In praise of ample women…

la belle Morphise (Mme Marie-Louise O’Murphy)

…for Frances

The struggle is with fashion and food, mores and men, and more than mores, machines like mini-cars and machinations of the medical devil like ‘fat’s a killer’. What a battle! It makes Balaclava sound like a gentle pony-trek.
However, if men had any say in the matter-which they hardly seem to have, at least neither openly nor operatively-the pendulum from bones to embonpoint could well be on the swing, the charge of the very light brigade be over. For years we have heard the old grumble: ’I like something to get hold of.’ But now it is becoming more sinister, even young men are heard to snarl and mutter, ‘We’re sick of the spiders…’ So, ladies, it may be the time to pop another chocolate in, have a dozen cakes and eat them; to watch the calories rise like flies, and give those carbohydrates the freedom of your well-curved kingdom.

Your reward will be a mile of flashing white ivories. An old English saying once went: ‘What she wants in up and down, she hath in round about.’ Let it be said again. Pay, though, less attention to another proverbial Englishman’s requirements of a woman: ’Fat, fair and fourty.’ You can as well be young, dark and just delectably plump. But always remember, another old English phrase: ‘The fat’s in the fire’. Reflect, as you pop another soft-centre in, that sexually speaking the fat is the fire.
The connection between plumpness and food are not only those between the chocolate box and you. They are more general. " I’d like to eat you,’ he says-not meaning your bones. And he is talking not only of his love for your violet eyes but of his love for the eyeballs themselves and more, of his natural and healthy appetite for all the fine rounded flow of flesh mounted about them and below. Who ever heard of a fine, lean partridge? Plump’s the word, the sensory connection are obvious.
If courtship is a sweet and soulful aperitif the act of love itself is a dual mastication. In which case why not give him a good meal, mother’s-apple-pie-wise?
When Ivan Bunin wrote:’…but he was already intoxicated by the size and whiteness of that naked body..’ he was not describing a possibly quite charming fifteen-stoner full of triplets, but more a good helping from the generous platter of the day. Flesh was then flesh, as it had been for centuries before, and welcomed as such. But the flesh, I should think, was Boucher flesh rather than the heavier Rubens cut of meat: in other words, it is well rounded and plump, delineated by the most delightful dimples and creases.

Anyway, over-slimming is as much of a killer, or as wearying, as too much tissue. Moderation must surely be the means. François Boucher, one feels, well knew. A court painter, and French, he lived from 1703 until 1770, drawing and painting hundred of plump divinities and comfortably missing the Revolution by almost a round score of years. Fortunate fellow, one might think, though perhaps a little lacking in breastwork by Hollywood’s best standards. And it may be salutary to reflect that one of Boucher’s most famous nudes, the little lady lying on her stomach in the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna, is called Miss Morphise O’Murphy.
Could one thus be drawn to conclude that those pinkly limbs, those pretty plump cheeks-are all potato?