COUNT D'ORS.A.Y. , IN his record of the sayings and doings
of Count D'Orsay and of the remarkable circle whose interests centred in the Blessington-D'Orsay Salon at Gore House Mr. Teignmouth Shore has brought together a number of extremely entertain- ing pages. We meet first with the youthful Count making his mark in French society even as a boy, and intro- duced to the Duke of Wellington because of the attention be attracted in the Bois de Boulogne "from his handsome appearance, his gentleman-like bearing, his faultless dress, and the splendid English hunter he was mounted upon "—so writes Lord William Pitt Lennox in his memoirs. The main thread of D'Orsay's life, however, begins with his meeting with Lady Blessington in 1821: he was then twenty and she thirty-two. It was an acquaintance broken for a time in the following year, when D'Orsay returned to duty with the French colours; but it needed no more than a visit of Lord and Lady Blessington to the hotel at Valence, where D'Orsay lay with his regiment, for him to throw up his commission when actually under orders to march with the Due d'Angouleme over the Pyrenees. That was the turning point in Count D'Orsay's life which established him finally as an idler dependent on his wits and the purses of other people. There followed a curiously undisturbed period of friendship with Lord Blessington, in the course of which he became the husband of Lord Blessington's daughter by a previous mar- riage—a child of fifteen, who inherited the greater part of her father's fortune. That was in 1827. Lord Blessington died two years later, and D'Orsay separated from his wife in 1831: those were the beginnings on which was founded the Blessington Salon, first at Seamore Place and after- wards at Gore House. For the next eighteen years D'Orsay's position in London society was unrivalled. Holland House, of course, attracted a different and a higher circle ; but in his own metier nobody could touch D'Orsay. He had soon dissipated or mortgaged his wife's fortune, and was head over ears in debt, but he found fresh sources on which to draw for his needs. When his tailor sent to Seanaore Place the clothes which in turn brought the custom of fashionable London to his shop, bank-notes were slipped into the pockets. There was an occasion when this ceremony was omitted, and the clothes were returned with an intimation that the pocket-lining had been forgotten. Fashion followed D'Orsay's lead in clothes with unctuous absurdity. Once, to keep himself dry, he bought a waistcoat from a passing sailor, buttoned it outside his coat, and rode on into Hyde Park. The next day all the dandies appeared in the Park in the new garment ; thus began the paletot. On another occasion, wishing to do a good turn to a match-seller, he bought a match for a guinea and told those standing near him that he could not smoke a cigar lit by any other kind. The match- seller made his fortune. A certain income, of course, he made by gambling, for he went by the comfortable rule of keeping what he won and never paying his losses ; but he added also to these varying assets the fees which he charged for portrait-drawing and modelling or sculpture. D'Orsay, indeed, could have made a name for himself as an artist had be possessed the energy or inclination, but he could get no further than very fair amateur performances, which earned him some convenient cash. But the cash was never anything more to him than counters. Before the end came for the • "D'Orsay, or the Complete Dandy." By W. Teignmouth Shore. London: John Long. [10a. 6d. net.]
Gore House regime D'Orsay was £120,000 in. debt. Gore House ended by an execution being put in by a long-suffering firm whose account came to over £4,000, and with the fall of Gore House fell everything. Lady Blessington left for Paris, and was dead within two months ; two years later D'Orsay, broken by the loss, followed her to the grave.
The pity is that Mr. Teignmouth Shore has not taken his subject sufficiently seriously. He has made an amusing, interesting book, but as a study of D'Orsay's character it is worth little. He does not help his reader to make up his mind as to what the man really was ; he does not even try to make up his own mind. He writes throughout, in criticizing D'Orsafs carelessness and extravagance, in a vein of tiresome irony. "There are mouldy-minded people who put out the finger of scorn at D'Orsay," he remarks, and suggests that the real treatment for "sunny souls" of D'Orsay's character is that they should be pensioned by the State and set above the cares and worries of a few pounds here or there. There would doubtless be plenty of candidates for such a pension. But, brilliantly gifted though D'Orsay was and triumphantly though he led the dandies of the thirties, it is possible to admire his achievement too thoroughly. After all, the keynote to his character is that for a mere life of pleasure he deserted the colours, and that is a fact for which French- dandyism, at all events, has never forgiven him.
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