THE GAME OF HEARTS: Harriette Wilson's Memoirs (532 pp.)—edited by Lesley Blanch—Simon & Schuster ($5).
Rarely has London lived quite so lustily as in the first years of the 19th century. Then the fat, fun-loving Prince of Wales reigned as Regent (for doddering George III) and "First Gentleman of Europe." Beau Brummell set the fashions, and the romantically adored Lord Byron sported through pubs and palazzi as Childe Harold in person. Of all the high-living courtesans who kept dizzy pace with the Regency's beaux and bucks, the most celebrated was Harriette Wilson. ''I supped once in her society," wrote Sir Walter Scott in 1825,"at Mat. Lewis's in Argyle Street, where the company chanced to be fairer than honest . . . She was far from beautiful, but a smart, saucy girl, with good eyes and dark hair, and the manners of a wild schoolboy."
Neither so lucky as her sister Lady Berwick nor so influential as Lord Nelson's mistress Lady Hamilton, this witty, tempestuous daughter of a Swiss-born Mayfair watchmaker rejoiced that "I have a devil in my body," and queened it for years over Britain's most dashing peers, in the park, at the opera and in her boudoir. When finally she fell from feminine preeminence, she rose again to outrage old beaux and outshine new belles as a scarlet lady of letters.
The Lady Blandishes. Harriette Wilson's sprightly Memoirs have been dusted off by British Author-Journalist Lesley Blanch, the onetime British Vogue staffer who last year recorded in The Wilder Shores of Love the lives of four other uninhibited 19th century boudoir specialists. Having edited Harriette's original four-volume confession to fit into one book, Author Blanch adds a long and perfumed preface telling how the lady came to write it. Evidently the ill-timed parsimony of one of her old patrons, who thought to satisfy a promised annuity of £500 by a single payment of £1200 left Harriette with a lasting sense of ill treatment. First angrily thinking to blackmail one blackguard, she soon boldly altered her plan to include all her old flames. Before publishing, she gave each a chance to buy his way out of the book in return for cash payment. "That most prolific plenipo, the Hon. Frederick Lamb," she wrote of Lord Melbourne's brother, has "called on [my publisher] to threaten him, or us, with prosecution . . . Had he . . . only opened his heart, or even purse to have given me but a few hundreds, there would have been no book, to the infinite loss of all persons of good taste and genuine morality."