I concede that, since consenting to Madame de Buffon’s proposition, I had received a good many gifts: tokens of gratitude due to a woman of my sort. As a display of her affection, she had presented me with a set of diamond-star hair pins and two of her shimmering gowns of pompadour and tabby silk, which she had once worn at court. Orléans, too, had not neglected to equip me with gifts suited to a mistress, albeit not the official maîtresse-en-titre, worthy of her own furnished hôtel particulier, the position occupied by La Buffon, but a favoured one nonetheless. Therefore I was presented with an assortment of exquisite trinkets and treasures: embroidered silk shoes from Genoa with gold buckles; a necessary whose neat little box was hewn from amber; a fan whose handle was set with diamonds; and the daintiest of sapphire and emerald eardrops. I had made a gracious show of accepting these objects, all the while recalling the words of Mrs Elliot and how I had battled them in my heart. For as much as I was devoted to my dearest of teachers, my patroness, my chère maman, I loathed that she had been correct, that I might do better in my life by enacting a performance of love than by any other means. The painting of a hundred miniature portraits might procure me but one of Orléans’s diamond eardrops, I mused. Indeed, while my character was muddied by my mode of life, while my associates remained femmes galantes and roués, no patron would consider my skill with paint a true accomplishment; rather it would be seen as a novel and charming manner of amusing him during a dance of seduction. I gazed at the magnificent jewels in my bidet and preferred to believe I had acquired them through my noble service as a forger of peace, as a maker of amends, as an ambassador, than simply through being what I had ever been: a whore.

As I stood there, bent and quizzically peering beneath the golden lid of this contraption, I heard the jib door open. Orléans emerged and upon beholding me let out a roar of delight. I beheld him with surprise, which only encouraged his hilarity.

‘I have played a good trick on you, have I not?’ He sighed and coughed and mopped his bald pate.

‘Indeed you have!’

‘Are they to your taste, ma petite?’ he then enquired with a certain courtly deference.

I assured him they were sublime, for that was indeed the truth. Then, with a pretty smile and an enraptured gaze, I assumed the role he demanded of me upon the occasion of his visits: that of the adoring mistress.