t toutes les femmes ont eu des amants, ou la conversation est
gaie, anecdotique, et ou l'on prend du punch leger a minuit et demie,
est l'endroit du monde ou je me trouve le mieux.'

And in such a Paradise of Frenchmen we may leave Henri Beyle.

1914

LADY HESTER STANHOPE

The Pitt nose has a curious history. One can watch its transmigrations
through three lives. The tremendous hook of old Lord Chatham, under
whose curve Empires came to birth, was succeeded by the bleak
upward-pointing nose of William Pitt the younger--the rigid symbol of an
indomitable _hauteur_. With Lady Hester Stanhope came the final stage.
The nose, still with an upward tilt in it, had lost its masculinity; the
hard bones of the uncle and the grandfather had disappeared. Lady
Hester's was a nose of wild ambitions, of pride grown fantastical, a
nose that scorned the earth, shooting off, one fancies, towards some
eternally eccentric heaven. It was a nose, in fact, altogether in the
air.

Noses, of course, are aristocratic things; and Lady Hester was the child
of a great aristocracy. But, in her case, the aristocratic impulse,
which had carried her predecessors to glory, had less fortunate results.
There has always been a strong strain of extravagance in the governing
families of England; from time to time they throw off some peculiarly
ill-balanced member, who performs a strange meteoric course. A century
earlier, Lady Mary Wortley Montagu was an illustrious example of this
tendency: that splendid comet, after filling half the heavens, vanished
suddenly into desolation and darkness. Lady Hester Stanhope's spirit was
still more uncommon; and she met with a most uncommon fate.

She was born in 1776, the eldest daughter of that extraordinary Earl
Stanhope, Jacobin and inventor, who made the first steamboat and the
first calculating machine, who defended the French Revolution in the
House of Lords and erased the armorial bearings--'damned aristocratical
nonsense'--from his carriages and his plate. Her mother, Chatham's
daughter and the favourite sister of Pitt, died when she was four years
old. The second Lady Stanhope, a frigid woman of fashion, left her
stepdaughters to the care of futile governesses, while 'Citizen
Stanhope' ruled the household from his laboratory with the violence of a
tyrant. It was not until Lady Hester was twenty-four that she escaped
from the slavery of her father's house, by going to live with her
grandmother, Lad