Seductress (22 page)

During this period Ninon produced her own small but distinguished literary oeuvre: poems, a character sketch, and a full-length satire savaging lecherous prudes,
The Coquette Avenged.
With her friend Saint-Évremond, she also solidified her Epicurean principles, the pursuit of happiness through moderation, reason, and strict morality. Ninon did not drink or indulge in anything to excess and was known as a model of rectitude. She reserved a year’s income for those in need and gained the epithet “the beautiful keeper of the casket” after she guarded a friend’s fortune for many years and returned it intact.

At midlife she opened an academy where she taught her enlightened Epicureanism and arts of love to aristocratic youths, with special emphasis on pleasing women. Lovers, including two bluebloods half her age, filled her dance card in later years. She swore off sex, though, at fifty-two and consoled herself with philosophy, reading, and friendship.

Shunned all her life by respectable women, Ninon was nonetheless “the century’s leading feminist,” in both example and precept. She mentored like-minded protégées (such as Madame de Maintenon) and condemned the plight of the feminine masses. They were tyrannized by lovers and husbands, she charged, “set upon by members of their own sex,” and rendered stupid in love. She urged them to wise up erotically and, as per the goddess, play the field. “A woman who has loved but one man,” she counseled, “will never know love.”

Uncharacteristically for a courtesan, she died comfortably of old age, with a valedictory poem on her lips. A radiant well-being accompanied her to the end, the result of a mind-heart sagacity cultivated to a perfect pitch. After her death mythmakers transformed her into a sex icon, the subject of twenty-three plays, dozens of novels, and hundreds of old wives’ tales.

But none perceived the true source of her supra-allure. One suggested that her combination of “beautiful woman” and gentleman made her the “most delicious of all.” Ninon, however, pushed a hotter button and embodied a more “delicious” combination: the sex goddess and all-wise goddess, the judge of man and arbiter of culture and morality.

When Lou Andreas-Salomé arrived in Vienna in 1912 to study psychoanalysis with Freud, few would have guessed they had a seductress in their midst. She was a stout, fiftyish matron who wore no makeup and looked so much older than her age that she’d been mistaken for her lover’s mother. She had the coarse face of a Muscovy peasant: a square chin, wide, fleshy mouth, beetling brow, bulbous nose, and deep-set eyes. But this plain Mother Hubbard, with her dirty blond hair pulled back in a bun, was one of the leading femmes fatales of her time and all times. More than one man committed or threatened suicide on her account, and Freud’s circle went into an electron spin the moment she set foot in his lecture hall.

Although love spells involve a complex mélange of lures, Lou’s chief aphrodisiac was her psychological genius. “Her mind was her charm center,” said one conquest, “captivating beyond compare, stimulating beyond compare.” But it was a mind with a special bent: insight into the human psyche, Inanna’s “perceptive ear” and the “art of counseling.” Few intellectual gifts are sexier. One of our deepest erotic wishes, as amorist writers and psychiatrists attest, is to be known and validated for our true selves.

Lou Andreas-Salomé, the “great understander,” knew this and put it to astute account in love. The god-men of her generation ate from her hand and tranced out beneath her “magnificent tiger-gaze” that plumbed and affirmed their core identities. The same depth charge perception also paid off professionally. A celebrity writer, thinker, and psychiatrist, she wrote twenty influential books and more than a hundred essays, articles, and reviews.

As one of the founding mothers of psychoanalysis, Lou was her own best subject. From childhood she deliberately fashioned her character into a paragon of mental health. With an acute sense of her nature and needs, she orchestrated her life for maximal happiness, becoming one of Abraham Maslow’s self-actualized exemplars before there was a name for it. Her titanic ego—vitality, courage, nonconformity, and swerve—inspired Nietzsche’s theory of the superman and prompted Freud’s rare concession that she was “beyond human frailty.” But the achievement of this wunderself didn’t come without a struggle.

Like other seductresses, Lou had to strike off the fetters of convention. She was born, by coincidence, in Russia on the day the serfs were emancipated, February 12, 1861, the last child and only daughter of the aristocratic Salomé family. From the start Lou was locked in mortal combat with her mother over correct behavior. But her sexagenarian imperial father indulged Lou and treated her like an infanta. Secretly opposing his wife, he allowed her to do as she wished, run wild, and roughhouse with her three brothers. When she found school and her classmates distasteful, he withdrew her, with a preemptory “Lou does not need compulsory schooling.” When she later rebelled and flatly rejected the tea party circuit, her mother gave up in exhaustion.

Worse was to come. After her father’s death the seventeen-year-old Lou tacked up her ninety-five theses. She hunted down a swashbuckling preacher, Hendrik Gillot, and defected from the family faith to the Dutch Reformed Church. More shocking still, she studied the history of Western philosophy in his private apartments, sometimes perched on his knee. Only after he seized her in a mad embrace and said he’d made plans to marry her and divorce his wife did things come to a head.

The horrified Lou fled from St. Petersburg and enrolled (in another act of apostasy) at the University of Zurich. She’d fled, not for the first time, from sexual passion. With all her intellectual precocity, she was a sexual late bloomer, perhaps the latest of any siren on record. But she ignored convention, heeded her own clock, and remained a virgin until she was ready for surrender with autonomy and satisfaction guaranteed.

In the interim she churned up some of the highest romantic dramas and greatest scandals the staid European intelligentsia had ever witnessed. After her studies in Zurich, where professors proclaimed her an intellectual “diamond,” Lou moved to Rome and ingratiated herself with the feminist doyenne of the day, Malwida von Meysenbug. Lou persuaded her of their affinity, invaded her salon and promptly grabbed Malwida’s prize exhibit, the philosopher-genius Paul Rée.

Paul, a brooding nihilist of thirty-two, was staggered by Lou. On their long talks during midnight strolls through Rome, she listened intelligently and challenged his ideas with breathtaking skill and vigor. He proposed and was so smitten he agreed to her preposterous counterproposal that they live together platonically with another like-minded philosopher.

Enter Friedrich Nietzsche. From the moment he met her, Friedrich felt he’d found the one woman who “understood him as no one else.” Lou’s clairvoyant grasp of his thoughts, combined with her defiant, life-affirming character, convinced him he’d at last discovered a “sibling brain” and alter ego.

To public stupefaction, he, Paul, and Lou settled into a threesome that they called the holy trinity, with the two friends secretly vying for Lou’s affections. Throughout this turbid ménage, Lou held her ground and refused to be engulfed by either philosopher-king, intellectually or erotically. A photograph of the time shows her firmly at the controls, whip in hand behind Paul and Friedrich, who were harnessed to a donkey cart.

In the end it was too much for the high-strung Friedrich. He commandeered her on a mountain expedition, kissed her wildly, and demanded marriage. When Lou declined, he went to pieces. With the fury of a “jilted schoolboy,” he took an opium overdose, challenged Paul to a duel, cursed Lou, and excoriated the whole female sex in
Thus Spake Zarathustra.

Afterward Lou moved in with Paul in a sexless
à deux.
He called her “Her Excellency” and made her well-being the “sole task of his life” for five years. She bloomed intellectually under these hothouse conditions, publishing an acclaimed novel about female freedom and attracting the best minds to their avant-garde salon. One regular said her book alone made his “love for Lou burst into bright flames.”

Her novel had a similarly inflammatory effect on a middle-aged professor en route through Berlin. Friedrich Carl Andreas, an exotic Orientalist, scholar, and world traveler, conceived such a passion for Lou that he planted himself on her doorstep and would not leave until she married him. Moved by a mysterious inner command (perhaps related to increased security), she agreed in 1888, with her usual proviso: no sex. Although she invited Paul to join them, he scrawled a wild note, “Be merciful, don’t look for me,” and disappeared, never to be heard of again until workmen found his body at the base of a cliff years later.

The marriage was as unconventional as everything else about Lou. Friedrich, after an abortive attempt to rape her, moved downstairs with the housekeeper and gave the upper floor to Lou, who came and went as she pleased. The union lasted forty-three years, during which Friedrich lovingly played caretaker-to-genius, colleague, confidant, and domestic anchor.

Lou thrived. She traveled and wrote steadily: reviews, fiction, philosophic essays, and two daring full-length psychological critiques. One, perhaps the first psychobiography, explained Nietzsche’s philosophy through his inner pain and conflicts. In the other, she examined Ibsen’s plays and came up with revolutionary dynamite. Women, she argued, are the superior sex, happier, hardier, sexier, better integrated, and naturally polygamous. They don’t “need the man in
any
sense.” Her fictional heroines began to change soon thereafter. During her mid-thirties they suddenly coruscate with allure, lay men out, and exult in the “marvel of sexual passion.”

Any number of suitors might have been responsible for Lou’s late-life sexual initiation: a Russian “giant of a man” who spirited her off to an Alpine hut for a week; the noted socialist Greg Ledebour; or two playwrights, Gerhart Hauptmann and Frank Wedekind, who dramatized her as a femme fatale. But she woke up with a bang, hypersexed and plurally inclined for the rest of her life, except for one monogamous passade.

The affair was a long romance with Rainer Maria Rilke, then an unknown poet and thirteen years her junior. Lou saw with X-ray clarity his potential and called herself his wife for four years. Under her tutelage he remade himself. He changed his name from René to the more masculine Rainer, learned the art of “festiv[ity],” and acquired confidence, psychic stability, and intellectual discipline. Their life together was “an unprecedented period of inspiration and creation for them both,” with shared studies and gay excursions to Russia and the countryside.

For Rainer she embodied a mythic divinity, a goddess of “blessed comprehension,” his “magnificent one,” his “June night of a thousand paths,” his muse, “mother and home.” Then, on the cusp of forty, Lou wearied of Rainer’s desperate idolatry and dropped him for more lovers and greater freedom. Like her other victims, he never got over her and said on his deathbed that she alone knew who he was.

In middle age Lou was no Brigitte Bardot. Heavy, plain-faced, and dressed in shapeless gray shifts, she seemed hardly a power vamp. Yet she was inundated with lovers. The most serious, handsome Dr. Friedrich Pineles (known as Zemek), squired her around for a dozen years and almost certainly got her pregnant. (Lou, averse to motherhood, miscarried, perhaps on purpose.) Despite Zemek’s popularity with women, he never married and died in 1936 with Lou’s “picture [still] in his heart.”

Throughout her fifties Lou continued to burn through men. She not only infatuated Freud, who sent her flowers and “sweet letters,” but enrapt his apostles. Victor Tausk, a tall, young “beast of prey,” fell passionately in love with her (only to commit suicide later), and a married Swedish psychoanalyst mooned over her for two years. She’d bewitched him, he believed, with her diabolic gift for “entering completely into the mind of the man she loved.” Another inamorato attributed her witchcraft to her “archaic” sexuality, her insatiable appetite and lascivious speech. “The reception of the semen,” she’d say
en passant,
“is for me the height of ecstasy.”

In psychoanalysis Lou found the ideal métier for her combined erotic and psychological gifts. With her usual independent-mindedness, she challenged Freud and developed her own theories, specifically on anal eroticism (still the standard on the subject), narcissism, love, and female sexuality.

A self-exalter herself, she anticipated post-Freudians, like Norman O. Brown, and valorized narcissism as the true source of love and vitality. Expanding on her female chauvinism, she claimed that women were not only the hornier, hotter, polygamous sex but also erotic multitaskers who performed a dozen roles at once in love: “lover, sibling, refuge, goal, defense, judge, angel, friend, child, and mother.” Male envy of this sexual superiority explained the angel-whore split and misogyny in general.

On sex she waxed mystical. Through intercourse, she wrote, lovers merged with the unity of all creation and recovered their innate bisexuality. Satiety and infidelity, though unavoidable, could be averted through love artistry or personal charisma. Some “geniuses” of seduction, she concluded, have “an unwonted aura of majesty” and entrain men forever.

Unquestionably she had herself in mind. “Yes,
I am
a femme fatale,” one of her fictional alter egos says, “and I shall sit back and
enjoy
being it.” Enjoy she did. Ignoring female hostility (housewives called her the “Witch of Hainberg”) and social coercion, she achieved the rarest of human fates: self-actualization, happiness, acclaim, and the adoration of men. At the end, half bald and sallow with renal disease, she enamored a young acolyte who nursed her and devoted his life to sorting her papers. She didn’t exaggerate when she referred to herself as the “fortunate animal.”

Others—Freud, Rilke, and assorted lovers—went beyond her self-assessment and equated her with a “mother goddess of the stone age,” a “daemonic [and] primordial” “force of nature.” She tapped a fantasy, buried deep in the genetic memory of the psyche, for a supreme she-deity of desire and wisdom to whom all hearts are open, no secrets hidden. At the same time, she used her “dangerous intelligence” for her own ends, to know herself cold and become what she was—the “Lou phenomenon,” sovereign in love, learning, and life mastery—and in the bargain, to find an “existential joy” of unparalleled, even mythic proportions.