marieduplessis:Kitty fascinated the public as much as she did Reynolds and seems postively to have c

marieduplessis:Kitty fascinated the public as much as she did Reynolds and seems postively to have courted notoriety… With seemingly shameless abandon, she played up to her popular image as a sexually voracious and power broking female - indeed a sort of skewed Cleopatra of her age.A satirical poem lampooned ‘Kitty’s stream of noblemen turned Fishermen’ and in 1765, as if to play up to this image, she sat for Nathaniel Hone, for a humorous portrait - almost a cartoon - that shows her concealing her nearly bare breasts behind a meagre scarf while a kitten fishes for trapped goldfish in a bowl in which is reflected a window crowded with rapt onlookers - Kitty’s ‘adoring’ public presumably. Her ostentatious and luxurious lifestyle, her public display of the wealth she had gained by her looks and wits, was by now notoriousThe Anglo-Venetian friend of Casanova, Giustiniana Wynne, confided in a letter that Kitty lived in ‘the greatest possible splendour, spends twelve thousand pounds a year, and she is the first of her social class to employ liveried servants…. there are prints of her everywhere.’ Giacomo Casanova himself, when in London in 1763-4, engineered a meeting with Kitty. Casanova was hard up, only too evidently on the prowl for opportunities and spoke little English so, it is fair to conclude, would not have been of great interest to the grand Kitty Fisher. He appears to have imagined otherwise.In his Histoire de ma vie, written during the 1780s but not published until 1794, Casanova remembered Kitty in her prime:  she was magnificently dressed, and it was no exaggeration to say that she had on diamonds worth a hundred thousand crowns. He was then told that if he liked he might have her then and there for ten guineas, a suggestion rendered more than unlikely by his next statement that Kitty had eaten a banknote for a hundred pounds, on a slice of bread and butter, that very day, a present from Sir Richard Atkins, brother of the fair Mrs Pitt. Casanova went on to inform his readers that he declined this bargain-basement offer of Kitty’s usually very expensive person because though charming, she could only speak English, and he liked to have all his senses, including that of hearing, gratified.The story of the money sandwich soon became, with various permutations, a London legend. The sum swallowed varied in different accounts – some said £20 and others £100 – but all agreed that Kitty ate the money because she regarded the sum offered an insultingly low payment for her nocturnal services. But perhaps there was more to her action than financial considerations. Perhaps she was by then living the role she had enacted for Reynolds. Cleopatra had swallowed a priceless pearl to impress a man. Now Kitty had done much the same, though not so much to impress any particular man as to express contempt for the mean spirits of all those men who had used her, and to proclaim her own independence. No wonder London was electrified.London’s Sinful Secret, The Bawdy History and Very Public Passions of London’s Georgian Age, Dan Cruickshank -- source link
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