“This is a pleasant avowal to me, I thought; but still I could not refrain from admitting that she was right. Then again, for a third time, the mental machinery of both went to work in silence, until that of the lady reached a ne plus ultra of admiration, and she ejaculated in an ecstasy: ‘Indeed, he is the nicest man that can possibly be!’”
The Kenney mentioned by Macready must have been James, who as the author of Raising the Wind, and of Sweethearts and Wives, was a singularly appropriate friend for the impecunious, amorous D’Orsay.
XVI
STARS
Lady Blessington reported that in June 1838, London was “insupportable. The streets and the Park crowded to suffocation, and all the people gone mad”; but in the same month Dizzy writes in a different key: “We had a very agreeable party at D’Orsay’s yesterday. Zichy, who has cut out even Esterhazy, having two jackets; one of diamonds more brilliant than E.’s, and another which he wore at the drawing-room yesterday of turquoises. This makes the greatest sensation of the two.… Then there was the Duke of Ossuna, a young man, but a grandee of the highest grade.… He is a great dandy and looks like Philip II., but though the only living descendant of the Borgias, he has the reputation of being very amiable. When he was last at Paris he attended a representation of Victor Hugo’s Lucrezia Borgia. She says in one of the scenes: ‘Great crimes are in our blood.’ All his friends looked at him with an expression of fear; ‘But the blood has degenerated,’ he said, ‘for I have committed only weaknesses.’ Then there was the real Prince Poniatowsky, also young and with a most brilliant star. Then came Kissiloffs and Strogonoffs, ‘and other offs and ons,’ and de Belancour, a very agreeable person. Lyndhurst, Gardner, Bulwer and myself completed the party.”
D’Ossuna died while quite a young man and was succeeded by his brother, also a friend of D’Orsay.
This must have been a curiously polyglot gathering, and the noble company of dandies was brilliantly represented by D’Orsay, Bulwer and Dizzy, not to mention Zichy of the turquoise jacket.