Books: L'Amour the Merrier

(2 of 2)

Perhaps the most advanced debauchee set the world has ever known was the French Order of the Aphrodites. The membership fee was £10,000 for a gentleman and £5,000 for a lady. The order was limited to 200 members, each of whom had to pass a rigorous three-hour test.

The Aphrodites' magnificent "country house" had an altar of love gods and goddesses and pink, taffeta-lined boxes for private love sessions, each fitted out with ingeniously placed peepholes. A journal of one of the female Aphrodites lists 4,959 amorous rendezvous in 20 years. This included 272 princes and prelates, 929 officers, 93 rabbis, 342 financiers, 439 monks, 420 socialites, 119 musicians, 47 Negroes and 1,614 foreigners ("during an enforced absence in London").

Came the Revolution. George Sand's grandmother once told her that "the Revolution brought old age into the world." Certainly, the tumbrils seemed to cart off some of the zest of Author Epton's chronicle. Napoleon, the self-made emperor, bolted his love affairs the way he bolted his meals. Lovers, who had been pretty vigorous since the Renaissance, again began to talk about dying. A book on How to Succeed in Love, published in 1830, suggested fainting fits, attacks of hysteria, and suicide threats. Morbid romanticism subsequently gave way to liaisons based on credit ratings. Toward the end of the century, some courtesans were known to vary the price of their favors depending on the fluctuations of the stock market.

To judge by the meager 30 pages she devotes to it, Historian Epton seems to feel that the 20th century is one of love's bear markets. Who killed Eros? Women did, by "becoming too much like men. Their curiosity value has declined." In compiling her Erostatistics, the author has done a lot to boost that curiosity value.