Among such clubs were La Société Joyeuse, Les Sunamites, La Paroisse, and Les Aphrodites. One group, called Les Restauratrices, used the methods and manipulations and stimulating potions and drugs that are so vividly described in Petronius’ Roman novel of the Satyricon. It was evident, then, that Les Restauratrices served men who had degenerated physiologically through age or extreme excesses.
These clubs recognized no amatory restraints whatever. They indulged in invented, ingenious permutations of amorous exercises, both privately and publicly, and even held competitions to decide the superior potency of members. The frequenters were ranked, in regard to prestige and distinction, according to the numerical extent of their encounters.
Birds and game were commonly used in amatory tonics. The medieval grimoires and manuals are packed with references to preparations that involve all parts of the bird as ingredients for erotic compounds. The philosopher and occultist Albertus Magnus, as an instance, who wrote on a vast number of allied subjects, prescribes, in one of his treatises, the brains of partridge, calcined into powder form, and steeped in red wine, as a prospective aid to vigor.
The licentious courts of France often experimented and used whatever lotion, concoction, or substance might prove effective in stimulating waning or exhausted capacities in the members of the court, both male and female. This quest grew to frantic and insidious proportions, for the entire court was tainted with perversions, sexual excesses, and exploratory monstrosities. For this purpose, then, ambergris, which is an ash-colored substance secreted in the intestines of the sperm whale, was used as a coating for chocolates, which were in the nature of titbits designed to arouse the courtiers, lechers, and gallants. As a perfume, ambergris was intended to provoke, through osphresiological channels, sensual attraction. Madame du Barry notoriously used ambergris as a means of ensuring Louis XV’s amatory interest.
Early chroniclers, herbalists, and compilers of miscellaneous knowledge often refer to tonics, pastilles, and compounds as amatory specifics, but provokingly do not name them. Thus in the Geneanthropoeia, virtually a textbook on anatomy and sexology, produced in 1642 by an Italian professor of medicine named Johannes Benedict Sinibaldus, there is reference to a plant indigenous to the Atlas Mountains in North Africa. This plant was reputedly of great erotic virtue. The difficulty lies in its identification.
Allusion is similarly and frequently made to certain trees, shrubs, and herbs of India that have analogous properties.