England's Mistress_ The Infamous Life of Emma Hamilton - Kate Williams [83]
Emma knew that the guests at the palazzo wanted to see her, the famous mistress and muse. She guessed that her notorious past meant that guests would be staring at her body and making suggestive comments about her. By developing the Attitudes, she exploited their attention and ensured that their reports about her focused on her performances rather than her previous behavior. Many arrived determined to judge her as immoral but left seduced by her skill.
Sir William's admiration for Emma deepened every day. He was allowing her to act as his hostess, and he gave her grand dresses and jewels in order to do so. On top of his basic allowance to Emma and her mother for clothes and washing of £200 a year, he bought her day dresses and formal gowns and "every now and then a present of a gown, a ring, a feather, etc." Once, he wrote, "she so long'd for diamonds, that, having an opportunity of a good bargain of single stones of a good water & a tolerable size, I gave her at once £500 worth," and then paid again to set them in necklaces and bracelets.
When he planned a trip to Puglia in 1789, she begged to join him, even though they would be walking and riding on "execrable roads" and sleeping in tents. Emma claimed that she could never be upset by poor accommodation, since she had lived in very rough lodgings in her youth. While Sir William Hamilton investigated the area's infrastructure and found the roads in ruins and the port of Brindisi abandoned, Emma watched the women in the town perform the tarantella, a dance inspired by the energetic movements of a tarantula.7 The performer shook a tambourine as she twirled and danced in a circle. She became more and more frenzied and sometimes collapsed at the end. When Emma returned to the palazzo in May, she incorporated the tarantula into her Attitudes, much to the delight of her audience. The Comte d'Espinchal decided that the beauty and voluptuousness of her performance could inflame the "most insensible man." Sir William envisioned happy years ahead spent indulging his graceful mistress.
But Europe was changing.
On July 14, crowds stormed the Bastille in Paris and thrust its governor's head onto a pike. In October, the king and queen of France were dragged from Versailles and imprisoned. Parisian nobles fled for their lives, and Sir William reported, "French refugees drop here apace."8 Neapolitan aristocrats were terrified for the French royal family and worried that their own masses cherished similar revolutionary fervor. As Sir William worried, the revolution "cast a visible Gloom upon the face of this Court."9 Ferdinand, however, quickly bored of the despondent mood of his acolytes and banned all mention of France at court. His ludicrous attempt to live in a happy bubble was a failure. France remained agonizing, "the only Topic in every Conversation."10
Within three years, Emma had emerged as a talented performer and a confident hostess. Glittering with diamonds, she was the image of an ambassadress and she combined natural style with ladylike accomplishments of music and languages. Now all she needed was the title. "I will make him marry me," she had warned Greville in 1786. As revolution engulfed France and began to tear across Europe, Emma began to realize her desire.
CHAPTER 23
Manipulating Sir William
All my ambition is to make Sir Wm happy & you will see he is so," Emma wrote to Greville. She lied: she wanted to be more than his mistress. Emma sought to share his work as the ambassadress, to visit the English court, and to settle down with him for good. Eighteenth-century women were trained to wait modestly for a proposal, but Mrs. Cadogan was hardly able to play the role of the pushy mother, intent on wringing the question out of the envoy. In late 1788, however, after only two years of living with him, Emma was sure