The Fortunate Mistress (Parts 1 and 2)

by Daniel Defoe

receive benefits,I turned about: "My lord," says I, "your Highness is resolved toconquer, by your bounty, the very gratitude of your servants; you willleave no room for anything but thanks, and make those thanks uselesstoo, by their bearing no proportion to the occasion."

  "I love, child," says he, "to see everything suitable. A fine gown andpetticoat, a fine laced head, a fine face and neck, and no necklace,would not have made the object perfect. But why that blush, my dear?"says the prince. "My lord," said I, "all your gifts call for blushes,but, above all, I blush to receive what I am so ill able to merit, andmay become so ill also."

  Thus far I am a standing mark of the weakness of great men in theirvice, that value not squandering away immense wealth upon the mostworthless creatures; or, to sum it up in a word, they raise the value ofthe object which they pretend to pitch upon by their fancy; I say, raisethe value of it at their own expense; give vast presents for a ruinousfavour, which is so far from being equal to the price that nothing willat last prove more absurd than the cost men are at to purchase their owndestruction.

  I could not, in the height of all this fine doings--I say, I could notbe without some just reflection, though conscience was, as I said, dumb,as to any disturbance it gave me in my wickedness. My vanity was fed upto such a height that I had no room to give way to such reflections. ButI could not but sometimes look back with astonishment at the folly ofmen of quality, who, immense in their bounty as in their wealth, give toa profusion and without bounds to the most scandalous of our sex, forgranting them the liberty of abusing themselves and ruining both.

  I, that knew what this carcase of mine had been but a few years before;how overwhelmed with grief, drowned in tears, frightened with theprospect of beggary, and surrounded with rags and fatherless children;that was pawning and selling the rags that covered me for a dinner, andsat on the ground despairing of help and expecting to be starved, tillmy children were snatched from me to be kept by the parish; I, that wasafter this a whore for bread, and, abandoning conscience and virtue,lived with another woman's husband; I, that was despised by all myrelations, and my husband's too; I, that was left so entirely desolate,friendless, and helpless that I knew not how to get the least help tokeep me from starving,--that I should be caressed by a prince, for thehonour of having the scandalous use of my prostituted body, commonbefore to his inferiors, and perhaps would not have denied one of hisfootmen but a little while before, if I could have got my bread by it.

  I say, I could not but reflect upon the brutality and blindness ofmankind; that because nature had given me a good skin and some agreeablefeatures, should suffer that beauty to be such a bait to appetite as todo such sordid, unaccountable things to obtain the possession of it.

  It is for this reason that I have so largely set down the particulars ofthe caresses I was treated with by the jeweller, and also by thisprince; not to make the story an incentive to the vice, which I am nowsuch a sorrowful penitent for being guilty of (God forbid any shouldmake so vile a use of so good a design), but to draw the just picture ofa man enslaved to the rage of his vicious appetite; how he defaces theimage of God in his soul, dethrones his reason, causes conscience toabdicate the possession, and exalts sense into the vacant throne; how hedeposes the man and exalts the brute.

  Oh! could we hear the reproaches this great man afterwards loadedhimself with when he grew weary of this admired creature, and becamesick of his vice, how profitable would the report of them be to thereader of this story! But had he himself also known the dirty history ofmy actings upon the stage of life that little time I had been in theworld, how much more severe would those reproaches have been uponhimself! But I shall come to this again.

  I lived in this gay sort of retirement almost three years, in which timeno amour of such a kind, sure, was ever carried up so high. The princeknew no bounds to his munificence; he could give me nothing, either formy wearing, or using, or eating, or drinking, more than he had done fromthe beginning.

  His presents were after that in gold, and very frequent and large,often a hundred pistoles, never less than fifty at a time; and I must domyself the justice that I seemed rather backward to receive than cravingand encroaching. Not that I had not an avaricious temper, nor was itthat I did not foresee that this was my harvest, in which I was togather up, and that it would not last long; but it was that really hisbounty always anticipated my expectations, and even my wishes; and hegave me money so fast that he rather poured it in upon me than left meroom to ask it; so that, before I could spend fifty pistoles, I hadalways a hundred to make it up.

  After I had been near a year and a half in his arms as above, orthereabouts, I proved with child. I did not take any notice of it to himtill I was satisfied that I was not deceived; when one morning early,when we were in bed together, I said to him, "My lord, I doubt yourHighness never gives yourself leave to think what the case should be ifI should have the honour to be with child by you." "Why, my dear," sayshe, "we are able to keep it if such a thing should happen; I hope youare not concerned about that." "No, my lord," said I; "I should thinkmyself very happy if I could bring your Highness a son; I should hope tosee him a lieutenant-general of the king's armies by the interest of hisfather, and by his own merit." "Assure yourself, child," says he, "ifit should be so, I will not refuse owning him for my son, though it be,as they call it, a natural son; and shall never slight or neglect him,for the sake of his mother." Then he began to importune me to know if itwas so, but I positively denied it so long, till at last I was able togive him the satisfaction of knowing it himself by the motion of thechild within me.

  He professed himself overjoyed at the discovery, but told me that now itwas absolutely necessary for me to quit the confinement which, he said,I had suffered for his sake, and to take a house somewhere in thecountry, in order for health as well as for privacy, against mylying-in. This was quite out of my way; but the prince, who was a man ofpleasure, had, it seems, several retreats of this kind, which he hadmade use of, I suppose, upon like occasions. And so, leaving it, as itwere, to his gentleman, he provided a very convenient house, about fourmiles south of Paris, at the village of ----, where I had very agreeablelodgings, good gardens, and all things very easy to my content. But onething did not please me at all, viz., that an old woman was provided,and put into the house to furnish everything necessary to my lying-in,and to assist at my travail.

  I did not like this old woman at all; she looked so like a spy upon me,or (as sometimes I was frighted to imagine) like one set privately todespatch me out of the world, as might best suit with the circumstanceof my lying-in. And when his Highness came the next time to see me,which was not many days, I expostulated a little on the subject of theold woman; and by the management of my tongue, as well as by thestrength of reasoning, I convinced him that it would not be at allconvenient; that it would be the greater risk on his side; and at firstor last it would certainly expose him and me also. I assured him that myservant, being an Englishwoman, never knew to that hour who his Highnesswas; that I always called him the Count de Clerac, and that she knewnothing else of him, nor ever should; that if he would give me leave tochoose proper persons for my use, it should be so ordered that not oneof them should know who he was, or perhaps ever see his face; and that,for the reality of the child that should be born, his Highness, who hadalone been at the first of it, should, if he pleased, be present in theroom all the time, so that he would need no witnesses on that account.

  This discourse fully satisfied him, so that he ordered his gentleman todismiss the old woman the same day; and without any difficulty I sent mymaid Amy to Calais, and thence to Dover, where she got an Englishmidwife and an English nurse to come over on purpose to attend anEnglish lady of quality, as they styled me, for four months certain.

  The midwife, Amy had agreed to pay a hundred guineas to, and bear hercharges to Paris, and back again to Dover. The poor woman that was to bemy nurse had twenty pounds, and the same terms for charges as the other.

  I was very easy when Amy return
ed, and the more because she brought withthe midwife a good motherly sort of woman, who was to be her assistant,and would be very helpful on occasion; and bespoke a man midwife atParis too, if there should be any necessity for his help. Having thusmade provision for everything, the Count, for so we all called him inpublic, came as often to see me as I could expect, and continuedexceeding kind, as he had always been. One day, conversing together uponthe subject of my being with child, I told him how all things were inorder, but that I had a strange apprehension that I should die with thatchild. He smiled. "So all the ladies say, my dear," says he, "when theyare with child." "Well, however, my lord," said I, "it is but just thatcare should be taken that what you have bestowed in your excess ofbounty upon me should not be lost;" and upon this I pulled a paper outof my bosom, folded up, but not