To the Empress Exoticism was like a palliative for the disdainful attitude of Royalist society, and it seemed as if she surrounded herself by these crazy people, who transformed the Palace into a sort of Babel, to revenge herself for the aloofness of the Royalists. Thus she was surrounded by a throng of women throwing glances all round, and sometimes their lips--women with hoydenish ways, eccentric tastes, feverish desires, amorous and tempting laughs, like an assembly of foreign and French Sultanas, whose nationality and difference of blood disappeared in the supreme object, pleasure. In the chroniques these women were qualified by the word “Cocodettes”; in history they are classified as “Femmes de l’Empire.”
The latter have left a special reputation. They remain as the absolute representation of an epoch of voluptuous aspirations, of pleasures of the flesh, of feverish passions. The men were merely “supers.”
The greater part of the responsibility fell upon the women. The sensualism which filtered through their bodies, the thrills of passion which animated their bosoms, captured men. In those days they loved readily and madly.
Young men, dominated by the intoxication of the flesh which stole into their brains, forgot the things of the heart; the “male” replaced the “man.” They had not to look far for their ecstasies, when women concealed their souls to show their beautiful limbs. It was an orgy--a perfumed, coquettish, gracious orgy, all the more seductive because it was veiled, because it was full of caresses; élégance was everything.
Some of these women, overcome by a thirst for orgies and by the vertigo impelling them to seek the unknown, roamed the boulevards by night in quest of an adventure, or betook themselves to the Opéra masked balls, finishing their Odyssey in a cabinet particulier.... Roman history was fashionable under the Empire, and people played at being Romans.
Others, of a more poetical temperament--perhaps less ardent, certainly more sober outwardly--found pleasure in intrigues with clerics. Louis XV. abbés are not rare in Paris, and more than one priestly hand could write interesting memoirs. These men who live with Christ have a magnetic influence over some women. They do not understand the ordinary priest--the priest of the people. They want to find in their priest a man of fashion; he must have a perfumed stole, just as they demand, at the altar, a gold or an ivory crucifix to kiss. Were it of wood it would kill their unreasoning faith, and they would fly from it; a plain, severely-cut soutane would be a terrible blow to their senses.