Courtesan. Thus we call a woman engaged in public debauchery, especially when she practices this shameful profession with a kind of consent and decency, and when she manages to give to licentiousness the attractiveness that prostitution almost always removes. Courtesans seem to have been more honorable in Roman society than in ours, and more during that of the Greeks than of the Romans. Everyone knows both Aspasias, one of whom gave lessons of politics and eloquence to Socrates himself;

Phryne, who had rebuilt — at her own expense — the town of Thebes, destroyed by Alexander, and whose debauchery thus served in some way to repair the evil done by the conqueror; Lais who turned the head of many philosophers, even that of Diogenes himself, whom she made happy, and that of Aristippus, who said of her, “I possess Lais, but Lais does not possess me,” (an important lesson for all wise men); finally the famous Leontion, who wrote on philosophy, and who was loved by Epicurus and his followers. Our famous Ninon Lenclos can be regarded as the modern Leontion, but there have been few like her, and nothing is more rare among us than philosopher courtesans , if the latter name does not disgrace itself to join the former. We do not elaborate much on this topic, in a work as serious as this. We only believe it necessary to say, independent of the lights of religion, and limiting ourselves to pure morals, that the passion for courtesans disturbs both body and soul, and that it does the most dangerous damage to the fortune, health, rest, and happiness. We could remind ourselves at this moment of the words of Demosthenes, I do not purchase an expensive regret and those of the emperor Adrian, to whom one asked why we paint Venus nude; he responded, quia nudos dimittit. (she strips down those who are pleased by her nudity).

But are not false women and flirts in a way more contemptible and more dangerous still for the heart and for the spirit, than are courtesans ? It is a question that we leave to be decided.

A famous philosopher of our time examines in his natural history why love creates happiness for all beings, and the misfortune of man. He responds that it is because in this passion only the physical is good, and that the moral element, that is the emotion that accompanies it, is worthless. This philosopher neither claims that the moral component does not add to physical pleasure, experience would argue otherwise, nor that the moral component of love is only an illusion, which is true, but does not destroy the vivacity of pleasure (and how few pleasures have a real object!). He doubtless meant to say that the moral aspect is what causes all of the evils of love, and in that, we could not agree with him more. From that we conclude only that if superior lights of reason didn’t promise us a better condition, we would have much to complain about concerning Nature, which while presenting us with one hand the most seductive of pleasures, seems with the other to distance us from it by the obstacles with which it is surrounded, and which place us, so to speak, on the edge of a precipice between pain and deprivation.

Qualibus in tenebris vitae quantique periclis Degitur hoc aevi quodcumque est! [1]

Besides, when we spoke above of the honor which the Greeks rendered to courtesans , we only spoke of it relative to other populations: in effect we can hardly doubt that Greece was the country in which these sorts of women were the most honored, or if you will the least despised. Mr. Bertin, of the Royal Academy of Fine Literature, in a dissertation read to this academy in 1752, and that he graciously communicated to us, proposed to prove against a slew of authors ancient and modern, that the honors rendered to the Greek courtesans , were not given by the entire nation, and were only the fruit of extravagant passion of a few individuals. It is what the author undertook to reveal with a great number of assembled facts, which he drew principally from Athenaeus and Plutarch, and that he opposes to the facts that are the customarily alleged in favor of conventional opinion. As Mr. Bertin’s memoir is not yet printed in March in 1754 as we are writing this, we do not believe we should enter into greater detail, and we send our readers to his dissertation, which seems to us to be very worthy of being read.

Note

1. "In how great perils, in what darks of life are spent the human years, however brief!" T. Lucretius Carus, Of the Nature of Things , translated by W. E. Leonard (New York: E.P. Dutton, 1921), 45.