I was taunted with the expense I am causing by having the old grey horse from the farm take me from Brandon to Lynford. And frost! Nothing is said about the expenses of Pym and his clerk coming here three times a week, for very little, and they would not like to go third class. … Last week, I was told I was no good. There was no use in my being here. I might just as well be at Lynford and she would have to tell me to stay there. Very well, I replied, you have only to say so once. Ah, she said, you threaten me.
The following afternoon, Yolande discovered Edward’s jewel and watch cases hidden away at the back of a drawer. In his will, he had left her ‘all the jewels and trinkets she has given me and which she is to point out and select also the plain gold ring which I always wear’. The cases had been brought to Grove House for her to make the selection, but she was so overwrought that they were wrapped in paper and put away for another time. On the evening of 3 March, Dwane wrote a long letter to Harry:
I have had such a trying afternoon. Madame was routing in the drawer of her table in which the cellar book is kept, and she complained that there was a packet at the back which was in the way. She took it out and impatiently asked me to open it, saying it was doubtless papers. There were two cases and I divined at once what they were from knowledge derived from your mother. One was your father’s jewel case; in the other were his various watches.
Such a scene I hope never to witness again. Madame was completely unnerved. She collapsed and began that tearless cry which is so painful to witness. Her reading of the situation is that your father himself put them there, in a place to which he knew no one had access but herself, so she would be sure to find them. ‘It was so like him, so like his thoughtfulness for her in everything’, etc. ‘Now she was alone, desolate and dreary,’ etc., etc.
There was no use arguing but I did my best to calm her. Later on, I tried to make her recall whether or not she had put them there herself, but in vain. ‘He had put them there, with his own hands.’ I tried as delicately as I could to show that that was unlikely, that your father had taken his watches and jewellery to Paris with him, and that in conformity with the terms of his will (this is what I understood from your mother), the jewels were sent to her that she might select what she liked from them. ‘No, no, that could not be,’ etc. The shock was terrible in its effects, construed as it was by her as a proof of your father’s kind thoughtfulness.
Yolande assumed that all the jewels were hers, without a thought for Edward’s wife and children. ‘I have suggested to Madame,’ Dwane continued:
that she should get you all together and either let you choose or make a distribution, but I do not think I am likely to prevail. No doubt Madame will tell Pym, who could disillusion her and have the will carried out by restoration of jewels. Your mother told me that he had declined to suggest such a thing to Madame last year when asked to do so but, if the way was opened for him, he surely would not shrink from reminding her of the terms and conditions of the will. Or am I to mind my own business?
Yolande wrote to Harry five days later – making no mention of the jewels:
I know well that I do not deserve praises for my épistolaire work. I am always backward for answering letters, not that I absolutely wish to be lazy and doing nothing. Oh no, I am sometimes very angry with me but I have not in me the energy to live as I used to do not so very long ago, and what is the point is that I have so little to say. If you can fancy how my days are passing, it would not surprise you, living almost quite by myself. I do not find the least thing that could have an interest for any of you.
Ten days earlier, Christopher Scott had arrived in Roehampton to discuss the final fittings for the church in Cambridge. Sitting in the drawing room in Grove House, he talked about the work that remained unfinished, but according to Michael Dwane, ‘he simply ceased to go on when he was treated in a way to which we are accustomed but he is not. People know little of Madame if they think they can force money out of her.’
Apart from Michael Dwane, Yolande had never shown this side of her personality to any member of the clergy. A few days later, she received a letter from Arthur Riddell conveying the pope’s blessing for her work in Cambridge. She replied on 4 March, the day after the scene about Edward’s jewel and watch cases, confirming that she was about to send Scott a cheque for £4,000 (£450,000):
I cannot thank you enough for your extremely kind letter which, besides being full of kindness to me, conveyed also the invaluable approval on the part of the Holy Father of the work it has been my privilege to carry out in Cambridge. The blessing which his Holiness has graciously conferred on me has filled me with happiness and gratitude … It will, I think, interest your Lordship to know that Dr Scott was staying with me last week and we then decided to complete at once what remains to be done for the Church. Accordingly it is my intention to forward to him the sum … which is needed to finish everything.1
The cold winter had affected Yolande’s feet and ankles which were crippled with arthritis, one reason perhaps for her bad temper. They had been damaged by her years as a dancer and the arduous training she underwent as a child. Ballerinas in the 1830s danced en pointe with no blocks in their shoes, just a mass of darning at the points, so they had to work hard to strengthen the muscles in their toes, feet and ankles. One of Edward’s daughters visited her in Roehampton on 19 March and, according to Fanny, found her ‘looking ill, complaining of sciatica, and was hardly able to crawl along’.
Yolande visited Fanny in Gloucester Street at least twice a week, driving in an open carriage from Roehampton even in the coldest weather. Fanny found her ‘very cross and tiresome’ and wished she would not come so often. ‘I pity poor Dwane,’ she wrote to Harry. ‘He says from the time he comes down in the morning until ten at night when she goes to bed, she hardly lets him out of her sight and finding fault with him all the time. He even seems afraid to go into the garden without permission.’
In April 1892, Yolande plucked up courage to return to Lynford Hall. Harry had arrived in England a few weeks earlier, but his lungs had deteriorated and he was ordered back to Switzerland, this time to Montreux. Michael Dwane wrote to him there on 1 May:
On her arrival and for some days afterwards, she was very sorrowful and broke down on first speaking to a person. Now, for more than a week, she has been much better. She suffers martyrdom from her feet and can walk but little, but otherwise I would pronounce her very well indeed. I need not say that she will not admit that she is any better, or ever will be, but that is because we say so and, of course, what we say is wrong. I dare not ask questions and conversation is hard if not impossible. I wish somebody else was staying here.
Yolande wrote five days later, thanking Harry for his attention during his brief stay in England:
You are so kind and tried to do everything to show me your utmost interest that if you did not say even so much, my heart would be full of gratitude. You must guess what I feel and I can only thank you heartily for all. I feel dull to think that you are gone away. I wish I was gone with you, or you with me, but this cannot be. I do not know what my short evening will do for me, but time may do still a little, very little comfort for me. Perhaps you may some day help me in that. Je vous embrasse.
On the 16th, Dwane wrote a rather indiscreet report on her health:
The doctor says that she is as clear in memory and as keen in intellect as ever. But in body? Well, I hardly know what to say. She has had attacks of what the doctor calls bile or ‘intestinal indigestion’, commonly called diarrhoea, and all last week she has been ill at ease. The worst of it is that it is accompanied by want of power of retention. Now this is simply entre nous …
And temper? Ah, only this afternoon there was an unusual amount of perversity about my going out in the carriage. I offered several times to go with her but ‘No’ she said. ‘Had I nothing better to do?’ At last she said that Marie was going with her, so I thought I was not wanted. I was leaving when I was asked ‘Was I not going in the carriage?�
�� I said ‘No’. ‘But you shall go,’ was shrieked in all violence and vehemence, and repeated several times.
Fanny Claremont was relieved that she had moved to Norfolk; she had been exhausted by the constant visits from Roehampton. Yolande wrote to tell her that she was ‘very miserable’ in Lynford and, when Fanny heard rumours that she was thinking of returning to Grove House at the end of May, she expressed the hope that she would stay in Norfolk. She was seventy-eight years old and suffering from liver failure. She did not feel well enough to cope with any more visits from Yolande.
When Harry returned to London in early June, he wrote to Lynford about his mother’s health. ‘I was happy to get your letter,’ Yolande replied on the 6th, ‘but I feel much upset that you had to give me a very poor account of the state you found the dear mother, with a little attack of bile. She is not subject to that generally and I hope it will soon get right.’
Harry made a brief visit to Lynford before returning to London and taking his mother to the Granby Hotel in Harrogate, a spa hotel where he hoped she might feel more comfortable. He suggested to Yolande that it would be a kindness to write to Fanny at this late stage in her life. ‘I could not write to her,’ Yolande replied on the 20th. ‘What could I say? I pray for her. It is all I can do. I want to be at Roehampton but cannot take any decision about going. I am miserable and want to see you all. Can I do anything useful?’
Next day, she received more news from Harrogate. ‘I am most unhappy that the news is no better,’ she replied:
I had a slight hope that the shade of a little comfort should have continued but your letter this morning takes away my hope. Do you like the consulting doctor and does it give a hope for us to feel less anxious? I wish I could be with you all, but I am always very fidgety when there is a question of moving.
Fanny may have been an unwelcome member of the ménage-à-trois, but she had lived with Yolande for twenty years – and while she lay dying in Harrogate, Yolande fretted about the journey to Roehampton. ‘She wants to go and I feel sure she will go,’ wrote Michael Dwane on 22 June, ‘only she will not fix a day. She is upsetting herself – and others – very much owing to her nervousness about the details (and expense) of the move.’
Yolande finally made the journey on 30 June. Four weeks later, Fanny Claremont died in the Granby Hotel in Harrogate. ‘It was so merciful,’ Harry wrote to his wife that evening. ‘She had no suffering and simply seemed to sleep out, just like the General did.’
He brought his mother home to London. After a funeral service in the Anglican church in Roehampton, the coffin was taken into the grounds of Grove House and buried in Edward’s grave outside the mausoleum. Yolande showed no grief as the Claremont family gathered in Grove House. She was happy to spend time with Harry and his children. ‘I wish I could have the dear children in my pocket,’ she had written during the winter, ‘to take them out for recreation and play with them till I am tired to have been pulled about.’
22
A SOLITARY DOVE
I do not know what my short evening will do for me, but time may do still a little, very little comfort for me.
Yolande Lyne Stephens, 6 May 1892
There are two – very different – accounts of Yolande’s personality towards the end of her life. The first is from the letters of Harry Claremont and Michael Dwane. The second is from the memoirs of Horace Pym. Yolande perceived Pym to be a friend as well as a lawyer. In his presence, she displayed the wit and charm that had captivated the men of society so many years before, just as she had done with Arthur Riddell and Christopher Scott.
After several visits to Lynford in the spring of 1892, Pym wrote that he had found her ‘excessively bright and quite equal to the labour of all her business affairs’. He would remember her in old age as ‘full of physical vigour and intellectual brightness, and still remarkable for her personal beauty, finding life to the last full of many interests, but impressed by the sadness of having outlived nearly all her friends and contemporaries’. In his opinion, she was:
A simple-lived, brave, warm-hearted, generous woman … Her conversation and power of repartee was extremely clever and brilliant. A shrewd observer of character, she rarely made a mistake in her first estimate of people, and her sometimes adverse judgements, which at first sight appeared harsh, were invariably justified by the history of after-events. Her charity was illimitable, and was always, as far as possible, concealed.
His memoirs continue with an interesting account of Yolande’s background and her whereabouts during the Siege of Paris and the Commune:
The history of this admirable woman is deeply interesting in every way. She was the daughter of Colonel Duvernay, a member of a good old French family, who was ruined by the French Revolution … She was educated at the Conservatoire in Paris, where they soon discovered her wonderful talent for dancing … For thirty-four years, as a widow, she administered, with the utmost wisdom and the broadest generosity, the large trust placed in her most capable hands …
During the Franco-German war of 1870, she remained in her beautiful home in the Rue du Faubourg Saint-Honoré and would daily sally forth to help the sufferings which the people in Paris were undergoing. No one will ever know the vast extent of the sacrifice she then made. Her men-servants had all left to fight for their country, and she was alone in the big house, with only two or three maids to accompany her.
During the Commune she continued her daily walks abroad, and was always recognised by the mob as a good Frenchwoman, doing her utmost for the needs of the very poor. Her friend, Sir Richard Wallace, who was also in Paris during these troubles, well earned his baronetcy by his care of the poor English shut up in the city during the siege; but although Mrs Lyne Stephens’s charity was quite as wide and generous as his, she never received, nor did she expect or desire it, one word of acknowledgement from any of the powers that were.1
Pym had known Yolande since he took over the legal management of her husband’s estate in 1870. It is difficult to understand how he could have believed these stories. Perhaps he included them in his memoirs to put a better light on the large sums of money he received under her will.
For ten years, Pym and his family had lived in Foxwold, a large house near Sevenoaks in Kent which he had built to his own designs. He had borrowed heavily to fund the building and, in a codicil dated 6 October 1892, Yolande left him a legacy of £10,000 ‘as a mark of my affectionate regard and gratitude for all he has done for me during many past years of friendship, with the desire (but not as a condition) that he will use the legacy in reducing any encumbrances existing at the time of my decease upon his Foxwold estate’.
In an earlier codicil dated 12 December 1891, she left £10,000 to Pym’s wife and £5,000 to each of his four children. These two codicils gave Pym and his family a total of £40,000 (£5 million). In addition to this, in a codicil to her French will dated 22 July 1893, she appointed Pym as her residuary beneficiary in France in place of Harry Claremont. Altogether, Pym and his family would receive £92,000 (£11 million) from Yolande’s will, in addition to his legal fees for administering the estate.
This was not all. Over the years, she had given him several old master paintings, including a Watteau, and many pieces of valuable porcelain and objets d’art. He would also inherit the contents of her apartment in the Champs-Élysées. As the fortunate lawyer wrote in his memoirs:
To the inmates of Foxwold, she was … a true and loving friend, paying them frequent little visits, and entering with the deepest sympathy into the lives of those who also loved her very dearly. The house bears, through her generosity, many marks of her exquisite taste and broad bounty, and her memory will always be fragrant and beautiful to those who knew her.
While Harry was forced to spend increasing periods of time in the mountains of Switzerland, Pym visited Yolande frequently in her old age, taking care to avoid matters which might cause friction, such as the restitution of Edward’s watches and jewels to his family. In September 1893,
when Yolande moved to Lynford after spending fourteen months in Grove House, he came to see her as soon as she had settled in. ‘I came here by very fast train,’ he wrote to his daughter on the 23rd, ‘and as I drove through the park, there were hundreds of pheasants running about and their kind old nurses, the hens under whose wings they had been hatched, were looking at them with surprise at their bright colours and flighty ways’.
He made many visits to Lynford during the next twelve months, staying overnight and providing her with the pleasures of his company. There were also legal matters to discuss, not least the matter of her executors. In her will of 1887, she had appointed Harry Claremont, Sir John Lubbock and Horace Pym. By early 1894, it was clear that Harry Claremont did not have long to live, while Sir John Lubbock – a remarkably busy man – was unlikely to take much interest in the administration. Pym told Yolande that she should appoint another executor.
George Claremont was dead, his brother Teddy was unsuitable, and apart from Horace Pym she had no male friends. Pym’s solution was to nominate his brother-in-law, Joseph Gurney Fox. She agreed to this and, in a codicil signed in Lynford Hall on 15 February 1894, she appointed Fox as the fourth executor and trustee of her will.
Yolande was transformed in Pym’s company; she missed him when he was gone. It is easy to conjure up an image of a little old woman dressed in black hobbling around the enormous rooms of Lynford Hall, dwarfed by the high ceilings and ornate furnishings, alone among her many servants, reliant for company on her chaplain and her lady’s maid. Spoilt by more than thirty years of more wealth than she knew what to do with, by Edward Claremont looking after all her affairs, there was nothing left to give her pleasure, just the constant pain in her feet and an aching loneliness.
On 5 July, she put pen to paper for the last time, writing to Harry in weak handwriting and in French:
The Beauty of Her Age: A Tale of Sex, Scandal and Money in Victorian England Page 21