Word: mistressing
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Dickens installed his mistress in a "bower in Ampthill Square." Richard Monckton Milnes (later Lord Houghton), who proposed several times to Florence Nightingale, compiled such an extensive mass of pornography for his Yorkshire home that he called the place Aphrodisiopolis. Queen Victoria's favorite poet and laureate, Tennyson himself, enjoyed rude limericks-those five-line exercises in lubricity that still enjoy a large oral circulation. Algernon Swinburne had a great taste for erotica ("Shall I tell our visitor about the man of Peru?"). Whistler's saucy Finette, who introduced the cancan to England, was clearly not his mother...
Through a London that was "a vast sink of sweated female labor," the ladies of easy virtue rode through Hyde Park in such splendid carriages or on such fine horses that the popular euphemism for rich prostitutes of the time was "pretty horse-breakers." One, Lizzie Howard, became the mistress of Napoleon III, and a French countess, and died a rich woman. Cora Pearl (born Crouch and no kin to Author Pearl), one of the few prostitutes to win mention in the Dictionary of National Biography, also made good in Paris. The book's title is provided by Catherine...
...theatrical has-beens and wouldbes of Rome's fleabag Hotel Imperatore, the Countess Sanziani exudes the imposing aura of a famed once-was. For La Sanziani. as Carmela soon learns, was once a legendary courtesan, mistress of a d'Annunzio-like poet, playmate of a Dutch multimillionaire, brief bedfellow of the Kaiser and of many another great or near great. Carmela is too young to sense it, but the poignancy of the countess is that in her rage to relive these past love affairs, she is dueling with her last and most pressing suitor-death...
...actors in equal measure. The women are excellent. Claire Bloom, as Richard's wife, has no choice but to portray a pallid case of hemi-Ophelia, but her softness is a fine contrast to the hard shape of Richard. Pamela Brown as the king's mistress, a role tellingly interpolated by Olivier, is magically effective; she says but four words ("Good morrow, my lord"), but she hangs in the offing like a sensuous portrait by Rubens, and fills the court with just the kind of sexual music Shakespeare meant when he spoke of "the lascivious pleasing...
...brief biographical introduction, British Essayist Violet Hammersley outlines the life that drove Madame de Sévigné to ink. Widowed at 25 when her chronically unfaithful husband was killed in a duel over his latest mistress,* Madame de Sévigné succumbed to the grand passion of possessive mother love for her only daughter. Cold, proud and wildly extravagant, the daughter was a great beauty and Madame de Sévigné married her off to a rich, twice-widowed count. But when her daughter left her side, Madame de Sévigné began carrying a literary...