Seductress (40 page)

Lola, however, was a lockpick from way back, inured to arrest warrants and attack. She knew no man would be penalized for leaving home, laying the world, and singing a hymn to freedom. She may have even known she had the authority of myth behind her and the future of feminism before her. Move like the “goddess,” she told women, with a “flying step,” and “live before [you] die.”

When a woman steps out of the house for adventure, she opens the floodgates, loosing every kind of female vice on society: insubordination, self-will, promiscuity, and that trait so dreaded by men, aggression. “Anger,” writes Susan Brownmiller, is “unattractive,” the ultimate sexual turnoff. Not in male love poetry, erotica, or ancient myth. Sex goddesses of antiquity were fierce, bellicose power queens. Just as the “war instinct and eroticism” share the same neural circuitry in the libido, so these mythic love deities were pumped by rage, violence, and bloodshed. It was part of their “joyful, voracious appetite for life,” their life-death totality, and plenum of being.

From the earliest times lions symbolized this aggressive aspect of the erotic divinity (as seen in the 18,000 B.C. Chapel of the Lioness in
Les Trois Frères
) and persisted into the cult of Inanna. She plants a foot on a lion on her seal, and her name was
labbatu,
Lady Lioness. Unfettered from home and free to indulge her wildness, Inanna mauled foes with the same gusto she gave to sex. “Manly” and courageous, she prowled the roads with weapons and “Holy Woman’s rage,” fought “hand-to-hand,” and crushed the “one she loath[ed].” The ancient Greeks recycled Inanna into a mythical race of Amazons—nomadic warrior women with raging sexual appetites who lived on horseback, ransacked civilization, repudiated housework, and refused to marry.

Seventeenth-century Europe had its own “Queen of the Amazons” to contend with, the “mad, mad” “Vagabond Duchess” Hortense Mancini. Rich, privileged, refractory, and as free with firearms as she was with men, Hortense lived a life that might have been dreamed up by a gothic romancer on Benzedrine. Pursued for twenty years by a demented husband and his armed posses, she dashed from melodrama to melodrama, conquering every heart in her path, male and female. She was a macha Hotspur, a drifter with attitude unleashed in a “softer sex” culture that enshrined feminine sweetness, chastity, stasis, and subordination and gave miscreants no quarter.

Hortense’s first impression on the world, ironically, was seraphic. When Cardinal Mazarin, the de facto French ruler during Louis XIV’s minority, summoned his niece to Versailles at age eight with her four sisters, he pronounced her an “angel.” He was wrong. “Her mother’s darling,” Hortense was a handful: spoiled, undisciplined, and intractable to feminine socialization.

She ran riot through the palace, laughed too loud, refused to obey, and flirted with everyone in pants, including Louis’s brother Philippe, who declared he “could not live without her.” Bundling her off to a convent failed (the nuns returned her in tears), as did the services of a stern governess. But the cardinal was no wiser and gave Hortense his entire fortune, the greatest in Europe, provided that her husband, the legal heir, change his name to Mazarin.

Despite the catch clause, titled suitors clamored for her hand: Charles, the future king of England; Prince Pedro of Portugal; Charles Emmanuel II of Savoy; and others. Her assets included more than wealth and high spirits; her beauty “surpassed all imagination.” In striking contrast to the “white and golden” belle ideal, she was dark and full-bodied in the Italian style, with a Roman nose, sultry pout, jet black eyes, and masses of raven hair that tumbled down her back in a riot of corkscrew curls. She had her pick.

But in a deathbed lapse of sanity Cardinal Mazarin chose for her and selected an aristocratic rotter and sycophant of no charms whatever. A tall spindleshanks, Armand Charles, marquis de la Meilleraye, lacked animation, education, and wit and harbored a streak of madness. But the cardinal, drooling dementia notwithstanding, had spoken, and the wedding took place in February 1661.

In five years Armand reduced Hortense to the “unhappiest woman” on earth. His mind snapped and spiraled into a paranoia that revealed the whole rationale behind female sequestration. Panicked at the possibility of Hortense’s roving libido, he barricaded her at home, denied her male guests, and forbade her to kiss their children, of whom she had four in quick succession. At one point, the sex-crazed marquis lopped off all the genitals in the cardinal’s priceless art collection.

Women had two recourses for marital abuse in those days—prayer and laudanum. Except Hortense. Traducing every sacred and secular marital law, she declared war on her husband. She escaped his house arrest five times, twice fled from convent prisons, and sued him for a separation. Exhausted by her demands, Louis XIV finally gave in and let her live independently until her case came to court.

Hortense saw her opportunity. Dressed in male disguise, she slipped out of Paris with a lover and merry band of followers and headed to Italy. An Alpine layover resulted in a liaison with her lover’s equerry and another pregnancy. But she scorched into Rome unperturbed, “dancing and running about” and flirting with all the men. Scandalized relatives foolishly packed her off to a convent. She broke out as usual and sped to France for a furious round of adventures and hairbreadth escapes.

Louis XIV’s demand that she desist and settle abroad only provoked worse audacities. She mounted a madcap campaign to rescue her unhappily married sister that involved an armed standoff in the forest, a sea chase with her brother-in-law’s warships, and shipwreck on the coast of Marseilles. After a cascade of parallel dramas, always with Armand’s armies at her heels, Hortense and her sister fetched up in Savoy, under the protection of Charles Emmanuel II, her old suitor.

A swashbuckling monarch who understood her, Charles gave her liberty, luxury, a château, and “all the privileges and none of the responsibilities of a petty sovereign.” For three years Hortense flourished, strapping on her “whirlwind warrior” sandals and running with her archaic passions. She hunted the woods in men’s trousers, paraded through the streets bathed in hares’ blood, swam in all seasons, and hitched up her skirts and danced with peasants.

Indoors she did what a sex deity does best; she seduced her secretary, César Vichard (author of
Dom Carlo,
source of the Verdi opera), and studied philosophy and history with him between bouts of lovemaking. Though no intellectual, Hortense had a mind and mouth on her. While in Savoy, she tossed off her memoirs, which sold briskly in four languages. “I have found at last,” she said at the end, “that quiet which I had sought so long in vain.”

Self-knowledge was not her long suit. After Charles died and his wife ousted her, Hortense was back on the adventure trail, accompanied by twenty men (including her secretary lover) and talking of “nothing but violins and hunting parties.” Hounded every step by Armand’s forces, she arrived in London penniless and caked with mud to cheering crowds. Her old beau Charles II soon joined them. He called her the “finest woman he had ever seen in his life,” installed her in a “Little Palace” conveniently across the park, and settled a handsome pension on her.

For a while she held first place in the royal seraglio. At the opening of Parliament she appeared by the king’s side “raised high above the other ladies.” He said he’d rather talk to her than anyone else and gave her the world: an exotic menagerie, a fleet of gold-livered servants,
grandes toilettes
from Paris, and the best chef and cellar in London.

But typically, Hortense’s hormones got the better of her. Unable to keep her hands to herself, she dallied with courtiers on the side, among them the prince of Monaco. The king looked the other way and only once stopped her pension, but his ardor cooled.

Not all of her infidelities were sexual. Her most celebrated was an
amitié amoureuse
with the sixty-year-old seigneur de Saint-Évremond. This famous French philosopher in exile fell hopelessly in love with Hortense and tagged behind her for the rest of her life as her personal tutor, factotum, and poet laureate. “Everything about her,” he raved, “turned to love; she was a miracle of beauty, miracle of love.”

Under his guidance, she acquired a “newfound reputation for wit and intelligence” and opened a stylish, if unconventional, salon. Highbrow debates and readings were carried on amid revelrous festivity: games of ombre and trente-et-quarante, arias sung by a “Golden Soprano,” and Hortense’s furlanos, danced to Gypsy guitars.

Her erotic explorations often took her beyond the cavalier population. Like the double-gendered sex goddess, Hortense also had lesbian affairs, then openly tolerated. She joined X-rated “horse races” at exclusive ladies’ nights and became so embroiled with the countess of Sussex that her husband had to abduct her from Hortense’s clutches. Other female admirers included the author Aphra Behn, who dedicated a novel to her and called herself her “entire slave.” “Each sex,” said Saint-Évremond admiringly, “provided its lovers for Hortense.”

Charles II’s death in 1684 cut Hortense’s financial supply lines, leaving her at the mercy of her husband, who still pursued her with deranged fury. Future kings, however, continued her pension, though in smaller and smaller amounts. She downsized her lifestyle but remained as extravagant as ever in spirit and libido. At thirty-seven she hurled herself into a grand passion with a heroic Swedish general and almost lost her mind when an infatuated rival killed him in a duel.

Afterward her mad run at life grew into a desperate quest for escape. She incurred gambling debts and slid into other excesses. Her militant fiber and colossal selfhood, however, spared her the usual thrill addict’s burnout. “Never have I been in better health, never more beautiful,” she boasted in middle age, but she collapsed in a coma at fifty-four and never recovered, except to rebuff a priest on her deathbed.

Her picaresque saga didn’t end there. Once her insane husband got his hands on her remains, he refused to part with them and lugged them around France on a yearlong pilgrimage. Every time the cortege approached, peasants poured out with the sick and dying to touch the bier of the mysterious saint. Many miracle cures were reported.

To have seen herself regarded as a saint would have given Hortense a good laugh. She’d always been Satan in skirts to the status quo. The court poet, Lord Rochester, compared her to Messalina, and coffeehouse wits said she copulated with stallions and valets and soused the whole city with her “cunt gravy.”

But Hortense, like the sex goddess, was beyond Madonna-whore polarities; she snarled the categories. She might have deserted her children, cheated at cards, and committed a hundred other offenses, but she was a force of nature, “raw libidinous energy,” a boundary-busting
labbatu,
whom men could not help but adore. “She comes, she comes!” chanted pub crawlers of her. “Resign the day—/She must reign, and you obey.”

Beryl Markham looks so leonine on her book jacket photo that we expect her biography to be titled
Lady Lioness.
It might well have been. This
über
siren, called simply “the creature” for her primitive erotic power, was the direct offspring of the goddess who “rides out on seven great lions” and roves the planet for men, excitement, and prizes.

Although passed over for more manageable action heroines, she was one of the greatest adventurers of modern times. Her exploits as a bush pilot and horse trainer set records, and her historic east-west solo flight across the Atlantic surpassed Amelia Earhart’s. In seduction, she scored just as impressively; lovers succumbed to her spell as if they were “under the influence of some swami.”

Raised wild in the African bush, Beryl received an early initiation into female erotic magic. When she was four, her Kipsigis nurse tied a cowrie shell on a leather thong around her wrist—symbol of vulva power. The charm worked. Throughout her childhood she was known as the girl with the “powerful
dawa
[charisma].”

No meddling parents or schoolmasters interfered with the exercise of this force. Her mother, having eloped with another Kenya settler in 1905, had long gone, and her laissez-faire father let nature take its course. Given free rein on the horse farm at the edge of the Njoro wilderness, she roamed the Mau forests with a tribal boy her age and learned what he did: how to hunt, wrestle, hurl spears, bear pain, avenge wrongs, and acquit herself with courage and cunning.

On several occasions her father made halfhearted attempts to civilize her and trucked in governesses for the purpose. But each time the enfant terrible ran them off. The first discovered a black mamba snake in her bed, and another discovered what happened when she tried to thwart Beryl. When the governess locked her in a hut, Beryl battered down the door with a forty-pound elephant tusk and disappeared into the bush for three days.