D'Orsay / or, The complete dandy

by W. Teignmouth Shore

  He is, perhaps, best known to the world at large under the slight disguise of Lawrence Boythorn in Bleak House.

  Charles Sumner describes him thus in 1838:—“Dressed in a heavy frock-coat of snuff colour, trousers of the same colour, and boots … with an open countenance, firm and decided, and a head grey and inclining to baldness … conversation … not varied, but it was animated and energetic in the extreme. We crossed each other several times; he called Napoleon the weakest, littlest man in history.”

  Forster’s account is more vivid:—

  “He was not above the middle stature, but had a short stalwart presence, walked without a stoop, and in his general aspect, particularly the set and carriage of his head, was decidedly of what is called a distinguished bearing. His hair was already silvered grey, and had retired far upward from his forehead, which wide and full but retreating, could never in the earlier time have been seen to such advantage. What at first was noticeable, however, in the broad white massive head, were the full yet strangely-lifted eyebrows. In the large, grey eyes there was a depth of compound expression that ever startled by its contrast to the eager restlessness looking out from the surface of them; and in the same variety and quickness of transition the mouth was extremely striking. The lips, that seemed compressed with unalterable will would in a moment relax to a softness more than feminine; and a sweeter smile it was impossible to conceive.”

  Carlyle says that “he was really stirring company; a proud, irascible, trenchant, yet generous, veracious and very dignified old man; quite a ducal or royal man in the temper of him.”

  He was very frequently at Gore House, and they must have made a curious trio, the fascinating Lady Blessington, the ducal Landor and dandy D’Orsay.

  He addressed these lines to her:—

  “What language, let me think, is meet

  For you, well called the Marguerite.

  The Tuscan has too weak a tone,

  Too rough and rigid is our own;

  The Latin—no—it will not do,

  The Attic is alone for you.”

  Of some of his many visits here are a few notes:—

  Writing Friday, 7th May 1841:—

  “I did not leave my cab at Gore House gate until a quarter past six. My kind hostess and D’Orsay were walking in the garden and never was more cordial reception. After dinner we went to the English opera, The Siege of Rochelle and A Day at Turin. Nothing could be worse than the first except the second. The Hanoverian minister, very attentive to Miss Power, a Carlist viscount, and Lord Pembroke were the only persons who stayed any time in the box,” and on 8th May he writes again from Gore House: “We went this evening to the German Opera. Never was music so excellent. The pieces were A Night in Grenada and Fidelio. Madame Schodel sings divinely, and her acting is only inferior to Pasta’s.… Both D’Orsay and Lord Pembroke were enchanted with Madame Schodel, and Lady B. and Miss Power, both good judges, and the latter a fine composer, were breathless. To-night we go to the Italian Opera.”

  Landor writing from Gore House in June 1842:

  “We have not been to the Opera this evening, as Lord Pembroke and the Duc de Guiche came to dinner. He is on a visit to Lord Tankerville, but has the good taste to prefer the society he finds here, particularly D’Orsay’s. D’Orsay was never in higher spirits or finer plumage.”

  On July 20th he writes:—

  “A few days after my arrival in town, the Duc de Grammont dined at Gore House. He is on a visit to Lord Tankerville.… D’Orsay has just finished an exquisite painting of the Duchesse.”

  Then on September 7th:—

  “I arrived at Gore House early on Monday. In the morning, beside Lord Allen and some other people, there called Lord Auckland.… At dinner the Duc de Guiche, Sir Francis Burdett and Sir Willoughby Cotton.… Those were bright hours; even my presence could not interrupt their brilliancy.… The Duc de Guiche left us this morning to shoot with his cousin, Lord Ossulton.[18] We miss the liveliness of his conversation—he talked Memoirs.”

  When he was not at Gore House he kept up a very lively correspondence with his two friends, some of which it will be useful to quote, for in familiar letters we become almost on speaking terms with their writers, and who of us would not be glad to chat with Lady Blessington, Landor and D’Orsay?

  This from her to him, when sending him her portrait:—

  “I send you the engraving, and have only to wish that it may sometimes remind you of the original. You are associated in my memory with some of my happiest days; you were the friend, and the highly-valued friend, of my dear and lamented husband, and as such, even without any of the numberless claims you have to my regard, you could not be otherwise than highly esteemed. It appears to me that I have not quite lost him, who made life dear to me, when I am near those he loved[19] and that knew how to value him. Five fleeting years have gone by since our delicious evenings on the lovely Arno, evenings never to be forgotten, and the recollections of which ought to cement the friendships then formed. This effect I can, in truth, say has been produced on me, and I look forward, with confidence, to keeping alive, by a frequent correspondence, the friendship you owe me, no less for that I feel for you, but as the widow of one you loved, and that truly loved you. We, or more properly speaking I, live in a world where friendship is little known, and were it not for one or two individuals like yourself, I might be tempted to exclaim with Socrates: ‘My friends, there are no friends.’ Let us prove that the philosopher was wrong, and if Fate has denied us the comfort of meeting, let us by letters keep up our friendly intercourse. You will tell me what you think and feel in your Tuscan retirement, and I will tell you what I do, in this modern Babylon, where thinking and feeling are almost unknown. Have I not reason to complain that in your sojourn in London you do not give me a single day? And yet methinks you promised to stay a week, and that of that week I should have my share. I rely on your promise of coming to see me again before you leave London, and I console myself for the disappointment of seeing so little of you, by recollecting the welcome and the happiness that await you at home. Long may you enjoy it, is the sincere wish of your attached friend,

  “M. Blessington.”

  He to her, in the shape of “bits” out of a long letter written from Florence in March 1835:—

  “Poor Charles Lamb, what a tender, good, joyous heart had he! What playfulness! what purity of style and thought! His sister is yet living, much older than himself. One of her tales is, with the sole exception of the Bride of Lammermoor, the most beautiful tale in prose composition in any language, ancient or modern. A young girl has lost her mother, the father marries again, and marries a friend of his former wife. The child is ill reconciled to it, but being dressed in new clothes for the marriage, she runs up to her mother’s chamber, filled with the idea how happy that dear mother would be at seeing her in all her glory—not reflecting, poor soul, that it was only by her mother’s death that she appeared in it. How natural, how novel is all this! Did you ever imagine that a fresh source of the pathetic would burst forth before us in this trodden and hardened world? I never did, and when I found myself upon it, I pressed my temples with both hands, and tears ran down to my elbows.

  “The Opium-eater calls Coleridge ‘the largest and most spacious intellect, the subtlest and most comprehensive that has yet existed among men.’ Impiety to Shakespeare! treason to Milton! I give up the rest, even Bacon. Certainly, since their day, we have seen nothing at all comparable to him. Byron and Scott were but as gun-flints to a granite mountain; Wordsworth has one angle of resemblance; Southey has written more, and all well, much admirably.…

  “Let me add a few verses as usual:—

  ‘Pleasures—away, they please no more:

  Friends—are they what they were before?

  Loves—they are very idle things,

  The best about them are their wings.

  The dance—’tis what the bear can do;

  Music—I hate your music too.

  Whe
ne’er these witnesses that time

  Hath snatch’d the chaplet from our prime

  And called by nature (as we go

  With eyes more wary, step more slow),

  And will be heard, and noted down,

  However we may fret or frown;

  Shall we desire to leave the scene

  Where all our former joys have been?

  No! ’twere ungrateful and unwise:

  But when die down our charities

  For human weal and human woes,

  ’Tis then the hour our days should close.’”

  And this:—

  “D’Orsay’s mind is always active. I wish it would put his pen in motion. At this season of the year (January) I fancied he was at Melton. Does not he lament that this bitter frost allows him no chance of breaking his neck over gates and double hedges? Pray offer him my kind remembrances.”

  And here a chatty little note from D’Orsay:—

  “It is a fact, that my brave nephew has been acting the part of Adonis, with a sacré cochon, who nearly opened his leg;[20] his presence of mind was great, he was on his lame leg in time to receive the second attack of the infuriated beast, and killed him on the spot, plunging a couteau de chasse through his heart—luckily the wild boar had one. The romantic scene would have been complete, if there had been another Gabrielle de Vergy looking at this modern Raoul de Courcy. We think and speak of you often, and are in hopes that you will pay us a visit soon. Poor Forster is ill and miserable at the loss of his brother. I am sure that Forster is one of the best, honestest and kindest men that ever lived. I had yesterday a letter from Eugene Sue, who is in raptures with Macready as an actor and as a man. We saw lately that good, warm-hearted Dickens—he spoke of you very affectionately.… —Most affectionately,

  “D’Orsay.”

  * * *

  XXI

  THE ARTIST

  It behoves us now to pay some attention to D’Orsay’s claims as an artist; if he had posed simply as an amateur, silence would be possible, but he worked for money, entered the lists with other artists, and therefore laid himself open to judgment. In his own day he was highly thought of by many—here we have what was written of him in La Presse on November 10th, 1850, when D’Orsay’s bust of Lamartine was exhibited:—

  “M. le comte d’Orsay est un amateur de l’art plutôt qu’un artiste. Mais qu’est-ce qu’un amateur? C’est un volontaire parmi les artistes; ce sont souvent les volontaires qui font les coup d’éclat dans l’atelier comme sur les champs de bataille. Qu’est ce qu’un amateur? C’est un artiste dont le génie seul fait la vocation. Il est vrai qu’il ne reçoit pas dans son enfance et pendant les premières années de sa vie cette éducation du métier d’où sort Michel Ange, d’où sort Raphaél … mais s’il doit moins au maître, il doit plus à la nature. Il est son œuvre.… M. d’Orsay exerça dans les salons de Paris et de Londres la dictature Athénienne du goût et de l’élégance. C’est un de ces hommes qu’on aurait cru préoccupé de succès futiles,—parce que la nature semble les avoir créés uniquement pour son plaisir—mais qui trompent la nature, et qui, après avoir recueilli les légères admirations des jeunes gens et des femmes de leur âge, échappent à cette atmosphère de légèreté avant le temps où ils laissent ses idoles dans le vide, et se transforment par l’étude et par le travail en hommes nouveaux, en hommes de mérite acquis et sérieux. M. d’Orsay a habité longtemps l’Angleterre ou il donnait l’exemple et le ton à cette société aristocratique, un peu raide et déforme, qui admire surtout ce qui lui manque, la grâce et l’abandon des manières.…

  “Dès cet époque, il commenca à jouer avec l’argile, le marbre, le ciseau, liè par un attachement devenu une parenté d’esprit, avec une des plus belles et des plus splendides femmes de son époque, il fit son buste pendant qu’elle vivait; il le fit idéal et plus touchant après sa mort. Il moula en formes après, rudes, sauvages, de grandeur fruste, les traits paysanesque d’O’Connell. Ces bustes furent à l’instant vulgarisés en millièrs d’exemplaires en Angleterre et à Paris. C’étaient des créations neuves.…

  “Ces premiers succès furent des plus complets. Il cherchait un visage. Il en trouva un. Lord Byron, dont il fut l’ami et avec lequel il voyagea pendant deux ans[21] en Italie, n’était plus qu’un souvenir aimé dans son cœur.… Il fit le buste de Lamartine,…” and then there is something approaching very closely to a rhapsody on this work of art, and then a set of verses by Lamartine himself!

  Debt drove D’Orsay to seek in art a means of adding to his income; in the case of Mr. Mitchell of Bond Street, who published a series of portrait drawings, it is even possible that he used his art to cancel his debt for Opera boxes, etc.! These portraits were 14 inches high and 10½ inches wide and were sold at 5s. each. The set must have been almost a pictorial “Who’s Who,” and among those honoured with inclusion may be named Byron, Disraeli, Theodore Hook, Carlyle, Liszt, D’Orsay himself, the Duke of Wellington, Greville, Louis Napoleon, Bulwer Lytton, Trelawney, Landor, Dickens, Lady Blessington, Henry Bulwer, Captain Marryat and Sir Edwin Landseer.

  Richard James Lane, the engraver and lithographer, saw much of D’Orsay, and judging by the following letter held him in esteem:—

  “As a patron, his kind consideration for my interest, and prompt fulfilment of every engagement, never failed me for the more than twenty years of my association with him; and the friendship that arose out of our intercourse (and which I attest with gratitude) proceeded at a steady pace, without the smallest check, during the same period; and remained unbroken, when on his final departure from England, he continued to give me such evidence of the constancy of his regard, as will be found conveyed in his letters.

  “In the sketches of the celebrities of Lady Blessington’s salons, which he brought to me (amounting to some hundred and fifty, or more), there was generally an appropriate expression and character, that I found difficult to retain in the process of elaboration; and although I may have improved upon them in the qualities for which I was trained, I often found that the final touches of his own hand alone made the work satisfactory.

  “Of the amount and character of the assistance of which the Count availed himself, in the production of his pictures and models, I have a clear notion.…

  “When a gentleman would rush into the practice of that which, in its mechanism, demands experience and instruction, he avails himself of the help of a craftsman, whose services are sought for painting-in the subordinate parts, and working out his rude beginnings. In the first rank of art, at this day, are others who, like the Count d’Orsay, have been unprepared, excepting by the possession of taste and genius, for the practice of art, and whose merits are in no way obscured by the assistance which they also freely seek in the manipulation of their works; and it is no less easy to detect, in the pictures of the Count, the precise amount of mechanical aid which he has received from another hand, than the graces of character and feeling that are superadded by his own. I have seen a rough model, executed entirely by himself, of such extraordinary power and simplicity of design, that I begged him to have it moulded, and not to proceed to the details of the work, until he could first place this model side by side with the cast in clay, to be worked up. He took my advice, and his equestrian statue of the first Napoleon may fairly justify my opinion.

  “In art, he had a heartfelt sympathy, a searching eye, and a critical taste, fostered by habitual intercourse with some of our first artists.”

  This letter from D’Orsay to Lane shows the Count in an amiable light:—

  “Paris, 21st February 1850.

  “My Dear Lane,—I cannot really express to you the extent of my sorrow about your dear and good family. You know that my heart is quite open to sympathy with the sorrows of others. But judge therefore, how it must be, when so great a calamity strikes a family like yours, which family I always considered one of the best I ever had the good fortune to know. What a trial for dear Mrs Lane, after so many cares, losing a son like yours, jus
t at the moment that he was to derive the benefit of the good education you gave him.… There is no consolation to offer. The only one that I can imagine, is to think continually of the person lost, and to make oneself more miserable by thinking. It is, morally speaking, an homœopathic treatment, and the only one which can give some relief.… Give my most affectionate regards to your dear family, and believe me always—far or near. Your sincere friend,

  “D’Orsay.”

  In 1843 D’Orsay writes jestingly of himself: “I am poetising, modelling, etc., etc. In fact, I begin to believe that I am a Michael Angelo manqué.”

  Concerning the Wellington statuette, D’Orsay writes to Madden: “You must have seen by the newspapers that I have completed a great work, which creates a revolution in the Duke of Wellington’s own mind, and that of his family. It is a statuette on horseback of himself, in the costume and at the age of the Peninsular war. They say that it will be a fortune for me, as every regiment in the service will have one, as the Duke says publicly, that it is the only work by which he desires to be known, physically, by portraits. They say that he is very popular in Portugal and Spain. I thought possibly that you could sell for me the copyright at Lisbon, to some speculator to whom I could send the mould.”

  Shortly before his death he completed a smaller equestrian statuette of the Duke, an account of which was given in the Morning Chronicle of 23rd December 1852:—

  “One of the last of the late lamented Count d’Orsay’s studies was a statuette of the Duke on horseback, the first copy of which, in bronze, was carefully retouched and polished by the artist. The work is remarkable for its mingled grace and sprightliness. The Duke, sitting firmly back in his saddle, is reining in a pawing charger, charmingly modelled, and a peculiar effect is obtained by the rider dividing the reins, and stretching that on the left side completely back over the thigh. The portrait is good, particularly that of the full face, and very carefully finished, and the costume is a characteristic closely-fitting military undress, with hanging cavalry sabre. Altogether, indeed, the statuette forms a most agreeable memorial, not only of the Duke, but, in some degree, of the gifted artist.”