If Marianne did manage to keep Wilkes waiting for sex, it was only for a short period, for on 9 January 1774, his diary entry recorded meaningfully and for the first time that he had ‘dined in Titchfield Street with Madam de Charpillon alone’. By then, he had forced Marianne to break definitively with Tommy Panton, with whom she still enjoyed a close relationship. On New Year’s Eve she wrote Panton two poems in the French language in which she always communicated. Each of them was charming, humorous and full of affection. The first, in which she referred to herself as ‘preti thing’, was a catalogue of good wishes for 1774:
je souhaite que pour la venir
que vous ne trouvier pas martir …
et vous trouverai que preti thing a dis des conseilles
qui son san pareil
(I hope for the future
That you will not be a martyr …
And you will find that pretty thing has given you advice
That is without equal.)
The second poem pushed him away in the most delicate fashion: if she had cut loose from him, it was for the pleasure of not seeing him ruined by their liaison:
je l’ai déchenné
s’est pour le plaisir de ne plus vous voir ruinée.29
Prey to the same insecurities as other men, Wilkes carefully copied out these poems in his own hand and kept them among his papers.
In February, he also copied out a letter Marianne wrote to Chase Price, in which she assured her old friend that she had made the right choice in choosing Wilkes over him.
For the next four and a half years, Marianne and her family enjoyed an unprecedented period of domestic and financial security at the expense of her ‘vrais honnorable My Lord Mayor’, as she addressed Wilkes after his election to the office in the City of London the following October. Marianne relished having such an important man as her lover, and in order to keep him interested she flirted with him, learned by heart the poems he wrote her from the Mansion House, the Lord Mayor’s residence, and sent him charming letters full of domestic details, wit and suggestive remarks. ‘Concerning my capricious health, my bizarre wit, and my baroque physiognomy they are all a little better than yesterday.’30 ‘If you are curious to know if I have gained anything from your little lesson this morning, come and experience it for yourself tonight.’31 She also proved herself staunchly loyal to him. When in July 1775 Wilkes was briefly imprisoned in the King’s Bench she wrote on his release, ‘you will never go back there, at least I will do everything within my power to make sure you never again speak of the king’s banch(sic’).32
Wilkes lapped up the intimate, adoring attentions of this younger, irresistibly beautiful woman. Though he was extremely busy, he saw Marianne as often as he could, sanctioned a correspondence, though not a meeting, between her and his beloved daughter Polly and, aware of the importance of the dreaded Augspurgher entourage, he courted her aunts and mother with almost as much attention as he did her. Within a year, however, cracks started to appear in their relationship. Wilkes simply did not have enough time for Marianne. When he was in London, his business in the City preoccupied him. During the winter months he spent weeks on end far away in the county of Somerset, taking the spa waters in Bath. The domestic routine of Great Titchfield Street continued in his absence. It pleased Catherine, Julie, Rose and Tommy, but Marianne found the way of life claustrophobic and frustrating.
By the summer of 1775, she sensed that Wilkes’s interest in her was waning. Though he continued to finance her modest lifestyle, and to send presents for all the family, he seldom came to see Marianne any more. While he went out on the town every night, she was expected to stay at home within the ever-suffocating bosom of her parasitic and increasingly elderly family and await his occasional visits. Too young and spirited to be fobbed off, like her grandmother, with a few chickens, cheeses and ‘sugar candy … the best I have ever seen’ as Catherine Brunner wrote to thank Wilkes after he sent her some, signing herself in her clumsy handwriting ‘Charpillon grandmerre’,33 Marianne longed to enjoy all the pleasures London had to offer: the opera, the theatre, concerts and masquerade parties at Carlisle House, and, most of all, the glories of the pleasure gardens where she had, in former days, played cat-and-mouse with the likes of Lord Pembroke and Casanova. But her activities were severely circumscribed by her position as Wilkes’s mistress. Although he occasionally allowed her to accompany him to ‘Rennella’, as she misspelled the name of the famous Chelsea pleasure gardens in her letters, for the most part he went everywhere without her, and disapproved strongly of her going out alone. This resulted in frequent squabbles. Marianne felt torn. She could not decide whether to go to the pleasure gardens alone ‘or to make the sacrifice on your behalf’, she wrote to Wilkes on 25 June 1775, adding plaintively that she believed ‘our long acquaintance has lessened your feelings, and that you have changed your ideas concerning me.’34
Since she could not afford to quarrel with Wilkes – her entire family depended upon him – Marianne kept his interest in her going through a mixture of flattery and jealousy. Over the summer of 1776 she hinted that she had a new admirer, but this failed to have the desired effect on him. Though she and Wilkes still corresponded regularly, Marianne rarely saw him. ‘As my destiny today is to live a monastic life, I wish to at least break the rules by a correspondence in this style,’ she wrote to him with carefully judged wit on 17 February 1777, including with her letter some of her aunt’s baume de vie. ‘I send you some of the convent’s balm; it will do you good but be cautious, it is charmed … Adieu my dear father confessor.’35
Given that Wilkes so rarely visited Marianne, and was in debt himself, how long would he continue to support her? Marianne attempted to control her anxiety about the future, but on Sunday 11 May 1777, her fears broke through her usual reserve. It was the first time for months that Wilkes had come to dine en famille at Titchfield Street, so potentially the occasion was an opportunity for her to win him back. But after they had eaten, an acrimonious row broke out between them, which culminated in Marianne losing her temper completely. ‘Monsieur,’ she yelled at the famous John Wilkes, ‘Vous m’êtes devenu aussi odieux que ma Mère!’ (’Monsieur, you’ve become as hateful to me as my mother!’) He immediately stormed out of the house, never to return there. His matter-of-fact diary entry for that evening – ‘Supped at Madame De Charpillon’s in Titchfield Street with Mademoiselle, Madame Topin, and Tommy Lee’ – gave no hint as to what had really taken place. But the following morning he wrote Marianne a chillingly cold letter, throwing her last words back at her and breaking off their affair. His letter ended with a short rhyme:
La plainte est pour le fat, le bruit est pour le sot,
L’honnête homme trompé, s’éloigné et ne dit mot.36
(The impertinent complain, fools shout,
An honest man tricked, gets away and says nowt.)
Realising that she had gone too far, Marianne attempted to backtrack. Wilkes, she wrote to him hastily that afternoon, had badly misinterpreted what she had said to him. ‘I am honest,’ she declared, ‘that’s the interpretation that you should have given to my last words.’37 If he had only been less suspicious and had had more confidence in her, he would never have written her such an abominable letter. Wilkes was unmoved. He had been seeking an excuse to shrug off his hefty financial and emotional responsibilities towards the occupants of Titchfield Street, and now Marianne had unwisely handed him one. Although she continued to plead with him for weeks, chiding him at the end of May that ‘The amiable Mr Wilkes has become so capricious that I’m in doubt as to whether my writing to you would please you or pain you’,38 by mid-June her tone was downbeat and apologetic. Her spirits, she admitted, were very low, for Wilkes had taken an ‘infamous resolution of indifference’ towards her. Marianne had almost, but not quite, given up hope of winning Wilkes back. In her irrepressibly flirtatious style she let him know that she had attended a masked ball at Ranelagh where the only pleasure she had had was in seeing ‘a
gentleman with Wilkes and Liberty written on his cap’ – or, as she wrote in French, ‘un Mr. que avoit ecri sur son chapo Wilkes et Liberta’. The masquerader disguised as Wilkes had played his role to perfection, and Marianne had heard the man say that the laws of England would have been lost had it not been for his hero.39
No amount of flattery could win Wilkes back; the former femme fatale who had been Casanova’s nemesis in matters of love had at last met her match. Gradually, an intermittent correspondence resumed between them, but their love affair was finished. In Bath the following winter, Wilkes began two lengthy liaisons with other women. Even so, La Charpillon had not entirely lost her fascination. Although he never dined with the occupants of Titchfield Street again, he continued to note down his ex-lover’s various changes of addresses: first to number fourteen Winchester Row, near Paddington, and later to number thirty-one Upper Seymour Street, near Portman Square.
From there, Marianne de Charpillon slipped quietly into obscurity. To Casanova she would always remain a vivid and uncomfortable memory. For him, a manipulative tease would for ever be ‘une Charpillon’.
TEN
Sophia Williams and Teresa Imer Cornelys
I have never been able to conceive how a father could tenderly love his charming daughter without having slept with her at least once.1
ON 24 JUNE 1820, sixty-six-year-old Sophia Williams, a grey-haired lady with a nose so long and thin that it overshadowed her chin, stood at the threshold of numbers thirty-two and thirty-three Mornington Place, a street of nondescript terraced houses off the Hampstead Road, in the London parish of StPancras. During the next half-hour, fifteen plainly-dressed young women wearing poke bonnets filed past her into the building, pausing only to drop her a small bob-curtsey. Mrs Williams, as Sophia was known despite her spinster status, responded with a thin, humourless twitch of the mouth that belied her turbulent emotions. Within its cage of tightly-laced stays her heart pounded with excitement. Today she was witnessing the culmination of a dream which she had been toiling for years to turn into a reality: the opening of the Adult Orphan Institution, her refuge and school of further education for vulnerable young women, women such as she had once been herself.
Inside the house the new wards, as the girls were termed, were each issued with half a dozen towels, two sheets and two spoons, and sent off to place their possessions in the simple, curtainless dormitories upstairs. Octavia Langhorne, Harriet Williams, Amelia Kendall, the three Ross sisters, Arabella Batley, Amelia Bennet, Clara Bingham, Mary and Frances Bussell, Eleanor Cambell, Emma Middleton, Eliza Elliott and Alicia Sills – all of them had lost fathers who were middle-class clergymen or military or naval officers; and seven of them had lost their mothers as well. Some had guardians, others were friendless, still others completely destitute. In the absence of private incomes and dowries, all faced an uncertain future in which one of the few respectable options open to them was to obtain a position as a governess or lady’s companion, and the dire alternative was to descend to a life on the streets. Mrs Williams’s Adult Orphan Institution would equip them for the former occupation, while safeguarding them from the kind of unscrupulous people who might push them into the latter. The formidable Mrs Williams would protect them from exploitation. She would fight the world on their behalf, and equip them to fight for themselves.
This was not the first educational establishment that Mrs Williams had opened. In 1806, under the patronage of George Ill’s wife Queen Charlotte, she had founded the Cheltenham Female Orphan Asylum, a school which prepared poor local orphans to take up positions as domestic servants. But the Mornington Place school, which she had got off the ground with the help of her friend Princess Augusta, was much closer to her own heart, and quite revolutionary in concept. For during the next few years Mrs Williams’s fifteen wards, who ranged in age between fourteen and twenty-one, would receive the kind of well-rounded education that was usually only available to upper-class men. They would learn to ‘be made perfect Mistress ... of the English language and Arithmetic, to write and read French grammatically, to be well grounded in sacred and profane History, Chronology, Ancient and Modern Geography and the use of the Globes, perfect in the rudiments of Drawing and Theory of Music, so as to be capable of teaching others’.2 In short, Mrs Williams’s Adult Orphan Institution was the first academic school of further education for women in England, a training college for governesses and female schoolteachers which predated the more famous Queen’s College in London’s Harley Street by twenty-eight years.
Since Mrs Williams’s own childhood had been blighted by a mother who had thrust her opinions on her, she was determined not to mould her charges’ minds against their will. Her aim was ‘not to give talents, but to cultivate them; not to combat bad habits, but to encourage and confirm good ones; not to correct erroneous ideas but to instil just ones’.3 False pride was to be avoided at all costs: as respectable girls who had fallen on hard times, those under her care must know their place in the world and yet be proud of it; for, as Mrs Williams later reported with heartfelt feeling to the wealthy subscribers who supported her school, ‘nothing is below the Dignity of a Gentlewoman but doing wrong’.4
For all her prim and proper appearance, wrong-doing was something that Mrs Williams knew all about, though not through any action of her own. As a child she had known poverty, destitution and what it was like to live on the wrong side of the law. Later she had experienced temptation, abuse and the bad influence of those who would exploit her. Like her charges, Mrs Williams had experienced first-hand all the indignities and fears of being a young woman alone in the world. Only by putting her faith in God had she survived what she described in her last will and testament as a life of ‘wonderful affliction’; and, almost certainly, survived it a virgin, in stark contrast to her promiscuous parents.
Now, through the Adult Orphan Institution, Mrs Williams would help other young women to resist evil as she had done. Showing the same entrepreneurial spirit that her despised mother had once possessed, she had worked tirelessly for years to enlist the hundreds of subscribers who were to support the Institution, and as chief governess, honorary secretary and sub-treasurer, she now had complete control of running it. Until her death four years later, the Adult Orphan Institution would be Mrs Williams’s world, and one she would rule like the most benign of tyrants. When the last of her new charges had entered its portals that morning, she closed the front door and fastened it with a heavy chain, cutting off her wards, and herself, from the bad influences of the outside world.
Sophia Wilhelmina Frederica Pompeati, later known as Sophia Cornelys and Sophia Williams, was the daughter of Giacomo Casanova and his childhood friend, Teresa Imer. After meeting Casanova at Senator Malipiero’s palazzo in Venice, Teresa had become a famous opera singer, an impresario, a high-class courtesan and an adventuress every bit as unscrupulous and daring as he was. Their brief flirtation, which had cost Casanova his relationship with the senator, had eventually been consummated in June 1753, and Sophia was the result of it. Born the following winter in Bayreuth, where Teresa was then living with her husband, Venetian choreographer Angelo Pompeati, and their two other children, Giuseppe and Wilhelmina, Casanova’s daughter had been named after Wilhelmine Friederike Sophie von Hohenzollern, the Margravine of Brandenburg-Bayreuth and the wife of Teresa’s lover, the Margrave.
By the time Sophia was four her mother had left Bayreuth, and her husband, and dragged her through France, Flanders and the Dutch Republic. During their travels the little girl had seen the death of her sister Wilhelmina, and observed her mother on the arms of countless lovers, some important, others not; they included Alexandre le Riche de la Poupliniere, Louis XV’s Farmer General and the one-time suitor of the pregnant Giustiniana Wynne, and Prince Charles of Lorraine, the Regent of the Austrian Netherlands. Sophia had lived through Teresa’s riches-to-rags decline in Paris, and her subsequent arrest and imprisonment for debt. She had witnessed her quarrels with scores of creditors, men and w
omen from whom Teresa was forced to flee time and again. During the first weeks of 1759, Sophia’s brother Giuseppe was taken away from the Dutch Republic to Paris by Casanova, a man who, during his brief stay in The Hague, devoured her own half-naked body with kisses and who, so her mother told her, was her real father. Nine months later, thirty-five-year-old Teresa dragged Sophia across the Channel to London in order to join yet another man, an independently wealthy English clergyman named John Fermor, who had fallen in love with Teresa after hearing her sing at a concert in Rotterdam and who had promised to help her reestablish her singing career in England.
In London mother and daughter had at first lived together in an uneasy, claustrophobic alliance. Teresa was totally dependent on Fermor. She knew no Englishman except her lover, and neither she nor her daughter spoke the English language. Almost as soon as they arrived in the sprawling metropolis, Teresa and Fermor began to squabble over money; besotted as he was by the sophisticated singer, the married father-of-two and school rector had not thought through the reality of keeping his extravagant foreign mistress and her child. As he had promised Teresa in the Dutch Republic, he arranged a debut concert for her at the Little Theatre in the Haymarket, but her singing career did not take off as they had both hoped that it would.
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