The God of the Labyrinth

  What is quite clear, both from Glenney’s notes and from Letters from a Mountain, is that there was always a certain basic difference of opinion within the Sect upon a fundamental point of doctrine. The Sect believed that man approaches the sense of the world as a ‘magical mystery’ more frequently through the sexual act than through religion or art. (The important word here is frequently. No one ever denied that the ecstasies of mystics may reach greater intensity than anything to be achieved through sex. But they are rare. On the other hand, man can approach the sexual mysteries every day.)

  All members of the Sect seemed to be agreed that mere uncontrolled promiscuity leads to boredom. But there was a con­siderable difference of opinion about the remedy. The tradition of the Sect—dating back four centuries—insisted that women should be treated as vessels of a religious mystery. The Hegumenos of Southern Russia brought this idea to its fullest develop­ment in the late sixteenth century. On the other hand, the Huldeians, a nomadic German sect (whose name derives from the Teutonic goddess of marriage), were closer to those early ‘monks’ who committed rape as often as possible. They believed that sex is most intoxicating when it is violent and abrupt. In the eighteenth century, to be a Huldeian meant simply that one aimed at penetrating as many vaginas as possible, preferably virgins. It amounted basically to a cult of seduction. Horace Glenney was a Huldeian without knowing it, and so was Esmond in his early days. Laclos was a Huldeian; so were the Grand Master, Abdallah Yahya, and his successor Hendrik van Griss. The man who was responsible for Esmond’s initiation, Abdallah Mumin, belonged to the tradition of the Hegumenos. The original Hegumenos (named after their first leader, the renegade ‘hegumenos’ or abbot of an order of Basilian monks) chose a beautiful young girl as a kind of pythoness, and another dozen girls as her handmaidens; these latter were also priestesses. The women were worshipped as divinities; but the males of the sect were allowed a certain amount of contact with the divinities, which could even culminate in sexual intercourse. In order to qualify for this, the male had to fast for three days out of every week for many months beforehand, and go through a number of well-defined stages of approach to the mystery. If he could lie on the steps of the ‘temple’ naked on a winter night—from dusk until dawn—he was allowed to act as a servant to three of the priestesses for an hour every day, bringing their food and clean­ing their rooms. He was allowed to eat the left-over scraps of food. After more tests, involving sticking slivers of wood under his nails and burning himself on the tender part of his forearm, he was allowed to become a ‘body servant’ to another three, laundering and sewing their clothes and washing their hair. Their physical waste products were regarded as sacred, and it was his job to take them into the depth of the forest and bury them in a place where no other males of the tribe could find them. He was allowed to smear himself with excrement and wash it off with their urine—a privilege envied by all the other males of the tribe. The mingling of the worshipper’s semen with the waste products of the ‘holy ones’ was regarded as the first degree of union with the divinity. If he could pass increasingly difficult and painful tasks, he was allowed an increasing number of privi­leges, until he might be one of the eight men who were the body servants of the Holy One herself. In that case, he might be the one who was chosen by lot to participate with her in the cere­monies that took place on the night of the full moon following the harvest, and to have intercourse with her, dressed in the robe of a bull. The loins of the priestess, and the phallus of her worshipper, were carefully dried on a sacred napkin after this ceremony, and the napkin was divided into eight parts and given to the eight servants, who then wore it attached to the head of the penis for the remainder of their term of office.

  It can be seen, I think, that the basic idea of the Hegumenos was to try to build up a state of sexual frenzy combined with religious adoration, and that each painful and difficult stage was designed to prevent the aspirant from becoming in any way relaxed or casual about his task. If he lost his erection at any time in the presence of the priestesses, he would be flogged and sent back to the tribe in disgrace. This meant that he came to rely a great deal upon his imagination. It will also be noted that his position was really that of a maidservant; he was treated as a woman, so that he would feel humiliated, and his sexuality would become furtive. The whole idea was that sex should never be treated as something ‘above board’, normal, to be taken for granted. Every object associated with the ceremonies became sacred and fearful—and also sexually exciting. The vagina of the priestess became an ultimate sacred goal, and the eight servants were envied by all the males for their possession of the fragment of napkin stained with her moisture.

  Esmond preferred the Hegumenos doctrine to that of the Huldeians. And much of the long letter to Glenney is taken up with argument against the kind of seduction that Esmond had once advocated. He keeps repeating that it has no lasting effect; it leads to satiety.

  The next episode is one of the most interesting—and worst documented—in the Esmond-Glenney relationship. It can be pieced together from several sources, including letters from Esmond—those we found in the trunk in the attic—letters and diaries belonging to Horace Glenney, and letters written by Mary and Maureen Ingestre. These will all be quoted at length in the forthcoming volume. The story that emerges is as follows:

  When Esmond and Horace Glenney had their reconciliation in London in October 1772, Esmond was staying at the house of his cousin Sophia, in St James’s. She was now Sophie Blackwood, having married Sir Edmund Blackwood, a wealthy brewer, whose father had been one of Handel’s backers. Lady Mary and Char­lotte Ingestre were staying with Elizabeth Montagu, the blue­stocking, who was instructing them in astronomy. Esmond was fascinated by the delicious and innocent Charlotte, then 19½. Glenney was impressed by Lady Mary, brilliant, beautiful and more self-possessed than her sister, although she was a year her junior. (This is typical of the different characters of the two men; Esmond, clever and dominant, preferred innocence and sweet­ness; Glenney, not entirely sure of himself, was dazzled by the more intellectual of the two.)

  It seems likely that Glenney would never have aimed so high without Esmond’s encouragement; he felt more comfortable seducing his social inferiors. What impressed Esmond was that most eligible men were shy of the Ingestre girls because of their reputation for brilliance and wealth. The sporting set made crude jests about them, and were secretly overawed by them, and the respectable young men—who probably sounded and behaved rather like Jane Austen’s Darcy or Mr Bingley—paid them grave compliments and tried to start intellectual conver­sations. Esmond’s response was simpler. He thought them both delicious, and remarked to Glenney that a man could spend an exquisite night between the two of them.

  Glenney knew that when Esmond said a thing like this, it was not mere wishful thinking. If there was any man in London who could seduce the Ingestre sisters, it was Esmond. He had the ideal qualification for seducing intellectual girls—a good mind. He and Lichtenberg had been the two best mathematicians of their generation at Göttingen. The Ingestre sisters actually knew Lichtenberg—they had been introduced to him by no less a person than the King, at Hampton Court, and had examined the King’s great telescope under Lichtenberg’s supervision. Obvi­ously, Esmond would have no trouble seeing a great deal of the Ingestre sisters, since they were staying with Sophia’s cousin Elizabeth. Esmond’s own telescope—made by Schwarmz of Ley­den—was an exceptionally powerful one. He set it up in an attic room in Sophia Blackwood’s house, pinned his diagrams on the walls, and invited Elizabeth Montagu and her two charming guests to come and study the stars with himself and Lichtenberg. Elizabeth Montagu had not met Lichtenberg; she was anxious to do so. Esmond had the foresight to have a small meal prepared in his ‘observatory’—pheasant, woodcock, capon, an Irish ham, and various other delicacies. The ladies asked many questions, and peered through the telescope for over an hour. Then the conversation shifted to philosophy, and Esmond and L
ichtenberg discussed Leibniz, Voltaire, Hume and the inaugural dissertation of the brilliant German, Immanuel Kant, in which he argued that reality is unknowable, and that the senses dictate the form of all our knowledge of phenomena. (The Critique, which devel­oped these doctrines, would not be published for another nine years.) Elizabeth Montagu was deeply impressed; she said she had never heard such profound and disturbing discourse—no, not even from Burke, Garrick or Dr Johnson himself. It was heady stuff, this German critical philosophy. The effect was achieved. Elizabeth Montagu later remarked that Esmond was one of the most eligible bachelors in London. And Esmond was already convinced that he had made a favourable impression on Char­lotte. He took her hand for a moment on the pretext of helping her on a dark corner of the stairway, and she allowed him to retain it several seconds longer than necessary.

  Horace Glenney was not present on this occasion. We know exactly why, for Esmond explains in one of the letters included in the manuscript of Letters from a Mountain. Esmond knew that Glenney would not make an immediate impact on the ladies, being rather shy. (What Esmond obviously means is that Glenney would hardly be noticed in company that included Lichtenberg, Elizabeth Montagu and himself.) His entrance had to be pre­pared. Esmond found out what Mary Ingestre had been reading, and Glenney spent twenty-four hours skipping through it and preparing brilliant remarks. Esmond rode in the park with the sisters two days after their evening with the telescope, and told them about the delicate, shy, noble character of his friend Glenney. He told Mary that Glenney had been brought up in a strictly religious manner, and that his acquaintance with German philosophy was undermining his faith; he invented a par­ticularly moving anecdote about Glenney in Chartres cathedral, asking with tears in his eyes: ‘Is all this beauty a monument to man’s ability to deceive himself?’ So when he took Glenney to call on Elizabeth Montagu a few days later, there was no need to encourage Mary to take an interest in him. She took the first opportunity to get him into a quiet corner, where she could question him earnestly about his doubts. The meeting was more successful than either of them could have hoped; she agreed to ride in the park with Glenney the next day, and spent the night storing up arguments from Butler and Tillotson on the evidence for divine workmanship in Nature. Glenney, in turn, did a certain amount of spadework for Esmond, hinting at secret sorrows and lost love. There can be no doubt that they made an impressive team.

  Esmond was ideally placed for spending a great deal of time with Charlotte. Elizabeth Montagu was his second cousin, and the girls had become friendly with Sophia Blackwood. No one thought it unusual if Charlotte walked from Mayfair to St James’s to call on Sophia and discuss what they should wear at Lady Sandwich’s autumn ball. And if Sophia was not at home, why should she not spend an hour discussing astronomy and meta­physics with Sophia’s cousin?

  By mid-October, Charlotte was admitting to Mary that she would be inclined to accept if Esmond proposed to her. Mary passed this on to Glenney, who told Esmond. He was surprised when Esmond did not seem particularly pleased at the news. But Esmond was clear-sighted enough to see that the situation was developing too fast, and was beginning to look dangerous. If Sophia and Elizabeth and Mary had all set their minds on match­making, he would probably find himself engaged before the end of the season. It was time for a temporary retreat.

  It was at this point that Horace Glenney decided to elaborate his story of the ‘lost love’. He confided to Mary that Esmond had been engaged to the daughter of a Swiss pastor. Esmond’s father had objected to the idea of an alliance with the daughter of a Calvinist parson and threatened to disinherit him. Like Gibbon, Esmond ‘sighed as a lover, but obeyed as a son’. They had been separated now for over a year, and she had written to tell Esmond that she was engaged to a wine merchant of Geneva. But Esmond had recently heard that this was untrue. She was still unmarried and unbetrothed, perhaps waiting for Esmond. . . .

  Esmond was furious when Glenney told him what he’d done. He had no wish to make Charlotte miserable and jealous; he only wanted to disappear for long enough to discourage the match­makers. Now they all believed he meant to return to Switzerland to take another look at his lost love. It was no good denying she existed; no one would believe him.

  Riding with him in Marylebone Fields, Charlotte asked him to stay long enough to partner her at Lady Sandwich’s ball. Esmond knew this would be fatal; he explained that this would be impossible. Charlotte returned home in tears. The next day, Mary Ingestre called on Sophia, and the two of them asked him to stay; Sophia said it was absurd to leave London at the height of the season, and that his business in Ireland could wait. Esmond tried to put them off by saying that he would return to London as soon as his business was completed, but it was no good. Char­lotte was convinced that if he left London now he would never come back to her.

  She called the following afternoon—when Sophia was out—and tried coaxing him. Esmond explained apologetically that he had to leave on boring family business, connected with the estate. She asked him point blank what the business was, and why it could not wait. Then she tried tears, and Esmond found himself petting her and comforting her. He was twenty-four and very susceptible; she was very beautiful. Some years later, in a letter to Laclos, he wrote:

  I have always been of the opinion that the most innocent and virtuous girls are those whom Nature has schooled best in the art of seduction; and if they are in love, they are almost irresistible. The only time I was ever seduced was by such a virgin, a foolish friend had made her believe I intended to rush to marry another woman to whom I had given proofs of my esteem. She came to persuade me one day when I was alone in the house. Until this time I had not so much as kissed her. First I tried honesty; I told her that my friend was a fool and that I had no intention of going to Switzerland. She asked why, in that case, I could not stay a few weeks longer. Then she cried, and I took her in my arms. When I kissed her, she stopped crying; then began to kiss me with such passion that I began to wonder if she was as virtuous as I had supposed. My common sense told me it was time to stop, but when I tried to calm her, she stopped my mouth with kisses and clung the harder. Then she said she felt she was going to faint, and sat down on a sofa; I said I would go to fetch water, but she begged me to stay and sit by her. Now would you not consider it reasonable, under these circumstances, to make the assump­tion that she was innocent of the effect she was having upon the organ of my adoration? My logic told me that if I pressed the discovery upon her, she might be shocked into modesty and prudence. Therefore, as I knelt with my head upon her breast, I slipped my hand into the open bosom of her dress and loosened one of her breasts from its corsage. When she made no protest, I understood that she permitted it because she felt she was winning me from the maid in Geneva. I became curious to see how far this reasoning would carry her. I transferred my lips to her feet; she was wearing no stockings and her legs were smooth and soft. When my head reached her knees, she twined her fingers in my hair, and I thought this was to prevent further advances, so I moved on with determination. But she made no attempt to hinder me, even when I pushed up her skirts to her waist and un­covered a downy mount and lips that were still undeveloped. I pressed my lips to this nether mouth, although she wriggled, and kept them there until I had moistened it with my spittle. Then I moved up, upon her, and began to loosen my trousers. She now said ‘No, no’ and moved her hips sideways, but otherwise made no determined attempt to hinder me. I unsheathed my weapon, pressed its head against the lips I had prepared for it, and began to move it up and down. When I felt the narrow orifice below me, I thrust gently, felt the mouth open slightly, and then felt myself tightly gripped by her. At this point, it was impossible to go further, and she lay there and gasped whenever I moved. I felt my climax come upon me, and withdrew in time to shed my dew upon the soft down at the base of her belly. Now she lay there, holding me tight, knowing now that she need fear no desertion, and might reasonably expect a proposal. I felt her victory had be
en gained too easily; therefore after I had recovered my vital powers, I went to the door and locked it, threw more logs on the fire; then went back to her—she was standing looking at a telescope that stood on a tripod—and began undoing the strings of her dress. She protested, but I ignored her, for I felt that if she intended to become my wife, she should begin upon her duties imme­diately. The protests were not seriously meant, for she allowed me to remove every article of clothing. I then made her lie in front of the fire, and went to work upon her breasts with a will. When I tried to introduce my tongue into the temple of love, she seemed shocked by such strange atten­tions; but soon grew accustomed to them. Thereupon, I tried again, and again had no more success than a child trying to push down a wall. After spending again, this time inside the cramped chamber, I allowed her to dress. We went downstairs and rang for tea, and spent half an hour talking of marriage. After this, since we were still left alone, I told her to come back to my room for one more try. She came unwillingly, being sore. This time I laid her down with her skirts above her waist, anointed the gates of the temple with a little butter that I had brought up with me, and pressed in upon her. She made it more difficult by wincing from me whenever I thrust, so half the force was lost. Then I whispered to her to open her knees wide and press them against my hips. And as I drove forward, so also did she, throwing herself upon me like a warrior falling on his sword. Then I felt myself tightly gripped, so I almost wondered if I should ever withdraw; she cried out, and two more hard thrusts had me buried deep in her, my whole member gripped tight from the head to the root.