And his taste was so delicate, that he had found instinctively what was required to complete the classic form of the drapery.
What a crowd at the duchess's! The heads all touched one another like the necks of bottles emerging from a basket.
And what long faces!
Ah! it is that English society was prodigiously bored. Boredom, that pastime of old peoples rotted by civilisation, reigned as master and triumphed hardly over the conventions. The French émigrés had brought with them, in the perfume of their yellowed lace and in the flash of their last jewels, the precious remains of a frivolity and of a grace which were at the point of death. The spirit of France had been for the lymphatic coldness of the English what condiments are for boiled beef: a stimulant to the appetite. Scandal was on the watch and morals were dissolute. But the wits of these haughty ladies had been sharpened, and all their intrigues were carried on slyly, clandestinely. Against the rigid and narrow Puritanism, against the redoubtable spirit of cant, imagination and fancy struggled without hope of victory. The façade, that was what mattered! So much the worse if the interior of the building were used as a stable. Only, hypocrisy being like the veronal which prolongs the torpor of surfeited and jaded societies, England continued to govern royally. Extravagance and dandyism were required to cheer her up. And how welcome on the occasion of some dreary social function was the arrival of a Hester Stanhope or of a George Brummel!
Lady Hester recalled her entry into the ball-room with Lord Camelford, her beloved cousin—a true Pitt, that man! And what an entry. Both were of extraordinary stature; the women had not enough smiles for him, the men not enough eyes for her. A long flattering murmur accompanied them.
"Have you seen Lord Camelford?" twittered the ladies. "Well, it appears that he blew out the brains of his lieutenant one day that a mutiny threatened to break out aboard his ship, and that quite coolly, just as I am speaking to you."
"Oh! my dear, you make me shiver."
"Yes, my dear, he frequents the taverns in the City, disguised as a sailor, and when he meets some poor devil whose face he recollects, he makes him tell him his history, thrusts a hundred pounds into his hand and threatens to thrash him if he presumes to ask him his name!"
"Have you seen Lady Hester Stanhope? She caused a scandal at the last Court ball. No, really! You have not heard people talking about it? It is shocking, my dear! Would you believe that Lord Abercorn, having vainly solicited from Pitt the Order of the Garter, turned towards Addington (the surgeon's son; yes, exactly) to obtain it? Lady Hester, having learned of the matter, flew into a furious rage. Talking with the Duke of Cumberland—it is from the duke himself that I have the story, she said:
"'After the innumerable favours which Lord Abercorn has received from Mr. Pitt, to go over to Mr. Addington! Ah! I will make him pay dearly for his defection.'