Casanova's Women (44 page)

Marianne de Charpillon was introduced to Wilkes during the autumn of 1773. Nine years had passed since her disastrous entanglement with Casanova, and her attitude to the men she was forced to cultivate had changed. She was now twenty-six, and the mother of a young boy, Tommy Lee. With a son as well as a grandmother, aunts and an ailing mother to support, Marianne's financial responsibilities were greater than ever. For the last four years ‘Polite Tommy' Panton, the son of a well-known Newmarket race-horse breeder and half-sibling of the illegitimately-born Duchess of Ancaster, had been her lover; since Marianne's young son bore the same Christian name, he may well have been his child. Although Panton adored Marianne, he was not wealthy enough to keep her, leaving her little choice but to cultivate other admirers.
They included the voluptuary Chase Price, John Wilkes's close friend.

Wilkes's appetite for women was so legendary that posthumously he acquired a reputation as England's answer to Casanova. In his youth he had been a member of Sir Francis Dashwood's infamous Hellfire Club, whose devotees dressed up as monks and held orgies at Medmenham Abbey, an old Gothic monastery on the Thames near Marlow; the club's motto,
Fay ce que voudres
– Do what you will – is still carved on one of the abbey walls above a wooden grating which allowed voyeurs to glimpse the sexual shenanigans taking place inside its great hall. Separated from his wife Mary, Wilkes took numerous lovers including one of his housekeepers, by whom he had had a son in 1760. But although they absorbed his abundant sexual energy, his feelings for them were never deep. As he wrote touchingly to his daughter in 1778, ‘I have since (my marriage) often sacrificed myself to beauty, but I never gave my heart except to you.'
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With her bright blue eyes, white skin, flowing auburn hair and refined, perfect features, Marianne de Charpillon immediately attracted Wilkes when he met her at a dinner held by Chase Price at the Old Swan Inn in Chelsea on 24 September 1773. In turn Marianne could not fail to have been impressed by him. Born in 1725, making him Casanova's direct contemporary, forty-seven-year-old Wilkes was a notoriously ugly man. As well as having dark bushy eyebrows and a shock of white receding hair, he was almost blind in one eye, and his marked squint gave his face a rather twisted expression. However, his personality more than made up for his lack of good looks. Witty, charming and a great conversationalist – his company was said to be a ‘perpetual treat'
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– Wilkes had a fabulous sense of humour and a great line in repartee: when Lord Sandwich criticised his morals, remarking that Wilkes would either die of venereal disease or on the gallows, Wilkes famously retorted, ‘That depends, my lord, whether I embrace your mistress or your principles.' Despite his odd appearance, Wilkes never had any trouble attracting women; he boasted that it took him only half
an hour ‘to talk away his face'. And although by the time he met Marianne the one-time romantic dissident was well on his way to becoming an establishment figure (the following autumn he would elected Lord Mayor of London) Wilkes was still very much a public hero.

A fortnight after meeting Marianne at the Old Swan Inn, Wilkes accompanied Chase Price to Black and White Lands Lane, Chelsea, where Marianne was then living. Five days later, on 12 October, he was back there again, this time without his friend. Though her family were always present – Marianne, it appears, still sought safety in numbers – Wilkes's courtship was swift and decisive, as his diary entries for that period show. On the twentieth, he took Marianne and her friend Miss Ratsell on an outing to Chiswick. Within a few days of this, he proposed a deal somewhere along the lines of Marianne's arrangement with the Procurator Morosini, but sensitively taking account of her close relationship with her family. In order to secure her exclusive services, Wilkes would install the entire Augspurgher clan in a house in Great Titchfield Street, just north of Oxford Street and much closer to his own home. Marianne agreed, and the move was made that same week. On 1 November, the MP joined Marianne, Rose, Aunt Julie and Miss Ratsell at number thirty Great Titchfield Street to celebrate both the move and his lover's twenty-seventh birthday. From then on, the busy MP visited Marianne as often as he could.

Was La Charpillon still up to her old tricks of withholding complete sexual fulfilment, even from a man of Wilkes's calibre? The family that had annoyed Casanova so much in the past still surrounded her like a human chastity belt. Within a fortnight of the move, her letters to Wilkes, though full of flattery, already hinted at misunderstandings between them. In one she thanked him for his ‘good advice' but added that she considered him ‘too kind to reproach me for my ideas since they are in your favour.'
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In another, she hoped that the next time they met he would be in a calmer, quieter mood, indicating that he had left Great Titchfield Street in a temper. Soon afterwards Marianne warned Wilkes
against putting her in an awkward situation: if he took her advice, she wrote, it was impossible that he would not profit from it, and she wished him ‘good health and much pleasure, something that you cannot possibly lack, seeing that you are so much admired by so many people'.
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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.
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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.'
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‘If you are curious to know if I have gained anything from your little lesson this morning, come and experience it for yourself tonight.'
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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').
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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',
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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.'
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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.'
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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.
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(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.'
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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',
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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.
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