LOL Stendhal, I still want to smack all your characters but you are an entertaining dude.

[tenlittlebullets]

I really should update about the past three days, because ladyhamilton (friend-from-Edinburgh) and I did kind of a whirlwind tour of Paris. It's one of those "too much to write about, so I will write nothing" things--I couldn't possibly summarize it, except that there was lots of nerdy cackling involved, and I am probably a very bad (and excessively morbid) tour guide. And now my mom is here, and I have been looking at my schedule for the next two months and hyperventilating as I realize I will have no time to do ANY of my schoolwork.

So instead of giving a blow-by-blow, I am going to go the route of "posting about completely irrelevant things," i.e. things only me and mmebahorel will find interesting, i.e. the question (spread over many threads about Les Mis slash) of how taboo oral sex was in the 1820s and 30s.

And I found a reference--to oral sex performed on a woman, not on a man, but in the context of married couples and real-life manwhores instead of the usual porn-and-prostitutes. Basically, Stendhal writing to Prosper Mérimée about male impotence, alluding to ways husbands can keep their wives entertained if they can't get it up. And completely dropping the coy façade of Armance to reveal the raunch underneath.

Context: This was on the general subject of Armance, where the male protagonist is hiding a secret that eventually drives him to suicide. Stendhal admitted in his correspondence that the secret was impotence--a taboo subject at the time--and in a letter to Prosper Mérimée he expanded on the subject quite a bit, going so far to name names and acknowledge it was not a rare problem. He also engaged in some, um, very frank speculation about his characters' sex lives, and how Octave managed not to reveal his secret on his wedding night.

Quote (loosely translated): "[Octave], like all Babilans [impotent men], is very strong in the auxiliary methods that have secured the glory of the President [a certain old libertine who frequented Stendhal's social circles]. A clever hand, an unofficial use of the tongue, gave Armance all sorts of pleasures. I'm sure that many young women don't know exactly what the physical aspects of marriage consist of."

At that point he's still making an effort to be classy and allusive about it, but at the end of the letter, he adds, "In 2826, if civilization still exists and I come back to my apartment in the Rue Duphot, I'll tell the story of how [Octave] bought a lovely Portugese dildo in elastic rubber, which he attached properly to his belt, and how with the above, after giving a complete ecstasy to his wife, and a nearly-complete ecstasy, he bravely consummated his marriage, in the Rue du Paradis in Marseille. When you're a dreamer, a witty man, a student of the Ecole Polytechnique, like [Octave], that's what you do. Give ecstasies with one's hand, what a beautiful euphemism to avoid the filthy word br-nl-r! [branler, to jerk off] The object of [Octave]'s meditations: giving ecstasies, etc., was the object of his meditations throughout his youth. You must know that he spent his youth with prostitutes; that's what I sought to indicate modestly. Armance tells him this slander that's been repeated about him."

In conclusion: Stendhal is a perv, and married men who'd been around the block a few times totally gave their wives head.