X
A SOLEMN UNDERTAKING
Our hero henceforth will occupy the centre of the stage, as a right-minded hero should do, beside him the shadowy figure of his wife gradually fading away into the background until at last quite invisible, and that of the flamboyant personage of the widow of our hero’s dead patron. Truly ironical; while Blessington lived and was an “obstacle” in the way of the course of true love there had seemed to D’Orsay to be no other way of settling his fortunes than to marry one or other of Blessington’s daughters, he cared not which. Now that the obstacle had been removed and the widow was free to be openly wooed and won, the path he had chosen to pursue appeared of those ways that had been open to him to be the most stupid. The lady who had been shackled was free; the lover who had been free was now shackled. Fortune is a humorist and her jokes are always at our expense, which makes it difficult for us to laugh with her.
Lady Blessington was clever in the choice of her physician, who prescribed company as a cure for depression of spirits. So we read in her ladyship’s Diary:—
“My old friends Mr and Mrs Mathews, and their clever son have arrived in Paris, and dined here yesterday. Mr Mathews is as entertaining as ever, and his wife as amiable and spirituelle. They are excellent as well as clever people, and their society is very agreeable. Charles Mathews, the son, is full of talent, possesses all his father’s powers of imitation, and sings comic songs of his own composition that James Smith himself might be proud to have written.”
Old and young Mathews delighted with their songs and recitations a party attended among others by the Duc and Duchesse de Guiche Madame Crawford and Count Walewski.
Later on we find Rogers and Luttrell calling upon her, and the former chatting of Byron. Lady Blessington mentions a lampoon which the great had written on the little poet, and which Byron had read to her and D’Orsay one day at Genoa.
“I thought you were one of Mr Rogers’s most intimate friends, and so all the world had reason to think, after reading your dedication of the Giaour to him.”
“Yes,” said Byron, with a laugh, “and it is our friendship that gives me the privilege of taking a liberty with him.”
“If it is thus you evince your friendship, I should be disposed to prefer your enmity.”
“Oh!” said Byron, “you could never excite this last sentiment in my heart, for you neither say nor do spiteful things.”