Mistress Catarina

🛑 ALL INFORMATION CLICK HERE 👈🏻👈🏻👈🏻

Mistress Catarina

The life of Catherine Robbe-Grillet makes Fifty Shades of Grey look like a Disney movie. In 1951, she became the mistress of the writer—and accomplished sadist—Alain Robbe-Grillet, whom she later married. Today, an 83-year-old widow, she is France’s most famous dominatrix. Visiting the 17th-century château where Robbe-Grillet conducts some of her rituals, Toni Bentley delves into the world of a modern-day Marquise de Sade, her relationship with the much younger Beverly Charpentier, and her journey from submission to dominance.
Paul Newman Says Wife Joanne Woodward Turned Him Into a “Sexual Creature” in Posthumous Memoir
Alex Jones Vows to Keep Terrorizing the Families of School-Shooting Victims Following Nearly $1 Billion Judgement
Tom Brady's Friends Reportedly “Hate” That He's “Refusing to Bend” for Gisele Bündchen
Paul Newman Says Wife Joanne Woodward Turned Him Into a “Sexual Creature” in Posthumous Memoir
Alex Jones Vows to Keep Terrorizing the Families of School-Shooting Victims Following Nearly $1 Billion Judgement
Tom Brady's Friends Reportedly “Hate” That He's “Refusing to Bend” for Gisele Bündchen
Paul Newman Says Wife Joanne Woodward Turned Him Into a “Sexual Creature” in Posthumous Memoir
Alex Jones Vows to Keep Terrorizing the Families of School-Shooting Victims Following Nearly $1 Billion Judgement
Tom Brady's Friends Reportedly “Hate” That He's “Refusing to Bend” for Gisele Bündchen
Paul Newman Says Wife Joanne Woodward Turned Him Into a “Sexual Creature” in Posthumous Memoir
Alex Jones Vows to Keep Terrorizing the Families of School-Shooting Victims Following Nearly $1 Billion Judgement
Tom Brady's Friends Reportedly “Hate” That He's “Refusing to Bend” for Gisele Bündchen
Paul Newman Says Wife Joanne Woodward Turned Him Into a “Sexual Creature” in Posthumous Memoir
Alex Jones Vows to Keep Terrorizing the Families of School-Shooting Victims Following Nearly $1 Billion Judgement
Tom Brady's Friends Reportedly “Hate” That He's “Refusing to Bend” for Gisele Bündchen
Paul Newman Says Wife Joanne Woodward Turned Him Into a “Sexual Creature” in Posthumous Memoir
Alex Jones Vows to Keep Terrorizing the Families of School-Shooting Victims Following Nearly $1 Billion Judgement
Tom Brady's Friends Reportedly “Hate” That He's “Refusing to Bend” for Gisele Bündchen
Paul Newman Says Wife Joanne Woodward Turned Him Into a “Sexual Creature” in Posthumous Memoir
Alex Jones Vows to Keep Terrorizing the Families of School-Shooting Victims Following Nearly $1 Billion Judgement
Tom Brady's Friends Reportedly “Hate” That He's “Refusing to Bend” for Gisele Bündchen
Paul Newman Says Wife Joanne Woodward Turned Him Into a “Sexual Creature” in Posthumous Memoir
Alex Jones Vows to Keep Terrorizing the Families of School-Shooting Victims Following Nearly $1 Billion Judgement
Tom Brady's Friends Reportedly “Hate” That He's “Refusing to Bend” for Gisele Bündchen
Toni Bentley is a Guggenheim Fellow, former New York City Ballet dancer, and author of “The Surrender: An Erotic Memoir,” and other books.
Sign up for our essential daily brief and never miss a story. It's on the house.
Dakota Johnson on Family, Sexual Agency—And the “Psychotic” Making of Fifty Shades of Grey
The star of Persuasion tells V.F. some surprising truths about her rise as an actor, producer, and fashion muse.
Inside Jerry Falwell Jr.’s Unlikely Rise and Precipitous Fall at Liberty University
Jerry Falwell Jr. was the Trump-anointing dark prince of the Christian right. Then a sex scandal rocked his marriage and ended his lucrative stewardship of the evangelical education empire founded by his father. In a series of exclusive interviews, Falwell—accompanied by his wife, Becki—describes the events that led to his ouster, their fallout, and why he’s finally ready to admit he never had much use for his father’s church anyway.
And Just Like That: All the Sex and the City Easter Eggs You May Have Missed
A guide to the SATC references packed into HBO Max’s revival, from Bitsy Von Muffling to those blue Manolo Blahniks.
Exclusive: Allegra Gucci Speaks to Vanity Fair About Her Mother, Her New Book, and What She Thinks of House of Gucci
The daughter of Maurizio Gucci and Patrizia Reggiani was overwhelmed as a child by a wave of tragedy and looked for “a gasp of air to breathe, even as sharks circled all around.” Now, she tells Vanity Fair Italia editor Simone Marchetti why she is breaking her silence in a shocking book.
Select international site United States LargeChevron U.K. Italy Spain France
To revist this article, visit My Profile, then View saved stories .
To revist this article, visit My Profile, then View saved stories .
To revist this article, visit My Profile, then View saved stories .
To revist this article, visit My Profile, then View saved stories .
I am going to meet the most famous dominatrix in France. It is a gray but bright day as the taxi drives from Paris through the lush green fields of Normandy. It is late afternoon. I have been invited to dinner and don’t want to be late. The address I have been given is so abbreviated as to be comical: no numbers, no street, no postal code, just the name of the château and the province in which it resides. The G.P.S. is having none of it.
I had asked in an e-mail a month earlier if I might observe one of Madame’s sadomasochistic rituals. I was told “no one observes, there are only participants.” I replied—what the hell—that I was willing to participate, imagining that I might be given a candle to hold in a doorway. “Madame is doubtful,” I was told, “but said she will think about it. But absolutely no photographs. ”
The driver finds the concealed turnoff, and I see the white gate I was looking for. A sharp right and we are thrust instantly into a Louis XIV fairy tale. An enormous horseshoe drive embraces a vast green field dotted with thousands of yellow buttercups. At its turn, the 17th-century Château du Mesnil-au-Grain sits in full glory and perfect symmetry. The black car drops me off and departs. I climb the stairs to the main entrance, where I am greeted by a tiny lady wearing a white scarf wrapped stylishly about her head, slim white cotton trousers and blouse, and a fluffy, sage-green mohair cardigan.
It is well known in France that this woman has une chambre secrète (a secret room), but no one knows quite where it is, though Edmund White has written that she “tortures” people in the “dungeon of her Norman castle.”
Catherine Robbe-Grillet is the 83-year-old widow of Alain Robbe-Grillet, theoretician, novelist, filmmaker, sadist, member of the Académie Française, and acknowledged “pope” of the avant-garde literary movement known as the nouveau roman. He is perhaps best remembered as the writer of Alain Resnais’s 1961 masterpiece, Last Year at Marienbad.
The young Robbe-Grillets bought the château in 1963, making them only its fifth owners since its construction, around 1680, and the first without aristocratic lineage. Despite their modernist leanings, the young couple dreamed of being châtelains, and thanks to a loan from Alain’s courageous publisher, Jérôme Lindon (famous as the French publisher of Samuel Beckett), the deed was done.
“Bienvenue,” Madame Robbe-Grillet says to me. (She does not speak English.) “Un petit château pour une petite dame!” (A little château for a little lady!) As she says this, she dips girlishly in a small curtsy, a charming, and disarming, gesture. The power she wields, standing at a majestic four feet eleven inches and weighing in at 88 pounds (she has worn a child’s size 10 her entire adult life), is obscured, though not for long, behind the most courteous carapace of the smallest and sweetest little old lady one might ever meet.
Having read her 1985 book, Cérémonies de Femmes ( Women’s Rites ), where she writes wryly, “You absolutely must believe that Sisyphus is happy!,” I knew that this lovely woman was a modern-day Marquise de Sade, and had, over the past four decades, pierced and cut some of her guests with hatpins—she has many varieties with beautiful ornaments that she keeps in a white lace pin cushion—locked others in small iron cages, crowned them with acacia thorns, handcuffed them to chains on walls, and basically beaten the shit out of a rather large number of people, male and female.
And there, just behind Madame, is the other person I have come to see, the woman she lives with, rather notoriously: Beverly Charpentier. The South African-born Beverly is a very pretty and vivacious 51, with lovely green eyes and soft tendrils of blond hair escaping her beautifully coiffed Gibson-girl bouffant. She is impeccably dressed in a long satin gold lamé skirt and pale, collared blouse. A string of pearls peeks out behind the top button. Her black shawl sets off her red fingernails. Madame likes them red.
The following morning, we sit, one on one, in the dining room of the warm and cozy house—“La Petite Maison,” built for the gamekeeper—that she lives in just south of the château. (The two women also reside in side-by-side apartments when in Paris.) Beverly has lit a towering inferno in the giant fireplace, and the hem of her long skirt is singed. She is a Cinderella to be reckoned with, not least because her prince turned out to be a woman.
“There is an awful lot out there about us that is wildly inaccurate,” she says. “They talk about me as Catherine’s ‘sexual slave.’ When I imagine an older woman and a younger woman and the term ‘sexual slave,’ the pictures that get conjured up in my mind are grotesque. Like her dressed in leather and boots, and me, chained, dangling from the rafters.” She roars with laughter while I wonder just what exactly does go on between them.
“Catherine is my secret garden,” she says quietly when I inquire about the nature of their intimacy. “I have given myself to her, body and soul. She does whatever she wants, whenever she wants, with either or both, according to her pleasure—and her pleasure is also my pleasure.” When I ask what she will do when Catherine dies, she starts to cry.
The back door of Beverly’s cottage opens onto one of two enormous ponds that frame the vast back gardens of the château. In summer, Madame and Beverly occasionally picnic in a little white-and-green rowboat, while in winter the ponds freeze over and the ladies ice-skate on them.
The park is also the setting for other bucolic events—like the warm summer afternoon when, under Madame’s instruction, a local woodcutter fulfilled his lifelong equestrian fantasy. Ever since he was a young man and worked as a groom for a beautiful, rather severe woman, he had aspired to be her horse. Now, naked, barrel-chested, on all fours, his genitals tied with weights, he was outfitted with a leather bridle, bit, and reins, specially made for him by a saddler—“not one of those cheap sex-shop toys,” says Beverly—and ridden, one by one, by each member of Madame’s petit clan, her close circle of dominatrix cohorts of whom she is “chief Queen.” Hierarchy is all, democracy is naught, in this world. Beverly, who briefly trained on the tightrope in South Africa, mounted the beaming man last, standing on his bare back, riding crop at her side in case he slowed down. An afternoon worthy of Fellini.
But it began with Disney. Beverly first saw Sleeping Beauty when she was five or six, but the beautiful princess was of no interest at all to the little girl: “I was fascinated when the queen [the wicked fairy] chained up the prince when he came to find Sleeping Beauty. I saw myself as that woman. I found the idea of chaining a man up so exciting.”
“My fantasy since I was a small child was to dominate a dominating man,” Beverly explains. “That turns me on more than anything, a man who does not want to be dominated—like Sean Connery, a really macho man. The kind of man who has no desire for submission. It’s truly perverse. It’s the power play: who has it, how long you have it for, and what you do with it.” Far from being a “slave,” Beverly, too, is a dominatrix of note, and her relationship with Catherine is increasingly difficult to categorize, even for a connoisseur of the unconventional.
Beverly was a sexually precocious young lady. “Since age 14, I never had boyfriends, but I had lovers,” she says. “For me, a one-night stand meant the fantasy was never destroyed. So exciting! Mini-fantasies I would live out, dominating them.” She smiles: “They hated it! They genuinely hated it. They would get angry . . . but excited. Really excited.” But, she adds, “I didn’t love anyone I was with. Never.”
Beverly first met Catherine more than 20 years ago in Mexico when both were reluctant spouses at an official function. Beverly was married to a French diplomat whom she had met in Soweto and married at age 23. (They remained married until his death, last October, and he and their two children, ages 23 and 27, visited the château regularly.) He was, at the time she met Catherine, the director of the Alliance Française, in Guadalajara, and he was hosting an evening in honor of Alain Robbe-Grillet.
“I saw this tiny woman standing all alone in a corner holding a glass of water while the great man was being fêted, so I introduced myself to her,” Beverly says. She found Robbe-Grillet’s wife to be “literally, immediately” the most fascinating person she had ever met. Their friendship continued when Beverly and her family relocated to Paris. “From the moment I met her, I was obsessed with her. I wanted to hear everything she had to say, I wanted to do things for her, I wanted to take care of her. I wanted to be with her. That little woman has more balls than any man I’ve ever met.”
Had women ever featured in her fantasies? “Never. Never. Never. And they don’t now, either.” She pauses and smiles. “Unless I could chain them up.”
After many years, Beverly mustered the courage to tell Catherine that she would be interested in participating in her “ceremonies”—as Madame calls her sadomasochistic stagings—and eventually she became one of the privileged petit clan. Then, at a ceremony one evening some years ago, everything changed. “I watched as she put her hand around the back of a submissive’s neck, and I realized in that moment I wanted that to be my neck.” A few days later she wrote a letter to Catherine dated May 5, 2005. It is her oath of allegiance:
Madame, you have asked nothing of me; it is, therefore, of my own free will that I offer to you allegiance, obedience and loyalty. I swear to serve you faithfully in all things great and small, to obey your orders, carry out your wishes, whatever they may be. I commend to you everything I possess, material, intellectual and physical that you may dispose of what I have as you see fit. I swear to dedicate myself to you, to remain by your side as long as you choose, as your attendant, servant, defender; to support and protect you, whatever the circumstances, in every way possible, even should it cost me my life.
Catherine suggested they have tea a few days later—and so it has been, as in Beverly’s pledge, for over eight years.
Acomplex, paradoxical portrait emerges. Beverly is a heterosexual, a dominatrix of men, submissive only to one particular person—who is a woman. “Is your driving desire to please Catherine?” I ask. She doesn’t miss a beat: “Absolutely. Yes.”
“She is the only person who has ever dominated me,” says Beverly. “What I feel for her is not because she’s a woman, or an older woman, or a tiny woman. It’s because she’s Catherine. She has this power—this thing that is like nothing I’ve ever encountered in anyone else. You read poetry about love, and I think of all the millions of words that have been written about it, and I’ve never read anything that comes close to describing what I feel.”
I ask if Madame feels the same way toward her. “Oh, no, she doesn’t!” she replies instantly. “She’s never felt that for anyone. She loved her mother, her father, her sisters, her sister-in-law, and her husband. And me. But what we call ‘being in love,’ that loss of control where you can’t imagine life without the other person, she has never felt that. She feels sad that she has never known that, but on the other hand it causes a lot of suffering and so she’s quite happy the way she is.”
The ladies live their daily life in civilized calm busyness and perfect equanimity, frequently checking their respective iPhones, though Madame leaves the e-mails to Beverly. They have never had a conflict: “Catherine decides everything,” explains Beverly, “so there can never, ever be any disagreement between us, because Catherine is right even if she is wrong!” And there are indeed a few things that Beverly doesn’t like, such as the time that Madame handed a certain gentleman a pair of Beverly’s black lace panties as a keepsake after a ceremony, thus orphaning a matching camisole.
In both Paris and Normandy, they live in their separate abodes and have breakfast and lunch separately, as Catherine does not appear in company before two P.M. The shelves in the libraries of their residences are overflowing with books, and they also have an inordinately busy social life in Paris, attending gallery openings, films, cocktail parties, and the theater frequently—both trained and worked as professional actresses. Though women of independent means, they do not live lavishly.
Beverly is a superb cook, and, when home, they will spend hours over a meal in animated conversation until well past midnight. But when not at the table, Beverly often sits at Catherine’s feet, gazing adoringly into her face, listening closely, blushing easily, while gently holding a few fingers of one of Madame’s tiny hands. Catherine “transmits” much of her power, according to Beverly, through her hands: “She has the hands of a blind person.”
Beverly pledged her life to Catherine three years before Alain died, in 2008, at 85. He and Beverly were good friends. “We had terrific fights about wine and Shakespeare,” she says. Alain was glad to know that Beverly would take care of Catherine after he died. The perpetual bad boy of French intellectuals to this day overlooks the ladies’ proceedings from the black-blue urn where his ashes reside, on a bureau shelf in the château’s dining room. The lip of the vase has great drips running down its tall, curved sides. “It is the urn,” says Madame, “that weeps.”
Just below the urn, perfectly aligned across the entire width of the bureau, lies a great, gradated, tightly braided length of soft brown leather; a silver snap hook shines at the thick end, while the single tail has a well-worn three-inch cracker. This beautiful weapon is the Robbe-Grillet “Marital Whip.” Catherine bought it as a gift for Alain, as “a symbol of my submission,” in 1954. It is the only whip, she says, he ever used on her: “It is my whole life.” In 58 years it has never been out of use.
‘I grew up in a world of women,” says Catherine, “my sisters, my mother, my grandmother, and the nuns.” Born Catherine Rstakian in Paris in 1930, she was the eldest of four sisters. Her father, who was Armenian, worked in an insurance agency but was absent for much of her childhood, ensconced in a sanatorium with tuberculosis. She attended a strict, all-girls Catholic school.
A perfect student, courteous, well behaved, and insistently honest, Catherine was always at the top of her class. But even then she unfailingly followed directions with a perceptible superiority. “It drove the nuns crazy,” she says, “but they couldn’t do anything about it. I was called ‘The Sneering Student.’ I was irritated at being preached to. Even now, any kind of moralizing annoys me. Instinctively, I argue the opposite to whatever is conventional.” To this day she remains an ascetic: she doesn’t drink or smoke, hardly eats, and is moderate in all things but one.
She lost her virginity at 18: “It hurt, and I remember thinking to myself, If this is making lov
Very Little Pussy Porn
Free Xhamster Lesbo Erotic Sex
Lana Rhodes Hd Lesbo