An Entrancing Ego: Samuel Pepys

We may be taken aback, however, to find that even grief affords the satisfaction of display. He's tender-hearted-in the Fire he notes "a poor Catt taken out of a hole in the chimney with the hair all burned off and yet alive." He's a man of sensibility, but a sensibility that is, as Tomalin points out, "tender in imagination" but "tough in practice." When his mother was dying he dreamt of her and wept in the dream, but he did not visit her or leave town for her funeral. Instead he goes off to the tailor to order mourning for his whole household, finishing the day "sad and afflicted, but my judgement at ease." Next day he enjoys a dinner with friends, "mighty extraordinary merry"-"too merry for me," he adds dutifully, "whose mother died so lately." But then again, "they knew it not, so cannot reproach me thereon, though I do reproach myself." Next day he's "up and down again about my mourning"-to the shoemaker's, the tailor's; he buys gloves, two periwigs . . . By Sunday he's ready for church, "and with my mourning, and new periwig make a great show."

But Lord's Day's not over. The afternoon will afford another kind of pleasure. He'll visit his mistress and there "haze todo which yo would hazer con ella"-the characteristic macaronics by which he buried his sexual peccadillos one level deeper in incomprehensibility.

Sundays, indeed, offer a mix of satisfactions. He hears a "very good" sermon (sometimes sermons put him to sleep). And "besides the sermon, I was very well pleased with the sight of a fine lady . . . very pretty and sprightly." What's nice about Christian services: the women, instead of being hidden behind a lattice, are visible, and perhaps more. Another Lord's Day he

stood by a pretty, modest maid whom I did labour to take by the hand and the body; but she would not, but got further and further from me, and at last I could perceive she did take pins out of her pocket to prick me if I should touch her again. . . .

Upon which he "did forbear," but "fell to gaze upon another pretty maid" and got hold of her hand, "which she suffered a little and then withdrew. So the sermon ended . . . and my amours ended also."

Tomalin does his amours full justice. But she sees the fundamental insecurity beneath the juicy bits that have rewarded readers since Victorian editors first allowed them to seep into print. "Pepys's own adventures, so frankly recorded, have given him a great reputation with posterity, but the truth is he had not much sexual confidence." He says so himself:

. . . walked (fine weather) to Deptford and there did business and so back again; walked, and pleased with a jolie femme that I saw going and coming in the way, which yo could have sido contented para aver stayed with if yo could have ganar acquaintance con ella; but at such times as those I am at a great loss, having not confidence, ni alguno ready wit.

This at thirty-four, seven years into his chronicle of competence and success; he will be thirty-six when it closes. In those nine years, by Tomalin's reckoning, "he has designs on something like twenty [women] but succeeds in seducing only three or four." "By his own account, most of his stories of women are stories of sexual failure." Nor were the women with whom he could hazer todo which he would (often with the complaisance of their husbands) the kind of elegant ladies he could entertain at a family dinner, or admire at the theater or in church. With those he could pleasure himself only in fantasy-and he recorded that too. Still, sexual pleasures and disappointments were only episodes, most of them brief. Tomalin points out how firmly the Diary sets them in the context of his varied busyness, "taking part in a committee meeting in a previous paragraph, and a page later . . . planning his house improvements." They are not at the center of his life or his journal. It's fairer, and more accurate, to attend while he speaks of his "great pleasure" in his work, or calls a flock of sheep on a sunny day "the most pleasant and innocent sight that ever I saw in my life."