er than she had anticipated.
D'Orsay, who seems to have been even more careless of money than his
mother-in-law, plunged deeper and deeper in debt--some of it, at least,
incurred in helping to keep up the Gore House _menage_--until he found
himself at last face to face with liabilities far exceeding L100,000,
and besieged with duns and bailiffs. Once he was arrested at the suit of
a bootmaker, and was rescued from prison by Lady Blessington's
rapidly-emptying purse. The climax came when a sheriff's officer
smuggled himself into Gore House, and brought down on d'Orsay's head an
avalanche of angry creditors, each resolute to have his "pound of
flesh." The Countess was powerless to stem the invasion; her own
resources were at an end, the Count himself was penniless. The only
safety was in flight; and one day Gore House was found empty. The birds
had flown to Paris; and the mansion which had been the scene of so much
magnificence was left to the mercy of a horde of clamorous creditors.

A few weeks later, all "the costly and elegant effects of the Right
Honourable, the Countess of Blessington, retiring to the Continent" were
put up to auction; and twenty thousand curious people were pouring
through the rooms which her gorgeous ladyship had made so famous--among
them Thackeray, who was moved to tears at the spectacle of so much
goodness and greatness reduced to ruin. The sale, although many of the
effects brought absurdly low prices, realised L12,000--a smaller sum
probably than would be paid to-day for half-a-dozen of the Countess's
pictures.

This crushing blow to her fortunes and her pride no doubt broke Lady
Blessington's heart; for within a few months of the last fall of the
auctioneer's hammer, she died suddenly in Paris, to the unspeakable
grief of d'Orsay, who declared to the Countess's physician, Madden, "She
was to me a mother! a dear, dear mother--a true, loving mother to me."
Three years later this "paragon of all the perfections" followed the
Countess behind the veil, and rests in a mausoleum, of his own
designing, at Chamboury, with one of the most lovely women who have ever
graced beauty with rare gifts of mind and with a warm and tender heart.

CHAPTER IX

A QUEEN OF COQUETTES

The 29th of May in the year 1660 was indeed a red-letter day in the
calendar of jovial fox-hunting Squire Jennings, of Sandridge, in
Hertfordshire. It was the day on which his Royal idol, the second
Charles, set out from