“She was a fine and somewhat full-blown blonde,
Desirable, distinguished, celebrated
For several winters in the grand grand monde.
I’d rather not say what might be related
Of her exploits, for this were ticklish ground.…”
At a later date we find Byron describing the Count to Tom Moore as one “who has all the air of a cupidon déchainé, and is one of the few specimens I have ever seen of our ideal of a Frenchman before the Revolution.”
Also at that later date (1823), when he met D’Orsay at Genoa with the Blessingtons, Byron was lent by Blessington a journal which the Count had written during this first visit of his to London. When returning it, he writes, on 5th April:—
“My Dear Lord,—How is your gout? or rather how are you? I return the Count d’Orsay’s journal, which is a very extraordinary production, and of a most melancholy truth in all that regards high life in England. I know, or knew personally, most of the personages and societies which he describes; and after reading his remarks, have the sensation fresh upon me as if I had seen them yesterday. I would, however, plead in behalf of some few exceptions, which I will mention by and bye. The most singular thing is, how he should have penetrated not the facts, but the mystery of English ennui, at two-and-twenty.[2] I was about the same age when I made the same discovery, in almost precisely the same circles—for there is scarcely a person whom I did not see nightly or daily, and was acquainted more or less intimately with most of them—but I never could have discovered it so well, Il faut être Français to effect this. But he ought also to have seen the country during the hunting season, with ‘a select party of distinguished guests,’ as the papers term it. He ought to have seen the gentlemen after dinner (on the hunting days), and the soirée ensuing thereupon—and the women looking as if they had hunted, or rather been hunted; and I could have wished that he had been at a dinner in town, which I recollect at Lord Cowper’s—small, but select, and composed of the most amusing people.… Altogether, your friend’s journal is a very formidable production. Alas! our dearly-beloved countrymen have only discovered that they are tired, and not that they are tiresome; and I suspect that the communication of the latter unpleasant verity will not be better received than truths usually are. I have read the whole with great attention and instruction—I am too good a patriot to say pleasure—at least I won’t say so, whatever I may think.… I beg that you will thank the young philosopher.…”
A few days later—how pleasing it is to find one great writer openly admiring another and a younger!—Byron writes to D’Orsay himself:—
“My Dear Count d’Orsay (if you will permit me to address you so familiarly)—you should be content with writing in your own language, like Grammont, and succeeding in London as nobody has succeeded since the days of Charles the Second, and the records of Antonio Hamilton, without deviating into our barbarous language—which you understand and write, however, much better than it deserves. ‘My approbation,’ as you are pleased to term it, was very sincere, but perhaps not very impartial; for, though I love my country, I do not love my countrymen—at least, such as they now are. And besides the seduction of talent and wit in your work, I fear that to me there was the attraction of vengeance. I have seen and felt much of what you have described so well … the portraits are so like that I cannot but admire the painter no less than his performance. But I am sorry for you; for if you are so well acquainted with life at your age, what will become of you when the illusion is still more dissipated?”