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Title: D'Orsay
or, The complete dandy
Author: William Teignmouth Shore
Release Date: February 16, 2018 [EBook #56581]
Language: English
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D’Orsay
* * *
BY THE SAME AUTHOR
A Soul’s Awakening [Crown 8vo, 6s.
Times.—“Mr Teignmouth Shore has captured our sympathy for his characters in an unusual degree.”
Morning Post.—“A charming and pathetic melody.… A tenderness that is infinitely moving.”
Punch.—“Powerful and pathetic. This truly charming story.”
Above All Things [Crown 8vo, 6s.
Daily Telegraph.—“All small investors in a hurry to make much out of little should read this novel, for it puts plainly and precisely before them some of the methods by which a swindler may, with seemingly virtuous intentions, appropriate, with perfect safety, other people’s money.”
Yorkshire Post.—“The people of his fiction play their parts so naturally and so simply that we sympathise almost as humanly with their troubles and joys as we might with those of our personal friends.”
Bookman.—“Delicate and unobtrusive art.”
Creatures of Clay
Recently published.] [Crown 8vo, 6s.
JOHN LONG, LIMITED, LONDON
* * *
Art Repro. Co.
Count d’Orsay
After a painting by Sir Francis Grant, P.R.A.
* * *
D’ORSAY
OR
The Complete Dandy
By
W. Teignmouth Shore
WITH PHOTOGRAVURE AND SIXTEEN OTHER PORTRAITS
London
John Long, Limited
Norris Street, Haymarket
(All Rights Reserved)
First Published in 1911
* * *
Contents
PAGE
I. Jocund Youth 15
II. She 24
III. Mars and Venus 35
IV. The Primrose Path 42
V. Byron 48
VI. Pilgrims of Love 53
VII. Marriage 65
VIII. Rome 76
IX. Paris 81
X. A Solemn Undertaking 92
XI. Seamore Place 100
XII. Handsome is— 116
XIII. A London Salon 135
XIV. Round the Town 145
XV. Gore House 157
XVI. Stars 172
XVII. Company 174
XVIII. More Friends 189
XIX. Nap 195
XX. W. S. L. 216
XXI. The Artist 225
XXII. Letters 235
XXIII. Exchequer Bonds 245
XXIV. Sundry Festivities 255
XXV. Sunset 270
XXVI. The End of Gore House 280
XXVII. Paris for the Last Time 284
XXVIII. D’Orsay in Decline 289
XXIX. Death 302
XXX. What Was He? 311
* * *
List of Illustrations
Count d’Orsay Frontispiece
After a Painting by Sir Francis Grant, P.R.A.
FACING PAGE
Lady Blessington 28
From a Water-colour Drawing by A. E. Chalon, R.A.
St James’s Square in 1812 36
Lord Byron 50
By D’Orsay.
D’Orsay, 1830 96
10 St James’s Square 100
Seamore Place 114
Crockford’s 150
Gore House 160
From a Water-colour Drawing by T. H. Shepherd.
The Countess Guiccioli 164
By D’Orsay.
Edward, First Baron Lytton 176
From a Painting by A. E. Chalon, R.A.
Carlyle in 1839 188
By D’Orsay.
Napoleon III. 206
By D’Orsay.
Lady Blessington 234
From the Bust by D’Orsay.
Hyde Park Corner in 1824 250
Garden View of Gore House 280
Mausoleum of Lady Blessington 288
From a Photograph by D’Orsay.
* * *
Dandiacal
What a delightful fellow is your complete dandy. No mere clothes’ prop he, the coat does not make the dandy; no mere flâneur in fine garments; far more than that is our true dandy.
Though there is not any authority for making the statement, we do not think that we are wrong in asserting that on the day when Adam first complained to Eve that she had not cut his fig-leaf breeches according to the latest fashion dandyism was born. It is not dead yet, only moribund, palsied, shaking and decrepit with old age, blown upon by an over-practical world of money-spinners and money-spenders. Joy seems to have become a thing of which it is necessary to go in pursuit; in the golden days of the dandies it was a good comrade which came almost without hailing to those who desired its company. A real dandy would wither and wilt in a world where joy is so much of a stranger as it is now to most folk.
It is curious that there does not exist any history of the Rise, Decline and Fall of Dandyism, a subject fit for the pen of Gibbon. But the reason is, that to write it with anything approaching to accuracy and completeness, or with sufficient sympathy and insight, would stagger the painstaking pedantry of a German philosopher and tax the wit and wisdom of George Meredith. Perhaps some day the University of Oxford or of Cambridge, when it has finished trifling with ponderous records of kings and queens, of statesmen and soldiers, of men of science and of writers of books, will gather together a happy band of scholars and men of the world, and will issue to us a joint-stock history of Dandyism. Reform is in the University air; let us hope. Might not the Academic authorities go even further with profit to themselves and to the nation? Ought they not to found and well endow a Chair of Dandyism? Should there not be a Professor of Dandyism to teach the young idea how to distinguish between dress and mere clothes? Between those two there is as great a gulf fixed as between the gentle art of the gourmet and the mere feeding of the gourmand. To teach also the art of living and the history of dandies and of dandyism? In these prosaic days we are only too ready to learn how to obtain the means of living without acquiring also a knowledge of how to use those means to good purpose. The Universities should likewise institute scholarships of dandyism, to encourage the study of dandyism in our Public and Board Schools, in both of which it is so grossly neglected. These scholarships must not be of meagre twenties and thirties of pounds, but of several hundreds per annum, so as to enable the scholar to practise the arts that he studies. We commend this outlet for money to millionaires of a practical turn of mind. The future happiness of our race depends upon its dandyism.
The dandy has played a conspicuous part upon the stage of history: Alcibiades, Marc Antony
, Buckingham, Claude Duval, Benjamin Disraeli prove the truth of this statement. It would be a nice point to decide how far their dandyism was part and parcel of their equipment for attaining greatness. At one period of English history the whole population of the country was divided between dandies and anti-dandies, Cavaliers and Puritans, the former dandified in dress, religion, methods of fighting and in morals. They were great dandies those martial Cavaliers, and so were a few of their successors, who flirted and frivoled at Whitehall under Charles II.
The literature of dandyism is varied, vast and interesting, but space forbids our doing more than briefly alluding to two of its lighter branches in English letters. The drama—or rather the comedy—of dandyism holds a very high place in the history of the British Stage. Lyly, the Euphuist, was a literary dandy of the first water, and his euphuism the height of dandyism in literary style. Shakespeare in Love’s Labour Lost has given us a whole comedy of dandyism, and in Mercutio a portrait of the complete Elizabethan dandy. But the comedy of dandyism was at its zenith in the days of Charles II. Congreve and Wycherley were its high priests, who preached through the mouths of their brilliant puppets the gospel of joy which the Court so ably practised. We have in The School for Scandal another bright flash of dandyism, though Charles Surface has too much heart for a true and perfect dandy.
In fiction we have many striking examples of dandiacal literature, notably Vivian Grey and Pelham, both written by dandies.
Dandies vary in kind as well as in degree, there being some who play at dandyism in the days of their youth, such for example as Disraeli; others who are pinchbeck dandies, falling into the slough of overdressing, such for example as Charles Dickens, who was a mere colourist in garments. There are the born dandies, Brummel, D’Orsay, George Bernard Shaw for examples, the last of whom was born at least 200 years behind his time; he would have been delightful at the Court of Charles the Merry. It is not necessary to be in the fashion to achieve the dignity of dandyism; G. B. S. sets the fashion himself and is the only one who can follow it.
The psychology of the dandy has been much misunderstood, probably because it has been so little studied. What dandies have done has been told to us in many a biography, but what they have been—upon that point silence reigns almost supreme. Yet the mind of the complete dandy is well worth plumbing. Those who know him not will perchance advance the theory that a man possessed of a mind cannot be a dandy; as a matter of fact the reverse is the truth; he must possess mind, but not a heart.
Even so profound a philosopher and student of human nature—the two are seldom found in conjunction, which accounts for the inefficacy of most philosophy—as Professor Teufelsdröckh of Weissnichtwo has defined a dandy as “a Clothes-wearing Man, a Man whose trade, office and existence consists in the wearing of Clothes. Every faculty of his soul, spirit, purse and person is heroically consecrated to this one object, the wearing of clothes wisely and well: so that others dress to live, he lives to dress.”
Which proves that though undoubtedly German philosophers know most things in Heaven and on Earth they do not know all, though they themselves would never make this admission. Teufelsdröckh’s definition of a dandy is preposterously incomplete, showing that he did not possess insight into the heart and soul of dandyism. He perceived the clothes, but not the man.
The proper wearing of proper clothes is but part of the whole duty of a dandy-man. A complete dandy is dandified in all his modes of life; his sense of honour and his conceptions of morality are dandified; he is an epicure in all the arts of fine living, in all forms of fashionable and expensive amusement, in all luxurious accomplishments. He must be endowed with wit, or at least gifted with a tongue of sprightliness sufficient to pass muster as witty. He must be perfect in the amiable art of polite conversation and expert in the language of love. He must own “the courtier’s, soldier’s, scholar’s eye, tongue, sword”; he must be “the glass of fashion and the mould of form, the observed of all observers.”
How far did D’Orsay fulfil these requirements? It is the aim of the following pages to answer that question.
* * *
D’Orsay
I
JOCUND YOUTH
It is the habit of historians to pay little heed to the childhood and the training of the kings, conquerors, statesmen and the other big folk whose achievements they record and whose characters they seldom fathom or portray. But perhaps they are right just as perhaps sometimes they are accurate. It is easier to judge correctly and with understanding the boy and what really were the influences that affected his development, when we know the performances of his maturity, than it is to trace in the child the father of the man. By what the man was we may know what the boy had been. Which brings us to this point, that we need not very deeply regret that the records of D’Orsay’s early years are but scanty. Such as they are they suffice to give us all that we require—a fugitive glimpse here and there of a childhood as great in promise as the manhood was in performance.
Gédéon Gaspard Alfred de Grimaud, Count d’Orsay and du Saint-Empire, Prince of Dandies, was born upon the 4th of September, in the year 1801. Whether or not he came into the world under the influence of a lucky star we can find no record; upon that point each of us may draw his own conclusion in accordance with his judgment of D’Orsay’s career and character.
He sprang from a noble and distinguished family, his father Albert, Count d’Orsay, being a soldier of the Empire and accepted as one of the handsomest men of his day, Napoleon saying of him that he was “aussi brave que beau.” It has been written of the son, “Il est le fils d’un général de nos armées héroiques, aussi célèbre par sa beauté que par ses faits d’armes.” Alfred inherited his father’s good looks and his accomplishment with the sword.
Writing in 1828, Lady Blessington says: “General d’Orsay, known from his youth as Le Beau d’Orsay, still justifies the appellation, for he is the handsomest man of his age that I have ever beheld…;” and Lady Blessington was an experienced judge of manly beauty.
His mother, a beautiful woman, was Eléanore, Baroness de Franquemont, a daughter of the King of Würtemberg by his marriage with Madame Crawford, also needless to say a beautiful woman; also apparently dowered handsomely with wit and worldly wisdom. Her marriage with the King who, it has been neatly said, “baptised with French names his dogs, his castles and his bastards,” was of course a left-handed affair, and on his right-handedly marrying within his own rank, she retired in dudgeon to France. Later she married an Irishman of large means, a Mr O’Sullivan, with whom she resided for some time in India, surviving him and dying at the advanced age of eighty-four, full of youthfulness and ardour. The grandson inherited her accomplishment in love.
So alluring, indeed, were her charms, that on her return from the East one of her many admirers presented her with a bottle of otto of Roses, outdone in sweetness by the following Mooreish compliment:—
“Quand la ‘belle Sullivan’ quitta l’Asie,
La Rose, amoureuse de ses charmes,
Pleura le départ de sa belle amie,
Et ce flacon contient ses larmes.”
The fragrance of the otto has long departed but that of the compliment remains. A pretty compliment deserves to attain immortality.
When in Paris in 1828 Lady Blessington was upon terms of intimacy with the D’Orsays, and was greatly impressed by la belle Sullivan, or, as she preferred to be called, Madame Crawford. She visited her in a charming hôtel, “entre Cour et Jardin”; and decided that she was the most “exquisite person of her age” that she had ever seen. She was then in her eightieth year, but we are told that she did not look more than fifty-five, and was full of good-humour and vivacity. “Scrupulously exact in her person, and dressed with the utmost care as well as good taste, she gives me a notion of the appearance which the celebrated Ninon de l’Enclos must have presented at the same age, and has much of the charm of manner said to have belonged to that remarkable woman.”
There is consi
derable mystery about this good lady’s career.
It was a foregone conclusion that a woman of this style would dote upon and do her best endeavour to spoil a bright, handsome boy such as was her grandson Alfred. Being an only son, an elder brother having died in infancy, the child was made much of on all sides. His good looks, his smartness, even his early developed taste for extravagant luxuries, charmed his accomplished grandmother, whom when later on he entered the army we find presenting him with a magnificent service of plate, which brought upon him more ridicule than envy from his brother officers.
In 1815 Paris was in a ferment of excitements and entertainments, all the great men and many of the great ladies of Europe were there gathered together—where the spoil is there shall the vultures be gathered together. Young D’Orsay, mere lad though he was, came very much to the front; even thus early his immaculate dress was noticeable; his spirited English hunter and his superb horsemanship attracted attention. Though he probably did not particularly relish the occurrence, he was presented to the Duke of Wellington. A great meeting this, the conqueror of the men of France and the future conqueror of the women of England.
Lord William Pitt Lennox, himself only sixteen, relates that he met D’Orsay in Paris in 1814, and he goes on to state that “in the hours of recreation, he showed me all the sights of the ‘City of Frivolity,’ as Paris has been not inaptly named.” Pretty good for two such mere lads!
“One of our first visits was to the Café des Milles Colonnes, which was, at the period I write of, the most attractive café in Paris. Large as it was, it was scarcely capable of containing the vast crowds who besieged it every evening, to admire its saloons decorated with unprecedented magnificence.…
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