MILLIONAIRES AND BALLERINAS

"KEEPING" A DANCER WAS A SOURCE OF IDENTITY,  PRESTIGE AND CREDIT

 "...Mr. Leuwen, the wealthy banker who keeps Mademoiselle des Brins, of the Opéra..."

-- Lucien Leuwen by Stendhal, 1834

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The second act over, the subscribers would meet the dancers backstage, or in a room specially designed for that purpose:

    Backstage at the Opéra by Jean Béraud, 1889 / City Museum (musée Carnavalet)

• The idealized image contributed to Paris's reputation for high-end sex:

The Foyer de la Danse, courtesy Opéra archives

"It is meant [...] as a setting for the graceful groups of ballerinas [...] one thinks of a kaleidoscope when they intermingle in thousands upon thousands of ways."

 -- Charles Garnier

• Degas's point of view

Shown at the exhibit "Degas at the Opéra," musée d'Orsay

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Those ballerinas, "the elite of Parisian pleasures:"

-- Splendor and Misery of Courtesans by Balzac (1838-47)

• "...her mother, as I have since learned, to my horror, was a dancer at the Opéra"

-- Said of the adventuress Becky Sharp
 in Vanity Fair by W.M. Thackeray 1848

By Degas

• The expression "It's my dancer" (C'est ma danseuse)...

means a pastime that absorbs huge resources and gives nothing in return. It harks back to the dancers' exorbitant demands for presents.

From humble backgrounds, usually illiterate, they left no records, and we know of them only through men who despised them.

They despised them back. The black choker Degas's dancer wears recalled a dog collar and meant, "We know what you think of us. We don't like you either."  

-- Nadège Maruta, cancan choreographer and historian,

personal communication

• Dancers' and courtisans' revenge : "At every bite, Nana devoured an acre...

She passed [...] like a cloud of locusts [...] she burned the land where she placed her little foot. Farm by farm, prairie by prairie, she bit into the inheritance [...] without even noticing, as she would munch a packet of pralines [...] but one night, all that was left was a little wood. She swallowed it with a look of contempt, for it was not even worth opening her mouth."

-- Nana by Émile Zola, 1880.

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The practice declined when the "Opéra girls" joined a strike of Opéra employees and obtained livable salaries: Subscribers' furious letters show that many girls then refused their "sponsorship." 

(In 1912)

It ended when an austère Protestant Jacques Rouché became director and ended the abonnés' privileges by financing performances himself.

(In the 1930's)

-- Pascal Payen-Appenzeller, historian of Paris,
personal communication

When Rouché's funds ran out the State took over.

(In 1939)

 

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Next,

Degas's "Little dancer"