09w18:1 Shakespeare's Blog Part XIV

by timothy. 0 Comments

May 1st
We were together, she and I, in my bedchamber, she but newly arrived in a sort of hunting costume with feathered hat, than who should enter by H, whom I have but heard of these many weeks and hardly seen for any length of time since my few minutes of slobbering gratitude over the £1000. She drinks him in, I see that, this striding-about-the-chamber lord with his ringflashing hands beating time to his loudly elegant eloquence of t hat and this and what Lady Such-and-such said and what His Grace observeth of the evil times and the approach of HM’s grand climacteric. He is full of French – bon and quelquechose and jenesaisquoi – so that she listens to him in wonder. He then, as she were a Bart Fair show like a pig-headed child, praises her strangeness, her colour, her littleness. Oh bring her over, he says, we must exhibit her, my friends will be much taken. And all the time she quaffs him and, when he is gone, will not do what she is rightly come to do (or have done) but talks of his clothes and his deadgold swordhilt and his quicksilver words, Mercurio. He is gone now for his plump prostitute boy, I roughly tell her. Oh, dat believe I not, she answers, he is much a gentleman for de ladies; dat see I bwery clear.

(Anthony Burgess, Nothing Like The Sun, p.153)

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