Or perhaps we should say le culte de priapisme, for I'm speaking of the remarkable and insatiable Pauline Bonaparte (1780 -1825), known today mostly for being Napoleon's sister, born, like him, to relative poverty as part of the very, very petty Corsican nobility. There were thirteen children in all, so it's probable that her formidable mother, Letizia, did a little penis worshipping herself. The family was only French by about a decade and a half, after France took Corsica as a colonial possession in 1768. But with Napoleon's meteoric rise, from victorious general to First Consul to emperor, Pauline followed, reveling in the life of luxury and privilege he showered on his favorite sister.
Unfortunately, she reveled in something else even more, this being her astonishing sexual appetite. She loved her brother, despite the fact that he bitched at her constantly and chose both her husbands; she hated the second one, a powerful Italian noble named the duc d'Borghese. She couldn't wait to get away from him and return to Paris. But it was while she lived with the duke in Rome, in 1804, that the great artist Canova did the sculpture above, called Venus Victrix, or Venus Victorious. A naked Pauline did the posing, which gave her stuffy brother fits.
Of course, the Lefevre painting to the left shows that she usually wasn't painted as a little shepherd girl, a la Marie Antoinette. Her face and form were legendary, and she kept her perfect complexion, all over, with a daily bath in 20 litres of milk mixed with warm water. She was always carried to the tub by one of her male servants; she had a real thing for being carried. Once, as a guest of her late husband's brother, she arrived, hauling her baggage and bathtub, and blithely requested her regular bath. He said he could provide the milk, but not the shower she liked afterwards. So she simply shrugged and had a hole knocked through the ceiling so the servants could pour the water over her. He said the place stank of rainwater and sour milk for weeks till he fixed it. But her regimen must have worked, since the men high and low lined up to be her lover. She rarely turned one away.
But they rarely lasted long. Pauline not only had an insatiable appetite, she also had an obsession with size over skill. Her physician, Dr. Peyre, was already telling her that her constant pelvic pain was due to sexual overindulgence. Unfortunately, he prescribed that she take the waters at a spa in Plombieres, and it was there, when she was supposed to be getting better, that she met Louis Phillippe, the Count de Forbin, who was apparently hung like an ox. She nailed him at once, took him home with her, made him her chamberlain, and was in constant need of his attention. Constant.At last her pain became unbearable, and Peyre called in a famed gynacolagist and imperial physician, Dr. Halle. His diagnosis was pointed. The princess was suffering from what he called furor uterinus, an over-abused uterus and vaginal canal, which was a nice way of saying nymphomania. Apparently she was in agony, with pelvic pain, headaches and uterine spasms. In his reports to Dr. Peyre, Halle stated bluntly that she must be "saved" by being kept from the cause of the inflammation, a cause he knew full well but refused, for propriety's sake, to name.
Pauline's nickname, especially in England, was "Messalina", a rather cruel reference to the debauched and power-hungry wife of the Roman emperor Claudius. Well, maybe it was better than simply la puta, French for "the whore," although this appellation was generally reserved by the Bonaparte women for the Empress Josephine. Worse, especially in British political cartoons, she was graphically accused of having slept with her own brother, the emperor. If they can be believed in the back-stabbing atmosphere of the court, several people claimed that Josephine had told them of having caught them in the act, and in fact, Pauline never denied it.
Pauline would die a sad death at 45 of stomach cancer. But, despite her frivolity and grotesque spending habits, she was the only one of Napoleon's family who followed him into exile, even though he'd showered money and kingdoms on them all. And she had a sense of humor about her own debauched image. It often took dinner guests some time to realize that the gold cups they were drinking from, that looked so much like reproductions of ancient Roman cups, were, in fact, modeled on Pauline's breast. A glance at the cup compared to the statue above is all that's needed to prove this more than an historical myth.
Pauline, you really rocked!
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