continued to take more than a passing interest in the opposite sex. His experience with the prostitute had probably been his first sexual encounter, and though initially bashful he soon became more confident. Whaley did not care for the appearance of most of the Auch women, who were ‘as yellow as saffron’ and, he thought, ‘the uglyest creatures I ever saw’. Yet he found them ‘nevertheless very ingageing[.] they have a great deal of wit and are very agreeable’. He did find a few of the girls pretty. One in particular caught his eye: the 20-year-old niece of the Archbishop of Auch, who invited him to attend to mass with her. ‘I would you may be sure have been glad to go,’ he wrote to Faulkner, ‘but unfortunately [on] the day appointed I was seized so violently with the tooth ach[e] I really thought I should have dyed.’5
It turned out that Whaley had to have a tooth pulled. It was no doubt an uncomfortable procedure: eighteenth-century dentistry could be excruciating. A couple of years later his lawyer Robert Cornwall complained of being ‘in the greatest torture these three days with a pain in my jaw, I went yesterday to have one of my teeth drawn, but the fellow has left the stump behind after cutting away great part of my gum and at this moment [I] am in great agony’.6 Whaley’s dentist was not so ham-fisted, but it seems that he impressed upon his patient the fashionable notion that teeth could be transplanted from one individual to another. Keen to find replacements, Whaley ‘gave three guineas to a peasant for one of his that fitted and it was put in the place of mine immediately and I am in hopes it will do. In a day or two I am to get another put in as soon as the one is fast.’7 But he was to be disappointed. Teeth cannot be transplanted and the ones he got from the peasant must have fallen out soon afterwards.
Despite his dental issues Whaley was not long in making himself at home in Auch, where he rented a stylish house and set himself up with servants, horses and dogs. He also acquired residences in several nearby towns, alternating between them as it suited him. Wray’s hands-off approach to his pupil’s tuition suited both parties and for a while they lived together amicably. ‘I am very happy with Mr. Wray,’ Whaley declared. ‘He is a real gentleman.’8 But in time they started living apart. ‘I found that we generally agreed better asunder, and therefore his visit at one of my residences was always a signal for me to remove to the other.’ (W, 13) Wray, in any case, had other things to occupy his mind. Whaley had noticed that in Auch women would ‘come lepping into Mr Wrays room before he is well out of bed in the morning and taulk pollyticks for two hours’.9 It is not clear whether talking ‘pollyticks’ was a code for something else, but in any event it was not long before the bearleader took up with a female companion.
***
As time went on Whaley found his funds running low. The rentals on his houses and his other outgoings could not be maintained on an allowance of £600 a year and in June 1783 he had to undertake a costly excursion. His tutor was ailing and so, ‘for my amusement and for poor Wrays health’, they travelled to the Pyrenean town of Bagnères de Luchon, famous for its thermal baths and medicinal waters. Bagnères was ‘one of the most expensive towns in France, [and] after Spa the most fashionable water drinking place’. It attracted upper-class visitors from all over Europe and Whaley met many young Irish and English gentlemen. He soon found his money running away from him as he tried to keep up with them. ‘When they gave one a dinner, or supper [they] thought it odd if I did not entertain them in return, which I did and certainly did what was proper.’ Within a month he spent £150, a quarter of his allowance, accumulating large debts into the bargain. To add further pressure, his new friends declared themselves shocked ‘at the pittyfulness of my scanty allowance’.10
Whaley was convinced that his relatives were treating him shabbily. His allowance, he felt, did not reflect his status or his fortune. In late June he wrote to Samuel Faulkner asking him ‘if you think six hundred a year a compatency equal to my fortune and what a young man on his travels should have when within three years of being of age’. Faulkner, of course, did not decide the amount of Whaley’s allowance, but as his land agent he did have access to the income from his estates and the young man knew he was his best chance of getting money. Insisting that ‘I neither play [i.e. gamble] nor whore’ he asked Faulkner to send him £300 to offset the expenses of his horses, his munificence to the locals (‘a young man in a small town abroad is esteemed and respected principally by his gennerous manner of treating the inhabitants’), and his excursions to places like Bagnères ‘where the acquaintance may well merrit cultivation’. While admitting that he was fond of pleasure ‘as is natural at my age’, he reiterated that he had ‘not the least desire to play’.11 The young gentleman, it seemed, protested too much: probably he had already lost a fair bit of money gambling. Faulkner forwarded the requested amount, but it was insufficient to answer Whaley’s demands. He was also annoyed to find his tutor spending with abandon: ‘Mr. Wray instead of saveing his income to my knolege spends every farthing of it.’12 Meanwhile he discovered that in France debtors were not permitted to leave town until they had paid everything they owed. When some of his creditors stopped his phaeton (a lightly sprung open carriage, the eighteenth-century version of a sports car) in the street in front of several of his compatriots, from whom he borrowed the money to pay them, he was mortified. ‘Now sure,’ he reasoned, ‘every person of common sense must see the impropriety and bad polliticks of sending me abroad when I am not allowed sufficient to live like a gentleman.’ His letters to his mother contained similar protestations, which eventually had the desired effect: from April 1784 his allowance would be doubled to £1,200 a year.
Shortage of money was not the only trouble Whaley had to contend with. At some point during his stay in Bagnères his horse fell on top of him, bruising him so badly that he decided to move further into the Pyrenees to another spa town, Barèges, where ‘the waters are better for wounds’.13 Though he recovered from the injury he did not see fit to tone down his excessive lifestyle and soon he was engaging in ‘all the folly and extravagance peculiar to our countrymen abroad’. (W, 13) Some of it involved the opposite sex. After leaving Barèges to return to Auch, probably during the autumn of 1783, he started pursuing romantic intrigues in earnest.
On a visit to Tarbes, around forty miles from Auch, Whaley made the acquaintance of an aristocratic couple: Henri Louis de Rohan, Prince of Guéméné, and his wife Victoire-Armande. The pair had once stood at the glittering apex of Parisian society: Henri Louis belonged to a noble house that claimed descent from the dukes of Brittany, while his wife was a favourite of Marie Antoinette and had been governess to the royal children. In 1782 Henri Louis had ‘managed to set the entire nation in an uproar by playing the starring role in one of the country’s most resounding bankruptcies’.14 His wildly extravagant lifestyle had resulted in an astronomical debt of 33 million livres and he and his wife were forced to flee to the south of France. Whaley was a regular visitor to their chateau in Tarbes and became a particular favourite of Victoire-Armande. He learned that she was contemplating a match between him and a female relative he believed to be her daughter. ‘At first I looked upon this as a feint; as I had conceived the idea that the Princess did not regard me with indifference herself. But on her persisting in the proposal, I expressed my acknowledgment in the warmest terms.’ (W, 15) In fact, Victoire-Armande could not have proposed such a match: her only surviving daughter, Marie-Louise, was already married. It may be that the noblewoman actually suggested that Whaley marry a niece or other female relative. But Whaley’s relatives in Ireland were vehemently opposed to the idea on the basis that the two parties were of different religions and they instructed Wray to take the young man away from Auch as soon as possible. This might have proved difficult had Whaley not become caught up in another romantic entanglement. This one had a much more troubling outcome.
This affair arose out of his acquaintance with the young female cousin of an Auch nobleman he named only as the Count V—. Whaley’s efforts to seduce her ‘in a short time succeeded to the utmost extent of my wishes’ (W, 15), but things became more complicated when it transpired that the girl was pregnant. Hoping to hush the matter up Whaley tried to keep her concealed in his house ‘till such time as it might be thought proper for her to appear again in the world’. (W, 16) Unfortunately a local abbé discovered what had happened and lectured the young woman harshly. Whaley responded to
