The Beauty of Her Age: A Tale of Sex, Scandal and Money in Victorian England

by Jenifer Roberts

  The government moved to safety in Versailles and, on 21 March, Lord Lyons and most of the embassy staff followed suit. Only Edward Claremont and three other men remained in Paris. ‘I have desired General Claremont to stay at Paris,’ Lord Lyons explained to the Foreign Office, ‘as I consider that his assistance in providing, in case of need, for the safety of Her Majesty’s subjects would be extremely important and valuable.’

  On 26 March, the Reds won a majority in municipal elections and, as the Commune of Paris installed itself in the Hôtel de Ville, Parisians gathered in their thousands, wearing red scarves and shouting ‘Vive la Commune!’ while cannons were fired in salute and massed bands played the Marseillaise.

  Lord Lyons changed his mind on 6 April and instructed Edward to join him in Versailles: ‘Your knowledge of French military affairs, and in particular your large acquaintance with French military men, would be better turned to account during operations now in progress by making Versailles your headquarters for the present.’5

  Edward left the Hôtel Molé and, during the next three weeks, wrote despatches about the organisation of the army and the difficulty of attacking the Reds in Paris. ‘All military men of any standing with whom I have conversed here,’ he wrote on the 15th, ‘seem more and more convinced of the difficulty of entering Paris, and indeed it does not require much military experience to see this … It is altogether the most extraordinary state of things; for five months the French army tried to get out of Paris and could not; now it is just as difficult for them to enter it, and no professional man who knows anything seems to see the end.’6

  He spent a few hours in Paris on the 22nd and reported that the Reds were ‘putting up enormous barricades in different parts of the town, very superior to those they made at first’. His replacement as military attaché, Colonel James Conolly, arrived in Versailles on the 27th and Edward wrote his final despatch the following day:

  The formidable barricades … continue to rise up in every direction … I may be thought to be taking too gloomy a view of the affair, but I try to see things as they are, not as I should wish them to be, which people are too apt to do here. I only hope that Colonel Conolly, who arrived here yesterday to relieve me, will be able to give your Excellency a brighter account in future.7

  Soon there were skirmishes in the suburbs. The army began to bombard the city centre, as the Prussians had done four months earlier, and a number of shells fell on the Champs-Élysées. ‘This is not intended,’ explained Colonel Conolly on 4 May, ‘but as most of the artillery men of the old school are still prisoners in Germany, the gunners are now for the most part very young, and their fire is often wild.’8

  Civil war was declared on 14 May. Seven days later, government forces entered the city, the people of Paris were called to the barricades and the streets became a battlefield. The Reds set fire to buildings in the city centre, fires which – fanned by hot weather and strong winds – consumed entire streets. ‘The state of Paris is heart-breaking,’ wrote Lord Lyons, who returned from Versailles for just one night:

  Fires in all directions, the air oppressive with smoke and unpleasant odours, the incessant roar of cannon and musketry, and all kinds of strange sounds … a fire raging in the next street but one, shells falling on the roof which might set fire to the house at any moment, and shot flying so fast on both sides that escape in case of fire would have hardly been possible.9

  Soldiers executed all the Reds they could find, as well as those suspected of harbouring them, and when there were no more barricades to defend, surviving Reds were lined up against walls and shot, their corpses burnt on funeral pyres or thrown into mass graves. There was fighting in the Rue du Faubourg Saint-Honoré, followed by soldiers dragging Reds from their hiding places and killing them in the street. More than 10,000 people died during what became known as La Semaine Sanglante – Bloody Week.

  It was all over by the end of the month. The government took control of the city on 28 May, order returned to the streets, and an Englishman emerged from hiding. ‘What a sight met my eyes,’ he wrote in his diary, ‘destruction everywhere. From the Châtelet to the Hôtel de Ville, all was destroyed, not a room left.’10 The palace of the Tuileries, the scene of so many glittering occasions during Louis-Napoleon’s Second Empire, was reduced to a burnt-out shell. A few weeks later, Thomas Cook was advertising special excursions to see ‘the ruins of Paris’.

  Five days after the defeat of the Commune, news arrived in Versailles that Sir Robert Peel had attacked Edward for a second time in the House of Commons. In a debate on the salaries and expenses of the Foreign Office, he complained that ‘General Claremont … has received £500 per annum for many years out of the Secret Service money for what were called his services, in addition to his fixed stipend’. He also complained that, ‘to use a common expression’, Edward had ‘levanted from his post as soon as the condition of things round Paris became precarious’. Peel’s speech was followed by another member saying that it was ‘monstrous’ that Edward should have received £500 a year from ‘Secret Service money’.

  Edward had lost his position in the embassy, he was being vilified in parliament, and his mother, Anaïs Aubert, was dying in the village of Louveciennes near Versailles from an illness which caused her ‘much suffering’. He looked after her for seven weeks until she died in his arms on 25 July. ‘It was the most touching thing,’ he wrote in his diary that night, ‘to see her trying with her poor emaciated hand to make the sign of the Cross.’

  On the 27th, he ‘put my dear mother in her coffin’. Two days later, Anaïs was buried in the cemetery at Montparnasse. Later that day, after seeing the notary about the sale of her house, Edward complained that the formalities would take several weeks and that ‘every kind of annoyance is to be expected’.

  Next morning, he received a letter of sympathy from Frederick Leveson-Gower, who had known Anaïs during his childhood in Paris: ‘I know how much you will feel it, but your consolation must be that she is spared any more suffering and that you have always been to her the best of sons.’ He also received a letter from General Henry Ponsonby, private secretary to Queen Victoria, whom he had first met in the Crimea:

  I have to thank you for the excellent photograph for the Queen’s book. Her Majesty is much pleased with it and it is placed in the album in the space which was waiting for your portrait … I never understood your resignation. I knew Lord Lyons was strongly in favour of you, but all I could learn was that you had resigned … and just at the moment when your intimate acquaintance with French military men would have proved most useful. Conolly no doubt is a worthy successor, but a new man always finds it difficult to take up a good predecessor’s work.

  On 28 July, Leveson-Gower had made ‘an excellent speech’ in the House of Commons during a second debate on the salaries and expenses of the Foreign Office:

  I find myself called upon to defend the character, ability, prudence, and courage of General Claremont, a particular friend of mine, who has been most unjustly criticised and most unfairly represented. I am satisfied that public opinion will acquit him of the unjust censures which have been cast upon him – censures which he has not in any way deserved.

  In reply, Lord Enfield thanked him for his ‘generous defence of that gallant officer’ and said he was sure that Sir Robert Peel ‘would never have made use of the expressions which he had used regarding General Claremont if he knew what pain they had occasioned one who had so gallantly defended his country’.11

  ‘I think I made a good defence of you,’ Leveson-Gower wrote to Edward on 1 August, ‘and that it impressed the House favourably. Several Members complimented me upon it … I am most anxious that you should return to England as soon as possible. I can hardly discuss the reasons, but you may rely on my advice being good.’

  Edward was torn between returning to London to defend his conduct and staying in Paris to sort out his mother’s affairs and manage the sale of her house in Louveciennes. During the next two weeks, as the c
orrespondence about his resignation was printed as a Command Paper for presentation to the House of Commons, he disregarded his friend’s advice and made the decision to stay in Paris.

  The Command Paper was read in the House on 18 August. It was published in The Times the following day, together with a leader on the subject which filled an entire page. The leader explained that two questions arose from the publication of the correspondence, ‘on the first of which we must speak with reserve … the personal relations between General Claremont and the Foreign Office’.

  The writer noted that Edward’s reasons for leaving Paris had been corroborated by the foreign secretary when he spoke in the House of Lords. In Lord Granville’s words: ‘About the second week in December, Colonel Claremont, finding that the only other Military Attaché in Paris was about to leave, came away with that gentleman, in obedience to orders received.’ As a result:

  General Claremont’s explanation is … distinctly corroborated by his superiors at the Foreign Office; and if he thus acted in obedience to orders, it may seem somewhat strange that his resignation should have been so summarily accepted, especially when Lord Lyons’s testimony to his previous services is accepted without qualification … Whether he acted rightly is another question … but he was not alone to blame, and it does not appear why he alone should be made the scapegoat for all the defaults of the Embassy.

  There was a second question to be considered:

  The fact cannot be explained away that none of the staff of the Embassy remained through the severest part of the siege, and that the member who was especially charged with military duties left his post at the crisis of a great military operation. We are totally at a loss to understand why General Claremont should ever have been instructed ‘to follow the course adopted by other Military Attachés’. What had the course adopted by others to do with his own duty? …

  We do not doubt that he had, as Lord Lyons attests, done good service; but men are appointed to such posts not simply that they may do ordinary work in ordinary times, but that they may render special services in an emergency. That emergency had arisen, and General Claremont ought to be been at his post to the last moment. No excuse can be made for him, except that his superiors had expressly released him from this simple and strict view of his duty by telling him to follow the example of others … His special duties required his presence at his post, and he was additionally bound to remain by the fact that his departure left the Embassy unrepresented …

  We have dwelt on General Claremont’s defence, not because it exonerates him from blame, but because it shows that he was not alone in fault … If the Diplomatic Service, with its various attachés, is to sustain the attacks to which it is now subject, it must show some better return of work than is afforded by the story of General Claremont and the British Embassy during the Siege of Paris.12

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  THE MÉNAGE-À-TROIS

  General Claremont … obtained the management of her property; and with his wife and children became permanent members of her family, and took up his abode wherever she was.

  Constance Smith, c. 1912

  Yolande had returned to Grove House in July 1870, a few days after Louis-Napoleon declared war on Prussia. She missed Edward’s reassuring presence. She worried about his safety in a country at war. When the Prussian army encircled Paris, she fretted about his well-being in a city under siege. For three months she received no news. His wife would not have passed on information from the Foreign Office, nor would it have been wise for Edward to send letters addressed to his mistress out of Paris by balloon post.

  She moved to Lynford in October and Edward’s arrival there in January 1871 was an unexpected pleasure. When he returned to Paris in February, she worried again about his safety, particularly during the dangers of the Commune. She hoped he would return to England in April after Colonel Conolly arrived in Versailles to replace him. Instead, she had to wait another six months while he tended his dying mother and dealt with her affairs.

  This was the fourth pivotal moment of her life. The first was the July Revolution of 1830 which allowed Véron to lift her straight from ballet student to soloist. The second came seven years later when she accepted Stephens’s offer against her inclinations. The third was in 1845 when the death of Lady Aldborough provided an opportunity to manipulate him into marriage. Now, eleven years after her husband’s death, she wanted Edward Claremont, not just as a lover but as a constant companion, to share her life and take the weight of administration and management off her shoulders.

  Edward was a highly effective officer in the field, as proved in the Crimea and during the Italian Campaign. He was valued by Queen Victoria and by ministers of state. He was popular in the army and in his diplomatic capacity at the embassy. He was respected by French army officers, as well as by Louis-Napoleon, and he was liked by British residents in Paris, at least until his departure during the siege. People had admired his savoir-faire since his early years in Canada.

  His relationship with the Foreign Office, of which The Times had written ‘with reserve’, would appear to have been poisoned by the fifteen-day interval between the order to join Lord Lyons in Bordeaux ‘without delay’ and his reply written in Lynford Hall. His friend the Duke of Cambridge, commander-in-chief of the army, came to the same conclusion. ‘I regret to hear of your having resigned,’ he wrote from his office in Horse Guards Parade on 23 March, ‘and of your resignation having been accepted, but your absence from Paris during the last part of the siege has been so much commented upon that I do not see how it was possible to escape from this unfortunate result. I have always regretted your not returning to Lord Lyons at Bordeaux when directed to. I thought it a mistake and I’m afraid that all this trouble may be regarded in this way.’

  Edward’s delay in replying to the order was crucial. An official of his standing, the military attaché to the British Embassy in Paris, should not have been out of communication for fifteen days during a critical period of the Franco-Prussian war as a result of – as he vaguely described it – ‘a circumstance over which I had no control’. The Foreign Office may also have heard rumours about the nature of his relationship with Yolande, adding a whiff of scandal to his lapse of duty. What was considered normal in Second Empire Paris was a different matter in Victorian England.

  If the despatch was sent to Edward at his London address, it is possible that his wife waited for several days before forwarding it to Norfolk. It is more likely that the delay was engineered by Yolande to keep him with her in Lynford Hall, to prevent him returning to the war in France where he would be placed in danger. It is not difficult to picture her, during those crucial few days, using her proven power of weeping to persuade him to stay a little longer in Lynford, to delay replying to the Foreign Office, to delay his departure for France. It seems to have been another occasion when he was detained in Norfolk ‘very much against my will but I could not help it’.

  With the active support of Lord Lyons, he had assumed that his resignation would not be accepted. He should have made more of an effort to defend himself, but he was angry at his treatment by the Foreign Office and grieving at the loss of his mother. He was also concerned about money. His salary as military attaché had come to an end and, even if he had been entitled to half-pay from the War Office, this would have been insufficient to support his family.

  When he returned to London in September, he wrote to his old friend Lord Cowley, referring to a conversation he remembered about a pension from the diplomatic service. ‘I must express the pleasure I had in seeing your handwriting again,’ Cowley replied on 10 October:

  I knew that you had been subjected to great distress but I did not know where you were. Now as to the matter on which you wrote to me. I cannot recall speaking to you about the subject … I have no doubt that you report correctly what occurred but I could not positively speak as much. If you can give about the date when you spoke to me, I will look into my correspondence …

  I do not won
der at your being annoyed at some of the assertions which have been made upon you and which anybody with any knowledge of the subject must know to be unfounded, but I must own that I did not see the necessity for your resignation. Had I been near you, I should have done all in my power to dissuade you from taking the step. I fear that this may stand in the way of anything being done for you now.

  Cowley wrote again five days later: ‘I have looked through all my official correspondence both public and private … and cannot find a trace of having brought your wishes before the government.’

  Yolande was in Roehampton when Edward received these letters. He spoke to her of his disappointment about the pension, the loss of his salary, his financial concerns for the future. The appeal of her money had grown stronger during recent months when he had been faced with one disaster after another. With an excess of income over expenditure, she was building up a significant fortune of her own and had no close relatives to whom to bequeath it. She had often told him so, dangling the prospect of great wealth in front of him and his children.

  The cards had fallen in her favour – and Cowley’s letters about the pension provided her with another perfect opportunity. Edward was, as Cowley realised, ‘in great distress’. It was easy for Yolande to persuade him that the simplest solution was for him to live with her on a permanent basis. He could take charge of her financial and business affairs, and he would never have to think about money again.

  Stephens’s will had not included the usual caveat about his widow’s remarriage, so a second marriage would have made no difference to Yolande’s financial position. Divorces had become easier since the Divorce and Matrimonial Causes Act was passed in 1857, but the cases were heard in public in the High Court in London and inevitably led to scandal. Edward, bruised by the recent publicity about his resignation, had no desire to have his private life raked over by the newspapers.