... he died an early martyr to the cause of sado-masochism.
Charles Whibley, below, writing, a trifle fastidiously and inaccurately, in
the intoduction to the appropriate volume of Stephen Farmer's Tudor
Translations, which at the time was being fronted by W.E.Henley [and thus
why I thought originally the passage in question might have been written by
Henley.]
... though it gets murkier. The singularly reclusive J.S. Farmer, to the
avocations of lexicographer and [distinctly sloppy] editor of English
Renaissance texts, added those of publishing pornography and championing
spiritualism.
So there *is indeed a strange loop between _The Squire of Alsatia_, Pierre
Motteux, and Farmer and Henley's dictionary of slang.
Anyway, here's Charley Boy (acolyte of Henley and author of _A Book of
Scoundrels_) on Motteux's death.
Robin
*************
What is certain is that at five (o'cock on February 19, 1718, Motteux went
off in a coach to White's, that he might procure some
ball-tickets for a lady of quality. He was discreetly
habited in a dark-coloured cloth coat, lined with orange coloured
Mantua silk ; and whither he went, or how
he spent that afternoon, there was no witness to declare.
But at nine o'clock he arrived at White's with a mysterious
scarlet cloak about him. He seems to have spoken
to no one ; and merely ate two glasses of jelly, while a
woman waited for him in a coach. Again there is silence
until twelve o'clock, when an apothecary, summoned to a
notorious house in Butcher Row, near Temple Bar, found
Peter Motteux dead, with a black ring round his neck and
bruises about his body. That he was the victim of foul
play there seems no doubt, and his friends did their utmost
to bring the malefactors to justice. Two men and four
women were duly arraigned at Justice Hall, in the Old
Bailey ; the men were bullies, and the women, save
Elizabeth Simmerton, who kept the house, were well
known as 'plyers.' The evidence seemed clear, and the
motive of theft was sufficient. But to the general surprise
the prisoners were acquitted, and none paid penalty for
Motteux's squalid death. A strange end, truly, for the
martyr of Protestantism and the translator of Rabelais!
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