Georgina knew by bitter experience that it was a man’s world. Harry’s complaisance, his lack of expostulation, and, since her return, his stony silence would have sent warning signals to any other Victorian woman. In an age where women had very few property rights, the freedom he had offered her by turning over Tavistock House was an illusion. What he gave he could as easily take back. However, she had been used to men giving way before her, and this she supposed Harry had done. Asking Menier to take control of her finances was a thoroughly idiotic thing to do, but she supposed, at some deep level, that he, too, was hers to do with as she liked. To get, you had to give. She did not want Menier physically, but she did desire his obedience (and complicity in what was going on between her and his wife). Unaware of the difference between a fool and a crook, she gave him too much.
It was a disastrous summer for anyone wishing to protest one’s sanity. One afternoon a strange face appeared at the ground-floor window. Standing in the garden were a young man named Richard Waddy, his wife, and their two young children. They wished to know, as so many did who came to the house, whether this was the place where Dickens had once lived. Conversation took place through the open window. Waddy was the son of Samuel Danks Waddy, M.P., Q.C., a man of irreproachable rectitude. Richard was, it very quickly became clear, mildly deranged. He introduced himself to Georgina as Cadwalladwr, Prince of Wales, “someone with as much if not greater claim to the title than the present Prince.” Mrs. Waddy, who was heavily pregnant with her third child, watched and listened helplessly. While Georgina humored him, he went on to say that she, too, from her ancestry and evident beauty, was very worthy to be his Princess. She laughingly told him she was old enough to be his mother. After more of the same, she closed the window on him, and the little family trooped off through the shrubbery. Watching with keen interest from the shadows of the room was Anarcharsis Menier.
The next afternoon Waddy called at the house alone, and a startled Georgina told Villiers to say she was not at home. He came again in the evening, leaving a white rose and a red one bound together in a ribbon. Soon an avalanche of letters began to descend on the house. In spite of herself, she warmed to him. This was the sort of thing Georgina considered herself good at: Waddy was someone she could control. The message in the correspondence that rained down on Tavistock House almost daily was simple enough. Georgina was the woman of the Welshman’s dreams. He was in love with her the way Dante loved Beatrice and Tristan Iseult. They were destined for each other. He conceived the plan of running away to India, where he would make Georgina Queen of the Orient.
The last letter from England was written in Liverpool on the eve of embarkation. Georgina should come to him, bringing with her £100 for the one-way ticket and the necessaries of the voyage. Unable to budge her, he set off alone, writing from every port of call along the way. Mrs. Waddy retreated to her parents in Plymouth, from where she sent piteous letters to Tavistock House. With the peculiar cruelty of which she was capable, Georgina made a most horrible reply: “I understood at last he was a poor madman. I gathered together all the letters he had sent me and which lurked in every corner; I made a little packet of them and sent them to his poor little wife . . . telling her his letters would help her rid herself of her husband.”
The runaway, who had never worked in his life, pitched up eventually in Madras. He had scouted out a French hotel that might suit the Queen of the Orient from the point of view of cuisine, though he strongly recommended they move up into the backcountry, where the weather was cooler and the scenery might remind her of Camarthen. He dwindled: his voice grew fainter. In the last of the letters he wrote to her, he had been turned out of European society and was living on the beach without shoes and in the rags of his London clothes.
Whatever might have happened between them, Georgina showed him no mercy now. Waddy was clearly mad. Pity was wasted on him. Even the smallest sympathy was misplaced. To be mad was to be incomplete, and what happened to him from now on was inalterable. It was true she had flirted with him, or given the appearance of encouraging him, though it is very unlikely their relationship was physical in any way.
In the Mémoires she deals with him magisterially: “I have published the letters of this poor ‘Cadwalladwr’ as well as those of Mrs. Waddy as a way of giving the reader an idea of the difficulty my poor dear husband must have faced in finding an excuse to have me locked up as a madwoman.” However, in a letter to her mother in 1881 she mentions Harry’s other purpose, which was to cite Richard Waddy as her lover in the divorce action he was bringing. The story has been suitably abbreviated: “By this post you will receive the tale of one of my lovers, Cadwalladwr Waddy. Have you ever read anything more absurd? This is a man to whom I spoke literally once and once only through a window, in the presence of his wife and children and others who could, if the need arose, witness the truth of what I’m saying.” The others she mentions were Menier and Angele, by whom the episode was remembered very differently.
Cunning and manipulative, for the Meniers every single thing that Georgina said and did was a source of potential blackmail. Angele understood, no less than her husband, that the real purpose of friendship was to discover and exploit weakness in others. She might look demure and flatter Georgina with her adoring glances, but she was playing a different game. As for Menier, he grasped that things could not go on in this rackety way much longer. Harry was closing in. What cards the Frenchman had in his hand he must play skillfully. It was true that Georgina quarreled with him daily and derided him to his wife, but this he bore with equanimity. He could sense Georgina’s restlessness: her situation was worsening, and nothing new was coming into the house to spark her explosive energies. As the summer sunlight gave way to lamps and fires, and the gutters overflowed and plaster broke off from the walls, she found goading Anarcharsis just too easy. He was common, vulgar, ugly. He had no culture, no ideas. She failed to realize that what he did have were the keys to the house.
In October 1877, at exactly the right moment, Angele came up with what Georgina called “a luminous idea.” Angele’s sister Marie Helluy managed an old people’s home in a small village called Argeuil, a few kilometers to the west of that country where Flaubert had set Madame Bovary. It was in rolling landscape dominated by the Epté Valley and could be reached from Paris via Forges-les-Eaux, which was on the main line to Le Havre. The proposal was to take all ten children and Bichette to Argeuil, where Marie and her companion, Victoria Claisse, could run the orphanage, while Georgina and Angele went to live in Paris. There they would train orphan Katie—who was three—to accompany Georgina in her quest for an international singing career.
Georgina jumped at the idea with her usual enthusiasm. Anarcharsis Menier, for whom this sort of thing was his bread and butter, drew up a prospectus in which his sister-in-law was nominated matron and Georgina director. The names of the superintending doctors were left blank, but the whole thing was handsomely printed as from the offices of La Liberté Coloniale. On paper it looked well. Georgina insisted that Menier, who was still trying to sell his balloon, should stay in London. The two women—soon to be four women—did not want him near them, not now or ever. He pretended to take his dismissal with suitable amounts of hurt and disappointment. His role, he supposed, with a resigned shake of his head, was to continue to handle the money and keep an eye on Tavistock House. Yes! Georgina replied triumphantly. What else was he fit for?
Once an idea had been put into her head, Georgina always acted on it with the greatest speed. Now nothing else would do but that they transfer the children to Argeuil, a place she had never visited, to the care of a woman she had never met. It had to be done now, immediately: passports for the children had to be obtained, travel arrangements made, letters exchanged between France and England. Maps were consulted and timetables checked.
A few further refinements crept in. She and Angele would live together in Paris without servants, the better to save money. Menier suavely recommended the Montmartre d
istrict as being suitable to their needs. Angele agreed to live with Georgina and act as a housewife while the singer went out to conquer all Paris with her voice, but she put her foot down about one thing: Bichette must come with them. Georgina had become accustomed to Angele’s maddening irresolution on the subject of this miserable human shuttlecock. The Frenchwoman’s capacity always to see herself as a victim made her a bad guardian of others. She loved Bichette when she was good, but the slightest upset or reverse in her relationship with the child sent her into frenzies of self-hatred.
This notion of woman as victim was almost completely foreign to Georgina. Women were wronged, but when they were, it was their duty to set things right. Retaliation was much better than recrimination. Angele may have been driven into prostitution, but she wasn’t walking the streets now and would never need to again. If there were wrongs left in her life, she should kick someone’s shins. All the vaporing about Bichette was annoying. Angele should do as she did and come to a decision. While they squabbled, trunks were packed and piled up in the hall. The children were warned against being sick, either in the train or on the boat.
Menier kept up the pretense of being aggrieved at the prospect of being left behind. It cost him nothing to be scorned, for as soon as the orphanage decamped, he had the run of a large house with a cook and three servants to look after him. At the last moment, Georgina had a rush of common sense. She entrusted her set of keys to a young couple named Lowther, with an invitation to live in the house rent free in exchange for looking after it. The Lowthers were only too happy to accept, and much might have been avoided if they had taken up residence. They turned up on the day of Georgina’s departure in good time to wave off the cabs bearing the orphans to Charing Cross. Then they went inside to explore the huge and suddenly silent house. To their surprise nothing had been packed away—the pictures still hung on the walls and china was displayed in every room. With characteristic fecklessness, Georgina had hardly bothered to put aside her personal jewelry.
The boat train had not left London before there was the sound of a key in the lock. The Lowthers went into the hall to discover who had access to the property in this way, expecting to find Harry. Instead they were greeted by Menier, whom they had never met, brandishing a piece of paper that he said was an agreement between himself and Georgina that made him her sole agent. The unfortunate Lowthers protested they had given up good lodgings to take up their new caretaking duties here. Menier waggled the paper under their noses, and they were thrown out even before they had unpacked.
Argeuil and Paris
1
Argeuil is a surprise. It is a handsome lopsided village on the road south from Forges. On the left is a handsome manoir and to the right the church, the mairie, and a little terraced hotel called Le Lion d’Or. What makes it so pleasant is a large sandy square, surrounded on three sides by tall farm buildings and two- and three-story bourgeois residences, some of them eighteenth-century. It was in one of these that Marie Helluy had her failing business, now to become the Weldon Orphanage. The village is light and airy, partly as a consequence of the church grounds having been absorbed at the very end of the nineteenth century. The cemetery, which had straggled into the main square in front of the church, was moved up to a knob of land three hundred meters away. The view from there is of rich pasture, though the Fôret de Lyons is just over the horizon, extending southward toward Rouen and the Seine. Argeuil is by no means la France profonde. The church is small and unimpressive, the hotel cramped and ancient, but by the standards of many another commune in neighboring départements, Argeuil is now and must have been then a sturdy and well-heeled place.
Angele had the gift of saying and doing what she thought people wanted to hear. During the London months she had begun to speak about the orphanage in the same high-flown way as Georgina herself, with more emphasis on the power of music in the upbringing of young children than the usefulness to them of soap or three hot meals a day. Her sister Marie Helluy was a shock to Georgina. Tall, skinny, and bad-tempered, she was distressingly down-to-earth and practical. She swore like a trooper, cooked uninspiringly, and often had to be rousted from her bed in the morning, which she shared with her friend and lover, the younger and more moody Victoria Claisse. The curé and the other communal dignitaries had never had much time for Marie Helluy and her ill-managed nursing home, but were utterly astounded to see its transformation now. Lallygagging about the streets and besieging the bakery for their morning bread, a handful of Protestant English children broke the peace and calm of Argeuil, none of them clear as to where they were or what they were doing there.
They were children unlike any seen before in the village. Their experience was bounded by Tottenham Court Road as far as Oxford Street. They had seen trees before and in those trees rooks and pigeons, squirrels, even. What they had not seen was a hundred head of cattle being driven down to milking or the utter dark of countryside after sunset. Having lived communally in Tavistock House, they had an elastic sense of property. Georgina had taught them to walk with their arms swinging, and now they marched about like ungainly marionettes, bellowing at each other, shouting and thieving. Argeuil folk quickly learned to despise them. There was a small community of Carmelite nuns next door to the hotel, to whom matters of charity were normally entrusted, and the villagers had—like all French men and women—a keen sense of propriety. C’était pas propre, cette galère. They were also highly suspicious of the voluble directrice whose principal point of interest in the life of the community was the post office, to which she repaired daily. A rumor grew that this was a man dressed as a woman, probably someone from Paris. To be from Paris was the ultimate opprobrium.
It might have been different if the orphanage had descended on Argeuil at another season of the year, when the days were longer. But they came when the village was battened down for the winter and women in particular hardly left the house. If they did, it was to buy vegetables they had not grown themselves or to walk to church. It was startling to see, looming out of the rain, children with a London pallor, dressed in oddments and shouting in jagged and ugly English. The more bourgeois families kept an aloof silence. Their farmhands were puzzled. To all of them, it was completely inexplicable why anyone should want to bring an orphanage to their doors. Used to charity as an outward expression of religious devotion, it troubled them that this establishment had no connection with the church. For women used to obeying their men, as well as working alongside them in the fields, it was equally shocking that the children were in the charge of four women, with no man to make the ultimate decisions. How could that possibly turn out for the good? If Angele and Georgina were married, as they said they were, then where were their husbands?
At first, Georgina found Marie Helluy’s strength and acerbity refreshing. There was certainly nothing namby-pamby about her. She slogged her way through the day, cooking and cleaning, bellowing warnings at the startled orphans, wagging a spoon in their faces. With no children of her own, and little English, she nevertheless soon let it be known who was boss. At night she had the habit of playing cards and smoking, a bottle at her elbow. The table talk was uninspired. Marie and Victoria had never heard of Gounod and made it clear they did not give a fig for music, art, or anything else. Their preferred topic was money. Like their neighbors, their day was made up of work, hard physical work that in London had been undertaken by the Westmacotts and Tibby Jordan. Here, there was no mistress and servants—the four women mucked in together, Georgina proving the least resourceful, Angele the most accident prone. The children were smacked and beaten and threatened. On occasion they were ceremonially thrashed. They fared badly at meals. A village rumor was that Helluy bought horse oats for a household that had no horse, with the implication that the children lived on them. All of them—and all the women—were infested with lice. There was never enough hot water and no plumbed bath. At night, with nothing to do but drink and smoke, the stories began to come out.
Angele’s background
was soon laid completely bare. She had been seduced by a married man in Soissons when she was sixteen, by whom she had a stillborn child. This man made her a small allowance and gave her some sticks of furniture. Anarcharsis had not taken her off the streets and made an honest woman of her overnight: he had pimped her for seven years before he married her. It was in vain for Angele to protest that she had danced at the Folies Marigny under the name of Mlle Lucienne: Marie knew it all.
Georgina disclosed some of her own adventures. She told them how the elderly and utterly respectable surgeon Sir Henry Thompson had come to her in the guise of “the Moth,” helplessly attracted to her flame, and how letters signed by the Moth had been discovered by Harry, who threatened to use them against him. He had also found the Moth and the Flame in the bedroom of a house they rented from time to time in London before Tavistock came along. This was greeted by ribald laughter. But her most reckless confession was one that, if true, throws new light on the Florence years. She claimed she had been abused as a child by Antonio, Morgan’s butler. She told this story perhaps to impress, perhaps because there were few topics of conversation other than sex. For the other three women it was a scandal, yet a familiar and unexceptional one. For us it leaps out of the story like a tongue of fire. This was a family secret with a vengeance. At some point in her childhood, Georgina had virtually the power of life and death over a grown man, for had she told her father of what had passed, surely Morgan would have given his butler up to the authorities. An even darker possibility is that he was told and did nothing.
When the fire was banked and the lantern turned out, these four women would go to two double beds, to whisper in the dark and all but Georgina to plot. Marie had already formed an opinion of her employer as far as the orphans went: “For her they are marionettes to show off and if their health suffers, it’s nothing but a detail. What do you say to what she told me: that since grown ups enjoy playing around with each other, she could not see why one stopped children doing the same thing?” Marie’s solution to these sexual explorations was a version of the straitjacket in which the hands of the children were separated one from another in canvas cuffs held apart by a rigid bar.
The Disastrous Mrs. Weldon Page 21