Jonathan Richardson

Confessions Of An English Traveler

Prologue

Looking back over my Life-it has not been a long one and I like to think I am still in my prime-I find it hard to say just when the thought of leaving England first arose in my mind. I only know that when I acquired new lodgings for the third time in two years my restlessness had become acute and could not have been cured.

The new lodgings were neither better nor worse than the ones I had occupied for several months previously. But I had grown morose from looking at the same faces and the same rows of brick-walled houses week after week, and moving about had become a necessity for me. If anything had been needed to add fuel to my discontent, the episode which I have just related had supplied it, and only a drastic break with the past remained as a means of improving my lot.

I had very nearly paid for my recklessness with my life and what had I gained from an encounter behind drawn blinds in the small hours that differed from a hundred others I had enjoyed in recent months? What had I gained that I could look back on as different, as wildly exciting?

True, no two women are alike. But when you have explored all of the possibilities resident in the delectable sex in a city such as London, when you have endured needless bickerings and the striking of bargains in disreputable taverns and poverty-blighted streets your thoughts turn to what might be accomplished in a happier climate under brighter skies.

I had spent most of the morning unpacking. There was an eight-foot-high book cabinet which could be swung out from the wall far enough to flood the shelves with sunlight from the window opposite and I could read the title of each book as I set it down.

Most of the books it would have been unwise to place in the hands of the very young. But few men of learning and wide experience would have thought my collection in any way outrageous, for I have a preference for classic volumes which have stood the test of time, and survived the unjustified attacks so often made upon great literature of a bold and candid nature by narrow-minded Servants of the Crown.

As I placed the books, one by one, on the cabinet's two upper shelves I paused to admire the fine gold-and-leather binding of JUSTINE, and found myself idly flipping a dozen or more pages I had memorized almost line for line.

What a hypocrite De Sade had been, pretending to be morally outraged by practices in which he had himself so frequently indulged that his last years had been spent on a mat of straw in a stone-walled asylum, for offenses which Napoleon had refused to condone, despite the presentation copy which the author had made bold to send him. Yet what a superb intellect the man had possessed, how marvellously he had illuminated the darkest recesses of the human mind!

I had closed JUSTINE with a snap and was chuckling, for the hundredth time, over a passage in Petronius, in which two dissolute wights, fleeing for their lives, take refuge in Roman Bath, and observe there a man whose organ was so huge that his body seemed like a tiny, dangling appendage attached to it-I was chuckling, as I say, over what is perhaps the most amusing passage in the whole of Roman literature when I heard a gentle tapping at the door.

It wasn't the first time that my new landlady had announced her presence in that way. But it was barely eight o'clock and the thought crossed my mind that only a matter of some importance would have brought her to my door at so early an hour.