Seductress (29 page)

While executing the equivalent of a triple axel on ice—feats of masculine and feminine rhyme played against intricate classical models—she hypes her sexual allure and power and rains down provocative invitations. “Kiss me. Again,” she writes. “Four I’ll return, and hotter than fire.”

In the “Debate of Folly and Love,” she replaces a male god, “Love,” with her own self-created sex goddess, “Folly,” a swanky, obstreperous “Queen of Men,” who knows “what it takes to be appealing” and has all humanity “under [her] control.” Like another Inanna, she’s the “sexual joy of the cosmos,” “always laughing,” dissolving inhibitions, and generating festivity. She teaches women how to seduce: to bolster male egos and at the same time to give them the business. She creates a tempest; she transforms vanilla love into the white lightning of passion. “You must be a sorceress,” gripes Love, “a shameless woman!”

She’s both: the divine wonder-worker redux and patriarchy’s bad girl. She disrupts the status quo, lures women off the domestic preserve, pitches men into inappropriate arms, and decrees feminine sexual sovereignty. Men must “do or say” what women want. At the end, Jupiter pronounces Folly the winner and rules that she can lead Love, whom she’s permanently blinded, wherever she wishes.

Like her priestess forebears, Louise summoned the sex goddess through the magical medium of poetry. Praised as she was as the Lyons Sappho, she couldn’t have expected a free ride after such sedition. A husband cited her in a lawsuit for corrupting his wife’s morals, chauvinists circulated scurrilous verses, and the ladies of Lyons cut and reviled her.

But the stouthearted Louise prevailed anyhow. Her indulgent husband left her wealthy enough to buy two vineyards, a country house, and a meadow, and she died nursed tenderly by a beau from the salon days. He erected a sculpture, we’re told, over her tomb on her country estate. We can only imagine the statue he commissioned—
La Belle Condière
with a book of verses in one hand, a lance in the other, and Folly’s calling card on the headstone: “I am a goddess. . . . I am the one who makes you great or who humbles you as I choose.”

André Malraux called Louise de Vilmorin the twentieth-century Louise Labé, a “fair knight” and a poet of the same intricate and otherworldly brilliance. At seventeen, though, she seemed a far cry from “Captain Louise.” Rather than mounted on a charger with a sixteen-foot lance, she lay on a rolling hospital bed, which she called Rosinante (after Don Quixote’s horse), with tuberculosis of the hip, flicking a cigarette.

Louise de Vilmorin had a long, equine face, an overbite, a pallid complexion, and the tall, rawboned body of an adolescent boy. But at her feet sat six college boys transfixed by her voice. In a musical contralto she reeled out a zany story about an old couple who adopt a chair for a son, give it a trust fund, and advertise for a bride.

Laughter erupted. Then they all pitched in and competed with stories of their own. These young men—Louise’s
société humoristique
and daily guests—also competed for her affections. As one later recalled, they all were in love with her. Preposterous though it sounds, Louise de Vilmorin was, perhaps even more than Louise Labé, an “empress of seduction,” who enravished the most talented men of her time. “Laughter,” she quipped, was “the scepter of [her] reign,” but it was really her collective magic, woven of her verses, stories, and unearthly, iridescent personality.

Relatively unknown now, Louise was a French literary star fifty years ago: author of fourteen novels, three poetry volumes, and winner of the Monaco Prize and Légion d’Honneur. She made no secret of why she wrote. Sexual conquest “lights my lantern,” she said; “that’s what pushes me to write.”

It had been so since infancy. Born into a festive, unconventional old French family in 1902, she received the genes, training, and spur to seduce from earliest childhood. Her mother was a celebrated seductress, and everyone in the large household of six children cultivated
le charme Vilmorin.
No rules and no banal restraints existed. Dinners were so uninhibited and witty that waiters were known to dash from the room in fits of laughter.

In common with many young sirens, Louise loathed her mother, a distant social lioness, and coquetted her way into her father’s affections. In all her early photos she vamps for the camera with the fury-to-captivate of a child star on audition. When her father died in World War I, she transferred her charm offensive to her four older brothers, who petted and adored her.

Then, after TB interrupted her education, she acquired another indulgent male captive, her tutor, Abbé Mugnier. Using a progressive educational approach, the abbé permitted Louise to study only what interested her and encouraged her to write. He also fell completely “under her charm.”

Louise almost married one of the suitors from her
société humoristique,
the writer Antoine de Saint Exupéry. For him, she was “poetry itself,” the “only woman he ever loved,” and the prototype of all the fey enchantresses in his fiction who lead men through a “magic door” into a “surreal world” and claim them for life.

But after a brief engagement Louise jilted him and married one of the power base husbands so often preferred by
sorcières,
a rich American sixteen years her senior. Henry Leigh-Hunt, though, couldn’t compete with the charged Vilmorin climate of continual revelry and male admiration. After four dismal years in Las Vegas, Louise embarked on her first affair.

Over the next seven years in France she went through a quadrille of lovers, each with the initials A. M. The birth of three children did nothing to slow down this formidable manslayer. First came André Massénna, followed in quick succession by Sir Alexandre Mackenzie, Alexandre de Milo, Alexandre (“Sacha”) de Manziarly, and André Malraux, distinguished men who loved her with “fire, fever, tenderness, and desperation” and who nourished her creatively.

Sacha, a brilliant lady-killer and
polisson
(down-and-dirty lover), set her career in motion. During their two-year liaison, he primed her confidence and encouraged her to write her first novel,
Sainte Unefois
(Onetime Saint). When editorial magnate André Malraux read it, he not only succumbed to the spell of her work and person but established her reputation with his book promotions. Her novel sold out, and fussy critics like Jean Cocteau hailed her as a “genius.”

Caught up in the celebrity whirl, Louise reaped the erotic rewards of her literary diablerie. Divorcing her husband and discarding Malraux, she assembled a group of playmates, known as Louise’s
bande,
and flipped through a card catalog of lovers including artist Jean Hugo and publisher Gaston Gallimard. She wrote another whimsical novella and on the brink of World War II married a man who might have walked out of a Grimm’s fairy tale.

Pali Palffy, count of Presbourg, was the last of the Hungarian feudal overlords, a “devourer of women,” who spoke six languages and lived in a castle at the foot of the Carpathian Mountains overlooking his domains. But only a few months into this fantastic marriage Louise’s domestic phobia kicked in, and she fled to Budapest in the Presbourg Rolls-Royce.

There, ensconced as “Queen of the Danube Gulls,” she wrote a novel and poetry for her club of admirers and as usual “burned up those who love[d] her . . . without so much as a backward glance at their ashes.” Another Hungarian count, Tommy Esterházy, fell so “unimaginably in love” with her that he divorced his wife and persuaded Louise to follow suit and marry him.

However, by the time Tommy arrived in Paris after World War II for the wedding, Louise had already sighted bigger game. One of the world’s greatest Lotharios, Sir Duff Cooper had just come to town as the new British ambassador, and Louise rose to the occasion. Unlike lesser seductresses, she didn’t aim to please but to “madden, enthrall, [and] transport.” She took a poetic tack toward a primal poetic goal, erotic intoxication.

When they met at an official function, she affected a look designed for maximum mystification: no makeup, ribbons knotted in a little-girl coiffure, and a Bavarian dirndl and shawl. Still unbeautiful in her forties, she had the curb appeal of a haunted carriage house on a storied estate.

Afterward Louise treated Duff to a “very Vilmorin evening,” leading him through a maze of whimsical apartments to a candlelit children’s playroom where “all transgressions were allowed.” In full
sorcière
mode, Louise wrote poems on napkins, traded puns, and regaled the table with risqué stories. The next day Duff sent her a bouquet of lilacs and red roses. “You are a treasure,” he wrote. “I want to be the miser.”

For three years Louise lived with him and his wife, whom she called Bijou Blue and Bijou Rose, in an open ménage à trois at the Borghèse hôtel. An unofficial ambassadoress, she accompanied Duff to public functions and assembled a group of literati and bon vivants, the “Comus Bande,” at embassy headquarters. She also trysted with old flame André Maurois on the side.

When the ménage broke up, Louise wrote her two best novels,
Julietta
and
Madame de,
both about
sorcières
who know “how to interest men,” shake them up, and ensorcel them.
Madame de
became one of the most popular books by a woman in France and a cult film classic, due in part because the siren gets her comeuppance and dies of a broken heart, strangled in a skein of lies.

Louise, however, was very far from a comeuppance. Approaching fifty, she embarked on affairs with two young swells, twenty-six-year-old Roger Nimier and Orson Welles, to whom she famously said, “Darling, tonight I’ll love you forever.” With both she meted out strong doses of difficulty and caprice. “I have no faith in my fidelity,” she taunted. Welles, a notorious womanizer, sent her fifty “my darling” telegrams from the set of
Othello
and installed himself so spousally in her home that she’d whisper to guests as she exited the room: “I’m going to fulfill my conjugal duty.”

Her love life ran apace with her literary output through her fifties and sixties. She wrote five more novellas, a film script, and a translation of
Kiss Me Kate,
and threw herself into a torrid amour with a mystery lover in 1958, “XY,” who inspired her only pornographic book,
Madame de V . . . Her Dark Thoughts.
Afterward this rogue-at-heart hit the road again, rebedding old lovers and picking up new ones in châteaus and resorts throughout Europe.

One conquest, Pierre Seghers, captivated by a candlelit poetry reading, begged her not to “play” with his heart. “I no longer know where I am,” he wrote. Louise replied that he’d “nail[ed] her in the heart,” but she played just the same. She continued on her sex-go-round and welcomed her first husband back when he returned in 1962, unable to forget her. Even her neglected children and grandchildren arrived to pay court.

Her fragile feminine “look” to the contrary, Louise, as female artists must, had an imperial ego and a tough hide. She considered herself a cross between Napoleon and Eleanor of Aquitaine. But old age and its assorted abrasions eroded her creativity at last, though she continued to bespell and subdue men.

She reunited with Malraux (now the minister of French culture) in the sixties and, sucked into his egotistic and diplomatic vortex, ceased writing. She amused guests, minted bon mots, and painted so competently that she had a show in New York City, yet she completed none of the novels she started.

She got, however, a death as poetically
exalté
as her fiction: laid out on her columned bed, draped in white silk, “surrounded by the household in tears.” After he buried Louise at Verrières, Malraux remained there until he died, unable to tear himself away from the genius loci of the place and his “illness.”

Her reputation, by contrast, has proved more forgettable. Except for
Madame de,
little remains in print, and her man-killer legend has faded like a pressed flower in an old book. There was nothing PC about her. Her apolitical, fantastical stories espouse no causes and tell no victim tales; her heroines knew and exercised their power.

For that and more competitive reasons, women abominated her. Anaïs Nin, once her tenant in Paris, savaged her as a narcissistic manizer and scribbler of frivolous fairy tales. Louise returned the favor and cordially loathed most women, especially feminists, whom she called a “herd of vain she-asses.”

Unlike Nin, however, Louise finessed both love and art, never abasing herself to male genius and producing a corpus of tightly crafted mythopoeic minimasterpieces. “She reigned in hauteur over the male sex,” working in sync with her female birthright, artistic erotic magic.

“You are magical,” said a lover, “real art”; “divine and fearsome,” added Jean Cocteau. Louise always claimed her charm came from her “signature.” She just didn’t know what it was, the spiral logo of the first divinity she served, the myth-speaking, maze-making creatrix of poetry, delirium, and seduction.

 

The early religiosexual rites synthesized all the arts in a kind of ur-rock opera. Under the combined spell of music, song, dance, pictures, and poetry, celebrants lost themselves in ecstasy and merged with the source of All Living. They and the earth were charged with new life. From these sacred spectacles came comedy and tragedy, the one glorifying renewed sexual potency in orgiastic festivity; the other, the miracle of rebirth-in-death through the release of suffering into redemption.

The sex goddess Inanna controlled both genres. At the annual Sumerian marriage ceremony, the prototype of comedy, her priestess and the king copulated on the high altar to invoke the divine generative force, followed by a free-for-all of cross-dressing, sex, and carnival excess.

In the Lamentations, priestesses clawed their eyes and thighs and wailed
balags
to mourn the annual exile of Inanna’s lover to the underworld, thus facilitating his predestined resurrection. Later the Dionysian rites subsumed these two forms in a riotous
komus,
with a procession of women bearing gigantic phalluses and a tragic “goat song” that bewailed the god’s necessary dismemberment before his regeneration.