England's Mistress_ The Infamous Life of Emma Hamilton - Kate Williams [32]
Fanning the flames of London's interest in new shows with effusive promotion, Graham declared the Temple an "enchanting Elysian Palace" where love, beauty, and "all that can ravish the senses, will hold their court." An Aladdin's cave stuffed with rented glitz, the lecture theater sparkled with gold decorations, silver statues of Venus, and expensive mirrors. Oriental drapes and paintings of medieval knights adorned the walls, and chandeliers and crystals glittered down from the ceiling. Graham had even affixed colored panes to the original sash windows so they resembled stained-glass windows. Huge glass tubes bubbled with gold liquid (Graham claimed it was electricity). On the stage was the "Temple of Apollo," a cupola on pillars almost eight feet high, topped with flaming lamps.
The great Celestial Bed occupied the adjoining bedroom. Graham claimed that the Bed was worth the preposterous sum of £100,000. The bed was available for hire at £50 a night. Graham's goddesses danced around the bed to advertise it to customers and then repeated the performance once the clients were under the sheets. The Bed was a king-size concoction of brass, purple satin, and crystal pillars, raised three feet off the ground, topped with a dome filled with "Arabian" perfumes in the "style of those in the Seraglio of the Grand Turk," and a statue of Hymen holding a cage containing two live doves. Like a bed in a high-class brothel, the underside of the canopy was decked with mirrors, the panels were carved with erotic scenes, and the frame could be tipped forward, back, or sideways. While the couple used the bed, music played around them and, according to Graham, "streams of light" whooshed up the pillars. Then the so-called electricity bubbling in the tubes apparently connected with the five hundred magnets inside the bed to create an explosion of, in Graham's words, “exhilarating force of electrical fire.” The “fire,” Graham promised, caused the users to be “powerfully agitated in the delights of love.” Such “superior ecstasy” would apparently produce a conception and guarantee a child. The divine illusion of the Bed was probably maintained by the Goddesses playing the secret music behind the wall, wafting perfumes around the room, and pulling levers that jolted the bed to give the clients what they believed were “electrical shocks.”
Graham's promise of a child was a surefire winner with aristocrats desperate for an heir. Women were soon queuing in their carriages outside the Temple in the hope of being cured of their infertility. Graham's rhetoric harmonized with the widespread belief that conception occurred only when the woman had an orgasm, which caused her to ovulate spontaneously. It was not until 1845 that scientists discovered that dogs ovulated in regular cycles and began to suggest that the same principle might apply to humans. Although a belief in the need for ovulation encouraged an interest in female sexuality, medical books did not encourage men to try to please their wives. Authors placed the responsibility firmly on the woman to greet her husband's efforts with “equal ardour.” Infertility was always seen as the fault of the woman: she was weak, undersexed, or simply lazy.
As a Goddess on the stage and performing around the bed, Emma was the luminous star of Graham's light and sound spectacular. As Elisabeth Vigée-Lebrun claimed, Emma, as Graham's Hygeia or Goddess of Health, “attracted the curious and the idle in droves; artists were particularly charmed by her.”1 Emma became a symbol of beauty to the capital's most fashionable citizens. “Daily he attracted overflowing audiences,” claimed a neighbor, and Henry Angelo described “carriages drawing up next to the door of this modern Paphos, with crowds of gaping sparks on each side, to discover who were