MEN, MONEY AND MEALS: AN ALIMENTARY READING OF MARGOT LA RAVAUDEUSE (1753) CATHERINE ROSE ELLIS

Born into a humble family in the poor east end of Paris and put to work as a stocking-mender by her mother, a young woman named Margot begins her sexual life in a grotty riverside cabaret on the Quai de la Rapée. There, she loses her virginity to her first love, a loutish ostler called Pierrot, with the occasion accompanied by a simple meal of cheap bread, wine and cheese. When her mother discovers she has been giving her earnings away to fund her beloved’s drinking and gambling, Margot flees home and finds her way to the Tuileries Gardens, where a benevolent woman, one Madame Florence, buys her café au lait and petits pains, and sweeps her off to join her boarding house in exchange for services undisclosed. The house is, of course, a brothel, where she sits down to a luxurious dinner of wines and ragouts with her new colleagues, whom she soon realizes are sex workers. The dinner rapidly turns into a drunken brawl and a food fight. At Florence’s brothel Margot cuts her teeth in the sex trade and develops a profound cynicism about the great and the good of society. There, she services a parade of grotesque clients, before finally leaving after an encounter with a troupe of musketeers when she is the only woman available to entertain them – no fewer than thirty times during their visit. After venturing out alone, she finds shelter with a lubricious clergyman, then a hawker and her lover, a priest with a sideline as a procurer, before joining the Opéra as an actress and to join the ranks of Paris’ dames entretenues (kept women). As her work becomes more stable, so do her finances. She hypnotizes men with her beauty, receiving money and jewels in exchange for her favours. These clients are less than entrancing, however, and sully her apartments with drunkenness, vomiting, and English cuisine

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