The Cosmopolitan 1886-08: Vol 1 Iss 5

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THE COSMOPOLITAN. AUGUST, 1886. THE STORY OF LESPINASSE. By EDGAR FAWCETT. | FIRST met Clarence Lespinasse when he was a young man of twenty-two. He was then re- markably handsome, and I think that all the changes that afterward fell upon’ his visage never really robbed it of this inherent beauty. He had an oval face, with eyes of a dark, liquid blue, at times exquisitely luminous, and shining amber hair, which : curled about his temples in those lines of grace we are apt to call classic, or even divine, if we see them on the heads of the famed Greek statues. There was yet no hint of beard on his smooth-moulded cheek and chin. His figure was almost below medium height and of extreme slenderness. He had no presence, as the phrase goes. You had to look at him twice before you recognized what an enchanting beginning nature had made in that brow and hair and profile. Then, too, his walk, his gesture, his carriage had not a trace of dignity or felicity. He was not awkward; he was simply without note or distinction, as regards movement and posture. But when he spoke, his rich, sweet tones instantly won you. At once, you felt that the soft, sonorous melody of such a voice as his was in perfect correspondence with the poetic countenance of which it, indeed, seemed a charming vocal expression. I had met him by the merest chance, one evening, at the reception of a certain Mrs. Cynthia Abernethy, a lady that supported her family through newspaper work and delighted in having ‘‘evenings’’ at her little basement house in Fifty-eighth street. The most extraordinary people came to Mrs. Abernethy’s evenings. They were true outgrowths of New York Bohemianism. This was a good while ago, and our big metropolis had not as yet awakened to any vague sense of a literary society. If you went to Mrs. Abernethy’s, you were almost certain to be ignorant that the Amsterdams or the Van Twillers were holding their select patrician revels elsewhere. New York aris- tocracy had not yet transpired, so to speak, in the current newspapers. Our social snobbery confined itself within far narrower limits. The Jenkinses did not go about then as now, seeking ‘‘items’’ for their gossipy columns. Occasionally, you heard that Mrs. Brown or Miss Jones was making a hard struggle for position, and covering herself, in consequence, with the ludicrous odium that always must be insep- arable from efforts of this kind, and that must always carry so pitiful a meaning in a republic self-sworn against these follies. But, as a rule, such efforts were rare; the craze for fashionable prominence had yet scarcely begun on the part of newly-gilded millionaires. Extreme mental cultivation was rather disdained by so-termed nabobs, as being ‘‘booky’’ and a trifle vulgar. If Clarence Lespinasse had ever received notice and tribute in those days from the self-styled potentates, I am very sure that his good looks, far more than his brains, would have secured him such favor. But he would probably have spurned it