The Disastrous Mrs. Weldon

by Brian Thompson

  Of one, the principal tenor, who had been gifted to her by the Rivière management, she wrote vengefully, “He knows nothing. He has not an idea of learning; he deserves to be beaten instead of paid. I laugh outright at them when they ask to be paid. Paid for what?” This sentiment and the atmosphere at rehearsals were very familiar to veterans of the Gounod Choir. These were amateur singers with their heads in the clouds, quite as hungry for fame as she was, but put to considerably more trouble. For her it was but a step upstairs from the famous library to the hallowed music room she had created for “the old man.” Her choir made its way there by omnibus and on foot, to be greeted at the door by the mystery Frenchwoman attached to the household and ushered up to rehearsals that were sometimes no more than lengthy progress reports on legal proceedings. Like the Gounodists, they were promised the moon but asked to pay for it out of their own pockets. Signor Orazio Valentino, the tenor, smoldered miserably. Some of the sopranos Rivière sent along—“the pretty girls”—were much more notable for their chests than for their lungs. She described them pithily as “washed out figurantes.”

  It was part of the newspaper interest surrounding her that she remained in possession of Tavistock House, and she was very careful to insist in public that all she wanted was the restitution of conjugal rights and the chance to make a home for her beloved Harry. Rivière’s visits gave him a quite contrary impression. The centerpiece of arrangements was not the absent husband, but the very visible and increasingly interfering Angele. The house was a shrine, the purpose of which was to venerate Georgina of the Miracles.

  On August 16 she took the choir to the huge and echoing Crystal Palace and gave the first of three Saturday concerts under the baton of her new artistic collaborator, the suave and smiling M. Rivière. Included in the program was a woefully bad work by Urich, who had been summoned from Paris. She had only been dissuaded with difficulty from giving a solo spot to Herr Saemundsen, “the only Laplander in London.” She herself was the star attraction. The Morning Post commented, “Mrs. Weldon was greeted with a perfect ovation, and her singing of the Sacred Song from Gounod’s Ruth was so rapturously encored as to render its repetition necessary, albeit the special merit of the performance may be difficult to chronicle.”

  Much did she care: the key words in this were “a perfect ovation.” Rivière was more sanguine, for some of the rapture of the evening had been provided by the choir itself, who acted as a kind of onstage claque. It was also completely against his musical policy to encore work—for her to accept such an invitation without first consulting him at the rostrum was an insult to his authority as conductor. It was no use her telling him his nose had been put out of joint. As he pointed out, her personal triumph had not stopped receipts for the concert from being disastrous. He regretted not taking closer artistic control of the venture. Even the venue was wrong—a choir of 350 was an achievement, but in the place it was heard, it was no more than a single pea swilled around a colander. She wrote:

  My General,

  I am going to write you a letter that will make you laugh. First let me tell you you are an IMBECILE. All these charming creatures to whom you listen, and who worry you, are dusters and dirty toe-rags. Listen to your own ears! Who is the pet? Who gets the triumph? Who got all the applause last Saturday night? Me!!! I am only too much in the right, my General. I know what I am about.

  Rivière was beginning to think otherwise. He had hired a choir and reaped confusion. It was obvious to him now that Georgina did not have it in her to think in terms of modest, attainable objectives. All the flimflam that had preceded the event, her tantrums, her startlingly vindictive way with the weaker choristers, her overweening certainty about what constituted musical taste (as, for example, commissioning such dire work from the unknown and shadowy Urich), made it clear she was not, in the sense he understood the word, a professional. “You speak in your letter of the applause which was bestowed on you: but this is precisely one of those things which causes me difficulties at the Crystal Palace. The Directors find that the applause prodigally bestowed on you by your Choir is in bad taste, and fear that it may cause a counter demonstration on the part of the public.”

  Two further concerts were poorly attended and went completely unnoticed by the music press. She did not realize how grave a situation this was for Rivière, because she supposed he had nothing else to do but think of her. In her mind she was, if not his sole crowd pleaser, then the principal one. The facts were otherwise. The Promenade Concerts were only a few weeks away, and his main concern was how to shoehorn the disastrous Weldon Choir into a schedule that included not one but seven military bands and half a dozen popular recitalists. She was bad at reading other people’s feelings and may have missed the underlying threat in this remark: “I let pass the concerts at the Crystal Palace, without wishing to speak to you or torment you with the future.”

  Angele was clever where Georgina was not. Once she had read these words, she could see what was likely to happen. There was a solution. In the early days of his dealings with Georgina, the impresario had confessed to certain liaisons, certain ancient sexual adventures unknown to his wife. In fact, he admitted wryly, there were another two households in France that bore his name and children who could look to him as their father. There had also been one or more business deals that had gone wrong in the world of stoves. He may have judged that these confessions would be forgotten or forgiven in the delicious moments of flirtation he shared with her. He may even have thought she was not listening too carefully, because whatever he said was immediately capped with an arch little confession of her own—this was business conducted over candlelight and wine, with eye glances and the occasional touch of fingertips. Ah, but they were two of a kind, la merle blanche and himself! He did not know his adversary, nor had he properly judged the brutal pragmatism of her friend Madame Menier. In September Angele went to Paris to dig the dirt on the imprudent Jules Prudence Rivière.

  It was Georgina’s pattern relationship with older men—first the flattering interest, which may have disguised a real need to find a father figure she could trust, and then the attempt to mold him, make him obedient to her whim. Watts had passed this way, as well as Sir Henry Thompson and, most spectacularly, Gounod. In each case, when the man rebelled, he was made to pay for what she considered his betrayal. Her own father had been the first and Rivière was the last of the series. There is no doubt that he was opportunistic and self-seeking; he was also far more sanguine than she about the nature of the business they were trying to conduct. Furthermore, they were risking his money. Rivière was used to singers eating from his hand, eking out a livelihood in what had already become a crowded marketplace. He was not accustomed to having terms dictated to him.

  On September 24, after another heated argument with the reduced choir chosen for the Covent Garden concerts, he lost patience and sacked all thirty of them. He accepted that he was in breach of contract, but he had suffered all he was going to. To his disgust, Georgina at once presented him with le dossier Rivière put together by Angele. He was stunned to read in it exact details of his undischarged bankruptcy and a description of him as a “trigamist.” “It would, perhaps, be advisable to converse on this subject,” Georgina suggested. It was blackmail of the crudest kind. After the few days given to him to reflect on matters, Rivière capitulated—“he came to rehearsal, looking like a sheep led to slaughter.” With the lack of realism she had so often shown in the past, Georgina considered this a winning stroke. Rivière, for all his mustaches and macassar oil, was just another tradesman. He must do as he was told. The choir members were enraptured. One moment they had been looking at the ignominy of having to tell their friends they would not, after all, be appearing at Covent Garden. Then, by what means they knew not, all was saved. Art had triumphed.

  There is no doubt Georgina was idolized by many of the choir. Some of them were attracted to her because of the spiritualist connection. Some were scrapings from the bottom of the barrel, r
ejects from other choirs or untrained aspirants who fancied a fling at choral work. Georgina began to grow suspicious of one such in particular. In the basses was a man named Fisher. No one had ever seen him sing. He turned up regularly enough, held the score open at more or less the right page, but made no effort to open his mouth. She was easily persuaded that he was a police agent installed by the management of the Royal Albert Hall (that old story) and paid in some way by Sullivan. Behind Sullivan was Harry. The more she pondered, the deeper and more obvious the conspiracy. Ernest Gye was the original leasor of Covent Garden, and who was Gye but a Garrick member and chum to Harry? Gye père was a drinking crony of de Bathe’s, his son sublet the Garden to the Gatti brothers, who were nothing but pastry cooks, and they in turn had leased to Rivière, who, she was now in a position to disclose, was a failed bankrupt and serial adulterer. It all hung together—what she had seen as her salvation was yet another attempt to do her in. Maybe Wontner was involved in some way. If Wontner, then surely Menier, no matter that he was doing time in Coldharbour Lane. At the back of it all was Gounod with his inveterate jealousy. Once again, this was war!

  She marked out the battle lines by quadrupling the choir demanded by Rivière for the Covent Garden concerts. He had advertised “a grand orchestra of a hundred musicians.” Georgina made sure the choir exceeded this number, filling the stage and hardly giving room to the strings to bow. Packed shoulder-to-shoulder, they swayed and heaved, sweating most cruelly, their eyes alight with the big moment of their amateur lives. A critic commented acidly that he formed a bad opinion of their musical talents after the first bar, but here the choir shared something of Georgina’s attitude. The critics could go to hell. They swung into Urich’s “Amarilla, a South African Melody,” the band hanging on to their music stands for dear life, Rivière swallowing his mustache in rage. He had in his program Emma Thursby, a young American soprano at the outset of her distinguished career and, for him, an expensive engagement. He had Signor Carrion from Her Majesty’s Opera. The key to his whole promotion was variety and a certain Gallic wit. What he did not need was a Benefit Season for Mrs. Georgina Weldon. At one performance she managed to cram 160 choristers onto the stage, eyeing him triumphantly and daring him to do anything about it.

  The crunch came on Balaclava Night, a rather dusty but popular tribute to the heroes of the Crimea. The choir was banished altogether from the stage for the excellent reason that Rivière had assembled his seven military bands in full fig, instruments burnished, ready to do justice to the theme “The British Army.” An actor by the name of Swinbourne was engaged to recite “The Charge of the Light Brigade.” Surely, even Mrs. Weldon could see that this was a special occasion. Unfortunately, she could not. She took a box with Angele and several of her more adoring ladies at her side, dressed in their choir costume, and besought the plaudits of the crowd. These were not slow in coming. As reward she scattered leaflets into the stalls. This was worse than the coarsest music hall. The acting manager of the theater was dispatched to remonstrate with her: she began to sing. Copies of a publication called the Medium, which carried an appealing photogravure of her, were flung over the wall of the box and snatched up by some promenaders. Others were scandalized. Balaclava and the destruction of the Light Brigade were subjects not to be abused in this way. Hayes, the front-of-house manager, explained in vain that Covent Garden was “a temple of music.” Georgina, with the silly petulance of which she was always capable, accused him of being drunk.

  The whole incident probably lasted only a few minutes and the actual program was barely interrupted, but it was more than the Gattis or Rivière could tolerate. On October 28 the contract with Mrs. Weldon’s choir was terminated for a second time. This time there was to be no going back. Rivière and Hayes made it absolutely clear that no member of the choir would be admitted to the theater under any pretext.

  The following night, Georgina, Angele, and a younger woman named Michou presented themselves at the theater, with tickets purchased in Mme Michou’s name. Georgina was, of course, recognized, and at the door to the first-tier box she had booked, she found Hayes, Mr. Sydney, representing the Gattis, and Inspector Cruse of the Metropolitan Police. Sydney, who was Irish, had already had his temper provoked by leaflets being distributed to the crowd outside, outlining with Georgina’s usual attention to detail the wrongs that had been visited on her by the management. He was having none of that and said so. He must now ask her to leave. By way of reply, she tipped his hat from his head and Sydney fell back, crying, “By Jove, she has given me a black eye!” The three women were bustled halfway downstairs, sat down and refused to budge, and were carried down the last steps by policemen summoned for the task. Georgina lost a bracelet that was wrenched from her wrist in the struggle and had her veil torn. The altercation was carried on outside, Georgina demanding that Cruse arrest her. “Lock me up! I wish you to do it!” He declined.

  Georgina was, however, soon enough back at Bow Street, defending a civil action for assault brought by Sydney. Angele, who had not been harmed by anyone, pinched and pummeled her own upper arms until they were black-and-blue, got a doctor’s certificate, and sued the Irishman in her turn. The choir sued Rivière, Rivière sued the choir. Then the two women settled down at Tavistock House headquarters to libel the impresario with the information gathered in Paris by Angele about his bigamous marriages, his bastard children, and his previous business dealings. They did this in a systematic way, calculated to bring a response. On December 9 Georgina was served with a writ for criminal libel.

  2

  On May 24, 1880, on the morning of her forty-third birthday, Sir Thomas Chambers sentenced Georgina to four months’ imprisonment as a common felon. She was taken from the court past suddenly indifferent defense counsel and driven by closed van to Newgate. That afternoon Neal, the solicitor, went to Tavistock House and evicted the hysterical Angele, after a four-hour siege.

  Georgina served thirty-seven days of her sentence. The women warders liked her, the governor was polite but unfeeling. The medical examination she underwent was perfunctory and of course insulting. She reserved her biggest contempt for the chaplain. Prison life was ruled by regulation, some of it pettifogging in the extreme, so that she was forbidden, for example, writing materials. She worked in the sewing room, at night sang in her cell and recited poetry. She resisted the chaplain’s attempts to make her see the error of her ways—the poor man did not grasp that she was above the law, as it was represented by English justice. Nor did she find the higher truths he might have to offer attractive.

  She passed her time in Newgate without the slightest remorse and seemed not to be in any way fazed by imprisonment—it was another form of theater, in which she, by her own lights, acted out the principal role. She wore the prison uniform with pride. Many prisoners of conscience had preceded her at Newgate, and in that sense she was in noble company. She had the knack not every first offender has of seeing out her time in quiet dignity, and though a woman was hung during her stay, that was a secondary event, played off stage. This image of an exemplary prisoner was illusory, however: by now her head was crammed with dates and facts, a small encyclopedia of grudges. There were plenty of others in prison like her, who could recite in excruciating detail times and places, lost witnesses and false affidavits, maddening bad luck. For the first time she was solely in the company of the unjustly accused, and the idea pleased her. “I wonder women can endure men,” she commented, after listening to their stories.

  Newgate was the experience of asylum without the accompanying terror—everyone would leave one day. In her own case she knew that on the outside Angele was running distractedly from office to office, petitioning the Home Office and writing to the Speaker of the House of Commons. James Salsbury, an elderly member of the choir, was another ally. He kept a health food shop and vegetarian restaurant (probably the first in London) at 23 Oxford Street and, more useful still, was the proprietor of a newspaper called the Herald of Health. Never a door
closed without another opening.

  Georgina was released at the end of June, to be greeted by a welcoming crowd outside the gates. She estimated it to be twenty thousand strong. Two versions exist of her release. In one, Angele arrived to collect her in a closed carriage, and the governor had her bundled away before a demonstration could commence. The details are entertaining:

  My solicitor, who was a first class idiot and had been brainwashed by the opposing side, and who doubted the coup I was meditating [of causing a quasi-political demonstration] which would have been so easy to accomplish, hired a coach, did the Good Samaritan and got la Menier to accompany him with the little Duprat children. Once in front of the gates, seeing the crowd, she wanted to get out and greet me. The old fox stopped her. The Governor had told her that if she left the coach he wouldn’t release me at all. She believed him: or did she believe him? God knows . . . I was released, I was flabbergasted, there was cheering: where were Blackie and the kids? There? In the coach! I threw myself forward to embrace them; someone pushed me in by my backside, the door slammed, the coachman whipped up his horses at a great gallop and I was left shouting stop! stop! I’ve been tricked . . .

  In the second version of events, which she reserved for the platform of lunacy law reform meetings and rallies, the crowd embraced her, she was pelted with flowers and fruit, dragged in her carriage to the Old Bailey, where speeches were made in her honor, and then driven to Hyde Park, where she addressed the cheering multitudes at Speaker’s Corner. She certainly went to see her mother at Stratford Street later that day. Louisa Treherne, at last stirred to be where the action was, counseled her yet again to seek a reconciliation with Harry. Or, if they could not live together, to accept what terms he might offer for a legal separation.