This time, Marie Bonaparte thinks she has found the secret. The year is 1924 in Paris, she is 41 years old and has a sex life that could be described as busy. Her husband, Prince George of Greece, whom she married in 1907, is homosexual and dates his own uncle, Valdemar of Denmark. She herself, as a free, rich and sensual woman, has many lovers, from the politician Aristide Briand to the American neurologist and psychoanalyst Rudolph Lowenstein. But here it is: “orgasmic normality”as she calls it, drives her to despair.
Marie Bonaparte would have dreamed of studying medicine but received only limited education, from private tutors at home. However, she spoke three languages from the age of 7, and was interested in the arts and sciences. Orphaned by her mother, who died a month after her birth, she is raised by her formidable grandmother. It is to her maternal family and not to the Bonapartes that she owes her colossal fortune: her grandfather, François Blanc, founder of the Monte-Carlo casino and the Hôtel de Paris palace in Monaco. His remarkable intellectual curiosity is fueled by his father, an anthropologist, who is often absent.
“His main interest is women’s sexuality, although this does not always appear in his published writings. She makes her own questions about sexuality a scientific quest”underlines the historian Rémy Amouroux, professor at the University of Lausanne and author of a biography on Marie Bonaparte (Presses Universitaires de Rennes, 2012). “She will create around her a network of women with whom she works and this is unprecedented because there are works on sexuality, but their authors are only men.”
Eternal unfulfilled
Her cousin Annie de Villeneuve was the first woman she measured. One day, while comparing their respective anatomy, Marie Bonaparte noticed that in her cousin, two centimeters separated the urethral meatus, the orifice which allows urination, from the glans of the clitoris. For her, it’s three centimeters! What if this was the cause of his inability to enjoy properly? But, “two observations are not enough. Others are needed.” wrote this graphomaniac, who recorded everything. “So I’m going to find Ms. Lobre, the gynecologist, so that she can allow me to make observations in her hospital consultation.”
And here is Princess Bonaparte who launches into the largest series of measures on the female sex of her time: 200 Parisian women pass through, including undoubtedly some members of the elite. In 1924, under the pseudonym AE Narjani, she published her work in the journal Brussels-Medical. The study, entitled “Considerations on the anatomical causes of frigidity in women”, is categorical: it is indeed the distance between the glans and the meatus which determines the female capacity for pleasure, and the “threshold of frigidity” is 2.5 centimeters. The golden ratio.
Beyond this distance, “the clitoris (East) located too far from the vagina for, in the normal relationship, contact and pleasure can ever be achieved. She thus describes the misery of these “teleclitoral”which would represent 2 out of 10 women: “even the attentive lover, once found, and his caresses ‘before, after or even during’, completing the orgasm, never fully satisfy these women. (…) [Elles] Although they may sometimes want to convince themselves of their perfect happiness, it is not perfect: they remain, despite all the caresses, all the tenderness, even filling their hearts, eternally unsatisfied by their body.
The secret of the archives
For a long time, there were doubts about the reality of this study. How could Marie Bonaparte have gone about measuring 200 vulvas in Paris in the 1920s? Not to mention that she questions them very precisely about their sexuality and their enjoyment. She would also have liked to sign her scientific article “by a doctor” but her great love Jean Troisier, a doctor at the Pasteur Institute, refused. They end up co-signing Narjani, a pen name from Sanskrit «nar» (man) and «jani»femme.