The Intimate Sex Lives of Famous People (96 page)

on romance, education, government, and

morality greatly influenced the leaders of

the French Revolution and the Romantic

movement. His philosophy is best epitomized in the concept that man is naturally

good and that all contact with society is

corrupting. So controversial and influential was Rousseau that George Sand called

him “St. Rousseau,” Voltaire and David

Hume called him “a monster,” and Tolstoi

said that Rousseau and the gospel were

the two greatest influences in his life.

HIS PERSON:
After a dispute forced Rousseau’s widowed watchmaker father to flee Geneva, Jean-Jacques and his brother François were left with an uncle. François was soon apprenticed, and Jean-Jacques was sent to live with a minister who taught him the classics. At the age of 16 he left Geneva to embark on a lifetime of traveling. In love with nature, he tramped about the countryside taking odd jobs. He worked variously for a notary, an engraver, and a lackey, and eventually became a music teacher. At age 37 he won an essay contest and turned to writing, and by 46 he was famous. He became immensely popular in high society despite the fact that he railed against the oppression of the masses by the upper classes. In 1762, when his book
Émile
was condemned by both Church and State, he escaped Paris, was expelled from Bern, and found refuge in London, where he stayed for a year. Toward the end of his life, his tendency toward paranoia and reclusiveness grew worse. He was sure that his friends were plotting to discredit him. In part, his fears were well based, for he had repeatedly outraged his best friends either with insults or with his wildly extravagant ideas. A lonely and melancholic man, troubled for most of his life with physical and emotional pain, he sank into intermittent periods of mental illness before his death outside Paris.

LOVE AND SEX LIFE:
Good-looking, charismatic, and gushingly romantic, Rousseau was attractive to the ladies. But his love life was a complete mess. His first profound sexual experience was as a child. Having committed some minor offense, he received a spanking from his teacher, Mademoiselle Lambertier. He later wrote, “Who would believe that this childhood punishment, suffered at the age of eight at the hands of a spinster of 30 [he was in fact 11 and she 40], was to determine my tastes, my desires, my passions, my very self for the rest of my life?” He was left desperately craving more of the same. However, the astute teacher, realizing what she had started, never spanked him again. For poor Jean-Jacques, however, the damage was done.

He suffered “erotic frenzies” which led him to intense fantasies of being spanked. But worse than these troubling frenzies were the longterm effects of The Spanking. “I have passed my life in silent yearning among those I loved most. Never daring to mention my peculiar taste, I achieved at least some satisfaction from relationships which retained a suggestion of it…. To lie at the feet of an imperious mistress, to obey her orders, to be forced to beg her forgiveness—this was for me a sweet enjoyment.”

There was only one person with whom Rousseau truly lived out his masochistic dreams. In his brief youthful liaison with the 11-year-old Mademoiselle Goton, he was satisfied. She “played the schoolmistress” with him and spanked him, though “this was a favor which had to be begged for on bended knees.” To his delight, she “allowed herself to take the greatest liberties with me without permitting me to take a single one with her. She treated me exactly like a child.” After a short time, the two precocious youngsters were separated.

During his youth he was given to extravagant, unconsummated crushes on older women. And in due time he did learn about the birds and bees from the buxom Madame de Warens. He received an introduction to her house at Chambéry, Savoy, and lived there with her and her lover-caretaker, Claude Anet. Rousseau grew very devoted to her, calling her “mama” while she called him “little cat.” Five years later, “mama” offered Rousseau her favors, to be shared, of course, with Anet. The “little cat” was 21 and she was 34; it was time for him to become a man. She gave him a week to consider the proposition. He consented, but rather than being excited, he was repelled at the thought of having sex with her. After five years, Rousseau felt more like her son than her lover, saying, “I loved her too much to desire her.” It turned out that
Mme.
de Warens was a cold fish in bed, and Rousseau didn’t enjoy himself. “Twice or thrice, as I pressed her passionately to me, I flooded her breast with my tears. It was as if I were committing incest.” He turned to fantasizing about other women while he was making love to her. The
ménage à trois
continued until Anet died in 1734. Rousseau stayed with
Mme.
de Warens for three more years, finally leaving to seek his fortune when she brought in another young lover to live with them.

Rousseau’s next romantic adventure began in 1745. At a hotel in Paris, he became infatuated with the chambermaid, 24-year-old Thérèse le Vasseur.

Their affair lasted for the rest of his life. He told her from the start, “I shall never leave you, but I shall never marry you.” After 23 years, he did marry her, in a spur-of-the-moment ceremony which he conducted himself. In a letter to a friend, he recommended a quarter of a century as a sensible length of time for a trial marriage.

Thérèse was pretty and kind and a good cook, but completely unsuited intellectually to Rousseau. She could barely tell the time, never learned to spell correctly, was unable to remember the months of the year or count money. She was remarkably devoted to Rousseau, considering his difficult nature and his cruelty regarding their five children born out of wedlock.

Despite her protests, Rousseau insisted that each one be given at birth to a foundling hospital. His rationales were absurd; for example, since they weren’t married, he argued, it was the only way to “save her honor.” In later years he was racked with grief over his actions. Although his pet names for Thérèse were “aunt” and “boss,” he never asked her for a spanking, and reported that she too was cold in bed. Interestingly, this was not the report of James Boswell (an ardent admirer of Rousseau) who constituted, as far as is known, Thérèse’s only infidelity. Boswell wrote that he and Thérèse “mated” 13 different times. Thérèse told Boswell that while he was “vigorous”

in bed, his lovemaking lacked “art.”

Rousseau’s wildest passion hit him when he was 44. The inspiration was the Countess Sophie d’Houdetot, a not especially pretty married woman.

The problem was not Sophie’s husband, but that she was devoted to her lover, an officer friend of Rousseau’s who was often away. As usual, Rousseau “loved her too much to possess her.” But that didn’t stop him from trying. “The continuance over three months of ceaseless stimulation and privation threw me into an exhaustion from which I did not recover for several years and brought on a rupture [a hernia] that I shall carry with me to the grave … such was the sole amorous gratification.” All in all, he decided that it was the first and only time he had truly fallen in love; and Sophie served as inspiration for the terrifyingly moral Julie in his novel
The New Héloïse
.

QUIRKS:
Rousseau was possessed of numerous sexual eccentricities. He had the odd habit of going into raptures over inanimate objects. When living

with
Mme.
de Warens, he would wander through her apartment kissing her armchair, her bedcurtains, even the floor she walked on. Another female friend sent him “an under-petticoat which she had worn and out of which she wanted me to make myself a waistcoat…. It was as if she had stripped herself to clothe me…. In my emotion I kissed the note and the petticoat 20 times in tears.” (Thérèse thought he was mad.) As a young man Rousseau went through a period of exhibitionism. He would hide in dark alleys, and when a woman passed by he would expose his buttocks, hoping that one day some bold female would spank his behind in passing. Another time he flashed before some girls fetching water at a well, admitting in
Confessions
that the sight was “more laughable than seductive.”

When one of the girls gave the cry of alarm, Rousseau was confronted by an intimidating posse consisting of an angry man and several old women brandishing brooms, but he managed to worm his way out of trouble.

One of Rousseau’s most incredible sexual escapades occurred while he was living in Venice, Italy, as a young man. Although he claimed to loathe prostitutes, he occasionally visited them. One such local beauty was Zulietta, a woman he elevated to goddesslike proportions in his mind. But on his first visit to her, as he was about to “pluck the fruit,” he became deeply upset and began to cry. How, he wondered, could it be that this divine being was a mere prostitute? He decided there must be something wrong with her, “a secret flaw that makes her repulsive.”

She managed to cheer him up, but as he was about to enter her he suddenly discovered the secret defect. “I perceived that she had a malformed nipple; I beat my brow, looked harder, and made certain this nipple did not match the other.” Casanova had enjoyed Zulietta three years earlier and mentioned no such flaw. But Rousseau “started wondering about the reason for this malformation…. I was struck by the thought that it resulted from some remarkable imperfection of Nature…. I saw clear as daylight that I held in my arms some kind of monster rejected by Nature, man, and love.” When he pointed this out to her, she scornfully told him to “leave the ladies alone and go study mathematics.”

MEDICAL REPORT:
Much of Rousseau’s unhappiness was directly traceable to an extremely painful bladder ailment which troubled him all his life. He suffered a congestion of the trigones, or posterior part of the urethra, and inflammation of the bladder, which caused frequent, incomplete, and painful urination and fever. He needed a chamber pot constantly when his bladder was acting up, and Thérèse had to insert a catheter into his penis, but this often did not work. Sex became so painful for him that he gave it up entirely for the last 13 years of his life, returning to masturbation.

—A.W.

The Randy Lord Russell

BERTRAND RUSSELL (May 18, 1872–Feb. 2, 1970)

HIS FAME:
Bertrand Russell, British

philosopher, mathematician, and peace

activist, achieved scholarly renown with

the mind-bending classic
Principia

Mathematica
(1910–1913), which he

coauthored with Alfred North Whitehead. Russell also wrote numerous more

popular works, including
Marriage and

Morals
(1929),
History of Western Philosophy
(1945), and his
Autobiography

(1967–1969).

HIS PERSON:
Russell, like Voltaire,

Russell and Alys Pearsall Smith

was the “laughing philosopher” of his

generation. An elfish, mischievous face resembling that of Sir John Tenniel’s Mad Hatter surmounted his lively sparrowlike body. His irreverent wit and huge personal magnetism marked a bottomless appetite for life. Yet, also like Voltaire, he was a deeply passionate man whose rage at public policy often gave him, in news photos, the aspect of an avenging angel. Throughout his life he attacked conventional wisdom on everything from sex, education, and religion to woman’s rights, politics, and nuclear arms.

Born into one of England’s oldest families and raised by his austere Presby-terian grandmother, Russell was a shy, oversensitive child much concerned with his “sins.” His precocious and gifted mind rejected religion at age 18, and led him to mathematics in search of “whether anything could be known,” a lifelong pursuit. As an outspoken pacifist, he was jailed as a security risk in 1918 but supported the allies in WWII. Russell had almost achieved an affectionate popular following by the time he won the Nobel Prize for literature in 1950. His controversial stands on the Vietnam War, John F. Kennedy’s assassination, and nuclear testing increased his following. In his late 80s he led protest marches and sit-down demonstrations and was again jailed. “I do so hate to leave this world,”

he said shortly before he died peacefully at 97.

SEX LIFE:
At 15, Russell wrote, he was “continually distracted by erections,”

and “fell into the practice of masturbating.” He suddenly dropped the practice at age 20 because he was in love. Alys Pearsall Smith, from a prominent Philadelphia Quaker socialist family, was five years older than Russell. He determined to marry her and first kissed her four months after he proposed.

His grandmother vigorously fought the match, calling Alys a “baby-snatcher”

and “designing female” and whispering dire stories of insanity in both families.

The couple speculated about the frequency of their future sexual intercourse, but both remained virgins until their marriage in 1894. Their sexual difficulties during their honeymoon “appeared to us merely comic,” Russell reported, “and were soon overcome.” Alys, educated to think of sex as God’s grudge against women, supposed that her carnal desires would be properly infrequent, but Russell “did not find it necessary” to argue the matter. Though both gave lip service to free love, neither practiced it, and their first five years together were happy and highly moral.