Dinners.
I also dined in the East End of the town with Mr. Rothschild[168] of London, of the younger branch of Salomon[169]: where did I not dine? The roast-beef equalled that of the Tower of London in stateliness; the fish were so long that one could not see their tails; ladies, whom I met there and nowhere else, sang like Abigail. I quaffed tokay not far from the place which had seen me toss off water by the pitcherful and almost die of hunger; reclining against the silk-squabbed back of my well-padded carriage, I saw that same Westminster where I had spent a night locked in the Abbey, and around which I had strolled, covered with mud, with Hingant and Fontanes. My house, the rent of which cost me twelve hundred pounds a year, was opposite the garret inhabited by my cousin de La Boüétardais what time, in a red robe, he used to play the guitar on a borrowed truckle-bed to which I had offered shelter beside my own.
There was no longer a question of those Emigrant hops at which we used to dance to the tune of the violin of a counsellor to the Breton Parliament; it was Almack's, conducted by Collinet, that provided my delight: a public ball under the patronage of the great ladies of the West End. There the old and the young dandies met. Among the old, shone the victor of Waterloo, who aired his glory like a snare for women stretched across the quadrilles; at the head of the young, stood out Lord Clanwilliam[170], said to be the son of the Duke of Richmond[171]. He did wonderful things: he galloped out to Richmond and returned to Almack's after twice falling from his horse. He had a certain manner of utterance, after the fashion of Alcibiades, which was thought enchanting. The fashions in words, the affectations of language and pronunciation changing, as they do, in almost every parliamentary session in high society in London, an honest man is wonder-struck at no longer knowing English, which he believed himself to know perfectly six months before. In 1822, the duty of the man of fashion was, at the first glance, to present an unhappy and ailing figure; he was expected to have something neglected about his person: long nails; beard worn neither full nor shaved, but seeming to have sprouted at a given moment by surprise, through forgetfulness, amid the preoccupations of despair; a waving lock of hair; a profound, sublime, wandering and fatal glance; lips contracted in scorn of the human race; a heart bored, Byronian, drowned in the disgust and mystery of existence.
To-day it is no longer so: the dandy must have a conquering, thoughtless, insolent air; he must attend to his dress, wear mustachios or a beard cut round like Queen Elizabeth's ruff or the radiant disk of the sun; he reveals the lofty independence of his character by keeping his hat on his head, by lolling on the sofa, stretching out his boots before the noses of the ladies seated in admiration on chairs before him; he rides with a cane which he carries like a wax-taper, indifferent to the horse which chances to be between his legs. His health must be perfect and his soul always at the height of five or six felicities. A few Radical dandies, those most advanced towards the future, possess a pipe.
But, no doubt, all these things are changed in the very time which I am taking to describe them. They say that the dandy of the present moment must no longer know if he exists, if the world is there, if there are women, and if he ought to salute his neighbour. Is it not curious to find the original of the dandy under Henry III.?
"Those pretty minions," says the author of the Isle des Hermaphrodites[172], "wore their hair longish, curled and curled again, showing above their little velvet caps, like the women, and their shirt-ruffs of linen all around, starched and half-a-foot wide, in such fashion that, to see their heads above their ruffs, it seemed as though it was the head of Saint John in a dish." They leave to go to Henry III.'s chamber, "swinging their body, their heads and their legs so that I thought at every turn that they must needs fall at full length.... They found that manner of walking finer than any other."
London society.
All the English are mad by nature or by fashion.
Lord Clanwilliam passed quickly: I met him again at Verona; he became British Minister in Berlin after me. For a moment we followed the same road, although we did not walk with the same step.