Baron Jacques d'Adelswärd-Fersen (born 20 February 1880 - d. 1923) was a French aristocrat, a novelist and poet.
Unfortunately for him, he was not sexually interested in adult men (which at the time in France would not have brought him into legal trouble) but in teenage boys between about 15 and 17 years old. This inclination eventually caused his undoing in French society.
In 1903, after a scandal involving Parisian schoolboys had made him a persona non grata in the salons and dashed his marriage plans, he took up residence in Capri, where he lived with his longtime boyfriend and 'secretary', Nino Cesarini until his death in 1923.
Fersen met in Rome a fourteen-year-old construction worker, Nino Cesarini, who immediately stole his heart. Fersen sounded out the boy's family and obtained their permission to take Nino with him as his secretary.
They become lovers. The two of them were greeted with understandable suspicion on Capri.
D'Adelswärd-Fersen frequently organised parties in his splendid villa, to which all the intellectuals and 'eccentric' travellers staying on the island of Capri were invited.
The Baron lived for twenty years on the island; his death there, possibly through suicide, is thought to have been caused by an overdose of cocaine. His ashes are kept in Capri’s non-catholic cemetery. Nino Cesarini passed away in 1943.
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