All this “crowded sumptuousness” was due to the taste of Lady Blessington.  Amid it she received royal dukes, statesmen such as Palmerston, Canning, Castlereagh, Russell, and Brougham, actors such as Kemble and Matthews, artists such as Lawrence and Wilkie, and men of letters such as Moore, Bulwer-Lytton, and the two Disraelis.  To maintain this sort of life Lord Blessington raised large amounts of money, totaling about half a million pounds sterling, by mortgaging his different estates and giving his promissory notes to money-lenders.  Of course, he did not spend this vast sum immediately.  He might have lived in comparative luxury upon his income; but he was a restless, eager, improvident nobleman, and his extravagances were prompted by the urgings of his wife.

In all this display, which Lady Blessington both stimulated and shared, there is to be found a psychological basis.  She was now verging upon the thirties—­a time which is a very critical period in a woman’s emotional life, if she has not already given herself over to love and been loved in return.  During Lady Blessington’s earlier years she had suffered in many ways, and it is probable that no thought of love had entered her mind.  She was only too glad if she could escape from the harshness of her father and the cruelty of her first husband.  Then came her development into a beautiful woman, content for the time to be languorously stagnant and to enjoy the rest and peace which had come to her.

When she married Lord Blessington her love life had not yet commenced; and, in fact, there could be no love life in such a marriage—­a marriage with a man much older than herself, scatter-brained, showy, and having no intellectual gifts.  So for a time she sought satisfaction in social triumphs, in capturing political and literary lions in order to exhibit them in her salon, and in spending money right and left with a lavish hand.  But, after all, in a woman of her temperament none of these things could satisfy her inner longings.  Beautiful, full of Celtic vivacity, imaginative and eager, such a nature as hers would in the end be starved unless her heart should be deeply touched and unless all her pent-up emotion could give itself up entirely in the great surrender.

After a few years of London she grew restless and dissatisfied.  Her surroundings wearied her.  There was a call within her for something more than she had yet experienced.  The earl, her husband, was by nature no less restless; and so, without knowing the reason—­which, indeed, she herself did not understand—­he readily assented to a journey on the Continent.

As they traveled southward they reached at length the town of Valence, where Count d’Orsay was still quartered with his regiment.  A vague, indefinable feeling of attraction swept over this woman, who was now a woman of the world and yet quite inexperienced in affairs relating to the heart.  The mere sound of the French officer’s voice, the mere sight of his face, the mere knowledge of his presence, stirred her as nothing had ever stirred her until that time.  Yet neither he nor she appears to have been conscious at once of the secret of their liking.  It was enough that they were soothed and satisfied with each other’s company.