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 long-term 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, 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.
Russell and Alys Pearsall Smith
Born into one of England’s oldest families and raised by his austere Presbyterian 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.
About 1901, however, Russell fell in love with Evelyn Whitehead, gifted wife of his collaborator Alfred North Whitehead. This relationship, though never physical, came as an “awakening” to Russell, who underwent an almost mystical “change of heart” in many of his feelings and views. Suddenly realizing—during a solitary bicycle ride—that he no longer loved Alys, he quite promptly told her so. “I had no wish to be unkind,” he wrote, “but I believed in those days (what experience has taught me to think possibly open to doubt) that in intimate relations one should speak the truth.” For nine more years Russell and Alys maintained the facade, but occupied separate bedrooms and were thoroughly miserable. “About twice a year,” Russell wrote, “I would attempt sex relations with her, in the hope of alleviating her misery, but she no longer attracted me, and the attempt was futile.”
One of his first tentative flings involved a young secretary with a matchless Victorian name, Miss Ivy Pretious. In 1910 he met Lady Ottoline Morrell, wife of Liberal M.P. Philip Morrell. Russell described Lady Ottoline as “very tall, with a long thin face something like a horse, and very beautiful hair.” Their sexual relationship was furtive since Ottoline had no desire to leave or embarrass her husband. Philip appreciated their discretion. Russell left Alys that spring and did not see her again until 1950, when they met as “friendly acquaintances.” Lady Ottoline “made me much less of a Puritan,” he wrote, but he resented not being her sole interest. They had stormy quarrels but remained lovers until 1916 and close friends until her death in 1938.
Russell stopped being “a Puritan” with a vengeance. After 1910—though married three more times—he was never again monogamous until extreme old age. His private life was a chaos of serious affairs, secret trysts, and emotional tightwire acts that constantly threatened, if never quite exploded into, ruinous scandal. In his letters to Ottoline and other lovers, his conscience drove him to confess, even though he “made little of,” his escapades with other women. More surprising is that most of his lovers tolerated his wanderings and each other so well.
During his first American lecture tour in 1914, a new Russell, turned on by any pretty woman within earshot, emerged full-force. He became intimate with Helen Dudley, daughter of a Chicago surgeon, and invited her to England, “My Darling,” he wrote to Ottoline, “please do not think that this means any lessening of my love for you.” When Helen actually arrived, however, Russell felt “an absolute blank indifference to her.” By this time he had taken up with Irene Cooper Willis, a talented beauty whom he hired as a research helper. But she feared scandal and Russell hated caution. “I wish to goodness I had not made love to her,” he told Ottoline.
In 1916 Russell met Lady Constance Malleson, a 21-year-old auburn-haired actress who used the stage name “Colette O’Niel.” Her marriage to actor Miles Malleson was “open” by mutual agreement, and Russell remained her lover until 1920, often spending holidays with the couple. They renewed their affair three times over the next 30 years, and Colette always sent him roses on his birthday. But his affections for Colette “could never make a shadow of a difference to what I feel for you,” he wrote to Ottoline.
Russell desperately wanted children. In 1919 he met Dora Black, a suffragist who was also interested in having children without the fetters of marriage and monogamy. Still in love with Colette, and regularly pouring out his heart to Ottoline, Russell went to China to take a post at Peking University, and Dora went with him. She was eight months pregnant when they returned to England in August of 1921. “From the first we used no precautions,” said Russell. Having agreed on a marriage “compatible with minor affairs,” and with their baby due in one month, they were wed. After a second child was born, the Russells established the experimental Beacon Hill School. Its liberal policies included advocacy of free love for those on the staff, and Russell enjoyed several affairs with young female teachers. While he was philandering at school and during lecture tours in the U.S., Dora had an affair with American journalist Griffin Barry and bore him two children. Russell
clearly resented this particular application of his free-love theories. Moreover, he had said in their marriage contract, “If she should have a child that was not mine there would be a divorce.” Strained beyond endurance, the marriage ended in 1935.
Russell felt that he didn’t know any woman until he had slept with her. In Marriage and Morals he advocated both trial and open marriage, exceedingly radical proposals for 1929. He did not think he could “remain physically fond of any woman for more than seven or eight years.” Dora wanted another child by him, but he “found it impossible.” His affair with 21-year-old Joan Follwell was typical. “My only fear,” he told her, “is lest you may find me inadequate sexually, as I am no longer young … but I think there are ways in which I can make up for it.” She reported years later, “I had dinner with him and the third time I slept [with him] … this lasted over three years. But the sleeping wasn’t a success so I gave him up.” For all his galloping satyriasis, Russell apparently suffered frequently from impotence.
In 1930 he began a long affair with Patricia “Peter” Spence, the young governess of his children. He was determined to marry her, and finally did in 1936. A son was born the next year.
The family spent the war years in the U.S., where “Peter” Spence became increasingly unhappy. Russell’s daughter recalled their unpleasant domestic life. “She had found marriage to the great man something of a disappointment. His passion cooled and was replaced by kindly courtesy and a show of affection thinly unsatisfying to a romantic young woman.” By 1946, now in his 70s, Russell took up with the young wife of a Cambridge lecturer; their relationship lasted three years. Colette, whom he saw for the last time in 1949, wrote him bitterly, “I see everything quite clear now, and it seems a dreary end to all our years…. Three times I’ve been drawn into [your life] and three times thrown aside.”
The Intimate Sex Lives of Famous People Page 65