by Emily Hahn
“If certain connections should be formed,” he had once written in a list of self-admonishments, “to keep at a distance.” This, to all intents and purposes, he did with Mrs. Grand, and it is interesting to observe that Catherine was not brutally condemned, any more than was Marian, by Calcutta society. Some ladies even continued to call on her. Not Mrs. Hastings, however. It would perhaps be too much to expect Marian to have done so.
Junius did not get off merely with the payment of that savage fine. Much to his fury, Hastings harped on the matter whenever he got a chance in council, and in company with Barwell he even sent a report of it home to the Court of Directors. Who were they, Junius demanded, to take exception to such an affair? Hastings, who had taken Imhoff’s wife, and Barwell who had got mixed up with bad Mrs. Bonner! Talk about the pot calling the kettle black-arsed!
We don’t know if Catherine was happy, living in sin with Francis. Nobody seems to have taken the trouble to inquire. That she remained under his protection for more than a year seems to prove it, but then she had little or no choice in the matter. Her father probably nagged her, telling her that she could count herself lucky, after behaving so badly, to have someone to pay her bills. As for Francis, he seems to have been content with his beautiful prize, though the loss of all those rupees must have irked whenever he thought of them. A series of notations in his journal soon after his mistress was installed shows that he got some of his money’s worth, at any rate:
September 9: Go up to Hughely, where I propose to stay till we hear decisively from England.…
September 17. O, Cara Phillide, rendi mi il cor.
September 29: Quae spiravit amores.
October 12: In the evening returned to Hughely.
October 16: At Hughely.
October 17, Sunday: Ditto: Ridet hoc, inquam, Venus ipsa, rident simplices nymphae.…
From this point on the paths of the two outstanding brides of Calcutta, 1777, diverge sharply. Both had long lives still ahead of them, but they did not remain in the same city, nor even on the same Continent. Let us first see what became of Marian.
She returned to England nearly a year ahead of Hastings, in 1784, because they were both convinced that she was too delicate to stand the strain of another Calcutta summer. There was a brief flurry during the voyage, for she thought she was pregnant at last, after having given up hope of ever bearing a child to Hastings. She wrote the news to him and he was joyful until her next letter told him that she had miscarried. Hastings missed her sorely. Through all their life together he remained devoted to his wife, and it was a happy day for him when he rejoined her in England.
They were treated at first with great cordiality by court and company. Hastings felt he had every reason to expect a peerage, and Marian was gay and charming, and thought London a wonderful place. She saw no reason why she should not glitter in England as bravely as she had done in India. Fanny Burney, who met her, several times spoke of her high spirits and her charm. The little brown wren could not but betray a natural distrust of this peacock. Marian had attractive manners, however—Miss Burney admitted as much—“and attentions to those she wishes to oblige. Her dress … was like that of an Indian princess, according to our ideas of such ladies, and so much the most splendid, from its ornaments of style and fashion, though chiefly muslin, that everybody else looked under-dressed in her presence.”
As things turned out, Marian would have done better not to have put so many others in the shade. She should not have glittered so bravely at Charlotte’s court. Probably she did not realize that impeachment was hanging quite so close over her husband’s head. Then the blow fell. The court never turned its back or reversed the royal family’s conviction of the innocence of Hastings, who had married the friend of Mrs. Schwellenberg, but the company was another matter. Hastings was impeached; the seven years’ ordeal began. And Marian was to learn through bitter trial how unwise she had been to blaze with jewels, wife as she was to a man responsible, if Burke was to be believed, for “violent sales, fraudulent purchases, confiscations, inhuman and inutterable tortures, imprisonment, irons, whips, fines, general despair.…”
Most of the tittering, wellborn audience assembled in Westminster Hall at the opening of the Hastings trial believed Burke. To believe him was the fashion: Francis had done his work well. There was in the public’s enthusiastic acceptance of the accusations a certain element of pride, pride as it were in self-castigation. They were British, thank God. As justice-loving Britons they would not shrink, they felt, from punishing even so loftily placed a man as Hastings. In their burning zeal they could hardly wait to punish him. “If thy right eye offend thee, pluck it out.” And if, as seems probable, many of the audience mistook their motives, and acted from submerged jealousy rather than a true passion for justice, we must place a part of the blame on those famous jewels of Marian’s.
Besides, Burke delivered his lines so well! Who could resist him? Certainly not the ton of London, who knew only what they were told and judged by the manner rather than the matter of the telling. “The ladies in the galleries,” wrote Macaulay, “unaccustomed to such displays of eloquence … were in a state of uncontrollable emotion. Handkerchiefs were pulled out; smelling bottles were handed round; hysterical sobs and screams were heard: and Mrs. Sheridan was carried out in a fit.”
Ultimately, of course, it all settled down, well before the final vindication of poor Warren Hastings. Seven years is a long time, too long for feverish excitement to endure against the cold douche of fact. Cleared of the charges, the erstwhile governor general was free to retire to Daylesford, the family’s former estate which he had always wanted to recover and had at last acquired. The only trouble was that now he had no money with which to keep it up. He had very few worldly goods left, especially for a man who had occupied the tremendously powerful position Hastings had held. He was old. His name was clear and he had his adored Marian, but he had spent his entire fortune in the defense, and his chance of a peerage had gone glimmering. (Francis, however, went into Parliament, acquired a title, and enjoyed the friendship of the Prince of Wales.)
It seems fitting that Marian’s jackdaw-gathered jewels should have been used to pay for her husband’s vindication. One by one during those years of trial they were brought out and sold. One famous diamond actually went back to India and was bought there. During the careful years at Daylesford, too, her long-guarded hoard was very useful. Nobody ever found out quite how much Marian had managed to salt away during that era of splendor in Calcutta, but there was enough, somehow, to settle a little fortune on her son when he married, to eke out here and there during Hastings’s lifetime, and to keep his wife going in a frugal but aristocratic sort of way through her long widowhood.
In his old age Hastings had been deeply respected by everyone, and so was Marian, who lived so long she outstayed all memory of her tactless youthful display of wealth. She became a county gentlewoman, a typical English lady, with nothing vulgar about her, nothing extreme, not so much as one jewel in her venerable white hair. As a widow she lived and died discreetly. Today she lies in Daylesford courtyard with her husband, Joan to his Darby, quiet and respectable as if there had never been scandal about Von Imhoff, or envy in India, or vicious lampoons and caricatures of her in London pamphlets; as if she had never played with pearls and kittens in a bowl. Whereas Catherine …
Now let us turn back to Catherine, whom we left at Hooghly, snug in Francis’s house and arms. Grand was gone and her needs for the present were taken care of, but she may with reason have worried about her future. After all, there could be no question of Junius doing the right thing by her. He was very much a married man with five children in England.
Moreover, it was becoming increasingly evident, even before the duel, that Calcutta would not be big enough to hold both Hastings and Francis much longer. One of them would have to go, and it was only in his more foolishly sanguine moments that Junius thought, nowadays, that it would be Hastings who would be forced out.
We don’t know what it was like when they parted. We can only imagine tearful scenes and reproaches, culminating in Francis’s offer to buy his lady love a passage to Europe, and perhaps a small annuity as well, so that she might start life anew. Perhaps it was not like that at all, but we don’t know. We only know that she did go to Europe, before Junius himself set sail, and that there does not seem to have been any serious promise between them to meet again. It is my belief that Catherine was wild with joy at the prospect of seeing fabulous Europe. All her life (such as there was of it, she being only seventeen at this time) she must have dreamed of England and France as youth in Europe dreamed of romantic India. Did she weep as she kissed Junius good-by? If so, I think they were merely tactful tears.
The voyage to the Promised Land turned out to be a long, exciting one. At the Cape of Good Hope there came aboard Mrs. Grand’s ship (a Dutch one) one Mr. Thomas Lewin, a young man who had for some time been private secretary to the governor at Fort St. George (Madras), and was carrying dispatches of some importance to England. As the ship put into Cádiz she was attacked by two French warships, and Mr. Lewin had to tear up his dispatches and throw them out the porthole. Whether or not Mrs. Grand was in his confidence at this time, they were certainly friends from Cádiz on. They traveled together to Lisbon and then to England, and set up housekeeping together in Fitzroy Square, where the beautiful houses must have only recently been built around the little park. Sometimes when crossing the square I think of Mrs. Grand’s pretty face peering through the glass of her carriage as it rolled across the cobbles there and deposited her at one of the Adam doors.
Well, then they went to Paris, and there Mr. Lewin seems to have left Catherine, after settling an annuity on her. (He was only twenty-eight, but he had already made his fortune in India and was quite ready to spend it.) There is no hint that he ran away from her, or she from him, but it is impossible to figure out just what she did do after that, until she comes onstage again as large as life in the role of Talleyrand’s mistress. It was rumored that she went to live with relatives in Paris. Sir Philip Francis in his dotage told his second wife that she did so, and that he saw her from time to time but never renewed their old intimacy. Some of the people who wrote about Talleyrand have given their versions of Madame Grand’s whereabouts during the Revolution, and one of these goes on to tell about a young English naval officer who went to Paris to recover her property for her. Or was it her property? Was it not that of a nobleman who was at the time her protector? Since the entire tale may well be apocryphal, it seems idle to wonder.
There are other stories, of course. As soon as she married Talleyrand many men claimed to have known her in the Biblical sense. It is a way men have. Some may have been telling the truth. An uncle of Sterne’s “Eliza,” an Anglo-Indian, is supposed to have kept her for a time. There was an elderly roué who boasted to his niece that he had been pursued by Mrs. Grand years before, when she was a daughter of joy in Paris, and that she had dined with him clad only in her long golden hair. But then he was so old he may have got his names mixed up.
Undoubtedly Catherine was a beautiful woman, but some of her charm was also in her soft, innocent manner, like that of a gentle little girl. Her large eyes with dark brows and lashes, her wonderful hair, her grace, her pleasing, simple gaiety—small wonder so many catty stories collected about her, especially after she made good beyond a harlot’s wildest dreams, in marrying a man who became a prince. Today’s reader studying her portraits need make no effort, as he must with Mrs. Hastings’s pictures, to understand her beauty. It triumphs over fashion.
The story of her second marriage begins in mystery. Somewhere she met Talleyrand, probably during the Revolution. She was living with him when he came to Paris from Hamburg in 1796, and soon after their arrival she was arrested on suspicion of being a spy. Talleyrand wrote to Barras, the director, to get her released, protesting that it was ridiculous to have thought her capable of any interest in politics. “C’est une Indienne,” he said indignantly, “bien belle, bien paresseuse, la plus désoccupée de toutes les femmes que j’ai jamais rencontrées.”
The former priest had at that time been excommunicated for six years, for the crime of freethinking. It is said that he lent his assistance in the negotiations which preceded the signing of the Concordat, and that in return for his sympathetic help the Pope, in 1801, removed this ban of excommunication, allowing him to revert to the secular state. At least, Talleyrand himself claimed that he was allowed thus to revert, though later the Pope was angry that he had married. There are two theories as to how Talleyrand happened to marry at all, after having lived irregularly with Mrs. Grand for many years without evident distress. The first theory is the romantic one that he longed to make an honest woman of her and planned well in advance, with great cunning, to gain the Pope’s favor. Thence the Concordat. I do not think we need take this theory too seriously.
The other tale sounds more reasonable. Talleyrand was now Foreign Minister, and Catherine presided at his official receptions. For a long time she remained in happy ignorance that such an arrangement was not quite the thing, but ultimately there were so many indignant complaints from ambassadresses, and so many comments from envoys about the extraordinary customs of the French, that Bonaparte took action and commanded Talleyrand to put the woman out of his house.
Catherine, through the intercession of Josephine, obtained an audience with Napoleon. Kneeling at his feet, she wept and pleaded until he modified his orders. Talleyrand, he said, must marry her, or the original command still stood. Whereupon they were married, very quietly, on September 10, 1802.
A third version of the story is that Talleyrand married Catherine in defiance of Bonaparte’s order that the relationship be dissolved. Maybe so. Certainly Bonaparte’s subsequent behavior does not contradict this tale. He was very rude to her, and after his coronation always made trouble about her attending court. But then Bonaparte was usually rude to women, so that proves nothing.
As might be expected, the wits of Paris let their fancies roam freely on the subject of Talleyrand’s wife. The greater part of their anecdotes make mock of her for her stupidity, and there can be no doubt that she often exhibited extreme simplicity of mind. Not only did she look babyish, even at the age of forty, but she had the mentality of a child. Modern Americans would call her a dumb blonde. But it is not unlikely that she deliberately exaggerated her stupidity, knowing that a woman who is mentally inferior to the average man automatically pleases him by tickling his vanity. Her type is universal and always with us. It is not recorded that Madame ever failed to take care of herself, or went hungry or badly clothed. As long as she lived by her wits she lived well. Could she, then, really have been so slow-witted?
Moreover, we must remember that the saga of Madame la Princesse (her husband was raised to the rank of Prince of Benavento in 1806) wrote itself in the malicious atmosphere of Napoleon’s court. The little stories served to amuse many a salon. It became the fashion among the wits to think up new idiotic remarks and credit them to the princess, as today we credit all malapropisms to Mr. Goldwyn. Many of the tales were certainly fabricated.
It would be pleasant to be able to say that our heroine, safely married and still lovely at the age of forty, lived happy ever after. In a way, perhaps, it would be true. But she had her troubles, even after the fairy-tale story of her wedding.
To begin with, Mr. Grand cropped up, penniless in spite of Francis’s rupees and the indigo venture. His appearance in Paris so soon after Catherine’s second marriage may have been coincidence, but not many people who knew him would have believed that. His arrival, and his fairly prompt departure with a job in his pocket, created a host of new rumors. Had Madame really been divorced from Grand before she married Talleyrand? In the confusion surrounding the whole question, which includes the argument about Talleyrand’s secularity, one loses track of what might matter, and by what law the marriage was or was not valid. One’s head spins. Actua
lly, poor Catherine may not have been worried about divorce and remarriage, but only about Grand; he must have been an embarrassing echo of the past in any case. Fortunately, Talleyrand had many contacts, and was not averse to using them. Ten days after the Talleyrand marriage, the Batavian Republic nominated Mr. G. F. Grand “to the station of Privy Councillor of the Government at the Cape of Good Hope.” To the Cape he went and at the Cape he stayed, married for the second time, and settled down and wrote his memoirs. He received a salary (for which he did no work) of something under £170 a year. This was not much, admittedly, for a man who once got fifty thousand sicca rupees in one stroke, but Grand managed on it. The lot of a cuckold is sad, but it need not be poverty-stricken.
After that crisis Madame Talleyrand got on well enough in her new station. The gossip went on; the anecdotes collected; more and more her husband ignored her, though he was never unkind. When she was fifty-three he set her aside altogether. Thereafter she maintained a separate establishment. But there was no divorce; she retained her proud married name and kept her rank and luxury. Her beauty faded at last. The princess grew stout and ruddy; even, it must be confessed, somewhat pompous. No doubt she felt she had a right to complacency. After all, in spite of her notorious stupidity, in spite of the long-ago disgrace in Calcutta, she hadn’t done too badly. She had amassed a fortune; she had become a princess.
