D'Orsay

D'Orsay, ALFRED GUILLAUME GABRIEL, COUNT, the last of the 'dandies,' was born in Paris, 4th September 1801. The son of General D'Orsay, a distinguished French soldier, he early entered the service of Louis XVIII. as a lieutenant in the Garde du Corps. It was while his regiment was stationed at Valence on the Rhône in 1822 that he made the acquaintance of Lady Blessington (q.v.), who was travelling on the Continent with her husband. An intimacy soon sprang up between the brilliant countess and the still more brilliant Frenchman, and D'Orsay resigned his commission, and attached himself to the Blessingtons, with whom he travelled in Italy and elsewhere, until 1827, when as if to 'regularise' his irregular position in the family, he was married to Lady Harriet Gardiner, Lord Blessington's fifteen-year-old daughter by a former wife—a marriage which, as may be supposed, turned out unhappily. In 1829 Lord Blessington died, and D'Orsay separated formally from his wife, and took up his residence at Lady Blessington's, in Mayfair first, and then at Kensington, where for twenty years they defied the conventions in the midst of a society of authors, artists, and men of fashion. D'Orsay was not only one of the handsomest men of his time, well bred, well dressed, the mirror of fashion and the mould of form; but he was an accomplished painter and sculptor, an author of no mean power, an excellent talker, and a genial companion. An intimate friend and constant supporter of Louis Napoleon, he naturally looked for a position when the exile became prince-president and the host a bankrupt; but the office for which he was so admirably fitted, that of Director of Fine Arts in Paris, was conferred upon him only a few days before his death on 4th August 1852.