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volumes of memories, saying pathetically of himself, "I have lived long enough to have lost all my dearest and best friends. The great laws of humanity have left me on a high and dry elevation, from which I am doomed to look over a sort of Necropolis, whence it is my delight to call forth choice spirits of the past."

CHAPTER XVIII

DORINDA. But how can you shake off the yoke? Your divisions don't come within the reach of the law for a divorce?

MRS. SULLEN. Law! what law can search into the remote abyss of nature? What evidence can prove the unaccountable disaffections of wedlock? Can a jury sum up the endless aversions that are rooted in our souls, or can a bench give judgment upon antipathies ?

OF

GEORGE FARQUHAR, The Beaux Stratagem.

F all the Beaux and Dandies, Brummell, as has been said, touched the highest mark. He was a Beau, and nothing but a Beau. When he failed in attracting from the world appreciation of his one great quality he had nothing to fall back upon; he could not support himself; he was helpless. Nash added to the numerous proofs of his profession as a Beau a power of enforcing his opinions upon others, of effecting a direct change of manners in a kingdom of his own; he was not only a Beau, but a ruler. D'Orsay, at the other extreme of our history, had also the power of exploiting the world not only by his dress and manners like Brummell, but by a subtle cleverness which lacked the rugged honesty of Nash, and by an artistic capacity which was sufficient to supply his needs when he too fell out of the front rank.

We have done with the reckless, light-hearted, unprincipled, roystering crew of Beaux and Dandies whose fortunes we have so far followed. We have now something daintier, harder, more dilettanti and selfish than anything that has gone before, a man whose own ad

vantage ran like a silver thread always before him, and who was impervious to any stigma of indignity or dependency that its pursuit might bring him.

At the time of D'Orsay's death many were the laudatory paragraphs and articles published upon his character, the Times, for instance, was almost too kind; but then, that newspaper circulated among those people who held out both hands to D'Orsay and virtuously turned their backs to Lady Blessington. From my

point of view the injustice of classing Brummell and D'Orsay together was to the former and not to the latter; however, D'Orsay was more clever, more accomplished, and had the merit of inherited rank. That powerful newspaper said of him :

"It were unjust to class him with the mere Brummells, Mildmays, Alvanleys, or Pierrepoints of the Regency, with whom in his early life he associated, much less the modern man about town who succeeded him; equally idle were the attempts to rank him with a Prince de Ligne, an Admirable Crichton, or an Alcibiades, yet was he a singularly gifted and brilliantly accomplished personage, and has furnished a career about which it is not our task to moralise."

Gédéon-Gaspard Alfred de Grimaud, Comte d'Orsay et du Saint Empire, belonged, as his names and title show, to an aristocratic French family-a family which suffered much through the Revolution, for before that date the Counts d'Orsay had also held the titles and lands of Comte d'Autray, Baron de Rupt, possessor of the sovereign land of Delain, lord of Nogent-le-Rotrou, of Perche, and of Orsay, near Paris. But the lands were alienated, the titles lost, and the castles destroyed in the gigantic struggle between the people and the aristocrats. Lady Blessington gives us, in her gives us, in her "The Idler in

France," a description of the Château d'Orsay, which is situated on the Yvette, a tributary of the Seine, and about thirty miles south of Versailles. It was a fortified château surrounded by a moat supplied by the river, but only one wing was standing, as the revolutionaries had been at work upon it. However, its subterranean portion still showed the extent and magnitude of its buildings. Here Alfred's grandmother, the Princess de Croy, had lived her brief married life, and died after bearing one son, who was later known as General Comte d'Orsay, and by society as Le Beau d'Orsay. When Napoleon first saw him he remarked that he would make an admirable model for a Jupiter, so noble and commanding was the character of his beauty. He is said -in early Victorian phrase-to have been "entirely free from vanity, and to possess a calm and dignified simplicity that harmonised well with his lofty bearing."

There are several dates given for Alfred d'Orsay's birth, the most general being September 4th, 1801, though Raikes, in his Diary, notes: "February 4th, 1842 -"We celebrated D'Orsay's birthday at his house.” The Gentleman's Magazine gives the year as 1798. However, the chief thing is not when D'Orsay began to live, but, being born, how he lived.

Of his early history we ascertain that he learned to read by spelling out the "bulletins of victory" of the Grand Army, that he was always courageous and warm-hearted, and that his sympathies through all his life were for the Bonapartes, it having been intended that he should become page to Napoleon. He entered the army as early as possible, and later, though reluctantly, became one of the garde de corps of the restored Bourbon; he did not like it, but it was necessary to be a soldier, a sentiment which with him, however, was not very long

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lived. As a boy he had indeed felt such a dislike to the Bourbons that when they entered Paris he went to a corner in the house farthest removed from the street that he might not hear them pass. His men in the army loved him, not only for the thought and kindness he showed them, but because of his strength and the way in which he excelled in sport.

Whatever has been said of D'Orsay, it cannot be controverted that he was genuinely kind-hearted and brave. In his youth his brother officers laughed at him for dancing with the plainest girls and paying attention to the neglected ones; and there is on record an instance in which he gave a bully a sound thrashing. At that time, when living out of barracks, he lodged with a widow who had one son and two daughters. The son was a big brute, who treated his womenfolk with any violence which occurred to him, and when there were sounds of disturbance in the landlady's room one day, D'Orsay went to investigate. The charming son was beating his mother, and when interfered with turned the force of his fists and feet upon the slim young officer. He, nothing daunted and better trained, soon taught the young man to cry for mercy, and ended, as his French biographer, M. de Coutades, says, by knocking him down "with a hand as beautiful as that of Apollo and as strong as that of Hercules." It is doubtful whether the vanquished one thus appreciated the hand which struck him.

In 1816 his mother and father lived in the Rue Mont Blanc, now called the Rue de la Chaussée d'Antin, in the house which later was occupied by Rossini. Gronow first saw him at the house of his grandmotherthe well-known Madame Craufurd-in the Rue d'Anjou Saint Honoré, where he appeared to be a general