COUNT D'ORSAY.

Lyttelton Times, Volume II, Issue 100, 4 December 1852, Page 6

COUNT D'ORSAY.

(From the Globe.)

Unquestionably one of the celebrities of our day, the deceased man of fashion, claims more than the usual curt obituary. It were unjust to class him with the mere Braramells, Mildmays, Alvanleys, or Pierrepoints of the Regency, with whom, in his early life, he associated, much less the modern men about town who have succeeded them ; equally idle were the attempt to rank him with a Prince de Ligne, an Admiral 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 moralize—a brief retrospect is all that journalism can afford. That he was born (at Paris) precisely at the opening of the present century would appear from the fact of Lord Byron's expressing his astonishment at the precocity exhibited in a certain diary M.S, from the' Count's pen, perused by his Lordship at Genoa (April 5, 1823)":-— " The most singular thing is how he should have penetrated, not the fact, but the mystery of the English ennui at two-and-twenty. I was about the same age when I made the same discovery, in almost precisely the same circles." This MS., which was pronounced by such competent authority to be equal to anything Count de Grammont has left us about contemporary frivolity, is possibly yet extant, and to its publication we must defer any knowledge of the juvenile portion of his fashionable experiences. He had hereditary pretensions to the peculiar social amenities and tact of the Grammontsand of Antony Hamilton; but to the reminiscences of Hampton Court and Tunbridge Wells there was superadded in his person the soldiership and chivalry of his father, General D'Orsay, an old campaigner of the Empire. In his 20th year he had already relinquished the gaieties of London and entered the French service; for it was while quartered at Valence on the Rhone, on the 15th of November, 1822, that an occurrence took place which changed the whole destiny of Alfred; and while it deprived the ser- j vice of one who would probably have risen to eminence as a first-rate military character, and eventually a marshal of France, turned back his existence into its former channels of London life, and extinguished all the prospects of more exalted distinction in more noble pursuits and on a broader theatre. The reader of Lady Blessington's ' Idler in - Italy' will look in vain for any notice of her first casual rencontre with the fascinating Lieut. D'Orsay at Valence, though she does remark that singular coincidence, "Napoleon, when Lieutenant, was quartered in this town." The regimental mess happened to be established in the hotel where Lord Blessington alighted on his way to Italy, down the Rhone, and a chance acquaintanceship having ripened into intimacy, at his Lordship's invitation the Count joined them in their trip southwards. The regiment was just then under orders to march with the Due d'Angouleme across the Pyrenees, and the young French officer had to expect the sarcasms of the uninitiated as to his motives for quitting the service at that particular juncture. He braved the imputation of cowardice, but he could well afford it. The arrival of the strangely constituted travelling party at Genoa is thus chronicled by Byron :—" Milord Blessington and epouse, travelling with a very handsome companion in the shape of a French Count, who has all the air of a Cupidon dichaine", and one of the few ideal specimens I have seen of a Frenchman before the Revolution." Concerning the Earl of Blessington, his individuality may be well conjectured, but we are not left to our -own surmises as to the sort of man he must have been. Byron adds— " Mountjoy (for the Gardiners are the lineal race of the famous Irish Viceroy of that ilk) ssems very goodnatured, but he is much tamed since I recollect him in all the glory of gems and snuff-boxes, and uniforms and theatricals, sitting to Strolling, the painter, to be depicted as one of the heroes of Agincourt." It was finally arranged that D'Orsay was to be a fixture in the family, by becoming the husband of the honourable Harriet Gardiner, his Lordship's daughter by his first wife.. This young and beautiful person was summoned accordingly from school, and forthwith married to the Count at Genoa, in obedience to her father's mandate. The tale of Iphigenia is sometimes combined in modern life with other not less painful narratives of classic destiny. Lord

Blessington died at Paris in 1827, and the title became extinct. His Countess became a star in the literary firmament of England, and Count D'Orsay resumed in London the career of sportsman, exquisite, artist, and general arbiter elegantiarum, as all the world knows. It were superfluous to expatiate on matters of such universal notoriety. It was inevitable that Louis Napoleon should come into close contact with the Count here in his days of exile and adventure. It may be added, that it was in no spirit of selfish calculation that D'Orsay rendered valuable services to the_ nephew of the Emperor, whose chances of an imperial Crown were then of the most imperceptible nature. The gratitude of the latter towards his London friend had been so long quiescent that its recent display has called forth more surprise than applause. In his decay and decrepitude he was granted a splendid annuity; but if he has not lived to enjoy the tardy arrival of better fortune, neither has he trusted to circumstances fora fitting sepulchre wherein to sleep after life's fitful fever ; for he had prepared his own resting place by the side of Marguerite Countess of Blessington.

He spent his last years in erecting, on a green eminence in the village of Chambourey, beyond St. Germain-en-Laye, where the rustic churchyard joins the estate of the Grammont family, a marble pyramid. In the sepulchral chamber there is a stone sarcophagus on either side, each surmounted by a white marble tablet; that to the left encloses the remains of Lady Blessington ; that to the light was " untenanted" at the time when Isabella Romer described the mausoleum in Bentley's Miscellany, May 1, 1850. Since,then the fair hand that wrote the account of that tomb is itself cold in the grave, and the "tenant is now forthcoming for his self-ap-pointed home.