Grammont-Caderousse, shared this
favor, and have remained legendary characters, to whom their disdain for
everything vulgar, their worship of their own persons, and many costly
follies gave an ephemeral empire. Their power was the more arbitrary and
despotic in that it was only nominal and undefined, allowing them to rule
over the fashions, the tastes, and the pastimes of their contemporaries
with undivided sway, making them envied, obeyed, loved, but rarely
overthrown.

It has been asserted by some writers that dandies are necessary and
useful to a nation (Thackeray admired them and pointed out that they have
a most difficult and delicate role to play, hence their rarity), and that
these butterflies, as one finds them in the novels of that day, the de
Marsys, the Pelhams, the Maxime de Trailles, are indispensable to the
perfection of society. It is a great misfortune to a country to have no
dandies, those supreme virtuosos of taste and distinction. Germany,
which glories in Mozart and Kant, Goethe and Humboldt, the country of
deep thinkers and brave soldiers, never had a great dandy, and so has
remained behind England or France in all that constitutes the graceful
side of life, the refinements of social intercourse, and the art of
living. France will perceive too late, after he has disappeared, the
loss she has sustained when this Prince, Grand Seigneur, has ceased to
embellish by his presence her race-courses and "first nights." A
reputation like his cannot be improvised in a moment, and he has no
pupils.

Never did the aristocracy of a country stand in greater need of such a
representation, than in these days of tramcars and "fixed-price"
restaurants. An entire "art" dies with him. It has been whispered that
he has not entirely justified his reputation, that the accounts of his
exploits as a _haut viveur_ have gained in the telling. Nevertheless he
dominated an epoch, rising above the tumultuous and levelling society of
his day, a tardy Don Quixote, of the knighthood of pleasures, _fetes_,
loves and prodigalities, which are no longer of our time. His great
name, his grand manner, his elderly graces, his serene carelessness, made
him a being by himself. No one will succeed this master of departed
elegances. If he does not recover from his attack, if the paralysis does
not leave that poor brain, worn out with doing nothing, we can honestly
say that he is the last of his kind.

An original and independent