“Gore House last night was unusually brilliant. Lady Blessington has the art of collecting around her all that is best worth knowing in the male society of London. There were Cabinet Ministers, diplomats, poets, painters, and politicians, all assembled together.… She has the peculiar and most unusual talent of keeping the conversation in a numerous circle general, and of preventing her guests from dividing into little selfish pelotons. With a tact unsurpassed, she contrives to draw out even the most modest tyro from his shell of reserve, and, by appearing to take an interest in his opinion, gives him the courage to express it. All her visitors seem, by some hidden influence, to find their level, yet they leave her house satisfied with themselves.”
Gore House
(From a Water-colour Drawing by T. H. Shepherd)
[TO FACE PAGE 160
But Madden, who was more intimate with her than perhaps anyone else save D’Orsay, gives us a peep behind the mask of gaiety. He declares that there was no real happiness in those Gore House days; the skeletons in their cupboards were rattling their bones. Lady Blessington’s merriment had no longer the sparkle of genuine vivacity, was no longer unforced. Cares and troubles grew upon her; her “conversation generally was no longer of that gay, enlivening, cheerful character, abounding in drollery and humour, which made the great charm of her réunions in the Villa Belvedere, and in a minor degree in Seamore Place.”
This is supported by Bulwer in a letter to Albany Fonblanque in September 1837: “I had a melancholyish letter from Lady Blessington the other day. It always seems to me as if D’Orsay’s blague was too much for her. People who live with those too high-spirited for them always appear to me to get the life sucked out of them. The sun drinks up the dews.” So does the passage of years. Lady Blessington was now fading. The background of her life had grown grey; the passage of years was impairing her beauty; money matters troubled her sorely, and it cannot have added to the joy of life to know that her love and her charms no longer satisfied all the requirements of her lover. Banishment from the society of almost every respectable woman must also have grated upon her who was born to reign over society.
As for D’Orsay, his existence was one perpetual gallop after pleasure and to escape the clutches of duns and their myrmidons. As far back as his arrival in England he had been arrested on account of a debt of a mere £300 to his Paris bootmaker, M’Henry, who, however, did not enforce imprisonment, but allowed the bill to run on for several years. The mere fact of D’Orsay being his patron brought him the custom of all the exquisites of Paris.
It was a magnificent misery for “the gorgeous” Lady Blessington; but D’Orsay possessed a heart and spirit above trifles; the conqueror of to-day does not discount his present pleasure by any foreboding of defeat to-morrow. D’Orsay had conquered London society, almost all the male members of it and not a few of its female; with his wit and his good looks he could gain for love what only money could obtain for less favoured rivals.
Of the fair, frail ones who were to be met with at Gore House one of the most distinguished, if not for good looks, at any rate for the good fortune of having had a famous lover, was the Countess Guiccioli. Shee met her there in the spring of 1837, and was sorely disappointed. He considered her a “fubsy woman,” without youth, beauty or grace; short, thick-set, lacking in style: “She sang several Italian airs to her own accompaniment, in a very pretentious manner, and her voice is loud and somewhat harsh.” It is told of her that once at a great house, when all were alert to hear the song to which she was playing the introduction, she suddenly clasped her—waist, exclaiming—