MRS. LANGTRY’S LONDON HOUSE.

Poverty Bay Standard, Volume IX, Issue 967, 6 August 1881, Page 2

MRS. LANGTRY’S LONDON HOUSE.

The househould effects of the beautiful Mrs. Langtry were sold at auction recently, and a large crowd of London people attended the sale. There were Elizabethan chairs and Chippendale tables and pretty screens, to say nothing of cast-off pairs of skates, yacht flags and dog chains, all to be put under the auctioneer’s hammer, and the people who had a desire to know how a professional beauty lived, gratified their curiosity and indulged in a souvenir at one and the same time. The matter is of moment, however, but for one fact, and that is that the house, which was a famous fashionable resort, where the best people of Rondon where being constantly entertained, was a poor one, short of its decorations and robbed of the taste which has changed its low, square rooms and narrow halls into a bower

of beauty. It was in a fashionable neighbourhood, but it was of itself a thoroughly unfashionable house ; old and common, with tawdy, cheap interior decorations and common appearance. The taste of the woman whose dresses where the despair of dowagers with marriageable daughters, and whose beauty was enhanced by the faultless costumes she wore, made this house a home of beauty. The woman who could, make the metamorphose made in that house should not be permitted to live in idleness. If fortune fails her, and it is whispered that it is already doing so, she should be induced to teach aesthetic art to common minds and show the unimaginative of her sex how to cover dingy walls and tawdry ceilings with green draperies, and convert cheap windows into bowers for flowers. Her value would be priceless if she could be induced to do this, for the art she possesses is one of the rarest, and women who have it are worth more to the world than they know. If Mrs. Langtry would but return to London she would find her popularity increased tenfold, for it is with admiration that people speak of her after knowing her cleverness in house furnishing. With a few hondsome rugs and easy chairs, plenty of draperies, and not many articles of virtu she transformed an old London house into a charming home, where guests were to enjoy their surroundings, and its restful beauty. Mrs. Langtry is, therefore, something more than a professional beauty, and if she is to go out West, as the papers announce, what a godsend she would be to the kind of folk described in the Fair Barbarian, who live at “ Bloody Gulches,” and send to New York for furniture to crowd into them. The upholsterers might suffer in pause, but the cause of art would be served and people would be made all the happier for having tasteful homes. Mrt. Langtry has a career before her if she wishes to come before the people as a teacher of Octavia Bassetts, and no doubt some enterprising lecture bureau will have her booked for lectures immediately.— Brooklyn Eagle.