For years we have literally had but one salon in this city—a gathering in the evening of all the brilliant and cultivated people, both young and old, embracing the distinguished strangers. A most polished and cultivated Bostonian, a brilliant woman, was the first, in my day, to receive in this way weekly. During her life she held this salon, both here, and all through the summer in Newport. “The robe of Elijah fell upon Elisha” in an extremely talented woman of the world, who has most successfully held, and now holds, this salon, on the first day of every week during the winter, and at Newport in summer.
The mistake made by the world at large is that fashionable people are selfish, frivolous, and indifferent to the welfare of their fellow-creatures; all of which is a popular error, arising simply from a want of knowledge of the true state of things. The elegancies of fashionable life nourish and benefit art and artists; they cause the expenditure of money and its distribution; and they really prevent our people and country from settling down into a humdrum rut and becoming merely a money-making and money-saving people, with nothing to brighten up and enliven life; they foster all the fine arts; but for fashion what would become of them? They bring to the front merit of every kind; seek it in the remotest corners, where it modestly shrinks from observation, and force it into notice; adorn their houses with works of art, and themselves with all the taste and novelty they can find in any quarter of the globe, calling forth talent and ingenuity. Fashionable people cultivate and refine themselves, for fashion demands this of them. Progress is fashion’s watchword; it never stands still; it always advances, it values and appreciates beauty in woman and talent and genius in man. It is certainly always most charitable; it surrounds itself with the elegancies of life; it soars, it never crawls. I know the general belief is that all fashionable people are hollow and heartless. My experience is quite the contrary. I have found as warm, sympathetic, loving hearts in the garb of fashion as out of it. A thorough acquaintance with the world enables them to distinguish the wheat from the chaff, so that all the good work they do is done with knowledge and effect. The world could not dispense with it. Fashion selects its own votaries. You will see certain members of a family born to it, as it were, others of the same family with none of its attributes. You can give no explanation of this; “One is taken, the other left.” Such and such a man or woman are cited as having been always fashionable. The talent of and for society develops itself just as does the talent for art.
COTILLIONS IN DOORS AND OUT.
CHAPTER XIII.
Cost of Cotillion Dinners—My delicate Position—The Début of a Beautiful Blonde—Lord Roseberry’s mot—We have better Madeira than England—I am dubbed “The Autocrat of Drawing-rooms”—A Grand Domino Ball—Cruel Trick of a fair Mask—An English Lady’s Maid takes a Bath—The first Cotillion Dinners given at Newport—Out-of-Door Feasting—Dancing in the Barn.
But to return to our Cotillion Dinners. A friend thought they were impracticable on account of the expense, but I had remembered talking to the proprietor of the famous Restaurant Phillipe in Paris, as to the cost of a dinner, he assuring me that its cost depended entirely on what he called les primeurs, i.e. things out of season, and said that he could give me, for a napoleon a head, an excellent dinner, if I would leave out les primeurs. Including them, the same dinner would cost three napoleons. “I can give you, for instance,” he said, “a filet de bœuf aux ceps at half the cost of a filet aux truffes, and so on, through the dinner, can reduce the expense.” Submitting all this to my friend Delmonico, I suggested a similar inexpensive dinner, and figured the whole expense down until I reduced the cost of a cotillion dinner for seventy-five or a hundred people to ten dollars each person, music and every expense included. Calling on my friends, they seconded me, and we then had a winter of successful cotillion dinners. It was no easy task, however. How I was beset by the men to give them the women of their choice to take in to dinner! and in turn by the ladies not to inflict on them an uncongenial partner. The largest of these dinners, consisting of over a hundred people, we gave at Delmonico’s, corner of Fifth Avenue and Fourteenth Street, in the large ball-room. The table was in the shape of a horseshoe. I stood at the door of the salon, naming to each man the lady he was to take in to dinner, and well remember one of them positively refusing to accept and take in a lady assigned to him; and she, just entering, heard the dispute, and, in consequence, would never again attend one of these dinners. Sitting at the head of the table, with the two young and beautiful women who were then the grandes dames of that time, one on either side of me, we had opposite to us, on the other side of the narrow, horseshoe table, a young blonde bride, who had just entered society. I well remember the criticisms these grand ladies made of and about her. The one, turning to me, said, “And this is your lovely blonde, the handsomest blonde in America!” The other, the best judge of her sex that I have ever seen, then cast her horoscope, saying, “I consider her as beautiful a blonde as I have ever seen. That woman, be assured, will have a brilliant career. Such women are rare.” These words were prophetic, for that beautiful bride, crossing the ocean in her husband’s yacht, wholly and solely by her beauty gained for her husband and herself a brilliant position in London society. Turning to me, the lady who had made this remark asked me how she herself looked. I replied, “Like Venus rising from the sea.” My serenity was here disturbed by finding that one of the ladies, disliking her next neighbor, as soon as she discovered by the card who it was, had quietly made an exchange of cards, depriving a young gallant of the seat he most coveted, and for which he had long and earnestly prayed. Of course, I was called to explain, and quiet the disturbed waters. The gentleman was furious, and threatened dire destruction to the culprit. I took in the situation, and protected the fair lady by sacrificing the waiter. After the ladies left the table, at these dinners, the gentlemen were given time to smoke a cigar and take their coffee. On this occasion, the Earl of Roseberry was a guest. Whilst smoking and commenting on the dinner, he said to me, “You Americans have made a mistake; your emblematic bird should have been a canvasback, not an eagle.”
It was either to this distinguished man or the Earl of Cork, at one of these after-dinner conversations, that I held forth on the treatment of venison, asserting that here, we always serve the saddle of venison, whilst in England they give the haunch. And when they send it off to a friend, they box it up in a long narrow box, much resembling a coffin. The reason for this was given me,—that their dinners were larger than ours, and there was not enough on a saddle for an English dinner. Again, I called attention to the fact that here we eat the tenderloin steak, there they eat the rump steak, which we give to our servants. The reason for this, I was told, was that they killed their cattle younger than we killed ours, and did not work those intended for beef. On Madeira, I stated, “we had them,” for, I said, “You have none to liken unto ours”; though later on, at another dinner, when I made this assertion, the Duke of Beaufort took me up on this point, and insisted upon it that in many of the old country houses in England they had excellent Madeira.
The following anonymous lines on this dinner were sent to me the day afterwards: