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While still at university, he was spotted by one of the most beautiful women of France, taken to her home, thrust into an armchair, ravished, and swept into a three-year affair. As he moved up the diplomatic ladder, he “made every woman fall in love with him,” even his wife, an heiress whom he had wed in a marriage of convenience. And he loved them in return, often two or three simultaneously. He said he “cared for all in a different way and for different reasons.”

His mistresses were many—titled, married, and select. There was the wife of a Russian general who appeared like a “beautiful naked angel” on his doorstep in Dresden; Napoleon’s sister, whose bracelet of hair he never took off; and two duchesses, one of whom cost him Bavaria when he overslept with her during the Congress of Vienna. Altogether, Metternich had nine major amours, including two more wives after his first one died. His last was a spitfire Hungarian and aristocrat thirty-two years his junior who bore four of his children. At seventy-five, widowed and in exile in England, he was visited by all his surviving lovers, including a seventy-six-year-old ex-mistress still in love with him.

Metternich was “extremely handsome” right into old age, when his face was sunken and seamed and his hair, shock white. But what made him such an unsurpassed “
homme à femmes
” was his exquisitely tuned social antennae and arts of ingratiation. It made him, too, a dominant figure in European government up until 1848. “Politics and love,” he believed, “went hand in hand.”

Pleasure

Pleasure considered as an art is still waiting for its physiologists.

—H
ONORÉ DE
B
ALZAC
,
The Physiology of Marriage

The cast of male characters in Woody Allen’s
Vicky Cristina Barcelona
comes straight from a Social Darwinian lineup. They’re good physical specimens, rich, stable, respected, devoted, and free with goodies: yachts, maids, and mansions with tennis courts. But they leave the two heroines cold. Instead, the women fall for a stranger who makes them an offer one night they can’t refuse. A sultry Spanish painter approaches them at dinner and says, “I would like to invite you both to spend the weekend. We’ll eat, we’ll drink wine, we’ll make love. The city is romantic, the night is warm, why not?” A
maître de plaisir
, Juan Antonio leads them down the pleasure path that weekend and thereafter, serving up gourmet delights of mind and body: art, travel, cuisine, poetry, music, beauty, frolic, and passionate sex. In the process, the “right choice” men fall by the wayside—revealed in all their robotic drabness and undesirability.

You might ask, What’s pleasure got to do with it? To evolutionary diehards, not much, except as an adaptive by-product, candles on the mating cake, or “spandrels,” as biologists call them. Women want men, they contend, for weightier reasons. Desire, however, has an inconvenient way of ignoring reason; falling in love, writes psychiatrist Michael Liebowitz, is “having your pleasure center go bonkers.” “Love is pleasure,” as the ballad proclaims. And ladies’ men are deluxe pleasure-providers, adept in the whole repertoire of enjoyment.

Although we’re awash in entertainment options, men who deliver full delight in love are relatively rare. The default position in the animal kingdom, notes Geoffrey Miller, is apathy; the select few favored by “hot choosers” in prehistory were men talented in the arts of pleasing, from the sweets of the sense to the charms of the mind. Women may have inherited an internal pleasure-meter and pick men who move the needle.

A second theory keys off from Freud’s pleasure principle, the idea that the unconscious contains drives for gratification that must be repressed in the interests of civilization. According to a school of neo-Freudians, this repression is both excessive and toxic. What’s wanted—craved deep in our ganglia—are men who will shed restraints and restore sensuosity, satisfaction, and primal joy.

Sex gods like Dionysus, “the delight of mortals,” were pleasure freedom-fighters. They released “everything that had been locked up,” and drenched the earth in delectables: wine, dance, joy, and satisfactions of soul and body. “Pleasure” was “the image of the divine state” in ancient Shiva worship.

Are women more susceptible to these blandishments? Maybe, if scientists are right. As sex researcher Marta Meana observes, female erotic fantasies focus on getting pleasure. Perhaps this stems from the extra vigilance and life tensions women bring to the bedroom, or a heightened sensuous receptivity. Their hearing, vision, smell, and tactile senses are sharper than men’s, and they furnish their imaginative sex scenes with a sensorium of props: votive candles, silk sheets, mood music.

The mantra of romance heroes is “relax, gorge your senses, let me show you a good time.” Josie of Eloisa James’s
Pleasure for Pleasure
is deflowered by the “adorably beautiful” Earl de Mayne on a sofa in a moonlit cottage amid a scented rose garden.

Mary Gordon’s novel
Spending
speaks to every woman’s starvation for joy and relief from strain and overwork. Monica Szabo, a middle-aged painter, meets a fantasy muse, a wealthy commodities broker who offers to give her what she needs: R & R (dance, gourmet dinners, perfumed baths), sexual solace, and trips to see art galleries and bask in the Old Masters. Pleasure-soaked, she produces her great work.

Men’s love manuals have always emphasized the arts of the delight. The
K
ā
ma S
ū
tra
devotes volumes to the minutiae of intoxicating a lover through hedonistic allures, from a sumptuously fitted-out “chamber of love” with soft cushions and games, to festive evenings of song, music, and flower battles. Ovid was less specific; just “endeavor to please,” he exhorted. The mindset is what counts, wrote Balzac in the nineteenth century; a man must interest himself in the “science of pleasure” to prevail with women.

Casanova, a thinking woman’s voluptuary, studied the subject at length and concluded that “pleasure, pleasure, pleasure” was man’s highest calling—if and only if it were treated intelligently. There must be a spiritual component, he wrote, combined with connoisseurship and variety. His three happy months with Henriette were carefully calibrated: scholarly studies, sex, rest, and different diversions and operas each day.

During the nine-to-five work crackdown of the 1950s, romancer Porfirio Rubirosa asked a subversive question: “What’s wrong with pleasure?” It doesn’t take a PhD in psychology to guess the consequences. Standing “head and shoulders above the international pleasure pack,” “Rubi” was gallant, sophisticated, and a genius of enjoyment. He knew how to keep delight fresh and soul-satisfying, and tailor it to each woman.

He wooed Doris Duke, his third wife, with a pleasure tour designed specifically to her tastes. He took this cosseted, libidinous heiress (daughter of tobacco mogul “Buck” Duke) to louche Left Bank hangouts and anything-goes Antibes, where he treated her to “the most magnificent penis” she had ever seen.

After their divorce, he conquered Zsa Zsa Gabor through a different tack. For the stressed-out movie star, he delivered sabbaticals of Hungarian food, getaway weekends, and uninhibited all-night revels where Rubi drummed with the band and led musicians home for ham-and-egg feasts. “We were like two children,” recalled Gabor, “pleasure seeking, hedonistic.” “I am, and always will be,” he said, “a man of pleasure.”

It’s no feat for a king to have mistresses; ambitious beauties will hurl themselves at any crowned head. But to have them love you is another thing. Charles II of England adored women, and they repaid him in kind. Called the “Merry Monarch,” he came to the throne in 1660 after Oliver Cromwell’s harsh nine-year puritanical rule, and reintroduced the pleasure principle. Fun returned from exile. And the king led the way, “charm[ing] all who came near him” with his affability, ease of manner, and talent for enjoyment. He turned the palace into a garden of delights—sports, dances, comedies, exotic birds, verdant parks, and the arts and sciences—and populated it with Eves. He had nine mistresses, at least, whom he treated to this fare, and none was indifferent to Charles. His French
maîtresse en titre
Louise de Keroualle thought him “the love of her life”; comic actress Nell Gwynne sincerely loved him; and his often-betrayed wife, Catherine of Braganza, worshipped the ground he walked on.

Despite the rampant hedonism and sexual license of modern life, pleasure may be on the decline. Studies show that Americans tend to defer fun and enjoyment; we work longer hours and work at play and relationships. Which isn’t how eros operates. As Johnny Depp’s character in the movie
Don Juan DeMarco
explains, “I give women pleasure if they desire. It is of course the greatest pleasure they will ever experience.”

Self-Realization

I am large, I contain multitudes.

—W
ALT
W
HITMAN
,
“Song of Myself”

Don Juan of Steven Millhauser’s story “An Adventure of Don Juan” is the seducer at the top of his form and so jaded by success that he decides to visit an unprepossessing English squire for a change of scene. Once at the estate of the round-faced Augustus Hood, he sets his sights on his wife, Mary, and sister-in-law Georgiana; they’re both easy prey, he muses, he’s “never wrong about such matters.”

But he has underestimated his host. Hood, despite his schoolboy looks, is a dynamo, a “man of many projects” who has turned Swan Park into a highbrow Disneyland. When not in his library or workroom, he gives guided tours of his simulated Elysium and hosts erudite dinner-table debates. Don Juan begins to feel progressively off his game. With his seductions stalled, he takes matters in hand one night and winds his way through Hood’s labyrinthine mansion (an image of its owner), to Georgiana’s boudoir. He opens the door and sees that he’s been outmatched by a greater seducer: Hood is in bed nude with his siter-in-law.

Complete, multifaceted personhood is the peak of character development—and seductive allure. Philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre thought this was the all-access pass in amour. “The lover,” he wrote, “must seduce the beloved” by besieging her with “his plenitude of absolute being” and intriguing her with his “infinity of depth.” Which is a tall order. Full self-development takes drive, courage, and a robust ego. Not every ladies’ man is up to the task, but most are strong-selved, replete personalities. Actualized individuals, note psychologists, report “richer, more satisfying love experiences,” which may be related to the fact that they’re desired more. We love souls that are “overfull,” that evoke “wholeness.”

A rich-natured ladies’ man compels women—regardless of his rank, income, or looks. When women in surveys express a preference for “achievers,” they seldom mention tangible assets; they cite intelligence, energy, ambition, and all-round excellence. They seek, as psychiatrist Ethel Person explains, an “authentically powerful” selfhood. Supermodel Carla Bruni said former French president Nicolas Sarkozy conquered her through the force of his prolific personality. “He has five or six brains,” she told an interviewer, “which are remarkably well irrigated.”

Sexual selection and ancient myth favored high evolvers. Ancestral women, surmises Geoffrey Miller, were less impressed with material resources than cerebral ones, preferring polysided, potentiated men over one-dimensional swells. And fertility gods were individuated on a heroic scale. Khonsu, the ancient Egyptian love deity, fertilized the cosmic egg and commanded health, architecture, time measurement, hunting, travel, and wisdom. As for the thousand-named Shiva, he contained the entire cosmos, and Dionysus was the lord of “diversity” and “inexpressible depth.”

Storied ladykillers often display manifold characters. Odysseus is a
kalokagathos
, “complete man”; Cuchulain, a many-gifted wonder; and the knight Lanval, of Marie de France’s medieval
Lais
, such a model of total manhood that both Guinevere and the queen of the fairies proposition him. The duc de Nemours of Madame de La Fayette’s seventeenth-century
Princesse de Clèves
is unsurpassably self-actualized. A court paragon—multi-accomplished, integrated, and zealous—he enamors the married princess, with tumultuous results.