Word: chesterfields
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...bristled with swashbuckling Renaissance antics, and bustled down the old pay-dirt road to sales of more than 1,000,000 copies each. But before he became the darling of the cloak-and-swagger set, Author Shellabarger, a onetime Princeton professor, wrote sober-sided biographies. One of these. Lord Chesterfield and His World, published in Britain in 1935, is making a belated U.S. bow. Scholarly Author Shellabarger has taken a firm grip on a slippery subject: a man with the moral instincts of a chameleon and the temperament of an icicle...
Philip Dormer Stanhope, fourth Earl of Chesterfield, was a chilly 18th Century aristocrat, diplomat and wit, whose famous letters to his son, designed to make the lad a blue chip off the old block, immortalized their author instead. Reared in the Age of Reason, Chesterfield also became its perfect symbol: a man who saw his time steadily, but never saw through...
...Chesterfield's emotional budget, sentiment was a luxury, style a necessity. "Do everything," the earl instructed a godson, "in minuet-time; speak, think, and move always in that measure." The irony of Chesterfield's own life was that he gracefully missed every other beat. He served George II ably as ambassador to The Hague, and was probably one of the few lord-lieutenants of Ireland whose blarney charmed the Irish. But solid triumphs abroad never netted him more than slim cabinet posts at home, and George II scornfully dubbed the diminutive earl a "dwarf-baboon...
Though his fabulous Mayfair manor, Chesterfield House, took three years in the building, the earl never properly had a home. At 38, his personal fortune depleted by staggering losses at cards, he advertised for a wife ("I want merit and I want money"). He got the money from a middle-aged and somewhat vulgar countess who brought him ?50,000 in dowry and ?3,000 in annual income. After the wedding, they were rarely seen together...
...Chesterfield took a dim view of women generally; he felt their proper function was "to suckle fools and chronicle small beer." But in an age of high manners and low morals, it was chic to have a mistress, even more chic to sire a bastard. The earl had both...