In the seventeenth century another notable sculptor who has been termed the Flemish Cellini, Jérôme Duquesnoy (whose still more distinguished brother François executed the Manneken Pis in Brussels), was an invert; having finally been accused of sexual relations with a youth in a chapel of the Ghent Cathedral, where he was executing a monument for the bishop, he was strangled and burned, notwithstanding that much influence, including that of the bishop, was brought to bear in his behalf.[[66]]
In more recent times Winkelmann, who was the initiator of a new Greek Renaissance and of the modern appreciation of ancient art, lies under what seems to be a well-grounded suspicion of sexual inversion. His letters to male friends are full of the most passionate expressions of love. His violent death also appears to have been due to a love-adventure with a man. The murderer was a cook, a wholly uncultivated man, a criminal who had already been condemned to death, and shortly before murdering Winkelmann for the sake of plunder he was found to be on very intimate terms with him.[[67]] It is noteworthy that sexual inversion should so often be found associated with the study of antiquity. It must not, however, be too hastily concluded that this is due to suggestion and that to abolish the study of Greek literature and art would be largely to abolish sexual inversion. What has really occurred in those recent cases that may be studied, and therefore without doubt in the older cases, is that the subject of congenital sexual inversion is attracted to the study of Greek antiquity because he finds there the explanation and the apotheosis of his own obscure impulses. Undoubtedly that study tends to develop these impulses.
While it is peculiarly easy to name men of distinguished ability who, either certainly or in all probability, have been affected by homosexual tendencies, they are not isolated manifestations. They spring out of an element of diffused homosexuality which is at least as marked in civilization as it is in savagery. It is easy to find illustrations in every country. Here it may suffice to refer to France, Germany, and England.
In France in the thirteenth century the Church was so impressed by the prevalence of homosexuality that it reasserted the death penalty for sodomy at the Councils of Paris (1212) and Rouen (1214), while we are told that even by rejecting a woman's advances (as illustrated in Marie de France's Lai de Lanval) a man fell under suspicion as a sodomist, which was also held to involve heresy.[[68]] At the end of this century (about 1294) Alain de Lille was impelled to write a book, De Planctu Naturæ, in order to call attention to the prevalence of homosexual feeling; he also associated the neglect of women with sodomy. "Man is made woman," he writes; "he blackens the honor of his sex, the craft of magic Venus makes him of double gender"; nobly beautiful youths have "turned their hammers of love to the office of anvils," and "many kisses lie untouched on maiden lips." The result is that "the natural anvils," that is to say the neglected maidens, "bewail the absence of their hammers and are seen sadly to demand them." Alain de Lille makes himself the voice of this demand.[[69]]
A few years later, at the beginning of the fourteenth century, sodomy was still regarded as very prevalent. At that time it was especially associated with the Templars who, it has been supposed, brought it from the East. Such a supposition, however, is not required to account for the existence of homosexuality in France. Nor is it necessary, at a somewhat later period, to invoke, as is frequently done, the Italian origin of Catherine de Medici, in order to explain the prevalence of homosexual practices at her court.
Notwithstanding its prevalence, sodomy was still severely punished from time to time. Thus in 1586, Dadon, who had formerly been Rector of the University of Paris, was hanged and then burned for injuring a child through sodomy.[[70]] In the seventeenth century, homosexuality continued, however, to flourish, and it is said that nearly all the numerous omissions made in the published editions of Tallement des Reaux's Historiettes refer to sodomy.[[71]]
How prominent homosexuality was, in the early eighteenth century in France, we learn from the frequent references to it in the letters of Madame, the mother of the Regent, whose husband was himself effeminate and probably inverted.[[72]] For the later years of the century the evidence abounds on every hand. At this time the Bastille was performing a useful function, until recently overlooked by historians, as an asile de sureté for abnormal persons whom it was considered unsafe to leave at large. Inverts whose conduct became too offensive to be tolerated were frequently placed in the Bastille which, indeed "abounded in homosexual subjects," to a greater extent than any other class of sexual perverts. Some of the affairs which led to the Bastille have a modern air. One such case on a large scale occurred in 1702, and reveals an organized system of homosexual prostitution; one of the persons involved in this affair was a handsome, well-made youth named Lebel, formerly a lackey, but passing himself off as a man of quality. Seduced at the age of 10 by a famous sodomist named Duplessis, he had since been at the disposition of a number of homosexual persons, including officers, priests, and marquises. Some of the persons involved in these affairs were burned alive; some cut their own throats; others again were set at liberty or transferred to the Bicêtre.[[73]] During the latter part of the eighteenth century, also, we find another modern homosexual practice recognized in France; the rendezvous or center where homosexual persons could quietly meet each other.[[74]]
Inversion has always been easy to trace in Germany. Ammianus Marcellinus bears witness to its prevalence among some German tribes in later Roman days.[[75]] In mediæval times, as Schultz points out, references to sodomy in Germany were far from uncommon. Various princes of the German Imperial house, and of other princely families in the Middle Ages, were noted for their intimate friendships. At a later date, attention has frequently been called to the extreme emotional warmth which has often marked German friendship, even when there has been no suspicion of any true homosexual relationship.[[76]] The eighteenth century, in the full enjoyment of that abandonment to sentiment initiated by Rousseau, proved peculiarly favorable to the expansion of the tendency to sentimental friendship. On this basis a really inverted tendency, when it existed, could easily come to the surface and find expression. We find this well illustrated in the poet Heinrich von Kleist who seems to have been of bisexual temperament, and his feelings for the girl he wished to marry were, indeed, much cooler than those for his friend. To this friend, Ernst von Pfuël (afterward Prussian war minister), Kleist wrote in 1805 at the age of 28: "You bring the days of the Greeks back to me; I could sleep with you, dear youth, my whole soul so embraces you. When you used to bathe in the Lake of Thun I would gaze with the real feelings of a girl at your beautiful body. It would serve an artist to study from." There follows an enthusiastic account of his friend's beauty and of the Greek "idea of the love of youths," and Kleist concludes: "Go with me to Anspach, and let us enjoy the sweets of friendship.... I shall never marry; you must be wife and children to me."[[77]]
In all social classes and in all fields of activity, Germany during the nineteenth century produced a long series of famous or notorious homosexual persons. At the one end we find people of the highest intellectual distinction, such as Alexander von Humboldt, whom Näcke, a cautious investigator, stated that he had good ground for regarding as an invert.[[78]] At the other end we find prosperous commercial and manufacturing people who leave Germany to find solace in the free and congenial homosexual atmosphere of Capri; of these F. A. Krupp, the head of the famous Essen factory, may be regarded as the type.[[79]]
In England (and the same is true today of the United States), although homosexuality has been less openly manifest and less thoroughly explored, it is doubtful whether it has been less prevalent than in Germany. At an early period, indeed, the evidence may even seem to show that it was more prevalent. In the Penitentials of the ninth and tenth centuries "natural fornication and sodomy" were frequently put together and the same penance assigned to both; it was recognized that priests and bishops, as well as laymen, might fall into this sin, though to the bishop nearly three times as much penance was assigned as to the layman. Among the Normans, everywhere, homosexuality was markedly prevalent; the spread of sodomy in France about the eleventh century is attributed to the Normans, and their coming seems to have rendered it at times almost fashionable, at all events at court. In England William Rufus was undoubtedly inverted, as later on were Edward II, James I, and, perhaps, though not in so conspicuous a degree, William III.[[80]]