“‘Put it on my finger,’ I replied; ‘and this instant, for a true friend is better than a magic ring, I put it on.’
“‘You are very brave,’ said he, ‘then you shall hear the lines I heard in a rival salon, repeated by him who last wafted the censer to you to-night.’ He repeated a kind of doggrel pasquinade, beginning with—
‘Tell me, gentles, have you seen,
The prating she, the mock Corinne?’
“Dumont, who had the courage for my good to inflict the blow, could not stay to see its effect, and this time I was left alone, not with my nonsense, but with my reason. It was quite sufficient. I was cured. My only consolation in my disgrace was, that I honourably kept Dumont’s counsel. The friend who composed the lampoon, from that day to this never knew that I had heard it; though I must own I often longed to tell him, when he was offering his incense again, that I wished he would reverse his practice, and let us have the satire in my presence, and keep the flattery for my absence. The graft of affectation, which was but a poor weak thing, fell off at once, but the root of the evil had not yet been reached. My friend Dumont had not cut deep enough, or perhaps feared to cut away too much that was sound and essential to life: my political ambition remained, and on Lord Davenant’s return sprang up in full vigour.
“Now it is all over, I can analyse and understand my own motives: when I first began my political course, I really and truly had no love for power; full of other feelings, I was averse from it; it was absolutely disagreeable to me; but as people acquire a taste for drams after making faces at first swallowing, so I, from experience of the excitation, acquired the habit, the love, of this mental dram-drinking; besides, I had such delightful excuses for myself: I didn’t love power for its own sake, it was never used for myself, always for others; ever with my old principle of sacrifice in full play: this flattering unction I laid to my soul, and it long hid from me its weakness, its gradual corruption.
“The first instance in which I used my influence, and by my husband’s intervention obtained a favour of some importance, the thing done, though actually obtained by private favour, was in a public point of view well done and fit to be done; but when in time Lord Davenant had reached that eminence which had been the summit of my ambition, and when once it was known that I had influence (and in making it known between jest and earnest Lord Davenant was certainly to blame), numbers of course were eager to avail themselves of the discovery, swarms born in the noontide ray, or such as salute the rising morn, buzzed round me. I was good-natured and glad to do the service, and proud to show that I could do it. I thought I had some right to share with Lord Davenant, at least, the honour and pleasures of patronage, and so he willingly allowed it to be, as long as my objects were well chosen, though he said to me once with a serious smile, ‘The patronage of Europe would not satisfy you; you would want India, and if you had India, you would sigh for the New World.’ I only laughed, and said ‘The same thought as Lord Chesterfield’s, only more neatly put.’ ‘If all Ireland were given to such a one for his patrimony, he’d ask for the Isle of Man for his cabbage-garden.’ Lord Davenant did not smile. I felt a little alarmed, and a feeling of estrangement began between us.
“I recollect one day his seeing a note on my table from one of my protegés, thanking me outrageously, and extolling my very obliging disposition. He read, and threw it down, and with one of his dry-humour smiles repeated, half to himself,
And so obliging that she ne’er obliged.‘
“I thought these lines were in the Characters of Women, and I hunted all through them in vain; at last I found them in the character of a man, which could not suit me, and I was pacified, and, what is extraordinary, my conscience quite put at ease.
“The week afterwards I went to make some request for a friend: my little boy—for I had a dear little boy then—had come in along with mamma. Lord Davenant complied with my request, but unwillingly I saw, and as if he felt it a weakness; and, putting his hand upon the curly-pated little fellow’s head, he said, ‘This boy rules Greece, I see.’ The child was sent for the Grecian history, his father took him on his knee, while he read the anecdote, and as he ended he whispered in the child’s ear, ‘Tell mamma this must not be; papa should be ruled only by justice.’ He really had public virtue, I only talked of it.