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Cependant, ingrat que tu es, je suis malgré tout, aujourd'hui comme toujours, ton ami à la vie à la mort, ALFRED D'ORSAY."

"38 Rue de la Ville l'Evêque, Paris, Mardi (Avril, 1849). "MON BON QUIN,―J'ai eu un depart imprevu, heureusement, que je suis safe de ce côté. Il a fallu que je me decide de partir à 3a de la nuit pour ne pas manquer le Dimanche. Ces dames vous raconteront qu'une de mes premières pensées ici a été pour vous Vous le voyez par ce peu de mots. Aimez moi toujours de loin, car je vous aimais bien de près.

"Votre meilleur ami,

LETTRE DE M. ALFRED DE VIGNY AU COMTE D'ORSAY.

ALFRED."

"Je partais pour Birmingham, cher ami, lorsque j'ai reçu livre et billet de ta part: me voici en pleine forge à present, observant les Cyclopes dans leur antre et j'en ai déjà les mains noires. J'oublie l'odeur du charbon en lisant le voyage de Lady Blessington, et il me semble que je respire un beau bouquet arrivé de Florence. Je vois passer bien des noms que je connais, et je serai heureux d'en parler avec l'auteur de ce charmant livre et des gracieuses fantaisies.

"C'est une aimable chose que cette galerie de portraits qui commence par celui de la voyageuse. J'ai et le peintre et les tableaux avec moi, cela me fait bien plaisir et je y reviendrai tous les jours.

"Comme la patrie nous fait toujours, Lady Blessington, au milieu de Venise, n'a pas resisté au plaisir de peindre une campagne Anglaise―c'est un paysage, c'est un tableau de genre d'une verité charmante et dont l'etendu montre le plaisir qu'elle prend à cette promenade ideale qu'elle prefere bien au reel voyage. Et ce pauvre Byron, je le retrouve partout grace à elle, que je la remercie d'en parler encore et en vers si melancholiques. Je crois en verité qu'il se promene et s'assoit entre elle et toi. Gore House est son Westminster Abbey. Que c'est bien, que c'est rare de savoir se souvenir ainsi que l'on merite d'être aimé pour cela. Garde ce souvenir de bonheur toute ta vie. ALFRED DE VIGNY."

N'oublie pas ton ami,

No. III.

LETTERS OF COUNT D'ORSAY TO R. R. MADDEN, AND SOME CORRESPONDENCE IN RELATION TO HIS STATUETTES, &c.

"You must have seen by the newspapers that I have completed a great work, which creates a revolution in the Duke of Wellington's own mind, and that of his family. It is a statuette on horseback of himself, in the costume and at the age of the Peninsular war. They say that it will be a fortune for me, as every regiment in the service will have one, as the duke says publicly that it is the only work by which he desires to be known, physically, by portraits. They say that he is very popular in Portugal and Spain. I thought

possibly that you could sell for me the copyright at Lisbon to some speculator, to whom I would send the mould. What do you think of it? Inquire.

"D'ORSAY."

"Gore House, May 9th, 1845.

"MY DEAR MADDEN,-I wish that you would protect, with all your strength, power, and eloquence, the contemplated project of a rail-road between Lisbon and Madrid. The name is Vaughan et Cie; my nephew, the Duke de Guiche, is one of the directors, and Tom Duncombe and General B- will be the active men with the Portuguese government, as that government owes him a great deal of gratitude for his services, and Palmella and Mare of opinion that he will succeed in obtaining the concession, because governments are very generous when they can oblige without putting their hands into their own pockets. Bis going very soon to Lisbon; he will see you, and you must aid him, and I am sure that you will be glad to do it. We have received the Portuguese papers that you sent me, and what is very curious is, that, without knowing one word of that language or Spanish, I could understand them perfectly well.

"Lord H— is a great friend of B-; in fact, he is a great favorite at Lisbon, which will aid the undertaking. The old instituteur of the king, and who is his chamberlain, is devoted to B; Mr. Deutz, I think, his name is. "Lady Blessington sends you her kindest regards.*

"Believe me always yours most faithfully,

COUNT D'ORSAY."

"Gore House, Thursday.

"I was fain to believe that you had bolted at once to Ireland, particularly without saying adieu.

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I hope that you won't find a ship direct for Havre.

"Miss Power has communicated your letter to me. It was precisely about Tojalt that I wanted to speak to you. I know his man of business in the

* Count D'Orsay, in the difficulties of his position in 1845, vainly looked to various visionary speculations for the means of extricating himself from embarrassments that were, in fact, overwhelming and insurmountable. A schedule of his liabilities, which I have seen, was prepared by him in 1845, with a view to some arrangement with his creditors, whose claims then amounted to £107,000 (and these claims did not comprise many debts to private friends, which were not likely to be pressed, or which could not be enforced, probably amounting to about £13,000 more). In the event of such expected arrangement being made, an idea was entertained of procuring for him "the benefit of the act”-in plain terms, of declaring him a bankrupt; but there were difficulties in the way of identifying him with some legitimate commercial or agricultural pursuit. One of the most remarkable illusions at the period above referred to, which took possession of his mind, was the hope of making a vast and rapid fortune by succeeding in the attempt of the alchymists of old, of converting the baser metals into gold! Some foreign schemers and impostors had persuaded the count they had discovered the great arcana of alchymy, and all that was wanted was the necessary funds to set to work. The poor count lived to see the folly of this speculation; like that of many other schemes suddenly adopted in his difficulties, they began brilliantly, and ended in a bubble.-R. R. M. The Minister of Finance in Portugal in 1845.

city, who deals largely for him in the funds. He has, I think, £200,000 in the Portuguese, and never gave the slightest hint as to any chance of discomfiture in that market. Certainly he must be wide awake as to his own interests, and must be in a good position to feel the pulse of the administration. Does he see only one side of the question, or is he one of those men who like to be blind? Let me have a resumé of the letter you showed me. "Believe me yours most faithfully, COUNT D'ORSAY."

"Paris, May, 1852.

"MY DEAR MADDEN,-You go to St. Germain by the half past twelve o'clock train from the Rue St. Lazare. You find a carriage at the station at St. Germain, which will take you for three francs to Chambourcy and back. "Go to the curate, Mr. Penon, and say you come from me. beadle, who will take you to the tomb.

Yours ever,

No. IV.

Send for the D'ORSAY."*

LETTERS FROM R. R. MADDEN TO COUNT D'ORSAY.

"(1841), Sloane Square. "MY DEAR COUNT,-I suppose a man like your classical friend, who had made the grand tour, and had sojourned a long time especially in Southern Italy, finding himself alone in a sponging-house in London, might thus soliloquize: I have been all over Italy, traveled in vetturas, swum in gondolas, sailed in feluccas, rode on cuccias, performed divers pedestrian feats in Romagna and Liguria. I have seen St. Peter's, Pompeii, Herculaneum, Vesuvius; sauntered through the Vatican, made pilgrimages to lovers' tombs and the sites of poets' birth-places. I have wandered among ruins of shrines and temples, lost myself in gorgeous palaces and great Gothic wildernesses of cathedral churches. I have been dazzled with the glories of the rising and the setting sun on the Bay of Naples, the Lago Maggiore, the Gulf of Spezia, the sea of the Mediterranean. I have drunk in odors, without stint or measure, of sweet and fragrant flowers. I have been inebriated in orange groves with the perfumed air of those trellised walks, with the interwoven branches of the vine, and mingling rose-buds. I have lived in the sweet South, and felt some influences thereof in waking dreams and reveries, feeling as if my senses were overpowered with the ecstasy of their enjoyments, and my soul gave itself up to the illusions of this Italian life, as if it would never awaken to encounter its realities in a gloomy sponging-house in a narrow street in London, redolent with vapors of stale porter and English gin, with fumes of tobacco, with which the dingy red curtains are thoroughly saturated, presenting from every dirty window a boundless contiguity of shade afforded by the

*The above note, the last I received, was written to me while on a visit to Paris, in the latter part of May, 1852, a few weeks only before the death of poor D'Orsay; with it I received the key of the inner door of that tomb in which the remains of Lady Blessington were deposited.

APPENDIX.

463 surrounding brick walls, surmounted by chimney-pots in various degrees of dilapidation; a sombre sky, in which some demon has upset his inkstand, and a sanded floor, an utter stranger to the great moral influence of soap and R. R. MADDen." Yours, sincerely and truly,

water.'

"MY DEAR COUNT,-The announcement of your completion of a statuette of the Emperor of Russia gave me no pleasure. The tendencies of art toward hero-worship are rather too strong already.

"I would have been better pleased to have heard you had been devoting your fine talents to the representation of some living philosopher, if there be one alive, or some nobleman of nature of a literary turn, or some hero of humanity, if any such are left among us, than chiseling the poor innocent marble into the hard traits and facial angles of any great fighting fellow. It would be a small ambition to swell the throng of the hero-worshipers of our times, the idolaters of the war principle, the glorifiers of the work of Waterloo or Yours, R. R. M." Warsaw. Don't be angry, my dear count.

No. V.

WORKS OF ART OF COUNT D'ORSAY.

The three works of art which D'Orsay prided himself on most were the statuettes of the Emperor of Russia, Napoleon, and the Duke of Wellington, upon which the following critical observations, made at the time of their appearance, may be interesting:

COUNT D'ORSAY'S STATUETTE OF THE EMPEROR OF RUSSIA.

- "The peculiar merits of the accomplished and versatile artist are displayed to great advantage in the dignified air, carriage, and soldierlike attitude of the emperor, and the strong resemblance to the original, despite the smallness Great skill is manifested in of the scale and the difficulties of the material. concealing the disproportion so manifest in the living figure-the excessive length of the lower extremity in relation to the trunk. The bright color of the bronze, approaching to the fine, faintly-obscured golden hues of the old Florentine bronze castings, adds not a little to the effect of this admirable statuette."

COUNT D'ORSAY'S EQUESTRIAN STATUETTE OF NAPOLEON.

"The taste of Count D'Orsay has long been recognized in the most polished circles of English society. In dress he has led the fashion, while as an artist he has evidenced a degree of talent very seldom met with in an amateur. Of late he has surprised the world by a further manifestation of talent. He has become a sculptor, and, by a series of brilliant statuettes of wellknown characters, has given still another proof of the diversity of his genius. The statuette of Wellington was illustrated some time since: we are now en

abled, by his kind permission, to engrave the companion work of art-the statuette of Napoleon-from a sketch furnished by Count D'Orsay himself. It has been drawn upon the wood by Gilbert, and engraved by Mr. W. G. Mason. The original is now at the birth-place of the conqueror. The Prince Demidoff having presented to the town of Ajaccio this statuette of Napoleon, it has been placed in the grand salle of the Hotel de Ville. The following account of the ceremony observed on the occasion is quoted from 'The Journal de la Corse' of the 14th of September: The equestrian statuette of the emperor, by the Count D'Orsay, completes the small Napoleon Museum, which we owe to the munificence of Cardinal Fesch, which excites the admiration of all foreigners.'"*

6

COUNT D'ORSAY'S EQUESTRIAN STATUETTE OF HIS GRACE THE DUKE OF WEL

LINGTON.

"It seems as if the veritable war-horse of Job's exclamation stood before us, pawing the earth with his foot, and snuffing the battle afar off.' But still he obtrudes not himself into the subject-matter of the testimonial, except as an effective foil, impressing more strongly the ideas to be conveyed by the whole. Cool, reflecting, and observant, the duke sits like a general who perceives the game already in his hand; but how much more sagacious calmness does the action of his restive horse convey, by the comparison of very opposite characters thus forced upon the attention of the spectator. Neither must it escape observation how much the depressed head and arching neck of the animal assist in producing that classic unity of effect which is produced in a grouped scene where a pyramidal outline has been successfully preserved. In features and form the duke is represented as he was a quarter of a century ago. The costume, also, is adapted to the time to which the statuette refers, and which may naturally be presumed to be the year of Waterloo. The two greatest generals of the day had not previously been actually opposed in personal command; and as Napoleon's statuette, it is to be hoped, will always accompany our present subject, it is but right and proper, therefore, that these rival heroes should be represented as they contemporaneously appeared on that occasion, especially as, in future history, they will ever be mutually suggestive of each other's career. The costume chosen strongly indicates the simplicity and truth of exalted genius. No blanket-like toga or stirrupless lower limbs detract from the dignity or the feeling of what ought to be the appointments and dress of an English field-marshal on active service; and we defy all comparison, for real classical effect, with all or any of the many sculptured absurdities in Greek or Roman attire which a wretchedly snobbish taste has succeeded in erecting in some of the finest situations in the metropolis. We admire exceedingly the character of the friezed cocked hat of the rank Count D'Orsay has chosen for his Wellington."+

"One of the last of the late lamented Count D'Orsay's studies was a stat*The Pictorial Times. + Ibid.

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