his errant niece presented a most welcome diversion.
And so to Laura Place we were gone.
I DO NOT BELIEVE I EXAGGERATE WHEN I DECLARE THAT THE DOWAGER Duchess of Wilborough's establishment was ablaze last e'en with a thousand candles. Light spilled out of a multitude of casements (the original glazing of which must have exacted from the late Duke a fortune), and cast diamond-paned shadows upon the snowy street; light flowed from the open entry-way at every chair's arrival, like a bolt of silk unfurled upon the walk. A hubbub of conversation, too, and the clatter of cutlery; a voice raised hoarsely in song; a burst of laughter. The faintest strain of a violin drifted to the stoop.
Henry paid off the chairs and presented our cards to the footmen, but I found occasion to dally at the very door, almost deterred by the glittering hordes I glimpsed within— until an exclamation from Eliza thrust me forward. I had trod upon the foot of Marie Antoinette.
The foyer was a wealth of pale green paint picked out with pink and white, the colours of Robert Adam. Pink and green silk lined the windows, and a bust of the Tragic Muse loomed before a pier glass opposite—Mrs. Siddons, no doubt, and taken from the painting by Reynolds.3 I gazed, and beheld myself reflected as Shepherdess, a forlornly bucolic figure amidst so much splendour. Eliza pinched my arm.
“As near to Old Drury as may be, my dear,” she murmured.”4
“Indeed,” I replied. “The Dowager Duchess may be living in relative retirement, but she has not yet foresworn her passions.”
“Let us go up,” Henry interposed with impatience. “There is a fearful crush at my back!”
The rout was intended, so Lord Harold had informed us, as a tribute to the principal players of Bath's Theatre Royal5—and the present evening's performance being just then concluded, the tide of humanity spilling into Laura Place from the direction of Orchard Street was decidedly at its flood. The staircase, a grand curve of mahogany, was completely overpowered with costumed bodies struggling towards the drawing-room; I hooked one arm through my brother's, and the other through my sister's, and so we stormed the barricade.
Let us pass over in silence the travails of the next quarter-hour; how our gowns were torn, and our headdresses deranged; what injuries to slipper and glove. Better to employ the interval in relating the chief of what I know about the Dowager herself—the barest details of Her Grace's celebrated career.
I have it on so good an authority as my dear mother's dubious memory, that Eugenie de la Falaise began her ascent as a pert young chorus girl in the Paris comic opera; from thence, with a comely ankle and a smattering of English, she rose to Covent Garden; and it was there the Duke of Wilborough—the fiflh, rather than the present, Duke— fell headlong in love with the lady. Wilborough was already past his first youth; he had seen one Duchess into her grave, and her stillborn son with her; and thus it should not be remarkable that he might establish the beautiful Eugenie privately, or offer unlimited credit in the most fashionable shops, and a smart pair to drive her about Town, in return for the enjoyment of her favours, as Lord Derby once did with Miss Farren.6 But Eugenie had a greater object in view. She wished to play at tragedy.
That she was unsuited for Isabella, or Lady Macbeth, or even the role of Portia in The Merchant of Venice, need not be underlined. Twelfth Night, perhaps, or She Stoops to Conquer, may have shewn her talents to advantage; but at the Duke of Wilborough's intercession with the Drury Lane director, Lady Macbeth she played—and opposite no less a personage than the redoubtable Mr. Garrick.
The performance—there was, alas, only one—was declared to have been lamentable. The outraged patrons hissed and shouted, threw all manner of refuse from theatre pit to stage, and forced the curtain down in the very midst of Lady Macbeth's celebrated walk. Eugenie de la Falaise was mortified, and disappeared abrupdy from public view, never to return to the London theatre.
We cannot in justice fault the fifth Duke for having married her. He may be forgiven the indulgence of his folly. The pity, the generosity, the rashness her ruined career may have excited—we can have only the merest idea of how they worked upon his sensibilities. Eugenie was, it is said, a beautiful woman at twenty-four; and though she is now a grandmother these