“Did you know that they had a conseil de famille that day?”
“No. I heard nothing of it.”
“The whole family signed a petition to the Emperor Napoleon to be allowed to return to France and serve in the army.” The Prince studied her. “Can you imagine why they want to go back to France when they can live quietly here and be out of politics?”
The remark was intended to be genial, but it had its shaded side. Edward was no stranger to the lighter, dizzier character of the Second Empire, but it was as if in that one remark he consigned it and all its vanities to oblivion.
Lillie returned home to Paris and on July 17 drove to St. Cloud for dinner with the Empress. When the Moultons arrived, instead of a flurry of servants in the vestibule, there was only one distracted official. The dinner had been canceled. Then, at the last moment, Eugénie sent word they were to be admitted. Other than members of the imperial household, they were the only guests. The meal was taken in terrible silence, interrupted by a stream of telegrams. At the end of the meal, the Emperor, wracked with kidney stones and ashen white, hauled himself to his feet and almost absentmindedly bade the company good night. He had already sworn to take the field at the head of his troops but could barely mount the stairs in his own palace.
Two days later France declared war upon Prussia.
Gounod
1
An almost insensate war fever convulsed France. In Paris hapless German tourists were knocked to the pavements and beaten senseless. People ran about the streets all day long, looking for something to cheer. The curtain was rising on one of the most catastrophic events in French history, a conflict in which England for once had no interest or treaty commitments. The Foreign Office and the British ambassador had been taken completely by surprise. Clarendon, who had smiled so kindly on Georgina at Ashridge all those years ago, died suddenly at his home in Grosvenor Crescent on June 27 and was replaced as Foreign Secretary by Granville, who had been Knave of Hearts on that same glorious evening. On appointment, he unwisely announced that not a cloud obscured the pleasant prospect of peace in Europe. A fortnight later Napoleon declared war.
In Paris Lord Lyons found himself once again vexed by a flood of cables and dispatches. His afternoon carriage rides with the ever-faithful Bully Sheffield and Bully Malet, who had followed him from the Washington posting, were now sorely disturbed. In normal times the curious might set their watches by his grave progress in the Bois de Boulogne. Now, yet again, Lyons was forced to make contingency plans for the evacuation of the embassy. That was, he hoped, a thing of last resort; but it did not help that in Washington Prévost-Paradol, the French ambassador, predicted a Prussian victory and then drove home the point by committing suicide. His was almost the first shot fired.
In London sympathies were divided between the two belligerents. Patriots bore in mind that the Crown Prince of Prussia was married to Victoria’s eldest daughter. The Queen was much gratified to hear from her son-in-law words indicating a complete reprobation of sinful Paris. (The Prince, meanwhile, was curtly dismissed by Bismarck in a conversation with William Russell of the Times as “that dunderhead,” and an enraged Russell asked permission to quote him.) Many found the Germans—as represented by those who flocked to the spas and watering places favored by the British—sociable and well behaved, with a reputation for exquisite manners. They were, as they constantly assured their Anglo-Saxon friends, much more in tune with them than with the French. And this struck some as no more than the truth. Those who had tasted the pleasures of Paris in the Second Empire—its wit and irreverence as well as its monumental hedonism—suddenly remembered tendencies to bombast and ungentlemanly arrogance among the French. There was a strong feeling in England that the war had been foolishly provoked not by Bismarck, who was its actual author, but by the Empress Eugénie. Certainly the grounds for it, understood to be an insult offered to the French by the Kaiser, subtly reworked as an insult to the Kaiser by the French ambassador at Ems, was the stuff of opéra bouffe. As in Offenbach, war had descended out of a clear blue sky.
One of the multitudes of Parisians caught up in the patriotic hysteria was the composer Charles Gounod. The day Lillie Moulton dined with the Comte de Paris in London, without quite realizing she had walked into the conclusion of a historic conseil de famille, happened to be Gounod’s fifty-second birthday. He celebrated it in Paris with some aplomb. On the face of it, the empire could not have boasted a more solid and conscientious citizen. Member of the Institut de France, Academician, officer of the Légion d’Honneur, the composer had got from the epoch his full share of rewards. There was little frivolous and nothing bohemian about him. His Faust had been triumphantly revived in March of the previous year, and plans were in train to start rehearsals at the Opéra of a sellout revival of his most successful opera, Roméo et Juliette.
He was the very model of bourgeois success—heavy, mannered, sometimes even somber in character, with an oracular way of expressing himself suitable to his artistic eminence. His name appeared on prestigious committees. His opinion was sought at the best salons. He lived in a fine house at St.-Cloud with his wife, two children, and his mother-in-law, the redoubtable Mme Zimmermann. Photographed in about 1870, his image shows an imposing figure with slightly dandified clothes, arms folded, a full beard already turning white. The way he holds his head and the expression on his face are challenging, magisterial.
He had another side. Paris in the nineteenth century was a city particularly rich in caricaturists, and what they brought out was the size of his head and a peculiar quizzical intensity in his expression. The photograph taken of him in 1870 is how he saw himself. In caricature he always looks disheveled. His eyes are huge and dark, and his brow slopes back an immense way such as to indicate deep and passionate thoughts. He seems on the point of tears or as if caught in some guilty act to which he must now confess. Even if one knew nothing at all of his personal life, these sketches would seem to show a weak and vacillating personality.
The caricaturists were responding to well-known failings in him. In particular he was a colossal flirt. At soirees, or to enliven the slumbrous afternoon calm of a French at-home, he was given to singing at the piano, sometimes complete operatic scores. On these occasions he invariably rendered the female part of his audience brimful of tears. Not every composer can sing, and there was an element of party trick in Gounod’s ability to caress his audience. A woman once asked him how he came to write such beautiful music. “God, madame, sends me down some of His angels and they whisper sweet melodies in my ear,” he murmured. He meant it.
In 1852 he married Anna Zimmermann, whose father was a professor at the Paris Conservatoire. In fact he almost balked at the last fence. Going to the Zimmermanns with a letter explaining how impossible it was for him to marry, he was greeted on the doorstep by his future mother-in-law, who swept him into the drawing room to make his proposal. He put the letter back in his pocket and proposed. This suggests the plasticity of the caricature and not the jaw-jutting determination of the photograph.
There was a price to pay for being Gounod. Intimates knew he was prone to massive attacks of melancholy and self-loathing. When he was in the mood, nobody could be more tragically afflicted than he. In the early months of 1870 he had just such an attack:
My work costs me the most painful efforts and racks my brain. I fight against the void, I think I’ve written something acceptable, and then when I look at it again, I find it execrable. My mind wanders and grieves, I don’t know where I am. It would be a help if only I knew how to deal with such a horrible condition. I can’t see clearly any more: I don’t know where I’m going . . . twenty times melancholy overwhelms me, I weep, I despair and I want to get away . . . I open my notebook and shut it again. Nothing! My mind is empty! Oh Lord, what better can be done than to accept this desolation and nothingness! I thought I was worth something! I didn’t want to be a nobody.
For some these thoughts expressed the very essence of Romanti
c agony. This was how great creative minds were supposed to speak to their demons. But insiders, while they might admit he had a difficult and also vexatious job, knew that Gounod’s mental resilience was suspect and would have been so whether or not he composed music for a living. Never far from the Gounod entourage was Dr. Antoine Émile Blanche, who had a clinic at Passy. Blanche had treated Gérard de Nerval for madness and was to attend the last days of Guy de Maupassant. Dr. Blanche was what was described in those days as an alienist and his clinic effectively a private asylum. Gounod’s overwhelming despair had already sent him to the clinic in Passy more than once.
At first the war galvanized him. He took the man in the street’s view of the coming conflict and composed a fiery patriotic song called “À la Frontière!” (His fellow composer Richard Wagner was meanwhile telling French friends passing through Munich that the only way out was to bomb Paris and burn it to the ground. This was ungrateful, because it happened that Gounod as an unctuous young man had met Wagner on the beach at Trouville and persuaded the German to adopt Catholicism. Gounod was, very improbably, Wagner’s godfather.) But after a little while his native prudence reasserted itself, and as the crisis deepened, he evacuated his wife and children to Varangeville, near Dieppe. He wrote them twice-daily bulletins. “Prayer is your only weapon! You must load it! The soul of the French must be the gunpowder that fires French bullets!” he explained to his wife.
Prayer proved less effectual than Prussian efficiency. As the summer months passed, so did some of the hysteria. Things were looking black. The Louvre was emptied of its treasures which were taken to the coast at Brest. Most theaters closed and the Opéra became a military depot. The Emperor had gone at the head of his armies to the eastern frontiers, but the news from there was not good. One morning a spectacular victory was announced, and Paris was delirious with joy. In the afternoon the report from the front was contradicted: the Imperial Army had suffered heavy losses. Despair rushed in like seawater. On September 1 the unimaginable took place. Paris was utterly staggered to learn that Napoleon had capitulated at Sedan. The surrender was unconditional and the Emperor himself captured.
The fine detail was dramatic enough to satisfy any composer. The defeated Emperor met Bismarck in the upstairs room of a squalid cottage near Donchery, hastily requisitioned for the purpose. The last time they had met was at the Paris Exhibition three years earlier, when the first performance of Gounod’s Roméo et Juliette had been part of the glittering celebrations. Then, Bismarck in his white uniform and helmet with eagle mounted had been a raree-show all of his own. Things were very different now. While waiting to learn what his fate was to be, Napoleon walked up and down the cottage garden between rows of potatoes. The escort that came later in the day made all clear. On a command from an indifferent young subaltern, the party drew swords, as it would for the capture of the merest private. The empire was at an end.
Gounod at once fled Paris to Varangeville and on September 13 embarked at Dieppe with his family for England. London presented a stark contrast to the panic and uncertainty of Paris. On his earlier visits, when the City of Lights had been the undisputed style capital of Europe, Gounod found his English admirers wooden and the streets of London dirty and unkempt. Exile changed his point of view. Now everything seemed wonderful. He lived first at Blackheath with some English friends named Brown before finding accommodation in Park Street, near Regent’s Park.
A letter he wrote to Crown Prince Frederick—whom he had never met—throws some further light on his personality. As the Siege tightened around Paris, Gounod read with alarm how leafy and prosperous St. Cloud had become a battleground. In his letter he asked the Prince to use his influence to spare the house, or at least ensure the German gunners were made aware of its illustrious owner, a man always friendly to German art and the suitably reverent composer of Faust, no less. Surely there could be some special consideration given in what were trying circumstances. (In fact, the house was in the middle of the battle zone, and both French and German patrols occupied it during the fighting.) Frederick seems to have made Gounod’s letter public, which did nothing for his reputation in Paris. There, famously, as the Siege took hold, even people of the highest rank were starving. Georges Bizet joined the National Guard and was given a rifle he did not know how to fire; he spent much of his time scavenging for food. In October Gounod wrote to his brother-in-law:
We ought all to be standing face to face with the Prussians at this moment. Every one of us, or not a soul. And it astounds me that three million Frenchmen and 30,000 cannon were not summoned, over a month ago, under one and the same flag (not that of France alone but of humanity in general) to repulse this invasion of machines rather than of men. Here comes Mrs. Brown. Goodbye for a while.
On an even more unfortunate note he tried to explain that while blood was being spilled in France, those who had fled also experienced their own agonies. But Gounod’s exile was personally exhilarating. His presence in London that winter had not gone unnoticed by the music world, and by comparison with his Parisian relatives he spent a pleasant and calming time. On February 26, 1871, he was invited to meet Julius Benedict at his house in Manchester Square, off Wigmore Street. It was a happy occasion: Benedict, who had recently naturalized, had even more recently been knighted for his services to music. What was more congenial than for the Stuttgart-born Englishman to extend the hand of friendship to the distinguished French exile? This was the kind of social engagement Gounod understood very readily and something he had done a hundred times before. It was a meeting of music makers attended by their acolytes and admirers. After a while, Gounod was pressed to play the piano and noticing a woman in the room with a lively eye and a forward expression, elected to accompany himself in the song “À une Jeune Fille,” directing his performance almost exclusively at her. It was a wonderful piece of theater: typically Gallic, probably ironic, for the lady was no longer young, and thus tender and witty in just the way Parisians could carry such things off.
The woman, who was with her husband, was of course Georgina. Bursting into uncontrollable tears at the beauty of the moment and the compliment she had been paid, she retreated behind the window curtains to drink a glass of water. She made sure she stayed there until all but the principal guest had left. Only then did one supremely talented flirt come face-to-face with another.
2
Gounod was nineteen years older than Georgina and may have worried that the slim good looks of his youthful self had fled forever. But if he had anxiety on that score, it was unfounded. He was exactly the kind of man Georgina had been looking for in one guise or another since childhood—an older, more mature figure with a knowledge of the world, a practicality and assurance she need not try to match. Gounod would provide the worldliness and she the romantic idealism. She soon discovered things about him that surprised her by the way they chimed deliciously with her own personality. Gounod was an artist, but he was also a troubled man. He was more like his caricature than he cared to admit. He had, she saw, his mystical, incoherent side, his sense of the unutterable. He had a haplessness and childlike innocence when it came to subjects other than Wagner, whose music he admired—for example, such mundane matters as contracts and royalties, or more tellingly marriage and children. He had secrets, emotional luggage he carried with him that he hinted would make her hair stand on end, and was sentimental to a fault. Of course it mattered to Georgina that he was famous, and he did not blanch when she applied the term “genius” to his musical talent. His calm acceptance of her adulation was proof in itself of genius. But maybe his greatest attraction to Georgina was that, like her, he longed to be loved. It did not matter that he was loved, that his loyal wife loved him. The love he wanted was unspecific and not even particularly sexual. She recognized that in him straightaway. This great man was made just like her. His heart was bleeding and his mind misunderstood. As to the rest of him, his gifts and personality, there was an obvious way of describing his allure. Charles Gounod was ever
ything that Harry Weldon was not.
The starting point for their relationship was very flattering. A few days after their first meeting, he called at St. James’s Hall, where she was rehearsing, and overheard her singing Mendelssohn’s “Hear My Prayer.” His admiration for her voice was immediate and unfeigned. His good opinion was worth having. Gounod had known Pauline Viardot when he was Georgina’s age, and Viardot was still counted as one of the greatest operatic sopranos of the century. For her he had written Sapho and, the gossip ran, shared her favors with her weak and complaisant husband and the unlikely third party Ivan Turgenev. That was one of his murky secrets. Like Gounod, Viardot had fled the war and was living at Devonshire Place, off the Marylebone Road. Turgenev, who had secretly helped to fund her, had rooms a few streets away. (He had brought back from the war a characteristic Turgenevian story. The distant shelling of Strasbourg had brought down the chimney stack of the villa in which he was staying. He had noticed this chimney when he first took up the let of the property and mentioned it to the architect, who happened to be French. “That stack, m’sieu, is as strong as France itself,” the man replied.)
In more recent years Gounod had worked with the equally illustrious Marie Carvalho, who had created the part of Marguerite in Faust. Gounod might be two-faced about many things, but a professional tribute from him was not likely to be dishonest. Having heard Georgina sing, he said at once, “I was struck by the purity of her voice, by the sureness of her technique and the noble simplicity of her voice, and I was able to prove to myself that Benedict had not been exaggerating when he spoke to me about her remarkable talent as a singer.” It was, he added in a memorable phrase, “un voix des deux sexes.”
The Disastrous Mrs. Weldon Page 12