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TO GET JULY OFF TO A GOOD START, HERE'S SOMETHING FOR YOU - 02/07/21
Let's continue on this wave of sales that will guide you to the shores of pleasure, culminating in the well-deserved rest of those who have let themselves slide on these roads to well-being comparable to a massage with 10 hands covered with a royal seed.
So yes, I won't hide it from you, it's true that if you want to have a summer that lives up to your expectations, I'd advise you, in all modesty, to let yourself be amazed by our creations. Not only will they create butterflies in your belly the size of golden eagles, but they'll also give you the power to seize what's rightfully yours, the best.
I have to make amends, I think I've mixed up one of the newsletters and I'm sorry for my overzealousness coupled with my lack of attention. To get past that, I propose to celebrate the birth of a woman 139 years ago, Marie Bonaparte, the last descendant of Napoleon Bonaparte.
Orphaned by her mother, she was brought up by her father and grandmother, and it was the fortune she inherited that interested the adults around her more than her precocious intelligence. Passionate about anatomy, she dreamed of becoming a doctor, but her well-read father refused to allow her to study. Charmed at first by her father's secretary, who turned out to be a swindler when she was 16, she began a life of socialite, the only escape from her sadness at not being able to go to university. Through drinking and eating hors d'oeuvres, she eventually met King George I of Greece, whose son, another George, she married in Athens in 1907. Immersed in Greek royal life, she became severely bored and, above all, had to deal with the homosexuality of her husband, who was having a love affair with his uncle, Prince Valdemar of Denmark.
Not one to give up, she also allowed herself the right to live other stories, which saw her socialise with Aristide Briand (former French Prime Minister) and Rudolph Loewenstein (Polish doctor and psychoanalyst, naturalised American). Deeply affected by the death of her father and convinced that she was suffering from frigidity, she wrote an article on the subject, but above all she decided to undergo an operation in Vienna by a surgeon who had invented a fanciful theory about the absence of pleasure. Unfortunately, her many attempts were to no avail. Attracted by psychoanalysis and thanks to her rank, Freud agreed to treat her.
As well as being his patient, she also became the translator of some of his work into French. And it was thanks to her diplomatic connections that she was able to exfiltrate Freud and his family from Nazi Germany in 1938. She also received a large sum of money.
After the war, she went into exile and returned to France, where she continued her work on psychoanalysis, opposing Lacanism, before publishing what is considered to be her second major work, Theory of Female Sexuality, in 1951.
When her husband passed away in 1957, she decided to do everything in her power to save Cary Chessmann, a man on death row. As a teenager, he fell into a life of crime, which led to various hold-ups. But it was in January 48, after a chase with the police following a theft from a clothes shop, that he took the plunge for good. The police thought he was the Red Light Bandit, whose modus operandi was to rob women, then drag them off to a dark corner to rape them, flashing the lights on his Ford (how's that for alliteration!). After confessing, he quickly recanted, accusing the authorities of having extracted the confession from him with violence. Then on parole, the jury found no mitigating circumstances, and Chessman, who defended himself, was sentenced to death.
Incarcerated, he spent his time studying law to defend himself and writing novels that became bestsellers, translated into 14 languages. Unwilling to admit that he was the perpetrator of the crimes he claimed not to have committed, thus avoiding the death penalty, he was executed in the gas chamber in 1960.
Marie Bonaparte's busy life came to an end at her home in Saint-Tropez in 1962.
That's it, I'm done. Thank you for reading to the end of this special summer newsletter, a quadruple issue that will turn you into a knowledge monster. So thanks to whom? Thank you Patou, my darling.
A nice little tune to accompany this thick Newsletter from the heart:
