Such an Epicurean as de Gramont scarcely needed the advice of St. Evremond. No one knew the world better than he, or was more deeply acquainted with all its vice, at which, without seriously polluting himself with it, he laughed in the gayest, most cynical way. He had so little religion that once in old age, when his wife in an attempt to convert him recited the Lord's Prayer, he remarked, "That is very fine, who wrote it?" His moral sense was entirely lacking. Women meant to him an amour, nothing more. And even La Belle Hamilton, whose virtue, to his credit be it said, he never attempted to attack, had so little real hold of his affections that on being pardoned by Louis he would have gone back to France without marrying her had it not been for her brothers. Two of them, who had no intention of letting her be compromised by such a desertion, rode after him and overtook him at Dover. "Chevalier," they cried, galloping up and addressing him in his own fashion, "haven't you forgot something in London?"
"Excuse me," he replied gaily, "I have forgotten to marry your sister."
He returned and married her, making her, it must be confessed, the best of husbands. His conduct when married was in this respect in striking contrast with that of the de Gramonts of his time generally. For his brother the Maréchal was notoriously brutal; while the private lives of the Comte de Guiche and the Princess of Monaco, his nephew and niece, could not in the present day be exposed in print.
Many people have often tried to guess the secret of the fascination of this Chevalier de Gramont for La Belle Hamilton, a woman on whom slander never breathed. Without ourselves entering the lists of those who vainly attempt to explain the mysteries of human emotions, we should suggest that a mutual sense of humour was not without its effect on first attracting each to the other. Both were gifted with a very keen sense of the ridiculous. The picture of Miss Hamilton in the exercise of hers is one of the most entertaining incidents in the "Mémoires de Gramont."
A splendid masked ball, which the Queen gave in honour of the King, afforded Miss Hamilton an excellent opportunity to amuse herself innocently at the expense of two silly women of the Court. These persons, whose actions and appearance certainly marked them as victims for the practical joker, were Miss Blague, a maid of honour, and Lady Muskerry. As Miss Hamilton, said her brother, "liked to do things in order, she began with her cousin Muskerry, on account of her rank." The appearance of her ladyship was ridiculous in the extreme. Her face, which was ludicrously plain, matched her figure, which seemed without being so to be perpetually enceinte. This deformity was further heightened by a limp, occasioned by an inequality in the length of her legs. But Lady Muskerry, far from being aware of her defects, was exceedingly vain. "Her two darling foibles were dress and dancing. Magnificence of dress was intolerable with her figure; and though her dancing was still more insupportable, she never missed a ball at Court; and the Queen had so much complaisance for the public as always to make her dance. But in a function so important and splendid as this masquerade it was impossible to give her a part. However, she was dying with impatience for an invitation, which she expected."
It was this impatience on the part of Lady Muskerry that gave Miss Hamilton her opportunity. She sent her ladyship an invitation, as if from the Queen, with the request that she should appear at the ball as a Babylonian princess. Lord Muskerry, who was particularly afraid of ridicule, and aware of the absurd figure his wife would cut if she were present at the ball, had begged her on no account to think of accepting the invitation in case she should receive it. But Lady Muskerry, believing that her husband had taken measures to prevent her being invited, was so exasperated that she had determined to go to the Queen unbeknown to him and ask for an invitation. It was at this juncture that the invitation arrived. She promptly decided to conceal the fact from Lord Muskerry, and "immediately got into her coach in order to get information of the merchants who traded to the Levant as to how the ladies of quality dressed in Babylon."
The practical joke that Miss Hamilton prepared to play upon Miss Blague was of a totally different kind. She had noticed that the maid of honour was in love with the Marquis de Brisacier, a Frenchman as insipid and silly as herself, who was visiting England and paying her considerable attention. Miss Blague had quarrelled with another maid of honour, Miss Price, over some man whom Miss Blague believed had been "drawn away" from her by Miss Price. With this material the inventive mind of La Belle Hamilton prepared to play. The gloves of Martial, a Parisian maker, were then the rage, and Miss Hamilton, who had several pairs of them, sent one to Miss Blague together with some yellow ribbon and a note from the Marquis de Brisacier, couched in the most ridiculous and affectionate language, asking the maid of honour to wear them at the masked ball as the means by which he might recognise her. Then, giving a similar pair of gloves and a piece of yellow ribbon to Miss Price, the merry mischief-maker induced her to wear them by letting her only so far into the secret as to make Miss Blague's enemy determined to cut her out with Brisacier as she had previously done with the former admirer.
To Miss Hamilton's intense delight, as well as that of the persons she had taken into her confidence, both jokes succeeded admirably, and without the betrayal of their originator. But Lady Muskerry got no nearer the ball-room than the state entrance to Whitehall. As it was understood that all the ladies who were to dance in the Queen's quadrille, of whom Lady Muskerry had no doubt that she was one, would be met at the entrance to the palace by their partners, and as in the secrecy she was obliged to practise to prevent her husband from knowing that she had been invited to the ball she had not been able to learn who her partner was, she was still patiently waiting when the Chevalier de Gramont passed her. His costume and the late hour at which he arrived attracted universal attention, and the King asking him the reason of his delay, de Gramont seized the occasion in his characteristic way to tell a witty story, concluding as follows:
"À propos, Sire, I had forgotten to tell you, that to increase my ill-humour" (at the cause of his late arrival), "I was stopped, as I was getting out of my chair, by the devil of a phantom in masquerade dress, who wished by all means to persuade me that the Queen had commanded me to dance with her; and, as I excused myself with the least rudeness possible, she charged me to inquire who was to be her partner, and desired me to send him to her immediately. Your Majesty will, therefore, do well to give orders about it, for she has placed herself in ambush in a coach, to seize upon all who pass through Whitehall."
The Chevalier went on to describe the costume worn by the mask, whose appearance must indeed have been laughable; for poor Lady Muskerry, not having the least idea how a lady of quality dressed in Babylon, had adopted from a crowd of different opinions she had consulted something of each. The Chevalier's description of this fantastic unknown not only amused those who heard it, but excited the greatest curiosity, inasmuch as the Queen declared that all whom she had invited were present. They began to wonder who it could be. The King, whose sense of the ridiculous was much more mocking than Miss Hamilton's, guessed it was the Duchess of Newcastle—a woman even more absurd than Lady Muskerry. For she was afflicted with a dramatic cacoethes scribendi to such a pitch that she would only wear theatrical costumes, and kept a secretary, who, according to Walpole, was often roused in the night to register the Duchess's conceptions, "which," added this English de Gramont of a later generation, "were all of a literary kind, for her Grace left no children."