* * *
King of Holland, and Josephine's daughter Hortense, became the dictator Napoleon III in 1852.
After the fall of Napoleon, the Bonaparte family was exiled from France and Louis
Napoleon was brought up in Switzerland. From an early age, he had a string of lovers and illegitimate children.
Once the Duke of Reichstadt (Napoleon's only legitimate son and consequently
considered to be Napoleon II) died, Louis Napoleon headed the family claim to the throne of France. To strengthen his claim, he proposed marriage to his cousin Princess Mathilde Bonaparte. However, his hopes of marriage were dashed by his abortive attempt to overthrow the French government in 1836 and he was exiled to England.
Trying again in 1840, he landed with a small force at Boulogne and was immediately captured. Imprisoned in the fortress of Ham, he begged for female company. The French government allowed him visits from a voluptuous twenty-year-old named Alexandrine
Vergeot. She was officially employed to iron the guards" clothes but became known as
"bedmaker to the number one state prisoner". Louis Napoleon spent six years in prison at Ham, during which time Alexandrine bore him two sons.
In 1846, Louis Napoleon managed to escape and fled back to England. In London, he
lived with English beauty Elizabeth Howard, who kept him for the next two years. She also financed his return to France in 1848, where he seized power. He rewarded her with the title Comtesse de Beauregard and five million francs.
In 1853, Louis married the Spanish aristocrat Eugenie de Montijo, but Eugenie was
positively the last person he should have married. She thought that sex was disgusting. A devout Catholic, she believed that it should only be tolerated as an act of procreation.
Princess Mathilde believed she should have been a nun.
She was a twenty-seven-year-old virgin when they met and married and, two years later, after the birth of their only son, sex between them ceased. Nevertheless, she was jealous of her husband's lovers, accusing him of sleeping with the "scum of the Earth" just to embarrass her. Indeed, he had a taste for courtesans and prostitutes. He once paid £10,000 for a single night with the English prostitute Corn Pearl. She was notorious. When Bertie, the Prince of Wales, asked to see her, she had herself served up al his dinner table on a silver salver. When the cover was removed, she was naked except for a string of pearls and a sprig of parsley.
Another courtesan Napoleon III shared with the Prince of Wales was "La Barucci", a beautiful Italian girl called Giulia Beneni. She kept a silver goblet in her salon, engraved with the letter "N" and the imperial crest. He also had a long-running affair with the famous French actress, Rachael.
Napoleon III did not just sleep with working girls; he had aristocratic lovers too. The Marquise Taisey-Chatenoy reported Napoleon turning up in her bedroom one night, wearing mauve silk pyjamas. With little conversation and no foreplay, they began having sex. After a bit of sweating and grunting, the deed was done and he left. He also seduced Madame Walewska, the wife of his foreign minister.
His last mistress was a sturdy peasant woman, Marguerite Bellanger. Napoleon III was already ill and Eugenie was convinced that a new love affair would kill him, so she persuaded Marguerite to give him up.
Asked why he had so many mistresses, Napoleon III replied: "I need my little
amusements."
However, his "little amusements" were a constant political danger. His ministers begged him to be careful and warned him that he might end up in the hands of an adventurers. Indeed he did. The beautiful nineteen-year-old Contessa di Castiglione was sent by the prime minister of Sardinia to enlist his help in the struggle to unify Italy. She accomplished this in bed.
Napoleon III lacked political judgement all round. He embroiled France in several
disastrous wars and defeat in the Franco-Prussian War of 1870-71 lost him his throne. He died in exile in England in 1873.
2 - TEN DAYS THAT SHOOK THE BED
Vladimir Ilyich Ulynov - better known as Lenin - was a bit of a ladies" man, but he was only attracted to women who were involved in the revolutionary struggle. His first lover was Nadezhda Konstantina Krupskaya. She was a year older than him and already a committed Marxist. When as a young girl she read the first volume of Das Kapital, she said she heard
"the knell of capital sound - the expropriators are expropriated" and her "heart beat so that it could be heard". Obviously, she was a romantic.
Nadya was dark-haired and attractive, and she was impressed by the ardour of the young Lenin's revolutionary zeal. They would walk along the banks of the Neva and he would talk about the overthrow of capitalism and avenging his brother who had been hanged for attempting to assassinate the Tsar.
Lenin, however, also had eyes for one of Nadya's friends, the quick-witted and
adventurous Apollinaria Yakubova. Lenin proposed to Apollinaria just before he was arrested for subversion. From his prison cell, he wrote to Apollinaria and Nadya, asking them to stand on Shpalernaya Street outside the prison, where he might be able to catch a glimpse of them from a window. Apollinaria did not come and Nadya took up the vigil alone. Lenin took this to mean that his proposal had been rejected.
Apollinaria and Nadya were arrested too. They were exiled to Siberia but, just a few months into her sentence, Apollinaria was rescued by a young law professor named
Takhterev. They fled to London where Lenin met them during his stay there in 1902.
Apollinaria helped Lenin and Nadya find rooms at 30 Holford Square, off Grays Inn Road.
After a short jail sentence, Lenin was also exiled to Siberia. By that time, he was engaged to Nadya and asked the authorities if they could be together during their exile. The authorities agreed on condition they got married. Lenin's sister Anna was less than thrilled. "Nadya," she wrote, "looks like a herring."
Although Nadya had been pretty when she was younger, by the time she married Lenin, she was plain and looked older than her years. The writer Ilya Ehrenburg said unkindly: "One look at Krupskaya, and you can see that Lenin wasn't interested in women." She suffered from Graves disease, which meant they could not have children. He was no picture either.
Nadya's first words to her fiance, when she eventually arrived in his Siberian village, were:
"My, you've grown awfully fat." That night they stayed up drinking with the locals and it was nearly dawn before they went to bed.
Whatever chance they had of wedded bliss was shattered when Nadya's mother turned up.
A deeply religious woman with a tart tongue, she and Lenin constantly quarrelled.
* * *
Petersburg under an assumed name to protect himself from arrest, he met a divorcee known simply as Elizabeth de K. She was aristocratic and independently wealthy, with a refined taste for the arts, literature and gracious living.
They met in the Restaurant Tartar, where Lenin was dining with his friend Mikhail
Rumyantsev. She was dining alone and Lenin could not keep his eyes off her. Rumyantsev, knowing her slightly, went over and invited her to join them.
"You will meet a very interesting man," Rumyantsev told her. "He is very famous, but you musn't ask too many details."
Amused and interested, she came to their table where Mikhail introduced one "William Frey". She asked if he was English.
"No, I'm not exactly English," he said.
They had a pleasant conversation for about an hour. She was conscious that there was an air of danger about him, but she had no idea that he was the N. Lenin who wrote the inflammatory articles in
Novaya Zhizn
that everybody was talking about.
A week later she was visiting the offices of
Novaya Zhizn
when she bumped into the mysterious "Englishman" again.
"I'm glad to see you," he said. "I was worried about you. You don't come to the Restaurant Tartar any more."
She realized that, in a subtle way, he was inviting her to dinner there again, but she did not know him well enough to accept. She had to find out more. She sought out Rumyantsev and asked him about "William Frey".
"You don't understand," said Rumyantsev. "My friend Frey is certainly interested in women - but chiefly from a collective, social and political point of view. I doubt very much whether he has any interest in women as individuals. Allow me to add that, after our dinner the other evening, he asked me to vouch for you. He is suspicious of new acquaintances. He is afraid of informers. I had to tell him who you are."
Elizabeth realized that the mysterious Mr Frey was a dangerous revolutionary. But she had to see him again. Rumyantsev arranged a small dinner party. In the course of the conversation, the question of holding secret meetings in her apartment was raised. Her flat was in a fashionable district and visitors could slip in and out without being seen. The police were unlikely to suspect that revolutionaries were gathering there.
Elizabeth agreed to let them use her flat twice a week. She would send the maid away and prepare a samovar. Lenin would arrive first and give her the password of the day. She would let the other visitors in, once they had given the password. While the discussion was under way, she would retire to her bedroom. Some nights though, Lenin was the only one who turned up.
Their affair was passionate, but they clashed from the beginning. Elizabeth was a woman of broad cultural interests. Lenin cared for nothing except politics. However, she did try to move some way towards him. In June 1906, she attended a secret meeting in a field outside St Petersburg. When Lenin appeared, the crowd went wild. He exalted them to rebel
immediately and they set off marching into the city with Vladimir Ilyich at their head.
On their way down Pulostrovsky Prospect, the Cossacks rode the march down, slashing at the crowd with whips. Lenin threw himself in a ditch. He seemed pleased with the outcome, but Elizabeth realized that he was in imminent danger of arrest for inciting a rebellion. She asked him whether he was prepared to put himself totally in her hands and obey her implicitly. He said he was. She led him across the fields and down a series of overgrown pathways to an outlying village, then took him back to the centre of St Petersburg by streetcar.
He was equally protective towards her. Once, when they were alone together in her
apartment, a blazing cinder from the samovar fell on her dress, setting it on fire. Lenin hurled himself on her, smothering the flame. When he got up, she noticed he was trembling and as cold as ice. He turned and ran from the house. It was then that she knew he was in love with her.
She followed him when he went to live in Stockholm. Even in Sweden, he was afraid of the secret police. He lived the life of a conspirator - there were secret signs, passwords, meetings in out-of-the-way places.
One day, he phoned and told her to meet him at a certain arcade, but if other Russians were there, she was to pretend not to recognize him. When she arrived, she saw two Georgians hammering away at one of the vending machines. When Lenin turned up, the Georgians shouted, "Comrade Ilyich, help us with this damn bourgeois machine. We wanted ham sandwiches and all it gives us is pastry."
The Father of the Revolution then proceeded to use all his dialectical skills to get them their sandwiches, while Elizabeth pointedly looked the other way. Lenin was delighted with her, even though there was no real danger.
"Do you know who those two Georgians were?" he said later. "They are our delegates from the Caucasus. Splendid boys, but absolute savages."
Between his wife and party congresses, Lenin had little time to spare for Elizabeth.
Sometimes, on Sundays, he would hire a little rowing boat and take her out on the lake. The passion continued though. When she returned to St Petersburg, she got a wild and urgent letter from him.
"Write to me at once," he wrote, "and tell me precisely where and how we can meet, otherwise there will be delays and misunderstandings."
Elizabeth did not like the tone of this letter and decided to break off the affair. But two years later, she was in Geneva when she read in the newspaper that he was giving a speech in Paris. On an impulse, she took a train there. During the intermission, she went to see him in a small room behind the platform. He was surrounded by admirers and she could not get near him. Eventually he spotted her. He looked startled, then his eyes widened.
"What on earth are you doing here?" he asked.
"I came to hear you," she said, "and I have a commission to give to you from a certain person."
She handed him an envelope. In it were the address and phone number of the place where she was staying.
The next morning, she waited by the phone. It never rang. Instead, Lenin came round in person and they threw themselves into each other's arms.
The affair resumed, but without the intensity they had known before. Altogether they met and wrote, on and off, for nine years. Some of his early letters were passionate. The later ones read like a lecture on Marxist dialectics. In the end, they found that they simply lived in different worlds. Though a champion of women's rights, Lenin said that he had never met a woman who had read
Das Kapital
right the way through, could understand a railway timetable or play chess. He gave her a chess set and asked her to prove him wrong.
In response, she sent him a postcard of the Mona Lisa to study it and tell her his reactions.
He wrote back: "I can make nothing of your Mona Lisa. Neither the face nor the dress tell me anything at all. I believe there is an opera of the same name, and a book by d'Annunzio. I simply don't understand anything about this thing you have sent me."
The final falling out was over the question of liberty. Elizabeth questioned his belief in rock-solid Marxist dialectics. Surely, she said, there must be a place for personal liberty.