D'Orsay / or, The complete dandy

by W. Teignmouth Shore

  10 St James’s Square

  [TO FACE PAGE 100

  To this London, which, however, was not so dull as it looked, D’Orsay came in November 1830, taking up his residence with Lady Blessington and his wife in St James’ Square. But Lady Blessington soon found that her jointure of £2000 a year could not by any stretching meet the expenses of such an establishment, and that a removal to cheaper quarters was compulsory. D’Orsay and his wife took furnished lodgings in Curzon Street, but later on joined Lady Blessington in the house in Seamore Place, which she had rented from Lord Mountford and furnished with an extravagance worthy of an ill-educated millionaire. As for example, let us take a peep into the library—Lady Blessington was very literary—which looked out upon Hyde Park; the ceiling was arched and from it hung a lamp of splendour; there were enamelled tables crowded with costly trinkets and knick-knacks; the walls were lined with a medley of mirrors and book-cases, with as chief adornment Lawrence’s delightful portrait of the mistress of the house, now in the Wallace Collection. The dining-room was octagonal, and environed by mirrors; it was an age of mirrors and cut glass.

  Joseph Jekyll writes on June 20th, 1831: “Nostra senora, of Blessington, has a house of bijoux in Seymour (sic) Place. Le Comte d’Orsay, an Antinous of beauty and an exquisite of Paris, married the rich daughter of Lord Blessington, and they live here with la belle mère.” And on 18th July:—“The Countess of Blessington gave a dinner to us on Friday. Lord Wilton, General Phipps, Le Comte d’Orsay, and myself—Cuisine de Paris exquise. The pretty melancholy Comtesse glided in for a few minutes, and then left us to nurse her influenza. The Misses Berry tell me they have dined with the Speaker and wife, who have thrown my Blessington overboard.[6] The English at Naples called my friend the Countess of Cursington.”

  In January of the next year Jekyll was again present at a dinner in Seamore Place, other guests being George Colman, James Smith, Rogers and Campbell; “There was wit, fun, epigram, and raillery enough to supply fifty county members for a twelvemonth. Miladi has doffed her widow’s weeds, and was almost in pristine beauty. Her house is a bijou, or, as Sir W. Curtis’ lady said, ‘a perfect bougie.’”

  At Seamore Place Lady Blessington, with D’Orsay as ally and master of the ceremonies, gathered around her many of the most interesting and distinguished men of the time—statesmen, soldiers, writers, painters, musicians, actors, and many gay butterflies of fashion.

  But the triple alliance was soon reduced to a dual, Lady Harriet leaving Seamore Place, her husband and her stepmother—who doubtless had given her much good counsel and advice—in August, 1831. It was not, however, until February, 1838, that a formal deed of separation was executed. This diminution of the number of the household in nowise damped the gaiety of the two who were left behind, indeed the presence of the child-wife must often have been a wet-blanket. As far as D’Orsay was concerned, she had fulfilled her fate by supplying him with an income, which he speedily overspent and frittered away. It is surely a blot upon our social economy that such a man should have been driven to such a course in order to secure the means of living. There ought to be a young-age pension for dandies, and their debts ought to be paid by the State, thus leaving them free to do their duty without harassing cares as to ways and means. A dandy of the first water is a public benefactor and as such should be subsidised.

  Nathaniel Parker Willis, an American journalist and verse writer, who wrote much that is now little read, has given accounts of various visits paid by him to Lady Blessington and D’Orsay, to the mistress and to her master, at Seamore Place, and, as was the case with others who went there, apparently accepted the Count’s constant presence as quite natural. In truth, why should he not frequent the house of his adorable stepmother-in-law? Even when he was not chaperoned by his wife?

  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?

  She was dressed in blue satin, which against the yellow of the couch must have produced an hysterically Whistlerian fantasia. Willis describes her features as regular and her mouth as expressive of unsuspecting good-humour; her voice now sad, now merry, and always melodious.

  To them enter D’Orsay in all his splendour, to whom the fascinated Willis was presented.

  Thereon followed tea and polite conversation, the talk very naturally turning upon America and the Americans, Lady Blessington being anxious to learn in what esteem such writers as the young Disraeli and Bulwer were held in the States.

  “If you will come to-morrow night,” she said, “you will see Bulwer. I am delighted that he is popular in America. He is envied and abused—for nothing, I believe, except for the superiority of his genius, and the brilliant literary success it commands; and knowing this, he chooses to assume a pride which is only the armour of a sensitive mind afraid of a wound. He is to his friends the most frank and noble creature in the world, and open to boyishness with those whom he thinks understand and value him. He has a brother, Henry,[7] who is also very clever in a different vein, and is just now publishing a book on the present condition of France.[8] Do they like the D’Israelis in America?”

  Willis replied that the Curiosities of Literature, Vivian Grey and Contarini Fleming were much appreciated.

  To which Lady Blessington graciously responded:

  “I am pleased at that, for I like them both. D’Israeli the elder came here with his son the other night. It would have delighted you to see the old man’s pride in him, and the son’s respect and affection for his father. D’Israeli the elder lives in the country, about twenty miles from town; seldom comes up to London, and leads a life of learned leisure, each day hoarding up and dispensing forth treasures of literature. He is courtly, yet urbane, and impresses one at once with confidence in his goodness. In his manners, D’Israeli the younger is quite his own character of ‘Vivian Grey’; full of genius and eloquence, with extreme good-nature, and a perfect frankness of character.”

  After some further desultory chat, Willis asked Lady Blessington if she knew many Americans, to which the reply was—

  “Not in London, but a great many abroad. I was with Lord Blessington in his yacht at Naples when the American fleet was lying there … and we were constantly on board your ships. I knew Commodore Creighton and Captain Deacon extremely well, and liked them particularly. They were with us frequently of an evening on board the yacht or the frigate, and I remember very well the bands playing always ‘God save the King’ as we went up the side. Count d’Orsay here, who spoke very little English at the time, had a great passion for ‘Yankee Doodle,’ and it was always played at his request.”

  Thereupon D’Orsay, in his pleasant, broken English, inquired after several of the officers, who, however, it turned out were not known to Willis. The conversation afterward turned upon Byron, and Willis asked Lady Blessington if she knew the Countess Guiccioli.

  “Yes, very well. We were at Genoa when they were living there, but we never saw her. It was at Rome, in 1828, that I first knew her, having formed her acquaintance at Count Funchal’s, the Portuguese Ambassador.”

  In the evening Willis availed himself of the invitation he had received, finding Lady Blessington now in the drawing-room, with some half dozen or so of men in attendance. Among these was James Smith, an intimate of D’Orsay’s, in whose gaiety and savoir-faire he delighted. A pleasant story is this of later days, when Smith met the Countess Guiccioli at Gore House. After dinner these two chatted confidentially for the remainder of the evening, chiefly of their reminiscences of Byron, Leigh Hunt and Shelley. D’Orsay saw Smith home to his resi
dence in Craven Street, and as he parted with him, asked—

  “What was all that Madame Guiccioli was saying to you just now?”

  “She was telling me her apartments are in the Rue de Rivoli, and that if I visited the French capital she hoped I would not forget her address.”

  “What! It took all that time to say that? Ah! Smeeth, you old humbug! That won’t do!”

  James Smith, who, with his brother Horace, was the author of the Rejected Addresses, was born in 1775.[9] He was a wit in talk and in prose as well as on paper and in verse. Here are some lines he addressed to Lady Blessington when she moved westward to Gore House—

  “You who erst, in festive legions,

  Sought in May Fair, Seamore Place,

  Henceforth in more westward regions

  Seek its ornament and grace.

  “Would you see more taste and splendour,

  Mark the notice I rehearse—

  Now at Kensington attend her—

  Farther on, you may fare worse.”

  Gout and rheumatism afflicted him sorely in his latter years, though his face retained its hale good looks. At Seamore Place—and on similar occasions—he was compelled to move about with the aid of a crutch, or in a wheel-chair, which he could manœuvre himself, his feet sometimes encased in india-rubber shoes. Despite his infirmities his smile was always bright and his tongue ready with a witticism.

  When Jekyll asked him why he had never married, the response came in verse—

  “Should I seek Hymen’s tie?

  As a poet I die,

  Ye Benedicts mourn my distresses.

  For what little fame

  Is annexed to my name,

  Is derived from Rejected Addresses.”

  But we must return to the drawing-room in Seamore Place.

  On the other side of the hostess, busily discussing a speech of Dan O’Connell, stood a dapper little man, rather languid in appearance, but with winning, prepossessing manners, and a playful, ready tongue; Henry Bulwer. There were others, such as a German prince and a French duke and a famous traveller. And—there was D’Orsay, a host in himself in both senses of the word, the best-looking, best-dressed, most fortunate man in the room; yet despite it all—there he sat in a careless attitude upon an ottoman.

  It was nearly twelve o’clock, the witching hour, before Mr Lytton Bulwer (“Pelham”) was announced, who ran gaily up to his hostess, and was greeted with a cordial chorus of “How d’ye, Bulwer?” Gay, quick, partly satirical, his conversation was fresh and buoyant. A dandy, too!

  Toward three o’clock i’ the morn James Smith made a move and Willis his exit.

  In June 1834, Willis dined at Seamore Place, the hour appointed being the then unusually late one of eight o’clock. Again the company, who were awaiting the arrival of Tom Moore, was of mingled nationalities—a Russian count, an Italian banker, an English peer, Willis an American, and for host and hostess, a French count and an Irish peeress. Lady Blessington took the lead—so says Willis, and he should know for he was there, lucky dog—in the war of witty words that waged round the dinner-table, and we may be sure that D’Orsay was not among the hindmost.

  The talk was turned by Moore upon duelling—

  “They may say what they will of duelling; it is the great preserver of the decencies of society. The old school, which made a man responsible for his words, was the better. I must confess I think so.” He then told an amusing story of an Irishman—of all men on earth!—who “refused a challenge on account of the illness of his daughter,” and one of the Dublin wits made a good epigram on the two—

  “Some men, with a horror of slaughter,

  Improve on the Scripture command;

  And ‘honour their’—wife and their daughter—

  ‘That their days may be long in the land.’”

  The “two” being the gentleman above referred to, and O’Connell, who had pleaded his wife’s illness as an excuse upon a similar occasion.

  “The great period of Ireland’s glory,” continued Moore, “was between ’82 and ’98, and it was a time when a man almost lived with a pistol in his hand. Grattan’s dying advice to his son was: ‘Be always ready with the pistol!’ He himself never hesitated a minute.”

  This we must take as a mere spark from the coruscations of brilliancy that fell from the lips of the beautiful hostess and her clever guests, from whom she had the art of drawing their best.

  Coffee was served in the drawing-room. Moore was persuaded to sing. Singing always to his own accompaniment and in a fashion that more nearly approached to recitation than to ordinary singing, Moore was possessed of peculiar gifts in the arousing of the emotions of his hearers, and accounted any performance a failure that did not receive the award of tears. On this occasion, after two or three songs chosen by Lady Blessington, his fingers wandered apparently aimlessly over the keys for a while, and then with poignant pathos he sang—

  “When first I met thee, warm and young,

  There shone such truth about thee,

  And on thy lip such promise hung,

  I did not dare to doubt thee.

  I saw thee change, yet still relied,

  Still clung with hope the fonder,

  And thought, though false to all beside,

  From me thou could’st not wander.

  But go, deceiver! go—

  The heart, whose hopes could make it

  Trust one so false, so low,

  Deserves that thou should’st break it.”

  Then when the last note had died away, he said “Good-night” to his hostess, and before the silence was otherwise broken—was gone.

  Dizzy was party to a famous duel which did not come off, consequent on fiery language used by O’Connell, who courteously rated him thus: “He is the most degraded of his species and his kind, and England is degraded in tolerating and having on the face of her society a miscreant of his abominable, foul and atrocious nature. His name shows that he is by descent a Jew. They were once the chosen people of God. There were miscreants amongst them, however, also, and it must certainly have been from one of these that Disraeli descended. He possesses just the qualities of the impenitent thief that died upon the cross, whose name I verily believe must have been Disraeli.”

  Dizzy put himself in D’Orsay’s hands, but the latter thought that it would scarcely be becoming for a foreigner to be mixed up in a political duel, though he consented to “stage-manage” the affair, which never came off, owing to O’Connell’s oath never again to fight a duel.

  D’Orsay was exceedingly ingenious in drawing out the peculiarities of any eccentric with whom he came in contact, among his principal butts being M. Julien le Jeune de Paris, as he dubbed himself; he had played his small part in the French Revolution and had been employed by Robespierre. This queer old gentleman had perpetrated a considerable quantity of fearful poetry, portions of which it was his delight to recite. These effusions he called “Mes Chagrins,” and carried about with him written out upon sheets of foolscap, which peeped out modestly from the breast-pocket of his coat. It was D’Orsay’s delight when M. Julien visited Seamore Place to induce him to recite a “Chagrin,” the doing of which reduced the old man to tears of sorrow and the listeners to tears of laughter. One evening a large party was assembled, among whom were M. Julien, James Smith, Madden, and Dr Quin, a physician whom young Mathews describes as “The ever genial Dr Quin … inexhaustible flow of fun and good-humour.” D’Orsay gravely begged Julien to oblige the company, and overcame his assumed reluctance, by the appeal—

  “N’est ce pas Madden vous n’avez jamais entendu les Chagrins politiques de notre cher ami, Monsieur Julien?”

  “Jamais,” Madden stammered out, stifling a laugh.

  “Allons, mon ami,” D’Orsay continued, turning again to his victim, “ce pauvre Madden a bien besoin d’entendre vos Chagrins politiques—il a les siens aussi—il a souffert—lui—il a des sympathies pour les blessés, il faut lui donner ce triste plaisir—n’es
t ce pas, Madden?”

  “Oui,” gurgled Madden.

  Then the funereal fun began. Julien planted himself at the upper end of the room, near to a table upon which some wax candles were burning, and drew forth his “Chagrins” from his breast. Lady Blessington seated herself at his left hand, gazing solicitously into his face; at his other hand stood D’Orsay, ever and anon pressing his handkerchief to his eyes, and turning at one of the saddest moments to Madden, and whispering, “Pleurez donc!”