Sto scrivendole un libro. Se avete informazioni sul caso, prego trasmettami un email.
J'écris un livre concernant elle. Si vous avez des informations sur le cas, veuillez m'envoyer un email.
Marie Tarnowska had "the best figure in Europe." That was the judgment of the press anyway. She also had the blackest heart.
Setting aside the Nazi grotesqueries, sexual sadists of the female variety are very scarce co
mpared to the male. And Marie didn't torture strangers. Thus she has few rivals for the title of World's Worst Lover.
Marie attracted the suicidal and homicidal and enjoyed making them suffer. The psychotic beauty found ecstasy when she burned her lovers with cigarettes or shot them or made them lick her boots or cuckolded them. It was all done with their consent - except the last man. He did not want to die.
Photo: Marie entering the courthouse to stand trial for murder. Via
Marie has been an obsession of mine for years, though I dare not try to explain it and am pleased to hastily add that I'm not the only one who relishes stories of history's most wicked women.
Based on newspaper accounts in American papers that I found in NewspaperArchive.com, I wrote a summary of her criminal career, then a postscript. That first post became something of a phenomenon. In the two years since I wrote it, I've seen between 40,000 and 50,000 hits on that essay - it's by far the all-time most visited page on this website. I have since learned that many of the facts are inaccurate, so I'm calling it the American version of her story, sanitized for the States.
Recently I had a chance to read two books about Marie Tarnovska. Someone kindly pointed out to me that Marie's story was fictionalized in the 1960s by Hungarian journalist Hans Habe as The Countess. Habe was one of the most successful writers in Europe at the time. [A sidebar: Habe's beautiful teenage daughter Marina Habe was murdered in California in 1968, and some think the Manson family was responsible.]
Habe's book about the evil countess was translated into several languages, including English, and was an international literary phenomenon. Reviewers called it "a brilliant panorama of Europe in decay." Said another: "Exquisite beauty combined with exquisite evil is a provocative subject, and Habe makes the most of it." Though I normally don't like my crime stories fictionalized, I finished the book thinking there's no other way to tell her story properly.
Another book about Marie is available to one and all for free -- Google has digitized Annie Chartres's 1915 account of her visit to Marie in an Italian prison. The book is Marie Tarnowska. It is a mesmerizing book though as close as I ever hope to come to meeting a real "Marquise de Sade."
Comments