During his firsts visit to London, which has already been mentioned, Count d’Orsay was invited once or twice to receptions given by the Earl and Countess of Blessington, where he was well received, though this was only an incident of his English sojourn.  Before the story proceeds any further it is necessary to give an account of the Earl and of Lady Blessington, since both of their careers had been, to say the least, unusual.

Lord Blessington was an Irish peer for whom an ancient title had been revived.  He was remotely descended from the Stuarts of Scotland, and therefore had royal blood to boast of.  He had been well educated, and in many ways was a man of pleasing manner.  On the other hand, he had early inherited a very large property which yielded him an income of about thirty thousand pounds a year.  He had estates in Ireland, and he owned nearly the whole of a fashionable street in London, with the buildings erected on it.

This fortune and the absence of any one who could control him had made him wilful and extravagant and had wrought in him a curious love of personal display.  Even as a child he would clamor to be dressed in the most gorgeous uniforms; and when he got possession of his property his love of display became almost a monomania.  He built a theater as an adjunct to his country house in Ireland and imported players from London and elsewhere to act in it.  He loved to mingle with the mummers, to try on their various costumes, and to parade up and down, now as an oriental prince and now as a Roman emperor.

In London he hung about the green-rooms, and was a well-known figure wherever actors or actresses were collected.  Such was his love of the stage that he sought to marry into the profession and set his heart on a girl named Mary Campbell Browne, who was very beautiful to look at, but who was not conspicuous either for her mind or for her morals.  When Lord Blessington proposed marriage to her she was obliged to tell him that she already had one husband still alive, but she was perfectly willing to live with him and dispense with the marriage ceremony.  So for several years she did live with him and bore him two children.

It speaks well for the earl that when the inconvenient husband died a marriage at once took place and Mrs. Browne became a countess.  Then, after other children had been born, the lady died, leaving the earl a widower at about the age of forty.  The only legitimate son born of this marriage followed his mother to the grave; and so for the third time the earldom of Blessington seemed likely to become extinct.  The death of his wife, however, gave the earl a special opportunity to display his extravagant tastes.  He spent more than four thousand pounds on the funeral ceremonies, importing from France a huge black velvet catafalque which had shortly before been used at the public funeral of Napoleon’s marshal, Duroc, while the house blazed with enormous wax tapers and glittered with cloth of gold.