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Updated: August 8, 2024
It could not but unsettle him, and draw him into much more gaiety than was compatible with the higher pursuits his mother had expected of him; and what was worse, it threw him into Sir Harry Vivian's set, veteran roues, and younger men who looked up to their knowingness and listened to their good stories. What amount of harm it was doing Raymond could not guess.
In the curious network of lines all over the worn face of the princess there were suggestions of the sensual lure that had made her the mistress of the court; a gentle but pitiful droop to the mouth that I had noticed persisting in the roués and sirens of Asia after senility had struck away all charm.
Lady Morgan preserved to the end of her days a packet of love-letters indorsed, 'Sir Charles Montague Ormsby, Bart., one of the most brilliant wits, determined roues, agreeable persons, and ugliest men of his day. The summer of this year, 1808, Miss Owenson spent in a round of visits to country-houses, and in working, amid many distractions, at her Grecian novel, Ida of Athens.
His roues and valets were always eager to present fresh mistresses to him, from which he generally selected one. Amongst these was Madame de Sabran, who had married a man of high rank, but without wealth or merit, in order to be at liberty.
Not the roués of the Regency after the suppers that have become a by-word not the mousquetaires after the wildest of their orgies were ever so unrelenting in brutality toward women quite lonely and undefended as those unshorn ornaments of Young France, when replete with a dinner at forty sous, and with the anomalous liquor that Macon blushes to own.
Old beaux of the time of the Empire, with dyed and waxed moustaches, with dyed or grizzled hair flattened on their temples, their flabby cheeks cut across by stiff collars as jelly is cut by a knife, were hobnobbing, fat and lean, with young fops of the Republic, who with their sharp eyes, wide-open nostrils, their cheeks covered with brown or flaxen down, their hair carefully brushed, or already bald, seemed quite surprised to find themselves in such a place, and chattered and cackled among themselves like beardless conscripts, perverted and immoral but with some scruples still remaining and less cunning than these well-dressed old roués standing firmly at their posts like veterans.
I saw through the windows of the long Galerie de Diane the roues of the Regency at supper, and at table with them a dark, semi-barbarian little man in a coat of Russian sable, the coolest head in Europe at a drinking-bout.
Stung to the quick by the contrast between his past and his present place in the English world, he hastened abroad. There, whether in distraction from thought, or from the curiosity of a restless intellect to explore the worth of things yet untried, Randal Leslie, who had hitherto been so dead to the ordinary amusements of youth, plunged into the society of damaged gamesters and third-rate roues.
What is extraordinary is, neither his mistress nor Madame la Duchesse de Berry, nor his 'roues', could ever draw anything from him, even when drunk, concerning the affairs of the government, however important.
"Out on you, Saville," said Godolphin; "as well might you say no music out of the opera; these verbal prettinesses colour conversation. But your roues are so d d prosaic, you want us to walk to Vice without a flower by the way." "Vice indeed!" cried Saville. "I abjure your villanous appellatives.
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