting a wife and children; and 2) these intrigues encourage lorettes to flaunt their wealth, making the honest women jealous of their affluence and likely to abandon the self-abnegation that keeps them submissive. If honest women decide to imitate the lorettes, they will neglect their motherly and domestic duties, thereby destroying the stable bourgeois household on which the Second Empire is based. Just as Sue's tale warns women against coveting the lorette's lifestyle, it also sends a message to bourgeois men: placing personal pleasure ahead of conjugal and societal duty will end in dishonor and, possibly, death.

Far from subtle, Sue's narrative directly links the epidemic mercantilism of the period to prostitution. He mocks those who gage the State's wealth by the amount of money individuals invest in prostitutes and finds the conflation of capitalism and prostitution threatening. Through the doctor's tirade at the orgy, Sue criticizes the growing habit of speculation as well as Guizot's call to the bourgeois to enrich themselves. For Sue, the lorette emblematizes what is wrong with the capitalism if one considers the doctor's belief that the lorettes will be remembered as "les arrosoirs d'ou s'est ecroulee a flots d'ors la richesse publique" (296). Capitalists such as Ducantal and lorettes like Emilia are what Sue calls "improductive and sterile"--for Ducantal as the phallic watering can squanders both wealth and sperm on the sterile cement that represents the lorette's barren womb and empty future. Just as the rich bourgeois is ejacul*ting into the mythically infertile prostitute without reproducing a child that represents an investment in the community, capitalism encourages the squandering of wealth by a few individuals on luxury goods and services that evaporate like champagne on a sidewalk. Such waste is a crime according to Sue, because the general public could benefit from the money thrown away by a few.

In Sue's view, society must be purged of capitalism for it exists as a type of illness. Sue writes: "Cette sanie morale demande un remede heroique. Le fer et le feu sont seuls efficaces contre la gangrene. Essayons, dans ce recit, de cauteriser la plaie, au risque de faire crier le malade" (242-43). By linking capitalism to the lorette and the rhetoric of contagion, Sue equates mercantilism with prostitution, a threat already familiar with a public increasingly wary of venereal disease and the growing number of women walking the streets. Through his choice of the word "gangrene" Sue appeals to emotion of those worried about the spread of contagion Parent linked to prostitutes some 15 years before Sue penned this narrative. Sue thus holds that capitalism, like the unethical practice of prostitution, must be contained for the good of society. To achieve this, Sue puts scathing words into the doctor's mouth that are meant to be so acidic they seal off the festering wound of capitalism as represented by the lorette.

Though Sue's black and white morality tale in which the rich are punished and the honorable avenged is at times banal for its didacticism and lack of nuance, it nonetheless benefits scholarship on prostitution because it is one of the earliest examples of the backlash against the lorette. Indeed the desire of Sue and the Goncourts to cauterize the social wound of prostitution with tire calls to mind the notion of "sealing up" the prostitute's story that appears in Barbey d'Aurevilly's Les Diaboliques (1874), specifically "La Vengeance d'une femme" and "A un diner d'athees." In psychoanalytical terms, Charles Bernheimer addresses the reasons that drive Barbey to contain the prostitute. Her sexuality becomes threatening, Bernheimer argues, for "She asserts her independence of the male plot at the very moment when the male thinks he is inscribing her body into it. This assertion, which stimulates narratively productive castration fears, becomes the object of complex strategies designed to put those fears to rest and achieve narrative closure" (88).

There is little in Sue and Goncourts' stories that would support a psychoanalytical reading of the fear of castration as it exists in Barbey; nonetheless, the narrative strategies that Bernheimer locates apply to these two works on the lorette because they have the same aim: to control the image of the unruly prostitute in a way that allays anxieties projected onto her. For Barbey, the fear of the emasculating vagin* drives the plot to dominate the prostitute, whereas for the Goncourts and Sue, worries about capitalism and female emancipation as embodied in the prostitute instill the need to regulate her image.

In a sense, the Goncourts' protests against the lorette's "assomption" and Sue's objection to the lorette and the bourgeois idealization of money with which she is associated are efforts to "seal off" the lorette's influence and hence achieve "narrative closure:' Though perhaps eclipsed by more famous texts like Alexandre Dumas fils's La Dame aux camelias and Emile Zola's Nana, the Goncourts' La Lorette and Sue's tale of the same name nevertheless epitomize the writers' tendency to project their fears of contagion and social instability onto the figure of the prostitute in works written in the second half of the nineteenth-century. When the Goncourts protest the lorette's glamorization, they not only signal her demise, but also announce the arrival of the demimondaine, the deviant mangeuse d'hommes who will replace her.

WORKS CITED

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Augier, Emile and Edouard Foussier. Les Lionnes pauvres. Piece en cinq actes en prose: Representee pour la premiere fois a Paris, sur le theatre de Vaudeville, le 22 mai 1858. Paris: Michel Levy, 1858.

Balzac, Honore de. La Comedie humaine iii. Geneva: Cercle du Bibliophile, 1972. --. Splendeurs et miseres des courtisanes. Paris: Garnier Freres, 1964.

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Barriere, Theodore de and Lambert Thiboust. Les Filles de marbre. Drame en cinq actes mele de chant. Paris: Calmann-Levy, 1883.

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Corbin, Alain. Les Filles de noce: Misere sexuelle et prostitution au xixe siecle. Paris: Flammarion, 1978.

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Courtney A. Sullivan

Department of Modern Languages

Washburn University

Topeka, KS 66621

NOTES

(1) See Sullivan 194-95.

(2) Concerning the publication of the work, Andre Billy asserts: "Dedicated to Gavarni, La Lorette was published in the summer of 1853. In it these reputed romantics boasted of being the first to protest against the apologias of the courtesan in love. La Lorette was their fifth work.... At Dentu's bookshop in the Palais-Royal, La Lorette, 6,000 copies of which were printed, was sold out in a week and a little later was reprinted with a vignette by Gavarni" (49).

(3) In the second edition, the Goncourts list the dates after the chapters on "La Lorette" (3 novembre 1852), and "Papa et Maman" (26 janvier 1853). They do not however list the dates for "Le Loret" "Le Vieux Monsieur," "les Messieurs de Passage," or "la Bonne." The second edition of this in-64 tome features chapter divisions, but no pagination.

(4) For more on the figure of the reformed courtesan, please see chapter two of Charles Bernheimer's Figures of Ill Repute.

(5) According to the Grande Encyclopedie, her moniker was a metonymy for the rough material of cloaks worn by the working class.

(6) Felski states: "Accounts of the modern age, whether academic or popular, typically achieve some kind of formal coherence by dramatizing or personifying historical processes; individual or collective human subjects are endowed with symbolic importance as exemplary bearers of temporal meaning" (60).

(7) In Henri Murger's Scenes de la vie de boheme, Jacques devotes his energy to his lover Francine, and is subsequently ostracized by the ascetic Buveurs d'Eau because he has placed comfort over art. Because the buveurs d'eau prize art above all else, they drink water so as to not offend their artistic colleagues too poor to buy wine. A large part of their philosophy consists of scorning those who would sacrifice artistic integrity for profit.

(8) For more on the fear of decomposition in nineteenth-century France, see chapters 7 and 8 in Bernheimer's Figures of Ill Repute

(9) According to Cyzba, the word lorette "connote simultanement l'evolution des moeurs de la bourgeoisie contemporaine, les progres d'une societe de consommation, la mutation profonde de la ville, du cadre urbain, par suite de l'essor du capitalisme industriel et de la speculation immobiliere" (107).

(10) The effects of industrialization on France and urbanization in Paris also shape literature as described in Flaubert (l'Education sentimentale, 1869), in Baudelaire (Peintre de la vie moderne, "Les Yeux des pauvres," 1864) and in Zola (la Curee, 1874, Au bonheur des Dames, 1883).

(11) The Grand Dictionnaire as a catalogue of popular culture sheds light on what the lorette meant to the public at the time by including "La Lorette" by G. Nadaud, a song the Grand Dictionnaire claims is an encyclopedia in itself.

(12) Even some rive years later in a Journal entry dated Jan. 16, 1857, the Goncourts pro pose branding the loette with a hot iron in order to identify this dangerous being they claim has invaded society and who governs societal customs and scandalously occupies the "loge a cote de votre femme?' Indeed, in order to keep the lorette in her place the Goncourts warn a prostitute one evening: "Vois-tu, il viendra un jour oU l'on te marquera avec un fer chaud un phallus sur l'epaule" (231).

(13) In their description of the bordello "Les Parques" the Goncourts note: "Dix sous. De tres jeunes gens branles dans l'escalier, pour deux sous. Bonne maison faisant bien ses affaires: il y vient des gens riches et des gens timides. Pas de femmes au-dessous de soixante ans. Les femmes ont de vieux beguins maternels pour les enfants" (Journal 82).