Deborah Friedell at the LRB:
Pepys was a meticulous – some might say compulsive – record-keeper, and his talent for storing and retrieving vast amounts of information would be useful to him throughout his career. Loveman argues that the diary became his ‘catch-all’ for anything he couldn’t safely or conveniently note in his official or household accounts. Into its pages went social debts (who had given him dinner, who still owed him one), gossip, the music he heard and the plays he saw, and the most intimate aspects of his life, from bodily functions (including what has been called ‘one of the best documented attacks of flatulence in history’) to sex.
He had married Elizabeth de St Michel when he was 22 years old; she was 14, young even by the standard of the time. We don’t know how they met. Her father was French, and she had grown up in Paris and Devon. She was a Protestant, though when she was angry at her husband she would sometimes threaten to convert to Catholicism. He thought that he was in love with her, at least at the beginning of their marriage. When he hears an especially stirring piece of music, he writes that it did ‘wrap up my soul so that it made me really sick, just as I have formerly been when in love with my wife’.
more here.
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