Malden took up the cudgels on my behalf once again. He told the prince that I had authorized the release of the letters, but that I had not abandoned all hope of a greater consideration based on the many liberal promises His Highness had made during our affair. After all, he had given me a bond for twenty thousand pounds fixed with the royal seal. What was that, if not a blazing proof of his intentions to see me well settled? But the royals were intractable. Five thousand pounds in exchange for the letters, or nothing at all.
They had worn me down. It was clear I had no more cards to play. Who can win against a king? Hotham called on me for the letters at the end of August. But where is the five thousand pounds? Malden wanted to know. Hotham didn’t have it. And yet he had expected me to fulfill my commission!
Infuriated, I wrote to Malden, so that all might know my mind without misinterpretation.
I have ever acted with the strictest honor and candor towards H.R.H.—neither do I wish to do anything I may hereafter come to repent. I do not know what answer may be thought sufficient; the only one I can, or ever will be induced to give is that I am willing to return every letter I have ever received from his R.H. bona fide. Had H.R.H. fulfilled every promise he has heretofore made me, I never could or would have made him ampler restitution, as I have valued those letters as dearly as my existence, and nothing but my distressed situation ever should have tempted me to give them up at all.
On September 6, 1781, Colonel Hotham received from me a box of beribboned correspondence. In exchange, I was given a draft for five thousand pounds.
Had the royal family triumphed over me, or was I the one who had finally received vindication? Though my pride remained as wounded as my heart, I took Georgiana’s counsel to my bosom. “No matter what disasters may befall you, one must always keep up appearances.” That same day I purchased a brand-new carriage in the very latest shade—a mud-brown color called “boue de Paris”—a city where I took the notion to reinvent myself anew, rising like the proverbial phoenix, and recapturing my former glory.
Act Four
Passion’s Slave
Twenty-one
Leader of the Cyprian Corps
1781…age twenty-three
I stumbled across a most intriguing discovery during those long months of dreadful and mortifying negotiation: that although the public derided me, they still followed me everywhere and clamored for news about me, devouring every item, both sweet and savory, as though beggars at a banquet. They had crowned me with the cap of celebrity and were unwilling to remove it from my troubled head.
Most delicious of all was that the prince himself had commissioned a full-length portrait of me by the esteemed Gainsborough—after he had severed our connexion! Romantics speculated that it was his father who had made him break with me and that the Gainsborough pastoral, where I pose with a sheepdog at my feet, holding the prince’s bejeweled miniature in my hands, was His Highness’s way of avowing that, at least in his tender heart, he was indeed unalterable to his Perdita through life.
I must confess I could not comprehend why the prince had made the commission, but when one is nearly commanded to sit to such an artist as Gainsborough, one does not decline!
I’m told that no one thinks the face resembles me. The body is appropriately slender and slim, and though I’m seated, it’s clear enough that I am rather tall, which is indeed accurate. And if there is something amiss about the face—and the artist himself admitted he had great difficulty catching my likeness—the painter portrayed my mood at the time with stunning clarity.
Romney and Reynolds also painted me during those same months—a testament to my popularity, even as the prince’s former mistress. But it is Gainsborough who most fully depicts the subject who visited his studio—for the young woman, wistful and melancholy, who sits amid the trees looks to me both unhappy and canny. A certain world-weariness has spoiled her rural idyll. Her eyes are narrowed, half in anger, as though vowing revenge for a wrong. The picture in her hands identifies the culprit. Despite all her finery, for she is adorned in the height of fashion, her hair dressed très comme il faut, she has lost, is lost, is truly Perdita.
Perhaps the painting was the prince’s subtle mea culpa. He would display the Gainsborough portrait so that all might admire it, and come away with his shocking unspoken confession: “Yes, it was I who made her so unhappy.” I wondered what Their Royal Majesties would have to say about it.
The other two distinguished artists also captured my mood, though their canvases, being of smaller scope, do not tell the whole story. From their compositions—images from waist to bonnet—I gaze at the viewer, occasionally askance, as if to say, “I do not fully trust you.”
But if my countrymen and-women wished still to gaze upon me, they would have to content themselves with viewing the likenesses created by the illustrious triumvirate of English portraitists. I left my daughter in London with Dorcas and took my ducats across the Channel, where I arrived with letters of introduction to the elderly Sir John Lambert, a British banker who resided there. Sir John, who was eminently connected with the highly influential French nobility, then secured me an introduction to the duc de Chartres.
What a man! I do not mean this exclamation to be an
