Beau Brummell
George Bryan Brummell, Esq., his Britannic Majesty’s Consul in the Norman city of Caen, was about to entertain. He had given instructions to his attendant that great company was expected, together with a list of the distinguished names to be announced; and by eight o’clock his room in the Hôtel d’Angleterre was prepared, the tables for whist were set out and the bougies lighted. Staring, half hypnotised, into the radiance of one of these placed on the mantelpiece, the Beau’s eyes blinked, and the Beau himself faced about with a puzzled look and a suspicious sniff.
“What is that smell, Loustalot?”
He spoke to the attendant, who in his little black jaquette and blue apron looked very much like what, in fact, he was—a waiter at the hotel. The expression on this man’s face scintillated between gravity and mockery; the tone of his voice hovered between audacity and deference.
“It will doubtless be the soot in the chimney, Monsieur,” he said coolly.
“H’m! You are sure it is not a candle in need of snuffing?”
“The best wax, Monsieur? Monsieur speaks as if he burnt filthy tallow. Monsieur’s nostrils are more sensitive than discriminating. A, là! What it is to be bred to this imperishable refinement!”
He was busy while he spoke in snuffing the wick, and in privately depositing the reeking instrument on the hob.
“I go to announce the company, Monsieur,” he said. “In the meantime, if I were Monsieur, I would not spit too much on the carpet.”
“An insolent rascal!” muttered the Beau to himself as the man disappeared. “I shall have to discharge him.”
He had, however, so completely forgotten his resolve the next minute, that when Loustalot, returning, thrust his head round the door, he could not for the moment recall who he was.
“O! by the by, Monsieur,” said the man, “Monsieur Magdelaine, the confectioner, desires to know if you will settle with him your little account for Maraschino and Biscuits de Rheims.”
The Beau smiled, waving his hand.
“To be sure—when it is full moon. Tell him so, my friend.”
“Will not Monsieur tell him himself? His smile is such a surety, and I cannot reproduce it.”
Brummell burst into a scream of rage.
“You dare to mock me! Leave the room, you scoundrel!”
The man grinned and disappeared. The spurt of fury ran to instant waste. Brummell set to pacing the room, eyeing successively the walls, the shining mantelpiece, his own shoes—all with an expression of the most complacent satisfaction. The last, indeed, as he saw them, evoked a positive sigh of transport.
“That Vernis de Guiton!” he murmured: “positively a Corinthian polish! But it’s devilish expensive—devilish.”
He strutted again, sticking out his chest and quavering a little stanza of his own, which someone at some time had set to music:
“Oh ye! who so lately were blithesome and gay,
At the Butterfly’s banquet carousing away;
Your feasts and your revels of pleasure are fled,
For the soul of the banquet, the Butterfly’s dead!”
He paused, cocking his head on one side, inquisitive.
“Now, where did I hear that?” he said. “Aye, aye—the poor butterfly, and dead, with the honey in his throat! Well, ’tis best—to fold one’s plumes upon the feast, and, sunk in the happy flush of revelry, to die and leave a golden record. So may Fortune favour me. But there’s time yet—poor butterfly, poor butterfly! Gad! he makes me weep.”
But it was only the oil dropping from his wig and running down his face. He attended personally to its lubrication in these days, and far too liberally. In a moment he looked up, the transcendent light returned to his eyes. He hummed a livelier air. Self-gratification beamed from him. It was something, after all, in this world, he reflected, to have that indomitable spirit which could rebound, like an india-rubber ball, from the blows of Fortune, the rebuffs of false friends, and exhibit always the same polished, undinted surface. He had not allowed hard Fate to subdue his spirit, to impair his wit, to hammer him into forgetfulness of his duty to his own original ineffable self, and he prayed only that the doom of the butterfly might overtake him long before age came to blunt his exquisite perceptions of fitness, his fastidious taste, his delicate palate! What if one were to come to realise, in moments of lucidity, one’s debased reputation, out-of-dateness, personal uncleanliness, perhaps?—O horrible, horrible! He shuddered; he touched the immaculate frill at his throat, smoothed the satin on his thighs with a trembling hand. An ugly dream! Thank God he could congratulate himself, had always been able to congratulate himself, on an intellectual strength capable of carrying the extremest extravagance of foppery. He had shaped himself deliberately to a fame he would never have attained on the force of his wit alone. And yet he had always remained a gentleman, and a gentleman could never come to forget himself. Intellect and character both told against any such possible demoralisation.
Loustalot threw open the door wide, and announced in a loud voice, “Her Grace the Duchess of Devonshire!”
With a bright smile and extended hands the Consul tripped forward.
“Ah! my dear Duchess,” he said, “you are welcome a thousand times. A chair, Loustalot.” (He seated himself close beside the lovely visitor.) “I was dreaming of old age,” he said, “and imperishable youth comes to rebuke me. Your Grace, more loving-kind than Aurora, once bestowed immortality on me, but with a better percipience than the goddess when she doomed her poor Tithonus to perpetual dotage. This is no dry grasshopper’s note, but the same liquid cackle that greeted our sallies at Chatsworth. Do you remember the French Marquis, whose hair-powder we dusted with sugar, and how at the breakfast-table, the heat and sueur having melted it, the flies settled until the poor man’s head was like a plum pudding? Hélas! the jocund spirit survives; only the environment dejects. But now that your Grace——”
“Milord Byron!” announced Loustalot at the door. The Beau rose, and advanced with infinite courtesy. Always the pink of breeding, he had yet an especial part to play before this pale, distinguished guest, whose compliment on the “exquisite propriety” of his dress and conduct had once reached his ears, never to be forgotten.
“I greet your lordship,” he said, “with a particular confidence, since for the nonce a goddess does the honours of my poor abode. Ah! that Sèvres biscuit figure—a girl bathing, after Falconet. It will appeal to you—a new acquisition. You know my fancy for canes and snuff-boxes and china—trivial pursuits, but more profitable than fox-hunting.”
“His Grace the Duke of Bedford!” bellowed Loustalot.
Brummell, having deposited the poet in a third seat, hurried to the door.
“Bedford, my dear fellow,” he whispered, horrified, “do you realise that the collar of your coat is turned up at the back? It recalls to me the most supreme moment in my life. I was due at Lady Dungannon’s reception, and circumstances had forced me—hush! the admission is inexpressibly painful—to, to take a hackney coach. However, I believed that I had successfully evaded detection, and had mounted the stairs into full view of the drawing-room, when a servant whispered in my ear, ‘Sir—do you know that you have got a straw in your shoe?’ Conceive, if you can, my horror. I shall never forget that moment.”
The memory, indeed, appeared so to weigh upon him, that for a little he forgot his company, and sat apart from it in dreary abstraction. The name of Mr. Chig Chester being called withdrew him from it, and he rose gaily.
“Our redoubtable gamester and sportsman,” he said, returning with the visitor. “We have material here for a table, Duchess. But remember, in Caen we play only for love and crackers.”
He dissolved into a fit of chuckling laughter, until the Lady Jersey was announced. And then came others—my Lord Petersham, the Duke of Rutland, Scrope Davies, Mrs. O’Neill, the Duchess of Gordon, and half a dozen more. The little room was soon too full for its capacity; but the spirits of the courtly host surmounted all difficulties and made a positive grace of inconvenience. He tripped, he chatted, he was perpetually talking and on the move, exchanging badinage with one, recalling incidents of past happy days with another, pointing out the treasures of his modest sanctum to a third—a picture by Morland, a clock by Verdier, a Louis XV bonheur du jour. Exile, he wished to show, had not dulled his appreciation of the beautiful, or shaken his position as a wit and supreme arbiter of the elegancies. Now as always it was a privilege to claim his acquaintanceship, to be seen on his arm; now as always his smile or his frown could make or break.
In the midst, a candle guttered heavily on the mantelpiece, and a little girl, the landlord’s petted one, ran into the room.
“Monsieur Brummell,” she cried, “Monsieur Brummell, you have not yet given me the sou you promised for nanan.”
He caught her by the arm.
“Hush!” he said. “Do you not see the company?”
She stared round with wide, wondering eyes.
“What company, Monsieur? I see only a row of chairs!”
“Look again, Babette.”
“I am looking hard, Monsieur.”
The Beau, releasing his grip, sank into a seat. Before him on the wall loomed a cheap mirror. He saw the reflection in it of a broken, toothless old man, semi-palsied, dirty, degraded. His scratch-wig, poked awry, was foul with rancid grease; his shoes were lustreless and in holes. He raised dim, wandering eyes, and marked the squalid, unfurnished walls, the one whist-table with a broken leg, the three common shells on the mantelpiece flanked by a couple of reechy tallow candles in brass sconces. And—yes, the row of empty chairs. Staring like one awakened, he uttered a dreary little laugh, and beckoned to the child.
“Come, Babette,” he said, “and we will hunt for the sou. Let us hope it has not slipped through the hole in my pocket. I had been playing, child—playing with the shadows of some little dolls, long, long dead everyone of them, and my company, after all, turns out to be one lonely old man, with a tattered coat and a single pair of trousers, which Madame Fichet has to patch while their owner lies abed.”