The handsome and well-traveled duc was ten years my senior and possessed of a grander sense of the world than many of his exalted ilk, owing to his commission to fight on the American side during our war with the colonies. In fact, he had just returned to the French court to announce General Cornwallis’s surrender at Yorktown.
Somehow, Lauzun’s successes against the British forces made him all the more alluring, as if I were flirting with danger.
Endeavoring to be gay and to forget the love that I knew in my heart of hearts I never would, I accepted the advances of the duc de Lauzun. I needed to be held, to feel special and treasured, however fleetingly, to hear the tender expressions of affection tickling my ears. And how sweet it was to hear those words in French, the language of love.
Lauzun filled a need and soothed the ache that had settled into my heart.
After a few months in France, I returned home to find the London papers filled with on-dits, tidbits of gossip about my continental expeditions, in which it was widely reported that I had become an immediate favorite of the French queen. For once, the rumors were true.
How soon one’s fortune can change when the winds of perception alter their course! Just as our family had been shunned in Bristol and later in Tregunter when we had fallen on hard times, yet feted once I was believed to have married well, or had achieved fame, so I was welcomed back to London by the society that had courted my attention when I was in favor with the prince.
Georgiana was quick to host a soiree in my honor, to which the cream of the Devonshire set were invited. With open arms I was welcomed back into a little world where excess was never enough, where gossip and scandal as much as sherry and Champagne were the lubricants of conversation, and where liberal views and sympathies were all the fashion.
How grand it was to see dear old Sheridan again—and how political he had become! He was very thick with “the eyebrow,” Mr. Fox, who looked as rumpled as ever. Fox was nothing to look at, to be certain, but his conversation was some of the best to be had anywhere. In his company I was always sure of deriving as much enlightenment as entertainment. Every time I looked at his caterpillar brows, I was put in mind of my former mentor Mrs. Lorrington, and felt even more at home in his presence.
And there was Lord Malden, dressed in richly embroidered pale green satin, from the domino ribband on his wig to his heels. The viscount rushed to greet me, and planted an effusive kiss on my clasped hands.
“My dear Mrs. Robinson, we hear you were the toast of France. You must tell us everything, but not too much—some things I would prefer remained privé!” He drew me aside until we were nearly obscured by the draperies in the salon. “When can I see you?” he demanded furtively. “I must see you, Mary. I have been longing for you ever since—” His gaze met mine and his lordship thought better of completing his thought.
I drew in my breath. “Come to me the day after tomorrow,” I told Malden.
I had turned a corner. My marriage had long been a sham, and there was no use pretending otherwise. Rekindling my romance with the Prince of Wales was an impossibility. I could stay cooped up at home, stewing in my melancholy over a lost love, or put a gloomy face on the mask I presented to the world, or I could move on. Amid the circles in which I desired to mingle, there was no dearth of offers.
I had plunged headlong into the abyss of moral scrutiny when I scrupled to enter the prince’s bed. With the next lover I took, Lauzun, I found it easier to reconcile my own misgivings.
Mr. Robinson never wanted a marriage free of other liaisons—why should I, who had already started down that path, suddenly embrace a hypocritical virtue, never again to share my body with another man?
I was seeking that which had always eluded me, always slipped through my grasp, as if I were trying to catch a fish with my bare hands. I was looking for love—one that would not abandon me as soon as I had given my heart, my body, and my trust.
But Lord Malden did not prove a terribly original paramour. I was fond of him—a rather temperate affection—and I doubt very much that he loved me. His was an infatuation that I permitted him to indulge because I was terribly lonely at the time. And in retrospect, I suppose I allowed him to pay his addresses to me because in some strange way it felt as though I was maintaining a connexion, however tenuous, to the prince. There were no grand promises made, no lavish tokens exchanged; and though we remained lovers for several weeks, our passion fizzled as many such arrangements do when the bloom fast fades from the rose, leaving the parties to acknowledge that the affair is fueled by expedience and not desire.
And yet, it was a man with the physiognomy of a beetle and the figure of a woodchuck who soon began to captivate me. He was a dreadful gambler as well—often spending days on end at the Cocoa Tree—yet another black mark against him. But Charles James Fox was brilliant. Undeniably so. A fiery orator whose passion for the politics of the day had, for me, a certain eroticism. So many of the Devonshire set feigned an aura of ennui, watching the world go by as if at a great remove, and as though it was a dreadful effort to compel oneself to care. But when Fox fired up a salon with his rhetoric, we listened and were inspired to change things.
Our affair became public almost immediately, giving the caricaturists ample fodder for their
