Part 15

Then of a much later date, probably 1842 or 1843:—

“I think that Henry the Eighth was at Richmond-on-the-Hill when Anne Boleyn was beheaded. They say that he saw the flag which was erected in London as soon as her head fell. Therefore, as you make him staying at Epping Forest at that time, and as I am sure you have some good reasons for it, I will thank you to give them to me.

“We regretted much not to have seen you at Bath, and I was on the moment to write to you, like Henry the Fourth did to the brave Crillon after the battle!

“‘Pends toi, brave Landor, nous avons été à Bath, et tu n’y étois pas—’

“You will be glad to hear that the second son of my sister has been received at the Ecole of St Cyr, after a ticklish examination. Hoping to see you soon, believe me, yours most affectionately,

“D’ORSAY.”

There is not very much of distinction, perhaps, in these two letters, but they serve to show the familiar friendship of the two men and also that the dandy studied his English History, at any rate as far as concerns the disposal of wives.

With John Forster he kept up a fairly lively correspondence, some of the letters containing points of interest:—

“GORE HOUSE, _25th October 1844_.

“It is really an age since you’ve been here. It’s a poor joke! Where _have_ you been?… Macready has sent me a Boston paper, in which I have read with great interest of his success.… I have not seen ‘De la Roche’ Maclise. Give him a thousand good wishes.

“Eugene Sue gets better and better; he leads you to his moral by somewhat perilous roads, but once you get there you find it pure and beautiful. The fecundity of his imagination surpasses all previous works; the Jesuits are smashed up, the convents broken down and the workman raised upon their debris. Amen.—Yours ever,

“D’ORSAY.”

Was it not to this practical Forster that D’Orsay wrote upon his project for establishing a means of communication between the guard and the engine-driver of a train? But the “sacrés directeurs de rail road” would not adopt his idea because of their own ideas of economy.

“P.M., _4th August 1845_.

“I am determined to follow up the directors until they take up my scheme, and if you will assist me” (_i.e._ by writing in the papers), “these continual accidents will establish a ‘raw,’ which we will tickle continually with cayenne pepper, and in the end they will take real steps to heal the wound. My idea is this, that they shall have a seat behind the last carriage of every train, just like the coachman’s of a hansom cab. It would be in communication with the engine by a long cord passing along the whole length of the roof of the carriages; on pulling the cord a hammer would strike a gong by the engine and would indicate that a halt must be made.…”

There was also to be an arrangement of lamps and a cord—very similar to that now in use—for the benefit of travellers in trouble. Quite sufficient in all this to prove that a dandy need not be a fool.

“GORE HOUSE, _25th September 1845_.

“I am sorry to tell you that Lady Blessington a reçu des nouvelles” (from here the letter is in French); “very alarming concerning the health of Lady Canterbury. There is no doubt she is gradually sinking, surrounded by those who choose to blind themselves to her condition.… It will be best, I think, for you to tell our dear Dickens why for the moment we must abandon our plans. I should most willingly have gone with you to Knebworth, we will arrange to go there together when I can manage a day.…” Knebworth was Lord Lytton’s country seat.

The letter continues, throwing a light upon the dark side of our comedy:—

“Think of poor Lady Blessington losing in so short a time her niece, her little niece, her nephew, her brother-in-law, and her sister dying.…”

Then again he returns to his railway scheme:—

“I was just going to write to you from the country, where I have been some time, to tell you that Lady C⸺ and Lady Sophie de V⸺ went to Derby by rail; they were in the last carriage of the train. One of the connections is broken, the carriage is tossed from right to left and left to right so violently, that the two unhappy people think they are lost, and wave their handkerchiefs out of the window. They call out; no one sees them; no one hears them, and happily they reach the station, not a moment too soon—the carriage could not have held out. You will see that a guard in such a case would have saved this? Do you think we had better drop the subject or take it up again? _Au revoir_, brave Forster.”

* * * * *

“BOURNEMOUTH, HANTS, _9th September 1848_.

“We are in the most charming neighbourhood in the world, a kind of Wheemby Hill with the sea: it is three hours from Southampton. Come and see us! You will be delighted, it is perfection for bathing, and the weather is superb; it is the climax of summer.…”

Of Mathews’ friendship with D’Orsay in Italy, an account has already been given; the following letters show that it was continued on paper:—

“_17th November 1831._

“MY DEAR CHARLES … I have lost my poor friend Blessington and my mother within two months; they died in my arms, and when I think of them it is always their last moments that come to my mind. I would it were in other times, but that is difficult.…”

The following from London:—

“_1st September._

“MY DEAR CHARLES … I was the other day at Goodwood.… Since I learnt that you had taken the Adelphi I agreed with Lord Worcester that we would do all we could to interest society in your favour by thinking and talking about it. I understand that the first idea of Y(ates)[24] is to put you at a disadvantage, he himself will leave you, in order to make you feel that he is indispensable; this season is a trial that he gives you, hoping that in case of a failure you will give everything up into his hands. No matter what happens you must remedy this. Reeves, also, goes to America. Mrs Honey is engaged elsewhere; in short, most of the old names connected with the theatre are going. I therefore recommend you to make an arrangement with the proprietor of the Queen’s Theatre, who would join his company with yours; union gives strength, and thanks to your talents you will triumph completely over the trap which Y(ates) has set for you. The Queen’s Theatre has been very successful this season; to-day they have taken £90; it is wonderful for the time of year. Chesterfield, Worcester and myself have a box there and we wish to have one at the Adelphi, and speaking this evening on the matter to Bond, he told me that he would be delighted to join his company with yours and then to close the Queen’s Theatre. Think it over, see if you would not find it to your advantage, and let me know.—Your sincere friend, etc.

“D’ORSAY.”

The Adelphi was opened by Yates and Mathews on 28th September 1835; the house was full, but the season was not satisfactory.

The details of acting and stage production were not beneath D’Orsay’s notice:—

“MY DEAR CHARLES,—I like your new piece very much, and you acted very well. You must ask the orchestra to accompany you a little less noisily, for the noise they made made it impossible to follow a quarter of your Aria. You would do well, also, in my opinion, to cut out two verses of the Welsh song. Your Frenchwoman is perfect; it is the best that I have yet seen presented in an English theatre. Use your influence to make Oxberry wear a black wig, he will be the image of George Wombwell,[25] he has the dress and the manner to perfection, and it will be a hit. Wombwell won’t be annoyed, on the _contrary_.… _Au revoir_, dear Charles.—Your affectionate,

“D’ORSAY.”

The bright vivacity of the following letter to Dr Quin had best be left in its native French:—

“_8th Août 1831_, “SEAMORE PLACE, MAYFAIR.

CHER ET ESTIMATE QUIN,—Régénérateur de l’humanité souffrante! Nouveau Prophète dont les disciples s’essoufflent à chanter les louanges, et qui finira par triompher comme la civilisation régnante; comment se fait il que vous oubliez entièrement votre disciple Alfred, n’attendez pas en vain l’arrivée d’un ange du ciel pour m’éclairer mais déroulez vos Papyrus pour y graver les progrès de la marche gigantesque de cette _methodus medendi_, qui jointe à votre intelligence vous assure pour votre vieillesse un outrage de Lauriers dont l’épaisseur permettroit à peine que vous soyez encore plus eclairé par le rayon de gloire que le Ciel dirigera sur vous—Maintenant que je vous ai dit ma façon de penser à votre égard, parlons de moi dans un style _moins laconique_.

“Depuis mon arrivée dans ce pays il étoit difficile de pouvoir donner un _Fair Trial_, à la méthode, étant toujours obligé à diner et boire un verre de vin, avec tous ceux qui ont soif. Ainsi je l’ai abandonné trop tôt pour me guérir, mais toujours à temps pour me pénétrer que jusqu’à ce jour le genre de humain a vegeté au lieu de vivre—Il faut donc que je recommence malgré que je souffre moins; repénêtrez vous de ma santé, consultez vos oracles, et voyez à me reprendre en main comme vous l’aviez fait. Je suivrai ponctuellement vos airs, et vous aurez au moins la gloire d’avoir guéri une des trompettes de la renommée de la méthode, et un ami sincère. Détaillez bien la manière de prendre, les remèdes, et prescrivez non pas en _paraboles_, mais dans votre style persuasif.… Adieu, brave Quin. Je vous serre la main non pas de toutes mes forces, mais de tout mon cœur.—Votre devoué et sincère ami,

“ALFRED D’ORSAY.”

Dr Quin was the first homœopathic practitioner in England, and in his early days was denounced as a quack. He was endowed with an inexhaustible fund of good humour, was a wit and a master of repartee. In a postscript to another letter D’Orsay writes:—

“You have, my friend, an unbearable mania, that of always defending the absent. Don’t you know that there is a French proverb which says, ‘Les absens ont toujours tort?’ This fashion never goes out, and, the devil, you who are the ‘pink of fashion,’ you must be in the mode.”

Jekyll declared to Lady Blessington that he “was asked gravely if quinine was invented by Doctor Quin!”

Here is a quaint little note to the Doctor:—

“GORE HOUSE, _Saturday_.

“MY DEAR DR QUIN,—M. Pipelet (D’Orsay) requests that you will send him the letter about Mr ⸺ you promised he should have. I suppose it is in vain to tell you we are going to the Opera to-night. Of course you have 999 impatient patients who _must_ see you every five minutes throughout the course of the day and night, and as many more friends who expect you to dinner. However, _en passant_, I venture to hint that we go with Mdme. Calabrella, so if you manage to kill off the maladies, and put the friends under the table in turn, we shall be delighted to see you ready and waiting, as Homer says in the fifth book of the _Iliad_, line forty-nine. Farewell, may you be happy whilst I—Sobs choke my utterance. Adieu.”

XXIII

EXCHEQUER BONDS

D’Orsay might have been a great artist and a great man of letters; of his genius as a financier there is no doubt. He solved the question of how to obtain unlimited credit; he paid such debts as he did cancel with money which legally was his, but which almost any other man would not have cared to touch.

Lord Blessington is said, when he persuaded D’Orsay to abandon his career in the French army, to have undertaken to provide for the Count’s future, and he fulfilled his promise at the expense of his daughter’s happiness and of the family estates.

In the return made of “The Annuities, Mortgages, Judgments and other Debts, Legacies, Sums of Money, and Incumbrances, charged upon or affecting the Estates of the said Charles John, Earl of Blessington, at the Time of his Decease,” we find that the mortgages and sums of money charged on D’Orsay’s account from 1837 to 1845, amounted to the quite respectable sum of £20,184. In Blessington’s will all his estates in Dublin, bringing in a rental of £13,322, 18s. 8d. were left to whichever of his daughters married D’Orsay.

By the marriage settlement £20,000 was to be paid to trustees, the Duc de Guiche, and Robert Power, within twelve months of the solemnisation, and a further £20,000 on Blessington’s decease; the money to be invested in the funds, and the interest thereupon to be paid to D’Orsay during his life.

As we have seen, the happy couple separated actually in 1831, legally in 1838.

In 1834 an order was made by the Court of Chancery in Ireland, upon which was thrown the task of clearing up the mess made of his property by Blessington, granting D’Orsay an income of £500, and to his wife £450.

How great that mess was, for which D’Orsay and his wife were partly to blame, will be seen from the following facts. The Countess had run up debts to the tune of £10,000, which sum, however, is scarcely worth mentioning beside that incurred by her husband. By the deed of separation between them, D’Orsay relinquished all his claims on the Blessington estates, in consideration—

i. Of £2467 of annuities granted by him being redeemed, which cost £23,500.

ii. In consideration of the sum of £55,000 being paid to him, £13,000 of which was to be raised as soon as possible, and £42,000 within ten years.

A grand total of money which all went in one way or another to pay off D’Orsay’s debts.

As to the estate: the trustees were empowered by Act of Parliament to make sales to the amount of £350,000 to pay off all encumbrances and claims. Thus ended the glory of the Blessington fortune; thus often has it been in Ireland.

D’Orsay found fortune and lost it; he could not even retain the wife with which it was encumbered.

Over £100,000 of debts we know he paid, and still he owed very much. For at least two years previous to his final departure from England he went in constant dread of arrest at the instigation of sordid persons, who had not sufficient understanding of the fact that it was an honour to them to help in the support of a great man. There are too many petty-minded people in the world! Just heavens! That a man of D’Orsay’s calibre should be confined to his house and grounds all the days of the week save Sunday, excepting that he could creep forth under cover of darkness! That the Prince of the Dandies should go in danger of the vile clutch of a sinister myrmidon of the law and of the degradation of a sponging-house.

In 1845 D’Orsay apparently realised that his pecuniary condition was irreparable, and sought in vain for means of escape. He prepared a schedule of his liabilities, the total sum of his indebtedness amounting to £107,000, not including a number of debts to private friends, which made an additional sum of £13,000. It was even contemplated that he should go through the Court of Bankruptcy, but a difficulty was found in the fact that it could not be proved that he was a commercial man or an agriculturalist. He only sowed wild oats.

The situation so pressed upon him, that he allowed himself for a time to become the prey of impostors, who declared that they had achieved what the alchemists of old had so long looked for in vain, the conversion of the baser metals into gold!

From an unveracious chronicle we quote a passage which is veracious:—

“Now, among the shyest birds that ever ducked from a missile of the law was, without an exception the Marquis d’Horsay (D’Orsay). His maxim had long been ‘catch me who can;’ at the same time, acting up to the patent-safety rule of ‘prevention being so much better than cure,’ he afforded no facilities whatever of being hobbled in the chase. At bay he kept the yelping pack, and within the good, stout, rich walls of his covert he maintained both a pleasant and a secure retreat from the dangers besetting him. He now no longer ventured to frame himself, as it were, in his cab, and exhibit his colours and attractions to the curious crowds, except on that privileged day—when even the debtor is at liberty to rest—the seventh of the week.[26] Then, indeed, he issued forth, decked as of old, and, like a bird free from the confines of his cage, made the most of the brief hours of his freedom.

“Every art, every manœuvre within the subtle and almost inexhaustible resources of those apt functionaries of the law who are ever on the alert to deprive the subject of his liberty, let him be never so chary of the preservation of it, had been put in force to trap our hero; but hitherto in vain. Mr Sloughman,[27] truly, arrived within a short journey of accomplishing this much-desired end; still he was frustrated, and now among the ranks of bums there was a cloud which damped their hopes and mildewed their energies. The Marquis was not to be grabbed, and they knew it. With flagging spirits the attempts were renewed over and over again. Bribes and offers of rewards were extended liberally to his menials for their traitorous assistance in obtaining the design, but they had been too well selected, and knew their own interests depended on no such frail or fleeting benefits. False messengers in all garbs and disguises, upon all kinds of errands and excuses, applied for admission and interviews. Even—yes, even the fair sex were at last made not bearers of Love’s despatches, but conveyancers of stern writs, notices of declarations, trials, and suchlike means to the end and breaking up of a man of fashion. Still the Marquis was proof against all these attacks, let them come in what shape they would.”

That may be fancy, but it is close akin to fact.

In _The English Spy_ we read of the crowd in Hyde Park of a Sunday afternoon at the fashionable hour:—

“The low-bred, vulgar, Sunday throng, Who dine at two, are ranged along On both sides of the way; With various views, these honest folk Descant on fashions, quiz and joke, Or march a _shy cock_[28] down; For many a star in fashion’s sphere Can only once a week appear In public haunts of town, Lest those two ever _watchful_ friends, The _step_-brothers, whom sheriff sends, John Doe and Richard Roe, A _taking_ pair should deign to borrow, To wit, until _All Souls_ the morrow, The body of a beau; But Sunday sets the prisoner free, He _shows_ the Park, and laughs with glee, At creditors and Bum.”

Henry Vizetelly used on occasion to make an early call upon Thackeray, and walk into town with him from Kensington. “On one of these journeys,” he says, “soon after Lady Blessington gave up Gore House to reside in Paris, I remember his taking me with him to look over the little crib, adjacent to the big mansion, where Count d’Orsay, Lady Blessington’s recognised lover, was understood to have resided, with the view of saving appearances. For years past the ringleted and white-kidded Count, although his tailor and other obliging tradespeople dressed him for nothing, or rather, in consideration of the advertisement that his equivocal patronage procured for them, had been a self-constituted prisoner through dread of arrest for debt. It was only on Sundays that he ventured outside the Gore House grounds, and for his protection on other days the greatest possible precaution was exercised when it was necessary for any of Lady Blessington’s many visitors to be admitted. D’Orsay’s friend, Thomas Slingsby Duncombe, who was mixed up with him in numerous bill transactions, used to say that the Count’s debts amounted to £120,000, and that before he retired to the safe asylum of Gore House, he was literally mobbed by duns.”

Tom Duncombe describes Lady Blessington’s parties as gay, “where all the men about town assembled, and sunned themselves in her charms; and where, for certain reasons, she was secure from the intrusion of rivals. There Count d’Orsay, tied by the leg with 120,000_l._ of debt, was sure to welcome his ‘_cher Tomie_.’”

“_Cher Tomie_” saw and knew much of D’Orsay, and did his best to help him in his money troubles. The following letters tell a tale of woe:—

_Saturday, 12th February 1842._

“MY DEAR TOMMY,—I know that you have been to C. Lewis, and that he told you it was settled. It is not so; he expected that I would have signed the renewals at sixty per cent. which he sent me, and which I delivered. Therefore, if you have a moment to lose, have the kindness to see him this morning and persuade him of the impossibility of my renewing at that rate; say anything you like on the subject, but that is the moral of the tale. You must come and dine with us soon again.—Yours faithfully,

“D’ORSAY.”

* * * * *

_Thursday, 6th April 1842._

“MY DEAR TOMMY,—I see by the papers that Lord Campbell and Mr T. S. Duncombe received a petition against the _Imprisonment for Debt_! It is the moment to immortalise yourself, and also the _sweetest_ revenge against all our gang of Jews, if you succeed in carrying this petition through. I have taken proper means to keep this proposal alive in the Press. Will you come and dine with us?—Yours affectionately,

“D’ORSAY.”

This last _may_ refer to the schedule above-mentioned:—

“MY DEAR TOMMY,—I send you this precious document; the only one I could obtain. It is a flaring-up page of the _History of the Nineteenth Century_! God is great, and will be greater the day He will annihilate our persecutors. _En attendant_, I am always,—Your affectionate friend,

“D’ORSAY.”

The following refers again to the Imprisonment Abolition Bill:—

“MON CHER TOMMY,—I think that we ought to try to ascertain how far the humbugging system can go. As soon as I received your note this morning I wrote to Brougham, and explained all the unfructuous attempts of Mr Hawes.[29] I enclose the first answer. _Now_, he has just been here, after having had a long conversation with Lyndhurst, who is decided to spur the Solicitor-General, stating, as the Parliament will last until Thursday week, there will be time enough to pass the bill. See what you can do with Mr Hawes. I am sure that if he will strike the iron now, when it is hot, that we have still a chance. Lyndhurst, I assure you, is very anxious about it, and expressed it strongly to Brougham. Do not be discouraged.—Yours affectionately,

“D’ORSAY.”

The enclosed note from Brougham ran:—

“MON CHER A.,—Je suis _coloré_ plutôt que _désespéré_. Il faut que je mette ordre à tout cela. Je vais chez Lyndhurst dans l’instant, H. B.”

Tom Duncombe was himself a capital hand at getting into debt; we read:—“Duncombe is playing good boy, having completely drawn in; he has given up his house and carriages, and taken his name out of the Clubs. He had become so involved that he could not carry on the war any longer. They say that he has committed himself to the amount of 120,000_l._”

Readers of _Vanity Fair_ will recall “Mr Moss’s mansion in Cursitor Street,” “that dismal place of hospitality,” to which Colonel Crawdon was an unwilling visitor. It was such an ordeal, that D’Orsay was determined not to undergo. Shame upon those who threatened him with it.