D’Orsay very naturally went to Paris, for, like his father, he had always been an ardent Bonapartist, and now Prince Louis Bonaparte had been chosen president of the Second French Republic.  During the prince’s long period of exile he had been the guest of Count d’Orsay, who had helped him both with money and with influence.  D’Orsay now expected some return for his former generosity.  It came, but it came too late.  In 1852, shortly after Prince Louis assumed the title of emperor, the count was appointed director of fine arts; but when the news was brought to him he was already dying.  Lady Blessington died soon after coming to Paris, before the end of the year 1849.

Comment upon this tangled story is scarcely needed.  Yet one may quote some sayings from a sort of diary which Lady Blessington called her “Night Book.”  They seem to show that her supreme happiness lasted only for a little while, and that deep down in her heart she had condemned herself.

A woman’s head is always influenced by her heart; but a man’s heart is always influenced by his head.

The separation of friends by death is less terrible than the divorce of two hearts that have loved, but have ceased to sympathize, while memory still recalls what they once were to each other.

People are seldom tired of the world until the world is tired of them.

A woman should not paint sentiment until she has ceased to inspire it.

It is less difficult for a woman to obtain celebrity by her genius than to be pardoned for it.

Memory seldom fails when its office is to show us the tombs of our buried hopes.

BYRON AND THE COUNTESS GUICCIOLI

In 1812, when he was in his twenty-fourth year, Lord Byron was more talked of than any other man in London.  He was in the first flush of his brilliant career, having published the early cantos of “Childe Harold.”  Moreover, he was a peer of the realm, handsome, ardent, and possessing a personal fascination which few men and still fewer women could resist.

Byron’s childhood had been one to excite in him strong feelings of revolt, and he had inherited a profligate and passionate nature.  His father was a gambler and a spendthrift.  His mother was eccentric to a degree.  Byron himself, throughout his boyish years, had been morbidly sensitive because of a physical deformity—­a lame, misshapen foot.  This and the strange treatment which his mother accorded him left him headstrong, wilful, almost from the first an enemy to whatever was established and conventional.

As a boy, he was remarkable for the sentimental attachments which he formed.  At eight years of age he was violently in love with a young girl named Mary Duff.  At ten his cousin, Margaret Parker, excited in him a strange, un-childish passion.  At fifteen came one of the greatest crises of his life, when he became enamored of Mary Chaworth, whose grand-father had been killed in a duel by Byron’s great-uncle.  Young as he was, he would have married her immediately; but Miss Chaworth was two years older than he, and absolutely refused to take seriously the devotion of a school-boy.