The Scandalous Ms. Steinheil by Jacqueline George

Back to regale us with tales of the naughty, please welcome Jacqueline George!

Cheers,
Cindy
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A hundred and twenty years ago in 1890’s, the world was a very different place. The centres of power, industry and culture were on the other side of the Atlantic. You might even think that France mattered more than America. It was a racy time in Paris. The Impressionists had taken the art world by storm. Toulouse Lautrec was drinking himself to death in the cafés of Montmartre, and the risqué dancers of the Moulin Rouge were shocking the world.

In French politics, everything was taking second place to l'affaire Dreyfus (The Dreyfus Affair), a complicated story involving an army officer who had been imprisoned largely for the crime of being Jewish.

The President of the day, a charming man of simple origins, was Félix Faure. He was a surprise appointment, chosen because he had the smallest number of enemies in the Republican party (does that sound familiar?)

I think I would have liked him. Faure had a job to do, representing the young Third Republic before the great states of Europe. Victoria still reigned as Queen-Empress across the channel in England, and Kaiser Wilhelm II had taken the reins of Chancellor Bismarck’s Germany and was looking for war. The Tsar of Russia in all his enigmatic grandeur might be an enemy, or an ally. Still, Félix Faure, son of a cabinet maker, gave nothing in dignity to kings and emperors.

Faure was handsome, and dressed well. He cared for himself, and changed clothes perhaps three times in a day. He also loved ladies, and people believed that he had impressed a formidable list of them very deeply.

One of the ladies he impressed was Madame Marguerite Steinheil, the wife of a painter. Faure became a frequent visitor to the family home, and Marguerite began to visit the President privately. She claimed to be his ‘psychological advisor’.

Her visits settled into a routine. In her memoires, she later wrote “A private detective dispatched by the president would accompany me to the Elysée Palace. I always entered through a little door overlooking the gardens. I crossed the ground floor, and reached the Blue Drawing Room where the president was waiting for our work session.”

On 16^th February 1899, Marguerite was alone with Faure in the drawing room when screams were heard by the President’s staff. They rushed into the room and found President Faure dying on the sofa. That much they were agreed on.

What they could not agree on, or perhaps could not talk of without disrespect, was Madame Steinheil. You can imagine that, in a small town like Paris, rumours began to fly in minutes. Let me give you the most generally accepted scenario:

When the President’s aides flung open the doors of the Blue Drawing Room, they found the President breathing his last on the sofa. Kneeling between his legs and struggling to get free, was a partially clothed Marguerite. She had been giving her lover a blow job and done it so well that his climax was final. He expired with his hands so firmly gripped in her hair that she had to be cut free. She was discreetly hustled away through a side door.

The Parisian press did not let her escape so easily. The President’s life had been ‘sacrificed at the altar of Venus’ and everyone knew just how it had happened. They also knew about Marguerite and although they did not print her name, they did talk a lot about la pompe funèbre. Now that is an unfortunate phrase in French because while it normally refers to funeral solemnities, a pompe is also slang for a blow job. Poor Marguerite was famous for all the wrong reasons.

Marguerite was thirty at the time, and had suddenly become a symbol of the grandeur and hedonism of her time.

Fame brought a surprising number of rich lovers, presumably drawn to sample her skills in bed. Life went very well until 1908 when she became involved in another strange incident. One night, her apartment was broken into, and her father strangled to death. Her stepmother beside him also died - by suffocating on her false teeth. There were no sensible theories about why the murders had happened, and an immediate attempt was made to pin the incident on Marguerite. In the end, commonsense prevailed and the police accepted her alibi - she had been found gagged and tied to her bed by the intruders.

Marguerite moved to England and faded from the public stage. In 1917, she married Robert Scarlett, a naval officer and the 6^th Baron Abinger and by the greatest good luck a film clip of her wedding survives here . She died in a seaside nursing home in 1954, a world away from that terrible day in the Blue Drawing Room.

Jacqueline lives in Far North Queensland, on the shore of the Coral Sea. She keeps herself busy with her cats and garden, and by writing books - some of which are far too naughty for her own good. You can find out more about Jacqueline and her books at www.jacquelinegeorgewriter.com

 

 

 

In love, with food by Jacqueline George

Please welcome my regular guest and a wicked author, Jacqueline George
Cheers,
Cindy

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In Love,

  With Food

 

I have been thinking recently about food. In fact, I think about it far too much, as the shrinking clothes in my wardrobe will tell you, but that’s not what I meant. I have been thinking about humanity and food, and the way we really, really enjoy making a meal of things. Sitting down with friends and family, and eating good food. This is not just about providing the fuel for living, but something much more fundamental.

I was reading the first proper novel in Western culture - The Odyssey - and I realised that the Greek heroes kept stopping the action to have barbecues. That’s right. Whenever they landed on a strange beach, the first item on the agenda was a barbecue. A funeral for an unfortunate colleague? Let’s have a barbecue. A ceremony to honour a God? Let’s sacrifice a sheep (and have a barbecue, of course). I’m afraid women did not feature at the feasts. They stayed in the tents and kept the bearskins warm for later.

 

 

All through history, the way kings and emperors celebrated their power and glory was by giving banquets. The bigger the Big Man, the bigger the feast, with tables groaning under weight of food and drink.

How does your man court you? He takes you out to dinner. How do you keep your family together? You all sit at the same table and eat.

Eating together is hard-wired into the human psyche. It’s what we do, it’s what we are. Humans eat together to be human.

Thinking about my writing, my stories always seem to have food in them. I don’t plan it that way, the food just happens. If I am writing romantically, it is natural to drift off into the erotic and it’s equally natural to bring in good food and drink.

Perhaps there is more to it than that. If you are telling a story, it is handy to have a setting in which the characters can just sit and talk. People don’t say much when they are being erotic (perhaps because it’s rude to talk with your mouth full), but they can say all sorts of things over a good meal. The writer can advance a story, fill in the characters or paint a beautiful background in a way that does not noticeably commit the sin of ‘telling, not showing’.

Would you like an example? Here is a short piece from The Prince and the Nun. Not one of the erotic bits because I don’t want to distract you, but just a step in the story. When you have finished, try and imagine the same scene without the soup; it wouldn’t be the same at all.

Therese has been taken to the front line one winter evening. As she arrives, she finds a poor soldier has wandered into a minefield, and she says the last words over him as he dies. The experience leaves her cold and shaken...

Shivering now, she picked her way step by step back to the road. The soldiers helped her back over the bank of snow beside the road and steered her back to Strelnikov.

“Follow the Sergeant, Therese. He’ll get you something warm to drink. Wait for me; I’ve got to have a word with Captain Stumpfl when he gets here.”

The sergeant led her along one of the paths into the trees. He was taking the death of his comrade calmly. He had probably seen many more on his journey to Tergov. After a few minutes, he turned abruptly aside and stepped quickly down into a hole in the ground. When he pulled aside the curtain at the bottom, candlelight fell out from the bunker beyond. She bent to enter and stepped down into a low room roofed with pine trunks.

To one side a crude table was squeezed between benches built against the walls, and the sergeant laid a greatcoat for her to sit on. A small pot stove kept the cold away, and on top of it a saucepan steamed. In the darkness beyond, Therese could make out bunks against the walls and clothes hanging to dry. The atmosphere was close and smelly.

“You’re in luck, Your Honour. We got some beetroot sent up today. No pierogi to go with it and make it proper-like, but it’ll warm you up anyway.”

He ladled the blood-red borscht into a large enamelled mug and gave it to her with a hunk of bread. It was hot and rich, and flattened drops of fat floated on its surface. She sipped at it eagerly. The sergeant sat opposite her in silence. She presumed he would be eating later, after the General had left.

“Where are you from, Sergeant?”

“Me? A long way from here, Your Honour. I come from a small place near Yegorlykskaya, on the other side of Rostov. It’s a different world, Your Honour. None of these mountains there.”

She sat and pondered his answer. It seemed strange to her that a young man from so far away should find himself sitting in a bunker in the forests of Krasna Dolina. Strange that another young man should have just died in the snow for no sensible reason. Strange that she should be here, her world turned upside down. There was a noise outside and Strelnikov pushed his way in. The sergeant writhed out from his bench and let Strelnikov sit down.

“Are they taking care of you?”

“Oh, yes. This borscht is good–try it.” She pushed the mug across to him.

The sergeant started to fetch another mug, but Strelnikov stopped him. “No, Sergeant. Save it for the men. I know they love it, and there’s never enough on a cold night. We’ll share this one.” They finished the soup turn and turn about, sitting in a bunker on a frontline that had never been fought over but was still lethal for the unwary.

As she followed Strelnikov out of the bunker, the sergeant stopped her. “The boys would like to say thank you, Your Honour. For what you did for poor Piotr. There’s none of us would have done it, not when you could see there was no hope for him. At least he died shriven, poor bastard, begging your pardon. We can tell his mum, and it’ll be some comfort.”

 

Jacqueline lives in Far North Queensland, on the shore of the Coral Sea. She keeps herself busy with her cats and garden, and by writing books - some of which are far too naughty for her own good. You can find out more about Jacqueline and her books at www.jacquelinegeorgewriter.com

 

Sir Francis Dashwood, Medmenham and the Hellfire Club by Jacqueline George

 Please welcome a regular guest, the incomparable Jacqueline George!

Cheers,
Cindy
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Sometimes I get so fed up with our politicians. They are so negative, so small minded, and they treat us like idiots. You know, and I know, that many of them would love to behave like lecherous old goats. (I am pointing at the boys here only because they are the most common offenders.) Given half a chance and a locked door, they would be all over their interns, and secretaries, and constituents, and anyone else who offers.

It is what rich and powerful men have always done. That’s OK by me, as long as it is truly consensual. If a silly girl or boy wants to give the old goat a thrill, that’s their business. Go right ahead - I don’t care. What makes me sick (gets my goat?) is the hypocrisy we have to put up with. Someone’s mistress is pregnant, or he has been caught playing with pretty young men in an airport toilet, and The World As We Know It is about the end. Their photograph is all over the papers, and talking heads everywhere are condemning the politician’s frivolity. His career is on the scrap heap, and reporters are badgering his wife and family with inane questions like How do you feel about your husband’s/father’s mistress? In fact, the only question that matters is the one we would like to ask the sinner himself - if you lied to us about your morals, why should we believe anything else you told us?

There was a time, perhaps even a golden age, when the great and good in society did not lie about these things - because they did not have to. What the upper classes did in private, stayed private. Indulging in a little fun and frivolity was accepted behaviour, although not discussed openly with the priest, or a gentleman’s wife (she did not discuss what she had been up to either, although her opportunities were more limited). A politician could be a man of principle no matter what playthings he took to bed with him.

In the secret English countryside, there is a monument to those enlightened days. Medmenham is a small village on the banks of the River Thames, between High Wycombe and Maidenhead. Nowadays it is a quiet place, home to executives and stockbrokers who work in London. Its past is much more interesting. A few years ago, in 1201, a Cistercian abbey was founded there. It survived for three hundred years until that well known job creator and private equity specialist Henry VIII threw out the monks, trashed the building, and sold the land off to his friends. The abbey remained a peaceful ruin for another two centuries, until it fell into the hands of Sir Francis Dashwood.

Now, if you knew half there is to be known about Sir Francis! Outwardly he was a respectable aristocrat. A member of Parliament, one time Chancellor of the Exchequer, a Royal appointee in the time of King George III and he died holding the office of Post-Master General.

So why do we remember him? As young man he was handsome, dashing, and caressed in the courts of Europe. He was a great success with women, and was even rumoured to have talked his way into the bed of Tsarina Anna I of Russia. Sir Francis was an unashamed party animal and felt that, as good food, good wine and naughty women were so enjoyable, indulging in them could not possibly be wrong. He indulged in all three with such gusto that he became known to everyone as the ultimate rake.
He had also acquired another trait familiar to us today - a distrust or even hatred of organised religion and its pompous leaders. This flowered when he established the Hellfire Club at Medmenham Abbey.

The Hellfire Club consisted of gentlemen who loved the good things in life. They started by simply dining together, but good food and wine were not enough. They needed women too...
The Hellfire Club came to Medmenham, and brought women along with them. What sort of women? The puritans of the time insisted that they were mere prostitutes, but we can be fairly certain that they included wives and sisters of the club members, and especially Lady Mary Montagu Wortley.

What did the Hellfire Club do? What they absolutely did not do was talk about their rural activities when they were back in town. What happened at Medmenham Abbey, definitely stayed at Medmenham Abbey. The few records made were destroyed when the club broke up. Visits to the Abbey were not something a lady would want her grandchildren to hear about. All we know is gleaned from gossip, and solid gold truth is hard to come by.

Secret or exclusive societies were a fashion of the times. They had their own rules and customs, and frequently their own uniforms, perhaps a jacket or special buttons. The uniform of the Hellfire Club went further. It was a monk’s habit. Of course, the women were not dressed as monks. They wore nuns’ clothing, at least until the parties really started to swing.

And then? Well, as far as we can make out, the parties were a strange mixture of religious parody and Roman orgy and sound like a lot of fun. Although there is no positive indication of Satanism, the parties sometimes did involve spreading naked, blindfolded nuns over an ‘altar’, for everyone’s enjoyment. Presumably including the nuns concerned.

That all seems fun, but not so very special by modern standards. Sir Francis’s special touch was in his art and architecture. His personal motto, carved in stone over the Abbey door, was Fais ce que tu voudras or ‘Do What you Wish’, a very suitable thought for a rich hedonist. Inside the house was comfortable and full of erotic paintings and statues. It also held the finest library of erotica in England (long since gone, unfortunately).
Around the house, Sir Francis created wonderful gardens for his guests to wander in and presumably recover from their efforts of the evening before. Even here they were impressed with Sir Francis's towering devotion to sex. Apart from other statuary, by the entrance to a cave on the property was a very famous marble statue of Venus, stooping to remove a thorn from her foot. She was facing away from the entrance, positioned so that an inattentive visitor would bump into the upraised bum of the Goddess of Love. As the famous politician John Wilkes described her, ‘Just over the two nether hills of snow were these lines of Virgil Hic locus est, partes ubi se via findit in ambas: Hac iter Elysium nobis...’ The words over this beautifully provocative statue mean At this place the road divides into two directions; Here is our path to Paradise. Do What you Wish indeed, and at the Goddess’s invitation!

So who were the club members? The rich, powerful and randy. Lords (and a few of their ladies), at least one serving Prime Minister, Cabinet ministers galore, minor royalty. Benjamin Franklin may well have been a member, although you will not find that admission in his own writing.

We don’t do that sort of thing nowadays, and certainly would not vote for any politician who dressed in a monk’s habit and played with half-naked nuns. We’re much more serious now. Still, Sir Francis makes me feel a little wistful. Not that you would catch me at a sumptuous banquet dressed in only a nun’s veil. I would never accept an invitation like that. Although, I wonder... Perhaps just once. Just to have a peep, maybe.

Judging a book by its cover by Jacqueline George

Please welcome Jacqueline George talking about one of my favorite topics--book covers...well, actually I really like the cover models **Cindy waves to the Ellora's Cavemen** Okay, I'll behave myself. Take it way, Jacqueline!

~Cindy
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Judging a Book by its Cover

Never judge a book by its cover. Well, yes, but... When you are flicking through Amazon’s many pages, what else is going to catch your eye? If you don’t know the author or the title, there is nothing else to go on. Would you ever investigate an unknown book that does not have a cover image displayed? In a high street bookstore, the cover is what tempts you to take the book off the shelf and look inside. The same applies online.

A book’s cover is important, and publishers do their very best to come up with something that will stop you just passing by and ignoring their book. They are not always good at this, but I sympathise. Finding a cover image that looks stunning all over the world is very difficult. It might surprise North Americans to hear that Europe thinks most of their covers suck. And I’m sure North Americans think European covers are too tame and boring.

Spare a thought for the poor publisher and his graphic designer. Real life is not easy.

One of my titles, How to make Wild, Passionate Love to your Man, is on sale in Australia and the US, but I cannot use the same cover for both places. Seems that Americans want fire but Aussies find that a little embarrassing. We prefer funny, and here are the two covers - guess which is which.

One thing we have to remember when designing the perfect cover is that it will be displayed online very small, as a thumbnail, until the potential reader makes her first click. Any extravagant artistic effect will be invisible and will probably just look a mess. The title itself will be unreadable unless it takes up half the page.

We just have to try our best. Here are a couple of covers from Gemma Parkes. Version one was sort of OK, but version two, with a splash of colour and the girl turned around, made all the difference.

 

On top of everything else, the censor has to have his input too. Of course, Americans have constitutional guarantees of freedom from censorship. Unfortunately, American corporations exist largely outside the constitution and companies like Amazon and PayPal decide what you can read, and what a book can carry on its cover. They are too busy making money by selling books to bother much about the contents, but they do care about covers. So - no pink bits, no matter how pretty they might be. And no muscular butt cracks either, I’m afraid. Look at this poor model :

Notice the difference? I bet she did, because after my distributor warned that Amazon has a strict no-nipple policy, I had to get my razor out and slice off her button. It brought tears to my eyes, and hers as well, I’m sure.

OK - I admit it. I am absolutely hopeless at guessing what people want to see on their book covers. That would not be so bad if I could rely on the professionals to tell me what works and what doesn’t, but sometimes I just have to shake my head. How about these covers, for the American ebook versions of two books and the Australian print versions? They couldn’t be more different, but which one would make you click and buy?

First, The Prince and the Nun, a historical romance.

And then Her Master’s Voice, an adventurous romance set in South-east Asia,

So next time you make a snap judgement and pick up a book because it has an interesting cover, spare a thought for the work that went into it. At least you picked the book up, so that worked as it should. Now let’s see what is inside the cover...

Jacqueline lives in Far North Queensland, on the shore of the Coral Sea. She keeps herself busy with her cats and garden, and by writing books - some of which are far too naughty for her own good. You can find out more about Jacqueline and her books at www.jacquelinegeorgewriter.com

Two Good Films by Jacqueline George

Please welcome my guest today, the incomparable Jacqueline George!

~Cindy
p.s. I'm a huge fan of these films too!
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Two Good Films

After a hard day of achieving not much at all, I sat back with a favourite drink (butterscotch schnapps on ice) and flicked through the movie channels. Not much on offer except yet another re-run of Connie and Carla. I have seen it a dozen times before, but still - it was worth another showing.

Have you seen it? It stars a couple of ditsy female singers who accidentally witness a gangland murder. They are immediately on the run from the Boss and wash up in Los Angeles. Their only chance of a break in that notorious town is to audition as a club act - in a drag queen show.

I won’t spoil it for you. The film is a comedy, but a comedy with manners. The other performers in the drag act are men (of course!), but mostly a bunch of lost souls who club together for support. In spite of this being a main stream film, they are portrayed sympathetically. We never learn if they are gay. The film is about their singing, not their love lives. Introducing real women in disguise into the act gives all sorts of comic opportunities, but also plenty of thoughtful moments. They are probably why I like the film and am prepared to watch it again.

In fact, the film is a bit of a Hollywood cop-out. Why would you make a film about drag queens when you could go the whole hog and make it about transsexuals? Probably because that would be a step too far for a large part of the US audience. They can take men dressed as women for a laugh, but get serious and sensitive and you are asking gender questions that really, really upset some people. The film had to have a happy and guaranteed straight ending.

There was an Australian film, The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert, featuring drag queens. That was never going to get a full US release, so its producers did not have to hold back. It is tough and dramatic, a touring drag act in the Australian outback. Wonderful costumes and scenery, great music and dancing, and some serious questioning of stereotypes.

The setting and the plot are absolutely real, and I like real. I like to see the dust of the desert, and the long, empty roads. The lonely pub (that is the actual pub in the pic) run by a sad old Australian with his crazy Asian wife who has never stopped being a bar-girl. I loved the cheerful, uncritical aboriginals who turn up one night when the bus has broken down far from help. All of these people and places are out there in the dry centre, and it does not take much effort for travellers to find them.

I respect the balls of the film-makers who were prepared to show real people behind the fantasy costumes, and not make fun of them. I especially value the ending which might be happy or not, but is certainly very risky. If you have not seen this film already, put it on your must-do list. It is one you will remember.

Still, for all that, Priscilla is a little bit of a cop out. Even Australian films cannot question intersexuality too closely. I guess we can accept that there are gays around (preferably somewhere out of sight), but we don’t want to think about living in the space between the extremes. After all, too much of that and we might start asking exactly where we stand ourselves.

I don’t think I know any transsexual people here, but I did work with a fully transgender welder on the other side of the country. A really good welder, artistic and imaginative, and far stronger than me. I soon got to know her as a person, not a sexual statement, and we got on together just fine. I wonder what she thought of these two films.

In the end, I like both films and would be happy to see them again. Sad that the indelible Hollywood stamp is on Connie and Carla, but we should be used to that by now. If only Hollywood could divert a fraction of the energy they devote to extreme violence in the direction of serious sex...

Dream on. They play ignorant, and encourage ignorance. In a climactic scene, they even have the two singers proving they are ‘real’ women by flashing their boobs - this in Los Angeles where possessing a nice pair of breasts says absolutely nothing about what your panties might or might not contain.

Oh, stop whinging, Jacqueline. At least some-one is thinking out there, and we have two good films to enjoy.

Jacqueline lives in Far North Queensland, on the shore of the Coral Sea. She keeps herself busy with her cats and garden, and by writing books - some of which are far too naughty for her own good. You can find out more about Jacqueline and her books at www.jacquelinegeorgewriter.com