The Intimate Sex Lives of Famous People (23 page)

and at least once considered herself on the brink of madness. Tallish, with a good body, she had fair skin, long eyelashes, auburn hair, and almond-shaped hazel eyes.

She lived in France for two years, during the time of the Reign of Terror, and was a member of the Girondin circle (the Girondins lost their power while she was there) and the lover of the American Gilbert Imlay. Back in London, she ended up living with, and then marrying, William Godwin. Mary died from complications following childbirth. When Fanny, Mary’s daughter by Imlay, killed herself at 22, she was wearing her mother’s corset, monogrammed “M.W.” Mary’s daughter by Godwin, named for her mother, was to become Mary Shelley, the author of
Frankenstein
. Before eloping, young Mary and her lover, Percy Bysshe Shelley, paid final tribute to Mary Wollstonecraft by joining hands over her grave.

LOVE LIFE:
Early in her life Mary had passionate, though probably nonsexual, relationships with women. She was essentially modest, shocked by the “jokes and hoyden tricks young women indulged themselves in,” and she felt that

“women are in general too familiar with each other.” However, she wrote possessive, loving, jealous letters to Jane Arden, a childhood friend, and her relationship with Fanny Blood, whom she met when she was 16 and Fanny was 18, was “a friendship so fervent, as for years to have constituted the ruling passion of her mind,” according to William Godwin. Mary and Fanny lived in the home of Fanny’s parents and ran a school together. Fanny was in love with Hugh Skeys. He finally married her in 1785 and took her to Lisbon, where she died during childbirth. Her death threw Mary into a long depression.

Mary tended to like young romantic men and middle-aged geniuses like painter Henry Fuseli, a member of Joseph Johnson’s circle, who was short, melodramatic, married, and bisexual. It is unlikely that Mary slept with Fuseli, though she was obsessed with him. She didn’t entirely approve of his character.

“I hate to see that reptile vanity sliming over the noble qualities of your heart,”

she once wrote him. When she asked his wife, Sophia, if she might live with them as “an inmate of the family,” Sophia threw her out. Meanwhile Mary turned down a number of marriage proposals and coined the phrase “legalized prostitution” as a synonym for marriage.

Gilbert Imlay, first of the two major loves of her life, was an American frontiers-man and writer, somewhat shady, tall and lean, with a “steady, bold step.”

It was probably in a Left Bank hotel room that Mary first had sexual intercourse, at the age of 33 or 34. “I don’t want to be loved like a goddess, but I wish to be necessary to you,” she told Imlay. When he was off on business, she wrote him love letters rhapsodizing on his glistening eyes and the “suffusion that creeps over your relaxing features.” In May, 1794, Fanny was born, and their passion faded after that. Mary followed Imlay back to London, where he was having an affair with an actress. Mary proposed a
ménage à trois
, but the other woman would have none of it. Twice Mary tried suicide, once by jumping into the Thames from Putney Bridge in the rain. “I would encounter a thousand deaths, rather than a night like the last,” her suicide note to Imlay read. “May you never know by experience what you have made me endure.” She was rescued by boatmen.

On Apr. 14, 1796, she boldly paid a call on William Godwin, the moral radical philosopher, whom she had met at an intellectual gathering five years before. (At that first meeting he had disliked her for talking too much, saying Thomas Paine couldn’t even get a word in.) A genius with a head too large for his body, Godwin was known for his integrity and kind heart. It was a case of “friendship melting into love,” he later said. That summer they became lovers, though after their first night together, she felt that he had acted “injudiciously,” and decided to return to her role as a “Solitary Walker.” He convinced her to continue the affair. It was domestic and joyous; they sent notes to each other constantly. In November she wrote, “I have seldom seen so much live fire running about my features as this morning when recollections—very dear, called forth the blush of pleasure, as I adjusted my hair.” That month she missed her period. (She probably knew of no method of birth control other than Godwin’s “chance-medley system,” a kind of rhythm method he may have introduced her to.) Against their basic principles (neither was religious), they were quietly married in church on Mar. 29, 1797. They did not live together. Mary wanted her husband “riveted in my heart” but not “always at my elbow,” yet she was jealous when a Miss Pinkerton flirted with him.

Their child, Mary, was born Aug. 30 with the help of a midwife. (Mary gave the job to a midwife rather than a male doctor as a form of feminist protest.) However, the placenta wasn’t expelled and a male physician was called in. He tore the placenta in pieces from her uterus with his hands, a procedure that caused her great agony and probably gave her puerperal fever. Puppies were brought in to suck off her excess milk, because she was too ill to breast-feed her child. When she was given opium for pain, she said, “Oh, Godwin, I am in heaven,” and he, who had been tenderly nursing her, replied, “You mean, my dear, that your physical symptoms are somewhat easier.” She died Sept. 10.

HER THOUGHTS:
“I think there is not a subject that admits so little of reasoning as love.”

“The heart is very treacherous, and if we do not guard against its first emotions, we shall not afterward be able to prevent its sighing for impossibilities.”

“A master and mistress of a family ought not to continue to love each other with passion … to indulge those emotions which disturb the order of society

… a neglected wife is, in general, the best mother.”

—A.E.

V

The Pen is

Prominent

Caffeinated Casanova

HONORÉ DE BALZAC (May 20, 1799–Aug. 18, 1850)

HIS FAME:
French master of the realistic novel, Balzac was a genius fueled by

coffee, lust, and ambition. He wrote

some 97 works, including two dozen

volumes of
La Comédie Humaine
(“The

Human Comedy”).

HIS PERSON:
Balzac endured a miserable childhood in Tours with an

indifferent mother. She sent him off to

boarding school and soon gave birth to a

“love child” whom she openly preferred

to him. After completing law studies at

the Sorbonne and working three years as

a law clerk, Balzac locked himself in an

attic in 1819 and started his writing

Balzac liked this 1848 picture for its “truthfulness”

career. It would be another 10 years

before he established his reputation with
Les Chouans
. In the interim, he was a hack writer, launched a shortlived printing concern, and speculated in a Sardinian silver-mining operation which drove him beyond the brink of debt.

Throughout his life he remained imprudent about money.

Inspired by a desire to be the Napoleon of novelists—near his desk was a marble bust of the late emperor—Balzac began his typical workday at midnight.

Dressed in a monastic white robe, he would write, wearing out a quantity of goose-quill pens and pausing only to drink several dozen cups of coffee in the next 16 hours. One could not write, he believed, without quantities of black coffee.

Between books he would reach other extremes, eating orgiastically and engaging in simultaneous love affairs as he charted a course through high society.

His reputation as a novelist who “understood” women grew, and so did the number of his female admirers. Portraits do not reveal him to be especially attractive; he stood 5 ft. 2 in. and was grossly overweight. His dark hair dripped pomade and he wore even the best clothes badly. He had dirty fingernails and picked his nose in public. For his charm to shine through, however, he had only to speak; all of his conversation sparkled with vitality and wit. A lover of worthless and often useless antiques, he collected canes with handles of gold, silver, and turquoise.

Inside one handle, he claimed, was the nude portrait of a “secret mistress.”

Balzac’s literary genius captured the essence of bourgeois life. He converted simple “romance” into a record of human experience. On his deathbed, he is said to have cried, “Send for Bianchon!”—a doctor he created in
La Comédie
Humaine
. To the end, Balzac was different; of all the great writers to have died of drinking, he was probably the only one for whom the fatal brew was coffee.

SEX LIFE:
“A woman is a well-served table,” Balzac observed, “which one sees with different eyes before and after the meal.” By all accounts Balzac devoured his lovers as voraciously as he enjoyed a good dinner. Young girls bored him. He preferred mature women and launched virtually every affair by saying, “I never had a mother. I never knew a mother’s love.”

Despite his bizarre appearance, he had no trouble finding willing women and he was a virtuoso at juggling his numerous affairs. (It is surprising that he had time for such dalliances, given his immense literary output.) A number of the 12,000 letters he received from female admirers contained explicit proposi-tions, many of which he accepted. He struck a responsive chord in these readers with his sympathetic delineations of unappreciated matrons. Biographer Noel Gerson refers to Balzac’s virile and experimental bedroom manner. Apparently he had been instructed by many courtesans over the years. “He slept with aristocrats, courtesans and trollops indiscriminately,” wrote Gerson, “displaying in his love life the same dazzling diversification that appeared in his writing. His yearning for romance, like all of his other appetites, was insatiable.” Considering his indifference to fidelity, it is noteworthy that he also had at least two very tender and enduring affairs of the heart.

SEX PARTNERS:
Balzac boasted of his chastity during his early days of writing, but at 23 he was introduced to sexual passion by Laure de Berny, a 45-year-old grandmother. Madame de Berny was prototypical of the lonely older woman with an inner fire so frequently depicted in his work. Their relationship lasted 15 years.

In the beginning of this affair, Balzac also found time to carry on with a wealthy widow, the blond Duchesse d’Abrantes. He met her in 1825, when she was 40, and set his sights on making love to this woman who had slept with Prince Metternich. Another of her charms was her fortune—always an irresistible feature in a woman—and she paid some of his mounting debts. The two reigning passions of his life—women and fame—were in part fueled by a desire for the money they could provide. He became increasingly promiscuous with age and always maintained the energy required for his demanding double life as lover and artist.

In 1832, however, he suffered rejection at the hands of the Marquise de Castries, one of the most beautiful aristocrats in France. She was perhaps the first woman of note who simply could not overcome the revulsion she felt at his appearance. Balzac got his revenge by ridiculing her in his novel
La Duchesse de
Langeais
. The episode left him feeling vulnerable and depressed; he was 33, and his debts were mounting. Madame de Berny was aged and he felt the need for a protectress more than ever. Then he received an intriguing letter from the Ukraine signed “The Stranger.” Balzac replied and discovered the writer, Evelina Hanska, was married to a baron. The following year Balzac and Evelina secretly met in Switzerland; they found each other plumper than they had hoped, but no matter.

They fell in love. For years they conducted a passionate correspondence. Evelina promised to marry him when her elderly husband died. Occasionally they would meet in various European cities for lovemaking that was, as he described it, “honey and fire.” Balzac did not deny himself the attentions of other women, however, and throughout this time he dallied with 24-year-old Marie Louise du Fresnay, who bore him a child. She passed the infant off as her husband’s. He also had a two-month affair with the most “divinely beautiful” woman he had ever seen, the notoriously promiscuous Lady Ellenborough. Another affair—with Frances Sarah Lovell, the reputedly “highly sexed” wife of Count Guidoboni-Visconti—lasted five years. She affectionately called him “Bally,” paid many of his debts, and bore him a child. Throughout all of this philandering Balzac kept up his association with various prostitutes, sometimes two at a time. In 1841 Evelina Hanska’s husband died, and Balzac, troubled by his coffee-assaulted stomach, was finally willing to settle down. But Evelina, who was now pregnant with Balzac’s child, refused to marry him. The child was stillborn. Balzac moved in with another mistress, Louise Breugnol, and his health began to fail. When he was near death, Evelina took pity on him and, 17 years after they first met, they were wed. Balzac would die five months later, with his wife asleep in the next room.