Confessions of a Courtesan

THE GAME OF HEARTS: Harriette Wilson's Memoirs (532 pp.)--edited by Lesley Blanch--Simon & Schuster ($5).

Rarely has London lived quite so lustily as in the first years of the 19th century. Then the fat, fun-loving Prince of Wales reigned as Regent (for doddering George III) and "First Gentleman of Europe." Beau Brummell set the fashions, and the romantically adored Lord Byron sported through pubs and palazzi as Childe Harold in person. Of all the high-living courtesans who kept dizzy pace with the Regency's beaux and bucks, the most celebrated was Harriette Wilson. ''I supped once in her society," wrote Sir Walter Scott in 1825,"at Mat. Lewis's in Argyle Street, where the company chanced to be fairer than honest . . . She was far from beautiful, but a smart, saucy girl, with good eyes and dark hair, and the manners of a wild schoolboy."

Neither so lucky as her sister Lady Berwick nor so influential as Lord Nelson's mistress Lady Hamilton, this witty, tempestuous daughter of a Swiss-born Mayfair watchmaker rejoiced that "I have a devil in my body," and queened it for years over Britain's most dashing peers, in the park, at the opera and in her boudoir. When finally she fell from feminine preeminence, she rose again to outrage old beaux and outshine new belles as a scarlet lady of letters.

The Lady Blandishes. Harriette Wilson's sprightly Memoirs have been dusted off by British Author-Journalist Lesley Blanch, the onetime British Vogue staffer who last year recorded in The Wilder Shores of Love the lives of four other uninhibited 19th century boudoir specialists. Having edited Harriette's original four-volume confession to fit into one book, Author Blanch adds a long and perfumed preface telling how the lady came to write it. Evidently the ill-timed parsimony of one of her old patrons, who thought to satisfy a promised annuity of -L-500 by a single payment of -L-1200 left Harriette with a lasting sense of ill treatment. First angrily thinking to blackmail one blackguard, she soon boldly altered her plan to include all her old flames. Before publishing, she gave each a chance to buy his way out of the book in return for cash payment. "That most prolific plenipo, the Hon. Frederick Lamb," she wrote of Lord Melbourne's brother, has "called on [my publisher] to threaten him, or us, with prosecution . . . Had he . . . only opened his heart, or even purse to have given me but a few hundreds, there would have been no book, to the infinite loss of all persons of good taste and genuine morality."

The Memoirs, published installment by installment in 1825, were a tremendous sensation, going through 31 printings in a year. Though never salacious, they are packed with intimately impertinent revelations; their tart dialogue and sharp observations of the stupidities of the gentlemen friends and customers make a racy and amusing picture of high and low life in Regency London. As Harriette tells it, she left her father's house at 15 to "place myself under [the] protection" of Lord Craven. The stolid lord proved "a dead bore," talking far into the night about cocoa trees. "I was not depraved enough to determine immediately on a new choice," says Harriette, "and yet I often thought about it. How, indeed, could I do otherwise, when the Honourable Frederick Lamb was my constant visitor, and talked to me of nothing else?"

The Duke Vanishes. When Craven heard of her visits with Lamb and turned her out, Harriette told herself, "This is what one gets by acting with principle." She never made the same mistake again. Having left Craven for Lamb, she left Lamb for the Duke of Argyll. Entertaining a likely buck at the opera, Harriette would sigh: "His legs were so beautiful, and his skin so clear and transparent . . . and 30,000 a year besides." The proudest titles of Britain vied for her favor; the heirs to great fortunes rushed from Oxford and Cambridge to throng her opera box.

"My old beau Wellington," she found tedious, goodhearted, generous. But when the duke spurned her dun ("Publish and be damned"), he too met a different kind of Waterloo. "His Grace," spits Harriette, ". . . has written to menace a prosecution if such trash be published . . . When Wellington sends the ungentle hint to my publisher, of hanging me, beautiful, adored and adorable me, on whom he had so often hung! Alors je pends la tete! . . . Good-bye to ye, old Bombastes Furioso." Then she proceeds to relate how the duke, fresh from his triumphant campaigns in Spain, hurried straight to her house one night only to find Argyll there before him. When Wellington knocked, Harriette dressed Argyll in her nightcap and dressing gown and sent him to the window to tell the conqueror to be off--as the hussy must have it--"to his neglected wife and family duties."

The Lover Famishes. If there was a love in Harriette's hectic life he was Lord Ponsonby, elegant, pale, "the handsomest man of his time." The wily huntress trapped him, held him three years. She claims to have torn up a letter in which he pledged her a life income of -L-200, and she has only soft words for him in her Memoirs. After 15 years, she wrote her friend Lord Byron: "Don't despise me; nothing Lord Ponsonby has dearly loved can be vile or destitute of merit."*

The closest Harriette ever came to respectability was when the Marquis of Worcester wanted to marry her. Though she paints a picture of the docile marquis lacing her stays and leaping from bed to make her breakfast toast, their domesticity was never formalized in marriage. The tart tone of her Memoirs suggests the likeliest reason why this handsome huntress finally bagged neither title nor fortune. All through her coquetting career she made enemies with her runaway wit. Though a rival says that Harriette and her publisher "fingered -L-10,000 of the public's money" as a consequence of her last gabby indiscretions, the fact is that Harriette finally married a bogus colonel and died poor, all assets gone.

* Ponsonby later became an ambassador famed for his imperturbable manners, tact, and quick, cool wit. Once, when the Sultan of Turkey felt that the diplomatic corps, headed by Ponsonby, did not show sufficient humility and awe when entering the royal presence, he caused a very low door to be built so that the diplomats would have to crawl to enter the Hall of Audience. His lordship, confronted with the new door, turned immediately and crawled through backward, presenting a splendid expanse of white satin breeches to the waiting Sultan and his viziers.

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