History books tend to focus on battles, inventions and treaties. Behind the scenes, plenty of famous names were busy with something else entirely.
From a king with custom-built furniture to a basketball legend who claimed 20,000 partners, these are the historical figures whose private lives were at least as remarkable as their public ones. Some of the stories have been exaggerated over the centuries, and we say so where that is the case.
10. Guy de Maupassant (1850-1893)
The French author of Bel-Ami was as productive in the bedroom as he was at his desk, and he liked to prove it. According to a famous anecdote, he once took a witness along to a Paris brothel to settle a bet with fellow writer Gustave Flaubert and slept with six women in an hour.
He boasted that he felt no more tired after twenty times than after two or three. The lifestyle came at a price: Maupassant contracted syphilis in his twenties and died of its effects at 42.
9. John F. Kennedy (1917-1963)
Publicly, the 35th president of the United States was the picture of a devoted family man. Privately, he may well have been the most unfaithful man to occupy the White House, which is saying something.
The list of women linked to him includes Marilyn Monroe, Marlene Dietrich and Angie Dickinson, along with secretaries and White House interns. He reportedly told British prime minister Harold Macmillan that he got headaches if he went three days without sex. His affair with Monroe was probably brief, but her breathy “Happy Birthday, Mr. President” in May 1962 fueled speculation for decades.
8. H.G. Wells (1866-1946)
The man who imagined time machines and Martian invasions was also an early champion of free love, long before the term became fashionable. Wells had a long series of affairs, fathered children with several women and wrote about it all in a frank memoir that was only published after his death.
The best-known story about him, possibly too good to be entirely true, is that he once made love to a young admirer on top of a pile of bad reviews of his work.
7. Catherine the Great (1729-1796)
No ruler has been the subject of more lurid rumors. The most famous one, that she died during sex with a horse, is pure fiction, spread by her enemies after her death. She died of a stroke.
The truth is less sensational but still remarkable. She had around 22 known lovers over her lifetime, usually one at a time, and treated them generously. Former favorites received estates, titles, pensions and in one case an entire country: her former lover Stanisław Poniatowski became King of Poland with her backing.
6. Victor Hugo (1802-1885)
The author of Les Misérables and The Hunchback of Notre-Dame had an appetite to match his enormous body of work. He bragged that he made love nine times on his wedding night.
Besides his wife Adèle, he kept a semi-official second partner, the actress Juliette Drouet, for fifty years, and on top of that had affairs with actresses, maids and admirers. He stayed sexually active well into old age, and his notebooks contain coded entries recording his encounters.
5. Giacomo Casanova (1725-1798)
His name has become a synonym for seducer, but the real Casanova was more complicated than the cliché. His memoirs, which run to more than 3,500 pages, mention around 120 lovers, from aristocrats and actresses to nuns and servants.
He was unusually focused on his partners’ pleasure for the time. He was also a spy, a gambler, a librarian and a man of letters who escaped from a notorious Venetian prison and debated with Voltaire. The lovers are only part of the story, though admittedly the part everyone remembers.
4. Cleopatra (69-30 BC)
Roman propaganda turned the last pharaoh of Egypt into a seductress who bewitched powerful men. In reality, she had only two known lovers: Julius Caesar and Mark Antony. Both relationships changed the course of history.
She had a son with Caesar and three children with Antony, whom she famously met on a gilded barge. The couple founded a drinking society they called “the Inimitable Livers”. Their story ended in 30 BC, when both took their own lives after their defeat by Octavian.
3. King Edward VII (1841-1910)
Queen Victoria’s eldest son was a lifelong disappointment to his strict parents. As Prince of Wales he waited almost sixty years for the throne and filled the time with gambling, banquets and a long list of mistresses, from actresses to aristocrats.
He was such a regular at Le Chabanais, the most exclusive brothel in Paris, that he had his own room there and a custom-made “siège d’amour”, a chair designed to make complicated positions easier for a man of his considerable weight. The chair still exists.
2. Wilt Chamberlain (1936-1999)
On the court, Chamberlain set records that still look unbreakable, including 100 points in a single NBA game. Off the court, he claimed a record of a very different kind.
In his 1991 memoir A View from Above, he wrote that he had slept with 20,000 women. That works out to more than one new partner a day for most of his adult life. Very few people believe the number, but like his 100-point game, it has become part of basketball folklore.
1. The Marquis de Sade (1740-1814)
The French aristocrat who gave his name to sadism went further than anyone else on this list, and spent much of his adult life locked up for it.
In 1768 he held a woman named Rose Keller captive, whipped her and poured hot wax into her wounds. In 1772 he was sentenced to death in absentia after drugging prostitutes in Marseille. He fled, was caught, escaped and was eventually imprisoned again. After the French Revolution briefly freed him, Napoleon had him arrested in 1801 over his novels Justine and Juliette. He died in the Charenton asylum in 1814. His books, banned for more than a century, are now studied as philosophical works about the limits of freedom.
