“The love that united them with their passionate kisses made them even more closely entwined. Divine lust! Mistress of the world!”
Those are lines from an erotic poem recently discovered in writings of Frederick the Great, the monarch who turned Prussia into a European power during his 18th century rule. Titled “La Jouissance,” the piece is coupled with a letter in which the newly crowned king explained to French philosopher Voltaire that he wrote the poem “because an Italian friend had claimed northern Europeans lacked the passion possessed by their southern European peers.”
(Via Book Slut)
