Beau Brummell The Ultimate Man of Style

Prologue Nothing was lacking. Lustres, candelabra, candles, masses of flowers; and he himself, in the blaze of all the lights, stood in the centre, expectant. Count d'Aurevilly at Brummell's last soiree When the Allies took Caen after the D-day Normandy landings in June 1944 they entered a city of rubble. The ancient capital of Lower Normandy and the stronghold of the Twelfth and Twenty-first German Panzer Divisions had suffered a month of bombardment by British and Canadian heavy artillery and 2,500 tons of RAF bombs. The eighteenth-century heart of the Ile St. Jean -- the area leading up to the German HQ in the chateau -- was destroyed. Canadian tanks plowed straight from the pontoon bridge over the River Orne and right through the ruins of the old town. "Andy's Alley" -- as the tank road to the chateau became known -- flattened whatever had been left standing in its path: houses, shops, cafes and hotels. Caen had been the jewel of the Normandy coast, a city built on a river island, with two royal abbeys and a wealth of bourgeois townhouses in honey-colored stone. Its many English visitors said the city reminded them of Oxford. Andy's Alley cut through Caen's destroyed center, across the place Dauphine, and the rue des Carmes. The tanks plowed on past the ruins of the Salon Litteraire and straight through the dining room of the bombed-out Hotel d'Angleterre on the rue St. Jean. An American soldier later took a photograph of the hotel, blown open to the winds, which was sold as a postcard souvenir to the GIs. Here, a hundred years before, George Brummell -- once the most fashionable foreigner in France -- had held soirees for passing English aristocrats. As the tanks rolled by under three stories of flayed hotel rooms, the wallpaper of Brummell's room flapped in the breeze. The year 1839. Room 29 was at the top of the Hotel d'Angleterre, overlooking the slate roof tiles of Caen. Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire, en route to Paris with her daughter, was the first guest to admire the view, and within minutes room 29 was pressed with Monsieur Brummell's other friends: the poet Byron, the old playwright Sheridan, the Duke of Wellington and Prince Frederick, Duke of York with Princess Frederica of Prussia. Fichet, the hotel owner's son, was used to the metropolitan glamour that still clung to the hotel's most famous resident: it fell to Fichet to attend Monsieur Brummell when he was holding one of his soirees. Brummell had taught him how to announce royalty and how much obeisance was expected by the victor of Waterloo, and Monsieur Brummell had taught Fichet about clothes. It was Fichet, also, who acted as valet to the hotel's celebrated dandy and wit, helping him into his evening coat and handing him the whitest of cravats with the reverence of a sacristan. Yet these soirees would end suddenly and in the same way. One moment, Brummell would hold out his arm to escort the Duchess of Devonshire across the room; the next, his eyes were opened to the reality around him. The room was empty. There was nothing in front of him but the candles, the flowers and the young Frenchman with pity in his eyes. Fichet eventually became inured, he said, to the dark pantomime of announcing Brummell's ghosts: the long-dead duchesses and courtesans, the Regency celebrities who had been Monsieur's friends. But he dreaded the moment when Brummell woke from his masquerade and saw the reality around him: the ruination of his fame and fortune and of his mind. "Babylon in all its desolation," as one friend of Brummell's said, "was a sight less awful." The Frenchman would then blow out the candles, shut the windows and leave BeKelly, Ian is the author of 'Beau Brummell The Ultimate Man of Style', published 2006 under ISBN 9780743270892 and ISBN 0743270894.