A Dangerous Liaison: 2one Woman's Journey Into a World of Aristocracy, Depravity, and Obsession

One can imagine an acquaintance, on listening to deBorchgrave's disquietingly intimate tale of her failed marriage to a baron and their life in Belgium, politely trying to end the conversation by suggesting she write a book about it. Unfortunately, she has, in tedious detail. The author, a freelance writer, offers explicit accounts of the couple's intense, sometimes sadistic lovemaking; of group lesbian sex as foreplay to group mixed-gender sex; of incest between the baron and his sister. So besotted was her husband Jacques with the sybaritic, that he was enraged when the author declined to sexually initiate his 16-year-old son; and his anger at her refusal to have her breasts enlarged surgically, as did his first wife, festered. The author and the baron met in 1977, and after a three-year courtship--during which he clothed her (no irony intended) and took her on holidays to St. Tropez--they married. His family was ambivalent about the new baroness: that she was raised in Boston and was the daughter of an attorney were in her favor; that she was a Manhattan Jew and brought no dowry were not. The specifics we're presented are so exhaustive that one is surprised to learn that this was a marriage of just one year's duration. The baron committed suicide in 1989. Photos not seen by PW . (Sept.)