Chapter 1 - lady hamiltons manuscript

This manuscript was found in the possession of the former Head Librarian of Calais, France where it had somehow found it's way. While it is true that Lady Hamilton spent her final sad years in France to escape her creditors, and that she died in Calais, nothing is known about when she acquired the services of the very literate and (to her) indispensable Colline, her maidservant. It may be added that nothing in current historic record gives us a clue as to what happened to Colline after the Lady's passing, but one can only hope that she found refuge somewhere on the Continent, and with her skill with the pen, may have found more remuneration than she had been able to gain from her long service to the lady.
It must be remembered that while the manuscript appears to be written in the first person, seeing as the date is such that it is, and owing to Lady Hamilton's condition at the time, these words are unquestionably those of Colline.

I

England

Oh I knew how to live before I met Nelson, but there was not real life in me until I did. Everything from my childhood in poverty through my marriage to Lord Hamilton seem to me to be irrelevant now that I have known what true love is.
I had known the love of men from an early age, the course, hard kind that dominates and gratifies their loins but does nothing to seek to really please a woman. Like dogs in an alley they can be, when their base desires fill them and when I was young, and a poor serving maid, I knew that sort of love, if it can even be called such. The fates had blessed me with a form both supple and voluptuous from an early age, leading the many men whose paths I crossed to describe me as a modern dryad, or a woodland nymph directly from the forests of Attica and the alter of Dionysius. They used me as such as I grew.
By age 15 my full grown height had reached 5 foot and 5 and my breasts were firm and high, above a delicate waist and soaring hips. My complexion pale, my eyes blue and my hair auburn brown set all off so that by my 16th birthday Sir Harry took me away for his own. My heart felt full of love for him at the time though I now know it was more full of hope. Hope for a full belly every night at bedtime and no pains of hunger. Hope for fine clothes and adventure. Hope that he might make me more than a kept woman. This hope I now realize was pointless. Harry Featherstonhaugh was not capable of more than seeing me as one of his trinkets, a pearl to show his foppish friends, and a thrill between silken sheets when the whim struck him. That was all I was to him, and well do I remember his admonishments to me when in my revelry at having all that I had been denied for so long in my larder, I covered my body with a lovely and sleek layer of fat: fat that thrilled me with its opulence but which he felt would take away from my luster and the glimmer of his pearl. He immediately restricted my access to victuals of all sorts and my lithesome figure returned, only to be blown up by his baby soon after, a baby that he soon removed from my care as it embarassed him, and then whisked me off to set me before a man who I thought would be more kind, and at least a being a gentleman, honorable: Sir Charles Greville.
Sir Charles would ultimately even tell me he loved me, which Harry never had, but this love was not alone going to aid him in his way up the social ladder. As he had met a wealthy daughter of an Earl, though she was frumpy, stupid and vain, he determined that I was an embarassment also, and determined to be rid of me through introduction. Sir Charles raved of my beauty, and though I had gained a few stone with the birth of my first child proclaimed my Classical grace and proportions to all in his company. Through this raving and flattery, I was introduced to an artist friend of his, George Romney.
Romney was entranced by my beauty! At least this is how he made his feelings known publicly. I believe partly as the result of some of Sir Charles boasting of my abilities in the bedroom and willingness to please, and partly because of his fascination with all things Classical, of which he remarked my figure was an exemplar, was George's heart captured. In the bedroom, he loved to fondle the fat I had gained in my confinement and my thighs, hips and even belly were likened to those of the goddesses, but he felt they were in need of filling out. He spoiled me with fine foods; pastries and muse de bouche, foods I had never before tasted and I must say that as my beauty smote Romney, fine tastes smote me. I reveled in a sort of gluttony for months, while George posed and painted, diddled and drew my growing form.
Of these early works, few escaped his private collection, and those were never well received or even titled with my name. English tastes at the time were not those of the 17th Century Dutch, and my figure had swelled to more than 14 stone before I recognized that what was happening to me, though pleasurable beyond belief, would end with me plying my wares on the streets of South London. The artist would tire, and I would be too fat to find the kind of man that could take care of me in the style I needed. A man who could afford to feed me to immensity, and love me all along the way. George was too flighty, too easily swayed by what he felt in the moment was beautiful. With this decision, I confined myself to tea and small meals, and sadly, I once again saw my now bounteous figure whyle away. George was bereft!
As my figure shrank, he began painting and drawing me, peeling off the pounds with his paint and charcoal, and showing me what a waif I would look like were I to become so thin. These images he would place next to those of me at my most opulent and then point out as such...
"Lady. See how your breasts will shrink from the full and glorious orbs they have become, back to these sharp little prominence's! How can you do this to yourself!! You must eat Emma, EAT!"
"Look darling! You have no more belly here! Imagine our pleasure in copulation with no warm and fertile belly to pile between us, how can you do this!"
"And your derriere Dear! From the magnificence of the painting on the left, to this...thin, wan, boyish arse! You cannot continue Emma...please!"
I replied that he should test the taste of the public by putting these works up for sale and finding the public's desires, and that I would live by the result. If they liked fat, I would stuff myself to the likeness of a prize hog for him, and eat myself to helplessness, all of which I of course secretly yearned to do, though just not with him! With that remark, his loins became enraged and he took me there in his studio, fumbling among palette and paint and attempting to get me to eat while he throbbed away between my thighs! My mind screamed that I should do, but I resisted, for he wasn't the man, or the future for me. He grasped at every roll and bulge of my body, played with my diminishing belly hang and bosom, and ultimately fell off to the side crying. He was distraught over weight I had yet to lose as well as that which was already gone. It was sad to me as he had been kind in his own way.
Some months later, when it had become apparent that the public wanted the smaller Emma, as a result of the sales and acclaim that his works acquired, he bowed to my wishes and sadly slipped out of my life. I heard later that I became somewhat of an infatuation to him, and that he painted me, and drew me, charcoled me and penned me again and again, but I was beyond his reach and in sunny Italy, beginning the second phase of my life at the time. Most of the works he did were not of the me he knew and generally reflected the Emma that the public loved, lithesome, waifish, and not at all what I had been when I was with him. Seeing these images made me think for a time that I had made a mistake and that he was a man who truly loved me but when I was in Portsmouth of a few years ago I was handed a packet by an old acquaintance, saying that I would surely appreciate it now. It was of course one of George's works, a charcol, portraying me at a weight he must have considered his goal for me. The Emma in the charcol had to weigh all of 30 stone, with great hanging rolls, a ponderous belly and a pair of legs only wide enough to support the burgeoning arse of a hippopotaumus! I laughed when I saw it, considering how far beyond the image I had grown by the time I viewed it!
I would always have a soft-spot in my heart for George though: it was he who really introduced me to great foods, and the love of a fattening form that would mark the rest of my life. Without him I may have discovered this about myself, but I think from my vantage now that it was his sharing with me his own love of my fat and the feeding of my youthful hunger that would lead me to become the woman I am now, though sadly alone.