Memoirs of Fanny Hill: A New and Genuine Edition from the Original Text (London, 1749)Cleland, John
General
Memoirs of Fanny Hill: A New and Genuine Edition from the Original Text (London, 1749)
Cleland, John
England -- Fiction; Erotic fiction; Prostitutes -- Fiction
I had now lived with Mr. Norbert near a quarter of a year, in which
space I circulated my time very pleasantly, between my amusements at
Mrs. Cole’s, and a proper attendance on that gentleman, who paid me
profusely for the unlimited complaisance with which I passively
humoured every caprice of pleasure, and which had won upon him so
greatly, that finding, as he said, all that variety in me alone, which
he had sought for in a number of women, I had made him lose his taste
for inconstancy, and new faces. But what was yet at least agreeable, as
well as more flattering, the love I had inspired him with, bred a
deference to me, that was of great service to his health: for having by
degrees, and with much pathetic representations brought him to some
husbandry of it, and to insure the duration of his pleasures by
moderating their use, and correcting those excesses in them he was so
addicted to, and which had shattered his constitution and destroyed his
powers of life in the very point for which he seemed desirous to live,
he was grown more delicate, more temperate, and in course more healthy;
his gratitude for which was taking a turn very favourable for my
fortune, when once more the caprice of it dashed the cup from my lips.
His sister, lady L..., for whom he had a great affection, desiring him
to accompany her down to Bath for her health, he could not refuse her
such a favour; and accordingly, though he counted on staying away from
me no more than a week at farthest, he took his leave of me with an
ominous heaviness of heart, and left me a sum far above the state of
his fortune, and very inconsistent with the intended shortness of his
journey; but it ended in the longest that can be, and is never but once
taken: for, arrived at Bath, he was not there two days before he fell
into a debauch of drinking with some gentlemen, that threw him into a
high fever, and carried him off in four days’ time, never once out of a
delirium. Had he been in his senses to make a will, perhaps he might
have made favourable mention of me in it. Thus, however, I lost him;
and as no condition of life is more subject to revolutions than that of
a woman of pleasure, I soon recovered my cheerfulness, and now beheld
myself once more struck off the list of kept mistresses, and returned
into the bosom of the community, from which I had been in some manner
taken.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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