Names Of Plays Italics Or Quotes

How we used to fetishize and differentiate our feelings. Rage! Hatred! Hunger! Pride! Jealousy! Ambition! Lust! We had a name for everything. But that colourful cavalcade of emotions was just a sham. It was all pain—all of it—all along. Rage was pain, hate was pain, pride was pain, lust was pain. All that's different now is that where pain used to have the luxury of being a bit of a drama queen and playing dress up, now it stands out there on the corner of Birchin Lane, quivering and naked.

She plays down Pompadour’s physical role, both as mistress and later as procuress; she underlines the fact that too much sex made Pompadour ill, and says that what she and Louis XV enjoyed together was ‘that particularly delightful relationship of sex mixed up with laughter’. She talks of Pompadour’s love of life, and interest in people, being ‘perhaps the base of what we variously call charm, sex appeal or fascination’. (Our italics.) So to Nancy, sex appeal is just charm under another name; its base is not anything so crude as physical desire.