This richly raucous history traverses the notoriously licentious British Regency era in the company of its most celebrated courtesan. Following a simple Edinburgh girlhood, Grace Dalrymple came of age in the sin city of London. As an impressionable bride of seventeen who married a man more than twice her age, Grace's remarkable beauty soon attracted the attentions of other men, and a disastrous liaison provoked her philandering husband to pursue a divorce. She became mistress of the most infamous peer in England, Lord Cholmondeley, who commissioned her Gainsborough portrait the same year she gave birth to a daughter (who may have been the child of the Prince of Wales). She was soon to find a new protector in France's richest man, Philippe, Duc d'Orleans, but this turned perilous when Orleans fell to the guillotine, just as Grace narrowly escaped with her life. --From publisher description.