this morning, and for your kind inquiries after my health, which is
wonderfully improved, if not quite restored, by this fine air, and _dolce
far niente_ life. I anticipate with horror the time when I shall be
obliged to leave it, and mix once more in the _troublous_ realities of
_public life_.”
Durham died in 1840, and of the event Alfred de Vigny wrote to Lady
Blessington:—
“PARIS.
“Moi qui me souviens, milady, de vous avoir trouvé un soir si
profondément affecté de la mort d’une amie, je puis mesurer
toute la peine que vous avez éprouvée à la perte de Lord
Durham. J’aimais toujours à me figurer que je le retrouverai à
Gore House à coté de vous, et je ne puis croire encore qu’en si
peu de temps il ait été enlevé à ses amis. Je ne crains point
avec vous de parler d’une chose déjà ancienne, comme on dirait
à Paris, car je sais quel religieux souvenir vous gardez à ceux
qui ne sont plus, et qui vous furent chers.
“Je regrette dans Lord Durham tout l’avenir que je me
promettois de sa vie politique, et le développement des idées
saines et larges, que, chez vous il m’avait montrées. Si je ne
me suis trompé sur lui, l’alliance de la France lui semblait
précieuse à plus d’un titre, et il connaissait profondément les
vues de la Russie. S’il tenoit à cette génération de vos hommes
d’état qui prennent part aux plus grandes luttes, il était
pourtant jeune d’esprit et de cœur, et un homme de passé et
d’avenir à la fois sont bien rares.
“Vous pensez à voyager en Italy, y songez vous encore, milady,
je le voudrois puisque Paris est sur le chemin, et je suis
assuré par toute la grâce avec laquelle vous m’avez ouvert
Gore House, que vous ne seriez point affligée de me voir vous
porter en France l’assurance du plus sincère et du plus durable
dévouement.
“ALFRED DE VIGNY.”
De Vigny was the popular French poet and novelist, author of _Cinq Mars_
and _Chatterton_, of whom Lady Blessington remarked that he was “of fine
feelings as well as genius, but were they ever distinct?”
Charles Buller will perhaps be chiefly remembered as the pupil of Carlyle
and the friend of Thackeray, who on his death in 1848 wrote to Mrs
Brookfield:—
“MY DEAR LADY—I am very much pained and shocked at the news
brought at dinner to-day that poor dear Charles Buller is gone.
Good God! think about the poor mother surviving, and what an
anguish that must be! 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. Lady Ritchie
remembers a morning call paid by D’Orsay to her father:—
“The most splendid person I ever remember seeing had a little pencil
sketch in his hand, which he left behind him on the table. It was a very
feeble sketch; it seemed scarcely possible to admiring little girls
that so grand a being should not be a bolder draughtsman. He appeared
to us one Sunday morning in the sunshine. When I came hurrying down
to breakfast I found him sitting beside my father at the table with an
untasted cup of tea before him; he seemed to fill the bow-window with
radiance as if he were Apollo; he leant against his chair with one elbow
resting on its back, with shining studs and curls and boots. We could
see his horse looking in at us over the blind.… I think my father had
a certain weakness for dandies, those knights of the broadcloth and
shining fronts. Magnificent apparitions used to dawn upon us in the
hall sometimes, glorious beings on their way to the study, but this one
outshone them all.”
By the way, Chorley was never editor of the _Athenæum_ as Greville states.
As for Brougham, what shall we say of that curious mixture of a man?
Three parts genius and one part humbug?
It was at Gore House on 21st October 1839, that Alfred Montgomery read
out the letter he had received which purported to come from Mr Shafto at
Penrith, at Brougham Hall. It announced that Brougham had been killed
by the overturning of a postchaise in which he was driving. The company
present were completely deceived and the news was communicated to the
papers, which with the exception of _The Times_ gave it currency.
Henry Reeve was dining at the club when he heard a rumour that Brougham
was ill, and straightway went up to Gore House, to find if there were any
news. The letter had been brought over by Alfred Montgomery to Gore House
early in the morning; Shafto was the only uninjured survivor of the
party of three in the chaise; Brougham had been stunned by a kick from
one of the horses, thrown down and the carriage had turned over on to
him, crushing him to death. D’Orsay spread the news round the town in the
afternoon, when he took his walk abroad. Reeve had better be left to tell
the rest of the story of that evening:—
“It was the most melancholy evening I ever spent there. In no house was
Brougham so entirely tamed; in none, except his own, so much beloved.
Only last Sunday week—not ten days ago—just six before his death—he
dined there, and stayed very late, which he rarely did, leaving them
dazzled with the brilliancy of his unflagging spirit. I was to have dined
there too; they very earnestly pressed me; but I had promised to go to
Richmond. They tried hard, too, to get Sir A. Paget; but we both stayed
away, and they sat down to table _thirteen_. I can only say that the
deaths which have struck me most in my life have always been preceded by
a dinner of thirteen, in spite of efforts to avoid it.”
Brougham, it is said, was very much interested in reading his obituary
notices! Shafto promptly denounced the letter as a forgery. Who then
wrote it? The Duke of Cambridge among many others suspected the corpse,
and greeted Brougham at a Privy Council meeting with: “Damn you, you dog,
_you_ wrote that letter, you know you did!” and chased him round the
room. D’Orsay apparently held the same opinion and was in turn himself
accused of the hoax. Fonblanque writes to Lady Blessington:—
“The falsehood that Count d’Orsay had anything to do with the hoax was
sufficiently refuted by all who knew him, by the two circumstances
that it was stupid and cruel; and the unique characteristic of D’Orsay
is, that the most brilliant wit is uniformly exercised in the most
good-natured way. He can be wittier with kindness than the rest of the
world with malice.”
Reeve asserts roundly that Brougham wrote later to Montgomery, admitting
that he was the perpetrator of the “thoughtless jest,” and continues:
“D’Orsay drew a capital sketch of Brougham in his plaid trousers, from
memory, which we thought invaluable; and nobody could look at his wild,
uncouth handwriting without tears in his eyes. In short, so bad a joke
was never played off on so large a scale before; but one can’t look
forward without a good deal of amusement to Brougham’s telling the story.”
We meet Lyndhurst and Brougham together at Gore House this year, just
as they appeared together in _Punch_ later on in that famous cartoon
“The Mrs Caudle of the House of Lords,” drawn by Leech and invented by
Thackeray. The picture represents Lyndhurst as Lord Chancellor reposing
in bed, his head upon the woolsack, beside him Mrs Caudle Brougham, very
much awake, and saying: “What do you say? _Thank heaven! You are going to
enjoy the recess—and you’ll be rid of me for some months?_ Never mind.
Depend upon it, when you come back, you shall have it again. No: I don’t
raise the House, and set everybody in it by the ears; but I’m not going
to give up every little privilege; though it’s seldom I open my lips,
goodness knows!”
Charles Sumner, the famous American senator and jurist, visited Gore
House in March, and records:
“As I entered her brilliant drawing-room, she came forward to receive
me with that bewitching manner and skilful flattery which still give
her such influence. ‘Ah, Mr Sumner,’ she said, ‘how sorry I am that
you are so late! Two of your friends have just left us—Lord Lyndhurst
and Lord Brougham; they have been pronouncing your _éloge_.’ She was,
of course, the only lady present; and she was surrounded by D’Orsay,
Bulwer, Disraeli, Duncombe, the Prince Napoleon, and two or three
lords. The house is a palace of Armida, about two miles from town.… The
rooms are furnished in the most brilliant French style, and flame with
costly silks, mirrored doors, bright lights, and golden ornaments. But
Lady Blessington is the chief ornament. The world says she is almost
fifty-eight; by her own confession she must be over fifty, and yet she
seems hardly forty: at times I might believe her twenty-five.”
Of D’Orsay, Sumner writes, he “surpasses all my expectations. He is the
divinity of dandies; in another age he would have passed into the court
of the gods, and youths would have sacrificed to the God of Fashion.… I
have seen notes and letters from him, both in French and English, which
are some of the cleverest I have ever read; and in conversation, whether
French or English, he is excessively brilliant.”
But most amazing of all his conquests was D’Orsay’s subduing of Carlyle.
Would it not have been thought that the dandy would have been a type
peculiarly irritating to the author of _Sartor Resartus_?
On 16th April 1839, Carlyle writes from Cheyne Row to his brother John:—
“… I must tell you of the strangest compliment of all, which occurred
since I wrote last—the advent of Count D’Orsay. About a fortnight ago,
this Phœbus Apollo of dandyism, escorted by poor little Chorley, came
whirling hither in a chariot that struck all Chelsea into mute amazement
with splendour. Chorley’s under jaw went like the hopper or under riddle
of a pair of fanners, such was his terror on bringing such a splendour
into actual contact with such a grimness. Nevertheless, we did amazingly
well, the Count and I. He is a tall fellow of six feet three, built
like a tower, with floods of dark auburn hair, with a beauty, with an
adornment unsurpassable on this planet; withal a rather substantial
fellow at bottom, by no means without insight, without fun, and a sort
of rough sarcasm rather striking out of such a porcelain figure. He
said, looking at Shelley’s bust, in his French accent: ‘Ah, it is one of
those faces who weesh to swallow their chin.’ He admired the fine epic,
etc., etc.; hoped I would call soon, and see Lady Blessington withal.
Finally he went his way, and Chorley with re-assumed jaw. Jane laughed
for two days at the contrast of my plaid dressing-gown, bilious, iron
countenance, and this Paphian apparition. I did not call till the other
day, and left my card merely. I do not see well what good I can get by
meeting him much, or Lady B. and demirepdom, though I should not object
to see it once, and then oftener if agreeable.”
But Carlyle was not always so complacent. In August 1848, the Carlyles
received from Forster “An invaluable treat; an opera box, namely, to hear
Jenny Lind sing farewell. Illustrious indeed. We dined with Fuz[14] at
five, the hospitablest of men; at eight, found the Temple of the Muses
all a-shine for Lind & Co.—the piece, _La Sonnambula_, a chosen bit
of nonsense from beginning to end—and, I suppose, an audience of some
three thousand _expensive_-looking fools, male and female, come to see
this Swedish nightingale ‘hop the twig,’ as I phrased it.… ‘Depend upon
it,’ said I to Fuz, ‘the Devil is busy _here_ to-night, wherever he may
be idle!’ Old Wellington had come staggering in to attend the thing.
Thackeray was there; D’Orsay, Lady Blessington—to all of whom (Wellington
excepted!) I had to be presented and give some kind of foolery—much
against the grain.”
A curious company this that D’Orsay moved in: Brougham, Lyndhurst,
Sumner, Carlyle, Landor, Macready, Haydon, Bulwer, the Disraelis, father
and son; men of brains and men without, of morals and of no morals;
comedians and heavy tragedians; he himself the prince of comedians,
though, as is often the case, beneath the light, lilting melodies there
surged a solemn, minatory bass. An absolutely happy man this D’Orsay
ought to have been, but—?
[Illustration: CARLYLE IN 1839
(_By D’Orsay_)
[TO FACE PAGE 188]
XVIII
MORE FRIENDS
Not only in the sports of the town but also in those of the country, and
with equal success, did D’Orsay indulge, paying many a pleasant country
visit. Thus in January 1840 he was down in Staffordshire hunting and
shooting with Lord Anglesey, Lord Hatherston and other good sportsmen,
and at the end of the same year he spent some weeks in the country with
Lord Chesterfield. At Chesterfield House in town, too, D’Orsay passed
many a pleasant hour with the generous, kindly Earl.
D’Orsay had a fondness for the theatre, both the regions before and
behind the curtain, and for those connected with it in any way. J. R.
Planché, herald, dramatist and student of costume, was at Gore House
on 6th May 1840, there being a brilliant company and much bright talk.
Bright companions and gay converse: no wonder that D’Orsay said that
“he had never known the meaning of the word _ennui_.” To the production
of Lytton’s _Money_ D’Orsay lent a hand in 1840, helping Macready in
various ways to secure an accurate representation of club-life and so
forth, introducing the actor to his hatter and so forth, and showing the
innocent man how play-accounts and so forth were kept. Actors in those
days must have been as innocent of the ways of the world as statesmen and
politicians are in these times.
Of another play of Bulwer’s, Charles Greville records:—
“March 8th, 1839.—I went last night to the first representation of
Bulwer’s play _Richelieu_; a fine play, admirably got up, and very well
acted by Macready, except the last scene, the conception of which was
altogether bad. He turned Richelieu into an exaggerated Sixtus V., who
completely lost sight of his dignity, and swaggered about the stage,
taunting his foes, and hugging his friends with an exultation quite
unbecoming and out of character. With this exception it was a fine
performance; the success was unbounded, and the audience transported.
After Macready had been called on, they found out Bulwer, who was
in a small private box next the one I was in with Lady Blessington
and D’Orsay, and were vociferous for his appearance to receive their
applause. After a long delay, he bowed two or three times, and instantly
retreated. Directly after he came into our box, looking very serious and
rather agitated; while Lady Blessington burst into floods of tears at his
success, which was certainly very brilliant.”
Macready himself notes of this occasion: “Acted Cardinal Richelieu very
nervously: lost my self-possession, and was obliged to use too much
effort; it did not satisfy me at all. How can a person get up such a play
and do justice at the same time to such a character!”
It was in truth a dazzling circle of dandies with whom Lady Blessington
and D’Orsay were surrounded: Disraeli, Bulwer, Ainsworth, Dickens—in
fact Gore House was the haunt of the novelists, for to the above may
be added Thackeray and Marryat. Ainsworth aped D’Orsay in matters of
costume and attitudinising, but as is so often the case with imitators
the copy did not nearly equal the great original. The author of _Jack
Shepherd_ and many other capital stories was “a fine, tall, handsome,
well-whiskered fellow, with a profusion of chestnut curls, and bore
himself with no inconsiderable manifestation of self-consciousness.”
Ainsworth started business life as a publisher, but made fame and money
as a writer. In order to correct the above somewhat acrid description of
him, here is a pleasanter one of later years:—
“The time is early summer, the hour about eight o’clock in the evening;
dinner has been removed from the prettily-decorated table, and the early
fruits tempt the guests, to the number of twelve or so, who are grouped
around it. At the head there sits a gentleman no longer in his first
youth, but still strikingly handsome; there is something artistic about
his dress, and there may be a little affectation in his manners, but even
this may in some people be a not unpleasing element. He was our host,
William Harrison Ainsworth, and, whatever may have been the claims of
others, and, in whatever circles they might move, no one was more genial,
no one more popular.”
Charles Dickens first visited Gore House in 1840, and soon gained and
always retained the friendship of D’Orsay. Dickens was a very vivid
dresser, his gay spirit loved riotous colours. He has been described as
“rather florid in his dress, and gave me an impression of gold chain and
pin and an enormous tie.” Dickens thoroughly enjoyed the conviviality of
Gore House, as is shown by the following letter:—
“COVENT GARDEN,
“_Sunday, Noon, December 1844_.
“MY DEAR LADY BLESSINGTON,—Business for other people (and by
no means of a pleasant kind) has held me prisoner during two
whole days, and will so detain me to-day, in the very agony
of my departure for Italy again, that I shall not even be
able to reach Gore House once more, on which I had set my
heart. I cannot bear the thought of going away without some
sort of reference to the happy day you gave me on Monday, and
the pleasure and delight I had in your earnest greeting. I
shall never forget it, believe me. It would be worth going
to China—it would be worth going to America, to come home
again for the pleasure of such a meeting with you and Count
d’Orsay—to whom my love, and something as near it to Miss Power
and her sister as it is lawful to send.…”
And this message in another letter to Lady Blessington, written in the
following year:—
“Do not let your nieces forget me, if you can help it, and give my love
to Count d’Orsay, with many thanks to him for his charming letter. I was
greatly amused by his account of ⸺. There was a cold shade of aristocracy
about it, and a dampness of cold water, which entertained me beyond
measure.”
There were three dandies in this Gore House circle of strangely different
temperaments and abilities. 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. The effeminate dandy pose
was excellently acted in the following which he tells of himself, writing
from Malta to his father in 1830:—
“Affectation tells here even better than wit. Yesterday, at the racket
court, sitting in the gallery among strangers, the ball entered, and
lightly struck me and fell at my feet. I picked it up, and observing a
young rifleman excessively stiff, I humbly requested him to forward its
passage into the court, as I really had never thrown a ball in my life.
This incident has been the general subject of conversation at all the
messes to-day!”
And this from Gibraltar:—
“Tell my mother that as it is the fashion among the dandies of this
place—that is, the officers, for there are no others—not to wear
waistcoats in the morning, her new studs come into fine play and maintain
my reputation of being a great judge of costume, to the admiration and
envy of many subalterns. I have also the fame of being the first who
ever passed the Straits with two canes, a morning and an evening cane. I
change my cane as the gun fires, and hope to carry them both on to Cairo.
It is wonderful the effect these magical wands produce. I owe to them
even more attention than to being the supposed author of—what is it?—I
forget!”
Disraeli in his dress had a touch of the fantastic, as thus, when he
appeared at a dinner party attired in a coat of black velvet lined with
satin, purple trousers with a gold stripe down the seam, a scarlet
waistcoat, lace ruffles down to the fingers’ tips, white gloves with
rings worn outside them and his hair in long, black ringlets.
Dickens was only a clothes-deep dandy; Disraeli was a true dandy as far
as he went, but he did not go all the way. He trifled with politics,
he did not realise that to be a perfect, complete dandy, calls for the
devotion of a lifetime. D’Orsay made no such mistake; he was a dandy
through and through and all the way; a dandy in love affairs, in his
toilet, in his clothes, in his sport, and in all the arts of life from
cookery down to sculpture. Thus it must be with every great man; he aims
at one target, pulls his bow with all his strength, and shoots only at
that one mark. D’Orsay had but one aim, to lead a life of dandified
pleasure.
XIX
NAP
Charles Sumner writes in March 1840: “Lady Blessington is as pleasant
and time-defying as ever, surrounded till one or two of the morning with
her brilliant circle.… Prince Napoleon is always there, and of course
D’Orsay.”
Says Edmund Yates, writing of the great folk in Hyde Park at a later
date:—
“There, in a hooded cabriolet, the fashionable vehicle for
men-about-town, with an enormous champing horse, and the trimmest of
tiny grooms—‘tigers,’ as they were called—half standing on the footboard
behind, half swinging in the air, clinging on to the straps, would be
Count d’Orsay, with clear-cut features and raven hair, the king of the
dandies, the cynosure of all eyes, the greatest ‘swell’ of the day. He
was an admirable whip—he is reported on one occasion, by infinite spirit
and dash, to have cut the wheel off a brewer’s dray which was bearing
down upon his light carriage, and to have spoken of it afterwards as ‘the
triumph of mind over matter’—and always drove in faultless white kid
gloves, with his shirt wristbands turned back over his coat-cuffs, and
his whole ‘turn-out’ was perfection. By his side was occasionally seen
Prince Louis Napoleon, an exile too, after his escape from Ham, residing
in lodgings in King Street, St James’—he pointed out the house to the
Empress Eugénie when, as Emperor of the French, on his visit to Queen
Victoria, he drove by it. He was a constant visitor of Lady Blessington’s
at Gore House. Albert Smith, in later years, used to say he wondered
whether, if he called at the Tuileries, the Emperor would pay him ‘that
eighteenpence,’ the sum which one night at Gore House he borrowed from A.
S. to pay a cabman.”
A strange, almost uncanny personage in some ways, this Louis Napoleon,
with his dogged, not to be daunted belief in his high destiny.
George Augustus Sala thus describes him:—
“A short, slight form he had, and not a very graceful way of standing.
His complexion was swarthily pale, if I may be allowed to make use of
that somewhat paradoxical expression. His hair struck me as being of a
dark brown; it was much lighter in after years; and while his cheeks
were clean-shaven, the lower part of his face was concealed by a thick
moustache and an ‘imperial’ or chin-tuft. He was gorgeously arrayed in
the dandy evening costume of the period … he wore a satin ‘stock,’ green,
if I am not mistaken; and in the centre of that stock was a breastpin in
the image of a gold eagle encircled with diamonds.”
Shee notes in May 1839, of an evening at Gore House: “Among the company
last night was Prince Louis Napoleon. He was quiet, silent, and
inoffensive, as, to do him justice, he generally is, but he does not
impress one with the idea that he has inherited his uncle’s talents any
more than his fortunes. He went away before the circle quite broke up,
leaving, like Sir Peter Teazle, ‘his character behind him,’ and the few
remaining did not spare him, but discussed him in a tone that was far
from flattering. D’Orsay, however, who came in later with Lord Pembroke,
stood up manfully for his friend, which was pleasant to see.”
Said D’Orsay: “C’est un brave garçon, mais pas d’esprit”; yet stood
manfully by him.