Forster and Dickens were together at Gore House early in 1848, when Madden tells us “there was a remarkable display of D’Orsay’s peculiar ingenuity and successful tact in drawing out the oddities or absurdities of eccentric or ridiculous personages—mystifying them with a grave aspect, and imposing on their vanity by apparently accidental references of a gratulatory description to some favourite hobby or exploit, exaggerated merit or importance of the individual to be made sport of for the Philistines of the fashionable circle.” Bear-baiting was succeeded in those polite days by bore-baiting. Anent this particular evening, one of those present wrote to Lady Blessington:—
“Count d’Orsay may well speak of our evening being a happy one, to whose happiness he contributed so largely. It would be absurd, if one did not know it to be true, to hear D⸺ (Dickens?) talk as he has done ever since of Count d’Orsay’s power of drawing out always the best elements around him, and of miraculously putting out the worst. Certainly I never saw it so marvellously exhibited as on the night in question. I shall think of him hereafter unceasingly, with the two guests that sat on either side of him that night.”
It was but fitting that the Prince of Dandies and the future Poet Laureate should come together. Tennyson writes:—“Count d’Orsay is a friend of mine, co-godfather to Dickens’ child with me.” This was Dickens’ sixth child and fourth son, christened Alfred Tennyson after his godfathers.
D’Orsay was not so unkind as to neglect his native country entirely, and we find him now and again running over to Paris.
As pendants to the Disraeli portrait of D’Orsay, here are two others, one from a man’s hand, the other from a woman’s.
Chesterfield House was the headquarters of a racing set, and was gossiped about as also the centre of some heavy gambling, probably untruly so.
The Honourable F. Leveson Gore in Bygone Years expresses himself bluntly: “I used to wonder that Lady Chesterfield admitted into her house that good-for-nothing fellow, Count d’Orsay. He was handsome, clever and amusing, and I am aware that in the eyes of some people such qualities cover a multitude of sins. But his record was a bad one. No Frenchman would speak to him because he had left the French army at the breaking out of the war between his own country and Spain, in order to go to Italy with Lord and Lady Blessington, and his conduct with regard to his marriage was infamous.” How uncharitable is the judgment of a virtuous world. Reading on we find that the writer holds that Lady Blessington induced D’Orsay “entirely to neglect his young wife. She, moreover, endeavoured to undermine her faith and her morals by getting her to read books calculated to do so, and what was still worse, she promoted the advances of other men, who made up to this inexperienced and beautiful young woman. Her life at Gore House[32] became at last so intolerable that she fled from it never to return.”
Mr Leveson Gore also calls Lady Harriet the only daughter of Lord Blessington, which is really not doing his lordship justice.
It is much more helpful, however, to have the opinion of a keen, shrewd woman; one who cannot have been disposed to like D’Orsay, yet who seems, as did her husband, to have a soft place in her heart for him.
Jane Welsh Carlyle was a capital hand at a pen portrait; here is what she has to say of D’Orsay:—