Here for thirteen years, with the handsome, gay, accomplished d'Orsay, who had separated from his wife, as major-domo, she dispensed a princely hospitality. Her dinners and her entertainments were admittedly the finest in London; and invitations to them were as eagerly sought as commands to a Court-ball.
"At Gore House," said Brougham, "one is sure to meet some of the most interesting people in England, and equally sure not to have a dull moment." Brougham was himself a constant and a welcome guest, and the men he met there ranged from Prince Louis Napoleon, then an exile without a prospect of a crown, and the Duke of Wellington to Albert Smith and Douglas Jerrold—so wide was the net of Lady Blessington's hospitality. And all paid the same glowing tribute, not only to their hostess's loveliness but to the warmth of heart, which was one of her greatest charms. And of all the great ones who sat at her dinner-table or thronged her drawing-rooms not one was wittier or more fascinating than Count d'Orsay, who, in spite of envious and malicious tongues, never occupied to the Countess any other relation than that of a dearly-loved and devoted son.
Although Lady Blessington's income rarely fell below £4,000 a year, it was quite inadequate to her expenditure; and it was clear to her that this era of splendid hospitality could not last for ever. A day of reckoning was sure to come; and it came sooner than she had anticipated. D'Orsay, who seems to have been even more careless of money than his mother-in-law, plunged deeper and deeper in debt—some of it, at least, incurred in helping to keep up the Gore House ménage—until he found himself at last face to face with liabilities far exceeding £100,000, and besieged with duns and bailiffs. Once he was arrested at the suit of a bootmaker, and was rescued from prison by Lady Blessington's rapidly-emptying purse. The climax came when a sheriff's officer smuggled himself into Gore House, and brought down on d'Orsay's head an avalanche of angry creditors, each resolute to have his "pound of flesh." The Countess was powerless to stem the invasion; her own resources were at an end, the Count himself was penniless. The only safety was in flight; and one day Gore House was found empty. The birds had flown to Paris; and the mansion which had been the scene of so much magnificence was left to the mercy of a horde of clamorous creditors.
A few weeks later, all "the costly and elegant effects of the Right Honourable, the Countess of Blessington, retiring to the Continent" were put up to auction; and twenty thousand curious people were pouring through the rooms which her gorgeous ladyship had made so famous—among them Thackeray, who was moved to tears at the spectacle of so much goodness and greatness reduced to ruin. The sale, although many of the effects brought absurdly low prices, realised £12,000—a smaller sum probably than would be paid to-day for half-a-dozen of the Countess's pictures.
This crushing blow to her fortunes and her pride no doubt broke Lady Blessington's heart; for within a few months of the last fall of the auctioneer's hammer, she died suddenly in Paris, to the unspeakable grief of d'Orsay, who declared to the Countess's physician, Madden, "She was to me a mother! a dear, dear mother—a true, loving mother to me." Three years later this "paragon of all the perfections" followed the Countess behind the veil, and rests in a mausoleum, of his own designing, at Chamboury, with one of the most lovely women who have ever graced beauty with rare gifts of mind and with a warm and tender heart.
CHAPTER IX
A QUEEN OF COQUETTES
The 29th of May in the year 1660 was indeed a red-letter day in the calendar of jovial fox-hunting Squire Jennings, of Sandridge, in Hertfordshire. It was the day on which his Royal idol, the second Charles, set out from Canterbury on the last stage of the journey to his crown. Mounted on his horse, caparisoned in purple and gold, at the head of a gay cavalcade of retainers, he rode proudly through the Kentish lanes and villages: through avenues of wildly-cheering crowds, flinging sweet may-blossoms and flowers under his horse's feet, and waving green boughs over their heads in a frenzy of welcome.
