Madame du Barry, with her chaperon, advanced to where the king stood between their graces, the Ducs of Richelieu and Aigullon. The formal words were spoken, and Madame du Barry sank to the ground before the king in a profound curtsy. He raised her right hand courteously, his lips twitching with laughter….She was decked in jewels, priced at nineteen thousand dollars, the gift of the king. She was garbed in one of the triumphant gowns that the women of the hour termed a "fighting dress." So radiant an apparition was she, so dazzling at the first minute of surprise, that even her enemies could not libel her beauty. After she was presented to the king, she was duly presented to Mesdames, to the Dauphin, to the Children of France.
Madame du Barry, with her chaperon, advanced to where the king stood between their graces, the Ducs of Richelieu and Aigullon. The formal words were spoken, and Madame du Barry sank to the ground before the king in a profound curtsy. He raised her right hand courteously, his lips twitching with laughter….
She was decked in jewels, priced at nineteen thousand dollars, the gift of the king. She was garbed in one of the triumphant gowns that the women of the hour termed a "fighting dress." So radiant an apparition was she, so dazzling at the first minute of surprise, that even her enemies could not libel her beauty. After she was presented to the king, she was duly presented to Mesdames, to the Dauphin, to the Children of France.
Marie had won. For the next five years she was the real Queen of France. And, during that time, she cost the French nation, in cold cash, something over seven million dollars.
She was not at all on the style of the Pompadour, who had yearned to meddle in politics. Marie cared nothing for politics, except to help out her army of friends and dependents. She had no ambitions. She had not even craved on her own account to be the king'smaitresse en titre. All she wanted was to have a good time. And she had it. The pleasure was all hers. The French people did the paying; until, years later, they exacted bloody settlement of the score.
Pompadour had worn out her life trying to "amuse the unamusable," to find novelties that would entertain the king. Marie did nothing of the sort. Instead, she demanded that the king amuse her. Pompadour had sought to sway the destinies of nations. Marie was quite happy if she could spend the revenues of her own nation.
She treated Louis in a way that caused the court to gasp with horror. She scolded him shrilly; petted him, in public, as if he had been her peasant spouse; and always addressed him as "France." He enjoyed it. It was a novelty.
Once, when she was giving an informal breakfast with a dozen or more nobles as guests, she ordered the king to make the coffee. Amused, he obeyed. She took one sip of the royal-brewed beverage, then tossed the cup into the fireplace, exclaiming:
"France, your coffee is as insipid as your talk!"
All political matters she turned over to d'Aiguillon, who was the clique's spokesman. To please him, and to "get even" for old scores, she caused the ruin of Choiseul.
The mode of Choiseul's downfall is interesting as a side light on court intrigue. The clique taught Marie how to poison the king's ever-suspicious mind against the prime minister, and she did so with great success. Thanks to her, Louis was held to believe that Choiseul, feeling his power over the monarch slipping, was planning a war scare with Spain, so that he could prove his seeming worth to the kingdom of France by dispelling the cloud.
The clique—having access, through a spy, to all of Choiseul's correspondence—resorted to a fairly ingenious trick. At Marie's suggestion, Choiseul's secretary was summoned to the palace. He was in the clique's pay. Before the king, he was questioned as to what he knew about Choiseul's affairs.
The man, with an air of mystery, answered that he knew nothing of them, but that he would give his majesty one hint—let the king request Choiseul to write a letter to Spain, assuring that nation of France's peaceful intent. Should Choiseul do so without comment, it would show he was not plotting a war scare, as charged. But should he hesitate—well, what could that prove, instead?
The plotters already knew that Choiseul had that very day sent a letter to Spain, proposing the mutual signing of a declaration of peace between the nations. The king requested his minister to send a letter that was almost identical with the one he had already written and dispatched. Naturally Choiseul hesitated. And the work was done.
Yet, out of careless good nature—she would not have bothered to harm anybody, politically or otherwise, if she had had her own way—Marie insisted that the king settle a liberal pension on the fallen minister; this despite the fact that Choiseul and his sister, Madame de Grammont, had both worked with all their might and main to block her rise.
She was good, too—as they all were—to her mother. She presented the horrible old woman with two or three estates and a generous income. She did the same for her titular husband, Guillaume, Comte du Barry. Her lightest fancy was enough to make or wreck any Frenchman. Everybody, high or low, was at her mercy. People of the bluest blood vied for chances to win her favor.
The Chevalier de la Morliere dedicated his book on Fatalism to her. The Duc de Tresmes, calling on her, sent in a note: "The monkey of Madame la Comtesse begs an audience." The Dauphin—afterward Louis XVI.—and Marie Antoinette, the Dauphiness, were forced to abase themselves before this vulgarian woman whom they loathed. She reigned supreme.
Extravagant as Pompadour had been, Marie was tenfold more so. She not only made the king gratify her every crazy whim, but she spent much time inventing crazy whims for him to gratify. If anything on sale was costly enough, she wanted it, whether it was pretty or hideous. All Marie demanded was that the article should be beyond the reach of any one else. In consequence, people who wanted to please her used to shower her with gifts more noteworthy for cost and for unusualness than for beauty. And one of these gifts chanced to be a jet-black and quaintly deformed ten-year-old slave boy, from Bengal. The slave's native name was unpronounceable, and the Prince of Conti—who had bought him from a sea captain and presented him to Marie—renamed him Louis Zamore.
Marie was delighted with the boy—as soon as she heard the price paid for him, and that he was the only one of his species in France. She dressed him in outlandish Eastern garb, and she used to tease him into screeching rages, as a mischievous child might tease a monkey. The slave child grew to detest his lovely owner. Remember Louis Zamore, please. He will come back into the story.
Here is a correct, but incomplete, list of Marie's personal expenditures during the five years of her reign as brevet queen of France:
To goldsmiths and jewelers, four Hundred and twenty-four thousand dollars; to merchants of silks, laces, linens, millinery, one hundred and forty-seven thousand five hundred dollars; for furniture, pictures, vases, et cetera, twenty-three thousand five hundred dollars; to gilders, sculptors, workers in marble, seventy-five thousand dollars. On her estate at Luciennes—whose chateau was built in three months by the architect Ledoux, whom she thrust into the Academy for doing it—she spent sixty-five thousand dollars.
To goldsmiths and jewelers, four Hundred and twenty-four thousand dollars; to merchants of silks, laces, linens, millinery, one hundred and forty-seven thousand five hundred dollars; for furniture, pictures, vases, et cetera, twenty-three thousand five hundred dollars; to gilders, sculptors, workers in marble, seventy-five thousand dollars. On her estate at Luciennes—whose chateau was built in three months by the architect Ledoux, whom she thrust into the Academy for doing it—she spent sixty-five thousand dollars.
ZThe heirs of one firm of creditors were, as late as 1836, still claiming the sum of one hundred and thirty thousand dollars from her estate. She had "state dresses, hooped dresses, dresses surla consideration, robes de toilette;" dresses costing two hundred dollars, four hundred dollars, six hundred dollars, and one thousand dollars; dresses with a base of silver strewn with clusters of feathers; dresses striped with big bars of gold; mosaic dresses shot with gold and adorned with myrtle; and riding habits of white Indian silk that cost twelve hundred dollars.
She had dresses whose elaborate embroidery alone cost twenty-one hundred dollars. Her dressing gowns had lace on them worth five hundred dollars and eight hundred dollars. She had cuffs of lace costing one hundred and twenty-five dollars, point-lace caps valued at three hundred dollars, andpoint Argentancostumes at eighteen hundred dollars. She ordered gold ornaments and trinkets of all sorts galore. Roettiers, the goldsmith, received an order from her for a toilet set of solid gold—for which she had a sudden whim. The government advanced twelve thousand ounces of gold for it.
Boehmer, the Paris jeweler, knowing of her love for ultra-costly things, made up for her a huge diamond necklace, of a heterogeneous mass of many-carat diamonds, arranged with regard to show and wholly without a thought of good taste. The necklace was so big and so expensive that Marie declared at once she must have it. Louis willingly consented to buy it for her; but he died before the purchase was made, and Boehmer was left with the ugly treasure loop on his hands. Long afterward he tried to sell it to Marie Antoinette. And from that transaction rose the mystery of "The Queen's Necklace," which did much to hasten the French Revolution.
In the spring of 1774, as King Louis and Marie were driving toward Versailles, they saw a pretty girl in a wayside field, gathering grass for her cow. Louis greeted the girl with a fatherly smile. The girl looked back at him with perfect indifference.
Piqued at such unwonted contempt for his royal self, the king got out of his carriage, waddled across to where the girl stood, and kissed her. The reason she had seemed indifferent was because she was dazed. The reason she was dazed was that she was in the early stages of smallpox.
Louis caught the infection and died a few days later.
The first act of Louis XVI.—the king's grandson and successor—was to order Marie to a convent. Later he softened the decree by allowing her to live at Luciennes, or anywhere else outside a ten-mile radius from Paris.
Then it was that the fallen favorite met Cosse once more. And their old-time love story recommenced, this time on a less platonic footing. She kept her title of "Comtesse," and had enough money—as she paid few of her debts—to live in luxury; still beautiful, still loved, still moderately young.
The Revolution burst forth. Marie enrolled herself as a stanch loyalist. Hearing that the king and queen were pressed for funds, she wrote to Marie Antoinette:
Luciennes is yours, madame. All that I possess comes to me from the royal family; I am too grateful ever to forget it. The late king, with a sort of presentiment, forced me to accept a thousand precious objects. I have had the honor of making you an inventory of these treasures—I offer them to you with eagerness. You have so many expenses to meet, and benefits without number to bestow. Permit me, I entreat you, to render unto Cæsar that which is Cæsar's.
Luciennes is yours, madame. All that I possess comes to me from the royal family; I am too grateful ever to forget it. The late king, with a sort of presentiment, forced me to accept a thousand precious objects. I have had the honor of making you an inventory of these treasures—I offer them to you with eagerness. You have so many expenses to meet, and benefits without number to bestow. Permit me, I entreat you, to render unto Cæsar that which is Cæsar's.
When the king and queen were beheaded, she secretly wore black for them. Also, she made a trip to England, where she tried to sell some of her jewels to help the royalist cause. All these things were duly repeated to the revolutionary government by Louis Zamore, her Bengalese servant.
One evening she was expecting a visit from Cosse. But midnight came, and he had not appeared.
"Go down the road," she ordered Zamore, who had just returned from an errand to Paris, "and see if you can catch sight of him."
"I can show him to you—or part of him—without troubling to do that," retorted Zamore, with sudden insolence.
Whipping one hand from behind his back, he tossed on the floor at Marie's feet the head of her lover. Cosse had been guillotined that day. Zamore, in return for certain information to the government, had received the head as a gift.
The information he had given led to Marie's arrest on the following charges:
"Having wasted the treasures of the state, conspiring with the enemies of the Republic, and having, in London, worn mourning for the late King."
Marie was sentenced to death, on December 7, 1793, and was beheaded the same day. Almost alone of all the Frenchwomen thus put to death, she turned coward at the last. The strain of peasant blood came to the fore. And where aristocrats rode smiling to the scaffold, Marie du Barry behaved like a panic-stricken child. She fell on her knees and begged for her life. She told where every article of value she possessed was buried, in her garden. If she thought thus to buy back her life, she did not understand the souls of such men as her captors.
They heard her to the end, jotting down the directions for finding her treasure. Then she was put into the tumbril, and was started on her way to the scaffold. The journey led past the old millinery shop where she had once worked. As she caught sight of its sign, she screamed out, twice.
The crowd had long ago grown accustomed to the sight of death. Now they seemed to awaken to the fact that they were about to kill a woman, a wondrous beautiful woman, at that. A sigh of pity ran through the throng. The driver in charge of the tumbril, fearing a riot and a rescue, whipped up the horses and drove on with his load. There were others besides Madame du Barry in the death wagon.
The cart reached the scaffold at four-thirty in the afternoon. Marie was the first to mount the steps to the guillotine.
Says De Goncourt, her biographer:
"They heard her on the steps of the scaffold, lost and desperate, mad with anguish and terror, struggling, imploring, begging for mercy, crying, 'Help! Help!' like a woman being assassinated by robbers."
Then fell the ax edge. And Marie's seven-million-dollar debt to the people of France was paid.
CHAPTER TEN
"THE MOST GORGEOUS LADY BLESSINGTON"
She was the ugly duckling of a family of seven beautiful children—the children of queer old "Shiver-the-Frills" Power, of Tipperary. Her name was Marguerite. Her father picked out a pretty name for the homely girl and then considered his duty done.
Marguerite was a great trial to everybody; to her good-looking brothers and lovely sisters; to Shiver-the-Frills, who was bitterly chagrined that his record for beauteous offspring should have been marred by so hideous an exception; to the family governess, who wouldn't even take the trouble to teach her to read; to the neighbors, whose joy in beauty she offended. Altogether, Marguerite was taught to consider herself a mistake. It is a lesson that children learn with pitiful readiness. Perhaps the mystic "Unpardonable Sin" consists in teaching them such a damnable doctrine.
Her father's baptismal name was not really Shiver-the-Frills, though nobody ever spoke of him by any other term. He had been christened Edmund, and he was a squireen of the Tipperary village of Knockbrit. He was a local magistrate, and he fulfilled his magisterial office almost as well as a mad dog might have done.
He had an insane temper. He did not confine this to his home—where he beat his children and servants most unmercifully—but aired it on the bench as well. Notably when, in a rage, he lawlessly commandeered a troop of dragoons and galloped over Tipperary and Waterford Counties with them, hunting down and killing peasants who had stirred his anger to maniac heat by some petty uprising.
He was a dandy—fop—macaroni—toff—whatever you choose, too; in a tarnished and down-at-heel way. And from his habit of eternally shaking out his dirty shirt ruffles and lace wristbands, in order to keep them from hanging limply, he was called "Shiver-the-Frills."
Marguerite's home life was one unbroken hell. Starvation, shabby-genteel rags, beatings, and full-flavored curses were her daily portion. A kind-hearted neighbor, Miss Anne Dwyer, took pity on the poor, abused little ugly duckling and taught her to read and write. But for this, she would have grown up too ignorant to pass the very simplest literacy test.
And an odd use the child proceeded to make of her smattering of education. Before she could spell correctly, she began to write stories. These she would read aloud by the peat smolder, on winter evenings, to her awed brothers and sisters, who looked on such an accomplishment as little short of super-natural.
Wonderful stories she wrote, all about princesses who had all the clothes they could wear and who could afford three square meals, with real butter, every single day of their lives; and about princes who never swore at or beat children or flew into crazy rages or even fluttered dirty ruffles.
The girl's gift at story writing gave her a higher place in the family esteem than she had ever enjoyed before. So did another miracle which came to pass when Marguerite was about twelve. She grew pretty. The ugly duckling, in less than a single year, developed from repulsive homeliness into a striking beauty. In fact, by the time she was fourteen, she was far and away the loveliest of all the "exquisite Power sisters."
Then began her career of super-woman. For, with dawning beauty, came an access of the elusive charm that sets Marguerite's type apart from the rest of womankind. And men were swift to recognize her claim to their worship. The swains whom Shiver-the-Frills allowed to visit his tumble-down mansion paid court to her instead of to her sisters. The fame of her reached the near-by garrison town of Clonmel, and brought a host of young redcoat officers swarming to the Knockbrit house.
Of these officers, two soon put themselves far in the van of all other contestants. They were Captain Murray and Captain Maurice St. Leger Farmer. Murray was a jolly, happy-go-lucky, penniless chap, lovable and ardent. The kindest thing one can say about Captain Farmer is that he was more than half insane.
Marguerite met Captain Murray's courtship more than halfway. But Shiver-the-Frills told the sighing, but impecunious, swain to keep off, and ordered Marguerite to marry Farmer, who had a snug fortune. Marguerite very naturally objected. Shiver-the-Frills flew into a ready-made rage and frightened the poor youngster almost to death by his threats of what should befall her if she did not change her mind.
So, cowed into submission, she meekly agreed to marry Farmer. And marry him she did, in 1805, when she was but fifteen.
It was an early marrying age, even in that era of early marriages. Many years had passed since Sheridan's metrical toast "to the maiden of bashful fifteen." And, as now, a girl of fifteen was deemed too young for wedlock. But all this did not deter old Shiver-the-Frills from a laudable firmness in getting rid of the daughter he hated. So he married her off—to a man who ought to have been in an insane asylum; in an asylum for the criminally insane, at that.
If Marguerite's life at Knockbrit had been unhappy, her new life was positive torture. Farmer's temper was worse than Shiver-the-Frills. And he added habitual drunkenness to his other allurements.
There is no profit in going into full details of Marguerite's horrible sojourn with him. One of his milder amusements was to pinch her until the blood spurted from her white flesh. He flogged her as he never dared flog his dogs. And he used to lock her for days in an unheated room, in winter, with nothing to eat or drink.
Marguerite stood it as long as she could. Then she ran away. You can imagine how insufferable she had found Farmer, when I say she went back by choice to her father's house.
Shiver-the-Frills greeted the unhappy girl with one of his dear old rages. His rage was not leveled at the cur who had so vilely misused her, but against the young wife who had committed the crime of deserting her husband.
Not being of the breed that uses bare fingers to test the efficiency of buzz-saws, I neither express, nor so much as dare to cherish in secret, any opinion whatsoever on the theme of Woman's Rights. But it is a wholly safe and noncontroversial thing to say that the fate of woman at large, and especially of husband-deserters, to-day, is paradise by comparison with what it was a century ago. For leaving a husband who had not refused to harbor her, Marguerite became in a measure an outcast. She could not divorce Farmer; she could not make him support her, unless she would return to him. She was eyed askance by the elect. Her own family felt that she was smirched.
Shiver-the-Frills cursed her roundly, and is said to have assumed the heavy-father role by ordering her to leave his ramshackle old house. Without money, without protector, without reputation, she was cast adrift.
There was no question of alimony, of legal redress, of freedom; the laws were all on Farmer's side. So was public opinion. Strange to say, no public benefactor even took the trouble to horsewhip the husband. He was not even ostracized from his own circle for his treatment to his girl wife.
Remember, this was in the earliest years of the nineteenth century, and in a country where many people still regarded wife-beating as a healthful indoor sport. Less than three decades had elapsed since a man immortalized by Thackeray had made the proud boast that, during the first year of his married life, he had never, when sober, struck his wife in anger. Nor was it so very long after the Lord Chief Justice of England handed down an official decision that a man might legally "punish his wife with a rod no thicker than his lordship's thumb." Whereat, one woman inquired anxiously whether his lordship chanced to suffer from gouty swelling of the hands. Oh, it was a merry time and a merry land—for women—this "Merrie England of the good old days!"
Marguerite vanished from home, from friends, from family. And a blank space follows. In the lives of scores of super-women—of Lola Montez, Marie de Chevreuse, Lady Hamilton, Adah Menken, Peg Woffington, Adrienne Lecouvreur, even of Cleopatra—there was somewhere a hiatus,—a "dark spot" that they would never afterward consent to illumine. And such a line of asterisks sheared its way across Marguerite's page at this point.
She is next heard of as leading a charmingly un-nun-like existence at Cahair, and, two years later, at Dublin. At the Irish metropolis, she enamored the great Sir Thomas Lawrence, whose portrait of her is one of his most famous paintings, and one that is familiar to nearly everybody. The picture was painted in 1809 when Marguerite was just twenty and in the early prime of her beauty.
She had ever a knack of enslaving army men, and her next wooer—in fact, Lawrence's lucky rival—was an Irish captain, one Jenkins. She and Jenkins fell very seriously in love with each other. There was nothing at all platonic in their relations.
Jenkins was eager to marry Marguerite. And when he found he could not do so, because of the trifling obstacle that her husband was alive, he sought a chance to put Captain Maurice St. Leger Farmer out of the road. But he was a square sort of chap, in his way, this lovelorn Jenkins. He balked at the idea of murder, and a duel would have put him in peril of losing Marguerite by dying. So he let Farmer severely alone, and contented himself by waiting impatiently until the drunken husband-emeritus should see fit to die.
And, until that happy hour should come, he declared that Marguerite was at least his wife in the eyes of Heaven. Startingly novel mode of gluing together the fragments of a fractured commandment! But the strange part of the affair is that Captain Jenkins' eminently respectable family consented to take the same view of the case and publicly welcomed Marguerite as the captain's legal wife.
And so, for a time, life went on. Marguerite was as nearly respectable as the laws of her time gave her the right to be. Jenkins was all devotion. She was moderately well received in local society, and she kept on winning the hearts of all the men who ventured within her sway.
Then into her life swirled Charles John Gardiner, Earl of Blessington, one of the most eccentric and thoroughly delightful figures of his day.
Blessington was an Irish peer, a widower, a man of fashion. He had a once-enormous rent roll, that had been sadly honeycombed by his mad extravagances, but that still totaled one hundred and fifty thousand dollars a year.
What chance had the worthy, but humble, Captain Jenkins against this golden-tinged whirlwind wooer? And the answer to that conundrum is the same that serves for the question concerning the hackneyed snowball in the Inferno. Blessington swept Marguerite off her feet, bore her away from the protesting captain and installed her in a mansion of her own.
Then, too late, came the happy event for which Jenkins and Marguerite had so optimistically been looking. In October, 1817, Captain Maurice St. Leger Farmer joined some boon companions in an all-night orgy in the upper room of a pothouse. Farmer waxed so much drunker than usual that he mistook the long window of the loom for the door. Bidding his friends good-by, he strolled out of the window into space. Being a heavier-than-air body, in spite of the spirits that buoyed him up, he drifted downward into the courtyard below, breaking his miserable neck.
Marguerite was free. Jenkins hastened to her and besought her to marry him, offering her an honorable name and a place in the world, and pointing out to her how much better off she would be in the long run as Mrs. Captain Jenkins than as the brevet bride of a dissolute earl.
But Blessington had by this time become the helpless thrall of Marguerite's charm. As soon as he heard of Farmer's death, he whisked her off to church and married her. And, by way of doing all things handsomely, he soothed the disconsolate Jenkins' feelings with a fifty-thousand-dollar check; thereby securing firm title to the good will and fixtures of the previous tenant of his wife's heart.
The earl took his new wife to his ancestral home, at Mountjoy Forest. And there the couple kept open house, spending money like drunken sailors, and having a wonderful time. It was the first chance Marguerite had ever had for spending any large amount of money. She so well improved her opportunities along this line, and got such splendid results therefrom, that she was nicknamed by a flowery Irish admirer "the most gorgeous Lady Blessington." And the name stuck to her, to her delight, all through life.
Blessington had always been extravagant. Now, goaded on by Marguerite, he proceeded to make the Prodigal Son look like Gaspard the Miser. One of his lesser expenditures was the building of a theater on his own estate, that he and Marguerite might satisfy to the full their love for amateur theatricals.
At this theater they and their friends were the only performers, and their friends were the only spectators. The performances must have been gems of histrionic and literary excellence, and a rare delight to every one concerned. It would have been worth walking barefoot for miles to witness one of them.
For the actors were bound by a list of hard-and-fast rules devised and written out by Lord Blessington himself. You may judge the rest of these rules by the first, which read:
Every gentleman shall be at liberty to avail himself of the words of the author, in case his own invention fails him.
Every gentleman shall be at liberty to avail himself of the words of the author, in case his own invention fails him.
One's heart warms to the genius who could frame that glorious rule for stage dialogue.
But Marguerite was of no mind to be mured up in an Irish country house, with perhaps an occasional trip to Dublin. She had begun to taste life, and she found the draft too sweet to be swallowed in sips. She made Blessington take a house in St. James' Square, in London.
There, for the next three years, she was the reigning beauty of the capital. Her salons were the most brilliant spots in the London season. Her loveliness made her and her home a center of admiration.
She had more than good looks; more, even, than charm. She had brains, and she had true Irish wit; a wit that flashed and never stung. She had, too, the knack of bringing out the best and brightest elements in everyone around her. So, while men adored her, women could not bring themselves to hate her.
She was in her element, there in London. But Blessington was not in his. He enjoyed it all; but he was no longer young, and he had led a lightning-rapid life. So, though he was ever a willing performer, the merciless pace began to tell on him.
Marguerite was quick to notice this. And she suggested that a nice, long, lazy tour of the Continent might brace him up. Marguerite's lightest suggestions were her husband's laws. So to the Continent they went, and London mourned them.
They set off in August, 1822. "No Irish nobleman," says one biographer, "and certainly no Irish king, ever set out on his travels with such a retinue of servants, with so many vehicles and appliances of all kinds to ease, to comfort, and the luxurious enjoyment of travel."
They planned to go by easy stages, stopping wherever they chose and for as long as the fancy held them. They traveled in a way a modern pork-king might envy.
One day in Paris, at the races, Lady Blessington exclaimed:
"There is the handsomest man I have ever seen!"
One of the throng of adorers hanging about the Blessington box confessed to knowing the stranger, and he was accordingly sent off posthaste to bring the "handsomest man" to the box. The personage who was so lucky as to draw forth this cry of admiration from Marguerite was at that time but eighteen years old. Yet already he was one of the most noted—or notorious—men-about-town in all Europe.
He was Alfred Guillaume Gabriel, Count d'Orsay, a typical Ouida hero. He was six feet in height, with broad shoulders, small hands and feet, hazel eyes, and chestnut hair. He was an all-round athlete—could ride, fence, box, skate, shoot,—and so on, through the whole list of sports. He was a brilliant conversationalist. He could draw. He could paint. He was a sculptor. And at none of these things was he an amateur, but as good as most front-rank professionals. He was later to win fame as the premier man of fashion of the period. A once celebrated book, "The Complete Dandy," had d'Orsay for its hero. Everybody who came in touch with the youthful paragon fell victim to his magnetism, and even Lord Blessington—who should have been wise enough to see what was coming—was no exception.
Young D'Orsay, at Marguerite's instigation, was invited to go along with the Blessingtons on the rest of their travels. He accepted. This meant his resignation from his regiment, which was at that moment under orders to leave France to invade Spain. He threw over his military career without a qualm. He had fallen in love at sight with "the most gorgeous Lady Blessington," who was fourteen years his senior. And, at sight, she had fallen in love with him. It was the love of her life.
The party moved on to Genoa. Here they met Lord Byron, who had found England a chilly abiding place, after the disgraceful affair that had parted him from his wife. Byron was charmed by Lady Blessington's beauty and cleverness, and spent a great deal of time with the Blessington party of tourists.
D'Orsay he liked immensely, once referring to him as "a Greek god returned to earth." Marguerite he frankly adored. And—so far as one knows—that was all the good it did him. With a wonder youth of the D'Orsay type ever at her side, Lady Blessington was not likely to lose her sophisticated heart to a middle-aged, lame man, whose power over women was at this time largely confined to girls in their teens. But Byron was the greatest living poet, as well as the greatest living charlatan. And Marguerite consented to be amused, in desultory fashion, by his stereotyped form of heart siege; even though his powers of attack were no longer sufficient to storm the citadel.
Still, the time passed pleasantly enough at Genoa; and Byron salved his bruised vanity by wheedling Lord Blessington into buying his yacht—a boat that the poet had long and vainly tried to get rid of. Faring better with "my lord" than with "my lady," he sold the boat at a fancy figure.
There was a farewell banquet, at which he drank much. Then the Blessingtons and D'Orsay departed from Genoa—on the white-elephant yacht. And Byron stood on the quay and wept aloud as they sailed off.
They went to Rome. But the Eternal City somehow did not appeal to Lady Blessington. So they gave it what would now be vulgarly termed "the once over," and passed on to Naples. Here, Marguerite was delighted with everything. The trio took a Naples house, and lived there for two and a half years.
The mansion Lord Blessington rented was the Palazzo Belvidere—which cost him an enormous sum. But, like an automobile, the initial price was the smallest item of its expense. Marguerite, perhaps to atone to herself for the squalor of her rickety girlhood home, declared the place would not be fit to live in until it had been refitted according to her ideas. Her ideas cost a fortune to carry out. But when at last the work was done, she wrote that the palazzo was "one of the most delicious retreats in the world." She also hit on a thoroughly unique, if costly, scheme for sight-seeing. For example, when she visited Herculaneum, it was with the archæologist, Sir William Gell, as guide. When she went to museums and art galleries, she took along as showman such celebrities as Unwin, the painter, Westmacott, the sculptor, or the antiquary, Milligan. And when she visited the observatory, it was under the guidance of Sir John Herschel and the Italian astronomer Piazzi. More than one of these notables sighed hopelessly for her love.
From Naples the party went to Florence. Here Walter Savage Landor met Marguerite. And he was little behind Byron in his appreciation of her charms.
By this time—nay, long before this time—people had begun to talk, and to talk quite distinctly. Marguerite did not care to be the butt of international gossip, so she enlisted her husband's aid in an effort to silence the scandalous tongues. Blessington's mode of doing this was highly characteristic of the most eccentric man living. He promptly offered to make D'Orsay his heir, if the latter would marry Lord Blessington's fifteen-year-old-daughter, the earl's only living child by his first wife. D'Orsay did not object. It mattered little to him whom he married. The girl was sent for to come to Florence, and there she and D'Orsay were made man and wife.
The trio thus enlarged to a quartet, all hands next set off for Paris. Lady Blessington learned that the house of Marechal Ney was vacant, and she made her husband take it at a staggering rental. And again she was not satisfied until the place had been done over from top to bottom. The job was finished in three days, the army of workmen receiving triple pay for quadruple speed. Lady Blessington's own room was designed by her husband. He would not allow her to see it until everything was in readiness for her. This is her own description of it:
The bed, which is silvered instead of gilt, rests on the backs of two large silver swans, so exquisitely sculptured that every feather is in alto-relievo, and looks nearly as fleecy as those of a living bird. The recess in which it is placed is lined with white fluted silk, bordered with blue embossed lace; and from the columns that support the frieze of the recess, pale-blue silk curtains, lined with white, are hung; which, when drawn, conceal the recess altogether…. A silvered sofa has been made to fit the side of the room opposite the fireplace.Pale-blue carpets, silver lamps, ornaments silvered to correspond…. The salle de bain is draped with white muslin trimmed with lace…. The bath is of white marble, inserted in the floor, with which its surface is level. On the ceiling a painting of Flora scattering flowers with one hand, while from the other is suspended an alabaster lamp in the form of a lotus.
The bed, which is silvered instead of gilt, rests on the backs of two large silver swans, so exquisitely sculptured that every feather is in alto-relievo, and looks nearly as fleecy as those of a living bird. The recess in which it is placed is lined with white fluted silk, bordered with blue embossed lace; and from the columns that support the frieze of the recess, pale-blue silk curtains, lined with white, are hung; which, when drawn, conceal the recess altogether…. A silvered sofa has been made to fit the side of the room opposite the fireplace.
Pale-blue carpets, silver lamps, ornaments silvered to correspond…. The salle de bain is draped with white muslin trimmed with lace…. The bath is of white marble, inserted in the floor, with which its surface is level. On the ceiling a painting of Flora scattering flowers with one hand, while from the other is suspended an alabaster lamp in the form of a lotus.
It was in this house that Lord Blessington died, of apoplexy, in 1829; perhaps after a glimpse of the bills for renovating the place.
Marguerite, on his death, was left with a jointure in his estate—which estate by this time had dwindled to fifty thousand dollars per annum. Her sole share of it was seven-thousand-five-hundred dollars a year, and the Blessington town house in London.
All along, D'Orsay and his wife had been living with the Blessingtons. When Lady Blessington came back to England, they accompanied her, and the three took up their odd form of life together at Gore House, in Kensington—Albert Hall now stands on its site—for Marguerite could not afford to keep up the Blessington mansion.
She tried to eke out her income by writing, for she still had the pen gift that had so awed her brothers and sisters. One of her first pieces of work was a book based on her talks with Byron, back in the Genoa days. TheNew Monthly Magazinefirst printed serially this capitalization of a dead romance. The volume later came out as "Conversations With Byron." And, of all Marguerite's eighteen books, this is, perhaps, the only one now remembered.
She was engaged, at two-thousand-five-hundred dollars a year, to supply a newspaper with society items. Then, too, she edited "Gems of Beauty," a publication containing portraits of fair women, with a descriptive verse written by her under each picture—straight hack work. Altogether, she made about five thousand dollars a year by her pen; a goodly income for a woman writer in her day—or in any day, for that matter.
Among her novels were "Meredith," "Grace Cassidy," "The Governess," and "The Victims of Society." You have never read any of them, I think. If you tried to, as did I, they would bore you as they bored me. They have no literary quality; and their only value is in their truthful depiction of the social life of her times.
She did magazine work, too, and wrote for such chaste publications asFriendship's Offering,The Amulet,Keepsakes, and others of like mushiness of name and matter.
Once more her salons were the talk of all England, and once more the best men crowded to them. But no longer did the best women frequent the Blessington receptions. The scandal that had been hushed by the sacrifice of the earl's daughter to a man who loved her stepmother had blazed up fresh when the D'Orsays went to live at Gore House with Marguerite. And women fought shy of the lovely widow.
It is one of the mysteries of the ages that so canny an old libertine as Lord Blessington should have been hood-winked by D'Orsay and Marguerite. There is no clew to it, except—perhaps he was not fooled. Perhaps he was too old, too sick, too indifferent to care.
And when D'Orsay's unhappy young wife, in 1838, refused to be a party any longer to the disgusting farce and divorced her husband, the gossip-whispers swelled to a screech. The wife departed; D'Orsay stayed on.
There is every reason to think Marguerite was true to her young "Greek God." But if so, it was not for lack of temptation or opportunity to be otherwise. In her late forties and early fifties, she was still "the most gorgeous Lady Blessington," still as lovely, as magnetic, as adorable as in her teens.
Among the men who delighted to honor her salons with their frequent presence—and more than one of them made desperate love to their hostess—were Bulwer, Dickens, Thackeray, Sir Robert Peel, Captain Marryat, Brougham, Landseer, Tom Moore, Disraeli, and many another genius.
Disraeli—one day to rule British politics as Lord Beaconsfield—was at that time merely a brilliant politician and an almost equally brilliant novelist. There is a story—I don't vouch for it—that, piqued at Marguerite's coldness toward himself, Disraeli revenged himself by portraying D'Orsay right mercilessly as "Count Mirabeau," in his "Henrietta Temple."
Landor was drawn by her lure into returning to England. The aged Duke of Wellington, too, was a guest at her more informal "at homes." Marguerite used such influence as she possessed over the duke to persuade him to let D'Orsay paint his portrait. So well did the picture turn out that the duke cried in delight:
"At last I've been painted as a gentleman!"
To the Blessington salons came an American, a man whose clothes were the hopeless envy of Broadway, and whose forehead curl was imitated by every Yankee dandy who could afford to buy enough pomatum to stick a similar curl to his own brow. He was N. P. Willis. You don't even start at the name. Yet that name used to thrill your grandmother. Willis was a writer; and gained more temporary fame for less good work than any other author our country has produced.
During a tour of England, he was fortunate enough to receive an invitation to call on Lady Blessington. And thereafter he called almost every day. He fairly raved over her.
"She is one of the most lovely and fascinating women I have ever known!" he wrote.
Then he wrote more; he wrote a story of something that happened at one of her soirees. He sent it to an American paper, never dreaming it would ever be seen in England. But the story was reprinted in an English magazine. And D'Orsay showed Willis the door.
Another visitor to Gore House was a pallid, puffy princeling, out of a job and out of a home. He was Louis Napoleon, reputed nephew of Napoleon the Great; and he was one day to reign as Napoleon III., Emperor of the French. In the meantime, exiled from France, he knocked around the world, morbidly wondering where his next suit of ready-made clothes was to come from. He even visited the United States, for a while, teaching school at Bordentown, New Jersey, and sponging for loans and dinners from the Jumels and other people kindly disposed to the Bonaparte cause.
Just now he was in England, living, when he could, on borrowed money, and sometimes earning a few shillings by serving as special policeman outside of big houses where dances or receptions were in progress. Out of the few English homes open to the prince was Marguerite Blessington's.
Marguerite and D'Orsay took him in, fed him, lent him money, and did a thousand kindnesses to the poor, outlawed fellow. You shall learn in a few minutes how he repaid their generosity.
While Marguerite had a talent for writing, she had a positive genius for spending money. And where talent and genius clash, there can be only one final result. Her talent, as I have said, brought her about five thousand dollars a year. Her income from her husband's estate was a yearly seven-thousand-five-hundred dollars more. But how could people like Marguerite and D'Orsay keep abreast of the social current on a beggarly twelve-thousand-five-hundred dollars a year?
The foregoing is a question, not a flight of rhetoric. It has an answer. And the answer is: they went into debt.
They threw away money; as apt pupils of the lamented Earl of Blessington might readily have been expected to. When they had no more money to pay with, they got credit. At first, this was easy enough. Tradesmen, high and low, deemed it an honor to be creditors of the all-popular Dowager Countess of Blessington, and of the illustrious Count D'Orsay. And even after the tradesmen's first zest died down, the couple were clever enough to arrange matters in such a way as to keep right on securing goods for which they knew they never could hope to pay.
Stripped of his glamour, his pretty tricks, and his social position, D'Orsay shows up as an unadulterated dead beat, a sublimated panhandler; while Marguerite's early experience in helping Shiver-the-Frills ward off bailiffs and suchlike gold-seekers now stood her in fine stead.
They were a grand pair. Their team-work was perfect. Between them, they succeeded in rolling up debts amounting to more than five-hundred-and-thirty-five-thousand dollars to tradesfolk alone. D'Orsay, in addition to this, managed to borrow about sixty-five thousand from overtrustful personal friends.
Thackeray is said to have drawn from them the inspiration of his "Vanity Fair" essay on "How to Live on Nothing a Year." D'Orsay, before consenting to let his wife divorce him, had stipulated that the earl's daughter pay him a huge lump sum out of the Blessington estate. He was also lucky at so-called games of chance, and his painting brought in a good revenue. But all this money was swallowed up in the bottomless gulf of extravagance.
Little by little, the tradesmen began to realize that they were never going to be paid, and they banded together to force matters to a crisis. In that era, debt was still punishable by imprisonment, and prison gates were almost ready to unbar in hospitable welcome to Marguerite and D'Orsay.
Like Dick Swiveller, who shut for himself, one by one, every avenue of egress, from his home, by means of unpaid-for purchases in neighboring streets, D'Orsay discovered that it was no longer safe to leave the house. Officers with warrants lurked at the area railings of Gore House. Tipstaves loitered on the front steps. All sorts of shabby people seemed eager to come into personal contact with Alfred Guillaume Gabriel, Count D'Orsay.
On Sunday alone—when the civil arm of the law rests—did the much-sought-after couple dare emerge from the once-joyous house which had grown to be their beleaguered castle. No longer could they entertain, as of yore, least a rascally warrant-server slip into the drawing-room in the guise of a guest.
Finally, the net tightened to such an extent that D'Orsay had great ado to slip through its one gap; but slip through he did, and escaped by night to France. Marguerite's wit arranged for his escape. And the man who lately had disdained to take a week-end journey without a half-dozen servants and a half score trunks was forced to run away in the clothes he wore, and with single portmanteau. Marguerite joined him at Boulogne, little better equipped than he.
Oh, but there were heartbreaking sights, in those days, in Boulogne, in Calais, and in Havre! Englishmen who had fled their own country for debt used to haunt the French seaboard, as being nearer their own dear land than was Paris. They used to pace the esplanades or cower like sick dogs on the quays, straining their eyes across the tumbled gray water, to glimpse the far-off white cliffs of their homeland. They would flock to the pier, when the Channel packets came in, longing for the sight of a home face, dreading to be seen by some one who had known them in sunnier days. Sneered at by the thrifty French, denied a penny's worth of credit at the shops, they dragged out desolate lives, fifty times more bitter than death.
It was no part of Marguerite's scheme to enroll D'Orsay and herself among these hangdog exiles. She had ever built air-castles, and she was still building them. She had wonderful plans for a career in France.
She and D'Orsay had done much for Louis Napoleon in his days of poverty. And now Louis Napoleon was President of France, and already there were rumors that he would soon make himself emperor. He was the Man of the Hour. And in his heyday of prosperity he assuredly could do no less than find a high government office for D'Orsay and pour a flood of golden coin into the lap of "the most gorgeous Lady Blessington."
Let me save you from suspense by telling you that Louis Napoleon did nothing of the sort. Indeed, he seemed much embarrassed and not at all over-joyed by the arrival of his old benefactors in Paris. He made them many glittering promises. But the Bank of Fools itself would have had too much sense to discount such promises as Louis Napoleon was wont to make.
Soon after their arrival in Paris, Marguerite learned that creditors had swooped down upon Gore House, seizing it and all the countless art treasures that filled it. House and contents went under the hammer, and brought a bare sixty thousand dollars; not enough to pay one of the D'Orsay-Blessington debts.
Marguerite was at the end of her career. She was sixty years old; her beauty was going; her money was gone. She had ruled hearts; she had squandered fortunes; she had gone through the "dark spot," (ninety-nine per cent of whose victims sink thence to the street, while the hundredth has the amazing luck to emerge as a Super-Woman.) She had listened to the love vows of men whose names are immortal. And now she was old and fat and banished. Hope was dead.
A younger and stronger woman might readily have succumbed under such a crisis. Certainly, Marguerite Blessington was in no condition to face it. Soon after she arrived in Paris, she sickened and died.
D'Orsay had loved her with fairly good constancy, and he designed in her honor a double-grave mausoleum of quaint design. And under that mausoleum, at Chambourey, she was buried. Three years later, D'Orsay was laid there at her side.
Super-woman and super-man, they had loved as had Cleopatra and Antony. Only, in the latters' day, it was Rome's vengeance and not a creditor-warrant that cut short such golden romances.