D'Orsay / or, The complete dandy

by W. Teignmouth Shore

  “Wellington had a private box at the Théâtre Français, which D’Orsay and myself constantly occupied to witness the splendid acting of Talma, Madame Georges, Mademoiselle Duchesnois in tragedy, and of that daughter of Nature, Mademoiselle Mars, in comedy.…

  “Upon witnessing Perlet in Le Comédien d’Etampes, D’Orsay said—

  “‘Is not Perlet superlative?’”

  In another of his numerous voluminous and often highly entertaining memoirs, Lord William writes of this same visit to Paris:—

  “One youth attracted great attention that day”—it was a royal hunt in the Bois de Boulogne—“from his handsome appearance, his gentlemanlike bearing, his faultless dress and the splendid English hunter he was mounted upon. This was Count Alfred d’Orsay, afterwards so well known in London society. De Grammont,[1] who some few years after married his sister, had sent him from England a first-rate Leicestershire hunter, whose fine shape, simple saddle and bridle contrasted favourably with the heavy animals and smart caparisons then in fashion with the Parisian Nimrods.

  “The Count was presented to Wellington and his staff, and from that moment he became a constant guest at the Hôtel Borghese.…”

  Of another hunt, or rather of the return from it, we read:—

  “Nothing occurred during the day’s sport to merit any particular comment; perhaps the most amusing part of it was our ‘lark’ home across the country, when myself, Fremantle, and other attachés of the English Embassy, led some half dozen Frenchmen a rather stiffish line of stone walls and brooks. Among the latter was D’Orsay, who, albeit unaccustomed to go ‘across country,’ was always in the ‘first flight,’ making up by hard riding whatever he may have lacked in judgment; he afterwards lived to be an excellent sportsman and a good rider to hounds.”

  As became the son of his father, though scarcely fitting in the grandson of a king, D’Orsay was ever a staunch Bonapartist, feeling the full strength of the glamour of Napoleon. But the Emperor and the Empire vanished in cannon smoke; the Bourbons occupied rather uncomfortably the throne of France, and D’Orsay, much against the grain, entered the King’s garde-du-corps. But so ardent was his devotion to Bonapartism, that when the new monarch made his state entry into his capital, the lad refused to be a witness of his triumph, would not add his voice to the general acclamation, and indulged in the luxury of tears in a back room.

  His inherited instincts and his education gave him a taste for all the fine arts of life, and Nature endowed him with exceptionally good looks. An upstanding man he became, over six feet in stature; broad-shouldered and slim-waisted; hands and feet of unusual beauty; long, curly, dark chestnut hair; forehead high and wide; lips rather full; eyes large, and light hazel in colour. Though there was something almost femininely soft about his beauty he was nowise effeminate; in fact, he was a superb athlete, and highly skilled in almost every form of manly exercise and sport. We are told that he was a wit; a capital companion at all hours of the day and night; a quite capable amateur artist, who, as is the way of amateurs, received assistance from his professional friends, and—which is unusual at any rate among amateurs in art if not in sport—took pay for his work. In short, he was a very highly-gifted and accomplished young man.

  D’Orsay was born in an age when the atmosphere was electric with adventure; when nobodies rapidly became somebodies, and many who had been brought up to consider themselves very considerable somebodies were shocked at being told that in truth they were nobodies, or at best but the thin shadows of great names. It was an age when even the discomforts of a throne were not an unreasonable aspiration for the most humbly born. With his beauty of face and figure, fascinating manners and high family influence, young D’Orsay must have looked upon the world as a fine fat oyster which he could easily open and from which he could pluck the pearl of success. He possessed a winning tongue that would have made him a great diplomat; the daring and skill at arms that would have stood him in good stead as a soldier of fortune; a power of raising money in most desperate straits that would have rendered him an unrivalled minister of finance. From all these roads to distinction he turned aside; he was born to a greater fate; his was the genius of a complete dandy. Few great men have been able so justly to appraise their abilities; still fewer to attain so surely their ambition.

  During his short service in the army he proved himself a good officer and made himself popular with his men by looking to their comfort and welfare. Naturally he assumed the lead in all the gaieties of the garrison town, the assemblies, the dances, the dinners, the promenadings, but how petty they must have been to him, and how often he must have wistfully repined for Paris. He could not play his great part on so circumscribed a stage and with so poor a company of players. But if he could not find sufficient social sport, he could fight, and did. On one occasion the cause of the duel was noteworthy. It happened only a few days after he had joined his regiment that at mess one of his brother officers made use of an offensive expression in connection with the name of the Blessed Virgin. D’Orsay, as became a devout Catholic gentleman, expostulated. The offence was offensively repeated, upon which D’Orsay, evidently feeling that a verbal retort would not suffice to meet the gravity of the occasion, threw a plateful of spinach in the face of the transgressor. Thereupon a challenge and a duel fought that evening upon the town ramparts. With what result? Alas, as so often upon important affairs, history holds her tongue. The historic muse is an arrant jade, who chatters unceasingly upon matters of no moment, and is silent upon points concerning which we thirst for information. That is one of the ways of women.

  On the occasion of a later duel, D’Orsay remarked to his second before the encounter:—

  “You know, my dear friend, I am not on a par with my antagonist; he is a very ugly fellow, and if I wound him in the face he won’t look much the worse for it; but on my side it ought to be agreed that he should not aim higher than my chest, for if my face should be spoiled ce serait vraiment dommage.”

  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. The son was a muscular young man of robust temper, and attracted—or rather distracted—one day by the sounds of tumult rising from below, D’Orsay hastened downstairs to find this youth employed in bullying his mother. The blood of D’Orsay was inflamed; the dandy thrashed the lout, promising still heavier punishment should occasion arise.

  * * *

  II

  SHE

  Even the ardent D’Orsay, while he was thus preparing himself for his life-work and laying the foundation upon which he was to raise so superb a fame, could not in the hours of his highest inspiration have dreamed that Fate was deciding his future in the person of a lovely Irish peeress, the cynosure of London society. Such, in fact, was the case. In the year 1821 he visited England and met with the woman who held his fortunes in her beautiful arms.

  Margaret, or as she preferred to be called, and when a lady expresses a preference that should suffice, Marguerite Power was born at Knockbrit, near Clonmel, on the 1st of September 1789, being the third of the six children of Edmund Power, a Tipperary squireen of extravagant propensities and of a violent temper and overbearing tyranny which rendered him a curse to his family. He was a good-looking, swaggering fellow, with a showy air, fond of fine clothes, fine wine, fine horses, and various other fine things, indulgence in which his income did not justify. His were a handsome set of children: the two sons, Michael and Robert, attained the army rank of captain; Marguerite—and two sisters, Ellen and Mary Anne; the eldest child died young. Of a quieter disposition than her brothers and sisters, Marguerite as a child was rather weak and ailing,
sensitive and reflective. At that time of her life her beauty was not obvious; indeed few then seem to have realised that there was any charm in the soft, round, clear-complexioned face, with its pretty dimples and large, grey eyes shielded by long, drooping lashes. Her voice was low, soft, caressing; her movements unstudiedly graceful. A dreamy child, who lived in fancy-land; strange to her comrades, who awarded her little else than ridicule and misunderstanding.

  In 1796 the Powers moved into Clonmel, which change was welcomed by all the family save Marguerite, who looked forward to it with a foreboding that was only too fully fulfilled. In some ways this move wrought good for the child, awakening her to the realities of life, arousing an interest in the ways and doings of the society into which she was thrown; her health improved, and with it her spirits, both mental and physical.

  Her father’s pecuniary affairs now went rapidly from worse to much worse, and his adventures in politics rendered him highly unpopular with those of his own rank and station. He was a hospitable soul in his reckless, feckless way while he had a penny to spend, and often when he had not, filling his house with guests, many of whom were military men, and emptying his purse.

  When only fifteen years old Marguerite began to go out into society, as did her sister Ellen, her junior by more than a year. The rackety society of a small, Irish garrison town can scarcely have been wholesome for a young, impressionable girl, and to its influence may be attributed the development in Lady Blessington’s character of many evil traits which healthful surroundings and judicious restraint might have held in check. The two graceful, pretty children quickly became popular.

  Among the familiar guests at the father’s house in 1804 were two officers of the 47th Regiment of Foot, then stationed in Clonmel, Captain Murray and Captain Maurice St Leger Farmer, the latter a man of considerable means, which was quite sufficient in Power’s eyes to make him an excellent match for Marguerite, to whom both the officers were paying attention. Though Farmer was young, good-looking, plausible, the child’s fancy turned toward his rival, who wooed and would have won her had a fair field been granted him. He warned Marguerite that Farmer had proposed for her hand to her father, the news coming to her entirely unexpected, most unwelcome, difficult to credit. But in a few days the information was proved conclusively to be true, her father informing her that Farmer had approached him in the matter, and that he had given his cordial consent to his addresses. Marguerite was dismayed, at first stunned. She fully understood the strong inducements which the prospect of her marriage with Farmer had for a man in her father’s embarrassed circumstances, and knew only too well from bitter experience how intolerant he was of opposition to any of his whims or wishes, and how little weight the desires of any of his children bore with him. From her mother she expected some sympathy, but to her dismay received scant consideration for her plea to be spared, her unwillingness being counted the romantic notion of a child too young to be able to form a right judgment of the advantages offered by this proposed marriage. Tears and entreaties availed not, and the child was married to a man whom she held in detestation and in fear.

  That the outcome of this inhuman mating was misery is not wonderful; there was not in it any possibility of happiness. The one a very turbulent man who, though not actually insane, was subject to paroxysms of rage that were terrifying; the other a child not yet sixteen years of age, with a nature very sensitive, impressionable, and with that intense longing for love, sympathy and understanding so common among Irish women and men. We know what Marguerite Power did become; it is idle to conjecture what she might have been had not this abominable marriage been thrust upon her.

  From her own account, which seems trustworthy, we learn that her husband treated his child-wife outrageously, not even refraining from physical violence. Her arms were meanly pinched till black and blue; her face struck. When he went abroad, not infrequently he would lock her into her room, sometimes leaving her for hours without nourishment.

  Three months after their marriage Farmer was ordered to rejoin his regiment at Kildare, and his wife took the bold, determined step of refusing to go with him. A separation being arranged, Marguerite returned to her father’s house, where she received a welcome the reverse of kind. Home was made utterly distasteful to her, and sympathy—the one thing that might have saved her—was withheld by her father and mother. It was given to her from an alien quarter, and she accepted the “protection” offered to her by Captain Thomas Jenkins of the 11th Light Dragoons, a Hampshire man of considerable property. The astonishing thing is that she acted on the advice given to her by Major, afterwards Sir Edward Blakeney, her supposed friend and well-wisher. Meanwhile Farmer had gone out to India in the East India Company’s service.

  When Lord Mountjoy, better known as Lord Blessington, first met with the fascinating Marguerite is not quite clear, but in all probability he did so in or about 1804, when serving as Lieutenant-Colonel of the Tyrone Militia when stationed at Clonmel.

  Blessington plays a considerable and mysterious part in the life of D’Orsay. His father, the Right Hon. Luke Gardiner, was born in the year 1745, and did his duty by his country and possibly by his conscience in various ways. He married the daughter of a Scotch baronet, who presented him with several daughters and two sons, one of these latter dying in infancy, the other, Charles John, entering the world on July 19, 1782. He was educated at Eton and at Christ Church, Oxford, and succeeded his father in the titles of Viscount and Baron Mountjoy in 1798. In 1809 he was elected, upon what qualifications it is difficult to imagine, a representative peer of Ireland, and in 1816 was created Earl of Blessington. In this same year we hear of his visiting Marguerite in Manchester Square, London.

  Lady Blessington

  (From a Water-Colour Drawing by A. E. Chalon, R.A.)

  [TO FACE PAGE 28

  As far as wealth was concerned Blessington certainly was granted a fine start in life, but it may well be doubted if he were well endowed or endowed at all with brains of any value, though we are informed by a lukewarm but still possibly too warm biographer that he was “possessed of some talents.” Let us hope so; but if so, he contrived with great skill to bury them. We do hear of him speaking in the House of Lords in support of a motion for a vote of thanks to Lord Wellington, and as a specimen of his eloquence we quote:—

  “No general was better skilled in war, none more enlightened than Lord Viscount Wellington. The choice of a position at Talavera reflected lustre on his talents; the victory was as brilliant and as glorious as any on record. It was entitled to the unanimous approbation of their lordships, and the eternal gratitude of Spain and of this country.”

  It is also recorded that his lordship spoke but seldom, which may be counted to him for a saving grace.

  He seems to have been more at home in the green-room than in the neighbourhood of the woolsack. He was very wealthy, very prodigal, vastly futile. Byron relates of him:—“Mountjoy … seems very good-natured, but is much tamed since I recollect him in all the glory of gems and snuff-boxes, and uniforms and theatricals, sitting to Strolling, the painter, to be depicted as one of the heroes of Agincourt.”

  In another portrait he appears as Achilles, dragging at his chariot-tail the body of Hector, a friend “sitting” for the corpse. Physically he was vigorous; a tall, bright-looking man; a capital companion, when only good spirits and a strong head unadorned with brain-sauce were called for.

  In 1808, or 1809, Blessington—then mere Mountjoy—fell in with a very charming and well-favoured lady named Brown, but there were “some difficulties in the way of the resolution he had formed of marrying the lady, but the obstacles were removed.” The obstacle was the mere trifle of her already being possessed of if not blessed with a husband, Major Brown, who, however, discreetly and considerately departed this life in 1812, thus enabling Blessington to legalise the lady’s position in his establishment, the outcome of his connection with her having already been that she had borne him two children, Charles John and Emilie Rosa
lie. This lady subsequently presented him with two further pledges of her fond affection, Lady Harriet Anne Frances Gardiner, born in 1812, and Luke Wellington, afterwards by courtesy Viscount Mountjoy, born in 1814. On the 9th of September of this same year she died.

  Blessington was gifted with a penchant for losing his heart to ladies possessed of “obstacles” in the way of his complete happiness, for, as has been noted, he was in 1816 vice Jenkins befriending Marguerite Farmer. Again fortune smiled on his desires, Farmer dying of injuries received during a drunken frolic in October 1817. On 16th February of the following year his widow became Lady Blessington, she then being in her twenty-ninth, he in his thirty-seventh, year.

  Her beauty had ripened into something near akin to perfection, a bright and radiant spirit shining through the physical tenement. Hers was a vivid, compelling loveliness, supported by a vivacious good humour. Her figure, though somewhat tending toward over-fullness, was moulded on exquisite lines and of almost perfect proportions; her movements still graceful and free, as they had been when she was a child; her face—now pensively lovely, now suddenly illuminated with a joyous fancy that first expressed itself in her sparkling eyes; pouting lips; a clear, sweet-toned voice; the merriest of merry laughs. In sober truth, a very fascinating woman.

  This wild Irish girl, for certainly she had been a leetle wild, had climbed high up the social ladder. Without any other fortune than her face and her winsome ways she had won a peer for her lord, who if not highly endowed with ability possessed fortune in abundance, which for the purposes of her contentment was even more to be desired.

  The fond pair paid a visit to my lord’s estate in County Tyrone, and also to Dublin, where the appearance of my lady created no small stir. From the first day of their marriage Blessington exhibited a sumptuous extravagance in providing luxuries for Lady Blessington, who herself records:—“The only complaint I ever have to make of his taste, is its too great splendour; a proof of which he gave me when I went to Mountjoy Forest on my marriage, and found my private sitting-room hung with crimson Genoa silk velvet, trimmed with gold bullion fringe, and all the furniture of equal richness—a richness that was only suited to a state-room in a palace,” or to any other room seldom used or seen.