In April 1849, D’Orsay writes to Dr Quin from Paris:—
“38 Rue de la Ville l’Eveque.
“Mon bon Quin,—J’ai eu un départ imprévu heureusement, que je suis safe de ce côté. Il a fallu que je me décide de partir à 3 hrs de la nuit pour ne pas manquer le Dimanche. Ces dames vous racontent qu’une de mes prèmieres pensées ici ont été pour vous. Vous le voyez par ce peu de mots—aimez moi toujours de loin, car je vous aimais bien de près.—Votre meilleur ami,
“Alfred.”
The death of Lady Blessington was a blow to him from which he never really recovered. Writing to Madden from Chambourcy on 12th July, Miss Power says:—
“Count d’Orsay would himself have answered your letter, but had not the nerve or the heart to do so; although the subject occupies his mind night and day, he cannot speak of it but to those who have been his fellow-sufferers. It is like an image ever floating before his eyes, which he has got, as it were, used to look upon, but which he cannot yet bear to grasp and feel that it is real. Much as she was to us, we cannot but feel that to him she was all; the centre of his existence, round which his recollections, thoughts, hopes and plans turned, and just at the moment she was about to commence a new mode of life, one that promised a rest from the occupation and anxieties that had for some years fallen to her share, death deprived us of her.”
The first visit that he paid to her tomb had a heart-breaking effect upon him; at one moment he would be stunned, at another driven to frenzy by his grief. What thoughts of past times must have assailed him: of his first meeting with her in London so many years ago; of the long days and nights of delight in Italy; of his marriage, perchance; of Seamore Place, of Gore House; of hours of merriment and of sorrow; of her tried faithfulness to him; of his occasional faithlessness. That his love for her survived even the advance of years we cannot doubt; but the love of man is different far from the love of woman.
In a letter, already partly quoted, to Lane, D’Orsay says, writing early in 1850:—
“Poor Miss Power is very much affected. There is no consolation to offer. The only one that I can imagine, is to think continually of the person lost, and to make oneself more miserable by thinking. It is, morally speaking, an homœopathic treatment, and the only one which can give some relief. You cannot form an idea of the soulagement that I found, in occupying myself in the country (at Chambourcy) in building the monument which I have erected to dear Lady Blessington’s memory. I made it so solid and so fine, that I felt all the time that death was the reality and life only the dream of all around me. When I hear anyone making projects for the future, I laugh, feeling as I do now, that we may to-morrow, without five minutes’ notice, have to follow those we regret. I am prepared for that, with a satisfactory resignation.”
D’Orsay wrote to Forster on April 23rd, 1850:—