The fascinating revelation (and inevitable resulting comedy) that the London-based call girl and sex-blogger Belle de Jour turns out to be a 33-year-old American academic called Dr Brooke Magnanti, with a PhD in epidemiology and forensic science, puts me in mind of an old story about another prostitute who used a combination of scientific know-how and native wit to hoodwink her foreign customers...
I’ll clinch the matter by telling you the story of what happened to a French gentleman, the Sieur of Lierne, when he lay with a gay lady of Rome. She, after the fashion of her chaste sisterhood, had a store of little light pellicles or bladders, soft dainty things and filled with sweet musk-scented perfume. And with sundry of these little balloons secreted about her, the fair Imperia – that was her name – lay with the gentleman in her arms and let him love her. While the two of them were toying with the dainties of love and savouring its keen delights, the lady with a cunning twist of her hand slipped one of her little bladders high up near the place of state, and then with a tiny press of her thigh burst it. The gentleman, hearing the report, wished to take his nose out of bed to get some fresh air. “’Tis not what you think,” said Imperia; “one should know the worst before one begins to be afraid.” At this persuasion the gentleman put his head back and met with a delicious odour and one quite different from what he had expected. This pleasant trick having occurred several times, he asked the lady if such sweet smelling airs came natural to her, seeing that those which floated around the lower parts of French ladies were of quite another kind. She replied with a philosophic frisk that the natural air of the country and the aromatic delicacies upon which the Italian ladies fed were distilled inside ‘em and issued quintessential from the breech, as from the beak of an alchemist’s retort. “Very surely,” said he, “our French ladies’ wind blows from a different quarter.” – However, it happened that after several more these musk(et) shots, Imperia, by force of a superfluity of internal wind, let a real fart, a highly natural, solid and substantial one. The Frenchman, whose nose had got into the habit of chasing after these reports (from whence cometh the saying: to lead by the nose), hearing the short, sharp crack, quickly burrowed his diligent propboscis under the sheets, so as to catch every fragment of the sweet breeze for the better apprehension of which he had wished himself made all nose. But alas! he was mistaken, and he drew back his nose quicker than you could have done it for him with forty of those great wooden shovels they measure corn with at Orleans. Wherefore? He had met with a smell so shocking, coming from the very heart of the bad place, that none before or since had smelt its peer. “Oh lady,” quoth he sadly, “what have you done?” And as he opened his mouth to say this, in leapt that warm breeze and played across his palate. “Sir,” laughed she, “’tis a compliment to remind you of your native land and loved ones far away!”
(Francois Béroalde de Verville – Moyen de Parvenir 1610)
A 17th Century Italian Courtesan Dr Magnanti: The Real Belle de Jour
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