D'Orsay; or, The complete dandy

by W. Teignmouth Shore

For what part shall we consider Lord Blessington as cast? Villain or fool? We incline to the latter: it takes a fairly astute man to play the villain with success; moreover, no man smiles and smiles and is a villain without motive for his villainy—at least not in real life. To complete our company we have two light comedians, Marianne Power, pretty and ever ready with a smile, and Mathews, always ready to provide amusing entertainment. For stage crowd, diplomatists, antiquarians, artists, noblemen, servants and so forth:—

Sir William Gell, whom we have met, with pleasure; an Hon. R. Grosvenor, whom Lady Blessington declared “the liveliest Englishman I have ever seen,” and considered that his gaiety sat very gracefully upon him; queens of beauty, too, such as the Duchess di Forli, “with hair dark as the raven’s wing, and lustrous eyes of nearly as deep a hue, and her lips as crimson as the flower of the pomegranate”; the Princess Centolla, who “might furnish a faultless model for a Hebe, she is so fair, so youthful, and so exquisitely beautiful”; an Hanoverian soldier of fortune, who came down to fight in Sicily and captured the heart and wealth of the Princess Bultera and her title too; the lively, diminutive, aged Thomas James Mathias, writer of that pungent satire upon authors, Pursuits of Literature, whose denial of his being the only begetter of it did not meet with credence. He was a man with peculiarities, one of which was the frequent use of the exclamation, “God bless my soul!” Another was his singularly accurate memory for dates connected with the eating of any special dish. It was fortunate for him that motor-cars were not of his day, for he was extremely nervous when crossing the street. He appears also to have been curiously simple. One day while dining in a café a shower of rain came down heavily, and Sir William Gell remarked to Mathias that it was raining cats and dogs. On the instant, as luck would have it, a dog ran in at one door and a cat at the other. “God bless my soul,” said Mathias, solemnly, “so it does! so it does! Who would have believed it!”

There was Sir William Drummond, scholar and diplomatist, minister-plenipotentiary to Naples, whose brilliant conversation was a mixture of pedantry illuminated by flashes of imagination; the Archbishop of Tarentum, a typical father of the Roman Church, “his face, peculiarly handsome, is sicklied o’er with the pale hue of thought; his eyes are of the darkest brown, but soft, and full of sensibility, like those of a woman. His hair is white as snow, and contrasts well with the black silk calotte that crowns the top of his head. His figure is attenuated and bowed by age, and his limbs are small and delicate…;” the astronomer Piazzi, discoverer of the planet Ceres; General the Duc di’ Rocco Romano, “the very personification of a preux chevalier; brave in arms, and gentle and courteous in society”; Lord Dudley, eccentric as is easily pardoned in a peer with an income of £40,000, with his unfortunate habit of expressing aloud his opinion, good or bad, of those with whom he conversed; James Milligan, the antiquary, to whom it was mere waste of time to submit a forgery as a genuine antique; Casimir de la Vigne, who recited his unpublished ‘Columbus’ at the Palazzo.

Fine company, of which but a few have been named; a liberal education in themselves to a young man on his way through a world where the proper study of mankind is man—and woman.

In junketings and journeyings the days sped by very merrily. Blessington himself was not fond of walking and was an enemy to sight-seeing of all kinds, so did not often join in the expeditions. Moreover, he was not an early riser, usually breakfasting in bed, and we cannot imagine that his company was very greatly missed; four is company, five is a crowd. The expeditionary party, therefore, consisted of Lady Blessington and D’Orsay, Marianne Power and Mathews; to which various guests were added as occasion and convenience dictated.

The romantic beauty of the gardens of the Palazzo appealed to at any rate some of the members of the household. In the evening they would resort to the charming Pavilion at the end of the terrace, and there listen to the playing and singing of the servants, some of whom proved to be delectable masters of music. There was, too, an open-air theatre in the grounds; the stage of springy turf, the proscenium formed of trees and shrubs, the seats of marble, backed by hedges of trimmed box and ilex. This shady playhouse the company frequented in the heat of the day; fruits and iced drinks were served. A pleasant earthly paradise, wherein the tempting of Adam by Eve was highly civilised—in its externals.

There were dinners on board the Bolivar, in the cabin wherein, it is said, Byron wrote much of “Don Juan”; D’Orsay must have felt quite in his element there.

In March 1825, the Palazzo Belvedere was deserted for the Villa Gallo at Capo di Monte, a less palatial but more comfortable abode, also possessing grounds of great beauty.

It was not until February 1826 that our party left Naples, where they had so greatly enjoyed themselves, returning to Rome, where they remained for a few weeks, going thence in April to Florence and in December being once again in Genoa. In Florence it may be noted that the Blessingtons and D’Orsay met Landor, with whom they quickly came to be upon terms of friendship.