The Intimate Sex Lives of Famous People (39 page)

Brulard
. His “ticket” won. A French

writer of the 19th century who wrote, he

said, for the liberated “happy few,” he has

been appreciated far more in the 20th

century than in his own, particularly for

his two “realist” novels,
The Red and the

Black
and
The Charterhouse of Parma
.

HIS PERSON:
Someone once asked

Stendhal what his profession was, and he

answered, “Observer of the human heart.”

Stendhal at 57

The heart he observed was often his own;

he described it with candor, accuracy, and much detail in his voluminous journals.

It was partly because of his appearance that he was so self-conscious. Though he had a radiant smile and well-shaped hands, Stendhal was no beauty. He lost most of his hair at an early age and chose to cover his pate with a purplish wig; his nose was thick, his cheeks were fat, and his legs were short. In later life, he developed a paunch. Once he expressed the desire to be a tall, blond German.

To compensate for his unprepossessing appearance, he cultivated a brilliant wit. “I’d rather be a chameleon than an ox,” was his motto, and a chameleon Marie Henri Beyle was, with more than 200 pseudonyms, among them Stendhal (his favorite), Dominique, Machiavelli B., Old Hummums, and Mr. Myself.

In contrast, his writing was simple and direct, and he worshiped the truth.

When a boy of 16, he left his hometown of Grenoble and his materialistic father, who had raised him “under a bell jar,” to study at the École Polytechnique in Paris. However, instead of enrolling, he lived in a garret and roved the streets expecting to find damsels to rescue. He himself was the one who was rescued—by a distant relative, Noël Daru, who found Henri ill, gave him a room in the Darus’

Paris home, and got him a secretarial job with the ministry of war. In 1800 Stendhal traveled to join Napoleon’s army in Italy, a country he adored for the rest of his life. Until 1814 he served on and off in the army; in 1812 he was with Napoleon during the retreat from Moscow. Battle disgusted him. After he rejected military life, he settled in Austrian-ruled Milan until 1821, when rumors claiming he was a French spy or an Italian revolutionary made him fear imprisonment. On returning to Paris, suffering from unrequited love for an Italian woman,
The Pen Is Prominent
/ Stendhal contemplated suicide, but he immersed himself in his writing instead. A return visit to his adopted homeland ended abruptly in 1828 when the Austrian police expelled him from Milan as a subversive. A magnanimous Stendhal nevertheless published his enthusiastic tribute to Italy,
Roman Journal
, the following year. In 1831, after the Austrians found him unacceptable for a post in Trieste, Stendhal accepted a consulship in Civitavecchia, located in the Papal States. Here he felt intellectually isolated and bored. Although his official duties were light during the next seven years, he started three books which he never completed.

He died of a stroke at the age of 59, his
chasse de bonheur
(“pursuit of happiness”) over. As he had requested, his tombstone was engraved with
Arrigo
Beyle, Milanese, Visse, Scrisse, Amoò
(“Henri Beyle, Milanese, He lived, He wrote, He loved”). It was a fitting epitaph for the creator of
Beylisme
, a method of deliberately cultivating the senses and the mind, which was expressed in the equation “Happiness = love + work.”

SEX LIFE:
Many of the women Stendhal loved were unattainable, including the first. He wrote, “I wanted to cover my mother with kisses, and that there not be any clothing…. I always wanted to give them to her on the breast.” She died when he was seven.

As he walked with his tutor, his 12-year-old eyes “devoured” a good-looking nun who passed them. Noticing the boy’s reaction, the tutor thereafter changed their route. Stendhal was also erotically aroused by paintings (“To bathe like that with lovely women!” he mused, standing before a landscape showing nudes in a stream), music, nature, and the glimpse of his Aunt Camille’s thigh as she descended from a wagon.

When he was grown, his love objects were often married women who refused to sleep with him. This did not lessen his relentless, though awkwardly shy, pursuit of them. And while he couldn’t always have what he wanted, he still enjoyed an active sex life. His first encounter, in Milan in 1800, was probably with a prostitute. He said of it, “The violence of my timidity and of the experience have absolutely killed my recollection.” However, he never forgot the result; a venereal disease, possibly syphilis, plagued him intermittently for the rest of his life. In the spring of 1806 he recorded another casual sexual encounter, this one with a serving maid in a doorway. Afterward, he accompanied her to her room for more sex, then left in the morning “thoroughly disgusted and ashamed,” but he also contemplated returning to her room to try anal intercourse.

His sexuality was affected by his state of mind. Of one sexual failure (followed in the morning by victory), he said that anxiety “agitated my mind too much for my body to be brilliant.” In a depressed mood in the summer of 1821, he attended a party where the guests were young men and prostitutes.

During the orgy, he was impotent with the prostitute Alexandrine—a “complete fiasco,” he said. She rejected his offer to bring her to orgasm manually, and then reported his impotence to the rest of the company, thus generating a story that circulated around Paris. His novel
Armance
was about an impotent man. Yet he wrote of having intercourse with a woman seven times in a row and of additional many-times-in-one-night bouts with other women. At 50 he confessed his interest was waning, that he could “quite easily pass a fortnight or three weeks without a woman.”

Although he was overwhelmingly heterosexual, an appreciator of women, he was once attracted to a Russian officer sitting next to him in a theater. “If I had been a woman, this lovable officer would have inspired me with the most violent passion.”

He died a bachelor.

LOVE LIFE:
In 1835, by the shores of Lake Albano, near Rome, Stendhal wrote in the sand the initials of his major loves:

a d

i l ine pg

de

r

V. A . A . M. M . A. A

. A . M . C. G. A.

He mused on the “amazing follies and sillinesses” they made him commit and noted that he had not even possessed all of them. He loved one enough to list her twice. In his order, they most likely were:

V.
—Virginie Kubly, a tall married actress whom he worshiped from afar while a teenager in Grenoble. Seeing her approach in a park, he fled from the

“burn” of her closeness. He never spoke to her.

Aa.
and
Apg.
—Angela Pietragrua (“Gina”), a married Milanese with flashing eyes whom he met in Milan in 1800. He was too shy to tell her of his love.

In 1811, again in Italy, he pursued and finally made love to her. To mark the occasion, he had his suspenders embroidered: “AP 22nd-September, 1811,”

and wrote, “It seems to me that perfectly pure pleasure can come only with intimacy; the first time, it’s a victory; in the three following, you acquire intimacy.” Their affair was studded with quarrels, signals (half-open windows), and barriers (two nuns sleeping in an adjoining bedroom). Gina’s performance in bed with another man, which he watched—unbeknownst to her—through a keyhole, made him think of “puppets … dancing before my eyes.” Initially it made him laugh, then depressed him. They broke up in an art gallery with Gina “clinging to my garments and dragging herself on her knees…. assured-ly she never loved me more than on that very day.”

Ad.
—Adèle Rebuffel, whom he met while having an affair with her mother.

She was then a child of 12. In his four-year pursuit of Adèle, the furthest he got was to put hand on her breast.

M.
—Mélanie Guilbert (called Louason), an actress with whom he lived in Marseilles from the summer of 1805 to the spring of 1806. On an outing in the countryside, he saw her bathe nude in a river, a vision like the painted nudes that aroused him when he was a boy. After she went back to Paris, he wrote, in disillusionment, “I desired passionately to be loved by a melancholy and slender woman who was an actress. I was, and I didn’t find sustained happiness.”

Mi.
—“Minette,” or Wilhemine von Griesheim, blond daughter of a Prussian general, who rebuffed his advances.

Al.
—Angéline Béreyter, an opera singer with whom he had a three-year affair, during which she taught him songs from various operas. Sometimes she had as many as nine orgasms a night, but he complained that their physical happiness robbed him “of much of my imagination.” In another list of his lovers, he said he never loved her.

Aine.
—Alexandrine Daru, wife of his cousin Pierre, double-chinned and decent, who never gave in to his blandishments, which included caressing her gloves as though they were her hands and tracing an
A
in the sand.

Mde.
—Mathilde Viscontini Dembowski (“Métilde”), a sympathizer with the revolutionary movement in Milan, whom he loved unrequitedly from 1818

to 1821. For her he turned down other women—though not all, as a case of gonorrhea he contracted in 1819 attests. Once he undertook to follow her to another town, where he contrived to pass by her in a disguise consisting of green spectacles and a large overcoat. She inspired his book
On Love
, a “scientific” study of love, in which he explained his concept of “crystallization”—love so powerful it transforms one’s beloved into a perfect being. The book sold 17

copies in its first ten years of publication. By the end of 1820, his pursuit of Métilde reached “
le dead-blank
.”

C.
—Countess Clémentine Curial (“Menti”), married, 36 to his 41 when their affair began. Once for three days, he stayed cooped up in a cellar, while she brought food and emptied his chamber pot and provided sex. In love with someone else, she ended the relationship in 1826, causing him great pain.

When she was 47, he tried to revive their affair, but she said, “How can you love me at my age?” and refused to consider it.

G.
—In 1830, Giulia Rinieri, a 19-year-old aristocratic virgin, attempted to seduce Stendhal, saying, “I am perfectly aware, and have been for some time, that you are old and ugly,” and then she kissed him. After hesitating for several months, he slept with her, then later that year asked for her hand in marriage but was rejected.

Ar.
—Alberthe de Rubempré, married, witty, a little crazy, in love with the occult. Their affair lasted six months, but he was in love with her a “month at most.” After he died, she tried, in a séance, to summon up the shade of

“poor Henri.”

HIS ADVICE:
Aug. 1, 1801, from his diaries: “Like many others, I’m embarrassed when it comes to _____ a respectable woman for the first time. Here’s a very simple method. While she’s lying down, you start kissing her lightly, you titillate her, etc., she begins to like it. Still, through force of habit, she keeps on defending herself. Then, without her realizing what you’re up to, you should put your left forearm on her throat, beneath her chin, as if you are going to strangle her. Her first movement will be to raise her hand in defense. Meanwhile, you take your _____ between the index and middle finger of your right hand, holding them both taut, and quietly place it in the _____…. It’s important to cover up the decisive movement of the left forearm by whimpering.”

—A.E.

The Tormented One

AUGUST STRINDBERG (Jan. 22, 1849–May 14, 1912)

HIS FAME:
Considered Sweden’s greatest playwright, Strindberg revolutionized

the world’s theater with a prolific outpouring of critical writings and dozens of

plays that still are performed today,

including the masterful
Miss Julie
.

HIS PERSON:
The fourth child born to

his parents—who had wed just a few

months before his birth—Strindberg had

a tormented youth. His father declared

bankruptcy, and the family’s poverty

forced Strindberg to wear ill-fitting

hand-me-downs and consequently suffer

the taunts of his schoolmates. Strindberg

adored his mother, but she clearly

favored her eldest son over August and the others. Yet worse was to come. In 1862, when Strindberg was 13, his mother died. Within a year his father remarried, and Strindberg found himself in continuing conflict with his aloof father and a stepmother whom he jealously hated.

An obvious genius, Strindberg was bored at the University of Uppsala. He failed to earn a degree and turned to writing for his livelihood. Supplement-ing his meager literary earnings by working as a librarian, Strindberg labored long on
Master Olof
, his first play, and was crushed when the Swedish Royal Theater rejected it. He persisted at his writing, but for consolation turned to alcohol—he was a prodigious drinker—and to mystical pursuits including alchemy (he claimed he had discovered how to transform baser metals into gold). Those around him suspected that he was sinking into madness. He proclaimed that the spirit of Edgar Allan Poe, who had died in the year Strindberg was born, had migrated into his body. Through it all, however, his powerful, often viciously satirical writing continued, and it had won him, by the time of his death, the general respect of his fellow Swedes, who regarded him as their most brilliant writer.