In her youth Maria Fagnani must have been a very fascinating girl. To George Selwyn, as we have seen, she was as the apple of his eye. He simply adored her. If she had a cold in the head, or an infantile ailment, however trivial, it was torture to him, provoking sympathy from his correspondents, who themselves seemed to be quite under the spell of the delightful child; and as he apparently never destroyed a note, there are plenty of these condolences in the budget of letters published by Jesse. To have won the heart of Thackeray’s Marquess of Steyne, if that fastidious personage ever possessed such an organ, was another feather in her cap, and in her old age we know how tenderly her son and Richard Wallace both loved her. In 1803 Lord and Lady Yarmouth were detained in France—he interned at Verdun—when war was again declared after the rupture of the Peace of Amiens, and their second son, Lord Henry Seymour, was born in Paris in 1805. Scandal declared that he was the son of Junot, Duc d’Abrantès, with whom Lady Yarmouth was very intimate. There is a note in Roscoe, page 8, which says: “She led a life of pleasure (1802-1807), travelling on the Continent with the Marshal Andoche.” That was Junot’s Christian name—but that he never was a marshal was his great grievance against Napoleon. This Lord Henry is not to be confounded, as is commonly done, with the Lord Henry Seymour, son of the first Marquess, who lived at Norris Castle, near Cowes, and spent a fortune in building the famous sea-wall. The Lord Henry with whom we have to deal was a very eccentric personage. Unlike his brother, Richard Lord Hertford, who was a handsome man, and in his youth a dandy of the 10th Hussars, Lord Henry was singularly ugly, even grotesque. There was in the Rue Lafitte a sketch or caricature of him, which I have seen, in which he was represented as a sort of Quilp, stunted, misshapen, and of prodigious strength. He was a hero of the various Salles d’Armes, a famous fencer and athlete, and the founder, or, at any rate, one of the founders, of the French Jockey Club. A kindly man withal, for by his will, in which his horses appeared as legatees—never to be crossed again—he left the bulk of his fortune to the hospitals of Paris. He died in 1859, three years after the loss of his mother. It used to be said that he never even set foot in England, but that was probably only one of the many fables set afloat about the two brothers. So curious a quartet as the mother, the two sons, and the enigma that was M. Richard, afterwards Sir Richard Wallace, furnished fine food for eavesdroppers and gossip-mongers.