turned to the companion and made one of the most famously ill-advised remarks in social history. “Who’s your fat friend?” he asked. Such an insult was social suicide. Shortly afterward Brummell’s debts caught up with him and he fled to France. He spent the last two and a half decades of his life living in poverty, mostly in Calais, growing slowly demented but always looking, in his restrained and careful way, sensational.
