After his wife gave up trying to satisfy his ravenous libido, Victor Marie Hugo embarked on a lifelong sex spree with hundreds of partners. Among them were prostitutes, courtesans, and mistresses. He remained active right up to his death at age 83.

When John Barrymore traveled to India in search of enlightenment, he found it at a brothel in Calcutta. There, expert prostitutes spent a month indoctrinating him in the delights of the Kama Sutra. He loved it, and subsequently rented a whole brothel in Madras for a week.

Already successful and popular by his early twenties, George Gershwin had no trouble attracting willing women; they flocked to him. Yet still he wanted more, so he cheerfully visited brothels. Gershwin felt that sex inspired his compositions, and he once considered keeping a mistress--until he learned how expensive it would be.

Of his dozens of mistresses, Napoleon Bonaparte's favorite was the Polish countess Marie Walewska--who heroically gave herself to him in hopes that he would help her homeland gain independence. Napoleon's right-hand-man Geraud Duroc also regularly procured women for the emperor's overnight relationships. Bonaparte himself stated that his first sexual encounter at the age of 18 was with a Parisian streetwalker.

In Michigan and Havana, Ernest Miller Hemingway enjoyed the services of prostitutes who he gave colorful nicknames like Xenophobia and Leopoldina. They became the basis for characters in his stories, and were his true friends. Indeed, Hemingway was the only mourner at Leopoldina's funeral, for which he paid the expenses.

As a boy, Diego Rivera "hung out" with the prostitutes in his hometown of Guanajuato. They treated him as a mascot, and he never forgot their kindness. Thanks to his many later experiences with prostitutes, Rivera was a skilled lover by the time he traveled to Spain at age 21.