QUEENS AND ROYAL MISTRESSES

QUEENS AND ROYAL MISTRESSES  

I discovered that she was a great reader. She liked history, but only history of a certain kind, the lives of queens and of mistresses of royal personages; and she would tell me with a childlike wonder of the strange things she read. She had a wide acquaintance with the six consorts of King Henry VIII and there was little she did not know about Mrs Fitzherbert [Maria Ann Fitzherbert, mistress of George IV] and Lady Hamilton [Emma, the mistress of Lord Nelson]. Her appetite was prodigious and she ranged from Lucrezia Borgia to the wives of Philip of Spain; then there was the long list of the royal mistresses of France. She knew them all, and all about them.

'I like to read about real things,' she said.

(p. 93-94)

(From Cakes and Ale by Somerset Maugham, in Ruskin Bond: "Love among the Bookshelves", Penguin/ Viking, ₹ 299)

I am not trying to sell dreams. ("Are You not? Really?")

Kishalay Sinha [G]