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 Canterbury on the last stage of the journey to his crown.  Mounted on his horse, caparisoned in purple and gold, at the head of a gay cavalcade of retainers, he rode proudly through the Kentish lanes and villages:  through avenues of wildly-cheering crowds, flinging sweet may-blossoms and flowers under his horse’s feet, and waving green boughs over their heads in a frenzy of welcome.

[Illustration:  SARAH, DUCHESS OF MARLBOROUGH]

And it was on this very day, as the “Merrie Monarch” was riding under the flowery arches and fluttering pennons of London streets, to the clanging of joy-bells and the thundering of cannon, with a procession twenty thousand strong behind him, that Squire Jennings’ daughter first opened her eyes on the world in which, though her simple-minded father little dreamt it, she was destined to play so brilliant a part.  No birthday could have been more auspicious than this which saw the restoration of a nation’s hope; and the sun which flooded it with splendour was typical of the good fortune that was to gild the life-path of the Sandridge baby.

If on that day Squire Richard had been told that his baby-girl would live to wear a Duchess’s coronet and to be the bosom-friend and counsellor of a Queen of England, he would have laughed aloud; and yet Fate had this and more in waiting for Sarah Jennings in the years to come.  The Squire himself professed to be no more than a plain country-gentleman, who knew as much as any man about horses and the management of acres, but knew no more of courts and coronets than of the man in the moon.