(By D’Orsay)
[TO FACE PAGE 164
The following, written in January 1845, must be quoted in full, and read with the remembrance to the fore that Lady Blessington posed in conversation and in print as having been on terms of intimate friendship with Byron. “… You have, I daresay, heard that your friend Count d’Orsay has within the last two years taken to painting, and such has been the rapidity of his progress, that he has left many competitors, who have been for fifteen years painters, far behind.
“Dissatisfied with all the portraits that have been painted of Lord Byron, none of which render justice to the intellectual beauty of his noble head, Count d’Orsay, at my request, has made a portrait of our great poet, and it has been pronounced by Sir John Cam Hobhouse, and all who remember Lord Byron, to be the best likeness of him ever painted! The picture possesses all the noble intelligence and fine character of the poet’s face, and will, I am sure, delight you when you see it. We have had it engraved, and when the plate is finished, a print will be sent to you. It will be interesting, chère et aimable amie, to have a portrait of our great poet, from a painting by one who so truly esteems you: for you have not a truer friend than Count d’Orsay, unless it be me. How I wish you were here to see the picture! It is an age since we met, and I assure you we all feel this long separation as a great privation. I shall be greatly disappointed if you are not as delighted with the engraving as I am, for to me it seems the very image of Byron.”
“Our great poet” would have torn the hair of his noble head if he had read this quaint production. La Guiccioli did approve the engraving to the contentment of the artist.
Shee tells us that the Countess on her visits to Gore House was overwhelmed by her more showy hostess, and by her sister, the Countess Saint Marceau, the latter forming a fine foil to the more exuberant Lady Blessington, being slight, short, small-featured, but extremely pretty and piquant, and, as Madden tells us, “always courted and complimented in society, and coquetted with by gentlemen of a certain age, by humourists in single blessedness, especially like Gell, and by old married bachelors like Landor.”
Landor visited Lady Blessington in 1837; he writes to Forster: “I shall be at Gore House on Monday, pray come in the evening. I told Lady Blessington I should not let any of her court stand at all in my way. When I am tired of them, I leave them.”
It is very strong proof of the fascination exercised by D’Orsay that such men as Landor, Carlyle and Forster, each one of whom we would think impervious to his charms, should have succumbed to them.
Landor’s enslavement by Lady Blessington or her sister is understandable, but what attracted him in D’Orsay? Chorley gives us a glimpse of Landor dining at Gore House when its master was absent: “Yesterday evening, I had a very rare treat—a dinner at Kensington tête-à-tête with Lady Blessington and Mr Landor; she talked her best, brilliant and kindly, and without that touch of self-consciousness which she sometimes displays when worked up to it by flatterers and gay companions. Landor, as usual, the very finest man’s head I have ever seen, and with all his Johnsonian disposition to tyrannise and lay down the law in his talk, restrained and refined by an old-world courtesy and deference to his bright hostess, for which chivalry is the only right word.”
Landor conceived quite an affection for D’Orsay; perhaps at heart they both were dandies? Here is a pleasant bit of chaff from Landor, written to Lady Blessington: “By living at Clifton, I am grown as rich as Rothschild; and if Count d’Orsay could see me in my new coat, he would not write me so pressingly to come up to London. It would breed ill-blood between us—half plague, half cholera. He would say—‘I wish the fellow had his red forehead again—the deuce might powder it for me.’ However, as I go out very little, I shall not divide the world with him.”