The type of the “grande cocotte” is encountered in its genuine and unadulterated form only in Paris. Here the demi-mondaine plays a great part in public life. The time of the earlier mistresses of princes, with their political intrigues and their far-reaching spheres of influence, is indeed over—a Lola Montez, an Aurora Königsmark is to-day no longer possible; and yet the Parisian demi-mondaine maintains influential relationships with the new great power of our time—the power of the press. The journalists who are in the service of the demi-monde are by George Dahlen termed the “Press-Fridoline,” because “their pens are paid, not with ducats, but with more or less enviable hours of love in distinguished boudoirs”;[311] and Victor Joze also describes the advertisements—paid for by a night of love, or perhaps only by a smile—which the writers of Paris give in the newspapers to the distinguished cocottes of the Quartier Marbœuf or of the Avenue du Bois de Boulogne, in order to attract the attention of Indian nabobs, Russian Grand Dukes, or American millionaires, to this or that fashionable beauty. This is characteristic of Paris. In other great capitals marketable gallantry does not seek publicity in this way, but pursues a more hidden course.
For what the German, and especially what the Berliners, term the “half-world” is very different from the type we have just described of the true Parisian demi-mondaine. Our half-world (the half-world of Berlin) is recruited for the most part from intelligent prostitutes, who are to be found chiefly in the public gardens, in the Zoological Gardens, in the Lehrter Ausstellungspark, and in the leading restaurants. Here every evening they seek new prey, every evening they sell their charms to a new lover for a definite sum of money; whereas the true lady of the half-world never has at any time more than one or two admirers, who provide for all the expenses of her life, and she never—at any rate in public—practises professional prostitution, as do the women just described.
Finally, there is yet another type, which must not be confused with the demi-monde. This is the international prostitute, who journeys from one place to another, has indeed often the appearance of a distinguished lorette, but leads a much more insecure, unstable life than the true demi-mondaine, and often combines with prostitution the profession of an adventuress. Now she is in Paris, now in London, now at Biarritz, now at Monte Carlo (the principal field of her activity), now in Constantinople, Smyrna, St. Petersburg, or Berlin. Sometimes she undertakes a voyage of discovery to the New World. Germany provides a not insignificant percentage of these international cocottes. Such wanderers are especially well known in the circles of officers and of speculators on the Bourse; by these they are not seldom “recommended,” after the manner in which a traveller is given letters of introduction. They may even be “raffled for,” as recently happened in an officers’ mess in Munich, and so pass to the share of the fortunate (generally much to be commiserated) winner. Abroad they prefer to adopt French or exotic names.
[243] Here, in the phrase “man at length become self-conscious,” we have the animating idea of this work, as it is of all fruitful efforts at the amelioration of the human lot. See the admirable development of this idea in E. Ray Lankester’s Romanes lecture, “Nature and Man”; and also in H. G. Wells’s later writings, more especially “A Modern Utopia” and “New Worlds for Old.”—Translator.
[244] That this opinion is false, I have proved incontestably as regards syphilis in my book, “The Origin of Syphilis” (Jena, 1901). For the European and Asiatic world, syphilis is a specifically modern disease, not more than 400 years old.
[245] Venice, 1534.
[246] “La Lozana Andaluza” (“The Gentle Andalusian”), by Francesco Delicado. Traduit pour la première fois, texte Espagnol en regard par Alcide Bonneau, 2 vols., Paris, 1888. Regarding this work, see my book “The Origin of Syphilis,” vol. i., pp. 36-43.
[247] Cf. also the interesting work of Salvatore di Giacomo, “Prostitution in Naples in the Fifteenth, Sixteenth, and Seventeenth Centuries, based on Unpublished Documents,” revised in accordance with the German translation, and provided with an introduction by Dr. Iwan Bloch (Dresden, 1904).
[248] Reprinted in his “Satyræ Medicæ XX.,” pp. 528-549 (Leipzig, 1722).