The Drop of the Dice

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IT IS ONE OF the perversities of human nature that when something which has been passionately wanted is acquired, it loses its desirability and there can come a time when the need to escape from it becomes an obsession. Thus it was with me. What I had desperately needed as a child—obviously because of what had happened to me—was security. By the time I was thirteen in that fateful year of 1715, I longed to escape from the cosy cocoon in which my family had wrapped me, and when the opportunity came, I seized it.

I must have been about four years old when I was brought to England by my Aunt Damaris and my Uncle Jeremy. Those first four years of my life had been lived most dramatically though I did not realize that at the time. I suppose I thought it was the most natural thing for a girl to be kidnapped by her father, taken across the sea to live most luxuriously with her parents and then suddenly to find herself plunged into the poverty of the back streets of Paris, from which she was rescued and whisked over the sea again to an English home. I accepted all that with the philosophical endurance of a child.

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