relations, and my husband's too; I, that was left so entirely desolate,
friendless, and helpless that I knew not how to get the least help to
keep me from starving,--that I should be caressed by a prince, for the
honour of having the scandalous use of my prostituted body, common
before to his inferiors, and perhaps would not have denied one of his
footmen but a little while before, if I could have got my bread by it.

I say, I could not but reflect upon the brutality and blindness of
mankind; that because nature had given me a good skin and some agreeable
features, should suffer that beauty to be such a bait to appetite as to
do such sordid, unaccountable things to obtain the possession of it.

It is for this reason that I have so largely set down the particulars of
the caresses I was treated with by the jeweller, and also by this
prince; not to make the story an incentive to the vice, which I am now
such a sorrowful penitent for being guilty of (God forbid any should
make so vile a use of so good a design), but to draw the just picture of
a man enslaved to the rage of his vicious appetite; how he defaces the
image of God in his soul, dethrones his reason, causes conscience to
abdicate the possession, and exalts sense into the vacant throne; how he
deposes the man and exalts the brute.

Oh! could we hear the reproaches this great man afterwards loaded
himself with when he grew weary of this admired creature, and became
sick of his vice, how profitable would the report of them be to the
reader of this story! But had he himself also known the dirty history of
my actings upon the stage of life that little time I had been in the
world, how much more severe would those reproaches have been upon
himself! But I shall come to this again.

I lived in this gay sort of retirement almost three years, in which time
no amour of such a kind, sure, was ever carried up so high. The prince
knew no bounds to his munificence; he could give me nothing, either for
my wearing, or using, or eating, or drinking, more than he had done from
the beginning.

His presents were after that in gold, and very frequent and large,
often a hundred pistoles, never less than fifty at a time; and I must do
myself the justice that I seemed rather backward to receive than craving
and encroaching. Not that I had not an avaricious temper, nor was it
that I did not foresee that this was my harvest, in which I was to
gather up, and that it would not last long;