Memoirs of a Secret Agent (1932). Moura was known as the Mata Hari of Russia. Her MI5 file recorded “that she can drink an amazing quantity, mostly gin.” It was she who, as early as 1951, was to tip off MI6 that Sir Anthony Blunt was a communist, her other claim to distinction being that she was the great-aunt of Nick Clegg, leader of the Liberal Democrats. She was twenty-four years younger than H. G. Wells, but it was no casual fling. After the death of his wife, Jane, in 1927, Moura became Wells’s closest female friend and he would later confide: “She was the only woman I really loved.” Moura was equally smitten. When quizzed by Somerset Maugham on what she saw in “the paunchy, played-out writer,” Moura replied: “He smells of honey.”
If Wells showed no signs of slowing down in his personal life, this was matched by his phenomenal productivity as a writer. In a career spanning fifty years, he published more than 130 books. Instead of mellowing, his political and social philosophy got more extreme as he got older, and his later books alternate between a kind of Utopian authoritarianism (he was a keen supporter of eugenics) and muscular “we’re all doomed” pessimism. His finest work of nonfiction, The Outline of History (1920), became an international bestseller, describing the modern world as “a race between education and catastrophe.” Wells was a passionate advocate of world government and he knew his subject, interviewing both Theodore and Franklin D. Roosevelt and Lenin and Stalin. He rejected both communism and fascism from the start, and if few people now take his political philosophy seriously, the Nazis, at least, felt otherwise. Top of the blacklist of intellectuals to be liquidated after their planned invasion of Britain was the name H. G. Wells.
For all Wells’s talk of the Great Sexual Liberation and his socialist dislike for the bourgeois institution of wedlock, he was happily married for much of his life. The final volume of his Experiment in Autobiography was published in 1984, after the last of his lovers had died. In it, he admits that he often wanted to leave Jane and the drudgery of family life for one of his younger, eager-minded lovers, but he knew that she was a steadfast presence, a true friend that he couldn’t do without. This was not the case with the other women he had known: “The women I have kissed, solicited, embraced and lived with, have never entered intimately, and deeply into my emotional life.” Sex with his mistresses occupied “much the same place in my life that fly-fishing or golfing has in the life of many busy men.” This is hardly a mission statement for a new world order of sexual liberation; it sounds more like a man having his cake and eating it. Jane forgave Wells and put up with his philandering because it posed no real threat. The “World-Man,” the “hero of the future” always came home for the sympathy, support, and encouragement that only she could give him. As he himself once confessed:
I can’t bank on religion. God has no thighs and no life. When one calls to him in the silence of the night he doesn’t turn over and say, “What is the trouble, Dear?”
The story of the loyal wife making sacrifices to support the career and unruly appetites of a gifted husband is a familiar one. But what happens when the boot is on the other foot? What if Jane had written about the marriage instead of Bertie? Reading the work of Colette (1873–1954) is practically a rite of passage for adolescent girls in France. In more than fifty novels, she lays bare the ambiguities of female love with such acuity and startling originality that they make H. G. Wells’s social novels look like so much high-minded puffery. If a chap wants to understand women’s sexuality, Colette is the perfect place to start. She laid out her stall early on. While still a schoolgirl, she decided she would be known by her surname, as the boys were. None of her friends in Burgundy ever used her Christian names—Sidonie-Gabrielle—and she continued the habit when, aged twenty, she married Henri Gauthier-Villars. Fifteen years her senior and an art critic who dabbled in fiction, he saw at once that she was the better writer, encouraging her to produce a series of novels based on her character Claudine, and locking her in her room until she had produced the requisite number of pages. First published under his pen name, “Willy,” they were runaway bestsellers, titillating French society with their implied lesbian relationships among schoolgirls.
Willy had an adventurous sex life himself, openly bringing a succession of young lovers back home and giving Colette at least one dose of gonorrhea. She left him in 1906, earning her living as an actress, and she formed a close lesbian relationship with the aristocratic Mathilde de Morny, Marquise de Belboeuf, better known as Missy. Colette and Missy were a scandal. At performances of Reve d’Egypte in 1907, there were riots when they bared their breasts and exchanged a kiss on stage. Fleeing Paris, Missy bought Colette a house in Brittany, where she could write after her divorce from Willy. (Willy, unfortunately, had kept the copyright to Colette’s early successes, and she needed an independent income.) Colette started writing a column for the daily newspaper Le Matin. Aged thirty-seven, she fell in love with twenty-four-year-old Auguste Heriot but abandoned him in 1912 to marry the editor of Le Matin, the wealthy Baron Henri de Jouvenel. He was to prove just as unfaithful as her first husband. In 1913 they had a daughter, Bel-Gazou, whom Colette referred to as “a rat.” Motherhood was not going to interrupt her career. “My strain of virility,” she wrote, “saved me from the danger which threatens the writer, elevated to a happy and tender parent, of becoming a mediocre author.” Bel-Gazou was left in the care of a nanny; it wasn’t unusual for Colette to pass six months without seeing her. At eight the child was sent to boarding school, and a friend of Colette’s revealed that “all weaknesses are forbidden her, above all asking for love….”
Henri de Jouvenel had a teenage son, Bertrand, who was sixteen in 1919 when Colette seduced him. To be fair to forty-nine-year-old Colette, she had initially hired two prostitutes to take his virginity, but he was unable to perform. Colette persevered and succeeded where the professionals had failed. Bertrand later described his stepmother as “demanding, voracious, expert and rewarding.” Colette, by her own account, remained in love with Bertrand’s father, but he was preoccupied with work and other mistresses. Eventually they divorced but she carried on living with her stepson lover, an affair that lasted until he was twenty-three. Colette had a savage perm and a face-lift in an effort to ward off old age—quite an experimental operation in the 1920s. She told a friend that the secret of life was to “content yourself with a passing temptation, and satisfy it. What more can one be sure of than that which one holds in one’s arms at that very moment?”
In 1935 she got married for the last time, to forty-five-year-old Maurice Goudeket. He soon ran out of money and before long he was selling secondhand washing machines and devices to unblock lavatories. Colette supported him with her royalties, and although he, too, took other lovers, he was jealous of any other men who paid her any attention right up until her death in 1954 at the age of eighty-one. His infidelities had never troubled Colette. She knew who was running the relationship. She understood that nothing sexual was ever straightforward, explaining to a friend that Maurice stayed with her because of her “male virility, which shocks him. When he sleeps with another woman he chooses one who is feminine, but he couldn’t actually live with a woman like that.”
For Marie Bonaparte (1882–1962) it was the lack of male virility that posed a problem—not hers, but her husband’s. Marie was the great-grand-niece of Napoleon, and the last of the Bonaparte line. Her marriage to Prince George of Greece connected her to the royal families of Denmark, Russia, and Great Britain (she was Prince Philip’s aunt). Prince George was tall, fair, and handsome, but he never even kissed Marie while they were engaged, something she put down to his chastity and good breeding. On her wedding night George could not perform and scurried off to his uncle Waldemar’s bedroom for a pep talk. Returning with instructions on how to consummate the marriage, he confessed, “I hate it as much as you do, but we must do it if we want to have children.” When they left for their honeymoon, Uncle Waldemar helpfully came with them, and George cried when he left three days later. He was soon back, though, and as it was clear she wasn’t going to be able to shake him off, Marie resolved to enjoy Uncle Waldemar’s company. He would kiss her passionately while George looked on. Marie sometimes joked that she had two husbands but that she thought of George more as a brother than a husband. When Marie was a teenager, she had had an affair with her father’s secretary, a man called Leandri, who then blackmailed her with the love letters she wrote to him. Undeterred by this unpromising start, Marie took numerous other lovers throughout her life, including the French prime minister Aristide Briand, although none of them was to bring her physical satisfaction.
As a young woman, Marie told her father, Prince Roland, that she wanted to train as a doctor, but he forbade it as an unseemly choice for an aristocratic woman. However, he permitted her to keep a human skeleton in her bedroom, so that she could study anatomy. This gave her nightmares, transforming in her dreams into a Hindu mummy that attacked her. Marie decided that the skeleton was a subconscious symbol for her dead mother, and that she must keep it in her room to force herself to conquer her terrors. Her neuroses multiplied: She had her bedroom curtains removed in case they harbored germs, and would not light a fire in case it sucked all the oxygen
