"On the top of the gallery," she says, "is a terrace, at the extreme end of which is a pavilion, with open arcades and paved with marble. This pavilion commands a most charming prospect of the bay, the foreground filled up by gardens and vineyards. The odour of the flowers in the grounds around the pavilion, and the Spanish jasmine and tuberoses that cover the walls, render it one of the most delicious retreats in the world. The walls of all the rooms are literally covered with pictures; the architraves of the doors of the principal rooms are oriental alabaster and the rarest marbles; the tables and consoles are composed of the same costly materials; and the furniture bears the traces of its pristine splendour."
Such was the Arabian palace of all delights of which her gorgeous ladyship now found herself mistress; and yet nothing would please her indulgent lord but the spending of a few thousands in adding to its splendours by new and costly furnishings. Here she spent two-and-a-half years of ideal happiness, sailing by moonlight on the lovely bay, with d'Orsay for companion; visiting all the sights, from Pompeii to the galleries and museums, with a retinue of experts, such as Herschell and Gell in her train, and entertaining with a queenly magnificence Italian nobles and all the great ones of Europe who passed through Naples.
From Naples Lady Blessington took her train to Florence, where she cast her spell over Walter Savage Landor, who spent every possible hour in her fascinating company; and where she was joined by her husband's daughter, the Lady Harriet Gardiner, a girl of fifteen, who, within a few weeks of reaching Italy, became the wife of my lady's handsome protege, d'Orsay. And it was not until 1828, six years after leaving London, that the stately procession turned its face homewards, halting for a few months of farewell magnificence in Paris, where Lady Blessington was installed in Marshal Ney's mansion, in an environment even more gorgeous than the Palazzo Belvidere of Naples could boast, thanks to the prodigality of her infatuated lord.
The description which her Ladyship gives of her Paris palace reads, indeed, like a passage from the "Arabian Nights."
"The bed," she says, "which is silvered instead of gilt, rests on the backs of two large silver swans, so exquisitely sculptured that every feather is in alto-relievo, and looks nearly as fleecy as those of a living bird. The recess in which it is placed, is lined with white fluted silk, bordered with blue embossed lace; and from the columns that support the frieze of the recess, pale blue silk curtains, lined with white, are hung. A silvered sofa has been made to fit the side of the room opposite the fireplace—pale blue carpets, silver lamps, ornaments silvered to correspond."
Her bath was of white marble; her salle de bain was draped with white muslin trimmed with lace, and its ceiling was beautiful with a painted Flora scattering flowers and holding an elaborate lamp in the form of a lotus. And all the rest of the equipment of this dream-palace was in keeping with these splendours, from the carpets and curtains of crimson to the gilt consoles, marble-topped chiffonières, and fauteuils "richly carved and gilt and covered with satin to correspond with the curtains."
This, although Lady Blessington little dreamt it, was to be the last lavish evidence of her lord's devotion to his beautiful wife; for, before they had been many months back in England the Earl died suddenly in the prime of his days. Large as his fortune had been, the last few years of extravagance had made such inroads in it that all that was left of his £30,000 a year was an annual income of £600, which went to his illegitimate son. Fortunately the Countess's jointure of £2,000 a year was secure; and on this income Lady Blessington was able to face the future with a heart as light as it could be after such a bereavement; for, eccentric as her husband had been, and in some ways almost contemptible, she had loved him dearly for the great and touching love with which he had always surrounded her.
It was during her early years of widowhood that her ladyship turned for solace, and also for additional revenue to support the extravagance which had now become second nature, to her pen, in which she quickly found a small mine of welcome gold. Her "Books of Beauty" and "Gems of Beauty" were an instantaneous success—they made a strong appeal to the flowery sentiment of the time, and sold in tens of thousands of copies. Her "Conversations with Byron," a record of those halcyon days at Genoa, fed the curiosity which then invested the most romantic of poets with a glamour which survives to our day; and her novels and gossipy books of travel were hailed in succession by an eager public of readers.
In these years of prolific literary labour she was able to double her jointure, and to maintain much of the splendour to which she had become so accustomed. Even her literary children were cradled in luxury on a fauteuil of yellow satin, in a library crowded with sumptuous couches and ottomans, enamel tables and statutary. To her house in Seamore Place her beauty and fame drew the most eminent men in England, from Lawrence and Lyndhurst to Lytton and young Disraeli, gorgeous as his hostess, in gold-flowered waistcoat, gold rings and chains, white stick with black tassel, and his shower of ringlets.
But the Seamore Place house proved too cabined and too modest for my lady's exacting social ambition. She demanded a more spacious and magnificent shrine for her beauty, which was still so remarkable that she was considered the loveliest woman at the Court of George III. when well advanced in the forties—and this she found at Gore House, in Kensington, a stately mansion in which Wilberforce had made his home, and which, surrounded by beautiful gardens and shut in with a girdle of spreading trees, might have been in the heart of the country, instead of within sight of the tide of fashion which flowed in Hyde Park.