Mademoiselle de la Force, before devoting herself to fairy tales (as Madame d’Aulnoy had done before her), used to dance at Ménilmontant with Monsieur de Briou, who knew whole pages of L’Astrée by heart, and was handsome and a minor aristocrat with a large fortune. Monsieur de Briou’s father was opposed to their affair and locked his son in a room overlooking the palace courtyard. So Mademoiselle de la Force hired a strolling player to take his dancing bears into Monsieur de Briou’s courtyard. Mademoiselle de la Force danced naked and drenched in sweat, sewn up inside the skin of a bear, beneath her lover’s window, and even managed to get close enough to arrange another encounter with him as she beat time with her paws. After the performance, the strolling player handed a basketful of figs to his bears and led them back toward the Pont-Neuf.
“A neighbor in the Combourg district had come to spend a few days at the chateau, along with his very attractive wife. Something happened in the village, I don’t remember what; we rushed to one of the drawing room windows to see. I reached there first, the visitor was running behind me, I wanted to offer her my place and turned toward her; she unintentionally cut across my path, and I felt myself squeezed between her and the window. I lost all sense of what was happening around me.”
“A black girl of thirteen or fourteen, almost naked and of singular beauty, opened the barrier to the enclosure like a young Night. We bought corn cakes, chickens, eggs, milk, and returned to the house with our pitchers and our baskets. I gave the young African my silk handkerchief: I had been welcomed to the land of freedom by a slave girl.”
“On those same pavements where ragged folk and men in frock coats are now seen strolling, young girls used to pass wearing white capes, straw hats tied under their chins with ribbons, baskets on their arms, with fruit or a book; all of them used to keep their eyes lowered, all of them would blush when someone looked at them. ‘England,’ says Shakespeare, ‘is a nest of swans among the waters.’”
UNE FEMME CURIEUSE: Voluptuousness is a state of the imagination that precedes, accompanies, and follows pleasure. It can be compared with that appearance assumed by trees in a park, the steps of a stairway, the outline of a manor house, when lit by the moon. A luminous glow then reveals the glory of their nature; and they are wrapped in a wonderfully sweet halo.
Madame Tallien, Juliette Récamier, and Joséphine de Beauharnais appear at the Bal des Victimes in Abel Gance’s film Napoléon, looking like three déesses of the Folies Bergère and faithful to the légende even in their Voluptuousness. Here, they are not parading on a brightly lit catwalk: all they have to do is descend a few gray steps on which they radiate “a sweet luminescence” (as one newspaper put it), while in the background, through the prison bars, the distant light of the outside world casts a halo around their shoulders and their hair. The film has a mauve tint: the camera lingers on the open tunics of these flappers of the Directory. Bonaparte, a sullen voyeur, draws back into a corner. The camera starts moving again as the dancing begins: among the bodies, which mingle, ever more softly, we no longer distinguish the curve behind a knee from that of a neck or arms. In this celluloid carnality, Glory bursts out of its revolutionary sackcloth.