I know your thoughts, reader. Why, only a halfwit would assent to such a proposal, one which offered nothing but a future replete with want and anxiety. Likewise, only a fool would abandon all prospects of restoring his fortune and his family name by marrying his whore. Dear friends, if you have thumbed the many pages of my memoirs only to arrive at such a conclusion, then I fear you have failed to derive even the slightest scintilla of wisdom from my tale. I would implore you: return to your life of petty gossip, of sneering in your church pew or theatre box, of judgement and condemnation and outrage. Shepherd your daughter carefully through balls and gatherings. Read her letters, choose her books, dispose of her novels. Ensure your son never holds a hand of cards, nor tastes a glass of punch. Guard over your husband’s or your father’s business. Scrutinize each ledger, search his study, pick and pillage his locked drawers and cabinets. Accost his banker and solicitor regularly. After you have duly completed those tasks, rest assured, dear reader: my fate or Allenham’s could never befall you or yours. Content yourself in the knowledge that wealth and title will preserve you from harm, just as it did the Duc d’Orléans and Louis XVI. We are all of us fools and halfwits. Our futures are never as certain as we would have them.

Upon that day, I chose the happiness laid before me. I chose hope. I chose love. And I have never had cause to regret it.

Afterword: An Incident in 1823

I WAS TORMENTED for many years by the manner in which I made my departure from Paris. It had been in haste and in the midst of great turmoil. I fretted endlessly for those friends I had left behind. Of course, by the end of that year, 1793, I had learned of Orléans’s tragic demise. I wept for him, boldly and without shame. I wept too for Madame de Buffon, for the grief visited upon her would have been insupportable. After a time, I mourned for her too. I could not have imagined that she would have been spared the guillotine when the Terror had harvested the lives of so many others less culpable.

Although I carried her memory in my heart, I had not spoken of her for many years. It was not until 1815, when I was in Brussels during the week of Waterloo and the Duchess of Richmond’s ball that her name was mentioned in passing. Madame Le Grand, an intimate female acquaintance of Monsieur Talleyrand, there disclosed to me the most remarkable piece of intelligence: Madame de Buffon had survived.