Mozart was ‘a fundamentally happy man’, writes Jan Swafford, witty, exuberant, energetic, constantly infused with musical ideas of power and beauty – very different from the cliché of the brooding genius expected by the Romantics in the next century. ‘Wolfgang is extraordinarily jolly,’ wrote his stern father, ‘but a bit of a scamp too.’ Leopold was moody, disappointed by his own career – ‘All men are villains,’ he told Mozart – but his wife was playful and scatological. In his teens, Mozart found a mischievous partner in his cousin Maria Anna Thekla: ‘The two of us are made for each other because she’s a bit of a rogue too.’ Their sexual explorations inspired his pungent letters: ‘I’ll kiss your hands, face, knees and your … whatever you permit me to kiss.’ Even while performing for aristocrats he privately guffawed as ‘a number of high nobility were present: Duchess Kickass, Countess Pisshappy, also Princess Smellshit with her two daughters’. But he was already composing: ‘The concerto I’ll write him in Paris, it’s fitting / For there I can dash it off while I’m shitting.’
Inspired by Vienna, Leopold took Mozart on a European tour to Paris (where traumatically his mother would later die of typhus), London and back to Vienna. There Joseph would become his patron.
Joseph was already wildly in love with Isabella when she played so well with the Mozart family. Isabella managed him excellently while, perhaps for Mimi, writing a treatise on men as ‘useless animals’, looking forward to female empowerment.
Then: disaster. After the premature birth of a second daughter whom Isabella named after Mimi, she caught smallpox. Her last letter was to Mimi: ‘God is too benevolent not to let me have the pleasure of kissing you again … Goodbye, be well.’ Isabella died aged twenty-one, then the baby followed.
Mimi was poleaxed – though she later married happily – but Joseph was inconsolable: ‘I have lost everything, the object of all my tenderness, my only friend.’ He told his mother, ‘I’ll never marry again … my existence is strained to breaking point.’ The queen-empress immediately ordered him to marry a Wittelsbach princess, Josepha of Bavaria. He resisted. Mimi, placing the dynasty first, showed Joseph her letters from Isabella in order to shatter his illusions, though he did not understand them. Acquiescing, he hated his new wife – ‘short, without a vestige of charm, her face covered in spots, her teeth horrible’ – and complained to a friend, ‘My wife is unbearable, they want me to make children. How can I? If I could put the tip of a finger on the tiniest part of her body not covered with spots, I would try.’ Observing her brother’s meanness, Mimi reflected, ‘If I were his wife, I’d hang myself on a tree in Schönbrunn,’ but even their mother conceded that Josepha was ‘not agreeable’. Within two years, Josepha too was dead of smallpox, that relentless killer.
As Frederick manoeuvred and negotiated desperately, William Pitt, the new prime minister, grandson of John ‘Diamond’ Pitt and son of Robert who had smuggled the jewel out of India, orchestrated a multifront war that delivered an astonishing array of victories from America and Africa to India.
* Nader’s Georgian ally King Hercules II, who had accompanied him to Delhi, united Kartli and Kakheti to create the first united Georgia for many centuries.
* The Omanis were Ibadites, followers of an eighth-century scholar who rejected certain Sunni and Shia doctrines, and were ruled by elected imams from a single family who had expelled the Portuguese and returned to their traditional trade on the Swahili coast of Africa.
* Voltaire was even ruder about Jews, whom he described as ‘an ignorant and barbarous people, who have long united the most sordid avarice with the most detestable superstition’.
* More outrageous was Julius Soubise, a manumitted slave originally named Othello who became the fencing teacher of an ageing society beauty, Catherine Hyde, duchess of Queensberry. Treated as her adopted son, renamed after a French duke, he became a fop, seducer and rake among the society dandies known as the Macaronis for their European style (Soubise was called the ‘Mungo Macaroni’ by the news-sheets), and probably her lover But when he was accused of raping a housemaid, the duchess sent him to India, where he founded a Calcutta riding school, dying after a riding accident.
* A typical French plantation owner, Gaspard Tascher, bought estates in Martinique and La Pagerie in Saint-Domingue, providing him with an aristocratic surname and funding a lifestyle that allowed his son to serve as a page at Louis XVI’s court. His granddaughter, Marie Josèphe Rose Tascher de La Pagerie, brought up by slaves, ruined her teeth eating sugar, so that when the creole arrived in Paris to marry an aristocrat her mouth was just full of black stumps; she was barely educated, yet she possessed conquering charm. Later known as Empress Josephine, she and Toussaint would cross paths.
