Celeste

by Roland Perry

  Lionel was forced to return to Ballarat, where he met with the French miners again and warned them not to get involved in the movement. The count knew from his contacts in the colonial government that there would be swift and tough action if matters in Ballarat looked to be getting out of hand. He warned his compatriots they could expect immediate deportation if they were found to be active in any serious protest against the British colonial rulers.

  The Reform League put forward a resolution, based on the UK Chartist Movement, which said, ‘That it is the inalienable right of every citizen to have a voice in making laws he is called on to obey; that taxation without representation is tyranny.’ This was compelling enough for most miners, but it was a further resolution that excited many of the French miners: ‘The League will secede from the United Kingdom if the current situation does not improve.’

  Lionel warned his compatriots that this would not happen and to not take part in any resultant action. He went further and published a proclamation to all French expatriates residing in Victoria, advising them to dissociate themselves from the agitation at the Ballarat goldfields.3

  Céleste observed that the governor, Sir Charles Hotham, whom she described ‘as a man of the highest breeding and most amiable’, was caught in a dilemma. He needed to police the area and he would lose his job if there was a serious move to secede by part of the colony. He was trying the middle ground by courting the miners, but they saw weakness and pushed harder for their additional demands as well as dropping the licence fee. Hotham became more authoritarian. At the same time, he declared his support for ‘democratic principles’ in spite of objections from the propertied and official classes who formed the Executive Council that ran the colony. Hotham took the time-honoured stalling route of appointing a Royal Commission on goldfield problems and grievances.

  But Rede was the man in charge of operations on the goldfields. Backed by military reinforcements, he stepped up the hunt for miners who hadn’t paid their licence fees, resulting in more confrontation with the miners, despite Hotham directing that he proceed cautiously and legally. More soldiers sent from Melbourne on 28 November were attacked by an angry mob of miners. There were injuries but no deaths, although there were rumours that a drummer boy had died.4 The next day 12,000 miners met and the Reform League delegation reported it had failed in negotiations with the authorities, dominated by Rede, with Hotham in contact by cypher (a forerunner to the telegraph). The miners resolved to burn their licences.

  On 30 November, Rede responded by ordering police to conduct a licence search. Eight ‘burners’ or licence defaulters were arrested. In turn, the miners rioted again. Soldiers had to extricate police before a possible lynching. This provided Rede with his excuse for his tough methods, which he believed were further justified when the miners, led by Peter Lalor, held a provocative meeting. At this meeting, a white-and-blue Australian Flag of Independence, bearing only the Southern Cross and no British symbols, was consecrated. Miners swore an oath to it: ‘We swear by the Southern Cross to stand truly by each other and fight to defend our rights and liberties.’

  A crude Eureka Stockade was built from timber and overturned carts. Armed miners took up the barricades. In response at mid-afternoon on 3 December, a contingent of 276 police and soldiers approached the Stockade. A battle ensued and the miners were routed in ten minutes. Twenty-two Irishmen (fourteen at the time, and eight dying later) were killed, and another twelve were injured. Six soldiers and police were killed in the battle. Martial law was imposed and the miner resistance collapsed much faster than it had formed.

  Lionel had opened an office in Collins Street, in Melbourne, to cope better with the crisis, and he feared an international incident. He hurried to Ballarat and was relieved to find that no French miner had been involved in the Stockade battle. His compatriot miners had been in sympathy with the rebels, but obeyed Lionel’s proclamation that they should stay out of the confrontation.

  CHAPTER 38

  Whatever Lola Wants . . .

  The Chabrillans experienced their own form of siege in Melbourne in the last weeks of 1854—a most eventful year—and into 1855. Céleste was snubbed by elements of Melbourne society, who’d learned, second-hand and from rumour, a little about her past.

  ‘I have been the victim of a kind of persecution,’ she noted, but ‘I had to be seen, nevertheless.’ Yet some ‘braver and kinder’ society matrons called on her in St Kilda to invite her to visit them. Despite this she remained suspicious of their advances.

  ‘I was not sufficiently well brought up to sustain a long conversation with well-bred people,’ she said in a frank self-analysis. But her attitude began to change when she accepted invitations to events where some people showed respect for her as a countess by bowing.

  External pressures continued. Ernest Baroche wrote from Paris again, warning that the sustained sales success of her Mémoires had created rumblings about the suitability of her carrying the countess title. Her marriage was under scrutiny, and Céleste and Lionel suspected his family was behind the outcry. There were calls from some quarters for the French Foreign Ministry to recall the count from Melbourne. But Baroche was quick to reassure the couple that nothing would be done without Emperor Napoleon III’s authority—and he had more on his mind than worrying about his consular officials. Céleste wrote to all her high-level contacts, including Prince Napoleon, in an effort to bolster support for Lionel and her.

  This news gave the count’s get-rich-quick schemes greater urgency. Prime among these was to import flour, which two compatriots had convinced him was in short supply. They wanted him to put up guarantees to charter two ships to bring flour supplies from Chile. They reckoned they could buy it in Chile for 200 pounds and resell it in Melbourne for a thousand.

  Lionel tried to justify the deal on moral grounds by saying the flour would help stop immigrants from dying of starvation. Céleste remained unconvinced, knowing that Lionel, while well-meaning, was not an experienced businessman. He had shown a high level of incompetence in money matters, and she had been the one to drive their return to solvency with her courage and intelligence. Céleste was sceptical about the flour deal. The partners alleged they did not have much money. They wanted to raise funds by securing Lionel’s personal guarantees.

  ‘One is the son of a shipowner from Bordeaux,’ Lionel said. ‘The other is from Toulouse and a real braggart . . . but is so industrious he succeeds in everything he does.’

  Céleste quizzed him. ‘How much would you make out of it?’

  ‘A million francs’, or about 40,000 pounds.

  ‘And how much do you stand to lose?’

  ‘From fifteen to twenty thousand francs each shipment.’

  ‘And if the flour arrived in bad condition?’

  ‘We can insure against that.’

  Céleste learned more. The ships were ready just as soon as Lionel gave the word. One of the French merchants involved was on one of the ships to make sure they bought the right amount of the commodity.

  ‘You’d better think it over carefully first,’ she advised.

  ‘To gain all,’ he told her, ‘one must risk all. Don’t worry, I’m doing this for your sake, and I shall be careful.’

  Céleste remained cautious, although she conceded that the best way to create real wealth away from the goldfields was to deal in commodities, particularly foodstuffs.

  ‘All the grocers made their fortunes very quickly,’ she noted in a prosaic, hopeful observation. ‘Fat candles are being sold for five francs [4 shillings] apiece.’

  Governor Hotham, ill from the stress of crushing the miners’ rebellion, put on a ball. He invited Lionel, who was obliged to go without his wife. It irked them both.

  ‘One-third of the invitees are ex-convicts,’ Céleste exaggerated in her diary, ‘and some are even escaped prisoners from the Sydney penal settlement.’ She had great delight in reporting that the ball was a flop. The food was ridiculed in the papers and offended her French s
ensibilities. The buffet consisted of nothing but cold meats and hams. The only drink was beer in barrels.

  Another contact from Paris’s demimonde was the adventurous Antoine Fauchery, a well-known writer, artist and photographer, who spent two years in the goldfields, with the usual experience of failing to make the hoped-for fortune. In 1854 he founded the Café Estaminet Francais in Melbourne’s Little Bourke Street, which featured a billiards table, a rarity in Australia at the time. The café was patronised by Europeans and French exiles who longed for the boulevards of Paris and the bohemian life there. When Fauchery’s café began to struggle, Lionel suggested he set up a photographic studio in Melbourne. But by 1855 his rent debts to the landlord had mounted and Fauchery left the café, making sure to hide his precious billiards table. He was pursued in the courts by the landlord. Lionel’s private, rather than consular, advice was to return to Paris and come back to Australia when he could pay his debts, then set up the studio (which he did with French girlfriend, later wife, Louise Josephine Gatineau).1

  Céleste’s competitive, conquistadorial and creative spirit was inspired by the arrival of the sparkling and sensual Irish-born Lola Montez, formerly Marie Gilbert. She was thirty-six when she arrived in Melbourne with a dance troupe in 1855. She had trained as a dancer in Spain and was famous/notorious for her erotic performance in Europe. Like Céleste, she had not made it as an actress, and her singing was not a box-office puller. Again like the countess, she had cut a swathe through the bedrooms of the rich and/or famous of Europe, including that of renowned Hungarian composer/pianist Franz Liszt. The affair with Liszt placed her high on the scandal register when it caused a split between him and his beautiful aristocratic mistress, the Countess Marie d’Agoult, with whom he had three children. But he soon regretted the Lola encounter. She was given to histrionics on and off the stage, and was a publicity seeker, which irked the studious Liszt. She was a supreme tantrum thrower, and when she took one temperamental fit too far in Dresden, Germany, he locked her in their hotel bedroom and fled. Shrewd and tidy, Liszt paid the hotel in advance for Lola’s anticipated destruction of everything not bolted down.

  Her penchant and capacity for seducing those at the pinnacle of society was matched only by Céleste, and they had more than a few belt notches in common in France, including Alexandre Dumas Sr.

  Céleste was a better dancer, but even she bowed to the grand gimmick of Lola’s ‘Spider Dance’. This had shocked critics in Europe, ensuring good theatre ticket sales for several years wherever she performed. Warned that puritanical Melbourne society might be scandalised by her hip-and-pelvic gyrations, Lola advertised the dance in a way to arouse curiosity rather than censorship.

  ‘A young Spanish girl, when amusing herself while dancing, is stung by a spider or tarantula,’ she told the press. ‘It fastens itself upon her person. As the poison gradually disperses itself through her frame, she becomes faint and exhausted, falls on the stage, or reels off distracted.’

  In the show, she added a final, dramatic and amusing twist by finding the spider and stomping on it in triumph.

  Lola had performed in Sydney before her Melbourne debut, and Céleste was intrigued by the Sydney Morning Herald’s review, which called it ‘the most libertinish and indelicate performance that could ever be given on the public stage’.

  Lola ignored that comment, saying that the reviewer had clearly never lived outside Australia, but she did embrace a review in the magazine Bell’s Life in Sydney that found ‘nothing in her beautiful saltation [leaping about] beyond descriptive, coquettish eccentricities’.

  Céleste went to a five-act performance, My History, which was very loosely based on Lola’s time in Bavaria with the king. At the end of act four she claimed to have only two things left in life, her conscience and her virtue, which Céleste laughed at as cheekily self-serving. Yet Lola confounded the audience in the last act by making a speech. She wanted everyone’s support and ‘protection’. They could prove their goodwill by coming to her plays every day. She blew kisses to many patrons.

  ‘Reduce the price of the seats!’ an Irishman called. Lola answered by arguing that they were worth ‘every penny’. Some in the audience agreed, others weren’t so sure, and a strident debate flowed back and forth with Lola holding her positions on all points. Others called out questions.

  ‘She replied with remarkable presence of mind,’ Céleste noted. ‘She speaks English very well. They clap and they whistle. There is an infernal din.’

  The Spider Dance followed the play. Céleste called it ‘ballet’. ‘It consists of moving about a lot,’ she said, ‘while frantically shaking the folds of an extremely short gauze skirt.’

  This exposed Lola’s long, slim legs and other tantalising glimpses, at least for the men.

  ‘All the women walked out before the end of the ballet,’ Céleste observed, ‘although there is nothing improper in it.’

  The police did not agree. They banned a second Spider Dance show.

  A day later, Lola made a point of coming to Céleste’s St Kilda home for tea.

  ‘People say she is mad,’ Céleste reported, ‘but she is simply very excitable.’ Céleste could not understand her rapid-fire Irish accent but did ascertain that Lola was hoping to make her fortune entertaining on the goldfields. Céleste wished her luck but did not think she would make her fortune in a place that was so rough and challenging.

  Lola was part of the drive for more and more entertainment in Victoria. Bars, cafés, concerts and dances burgeoned to soak up the hard-earned money of miners and others in the increasingly wealthy environment, especially Melbourne, which was fast becoming a very rich city. It was this burst of new entertainment and eating venues that first gave rise to the expression Melbournians would go to the opening of an envelope. It may have been said first by a visiting Sydneysider, but it was true.

  The Chabrillans were no longer disregarded. Invitations poured in. By mid-1855 they had become an essential item at openings, which obliged them to invite others to their own official events, such as the Bastille Day Ball.

  Once irritated by being ostracised, Céleste now resented the social whirl interfering with their private hours, and her chance to have time with the growing Solange. Céleste taught her everything from arithmetic to reading; but the little girl, now five, seemed difficult to inspire intellectually. Her limited desire for knowledge of any kind frustrated Céleste, who designated her as ‘thick-skulled’ and felt like giving up. The only consolation was having more time for her first attempt at a novel.

  Céleste, however, did lap up the newfound respect for her, and enjoyed all the attention after the earlier snub by the governor at his less-than-spectacular ball. She was especially gratified by the Freemasons Ball held in the aid of Allied Wounded. Melbourne Mayor John Thomas Smith organised the show, featuring a flower display in honour of Queen Victoria and Napoleon III. Smith was forty-nine, many times mayor, a publican and conservative politician and he had an affection for the Chabrillans. When he entered the ballroom of his own creation—the Queen’s Theatre Royal—it was to the strains of ‘Leaving for Syria’, which was France’s official march for public ceremonies during the Second Empire (from 1810). The mayor’s gesture was a tribute to France and their representatives in Melbourne, the Chabrillans.

  Smith then asked the countess to dance with him. Céleste was intimidated by the honour. She looked to Lionel, hoping he would indicate she should decline, but he knew the protocol and encouraged her to do it. She felt it did her ‘too much honour’, and thought she might faint. Smith bolstered her by whispering in her ear that he was demonstrating to the inhabitants of Melbourne his respect for the Chabrillans. Lionel and Céleste went home happier than at any other time in the colony to that point. They would never be completely comfortable with life in Melbourne, but this accolade did much for their morale, as did a remark by Lady Hotham late in 1855. Her husband had just died of either cholera, the official version, or distress and depression afte
r he was blackguarded in many quarters, particularly by the press, following the miners’ rebellion and the disaster of the Eureka Stockade.

  ‘The English are quite savage when it comes to making fun of people,’ Céleste noted. ‘They don’t even stop out of respect for the dead.’

  Lionel travelled to the governor’s mansion in South Yarra to pay his respects. The sad Lady Hotham apologised for the way she had treated him and Céleste.

  Lionel, ever the gentleman, was genuinely sorry for her especially given the trying time that she continued to have with the press.

  CHAPTER 39

  Counted Out

  Céleste’s prediction that Lola Montez would not find success on the goldfields did not prove correct at first. The miners loved this exotic and erotic Spanish (Irish) show-woman. They all turned out to be arachnophiles, at least when she performed her revealing sensual/sexual, ‘ballet’. The miners gave Lola the greatest reception of her life throughout February 1856. But in Ballarat, she was heavily criticised as much for her reputation as her stage show and Spider Dance. She was furious, claiming that the attacks were because she had refused to pay for promotional articles and favourable reviews. In what was seen as a Spanish tradition, she marched, horsewhip in hand, around to the Ballarat Times accompanied by Sally Bell, the wife of the impresario who had organised the trip around the goldfield towns. Bell thought the whip was simply part of Lola’s ongoing theatrics when she demanded to see the editor/owner Harry Seekamp. At first Lola verballed him for his ‘libellous’ remarks. Halfway through the tirade on the doorstep of the paper, her histrionics turned hysterical. She lashed him with the whip several times. When she could not be restrained, Bell, a friend of Seekamp’s, stepped in and punched Lola in the face.