Pavilions of the Heart

Lesley Blanch here takes the reader on a uniquely romantic journey to the settings - caves, convents, harems and villas - where lovers have come together for a moment, a night or a lifetime. Her subjects are chosen carefully from those places in her travels where she has come upon a story that has fired the imagination. Some of the stories are of great and famous love affairs, others largely unknown - though no less intriguing. Blanch writes of Nelson and Lady Hamilton's scandalous affair in a suburban house in London; Pushkin and Countess Woronzov's trysts in a cave beside the Black Sea; Wagner and Cosima's Swiss villa; the doomed Carlotta and Maximilian's palace at Chapultepec; Rossetti and Elizabeth Siddal's hidden room in crumbling Chatham Place and Chopin and George Sand's long years in her beloved Nohant. She resurrects Sultan Murad's room in the Seraglio and the madrassa of Bibi Hanum - Tamerlane's favourite wife - and tells the extraordinary story of Aurélie Picard, whose pavilion of the heart was deep in the Saharan desert.