An Irishman's Diary

ALAS, the Residence de France on Dublin’s Ailesbury Road will probably be best known for a generation as the property that, just before the crash, went on the market (unsuccessfully) at a staggering €60 million.

That now-poignant statistic aside, the other thing most people may remember about the mansion is the joke of then ambassador that it was so big, he and his wife sometimes had to locate each other in it by mobile phone.

But long before the boom – indeed long before its career in diplomacy – the house had a fascinating history. Which had hitherto escaped me until I heard some of it courtesy of the current resident, Ambassador Emmanuelle D’Achon, during last weekend’s Franco-Irish Literary Festival.

The story begins in the grim 1840s, when a teenage boy named George Bustard was selling newspapers at Donnybrook Fair and found a purse.

The purse had a large sum of money in it: one he might easily have kept.

But he didn’t.

With the honesty for which newspaper people have always been famous, he instead tracked down its owner and reunited him with the money.

Whereupon the impressed and grateful recipient dispensed a generous reward.

The upshot of this well-gotten gain was that the young man now had the means to emigrate to Australia (where the word Donnybrook – meaning a row of the kind all-too-common at the annual fair, whose excesses would soon see it banned) preceded him.

He made a fortune in construction there. And while doing so, he planned to return home some day and build a mansion. Sad to say, his ambition for a retirement on the banks of the Dodder was never realised. But in a very detailed will, he enjoined his children to do what he couldn’t.

Thus the next generation of Bustards – a son and three daughters returned to Ireland in his place: and, in 1885, using some of the great wealth he had left them, they built his dream house.

Almost every detail of the construction had been prescribed by the patriarch: from the specially-made white bricks, which cost an exorbitant two-and-a-half pence each, to the mansion’s name – Mytilene – borrowed from the main town on the Greek island of Lesbos.

It can hardly have been the writings of Sappho, a long-time resident of Mytilene who ran an academy there for unmarried young ladies and was a famous admirer of female beauty, that inspired him. Rather, apparently, he had once just heard the name as a child, and it excited in him a life-long fascination with ancient Greece and Rome.

Nevertheless it’s said that, in repelling all his daughters’ suitors while they lived in Australia, the old man was partly responsible for ensuring they too remained unwed. By the time they moved to Ireland, free of his overbearing protection, it was too late.

And so, after their brother left Dublin, the Bustard sisters shared the giant house: each living alone in her separate quarters, their numbers – like the Bustards of the avian world – in gradual decline.

Separate apartments aside, the house’s idiosyncrasies included furniture made from the timbers of a sailing ship such as the one that had taken the teenage newspaper seller to Australia. The dining table was horse-shoe shaped. And even the house’s portico – still its most obvious architectural feature today – was a curiosity.

Designed in the colonial style as protection against the blazing Irish sun, it suggests that old Bustard had been in Australia too long (a point underlined by the fact that the portico entrance was and remains north-facing).

But perhaps the most eccentric of the will’s stipulations was that the dinner table always had to be set for each of the four children, present or otherwise. One might wonder how breaches of this rule would ever have been policed. Even so, the last of the Bustard sisters, Kate, reportedly honoured it to the end, when she dined alone.

She lived into the late 1920s. And more than half a century later, a resident and historian of the road, Norah Fahie, remembered her as a sweet old lady who happily allowed local children to play among the garden’s cedars and other exotic trees, planted – again – in keeping with the terms of the will.

If the Bustard sisters themselves did not propagate, at least the exotic plants did. The same Miss Fahie reported the appearance in her own garden – several houses away – of the beginnings of a Himalayan Cedar, courtesy of the Bustard house. Himalayan Cedars are more typically found planted near Hindu shrines, but they seemed to be finding Ireland’s damp climate quite hospitable.

When Kate Bustard died, a niece and nephew sold the mansion to the French consul in Ireland (the Free State did not yet have the right to receive ambassadors). One of the first thing to go was the name.

Thereafter Mytilene became plain No 53 Ailesbury Road, a digit that, despite its plainness, would one day be exceeded by the number of millions it was deemed to be worth.

Its former residents now occupy a stately tomb in Dublin’s Mount Jerome Cemetery. And the price-tag of their old home, circa 2008, might as well be interred alongside them. Still, it was another interesting twist in the story of a house that has held up a slightly warped mirror to Ireland’s recent fortunes, having gone from Bustard to boom and then back again, or near enough.