The consulate at Caen, to which a salary of four hundred a year was attached, was secured for him. Brummell arranged that part of his income should be set aside to pay his debts (which amounted to about a thousand pounds), and his creditors allowed him to leave Calais. He had not long been installed when he wrote a formal letter to Lord Palmerston, then Foreign Secretary, stating that the place was a sinecure and the duties so trifling that he should recommend its abolition. It has never been made clear why he took this remarkable step. Was it in the hope of being appointed to a better position? Was it in the desire to evade the payment of his debts? Was it honesty? Whatever the cause, his action recoiled on himself. Lord Palmerston was regretfully compelled to take the consul at his word, and the place was reduced.
Brummell continued to live at Caen; but, being without resources, he sank deeper into debt, and in 1835 his creditors put him into prison. For the last time his friends came to his assistance. William IV. subscribed a hundred pounds. Palmerston gave twice that amount from the public purse. Enough was obtained to secure his liberation and to settle upon him an annuity of one hundred and twenty pounds. Soon he sank into a state of imbecility, and he ended his days in the asylum Bon Sauveur. He died on 30th March 1840.
A moral can easily be drawn from the story of this unfortunate man, and many writers have dwelt upon the lesson it furnishes. Yet there were many worse than he in the circle of which he was the arbiter. He lived his life: he paid the price. Let him rest in peace.
With the departure from England of Brummell the cult of the dandy began to decline. Count D’Orsay the Magnificent, however, galvanised it into fashion for a while. “He is a grand creature,” Gronow described him; “beautiful as the Apollo Belvedere in his outward form; full of health, life, spirits, wit, and gaiety; radiant and joyous; the admired of all admirers.”
He had an amusing naïveté in speaking of his personal advantages. “You know, my dear friend, I am not on a par with my antagonist,” he said to his second on the eve of a duel. “He is a very ugly man, and if I wound him in the face he won’t look much the worse for it; but on my side it ought to be agreed that he shall not aim higher than my chest, for if my face should be spoiled ce serait vraiment dommage.”
The dandies of a later day were but poor things—pinchbeck. Captain Gronow, in his youth a beau of no mean order, pours contempt upon their pretensions in no measured terms. “How unspeakably odious—with a few brilliant exceptions, such as Alvanley and others—were the dandies of forty years ago [1822]! They were generally middle-aged, some even elderly, men, had large appetites and weak digestions, gambled freely, and had no luck. They hated everybody and abused everybody, and would sit together in White’s bay window or the pit-boxes at the opera weaving tremendous crammers. They swore a good deal, never laughed, had their own particular slang, looked hazy after dinner, and had most of them been patronised at one time or other by Brummell and the Prince Regent.... They gloried in their shame, and believed in nothing good or noble or elevated. Thank Heaven, that miserable race of used-up dandies has long been extinct! May England never look upon their like again!”
The prayer may well be echoed. The bad influence of the dandies can scarcely be over-estimated; and the effect upon their own class of society was terrible. Their morals were contemptible, and they were without principle. Prodigality was their creed, gambling their religion. The list of those who died beggared is not much longer than the list of those who died by their own hands. They indulged in no manly exercises, and devoted their days to their personal decoration and to the card-table. Extravagance of all kinds was fashionable. Clothes, canes, snuff-boxes, must be expensive to be worthy of such distinguished folk, whose sole aim it was to outvie each other. A guinea was the least that could be given to the butler when dining out; but this was an improvement upon the day when Pope, finding it cost him five guineas in tips whenever he dined with the Duke of Montagu, informed that nobleman he could not dine with him in future unless he sent him an order for the tribute-money.
There was Wellesley Pole, who, after the opera, gave magnificent dinners at his home at Wanstead, where rare dishes were served and the greatest luxury obtained. He married Miss Tylney Pole, who brought him fifty thousand a year; and he died a beggar. There was “Golden Ball” Hughes, with forty thousand a year, who, when the excitements of the gaming-room were not to be had, would play battledore and shuttlecock through the whole night, backing himself for immense sums. He married a beautiful Spanish danseuse, Mercandotti, who appeared in London in 1822. Whereupon Ainsworth made an epigram:
“The fair damsel is gone, and no wonder at all