Seductress (23 page)

 

For all of Lou Andreas-Salomé’s psychological brilliance, she couldn’t compute. Unable to calibrate her fees against the declining German mark, she would have starved as an analyst if Freud hadn’t sent her periodic handouts. “The Fairy godmother who stood at your cradle,” he chided, “apparently omitted to bestow on you the gift of reckoning.”

But this gift was one of Inanna’s prime contributions to civilization and an innate female talent: “the holy measuring rod and line.” Inanna’s deputy, the grain goddess Nisaba, governed writing, accounting, surveying, and the “cubit ruler which gives wisdom.” Although usually considered a male left-brain function, logical and mathematical intelligence stems from the feminine principle. Paleolithic peoples learned to calculate by observing the cycles of the moon, the goddess’s imago. The twenty-two-thousand-year-old Venus of Laussel holds a bison horn aloft in her right hand notched with the thirteen months of the lunar year. Inevitably, two of the premier manslayers of Western history were queens of reason, analytic thinkers and surfers of factual reality.

The first, Émilie du Châtelet, was a woman cut to a superhuman scale. “A genius in virtually every realm of mathematics,” she outsmarted the leading male scholars of her day. In addition, she looked like a celebrity model, loved like a Lotharia, and lived like a sultana. “The wench,” said a Romeo of the age, “is formidable.” “The most brilliant member of her sex in Europe,” she was also a “passionate,” magisterial siren who captured and held the two
beaux du jour
of Paris, the duc de Richelieu and Voltaire.

Yet few parents have ever held out less hope for a daughter. The youngest of four children in a titled, wealthy family, Émilie was an ugly duckling, a plain, gangling tomboy whose mother rejected her in favor of her two tractable sisters. Her father, a pompous court official, had an equally dim view of Émilie’s prospects, but he took a shine to her and gave her an uncommon education. She received the finest tutors and athletic instructors and proved a prodigy, in sports and languages, math and metaphysics. “No great lord will marry a woman,” groaned her father as she approached maturity, “who is seen reading every day.”

She proved him wrong. When she arrived at Versailles for her “debut” with crates of texts and philosophy books, she set the jaded court gallants back on their heels. They took bets on who’d have her, but she fought them off, literally, for two years until she found the right husband, dueling a cavalier in the courtyard and gambling the others under the table through “prodigious feats with numbers in her head.”

Unexpectedly she’d become a stunning beauty. A five-foot-nine-inch blonde, she had a full
poitrine
and a piquant face: wide-set eyes, a high forehead, and a fetching pointed chin. She wore her thick hair unpinned to her waist and dressed in gold and silver
robes volantes
with such low necklines she created a fashion for rouging nipples.

At nineteen she discovered the marriage partner best calculated to serve her purposes. The marquis du Châtelet-Lomont measured up not only physically (at over six feet) but practically; as a general he spent most of his time in the field, leaving Émilie free to follow her own devices.

After an obligatory three children, Émilie took wing. She hired the best math and physics professors from the Sorbonne, studied maniacally (sleeping only two to four hours a night), and worked out original theorems. Determined to talk shop with her peers, she cross-dressed in breeches and frock coat and gate-crashed the all-male scientific club, the Café Gradot.

She threw herself just as furiously into high society. Overdressed, overperfumed, and histrionic, she was the center of attention of every gathering, quoting Descartes and flouting feminine decorum at every turn. She attended the theater, she bathed nude in front of her male servants, she took lovers. With one, she feigned suicide to get her way; with another, she discussed “the nature of man in relation to himself and his universe” in bed.

The duc de Richelieu, however, was of a different caliber altogether. This national hero and
homme fatal
“with all womankind at his feet” equaled Émilie in brains and libido and transformed her life. “Fascinated by her mind,” he encouraged her ambitions, guided her studies, and taught her emotional restraint. The affair lasted longer than any in his life, a year and a half, and ended only when he introduced her to Voltaire.

They made an odd couple. Émilie stood a head taller than Voltaire, then the intellectual dynamo, gadfly, and salon darling of eighteenth-century Europe. But they were made for each other. Both larger than life, both geniuses, they shared a passion for learning and social defiance. Before the night was out, they had fallen madly in love, Voltaire for the first time at thirty-nine.

They retired to Cirey, a Châtelet château in Lorraine that Émilie transformed into a voluptuous think tank and love nest. The library rivaled a small university’s, secret passageways connected their studies, and drawn curtains kept the rooms in perpetual twilight for mental concentration. Each, competitively whetted by the other, worked at fever pitch on separate projects, joining at dinner for long, guest-filled banquets.

Émilie descended the staircase for these dinners in full court dress, her hair upswept and decked with diamonds, her hands bejeweled and stained with ink. As dumbwaiters (the first in France) delivered courses of gourmet food, Émilie and Voltaire jockeyed volubly for attention. They fired off erudite screeds, argued at top volume, traded bon mots and insults in gutter French, then stopped abruptly and burst into laughter.

The revels continued beyond the dinner table. They staged play productions and impromptu poetry readings at 4:00 A.M. and once mounted a midwinter picnic to a frozen creek, where they sat on satin cushions in the snow and debated politics and drama all afternoon. Sometimes Émilie entertained the company with entire operas, which she played on the harpsichord, singing the parts from memory.

The Cirey years marked a period of prodigious intellectual output. The high-tension sexual and mental ambiance—the mutual admiration, challenge, and stimulation—spurred them both to massive achievements. Although most of Émilie’s work has been lost, she wrote the definitive book on Newton during this time and a three-volume study of Leibniz that earned her an international reputation as one of the leading minds of her time. She launched hundreds of scientific experiments and bested Voltaire in a science competition that argued the opposite thesis. The academic establishment anointed her “Lady Newton,” while Voltaire hymned her as “the most extraordinary woman in France” and his “divine mistress.”

A man of parts himself—poet, philosopher, historian, dramatist, and moralist—Voltaire was hard put to keep up with her. Émilie worked with the frenzy of an eighteen-armed goddess. Before even beginning her real work, her scientific and mathematical studies, she spent six to eight hours each day on other pursuits. She wrote poetry, translated Latin and Greek (her
Oedipus
remained a classic for over a century), designed a darkroom and indoor kitchen, and mastered law to defend her husband’s interests in court.

For fun, she wrote the first how-to,
On Happiness,
which became a best-seller and went through six editions. In it she told women how to be as happy as she was. They should, she advised, cultivate “strong passions,” savor the pleasures of the flesh, enrich their minds through study, and make themselves mistresses of the “metaphysics of love.”

Although she didn’t expatiate on this metaphysic, she plainly understood the arts of love. Along with the erotic and mental fireworks she delivered, Émilie monitored Voltaire’s life like a stage mother. She oversaw his diet, drove off pests and distractions, and reconciled her fractious lover to Louis XV with the “finesse and cunning” of an experienced diplomat. During their thirteen years together women scrambled to get their hands on Voltaire. But he was content to remain her “willing slave,” immune to temptation throughout his extended leaves in Paris and Prussia.

Nevertheless, these volatile geniuses drifted apart in the late 1740s, he to his niece, she to the arms of a glamorous poet ten years her junior. With him she became pregnant and died in childbirth at forty-three. When Voltaire heard of her death, he sobbed so violently that he struck his head on a post and fell down a flight of stairs. “I have lost half of myself,” he raved, and eulogized her as the ultimate woman, “a very great woman whom ordinary women knew only by her diamonds.”

Women knew more of her than her diamonds, of course—more than they liked. They sniggered at her behind their fans, cut her, and called her a “sorceress.” The clearheaded Émilie, who had an exact sense of her own worth, recognized her superiority and paid them no heed. “When I add the sum total of my graces,” she noted with mathematical precision, “I confess I am inferior to no one.” “The light of my genius,” she promised Voltaire, “will dazzle you.” It was a light no man, certainly no alpha man, could resist: the primordial lunar light of the goddess who bestowed numerical calculation, along with divine lust and the sex energy of creation.

The divine Nisaba’s accounting skills extended beyond numbers to language. She was the mistress of “Scribal Knowledge,” the fact gatherer and record keeper of society. Martha Gellhorn, her modern successor, took the measure of the twentieth century with pitiless accuracy. The first female war correspondent and a prizewinning reporter, she wrote seven collections of journalism, eleven books, and was known as one of the best witnesses to our age. She was also known as “the blonde peril” and “Magnificent Martie,” a woman who magnetized the men, and walked out of three marriages.

Martha Gellhorn’s upbringing could be a template for the making of a seductress. She was born into a permissive and unconventional family, the only daughter in a household with three brothers. Her mother and father, prominent St. Louis community leaders, raised their children on a diet of praise and positive reinforcement, with a religious respect for independence, nonconformity, and knowledge. During dinner debates, children were required to follow
Robert’s Rules of Order
and prove their points with evidence from books and journals. Living in the company of boys, Martha grew up feisty, rebellious, cocksure, and precociously smart.

When her private girls’ school threatened to make a lady of her, the Gellhorns transferred her to a progressive, coed school that they cofounded. Later, at Bryn Mawr, she escaped the “curse of respectability” again, leaving after three years for a career in journalism. With burn-your-boats bravado, she declined money from home, traveled to Albany, barged in on a newspaper editor, and demanded a job. For six months she covered the morgue and social events for the
Times-Union,
then bartered her way to Europe on a steamship in exchange for a magazine story.

Her career as a foreign correspondent had begun. Also as a seductress. She was tall, blond, and svelte, with chorine legs and a Breck girl face. She dangled a cigarette between her fingers in a “gesture of the brothel” and wore heavy maquillage and Schiaparelli samples. She had the sheen of experience and a stock of practiced love arts. Uninhibited, sensuous, fun-loving, and flirtatious, she “could talk the birds off a tree.”

As soon as the journalist Bertrand de Jouvenel met her, he simply walked out on his wife. This magnificent man was no tyro. Initiated and groomed by his stepmother, Colette, he was a world-class lover and serious activist who edited the leftist magazine
La Voix.
He shared Martha’s passion to “look and learn” and toured Europe with her, analyzing the body politic and lobbying for world peace. Their affair lasted three years, but in the end Martha “chalked it up,” saw she was “caught” and fled monogamy and domesticity.

At that point Martha got her first journalistic break as a field investigator with the Federal Emergency Relief Agency. Her record of the Depression fallout across rural America, delivered in “precise,” “evocative” prose, made her famous. Her picture ran on the cover of the
Saturday Review of Literature,
and
The Trouble I’ve Seen
drew praises from the toughest reviewers, one of whom compared her with Hemingway.

They seemed destined to meet. One afternoon in Key West she wandered into Sloppy Joe’s Bar, and there sat the thirty-seven-year-old author in a stained T-shirt and cutoffs belted with a piece of rope. Martha might have walked out of his
Sun Also Rises,
another Lady Brett femme fatale. She wore a black silk sheath and heels and, when she slid over to talk to him, spoke with wit and arch worldliness in a “husky, eastern-seaboard-accented voice.”

They left the bar together and conducted a torrid affair under his wife’s nose, calling each other Mooky and Scrooby and trysting openly. Later they reunited in Spain, where Martha finagled an assignment on the Spanish Civil War. Invading the no-woman’s-zone of war reportage, she stationed herself with Ernest in the thick of enemy fire and wrote dead-on dispatches that surpassed his in “intensity, focus, and unity.”

Their nine-year romance was one long erotic arm wrestle. They used each other as copy, not always flatteringly, and fought like matched champions. Deaf to Hemingway’s pleas to do his bidding, Martha went her own way, and when they married in 1940, she refused to take his name, play muse-wife, or stay home. From Finca Vigia, their Cuban villa, she flitted around the world on assignments and drove Ernest to distraction. He “would be destroyed,” he told Archibald MacLeish, if anything happened to her.

As he grew by turns more irascible and possessive (to the accompaniment of twelve whiskeys a day), Martha consoled herself with a handsome jai alai player and suffered no shit. After one of Ernest’s drunken exhibitions in public, she ran his favorite Lincoln into a ditch and let him walk home.

Without a qualm she left to cover World War II and beat him to the punch. Not only did she get there first, but she outclassed him in courage and coverage. She walked through minefields, flew a night-bombing mission in an unpressurized Thunderbolt, and stowed away on a hospital boat on D-Day and sneaked ashore as a stretcher bearer. Her powerful pieces, with their savage accuracy and clinical eye for significant detail, were masterpieces, “miniatures of war.” When the liberators arrived at Dachau, she was there to record it with chilling precision.