For Love & Money

LA BELLE OTERO by Arthur H. Lewis. 257 pages. Trident. $5.95.

THE COURTESANS: THE DEMIMONDE IN 19TH CENTURY FRANCE by Joanna Richardson. 257 pages. World. $10.95.

The profession of the fornicatrix has fallen upon seedy days. Rank amateurs have driven out the pros, giving the career field a bad name, and today's courtesans would rather provide grist for the sociologist's mill than salt for the Sunday supplements.

It was not always thus. In the turn-of-the-century fling known as la belle epoque, the courtesan was queen and her clients were often kings. In The Courtesans: The Demi-Monde in 19th Century France, Author Joanna Richardson selects an all-Second Empire team of les grandes horizontals. Her standards are stringent by definition: "A courtesan is less than a mistress and more than a prostitute. She is less than a mistress because she sells her love for material benefits; she is more than a prostitute because she chooses her lovers."

Many also achieved secondary but more lasting fame: Marie Duplessis was the prototype for the heroines of Dumas' La Dame aux camelias and La Traviata; Blanche d'Antigny was transformed by Zola into Nana and Apollonie Sabatier was the real-life la Muse et la Madone of Baudelaire's Les Flews du nuil. If these coquettes shared a single trait, it was by no means beauty but an indomitable will to succeed and the ability to overcome natural handicaps. A practical sort was Blanche d'Antigny. An inordinately heavy sleeper, she found early in her career that a chance admirer at times stole off without paying. She soon came up with a way to outwit such a lover: she would sew his nightshirt to her own nightgown before going off into slumberland.

Name Sleeper. The most notorious demimondaine of the era was a statuesque Spanish gypsy who is reputed to have amassed $15 million during an active career that spanned five decades. Her name was Augustina Otero, and her origins were humble to the point of bleakness. She was born in 1868, the second of seven bastards of a village prostitute. At the age of eleven, she was raped and rendered infertile for life. At twelve, she left home and wandered through Spain and Southern France, sharing bed for board before becoming a cabaret dancer. It was not long before she discovered her true calling.

Over the next quarter century, La Belle Otero's distinguished clientele came to include the crowned heads of England, Spain. Belgium, Russia, Germany, Persia, Monaco and Montenegro, as well as assorted dukes and princes, not to mention such uncommon commoners as Italy's D'Annunzio, an American Vanderbilt, and French Premier Aristide Briand. But she wasn't merely a name sleeper; she democratically slept with all who could afford her huge fees. "Don't forget," she once told her friend Colette, "that there is always a moment in a man's life, even if he's a miser, when he opens his hand wide." "The moment of passion?" asked Colette. "No," replied Otero, "the moment when you twist his wrist."

Curious Twins. In her dealings with men, Otero lost her professional cool but twice. Once she sought out Eugene Sandow, "the Strongest Man in the World." But he rebuffed her advances, preferring the male company of his Danish pianist roommate instead. The other object of her attentions was one half of an act named the Marco Twins --James, 6 ft. 3 in. and Dietrich, 3 ft. 6 in. It was the lower half of the team that attracted her ("Frankly, I was curious"), and one night she succeeded in satisfying her inquisitiveness. But later she discovered that the twins were not twins, not even brothers. They were husband and wife; it was the little fellow, she concluded, who was the husband. That's show business.

Otero's biographer, Arthur H. Lewis (The Day They Shook the Plum Tree), is a former newspaperman in the old copydesk tradition, relying heavily on choice clips and spicy quotes. He also does his duty by psychology and suggests that the fatherless Otero's entire life may not have been so much a triumphant romp as a protest against the man who raped her. If so, she certainly kept on protesting--and protesting. She had her last lover, it has been said, at 60. A compulsive gambler, she had lost her entire fortune by 1926 at the casino at Monte Carlo. She died only two years ago, at 96, in Nice, poor, solitary, devoutly religious, and apparently at peace.

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