The Disastrous Mrs. Weldon

by Brian Thompson

  All this in a house once owned by Dickens. Whirled about the rooms, even after Gounod had fled, was the undigested content of a satirical novel, plot and character jumbled together, but a book, were it ever to be written, now sadly out of fashion. It was a picture composed in broad strokes, lacking shape and focus. Trollope, who to some extent had inherited the mantle of Dickens and Thackeray, was far too fastidious an ironist to portray anyone like Georgina. Tavistock House was unkempt, disorderly, lacking in comforts. There was dust in every corner and an overpowering smell of dog. People who came there were shocked by Georgina’s careless attitude to the normal duties of a wife and homemaker. She dressed erratically and had begun to interest herself in vegetarianism, a sure sign of eccentricity. After the vision she received in the bedroom at Blackheath, spiritualism also occupied her attentions. She was disappointed to find she was not herself a conduit for spirit messages and would never make a medium. She was merely a person of importance to whom the dead wished to speak.

  Many of her former devotees in the choir began to panic. The Ballin family, who had girls under Georgina’s care, actually went to Paris to interview Gounod under the guise of offering him a testimonial and when they came back, tried to hold a secret meeting with other choir parents. Georgina immediately threatened a lawsuit. But the rot had set in. “Some people called Hinton prevented their daughter from belonging to my choir because of rumours concerning me and Gounod. As a consequence I lost not only Miss Hinton but her fiancé, Mr. Johnstone. Mr. Maskelyne made some publicity for his business and scandal for me by putting about the fact that I was a spiritualist. As a consequence the Alexandra Palace turned me down!!!”

  The Maskelyne she mentions was John Nevil Maskelyne, a professional stage magician and illusionist who was also an unmasker of mediums. It is a shame he of all people did her in because they had much in common. Like Georgina, Maskelyne had appeared at St. James’s Hall. He had made his name by exposing two fraudulent mediums called the Davenport Brothers. With his partner Cooke he ran a magic and stage illusion show at a venue called the Egyptian Hall in Piccadilly. With only a little alteration, and without the curse laid on her of an aristocratic background, Georgina might have done very well as a showman. She had the unquenchable self-belief but lacked the common touch. Father Rawlings, who foisted his scruffy and impudent bell-ringing sons on her, had a better instinct than she for what the general public wanted.

  It was now twenty years since she had made her play for fame at Little Holland House. So much had changed, and not just in her own life. Someone who knew Dickens and Tavistock House was Thackeray’s eldest daughter, Anne. She had been invited to the little theater in the garden to attend the first night of Wilkie Collins’s The Frozen Deep, a play based on the last expedition to look for Sir John Franklin, the arctic explorer. As a much younger child she had seen her father and Dickens at their very liveliest at Christmas dinners in which the children were passed boisterously from hand to hand like little squealing parcels.

  Born within weeks of Georgina, Anne Thackeray had grown up much more in the mainstream of Victorian life. The day Thackeray caught Georgina buying her wedding ring in Cockspur Street, his daughter had just published her first novel. Of course it helped to have a father like Thackeray, not because he was famous, but for the benefits of his teasing, affectionate nature and bearlike possessiveness. Thackeray loved his two children, and though their upbringing was highly unconventional and at times painfully lonely, he taught them the true shape of the world. Georgina, who could claim to know or to have met many of the people Anne Thackeray had met, might as well have been on another planet altogether now. For all the trademark pandemonium of Tavistock House, it was a lonely and unpopulated place.

  2

  Once Gounod was gone, the degree to which their financial affairs had mingled became apparent. A fortnight after he took his farewells of her at Charing Cross, repeatedly begging her to visit, standing at the window to his departing train with tears running down his cheeks and wetting his beard, she received a reply to her anxious inquiries after his health and well-being.

  My dear Mimi,

  I can no longer hide from you the profound and bitter grief which your letters since I have been here have caused me, they have upset all my heart and brought the height to the trouble of my existence.

  I have lived three years near you: in your hands, under your guardianship. What I have accomplished of work you know, you have been the witness of that which I have expended in strength, acceptance of anguish, endured of suffering of all kinds.

  That you have wished for and looked for my good I feel assured, but you have pursued the realisation of it by generous devotion to an absolutely chimerical end: many times, you know, I have attempted to oppose a resistance and my objections; I have been obliged to renounce to them each time if I dared say a word.

  To re-enter into this life of anxiety, of submission to the terror of saying the least word, of the sacrifice of my own thoughts so as to feel myself paralysed, is beyond my strength . . . Since you have desired my peace and my tranquillity, do not dream of reopening for me an existence which can bring neither you nor us peace. All that which is admirable will never destroy your instinct for command, nor my repugnance to this entire annihilation of myself and my child, the thought of which terrifies me. The part which I am now taking is imperiously commanded to me by the feelings of exhaustion produced by the struggles of these last years. To attempt to argue against this decision is useless and can but aggravate what I suffer. I know that the wish for my repose and the re-establishment of my health passes in your eyes before all—the cares you have taken of me when I was ill have sufficiently proved this. May God keep you

  Your dear old man who kisses you,

  Charles Gounod

  However clumsy the translation Georgina made of it into English, the meaning was unmistakable. She already knew that he was never coming back, but there was more to it than that. Gounod wanted nothing more to do with her. This was devastating. In her eyes at least she was his musical associate and there was money as well as art involved. She was his English apologist and historian, as well as being the holder of several important copyrights. She was his muse, his Pauline, the next great soprano in his life. It was perfectly true she had prepared for this last role in a very unusual and maladroit way, but she was shrewd enough to see that without him she was nothing. She sent a man named de la Pole to Paris to act as her agent and find out what was going on. Gounod responded by asking her to send in a bill for the time he had spent at Tavistock House, just as though she was a common lodging-house keeper. At the same time he asked her to make an inventory of all his possessions left in the house, which she was to pass to the French Embassy, which would then arrange to have them collected.

  This was mean and unfeeling at the personal level. It was also an attempt to divest Georgina of any commercial undertaking made between the two of them. For it now came out that far from being merely his landlady, there had in fact been such undertakings. She considered the copyright in some of the works he had composed in London to have been gifted to her, most particularly (and unjustifiably) the score of Polyeucte. Moreover, she was prepared to remind Gounod that he had once agreed that after setting aside a dowry for his daughter of 100,000 francs, the residue of all his future royalties would be devoted to the orphanage. Her view of his stay was that she had acted as “agent general” to him, going the rounds of the publishers, writing his publicity, doing his secretarial work, and fearlessly facing the vampire business world of music he affected to despise. She said, with some justification: “I had played the devil so that he might appear an angel.” The results might have been unfortunate, but there was truth in the remark, which she further refined as this: “I had been the monkey among the crocodiles.”

  It was a mistake of Gounod’s to ask for a bill—Harry could have warned him what would happen. She sat down and itemized every last expense. The first section throws useful light on his st
ay.

  In the first place, Mrs. Weldon only wishes he would refund to me the sum I have spent on the engraving of several of his works

  £282.0.0

  M. Gounod’s pension for 7 months, washing, carriage, wines, etc

  £140.0.0

  Solicitor’s account

  £110.0.0

  Subscription and entrance fee, Royal Yacht Club

  £8.0.0

  English translation, Joan of Arc

  £16.0.0

  Doctor’s bills and medicines for 2 years

  £45.0.0

  £601.0.0

  All of this money had been expended by Harry in the first place, and for three years in London it does not seem an unreasonable amount. But she was merely warming to her task; these were the trifles of the account. “The first thing which I consider undoubtedly due to me by M. Gounod is £3000 as compensation for having prevented me from carrying on a profession by which I was earning money for my orphanage.” This was much more contentious and must have left Gounod with his jaw on the table. But there was a greater sum yet to be subtotaled:

  Damages as compensation to some extent for the injuries done by infamous calumnies, lies and libels

  £5000.0.0

  The grand total came to £9,791.13.9, a sum she must have known she could never recover. Gounod did not have that kind of money, and no court in France or England would entertain damages of £5,000 for hurts it could be easily proved she had brought down on her own head. She was a woman scorned, and it brought out the vindictive streak in her. A concert of Gounod’s music in Liverpool was canceled because she would not release the copyright in some of the works, and there was a particular piece of pettiness with the score of Polyeucte, which she had wrestled for on the carpet in such a thrilling way and which she now absolutely refused to surrender. Gounod had a very strong case against her for theft but seems to have balked at the thought of bringing her to court. Enraged, he set about rewriting the entire score from memory. Whether she had wind of this or not, he had only just completed the task, which took him almost a year, when she sent him the original, every page of which was slashed through with blue pencil.

  Gounod was by now fully rehabilitated in Paris. In March 1875 he attended the first performance of Bizet’s Carmen at the Opéra-Comique. Massenet and Saint-Saëns were also in the audience. The master displayed his usual capacity for duplicity when it came to the careers of others. After hugging and kissing Bizet repeatedly during the second intermission, he sensed the production was going to fail. In the third act he leaned back in his box and murmured, “That melody is mine! Georges has robbed me: take the Spanish airs and mine out of the score and there remains nothing to Bizet’s credit but the sauce that masks the fish.” Those who heard him smiled wryly. The London years had not altered him after all.

  In June he attended Bizet’s funeral at the church of La Trinité in Montmartre. Claiming to have come direct from Bizet’s widow, who was prostrate with grief and unable to attend the funeral, he began to read from a speech scribbled on a scrap of paper. With a trembling voice he quoted Geneviève Bizet’s words, entrusted to him as one of the composer’s most cherished friends. “ ‘Those six years I spent with him,’ she told me ‘there was not a minute, not one minute that I am not proud and happy to remember.’”

  Gounod paused, bit his lip, and then burst into tears. Everyone knew that Geneviève had granted no such interview to Gounod and the words she might have spoken had been stolen out of her mouth by this master of self-dramatization. Gounod was back in the bosom of his reputation.

  3

  In the winter of 1875 Georgina went to lick her wounds in Rome. The French Embassy had collected Gounod’s possessions, and the elaborate account she prepared and sent him disappeared into the maw of what she now conceived of as “the Gounod clique,” a set of silent but inveterate enemies centered in Paris. Harry was invited to accompany her to Italy but declined, giving as his excuse his duties with the College of Arms. He agreed to join her for Christmas but in December wrote that his mother was ill. Georgina had no way of knowing whether this was true or not, but she must have had some anxiety about his general state of mind, because before leaving London she arranged for the bell-ringing Rawlings children to keep an eye on him. Her spies duly reported no particular cause for concern. She was uneasy all the same. What was at risk was not her honor, but the house. She had lost practically everything she thought worthwhile when Gounod left, and all that remained—the orphanage, the remnants of her singing career, her inextinguishable sense of social position—depended upon having Tavistock House as a base of operations. For ten years she had wandered England singing for her supper and retreating only when it was necessary to the cottage in Beaumaris. In half that time the house in Bloomsbury had become the touchstone of her existence. It was the museum of her real self, every stone of it. Harry might scoff, and there were certainly things wrong with Tavistock, never a light and happy home, too ill proportioned to be the most desirable property. Nevertheless, it was generally accounted hers and not his. He paid. She created.

  It was true that when in Rome her thoughts turned to other possibilities, such as a life of retreat in the Mediterranean where she could bring the children and live according to her other idea of herself, as a name written on an international register, the world as a Grand Hotel. One of the jokes she did understand was this: a man loses a sixpence in a dark alley and looks for it under a distant streetlamp, as offering more light. Plenty of the minor Italian aristocracy were cruising the Roman hotel lobbies in search of attractive but lonely Englishwomen to give this idea more than a theoretical base. Indeed, even while she spied on Harry, she was considering a proposition to live in Sicily with a shadowy but enthusiastically amorous count and forget her woes forever. There, it would rain blessings, the children would grow straight and strong, and she would spend her time traveling Europe with her voice. A stick to poke in Gounod’s eye.

  Harry was unfortunately telling the truth about a sick mother. Hannah Weldon died suddenly in January 1876, leaving a will that revealed some disheartening facts. The other Mrs. Weldon’s thoughts and wishes strongly favored her sister’s family. The will had been drawn up in 1865 in the Wynnstay Arms Hotel, Wrexham, and some of its many legacies fell to “the eldest son/eldest daughter of my said son” at a time when it was almost certain she knew of Georgina’s inability to conceive. Were Harry to be childless, the legacies would revert, but not always to him. She is described in the will as still being “of Beaumaris in the County of Anglesea” and her bequests favor nephews and nieces who sprang, like her, from the North. Georgina, who had been married to Harry for five years when the will was made, was gifted £100 and none of the jewelry, plate, or pictures. What other wealth Hannah had to dispose of, which amounted to no more than £3,000, she tied up in a trust fund, and there are many provisions for the distribution of the profits of this among the Rawson family. Harry benefited, but by no means as generously as he had hoped. This was the testament of a cautious, modest, and unfashionable woman of average means, who had skewed her charitable wishes to her sister and her family.

  It was a disappointing moment. Harry was bequeathed a few boxes of uninspired plate and china, books and pictures he did not particularly want, and—once the trust was divided among all the parties—next to no money. The reading of the will hardened his attitude toward Georgina and her plans. As she had begun to suspect, he was growing tired of Tavistock House. As an experiment in living in the grand style, it had proved disastrous. There were other options open to him. If he left Georgina or sold the lease and moved into smaller accommodation, what was lost? His post at the College of Arms afforded bachelor rooms, his club was as good as a home to him, and Annie Lowe waited patiently on the houseboat at Windsor.

  It was true that in business and money matters he was no more experienced than Georgina, although only a few years later he was made treasurer of the College of Arms. The thing he had that she lacked so conspicuo
usly was the ability to think things through. He may have seen, long before his wife, that Gounod’s defection had been more than an emotional blow. It really signaled the end of all her schemes and the snuffing out of her music career. It was all very well for Georgina to insist, as she did, that a true musical orphanage of the kind she envisaged must, absolutely must, have fifty children in it, but Harry could see what effect ten already had on his patience and goodwill. And it escaped no one that these ten had been left in the hands of servants while their patroness and music director took herself off to mend a broken heart in Rome. Without Gounod’s name and reputation to give some credibility to the ideas Georgina dreamed up, they were worthless. For as long as she was in the house, goading and urging, it was perhaps just possible for Harry to tolerate the children, the noise, the relentless self-advertising, and never ask where it was all leading. But when she was away, as now, the absurdity of what she wanted to do was apparent.

  Georgina claims that she sensed all this and had offered to place all the orphans back where they had come from—whatever that meant—live quietly, and be the model wife of a Herald. In her version of life after Gounod, she says that Harry recognized the good she was doing, disliked her absenting herself from the house for such long periods, but wanted to give her every chance to succeed. She wrote to him from Rome suggesting a pure piece of Georginaism. Her family considered him a blackguard. But he was not all bad, and she had thought of a way out of their present unhappiness. He liked Freddie Warre, and Warre had a whole floor to let in his house. Harry could go there. In three years’ time the trust allowed for in his mother’s will would mature, and if in those three years she had not made a success of the orphanage, “the ugly moment would have passed” and they could be as they were. Meanwhile, she would not ask for more than £1,000 a year from him and, imperatively, the house. Harry replied that he didn’t give a fig what the Trehernes thought of him but that he was in agreement “and he did not say a word to make me suspect he did not think my plan admirably diplomatic.” Fortified by these remarks, she packed her bags, said good-bye to her crestfallen Sicilian count, and set off from Rome, not to come home, but to stay with her uncle and aunt at the Schloss Hard.