The Sexual Exploits and Secret Diaries of Victor Hugo and Keynes

As I had written earlier, I read Victor Hugo’s ‘Les Miserables’ last month and I’ve been busy dipping into the commentaries and analyses of the work. Mario Vargas Llosa’s lectures on ‘Les Miserables’ is collected as a volume called ‘The Temptation of the Impossible’. Reading it, I discovered that our man Hugo was a sex-addict – probably the most famous one of the 19th century!

His love life alone was so intense and varied that it gives cause for astonishment and, of course, a certain envy). He was a twenty year-old virgin when he married Ade`le Foucher, but from the wedding night on, he began to make up for lost time. In the many years remaining to him, he performed innumerable amorous feats with democratic impartiality, for he went to bed with ladies from all echelons of society—from marquises to servant women, with a certain preference for the latter in his later years—and his biographers, those voyeurs, have discovered that a few weeks before he died, at eighty-three years old, he escaped from his house to make love to an old servant woman of his long-term lover, Juliette Drouet.

The New Yorker records:

…he resolutely cheated on both wives with actresses, maids, the barber’s wife, his son’s mistress, and anybody else who proved vulnerable to a seductive recitation of rhymed couplets by France’s greatest master of the rhymed couplet. He grew fond of prostitutes, too, and in later years visited them daily. Even when he was in his seventies, his distressed family had to conspire to keep the frisky old poet from escaping into the streets in search of adventures in no one knew what shady corners of Paris

Describing his penchant for servants, Llosa further shares:

Despite having brought his wife, Ade`le, and his lover Juliette with him to the Channel Islands and having sporadic intimate relations with local women or visitors, he maintained continued carnal commerce with the servant girls. It was commerce in all senses of the word, beginning with making payments. He paid for their services according to a strict tariff. If the girl only let him look at her breasts, she received a few centimes. If she completely undressed, but the poet could not touch her, that was fifty centimes. If he could caress her but go no further, it was one franc. When, by contrast, he achieved the ultimate, the payment could be one franc fifty or even, on the occasional lavish afternoon, two francs! Almost all these notes are written in Spanish to cover his tracks. Who would have thought that Spanish would become the language of transgression, forbidden pleasures, and sin for the great romantic.

It is also reported that, on his death, all the brothels in Paris were closed for a day to allow the sex-workers pay their last respects to their loyal customer. The sex workers also are reported to have draped their genitals in black crepe as a mark of respect. (Also pertinent to note that Hugo’s funeral was attended by around 2 million people and is considered to be the largest ever in French history.)

When I shared these excerpts with a journalist-friend of mine, she was intrigued by his love for servants and immediately pointed me to the historical figure of Hannah Cullwick. Cullwick was a Victorian-era diarist and a working class woman, who after her marriage to the aristocrat Arthur Munby, documented their love life through letters and photographs. While this was odd enough for the Victorian age, what made her even more intriguing was her fetish for role-play. In the language of BDSM, she would probably be what we today refer to as a sub or a slave. Her role play as a servant went to the extent of her covering herself in dirt and grime, licking her masters’ boots clean and recording all of it. Little wonder why she’s been an object of interest for the feminist movement. One cant help but be in awe of her courage to write and record these facts for posterity.

Through her Wikipedia entry, I got to know that a short film on her life, based on her diaries, called ‘On My Knees’ was made in 2003. The movie is available on YouTube:

Since we’re also on the topic of diaries and dalliances with servants, I cant help but mention the other celebrity who diligently recorded all his amorous exploits in a diary, John Maynard Keynes – arguably the greatest, most famous and most influential economist of all time. Despite being heavily engaged, writing and debating the global economic events of the 20^th century – the Great Depression, the Treaty of Versailles and the shaping of the Post-WWII economic order through the Bretton Woods Conference, Keynes did manage to find time to channel his sexual energies. Beginning from 1901 and until 1915, he maintained two diaries – one recording every partner he was with and the second recording in code the acts he indulged in.  Being a bisexual, most of his dalliances were with men. Some of his celebrated entries are a testament to the range of his pursuits: “16-year-old under Etna, Stable boy of Park Lane, Lift boy of Vauxhall, Jew boy etc“. These, in addition to diplomats, poets, writers and painters show the range of his exploits. One reason cited for his diaries ending in 1915 probably had to do with the intense persecution that homosexuals suffered. For instance, the Irish Nationalist Roger Casement might have been hanged for his nationalism in Ireland but his homosexuality was also used against him.

Keynes was also part of the artistic Bloomsbury group. In today’s world it would have been called a polycule. Sample this dynamic which I picked up from this source:

Keynes became friends with Lytton Strachey at the society of Apostles and the two of them, along with Leonard Woolf, Clive Bell, Virginia Woolf, Thoby Stephens, and Vanessa Bell formed the core of the famous Bloomsbury Group. You wonder what the dynamic of that group must have been like? Ah. Well, for starters, Lytton Strachey was Keynes’ sometimes lover, but he ended up proposing to Virginia Woolf. She, however, chose to marry Leonard Woolf while her sister, Vanessa, married Clive Bell. Keynes remained close to the Bells and the Woolfs, until he married the Russian ballerina Lydia Lopokova.

What a life!