Sadness

Passages

Every passage tagged with this emotion in the Vela corpus. Search the body text, narrow by source or register, click through to a book’s profile to see how the passage sits with the rest of the work.

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• From Best Erotica & Sexual Deviance Narratives Ever Written (2024)

  Prayer is the misfortunate's sweetest comfort; strength reenters him once he has fulfilled this duty. My courage renewed, I raised myself up, I gathered together the rags the villain had left me, and I hid myself in a thicket so as to pass the night in less danger. The security I believed I enjoyed, the satisfaction I had just tasted by communing with my God, all combined to help me rest a few hours, and the sun was already risen high when I opened my eyes. For the wretched, the instant of awakening is hideous: the imagination, refreshed by sleep's sweet ministrations, very rapidly and lugubriously fills with the evils these moments of deceiving repose have smoothed into oblivion. Very well, I said as I examined myself, it is then true that there are human creatures Nature reduces to the level of wild beasts! Lurking in this forest, like them flying the sight of man, what difference now exists between them and me? Is it worth being born for a fate so pitiable?... And my tears flowed abundantly as I meditated in sorrow; I had scarcely finished with my reflections when I heard sounds somewhere about; little by little, two men hove into view. I pricked up my ears: "Come, dear friend," said one of them, "this place will suit us admirably; the cruel and fatal presence of an aunt I abhor will not prevent me from tasting a moment with you the pleasures I cherish." They draw near, they station themselves squarely in front of me and so proximately that not one of their words, not one of their gestures is able to escape me, and I observe... Just Heaven, Madame, said Therese, interrupting herself, is it possible that destiny has placed me in none but situations so critical that it becomes quite as difficult for Virtue to hear them recited as for modesty to describe them? That horrible crime which equally outrages both Nature and social conventions, that heinous deed, in a word, which the hand of God has so often smitten, rationalized, legitimized by Coeur-de-fer, proposed by him to the unhappy Therese, despite her wishes consummated against her by the butcher who has just immolated her, in brief, I did see that revolting execration carried out before my own eyes, together with all the impure gropings and fumblings, all the frightful episodes the most meditated depravity can devise. One of the men, he who gave himself, was twenty-four years old, of such a bearing and presence one might suppose him of an elevated degree, the other, of about the same age, appeared to be one of his domestics.

• From Take Back Your Life: Recovering from Cults and Abusive Relationships (2000)

  Case in point: how heartening it is to see the lovely, caring, vibrant woman Hedda Nussbaum has become. She is now an activist who speaks out against violence in venues all over the country. PART TWOThe Healing ProcessThink wrongly if you please, but in all cases think for yourself -DORIS LESSING [image file=img/img0011.jpg] Each person's cult experience is different. Some may dabble with a meditation technique yet never get drawn into taking advanced courses or moving to a group's ashram. Others may quickly give up everything-including college, career, possessions, home, and family-to do missionary work in a foreign country or to move into cult lodgings. Still others may have been born or raised in a cult, never having the choice to join or be part of the group. After cult involvement, some people carry on with their lives seemingly untouched; more typical are those who experience a variety of emotional or psychological difficulties, ranging from inability to sleep, restlessness, and lack of direction to panic attacks, memory loss, and depression. To varying degrees, former members may feel guilty, ashamed, enraged, lost, confused, betrayed, paranoid, panicked, sad, unreal, or as if they are living in a sort of fog. Professionals who work with cult survivors note that it can take from one to two years for former members "to return to their former level of adaptation, while some may have psychological breakdowns or remain psychologically scarred for years."' Once again, those born and raised in a cult will face a whole different set of challenges and adjustments (see Part Three). The following case examples highlight the range of responses: Cynthia N., age thirty-eight, spent twelve years in a New Age group where she achieved a high level of leadership. She left because "I didn't feel right staying there anymore. I knew something was terribly wrong with the group and thought I'd go crazy if I stayed." She moved in with her parents, resumed college, and had a good job when she entered therapy five years after her cult departure to address some of the residual issues. Cynthia started therapy for treatment of a mild depression, complaining that life seemed rather flat and uninteresting. She had difficulty making friends and trusting people and she felt she had missed out on life, particularly compared to others her age who were married, had children, owned their own homes, and were advanced in their careers. After three months of intensive course work and counseling in the same group as Cynthia, Brian R. was hospitalized because of a suicide attempt. An eighteen-year-old college freshman at the time of his recruitment, his class work deteriorated immediately after he got involved with the group. He began hallucinating, seeing and hearing his leader talk to him, and he feared that he was being possessed by demons. Brian's behavior prompted the group to ask him to leave; he was becoming a hindrance.

• From Justine (Alexandria Quartet vol. 1) (1957)

  A thousand conversations, seeking out for each other like the tap-roots of trees for moisture — the hidden meaning of lives disguised in brilliant smiles, in hands pressed upon the eyes, in malice, in fevers and contents. (Justine now breakfasted silently surrounded by tall black footmen, and dined by candle-light in brilliant company. She had started from nothing — from the open street — and was now married to the city’s handsomest banker. How had all this come about? You would never be able to tell by watching that dark, graceful form with its untamed glances, the smile of the magnificent white teeth.…). Yet one trite conversation can contain the germ of a whole life. Balthazar, for example, meeting Clea against a red brocade curtain, holding a glass of Pernod, could say: ‘Clea, I have something to tell you’; taking in as he spoke the warm gold of her hair and a skin honeyed almost to the tone of burnt sugar by sea-bathing in the warm spring sunshine. ‘What?’ Her candid eyes were as blue as corn-flowers and set in her head like precision-made objects of beauty — the life-work of a jeweller. ‘Speak, my dear.’ Black head of hair (he dyed it), lowered voice set in its customary sardonic croak, Balthazar said: ‘Your father came to see me. He is worried about an illicit relationship you are supposed to have formed with another woman. Wait — don’t speak, and don’t look hurt.’ For Clea looked now as if he were pressing upon a bruise, the sad grave mouth set in a childish expression, imploring no further penetration. ‘He says you are an innocent, a goose, and that Alexandria does not permit innocent people to.…’ ‘ Please, Balthazar.’ ‘I would not have spoken had I not been impressed by his genuine anguish — not about scandal: who cares for gossip? But he was worried lest you should be hurt.’ In a small compressed voice, like some packaged thought squeezed to a hundredth of its size by machinery, Clea said:

• From Justine (Alexandria Quartet vol. 1) (1957)

  Then sometimes she wished to go away simply in order to belong more fully to her familiar! Poor fool, she was not spared anything in the long catalogue of self-deceptions which constitute a love affair. She tried to fall back on other pleasures, to find that none existed. She knew that the heart wearies of monotony, that habit and despair are the bedfellows of love, and she waited patiently, as a very old woman might, for the flesh to outgrow its promptings, to deliver itself from an attachment which she now recognized was not of her seeking. Waited in vain. Each day she plunged deeper. Yet all this, at any rate, performed one valuable service for her, proving that relationships like these did not answer the needs of her nature. Just as a man knows inside himself from the first hour that he has married the wrong woman but that there is nothing to be done about it. She knew she was a woman at last and belonged to men — and this gave her misery a fugitive relief. But the distortions of reality were deeply interesting to someone who recognized that for the artist in herself some confusions of sensibility were valuable. ‘Walking towards the studio she would suddenly feel herself becoming breathlessly insubstantial, as if she were a figure painted on canvas. Her breathing became painful. Then after a moment she was overtaken by a feeling of happiness and well-being so intense that she seemed to have become weightless. Only the weight of her shoes, it seemed, held her to the ground. At any moment she might fly off the earth’s surface, breaking through the membrane of gravity, unable to stop. This feeling was so piercing that she had to stop and hold on to the nearest wall and then to walk along it bent double like someone on the deck of a liner in a hurricane. This was itself succeeded by other disagreeable sensations — as of a hot clamp round her skull, pressing it, of the beating of wings in her ears. Half-dreaming in bed, suddenly horns rammed downwards into her brain, impaling her mind; in a brazen red glare she saw the bloodshot eyes of the mithraic animal. It was a cool night with soft pockets of chemical light in the Arab town. The Ginks were abroad with their long oiled plaits and tinselled clothes; the faces of black angels; the men-women of the suburbs.’ (I copy these words from the case history of a female mental patient who came under Balthazar’s professional care — a nervous breakdown due to ‘love’ — requited or unrequited who can say? Does it matter? The aetiology of love and madness are identical except in degree, and this passage could serve not only for Clea but indeed for all of us.)

• From Less (2017)

  How does Less get the world so wrong? Over and over again? Where is the exit from moments like this? Where is the donkey door out? “Mohammed, I am honored to be with you tonight.” “I am very great fan of Kalipso. Of course, I read not the English but the French. I am honored to be with you. And happy birthday, Arthur Less.” Probably now Tom and Freddy are packing their bags; they are many hours ahead, after all, and in Tahiti it is midday. Surely the sun is already hammering the beach like a tinsmith. The grooms are folding their linen shirts, their linen pants and jackets, or surely Freddy is folding them. He recalls Freddy was always the packer, while Less lounged on the hotel sofa. “You’re too fast and sloppy,” Freddy said that last morning in Paris. “And everything comes out wrinkled—see, watch this.” He spread out the jackets and shirts on the bed like they were clothes for a great paper doll, placed the pants and sweaters on top, and folded the whole thing up in a bundle. Hands on his hips, he smiled in triumph (by the way, everyone is completely naked in this scene). “And now what?” Less asked. Freddy shrugged: “Now we just put it in the luggage.” But of course this bolus was too large for the luggage to swallow, no matter how Freddy coaxed it, and after many tries of sitting and pressing, he eventually remade it into two packages, which he fit neatly into two bags. Victorious, he looked smugly at Less. Framed in the window, with that lean silhouette from his early forties, the spring Paris rain dotting the window behind him, Freddy’s former lover nodded and asked, “Mr. Pelu, you’ve packed everything; now what are we going to wear?” Freddy attacked him in a fury, and for the next half an hour, they wore nothing at all. Yes, surely Mr. Pelu is folding. Surely this is why he never calls to wish Less a happy birthday. And now Less stands on the balcony of the Swiss hotel, looking out over the frozen town. The railing is carved, absurdly, with cuckoos, each with a sharp protruding beak. In his glass: the last coin of champagne. Now he is off to India. To work on his novel, on what was supposed to be a mere final glaze and now appears to be breaking the whole novel to shards and starting again. To work on the tedious, self-centered, pitiable, laughable character Swift. The one nobody feels bad for. Now he is fifty.

• From Take Back Your Life: Recovering from Cults and Abusive Relationships (2000)

  (To this day, exercise helps me clear my thinking and maintain a connection to my physical self.) When I felt more confident, I took my first step into the business world and worked for a company that installed seasonal displays in retail stores. This job required me to develop management and decision-making skills, and through it, I became more self-directed. My depression continued sporadically for another eight months. Thoughts of finding a therapist resurfaced, but it took time to overcome my prejudice against therapy. I needed a therapist who would work with me as an equalsomeone who would be a coach instead of an authority figure. I interviewed therapists and carefully chose one, which in itself was empowering. For a while, triggers, things that reminded me of the group, bothered me. The smell of incense, for example, made me feel as though I were chanting again. Music was also a trigger that carried me back to feeling connected to the Swami. When I was a disciple, I was encouraged to direct all my emotional feelings toward him. No emotion toward another person or thing could be tolerated. I had been conditioned to suppress any type of feeling that was not approved. The only good emotion was a "devotional" emotion. Now love songs on the radio would send me into a crying jag. I would feel the loss as if I had just lost a lover. I would sometimes get confused and feel that my floating episodes were signs from God, directing me back to the path. As I reflected on the experiences of others who had left similar groups, I became more able to understand what was happening to me. I learned that many former members experience a kind of floating, so learning to label and defuse these episodes was vital to my recovery. Seeing the origin of my reactions helped me to resist the group's conditioning, and my emotional compulsion to return to the group subsided. Not allowing the triggers to cause me to dissociate gave me control over my life, which was another step in reclaiming my autonomy. I was desperately desirous of finding spiritual meaning in my life. I knew what I didn't want: a pseudo-spirituality that produced a dependent state, or an exclusive or secretive spirituality. I needed a mature spirituality that incorporated both mind and heart. I decided to explore the tradition of my family, Catholicism. I was fortunate to find a priest who responded with sensitivity, and with whom I could talk intelligently about my concerns. Fourteen years of immersion in groups that lived apart from the world had taken their toll. When I thought back to my precult days, my hopes forthe future, and my original goals, it was glaringly apparent that what I had wanted for myself was quite different from what I got. I sorted out what happened by carefully examining how I had been led on a divergent path. Going through that process in therapy was most helpful.

• From Emotional Inheritance (2022)

  I know what she means. She doesn’t want to end up envying her daughter for having the father she never had. She doesn’t want to repeat her history . Unlike the fantasy that one’s life starts or ends when a baby is born, life, and so, too, the process of examining it, is ongoing. There are many layers that Alice will have to peel away and explore as she gets closer to her emotional truth. She will relive her childhood with every stage of her daughter’s life. She will need to be angry at her parents and forgive them again. She will try to do her best, exactly the way her mother did, and will realize that her best isn’t always good enough. She will make mistakes and question herself, find herself overcorrecting for her parents’ faults as well as repeating them. She will feel gratitude for what they gave her, knowing that they were limited in their ability to know themselves and to work through their traumatic pasts, and that she had to do some of that work for them. Alice will never forget the painful yet fortunate journey of bringing Zoe to life. She and I will keep searching for her truths; she will try to own her past and question what she doesn’t yet know about herself and about life. In the end, we come to realize that it is the unexamined lives of others that we ourselves end up living.

• From Emotional Inheritance (2022)

  It wasn’t that Lara didn’t want to go to school, but rather that she wanted to stay home with Hanna, whom she experienced as distressed and felt she needed to protect . During that first session, Hanna and Jed told me an unusual and frightening story. They explained that when Lara was only five years old, her grandmother, Hanna’s mother, Masha, filed a complaint against Ethan, Jed’s son from his first marriage, for molesting Lara. Ethan was fourteen years old then, and social services were called to the house to investigate. But no signs of sexual abuse were found and the file was closed. Since then, Masha had filed eight more complaints against Ethan. Each time there was an investigation but no evidence was found and no charges were filed. “Our family is torn. We don’t know what to do and whom to believe,” Hanna told me during that first session. “I haven’t slept well since it happened.” Jed looked at Hanna and told me that Hanna was the one who had raised Ethan. Jed’s first wife had died when Ethan was only seven years old, and when Hanna had married Jed, she had become a mother to his son. Hanna loved Ethan. “Since her mother accused Ethan of molesting Lara, everything in our family has changed,” Jed said. “We all became suspicious of one another, not sure who lies and whom to believe, whom we need to protect and whom to blame.” Hanna started to cry. “I don’t believe he did it,” she said. “I really don’t believe it. I know him so well and I know my mother; when it comes to these things she can be a little crazy.” “What are ‘these things’?” I asked. Jed reached out and held Hanna’s hand. She didn’t answer. “This situation has created a lot of tension between us,” he said. “Hanna became depressed. She blames herself.” “What are you blaming yourself for?” I asked. “I’m her mother,” Hanna said, sobbing. “I’m the one who should know what the truth is.” She grabbed a tissue from the box and looked at me. “I don’t know, maybe I’m wrong and my mother is right and something terrible happened right in front of my eyes. I don’t know how to protect my daughter.” There was a long silence and then Hanna said, “I realize that maybe it’s my mother that I should protect my daughter from. My own mother, whom I love. But why would she blame him? Why would she do that?” Hanna and Jed hoped that someone would tell them what had really happened. They yearned for the truth. “What does Lara know about this situation? Is she aware of anything?” I asked before we ended the session.

• From Emotional Inheritance (2022)

  “My mother needed a goodbye ceremony. She explained to me that we had to move on with our lives, and that in order to do so we needed to have a healing ritual that would allow us to let go. She didn’t cry but I remember that she looked so sad. When we walked into his office, my mother stood right in front of his desk. She said out loud that she wished him the best in his new life, and then she took off her wedding ring and placed it on his desk. She collected the framed pictures of our family and put them in her bag. Then she pulled from her bag a small sculpture of a bird that we used to have in our living room. It was a gift he gave her before they got married. She put it on the shelf next to his desk. On his chair, she left their wedding album along with some of his stamp collection albums, which he had forgotten to pack. “Before we left, my mom said that she had one last thing to do. She stood in the corner, holding a few cards, and I recognized his handwriting on them. I think they were birthday or anniversary cards he had given her through the years. She whispered some things that I couldn’t hear and then spread them out on the floor. “When we got back to the car my mother asked how I was feeling. She said that we were free now and that this healing ceremony had already made her feel much better. I remember saying that it made me feel better too, but I was lying. That night I couldn’t sleep. I cried but I didn’t know why. “Art was the first person I ever told this story to. I remember his silence on the phone. And then I realized that he was crying. I asked him why he was so emotional, and he said he was not sure if it was because this was just a very sad story or if he was identifying too much with my father and felt his sadness at losing me. I was so touched by that answer and by how kind he was in his attempt to hear my story and not mix it with his own. It felt like he was the first person who ever considered my feelings.”

• From Less (2017)

  His escort, Amélie, a slim, pretty girl of Algerian parentage, spoke very little English; he wondered how on earth she had qualified for this position. Yet she met him every morning at his hotel, smiling, dressed in wonderful woolens, delivered him to the provincial librarian, sat in the backseat of the car throughout their tour, and delivered him home at night. Where she herself lived was a mystery. What purpose she served was an equal one. Was he meant to sleep with her? If so, they had mistranslated his books. The provincial librarian spoke better English but seemed burdened with unknown sadnesses; in the late autumn drizzle, his pale bald head seemed to be eroding into blandness. He was responsible for Less’s daily schedule, which usually consisted of visiting a school during the day and a library at night, with sometimes a monastery in between. Less had never wondered what was served in a French high school cafeteria; should he have been surprised it was aspic and pickles? Attractive students asked wonderful questions in horrible English, dropping their “aitches” like Cockneys; Less gracefully answered, and the girls giggled. They asked for his autograph as if he were a celebrity. Dinner was usually at the library, often in the only place with tables and chairs: the children’s section. Picture tall Arthur Less crammed into a tiny chair, at a tiny table, watching a librarian remove the cellophane from his slice of pâté. At one venue, they had made “American desserts” that turned out to be bran muffins. Later: he read aloud to coal miners, who listened thoughtfully. What on earth was everyone thinking? Bringing a midlist homosexual to read to French miners? He imagined Finley Dwyer entertaining in a velvet-draped Riviera theater. Here: gloomy skies and gloomy fortunes. It is no wonder that Arthur Less grew depressed. The days grew more gray, the miners more grim, his spirit more glum. Even the discovery of a gay bar in Mulhouse—Jet Sept—only deepened his sorrow; it was a sad black room, with a few characters from The Absinthe Drinkers, and a bad pun besides. When Less’s tour of duty was done and he had enriched the life of every coal miner in France, he returned by train to Paris to find Freddy asleep, fully clothed, atop the hotel bed; he had just arrived from New York. Less embraced him and began to shed ridiculous tears. “Oh, hi,” the sleepy young man said. “What’s happened to you?” Finley wears a plum-colored suit and a black tie. “How long ago was it? We were traveling together?” “Well, you remember, we didn’t get to travel together.” “Two years at least! And you had…a very handsome young man, I think.” “Oh, well, I—” A waiter comes by with a tray of champagne, and both Less and Finley grab one. Finley handles his unsteadily, then grins at the waiter; it occurs to Less that the man is drunk.

• From Less (2017)

  Whatever it is—Less never learned it. By his forties, all he has managed to grow is a gentle sense of himself, akin to the transparent carapace of a soft-shelled crab. A mediocre review or careless slight can no longer harm him, but heartbreak, real true heartbreak, can pierce his thin hide and bring out the same shade of blood as ever. How can so many things become a bore by middle age—philosophy, radicalism, and other fast foods—but heartbreak keeps its sting? Perhaps because he finds fresh sources for it. Even foolish old fears have never been vanquished, only avoided: telephone calls (frenetically dialing like a man decoding a bomb), taxicabs (fumbling the tip and leaping out as from a hostage situation), and talking to attractive men or celebrities at parties (still mentally rehearsing his opening lines, only to realize they are saying their good-byes). He still has these fears, but the passage of time solved them for him. Texting and email saved him from phones forever. Credit card machines appeared in taxis. A missed opportunity could contact you online. But heartbreak—how can you avoid it except to renounce love entirely? In the end, that is the only solution Arthur Less could find. Perhaps it explains why he gave nine years to a certain young man. I have neglected to mention that he has, on his lap, a Russian cosmonaut’s helmet. But now a bit of luck: from the world outside the lobby, a chime rings out, one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, causing Arthur Less to pop out of his seat. Look at him: staring at his betrayer, the clock, then running to the front desk and asking—at last—the essential temporal question. “I don’t understand how you could think I was a woman.” “You are such a talented writer, Mr. Less. You tricked me! And what are you carrying?” “This? The bookstore asked me to—” “I loved Dark Matter. There is a part that reminded me of Kawabata.” “He’s one of my favorites! The Old Capital. Kyoto.” “I am from Kyoto, Mr. Less.” “Really? I’ll be there in a few months—” “Mr. Less. We are having a problem…” This conversation takes place as the woman in the brown wool dress leads him down a theater hallway. It is decorated with a lone prop tree, the kind the hero hides behind in comedies; the rest is all brick painted glossy black. Less and his escort have run from the hotel to the event space, and he can already feel the sweat turning his crisp white shirt into a transparency.

• From Wild (2012)

  Together we descended Trail Pass Trail two miles down to a picnic area and campground at Horseshoe Meadows, where we met up with Doug and Tom and hitched a ride into Lone Pine. I hadn’t planned to go there. Some PCT hikers had resupply boxes sent to Lone Pine, but I’d planned to push through to the town of Independence, another fifty trail miles to the north. I still had a few days’ worth of food in my bag, but when we reached town I went immediately to a grocery store to replenish my stock. I needed enough to last for the ninety-six-mile section I’d be hiking once I made the bypass, from Sierra City to Belden Town. Afterwards, I found a pay phone and called Lisa and left a message on her answering machine, explaining my new plan as quickly as I could, asking her to send my box addressed to Belden Town immediately and hold all the others until I gave her the details of my new itinerary. I felt dislocated and melancholy when I hung up the phone, less excited about being in town than I thought I’d be. I walked along the main street until I found the men. “We’re heading back up,” said Doug, his eyes meeting mine. My chest felt tight as I hugged him and Tom goodbye. I’d come to feel a sort of love for them, but on top of that, I was worried. “Are you sure you want to go up into the snow?” I asked. “Are you sure you don’t?” Tom replied. “You still have your good luck charm,” said Doug, pointing to the black feather he’d given me back in Kennedy Meadows. I’d wedged it into Monster’s frame, up over my right shoulder. “Something to remember you by,” I said, and we laughed. After they left, I walked with Greg to the convenience store that doubled as the town’s Greyhound bus station. We passed bars that billed themselves as Old West saloons and shops that had cowboy hats and framed paintings of men astride bucking broncos displayed in their front windows. “You ever see High Sierra with Humphrey Bogart?” Greg asked. I shook my head. “That was made here. Plus lots of other movies. Westerns.” I nodded, unsurprised. The landscape did in fact look straight out of Hollywood—a high sage-covered flat that was more barren than not, rocky and treeless with a view that went on for miles. The white peaks of the Sierra Nevada to the west cut so dramatically up into the blue sky that they seemed almost unreal to me, a gorgeous façade. “There’s our ride,” Greg said, pointing to a big Greyhound bus in a parking lot of the store as we approached.

• From Sex with Kings: 500 Years of Adultery, Power, Rivalry, and Revenge (2004)

  In 1670 the king, anxious to take Madame de Montespan on a military campaign, needed to drag both the queen along as chaperone to avoid scandal and Louise to confuse the public about his relationship with Madame de Montespan. As the duc de Saint-Simon reported, “He paraded the two of them in the carriage with the Queen, along the frontier, at the encampments…. Crowds came running everywhere along the route, pointing at the carriage and naively calling to one another to come and see the three Queens!”29 In 1671 the poor queen found herself on another journey stuffed into a carriage with her husband and his two mistresses. One night, seven exalted travelers found themselves obliged to stay in the same room with one bed. Marie-Thérèse was given the bed, while the other six—the king, his brother and sister-in-law, his cousin Anne-Marie, Louise de La Vallière, and Athénaïs de Montespan, slept on mattresses on the floor. The flabbergasted queen cried out in her throaty Spanish accent, “What? All of us here together?” To which her husband retorted, “If you leave your bed curtains open, you can keep an eye on us all!”30 Marie-Thérèse often waited up quite late for her husband, who, out of courtesy to her, never failed to come to her bed, even if the sun was rising. When he finally did come, still warm from his mistress’s embrace, his wife greeted him with a smile. She was grateful that the king showed the court his respect for her so clearly. As one courtier remarked, “The King renders her the full honors of her position. He eats and sleeps with her…converses with her as gallantly as if there were no mistresses in his life…and fulfills his connubial duties…. He usually has commerce with her about twice a month.”31 At some point the queen stopped resisting the tide of beautiful nubile women rushing toward her husband. Perhaps time healed the first, ragged wounds into thick, strong scars. She even took to wearing Madame de Montespan’s signature hairstyle—curls on the brow and each side of the head to just below the ear, and a braid coiled on the back of the head, entwined with ribbons and pearls. One day, noticing they were both wearing the same coiffeur, the queen explained, “I’ve cut my hair like this because the King likes it, not to steal your hair style.”32

• From Tipping the Velvet (1998)

  It wasn’t a gaol.’‘A reformat’ry, then. But it’s true you were in one.’ She didn’t answer. ‘I don’t mind it,’ I added quickly.She gave a jerk to her head, and said: ‘No, I don’t mind it, now...’Had she said such a thing, in such a tone, to Diana, I think Diana would have slapped her. Indeed, she looked at me now a little fearfully; but when she did so, I grimaced. ‘I’m sorry,’ I said. ‘Do you think me very rude? It’s only - well, it is what Diana said, about why they had you in there at all. Is it true, what she said? Or is it only one of her stories? Is it true that they had you in there, because you ... kissed another girl?’She let her hands fall to her lap, then sat back upon her heels and gazed into the unlit grate. Then she turned her face to me and gave a sigh.‘I was a year in the reformat’ry,’ she said, ‘when I was seventeen. It was a cruel enough place, I suppose, though not so hard as other gaols I heard of; its mistress is a lady Mrs Lethaby knows from her club, and that is how she got me. I was sent to the reformat‘ry on the word of a girl I was friends with at a house in Kentish Town. We were maids there, together.’‘You were a maid before you came here?’‘I was sent out as a skivvy when I was ten: Pa was rather poor. That was at a house in Paddington. When I was fourteen I went to the place in Kentish Town. It was altogether a better place. I was a housemaid, then; and I got very thick with another girl there, named Agnes. Agnes had a chap, and she threw the chap over, miss, for my sake. That’s how thick we were ...’She gazed very sadly at her hands in her lap, and the room grew still, and I grew sorry. I said, ‘And was it Agnes told the story that got you sent to the reformat’ry?’She shook her head. ‘Oh, no! What happened was, Agnes lost her place, because the lady didn’t care for her. She went to a house in Dulwich — which, as you will know, is very far from Kentish Town, but not so far that we couldn’t meet on a Sunday, and send each other little notes and parcels through the post. But then - well, then another girl came. She was not so nice as Agnes, but she took to me like anything. I think she was a bit soft, miss, in the head.

• From Sex with Kings: 500 Years of Adultery, Power, Rivalry, and Revenge (2004)

  TenDeath of the KingI am as one who is left alone at a banquet, the lights dead and the flowers faded. —EDWARD ROBERT BULWER, FIRST EARL OF LYTTON DEATH IN HIS BLACK ROBES WAS A FREQUENT VISITOR TO royal palaces in centuries past. The highest in the land were often struck down at the peak of their youth and power. A member of the court or royal family could be dancing one night, dead the next. Even kings must die. Inevitably, the day came when Death, gaunt and hollow-eyed, began to pluck with clawlike fingers at the monarch’s soul, patiently plucking until in shrieking agony it tore through bone and sinew. Now indeed was no time for fond memories of candlelit lovemaking, of hazy wine-filled nights, of women’s lips and breasts and thighs. Not now, as the king prepared to walk into the gulf alone. For the first time in his life he would be truly alone, with no retinue of fawning courtiers or mincing ministers to strew rose petals in his path. In the end he was crownless, reduced in stature to that of the scurviest beggar, worth no more than any other human soul fleeing rancid human flesh. Looking Death in the face after a reign of seventy years, Louis XIV soberly reflected, “We do what we choose while we are alive, but when we are dead we have less power than the lowliest individual.”1 The king’s protection of his mistress ceased with the beating of his heart; sometimes, in a desperate fit of repentance, earlier. The mistress was often barred entrance into his sick chamber by angry relatives, unless of course the king had a contagious disease such as smallpox, in which case she would be expected to nurse him. Even if she did make it to the deathbed to bid her lover farewell, she was sent away before the priest came to administer last rites. To the dying monarch, his mistress had become a living accusation of mortal sin, and he was not permitted to sully his newly cleansed soul by even looking at her. There was no one less pitied than the courtesan of a dead king. Her carefully constructed position—which had been upheld only at the king’s insistence—suddenly collapsed, flinging her far below ordinary mortals. She was rarely permitted the right of the poorest citizen to participate in her lover’s funeral obsequies or visit the body lying in state. Retribution from the royal family for perceived insults was often swift and merciless. While former mistresses, long since dismissed by the deceased monarch, were forgotten and permitted to rusticate gracefully, it was the king’s final mistress who bore the full resentment of the royal family, courtiers, and commoners. In 1350 when Alfonso XI of Castile died of the black plague, his mistress Leonor de Guzman was imprisoned by Alfonso’s long-ignored wife Queen Maria and murdered in her cell by the queen’s express order.

• From Tipping the Velvet (1998)

  We lay together very straight and stiff, our heads upon the same prickling bolster, but hers turned from mine and her eyes shut fast. The coughing of the other lodgers, the soreness at my cheek, my general wretchedness and panic, kept me wakeful. When Zena gave a shiver, I put my hand upon her; and when she didn’t take the hand away, I moved a little closer to her. I said, very low: ‘Oh Zena, I cannot sleep, for thinking of it all!’ ‘I daresay.’ I trembled. ‘Do you hate me, Zena?’ She wouldn’t answer. ‘I shan’t blame you, if you do. But oh! do you know how sorry I am?’ A woman in the bed beside us gave a shriek — I think she was a drunkard - and that made both of us jump, and brought our faces even closer. Her eyes were still hard shut, but I could tell that she listened. I thought of how differently we had lain together, only a few hours before. My wretchedness since then had knocked the fire right out of me; but because it hadn’t been said by either of us, and I thought it ought to be, I whispered now: ‘Oh, if only Diana hadn’t come when she did! It was fun - wasn’t it? - before Diana came and stopped it ...’ She opened her eyes. ‘It was fun,’ she said sadly. ‘It is always fun before they catch you.’ Then she gazed at me, and swallowed. I said: ‘It won’t be so bad, Zena - will it? You’re the only tom I know in London, now; and since you’re all alone, I thought - we might make a go of it, mightn’t we? We might find a room, in a rooming-house. You could get work, as a sempstress or a char. I shall buy another suit; and when my face is all healed up - well, I know a trick or two, for making money. We shall have your seven pounds back in a month. We shall have twenty pounds in no time. And then, you can make your trip out to the colonies; and I’ — I gave a gulp — ‘I might go with you. You said they always need landladies there; surely, they’ll always need gentlemen’s tarts, too - even in Australia ... ?’ She gazed at me as I murmured, saying nothing. Then she bent her head and kissed me once, very lightly, upon the lips. Then she turned away again, and at last I slept. When I woke, it was daylight. I could hear the sounds of women coughing and spitting, and discussing, in low, peevish voices, the nights that they had passed, and the days they must now move on to.

• From Emotional Inheritance (2022)

  1LIFE AND DEATH IN LOVE AFFAIRSEve drives an hour, twice a week, to get to her session with me. She tells me that she hates driving, and how much she wishes someone would drive her, wait for her outside my office, and then drive her back home. She doesn’t need that person to entertain her; they don’t even need to talk. It would be more than enough for her to just sit next to the driver and listen to the music in the background. I feel a wave of sadness listening to Eve describing herself sitting silently next to the driver. I picture the little girl she used to be, trying to be good and quiet, not to interrupt anyone, not to get in trouble, pretending she doesn’t exist. I asked her in one of our first sessions what her earliest childhood memory was. She said, “I was five years old, waiting outside school for my mother to pick me up, and she forgot. I figured that I had to sit there and wait until my mother remembered. ‘Be patient,’ I told myself.” A first childhood memory often conceals within it the main ingredients of future therapy. It frequently illustrates the reasons the patient seeks therapy, and portrays a picture of the patient’s view of herself. Every memory hides within it previous and also subsequent repressed memories. Eve’s first memory conveys to me the experience of being forgotten. Slowly it becomes clear that she was often left alone with no parental supervision and that she grew up, the oldest of four children, in a family where there was much neglect and emotional deadness. I feel drawn to Eve. She is in her forties, her long brunette hair flowing onto her shoulders, her green eyes usually covered with big dark sunglasses. Eve takes off her sunglasses as she walks into the room, then quickly sits on the couch. She greets me with a shy smile, and I notice the dimple on her right cheek. She takes off her high heels and stays barefoot, sitting crossed legged on the couch. Eve is beautiful, and in some moments, when looking at me with the eyes of a young girl, she seems lost. I wonder if Eve’s mother eventually picked her up, and I try to imagine how Eve felt waiting there for her, hiding her fear that her mother might never come. I ask, but Eve is silent. She doesn’t remember. In our sessions, she often becomes dissociative, gazing out the window as if she is with me but also not with me. Something about her is breathtaking, but at times she seems flat. Eve is frequently distant; she is careful about expressing intense emotion, and she lapses into long silences.

• From Emotional Inheritance (2022)

  “Those were your exact words when I met you for the first time,” I say, trying to learn something about her from the way she looks: the black T-shirt, the black long silk skirt, her sneakers and blue nail polish, and her long straight hair, which I think used to be curly. I’m trying to read what has happened to her in the years since then. Where has she been? Is she happy? Did she find out what really happened? “I know it’s your birthday today,” she then says to my surprise. I nod and smile. Some things don’t change. She still knows more about me than I expect. “Don’t worry, I can’t read your mind,” she adds as if reading my mind. “When I tried to find you, I googled you, and one of the first things I found on your Wikipedia page was your birthday. I was happy you scheduled our session for today. I really wanted to give you a gift.” Traditionally, therapists do not accept gifts from patients. The contract with our patients is clear; there is no dual relationship, no exchanges other than our professional services for an hourly fee. Psychoanalyst and patient share a joint goal of trying to explore the unconscious; therefore, it’s interesting to understand when and why a patient brings a gift and what that gift represents. But in reality nothing can make a gift feel unappreciated and dismissed more than analyzing it. Lara opens her bag and hands me a small puppet. It is a girl wearing a red dress. Our Little Red Riding Hood. She surprises me again. “Do you remember?” she asks, and she suddenly sounds like the little girl she used to be. “Of course I do. I never forgot,” I say. We look at each other. I like her as much as I did all those years ago, and I wonder what has made her look for me now. “I came to see you because I need your help.” She answers the question I haven’t yet asked out loud. We start where we stopped years before. Lara tells me about her family’s move back then to the West Coast. It was sudden; she didn’t even have a chance to say goodbye. “In retrospect maybe we were running away,” she says. “Running away from the unhappiness my family lived in. But the unhappiness followed us and in fact only got worse.” The tension between Lara’s parents, Hanna and Jed, became intolerable, and four years later, they got divorced. Jed lost his job and had to move to work in Denver. Hanna grew even more depressed and was hospitalized. Lara found herself alone, and at the age of fourteen she had to move yet again, this time to live with her grandmother Masha. Lara talks and I feel sad and worried. How was it for her to move again, to separate from both her parents? To live with her grandmother, whom she used to have mixed feelings about?

• From Sex with Kings: 500 Years of Adultery, Power, Rivalry, and Revenge (2004)

  The saddest case was that of the actress Dorothy Jordan. Her ten children with the future William IV allowed her to die alone in exile and poverty while they were attending parties with their royal father. Their mother had become an embarrassment, but high society welcomed them with open arms when accompanied by William. All eight of the ten children who married did so into English nobility, living lives of luxury and conveniently forgetting that their mother was buried in a pauper’s grave in France. Legitimate BastardsKings usually legitimized these offspring by royal decree. This legitimization was an official recognition of fatherhood, leaving the children bastards, but bastards with high expectations. In 1360 King Pedro of Portugal wanted to legitimize his children with his mistress Inez de Castro, whom he had married after their births. The pope declared that the children could be legitimate only if their mother was crowned queen—and Inez had died five years earlier. Undeterred, King Pedro dug her up, dressed her skeleton in regal robes, and had it placed in a chair in the cathedral and crowned in an elaborate ceremony which all the nobles were forced to attend. After that no one protested when he legitimized the children. By the sixteenth century Europe had become somewhat more civilized. When Henri IV of France wanted to legitimize his son with Gabrielle d’Estrées in 1594, he merely issued documents proclaiming César his son. “We accord to him these letters,” Henri wrote, “inasmuch as the stigma that is attached to the birth of our son excludes him from all hopes of succeeding to this our Crown…. His state would be but a poor one, were it not for this, his legitimation, whereby he is rendered capable of receiving all the gifts and benefits which may be conferred on him both by us and others.”7 In addition to legitimizing their bastard children, kings often ennobled them, creating a string of infant counts and countesses, dukes and duchesses. While royal bastards were not considered suitable marriage partners for foreign royalty, they were highly sought after in marriage by noble families of the same nationality—thus mixing their blood with the sacred blood of the king. Because of the frequent marriage of bastard dukes and duchesses into established noble families, most of European nobility today is directly related to royal children born on the wrong side of the blanket.

• From Tipping the Velvet (1998)

  I stared at her. Still she would not catch my eye, but got to her feet, and crossed her arms over her waist. ‘Do you remember the gentleman who called on me last night,’ she said, ‘ - Mr Bliss?’ I nodded. She hadn’t mentioned him today; and in all my fussing over her visit, I had forgotten to ask after him. Now she went on: ‘Mr Bliss is a manager - not a theatre manager, like Tricky, but a manager for artistes: an agent. He saw my turn and - oh, Nan!’ - she couldn’t help but be excited now - ‘he saw my turn and liked it so much, he has offered me a contract, at a music hall in London!’ ‘London!’ I could only echo her in disbelief. This was terrible beyond all words. Had she gone to Margate or Broadstairs, I might have visited her sometimes. If she went to London I would never see her again; she might just as well go to Africa, or to the moon. She went talking on, saying how Mr Bliss had friends at the London halls, and had promised her a season at them all; how he had said she was too good for the provincial stage; that she would find fame in the city, where all the big names worked, and all the money was... I hardly listened, but grew more and more miserable. At length I placed a hand before my eyes, and bowed my head, and she grew silent. ‘You’re not happy for me, after all,’ she said quietly. ‘I am,’ I said - my voice was thick - ‘but I am more unhappy, for myself.’ There was a silence then, broken only by the sound of laughter and scraping chairs from the parlour below, and the shriek of gulls outside the open window. The room seemed to have darkened since we entered it, and I felt colder, suddenly, than I had all summer. I heard her take a step. In a second she was sitting beside me again, and had taken my hand from my brow. ‘Listen,’ she said. ‘I have something to ask you.’ I looked at her; her face was pale, except for its cloud of freckles, and her eyes seemed large. ‘Do you think that I look handsome today?’ she said. ‘Do you think I have been kind, and pleasant, and good? Do you think your parents like me?’ Her words seemed wild.