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The Memoirs, published installment by installment in 1825, were a tremendous sensation, going through 31 printings in a year. Though never salacious, they are packed with intimately impertinent revelations; their tart dialogue and sharp observations of the stupidities of the gentlemen friends and customers make a racy and amusing picture of high and low life in Regency London. As Harriette tells it, she left her father's house at 15 to "place myself under [the] protection" of Lord Craven. The stolid lord proved "a dead bore," talking far into the night about cocoa trees. "I was not depraved enough to determine immediately on a new choice," says Harriette, "and yet I often thought about it. How, indeed, could I do otherwise, when the Honourable Frederick Lamb was my constant visitor, and talked to me of nothing else?"
The Duke Vanishes. When Craven heard of her visits with Lamb and turned her out, Harriette told herself, "This is what one gets by acting with principle." She never made the same mistake again. Having left Craven for Lamb, she left Lamb for the Duke of Argyll. Entertaining a likely buck at the opera, Harriette would sigh: "His legs were so beautiful, and his skin so clear and transparent . . . and 30,000 a year besides." The proudest titles of Britain vied for her favor; the heirs to great fortunes rushed from Oxford and Cambridge to throng her opera box.
"My old beau Wellington," she found tedious, goodhearted, generous. But when the duke spurned her dun ("Publish and be damned"), he too met a different kind of Waterloo. "His Grace," spits Harriette, ". . . has written to menace a prosecution if such trash be published . . . When Wellington sends the ungentle hint to my publisher, of hanging me, beautiful, adored and adorable me, on whom he had so often hung! Alors je pends la tête! . . . Good-bye to ye, old Bombastes Furioso." Then she proceeds to relate how the duke, fresh from his triumphant campaigns in Spain, hurried straight to her house one night only to find Argyll there before him. When Wellington knocked, Harriette dressed Argyll in her nightcap and dressing gown and sent him to the window to tell the conqueror to be off—as the hussy must have it—"to his neglected wife and family duties."
The Lover Famishes. If there was a love in Harriette's hectic life he was Lord Ponsonby, elegant, pale, "the handsomest man of his time." The wily huntress trapped him, held him three years. She claims to have torn up a letter in which he pledged her a life income of £200, and she has only soft words for him in her Memoirs. After 15 years, she wrote her friend Lord Byron: "Don't despise me; nothing Lord Ponsonby has dearly loved can be vile or destitute of merit."*