Pauline Bonaparte & the Cult of Priapus

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!

Daisy, Daisy, give me your answer, do. . . .

You don’t hear much about good old-fashioned bestiality anymore. Mostly, it’s just a bad gag with a worse punch line - “With all a’ them sheep, you had’ta go an’ pick the sheriff’s girl.” Sex within species is pretty much available to all these days, and if someone goes for a pig instead, it’s because he’s one twisted mother. But in Days of Olde, when people on farms lived a much more isolated existence, it was a bit more common. Still a weapons-grade perversion, of course. After all, for the sake of cleanliness alone, it’s hard to imagine how the bung hole of a cow could ever look good. Just about anything would seem more sanitary, including the palm of your right hand. In his rollicking diaries, Boswell admits that, as a young man, he preferred hugging oak trees, imagining they were gnarly whores and finding relief from the desires that, his later life shows all too clearly, plagued him constantly. Well, at least it’s cleaner. But look out for that poison ivy.

Of course, if he’d stuck to following Dr. Johnson around and screwing oak trees, he probably wouldn’t have had to write Boswell’s Clap and Other Essays, detailing his persistent battles with gonorrhea.

Yet, for the historian, it’s interesting to note the moment in history when the fire and brimstone of American Puritans met the dying days of bestiality, and it’s really, really hard not to laugh, despite the fact that the confessed practitioner of same was summarily hanged. The part that’s so hysterical is the fact that, once the poor bastard had confessed, before he was hanged he had to take the whole kit and kaboodle of judges and church deacons down to the old homestead to tell them which of the animals there he’d had “unnatural congress” with. Can you even picture it? “Well, Daisy’s been my favorite since she was born. I love her curly hair.” Then poor Daisy, as well, faced the hangman’s noose.

Actually, despite their well-deserved reputation for stern punishment, so much so that, even in the mid-1600's, guys who’d come with them (pardon the pun) were leaving to start their own, less oppressive settlements, the Puritan fathers weren’t doing this to punish the animals. They were doing it because of their lack of any real understanding of the process of procreation. Their biggest fear was that it might be possible for the man to have impregnated a cow or a pig. And then what? What sort of unholy monster might result from that? So, with visions of It’s Alive (“Another one’s been born in Seattle”) dancing in their heads, they had the animals hanged, too. They were not slaughtered; no one was allowed to eat them. They were quietly buried in a secret place, before the lonely goatherd went to meet his Maker.

RIP

Bundling

A bundling board in place at the Benchmark Inn in Provincetown, Massachusetts,

in case you are looking for a proper New England way to spoil a fun weekend.

In my post on Pauline Bonaparte, I mentioned the fact that, from about 1780 to about 1820, an Enlightenment window opened on the world, and people were far freer in both language and sexuality, until Victorianism arrived on the heels of Romanticism in the late 1820's and slammed that window shut again.

In 1859, an historian named Henry Reed Stiles, mired in Victorianism, wrote a book on the history of Connecticut, in which he spoke scathingly of “the camp vices and recklessness” that descended on New England after the Revolutionary War, which “flooded the land with immorality and infidelity,” and caused both church and temperance to be ignored.

And then he said,

“Bundling, that ridiculous and pernicious custom which prevailed among the young to a degree which we can scarcely credit, sapped the fountain of morality and tarnished the escutcheons of thousands of families.”

Wrong move, Hank. They didn’t mind being called drunken and licentious pagans, but when he slammed bundling, they came out of the woodwork, according to Stiles, “buzzing around my ears.” How dare you label such a fine old New England custom as immoral? Stiles attempted apologies all around, but got a very cold shoulder. And so, as a mea culpa, he wrote a little book on the subject, taking a far warmer and less judgmental attitude. Apology accepted.

You may have heard the term before, and been confused about its meaning. Here’s the skinny. In the first century of its history, America suffered from a chronic shortage of beds. Inns were few and far between, and usually grotty. And so, “bundling,” in its essential form, was simply two people, often not of the same sex, sleeping in the same bed, either fully clothed or one above the covers and the other below.

But fairly soon, bundling came to mean something quite different. It became a custom of colonial America in which young men and women who were courting or engaged were allowed to sleep with one another in the same bed, usually in the fashion stated above. Astonishingly, it was most prevalent in Puritan New England and Quaker Pennsylvania, both areas notorious for their sexual prudery. There was even a thing called a “bundling board” that could be laid between them to help to insure there was no hanky-panky.

Stuffy British historians loved to imply that bundling was a strictly American phenomenon, but this is not the case. It was practiced in the same period and under the same name in Wales, and the old custom of “hand-fasting,” a period of trial marriage in Olde Scotland, was related to it. In Holland, (where of course, they were to stick strictly to conversing with one another) it was called “queesting.” In Switzerland, it was the “kiltgang.” And so it goes.

It wasn’t always easy to court in those days. Finding privacy and personal space was often a problem (the drive-in hadn’t been invented yet) and everyone knew what it meant when a couple took a walk or went off to see if Mom’s roses were in bloom. Also, in the countryside, young men sometimes had to travel quite a distance to come a’courting and spend a little time with their lady love, and so they often spent the night with the family. Houses were much smaller then, and on the surface, anyway, it seemed as if it would be difficult to indulge in much more than some whispered conversations, with Mom and Pop sleeping just across the short hallway in the tiny shotgun house. But what’s really bizarre about the custom is the way that parents tended to wink and turn a blind eye to the inevitable kissing, groping, and just plain shoving the damn board under the bed.

So, of course, it was inevitable that lots of couples jumped the gun. In fact, the figures differing from time and place and from scholar to scholar, it’s still a fair guestimate to state that about one-quarter of colonial brides going down the aisle were pregnant already. In early Puritan days, a seven-months baby could get both the husband and wife a literal public thrashing, but thinking softened a great deal by the late 17th and the 18th century, and seven or eight-months babies happened in the best of families. A lot.

And what’s even more interesting is that, typically, the parents on both sides were perfectly serene and content with the situation. There are several reasons for what seems such a reversal of expected attitudes. First, most parents in those days wanted their children happily married and producing grandkids as quickly as possible. Keep ‘em out of trouble. Elements of this attitude remain for many married thirtysomethings whose mothers are always carping about “When are you going to start your family?”

But there’s another explanation that sprang from attitudes of this period, one being that a state of betrothal between a couple was looked on quite seriously. In fact, by the early Victorian period, a man who walked out on an engagement could find himself smacked with a “breech of promise” suit, ordered to fork over major sums for the emotional damage he’d caused, nearly as if it were a divorce. Other, less well-known customs sprang from the same source.

For example, mostly in Germany, there was a tradition of paying what was called “wreath money” in a similar situation, the payoff termed Kranzgeld in German. (Wasn’t it Kipling who warned us that once you have paid the Danegeld, you’ll never be rid of the Dane?) This was money paid to a woman whose fiancé walked out on her after having taken her virginity, thereby lowering her chances of marrying well considerably. The money was compensation for this loss. Virginity had enormous value in these cultures; symbolically, in the same part of the world, a woman was entitled to wear a wreath of myrtle when she was a virgin being married, but if she’d lost her virginity, it was a wreath of straw.

It’s a little like that great commercial from a few years ago, when the smiling bride leans down to the little boy at the reception, and he says sweetly, “My mommy says you’ve got a lot of nerve wearing white.”

The Lady Freemason

The Pearl was a collection of erotic tales, rhymes, songs and parodies published in London between 1879 to 1880. The magazine was shut down by the authorities after just 18 issues for publishing rude and obscene literature.

For all my Masonic friends, and being married to the Dark Overlord of the World Freemasonic Plot, I’ve quite a few - here’s a little ditty from The Pearl.

Strictly Private, except to Brothers, BY ORDER, THE LADY FREEMASON.

As a brother of old, from his lodge was returning,
He called on his sweetheart, with love he was burning,
He wanted some favours, says she,
"Not so free," Unless you reveal your famed secrets to me."

"Agreed - 'tis a bargain - you must be prepared,
Your legs well exposed, your bosom all bared."
Then hoodwinked and silent, says she, "I'll be mum,
In despite of the poker you'll clap on my bum."

To a chamber convenient his fair charge he bore,
Placed her in due form, having closed tight the door,
Then presented the point of his sharp Instrumentis,
And the Lady was soon made an "entered apprentice."

His working tools next to her gaze he presented,
To improve by them seriously she then consented,
And handled his jewels his gavel and shaft,
That she in a jiffey was passed "fellow craft."

She next wanted raising, says he, "There's no urgency,"
She pleaded that this was a case of emergency,
His column looked to her in no way particular,
But she very soon made it assume perpendicular.

He used all his efforts to raise the young elf,
But found he required much raising himself;
The task was beyond him. Oh! shame and disaster,
He broke down in his charge, and she became master.

Exhausted and faint, still no rest could betide him,
For she like a glutton soon mounted astride him,
"From refreshment to labour," says she, "let us march.
Says he, "You're exalted - you are now royal arch."

In her zeal for true knowledge, no labour, no shirking,
His jewels and furniture constantly working,
By night and by day, in the light or the dark,
With pleasure her lover she guides to the mark.

"The Beast with Two Backs"

This charming phrase for two bodies writhing in passion's wrestling ring was first used in English in 1604 by Shakespeare in Othello. Iago says, "I am one, sir, that comes to tell you your daughter and the Moor are now making the beast with two backs."

It appears in French in Rabelais' 1532 work, Gargantua and Pantagruel, in this delightful line: "In the vigour of his age he married Gargamelle, daughter to the King of the Parpaillons, a jolly pug, and well-mouthed wench. These two did oftentimes do the two-backed beast together, joyfully rubbing and frotting their bacon 'gainst one another."

Perhaps the origin of the term makin' bacon...

Letter from Molly

Unfortunately, lots of victims of a public education think that sex was missionary position and just plain lousy until 1968, despite ample evidence to the contrary, much of which will be presented on this blog. In the first edition of the terrific book The Intimate Sex Lives of Famous People, a research task so daunting it was put together by the entire Irving Wallace family, the book closes with a letter of unknown origin, written around 1882, from a young newlywed named Mollie. Having promised to let her cousin Julia back east know what to expect on her wedding night, she mailed a graphic and delightful description of the joys of being deflowered.

It really ticks me off that, in the long-awaited new edition of the book that came out in 2008, the letter below has been removed, as has a charming chapter in the end on several famously happy marriages, to serve as counterpoint to the general warped but entertaining misery haunting the volume as a whole. It’s got to say something about our culture and its attitude, that marital sex is boring, period, that this letter was excised. Look at some of the accouterments under my own marital bed of thirty years before making that call. But young editors will have their way, and the addition of a few new subjects tossed in here and there, like Kurt Cobain, do not serve to take the place of what follows. Incidentally, it is reproduced here with its punctuation, or lack of it, in place. Spelling, too, was more a matter of opinion than hard fact in those days. But, for me, it's not a spoiler. To the real historian, it only adds to the charm.

My dear cousin Julia
I am now with much pleasure about to fulfill my promise of writeing to you after the consumation of my marriage with Albert so you may have some Idea of the thing when you and Harry are united which I hope will be soon You will please remember this is strictly confidential if we were not so intimate I would not write so plain but you know when we were together what one did the other knew so I will keep nothing back from you Albert and I where married day before yesterday our minister E. Hodge performed the ceremony all of our folks were present and nothing occured to mar the pleasures of the day all went off as weddings generaly do with fun frolicking cackes & wine &c But oh dear Julia you can but faintly comprehend the felicity I have experienced since that ever to be remembered night I thought I had some Idea of the enjoyment of married life but I was a novice in the mystries I will now endevor to give you a faint description of our married life The first night I lay with my dear Albert a thrilling sensation shot with the rapidity of lightning through my entire system Oh-the bliss of that moment So sensitively alive it excelled any thing I had ever experienced it was superlatively nice We lay a few moments enfolded in each others embrace our naked bodies in close contact for by some unaccountiable means my night clothes had all slipped above my waist my blood boiled and rushed through my frame like molten lava my prespiration ceased entirely at entervals and my head throbed almost to bursting a dizziness amounting almost to stupeifeication over came me a felcitiy not to be expressed in words my breath seemed to leave my body I felt paralysed and lay motionless and calm as some southern sea on a still summer morn When as to test the utmost tension of my nerves Albert took my hand and by degrees (I did not resist I suspected his intentions) in tremulous excitement conveyed it down his body until it came in contact with his-0! Heavens the thrilling sensation of that moment you know what I mean It was swollen to an enormous size my hand immediatley and tenaciously grasped it though I declare it was as much as I could do to fairly span it The soft velvet like feeling of its head gave additional impulse to my already excited feelings When to cap the climax of my felicity he gently raised himself on one knee and with the other between my thighs he separated my legs so as to admit his body between them and then in a moment he "was gently heaving up and down with an undulating motion when I felt it enter my person When the head entered it appeared to me that I was attacked with a spasm for I raised with sudden emotion as he bore down on me and this mutualy kept up had the effect of driving it quite into my person and then a shock suddenly passed through me as if from a galvanic battery a dizziness overcame me my eyes closed my bosom heaved my arms relaxed my perspiration ceased I was actually gone for I fainted When conciousness returned Albert was hugging & kissing me clasping me in his arms in the estacy of the moment I forgot all the world except my dear Albert we lay quite exhausted for about twenty minutes when he again conveyed my hand to that Dear member that had given me so much pleasure it was some what less in size but as soon as it felt the pressure of my hand it resumed its original proportion Albert made another attempt to raise himself upon me but I begged him more from delicacy than disinclination to desist wich kind soul as he is he did but I could not long resist for he thrust in between my thighs and kissed me so that longer resistance was impossible and I once more yeilded to his solicitation I did not faint this time though the pleasurable sensations were more acute than the first I would sooner have risked my soul's salvation than to have had Albert withdraw from his embrace I was some what sore and stiff in my parts next day but at present I feel as chirp as a squirrel I think he has done the work for me I think I am pregnant Now dear Julia the day is coming to a close and I must conclude this letter for I expect Albert at any moment and I would not for the world have him know what I have been writing to you so good bye for the present and in my next I will tell you more of the pleasures of married life. Give my love to Anna T Uncle and inquiring friends.
I remain your affectionate cousin Mollie

Twisted Sister

Some people have heard the title ‘Tis Pity She’s a Whore, perhaps from one of the two films made of the story. Most don’t know just how old the title is, nor how freighted with infamy. In the scandalous 1633 play ‘Tis Pity She’s a Whore, playwright John Ford wrote an unbelievably twisted story that would draw fire if it were performed next week in über-liberal Manhattan, this being the tale of a passionate affair between a brother and sister, Giovanni and Annabella. No, Ford didn’t cop out and do it in the Greek fashion, in which the two don’t find out they’re siblings until the tragic end when they pay for a crime they didn’t commit in their hearts. (But as Woody Allen said from prison in the hysterical Love and Death, “Isn't all mankind ultimately executed for a crime it never committed? The difference is that all men go eventually, but I go six o'clock tomorrow morning. I was supposed to go at five o'clock, but I have a smart lawyer.”)

Shockingly, the mutual passion of brother and sister is openly discussed from the first lines of the play, and is consummated soon after. As Shakespeare did so often, Ford set his play in Italy, as if to imply that this sort of debauchery might occur in hot-blooded Napoli, but never in the cool and clean-living pastoral countryside of England. And of course, just about everybody but the cat ends up dead in the end, in a horrifically graphic and grisly bloodbath of heavenly retribution. None of it helped. Though the play was performed, appropriately enough in the Cockpit Theatre near Drury Lane, most considered the material unpalatable, and it was in later years often removed from collections of Ford’s plays.

It didn’t grow more tasteful with the passage of three and a half centuries. Luchino Visconti directed a version of it with the luscious Romy Schneider at the Théâtre de Paris in 1961, while Roland Joffé directed a version for the BBC in 1980. Charlotte “I’ll peel for anyone” Rampling starred in a lousy Italian film version in ‘71, though in all fairness, the film is only available in America in a gutted version. Other than that, both the play, and the subject of incest as entertainment, has pretty much remained the province of porn, hard or soft at the core.

Actually, incest is, like child pornography, one of the only remaining taboos in our anchorless society that takes all the fun out of things being dirty because not much is dirty anymore. Not many “respectable” works have dealt with the subject; it does pop up a lot in the fiction of John Irving, most notably in The Hotel New Hampshire, which makes one wonder about his home life. In the few other serious works on the subject, punishment is swift and sure; in England, Hardy’s novel Jude the Obscure features a stunningly grim ending with suicidal children as the moral payback when two cousins run off together. Kind of hypocritical, when you think about it.

Few societies have tolerated incest, and it was looked on with particular horror in England, probably because it struck a nerve; the blooded class was always running around marrying their first cousins, a relationship considered too close in other cultures for making the beast with two backs. And all in all they were probably right, when you take a look at what consanguinity in the Windsors wrought, in the bat-boy ears and low criminal forehead of Prince Charles.

They say that one of Britain’s most notorious seducers, the poet George Gordon, Lord Byron, was done in by the temptation of fishing in home waters. As a young man he fell hopelessly in love with his half-sister, one Augusta Leigh; they shared a father in John “Mad Jack” Byron, who was married three times and dropped, probably of exhaustion, at thirty-five. Eventually Byron fled England in 1809, returning long enough to cause a scandal with Lady Caroline Lamb before leaving for good in 1816. The first time, it was probably because he was afraid of prosecution for incest. He would have done time for it.

Of course, we’ll never know for certain whether or not Byron slept with his sister, because his family burned his letters to Augusta after his death. This happened a lot in Victorian times, which really pisses historians off. From about 1750 to 1820, an Enlightenment window opened in both Europe and America, for good and ill as these things go, but a fresh breeze nonetheless. Sex was freer, adultery more common, belief in a personal God of fire and brimstone way down in the polls, and swearing was very, very popular. The educated classes in those days were fanatical letter-writers and journal-keepers, which would normally be a gold mine for historians. But from Aaron Burr to the explorer and anthropologist Sir Richard Burton, family members often burned their “lewd” journals and letters after their deaths, depriving posterity of the juiciest bits they left behind. Some, like George Washington, even purged their journals of coarse language while they were still alive, many having been born into the Enlightenment world and survived to the Victorian one, in which even the bare legs of pianos were covered for modesty’s sake.