W. Teignmouth Shore

“ Lady Blessington; but D’Orsay possessed a heart and spirit above trifles; the conqueror of to-day does not discount his present pleasure by any foreboding of defeat to-morrow. D’Orsay had conquered London society, almost all the male members of it and not a few of its female; with his wit and his good looks he could gain for love what only money could obtain for less favoured rivals.
Of the fair, frail ones who were to be met with at Gore House one of the most distinguished, if not for good looks, at any rate for the good fortune of having had a famous lover, was the Countess Guiccioli. ”

“ It was, therefore, no small feather in D’Orsay’s cap that he came to London an unknown young man, was seen, and by his very rivals at once acknowledged as a conqueror. His youth, his handsome face, his debonairness, his wit, were irresistible. Everywhere, even at Holland House, he made a good impression. He rode in Hyde Park perfectly “turned out,” the admired of those who were accustomed to receive, not to give, admiration. At a ball at the French Embassy where all the lights of fashionable society shone in a brilliant galaxy, he was a centre of attraction “with his usual escort of dandies.” ”

“ On the occasion of his first call Willis found Lady Blessington reclining on a yellow satin sofa, book in hand, her bejewelled fingers blazing with diamonds. He tells us that he judged her ladyship to be on the sunny side of thirty, being more than ten years out in his surmise, which proves that either the lady was extremely well preserved or the visitor too dazzled by her beauty or her diamonds to be in full possession of his powers of observation. But then, what man could be so ungallant as to guess any pretty woman’s age at more than thirty? ”

“ My Dear Count d’Orsay (if you will permit me to address you so familiarly) —you should be content with writing in your own language, like Grammont, and succeeding in London as nobody has succeeded since the days of Charles the Second, and the records of Antonio Hamilton, without deviating into our barbarous language—which you understand and write, however, much better than it deserves. ‘My approbation,’ as you are pleased to term it, was very sincere, but perhaps not very impartial; for, though I love my country, I do not love my countrymen—at least, such as they now are. ”

“ What thoughts of past times must have assailed him: of his first meeting with her in London so many years ago; of the long days and nights of delight in Italy; of his marriage, perchance; of Seamore Place, of Gore House; of hours of merriment and of sorrow; of her tried faithfulness to him; of his occasional faithlessness. That his love for her survived even the advance of years we cannot doubt; but the love of man is different far from the love of woman. ”

“ As little as had Marguerite Power when forced to marry Farmer. Did Lady Blessington recall her first wedding-day as she stood by and watched this sacrifice? She could not speak; her tongue was tied; what could it be to her if D’Orsay married? And D’Orsay, what word of exculpation or excuse can be said for him? Not one. Had he been free from [74] intrigue this marriage would have been a mere episode—as marriage then was and now so often is—in the life of a man of the world. The little schoolgirl must marry someone; why not D’Orsay? ”

“ SEAMORE PLACE
The London in which D’Orsay was destined to spend the majority of his remaining years, and of which he became so distinguished an ornament is far away from modern London, farther away from us, in fact, in manners, customs and appearance than it was from the metropolis of the England of Queen Elizabeth. Astounding is the change that has come about since the year 1830; the advent of steam and electricity, the stupendous increase of wealth, the extension of education if not of culture, wrought a revolution during the nineteenth century. ”

“ In the London of D’Orsay’s prime the salon was still a power for pleasure, and he and Lady Blessington reigned over that which was perhaps the most brilliant that our country has ever seen. There were others. That at Holland House, for example, where Lady Holland reigned supreme and somewhat severe. To that select circle, from which he was now, alas, excluded, D’Orsay had been admitted when as a mere youth he first visited London. Dining there one day, he was honoured by a seat next his hostess, who apparently looked upon the young Frenchman as sure to be awe-stricken by her presence. ”

“ A dandy with a damaged nose or deprived of one eye would be a figure of fun.
From remote ancestors D’Orsay inherited the spirit of chivalry, setting woman upon a lofty pedestal and then asking her to step down and make love to him. He was always ready to rescue a woman—not merely a beauty—in distress, of which a fine example is an event which befell while he was living out of barracks in apartments, which were kept by a widow, who had one son and two daughters. ”

“ Judged by the standards of life and conduct which must control everyday men and women, D’Orsay was a monster of iniquity, and also, as Punch would put it, he was worse than wicked, he was vulgar. His friends cannot have weighed him by any such standards, or they would have condemned him and scorned him. They could not then have accepted him as one of themselves, as a man to be almost loved; they would have turned cold shoulders to any ordinary mortal who treated the love of woman as a comedy and debts of honour as mere farce. ”

“ How poor-spirited the creature who could ask such a man as D’Orsay to pay back the money he had lent him or to render their due to the tailors and such like whom he had honoured with his patronage! The spirit of a D’Orsay cannot be appreciated rightly save by one of kindred genius. Who that was worthy to be his friend would not feel honoured by a request from him for a loan, and injured by even a hint at repayment? Of what value is a rich friend if he will not be your banker? ”

“ It will be interesting, chère et aimable amie, to have a portrait of our great poet, from a painting by one who so truly esteems you: for you have not a truer friend than Count d’Orsay, unless it be me. How I wish you were here to see the picture! It is an age since we met, and I assure you we all feel this long separation as a great privation. I shall be greatly disappointed if you are not as delighted with the engraving as I am, for to me it seems the very image of Byron. ”

“ Which failure, however, in the long run cannot have made any difference; to have hauled him out of his ocean of debt would only have landed him for a brief space upon dry land, whereon he would have gasped like a fish out of water; he was a born debtor. His marriage had replenished, or rather filled, his exchequer; then he proceeded with skill and rapidity to empty it. Why should not a colourless wife contribute to the support of a resplendent husband? Yet, marvellous, almost incredible, there were carping and jealous spirits who boggled over this and other transactions of Count d’Orsay. ”

“ From the first year of our acquaintance with you, we had learned to admire your genius, to respect your principles, and to love your goodness of heart, and the honest warmth of your nature. These sentiments have never varied. Every year, by unfolding your noble qualities to us, has served to prove how true were our first impressions of you, and our sole regret has been that your occupations deprive us of enjoying half as much of your society as all who have once enjoyed it must desire. ”

“ Lady Blessington was now fading. The background of her life had grown grey; the passage of years was impairing her beauty; money matters troubled her sorely, and it cannot have added to the joy of life to know that her love and her charms no longer satisfied all the requirements of her lover. Banishment from the society of almost every respectable woman must also have grated upon her who was born to reign over society.
As for D’Orsay, his existence was one perpetual [162] gallop after pleasure and to escape the clutches of duns and their myrmidons. ”

“ The death of Lady Blessington was a blow to him from which he never really recovered. Writing to Madden from Chambourcy on 12th July, Miss Power says:—
“Count d’Orsay would himself have answered your letter, but had not the nerve or the heart to do so; although the subject occupies his mind night and day, he cannot speak of it but to those who have been his fellow-sufferers. It is like an image ever floating before his eyes, which he has got, as it were, used to look upon, but which he cannot yet bear to grasp and feel that it is real. ”

“ Should there not be a Professor of Dandyism to teach the young idea how to distinguish between dress and mere clothes? Between those two there is as great a gulf fixed as between the gentle art of the gourmet and the mere feeding of the gourmand. To teach also the art of living and the history of dandies and of dandyism? In these prosaic days we are only too ready to learn how to obtain the means of living without acquiring also a knowledge of how to use those means to good purpose. ”

“ The world cannot rob us of that, and if it be better to live than to die, it is better to live in a good humour than a bad one. If a man be convinced that existence is the greatest pleasure, his happiness may be increased by good fortune, but it will be essentially independent of it. He who feels that the greatest source of pleasure always remains to him, ought never to be miserable. The sun shines on all; every man can go to sleep; if you cannot ride a fine horse, it is something to look upon one; if you have not a fine dinner, there is some amusement in a crust of bread and Gruyère. ”

“ Whatever Count d’Orsay undertakes, seems invariably to be well done. As the arbiter elegantiarum he has reigned supreme in matters of taste and fashion, confirming the attempts of others by his approbation, or gratifying them by his example. To dress, or drive, to shine in the gay world like Count d’Orsay was once the ambition of the youth of England, who then discovered in this model no higher attributes. But if time, who ‘steals our years away,’ steals also our pleasures, he replaces them with others, or substitutes a better thing ”

“ Dickens, a thorough Englishman in almost every habit and instinct, who dressed violently rather than well, sported somewhat fantastic costumes simply because it was the fashion so to do among the young men with whom his growing fame had brought him into contact. In the inner meaning of the word Dickens was no dandy, but simply a dressy man; his was not the dandiacal temper. Of this, indeed, there was far more in the Oriental Disraeli, though he, like his Vivian Grey, used high dressing as a pose. Whatever he undertook he loved to do well, and in his youth even to do to extremes. ”

“ In such a man, properly conscious of his gifts, modesty can only be a mockery. Mock modesty is to the true what mock is to real turtle—an insolent imitation. D’Orsay was above all things candid, when there existed no valid reason for being otherwise.
While at Genoa D’Orsay drew Byron’s portrait, which afterward formed the frontispiece to Lady Blessington’s Conversations of Lord Byron, which is quite the most realistic and skilful of her ladyship’s works of fiction. The poet gave the painter a ring, a souvenir not to be worn for it was too large. ”

“ As a matter of course the circumstances in which he was so ostentatiously living and his general reputation kept D’Orsay outside the houses of those who did not open their doors to everybody, though most male folk were pleased enough to visit him and Lady Blessington at Seamore Place, where of womankind, however, none except relatives and exotics were to be met with. But even a dandy must find occasionally a crumpled rose-leaf in his bed. ”

“ There was not a fashionable haunt of virtue or of vice in which D’Orsay was not quite at home. There was not any fashionable folly or accomplishment in which he was unskilled; a complete man-about-town, gambler, rake and dandy. We need not pursue him in all his pastimes; dead and gone revelries cannot be resurrected with any satisfaction; they smell musty. Let them lie. ”

“ The conqueror as he tosses uneasily in his sleep is assailed by dreams that terrify. D’Orsay in his hours of greatest triumph must sometimes have asked what would be the end of his career; when would come his Waterloo and St Helena? His thoughts must have sometimes turned toward the young girl he had married so light-heartedly, whose fortune he had squandered, and whose life he had shadowed. Success has its hours of remorse. Life is a riddle; but D’Orsay was not often so foolish as to bother his brains or break his heart over the solution of it ”

“ If I were to die I cannot bear to think of my mother living beyond me, as I daresay she will. But isn’t it an awful, awful sudden summons? There go wit, fame, friendship, ambition, high repute! Ah! aimons nous bien. It seems to me that is the only thing we can carry away. When we go let us have some who love us wherever we are.... Good-night.”
Thackeray, himself “no small beer” as a dandy in his young days, was a visitor to Gore House, and we fancy liked its mistress better than its master, with whom, however, he was on quite friendly terms. ”

“ To Madden, Henry Bulwer expressed the opinion:—“It was altogether a great pity D’Orsay was not employed, for he was not only fit to be so, but to make a most useful and efficient agent, had he been appointed.”
But Governments, as well as individuals, are fallible, and often blind to their best interests. Yet it really is difficult to understand why D’Orsay was refused his modest request; what more distinguished ornament to an Embassy could be desired than a splendid libertine and a man distinguished for the vastness of his debts? ”

“ When to those exterior attractions are added manners graceful and dignified, conversation witty and full of intelligence, joined to extreme gentleness, it cannot be wondered at that the Duchesse de Guiche is considered one of the most lovely and fascinating women of her day. It is a pleasing picture to see this fair young creature, for she is still in the bloom of youth, surrounded by her three beautiful boys, and holding in her arms a female infant strongly resembling her. ”