Over £100,000 of debts we know he paid, and still he owed very much. For at least two years previous to his final departure from England he went in constant dread of arrest at the instigation of sordid persons, who had not sufficient understanding of the fact that it was an honour to them to help in the support of a great man. There are too many petty-minded people in the world! Just heavens! That a man of D’Orsay’s calibre should be confined to his house and grounds all the days of the week save Sunday, excepting that he could creep forth under cover of darkness! That the Prince of the Dandies should go in danger of the vile clutch of a sinister myrmidon of the law and of the degradation of a sponging-house.
In 1845 D’Orsay apparently realised that his pecuniary condition was irreparable, and sought in vain for means of escape. He prepared a schedule of his liabilities, the total sum of his indebtedness amounting to £107,000, not including a number of debts to private friends, which made an additional sum of £13,000. It was even contemplated that he should go through the Court of Bankruptcy, but a difficulty was found in the fact that it could not be proved that he was a commercial man or an agriculturalist. He only sowed wild oats.
The situation so pressed upon him, that he allowed himself for a time to become the prey of impostors, who declared that they had achieved what the alchemists of old had so long looked for in vain, the conversion of the baser metals into gold!
From an unveracious chronicle we quote a passage which is veracious:—
“Now, among the shyest birds that ever ducked from a missile of the law was, without an exception the Marquis d’Horsay (D’Orsay). His maxim had long been ‘catch me who can;’ at the same time, acting up to the patent-safety rule of ‘prevention being so much better than cure,’ he afforded no facilities whatever of being hobbled in the chase. At bay he kept the yelping pack, and within the good, stout, rich walls of his covert he maintained both a pleasant and a secure retreat from the dangers besetting him. He now no longer ventured to frame himself, as it were, in his cab, and exhibit his colours and attractions to the curious crowds, except on that privileged day—when even the debtor is at liberty to rest—the seventh of the week.[26] Then, indeed, he issued forth, decked as of old, and, like a bird free from the confines of his cage, made the most of the brief hours of his freedom.
“Every art, every manœuvre within the subtle and almost inexhaustible resources of those apt functionaries of the law who are ever on the alert to deprive the subject of his liberty, let him be never so chary of the preservation of it, had been put in force to trap our hero; but hitherto in vain. Mr Sloughman,[27] truly, arrived within a short journey of accomplishing this much-desired end; still he was frustrated, and now among the ranks of bums there was a cloud which damped their hopes and mildewed their energies. The Marquis was not to be grabbed, and they knew it. With flagging spirits the attempts were renewed over and over again. Bribes and offers of rewards were extended liberally to his menials for their traitorous assistance in obtaining the design, but they had been too well selected, and knew their own interests depended on no such frail or fleeting benefits. False messengers in all garbs and disguises, upon all kinds of errands and excuses, applied for admission and interviews. Even—yes, even the fair sex were at last made not bearers of Love’s despatches, but conveyancers of stern writs, notices of declarations, trials, and suchlike means to the end and breaking up of a man of fashion. Still the Marquis was proof against all these attacks, let them come in what shape they would.”
That may be fancy, but it is close akin to fact.
In The English Spy we read of the crowd in Hyde Park of a Sunday afternoon at the fashionable hour:—
“The low-bred, vulgar, Sunday throng,
Who dine at two, are ranged along