Just now he was in England, living, when he could, on borrowed money, and sometimes earning a few shillings by serving as special policeman outside of big houses where dances or receptions were in progress. Out of the few English homes open to the prince was Marguerite Blessington's.
Marguerite and D'Orsay took him in, fed him, lent him money, and did a thousand kindnesses to the poor, outlawed fellow. You shall learn in a few minutes how he repaid their generosity.
While Marguerite had a talent for writing, she had a positive genius for spending money. And where talent and genius clash, there can be only one final result. Her talent, as I have said, brought her about five thousand dollars a year. Her income from her husband's estate was a yearly seven-thousand-five-hundred dollars more. But how could people like Marguerite and D'Orsay keep abreast of the social current on a beggarly twelve-thousand-five-hundred dollars a year?
The foregoing is a question, not a flight of rhetoric. It has an answer. And the answer is: they went into debt.
They threw away money; as apt pupils of the lamented Earl of Blessington might readily have been expected to. When they had no more money to pay with, they got credit. At first, this was easy enough. Tradesmen, high and low, deemed it an honor to be creditors of the all-popular Dowager Countess of Blessington, and of the illustrious Count D'Orsay. And even after the tradesmen's first zest died down, the couple were clever enough to arrange matters in such a way as to keep right on securing goods for which they knew they never could hope to pay.
Stripped of his glamour, his pretty tricks, and his social position, D'Orsay shows up as an unadulterated dead beat, a sublimated panhandler; while Marguerite's early experience in helping Shiver-the-Frills ward off bailiffs and suchlike gold-seekers now stood her in fine stead.
They were a grand pair. Their team-work was perfect. Between them, they succeeded in rolling up debts amounting to more than five-hundred-and-thirty-five-thousand dollars to tradesfolk alone. D'Orsay, in addition to this, managed to borrow about sixty-five thousand from overtrustful personal friends.
Thackeray is said to have drawn from them the inspiration of his "Vanity Fair" essay on "How to Live on Nothing a Year." D'Orsay, before consenting to let his wife divorce him, had stipulated that the earl's daughter pay him a huge lump sum out of the Blessington estate. He was also lucky at so-called games of chance, and his painting brought in a good revenue. But all this money was swallowed up in the bottomless gulf of extravagance.
Little by little, the tradesmen began to realize that they were never going to be paid, and they banded together to force matters to a crisis. In that era, debt was still punishable by imprisonment, and prison gates were almost ready to unbar in hospitable welcome to Marguerite and D'Orsay.
Like Dick Swiveller, who shut for himself, one by one, every avenue of egress, from his home, by means of unpaid-for purchases in neighboring streets, D'Orsay discovered that it was no longer safe to leave the house. Officers with warrants lurked at the area railings of Gore House. Tipstaves loitered on the front steps. All sorts of shabby people seemed eager to come into personal contact with Alfred Guillaume Gabriel, Count D'Orsay.