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I enjoyed the cigarette card post on the Count d'Orsay!

BTW, your entry talks about d'Orsay as a fashion leader in France, when, in actuality, most of his famous trend-setting took place in England. (It *is* true that he influenced men's dress on both sides of the Channel, his sister Ida being the French Duchess de Gramont and a Society beauty in her own right.)

If one looks at portraits of the Count in the late 1830s (the 1839 portrait in the British National Portrait Gallery by Hayter) and the one by Wood, c. 1840, you can see that his very dark dress of browns and blacks (described by Jane Carlyle in 1845) is very much in the sober mode and no longer of the "butterfly" colours of his younger years. You can also see the Count's receding hairline in the Wood portrait, showing that, at least, the great dandy's vanity could accept a little reality in his depiction as he approaches middle age.

P.S. The speculation--and speculation it remains--of the Count being the lover of both Lord and Lady Blessington was first proposed in a biography in the 1930s (Michael Sadleir) and it keeps popping up from time to time. The late historian Johanna Richardson doubted (in 1983) that Lady Blessington was ever Count d'Orsay's mistress.