But the Seamore Place house proved too cabined and too modest for my lady’s exacting social ambition.  She demanded a more spacious and magnificent shrine for her beauty, which was still so remarkable that she was considered the loveliest woman at the Court of George III. when well advanced in the forties—­and this she found at Gore House, in Kensington, a stately mansion in which Wilberforce had made his home, and which, surrounded by beautiful gardens and shut in with a girdle of spreading trees, might have been in the heart of the country, instead of within sight of the tide of fashion which flowed in Hyde Park.

Here for thirteen years, with the handsome, gay, accomplished d’Orsay, who had separated from his wife, as major-domo, she dispensed a princely hospitality.  Her dinners and her entertainments were admittedly the finest in London; and invitations to them were as eagerly sought as commands to a Court-ball.

“At Gore House,” said Brougham, “one is sure to meet some of the most interesting people in England, and equally sure not to have a dull moment.”  Brougham was himself a constant and a welcome guest, and the men he met there ranged from Prince Louis Napoleon, then an exile without a prospect of a crown, and the Duke of Wellington to Albert Smith and Douglas Jerrold—­so wide was the net of Lady Blessington’s hospitality.  And all paid the same glowing tribute, not only to their hostess’s loveliness but to the warmth of heart, which was one of her greatest charms.  And of all the great ones who sat at her dinner-table or thronged her drawing-rooms not one was wittier or more fascinating than Count d’Orsay, who, in spite of envious and malicious tongues, never occupied to the Countess any other relation than that of a dearly-loved and devoted son.

Although Lady Blessington’s income rarely fell below L4,000 a year, it was quite inadequate to her expenditure; and it was clear to her that this era of splendid hospitality could not last for ever.  A day of reckoning was sure to come; and it came sooner 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.