Mrs Jordan's Profession

by Claire Tomalin

  20

  Heartbreak: 1816

  If you have ever been poor, the stratagems of poverty come back to you like old friends when it looks you in the face again. Dora’s life with her mother in Dublin and Yorkshire thirty years earlier was there to draw on as she set up a frugal existence in France with Miss Sketchley at her side. Expecting, or at least hoping, it would be only a short stay, she took a small cottage on the coast, ten minutes’ walk out of Boulogne, in a hamlet called Marquetra. There was a garden planted with flowers and fruit trees, the landlady lived next door, and the landlady’s maid Agnés was happy to act as their servant. Agnés quickly understood that Madame James was a great personage fallen on hard times; or so she said afterwards. When pressed for detail, she also reported that the unhappy lady played her guitar to herself to pass the time, and that she appeared anxious. Communication was difficult, but it was obvious that she was waiting for letters; life was punctuated by Miss Sketchley’s visits to the post office in Boulogne. Madame James lived very economically, but she paid her rent regularly; and endeared herself to both landlady and maid as the ten days prolonged themselves and turned into as many weeks. There was no summons to return to London. When December came, she told them she was leaving, though not for England.

  All biographies come to sad ends, but this must be one of the saddest. ‘I begin to feel that acting keeps me alive,’ Dora wrote to George when he was still near enough for such day-to-day confidences, ‘in fact it keeps me from thinking.’1 There was nothing to keep her from thinking now, and less and less to keep her alive. At least a cheerful letter came from him at the end of the year, full of the wonders of India: ‘every house a palace, and the climate beautiful’. Frederick wrote too, from Paris, where he was stationed with his regiment; and it was probably to be near him – the only one of her sons she could hope to see – that she decided to move, first to Versailles and then to Saint-Cloud, both places with barracks and officers’ quarters attached to their palaces. The palace of Saint-Cloud, set on a terrace above the Seine, amid steeply rising gardens and woods, with a magnificent view over Paris on the other side of the river, had been a favourite residence of Napoleon, and was used by General Blücher as his headquarters in 1814. Both the barracks and the village of Saint-Cloud were clustered on the slope between the palace and the river, and here she found lodgings at N° 1, rue d’Angoulême.2

  Jonah Barrington, who, after her death, visited the house where she had lodged and was shown round by the landlord, described it as ‘large, gloomy, cold, and inconvenient’ with ‘scanty, old, and tattered’ furniture and a dank, unweeded garden. Barrington is an unreliable witness, but he was clearly shocked to find how comfortless her surroundings had been. The rooms she had used were, he said, shabby, and ‘in her little drawing room, a small old sofa was the best-looking piece of furniture; on this she constantly reclined,’ he was told.3 Reclining on a sofa had never been her habit, and suggests she was physically ill as well as unhappy.

  The Marches were now occupying her house in Englefield Green; since none of the debts he had accumulated were in his name, he was safe from arrest. In January Dora sent Miss Sketchley to England to collect her settlement money from Coutts, and also deputed her to see March and get his solemn word that he had no more outstanding bills or other claims on her estate. He objected rudely to Miss Sketchley’s asking him anything at all, and refused to answer; and with this depressing news she went back to Saint-Cloud.

  Dora then wrote to Barton, from whom she had heard nothing, to say she was worried that March was keeping back the names of more creditors. Previously March had promised that the list was complete, but she had reason to suspect it was not: ‘he declines making an oath to that purpose: this has caused me much uneasiness, for it appears to me vague, if not equivocal. I can solemnly declare that the names I sent you, are the only ones I know of, and the greater part utter strangers to me… What interpretation can be put on his refusal?’ The interpretation was unfortunately all too obvious: he had not confessed to everything yet; and this meant she could not safely return to England, unless Barton took some action to help her.

  She went on, ‘It is not, believe me, the feelings of pride, avarice, or the absence of those comforts I have all my life been accustomed to, that is killing me by inches; it is the loss of my only remaining comfort, the hope I used to live on from time to time, of seeing my children.’4

  Barton did nothing. He did not attempt to clear the debts or to pin down March; and apparently he did not even inform the Duke. March was no better. He accused Barton of dragging his feet, claimed to have written to his mother-in-law himself, and later said his letter must have been prevented from reaching her by some persons unknown. It is clear that this, like almost everything March said, was a lie.

  Though she was sinking into illness and despair, Dora still showed only her bright face to her children. The day after her letter to Barton, she wrote to Lolly, at sea again, thanking him for his ‘kind and affectionate letters’, passing on news of India, of Bushy, even of Fanny, who was acting in Bath, and Dodee, who was leaving Englefield Green, and moving into Fanny’s London lodgings. She urged him not to worry about her at all. She often dined with Frederick, she said, and he was all kindness and attention. In London General Hawker was active on her behalf, and Barton was kindly trying to sort out her ‘unfortunate affair’. ‘Make yourself, my dear Lolly, quite easy about me – I shall do very well… We shall all meet again, and I trust be very happy.’5

  On the back of this letter Lolly wrote, ‘This is the last letter I ever received from my dear departed and lamented Mother. Adolphus.’ It is not only the last to him, but the last of all her letters to survive. The absence of any more after January leaves a mystery over her last months. Many letters have been lost, of course – none of hers to George and Henry in India survives, nor any to her daughters – but it is unthinkable that she would have stopped writing to her children had she been able to hold a pen, or even to dictate to Miss Sketchley. In February Frederick had to leave Paris with his regiment for Cambrai, a hundred miles away; as far as we know he never said or wrote anything of his last contact with his mother. In her letter to Lolly, she said she planned to follow Frederick; but she did not. Miss Sketchley was not sent to England again, though she might have been expected to go in April, since Dora’s allowance was paid quarterly; but she remained in Saint-Cloud. However well intentioned, she was not capable of planning or initiating action.

  Dora’s health had been deteriorating for some time; she suffered from bilious attacks, pains in her side, swollen ankles, shortness of breath and increasing general weakness. Now her skin became discoloured. It was thought she might have a form of jaundice, la maladie noire. She was observed to be ill by her landlord, and she was visited by a physician, for what it was worth. She may have been suffering from liver disease or from slowly progressive heart failure, about neither of which could anything then be done.

  Apart from the doctor, Dora’s visitors now were not friends or family but fans, with their flattering and exhausting curiosity: an English hotel proprietor and wine merchant, Mr Greatorex, who had discovered the true identity of ‘Mrs James’, and Helen Maria Williams, one-time poet and radical, who had lived in Paris since the Revolution and was now a journalist, and curious to interview the celebrated actress. She called once, appeared sympathetic, and was allowed to come again; and the two women, who were of an age, talked of the theatre and gossiped about Napoleon, at any rate according to Miss Williams’s account, which was not published until after her own death a decade later.6 Miss Williams wrote that Dora was modest about her own achievements, and warm in her tributes to her friend and former leading man, John Bannister; she also spoke gratefully of her audiences, and said she wished she had been able to play more pathetic parts. The most interesting of her remarks, perhaps, as recalled by Miss Williams, were about the effects of applause. Dora described them as ‘internal exultation’ and ‘delight bordering upon exta
sy’: a stimulus or restorative she knew she would never experience again. It is unfortunate that Miss Williams’s four interviews are overwhelmingly made up of her own contributions to the conversation, and Dora’s are given in stilted literary prose: enough to make you long for an anachronistic tape-recorder. At her fourth visit Dora presented her visitor with a small book of poems she had written herself, and then sent a note excusing herself from the next meeting, being too tired and melancholy to see anyone.

  The collection of Dora’s poems seems to have been lost, and Miss Williams gave no dates for her interviews, although she said the last took place a few weeks before Dora’s death; Mr Greatorex also said he visited her a few days before her death, and found her ill but as charming, and as uncomplaining, as ever. The puzzle is that she should have been entertaining when she was not well enough to carry out the one activity that meant more to her than any other, writing letters to her children. March, April, May and June, when the woods and slopes of Saint-Cloud are freshly green and beautiful, remain an unexplained blank in this respect. She had already told Lolly that she found Paris ‘an odious place’. Now, as the trees came into leaf, she turned her face to the wall.

  In May the Duke was in London, assigned the task of leading his niece, Princess Charlotte, to the altar at Carlton House, where her wedding to Prince Leopold took place. They made an odd pair. She held her uncle in contempt; he resented her for standing between himself and the throne.7 She, at twenty, was happy to be marrying a husband she had chosen for herself; he, at fifty, had still not found himself a wife.

  Near by, in a house in Savile Row, Sheridan was lying sick in an upstairs room, his wife almost as badly afflicted with cancer downstairs. Too ill to move himself, he was in terror of the bailiffs carting him off bodily to prison; desperate notes of appeal to friends show how frightened he was. At this stage the Regent was informed of the condition of his old adviser, supporter and friend, and did arrange for some money to be sent round; it is said that Mrs Sheridan refused it proudly. Then Harriet Bessborough sent inquiries, and followed them up with a visit. She made her way into the house in the wake of a bailiff. The whole place was filthy, the ground floor occupied by more bailiffs, smoking and playing cards. Mrs Sheridan welcomed her and sent her up to her husband, begging her not to let her expression betray what she felt at the sight of him; and in his bedroom Harriet sat down on a trunk – there was no chair – beside his truckle bed. He fixed her with brilliant eyes, gripped her hand and told her he was determined she should never forget him; he would, he said, visit her after his death. She was frightened, and went away much distressed, both by his circumstances and his words.8

  A few days later, on 7 July, he was dead. Death somewhat restored his popularity in society. On 13 July – a Saturday – he was buried in Westminster Abbey, though not among the statesmen, as he had hoped, but in Poets’ Corner, which some might think a better place. Peers and bishops attended as mourners, and offered to serve as his pall-bearers; but the Prince Regent did not come to the Abbey, having given one of his large parties at Carlton House the night before. On the evening of the funeral, there was a performance of Mozart’s Così fan tutte at Covent Garden.

  Posthumously, Sheridan did better than his leading lady. Dora died two days before him, on 5 July: as lonely, as distressed, and ten years younger. Two men registered her death at the town hall in Saint-Cloud, at nine o’clock in the morning; they said she had died before dawn, at two. Neither of the men was a doctor: one was her landlord, Jean-Jacques Mongin, the other a young infantry officer in the French army named Suard, perhaps a fellow lodger. Mongin and Suard produced a curious mixture of fact and fiction for the Acte de décès. They called the dead woman ‘Dorothée Blamd’ and said she was ‘native de London (Capitale d’Angleterre)’. They reduced her age by six years to forty-eight (‘âgée de quarante-huit ans’), made her a widow and provided her with a businessman for a husband: she was ‘Veuve de Jordan – négociant’.

  Miss Sketchley must have been the source of this information. There are many stories surrounding Dora’s death, some of them stemming from Miss Sketchley’s confusion. At the beginning of July she wrote to Lucy Hawker – who had just given birth to her fourth baby – informing her of her mother’s death. While Lucy was in a state of shock, another letter arrived, saying she had made a mistake and that, although Mrs Jordan was very ill, she was still alive. Lucy immediately prepared to set off for France; but before she could leave, a third letter came, informing her that her mother was after all dead. While this private correspondence was going on, someone was also keeping the newspapers informed. On 1 July The Times reported the death of Mrs Jordan on 27 June, attributing it to a violent inflammation of the chest, which led to the rupture of a blood vessel; on 2 July it printed a correction:

  We entertain hopes that this interesting woman still lives. The letters which announced her death last week were received on Thursday. Letters of a subsequent date, received in town this morning, from a lady who accompanies Mrs Jordan, state, that her life had been despaired of, but that severe blisters had been applied, and hopes were entertained of her recovery.

  The death certificate of Mrs Jordan, calling her ‘Dorothée Blamd, native de London… âgée de quarante-huit ans… Veuve de Jordan, négociant’ from the archives at Saint-Cloud, dated 5 July 1816.

  Either Miss Sketchley was writing to The Times, or to someone in London who passed on the information. On 4 July The Times reported ‘The letter received on Tuesday from a lady who resides with Mrs Jordan states, that she was alive on Friday morning, but that a few hours would probably terminate her existence. The slight hopes which the physician entertained had entirely vanished.’ It was almost another week before, on 10 July, the newspaper said it had received papers from Paris that ‘mentioned her death’. She had ‘lingered in a state of insensibility until Friday last’.

  So farce took over from pathos at the end. It sounds as though Dora was in a coma during her last days, which was perhaps as well, since none of her children was with her, nor anyone she loved. George and Henry were in India, Lolly at sea, Tuss at school, Frederick – the only one of the boys who might have reached her – with his regiment. Fanny, struggling to establish herself as an actress, with a baby not her husband’s, and a drug problem, was in severe difficulties; so was Dodee March, who had to live with the knowledge that her husband had helped to bring her mother to ruin. Only Lucy, as we have seen, prepared to go to her when she heard she was ill; and it was her husband who travelled to Paris when the death was confirmed, the sole person to do so.

  The five FitzClarence girls were not in a position to travel abroad without their father’s permission and financial support. Whatever he felt privately, the Duke appears to have remained silent on the subject of her death. There is not a word of it in his letters to George and Henry, though he wrote regularly to both; incredibly, he seems to have relied on Barton to break the news to them. Eighteen months went by before he made his first reference to it, not with a word of regret or sympathy, but simply blaming March and Fanny for their bad behaviour, and Hawker for his ‘extreme folly’.9

  Barrington, who went in due course to Saint-Cloud to find out what had happened, said he got the details of Dora’s death from her landlord, whom he calls Mr C —, and who told him that her chief interest during her last weeks had been the arrival of letters from England; and that she grew very distressed when there were none for several days, and died in a sort of fit after he had told her one morning that there were still none. Boaden attributed her death to la maladie noire. He also introduced a note of ghastly frivolity into his account by suggesting she may not have died at all, saying he was certain he had seen her in Piccadilly later in the year, looking into a bookshop window through a concealing veil. Fanny also saw her in the Strand, he said.

  In Saint-Cloud Miss Sketchley found herself responsible for organizing the funeral. According to one of several conflicting accounts, Dora was at first denied Christian bu
rial by the Catholic church – as an actress and a Protestant – and only by ‘the strenuous interference of an English gentleman of some weight’ was she allowed to be placed in the Saint-Cloud Cemetery at all. One version says the Reverend Foster, chaplain to the British Embassy, officiated; another says he was unwell, and his place taken by Monsieur Marron, a French Protestant pastor. A third says the Mayor officiated, resplendent in his uniform. The numbers attending are also variously recorded. According to The Times, there were only two Englishmen present, and they were there only because they were passing ‘by accident’: Mr Greatorex and a London sculptor, William Henshall. A different version says Mr Greatorex found the pastor and gathered eight or nine English gentlemen from Paris. One English paper reported two hundred people present. The coffin was described as deal, a mere shell painted black, according to The Times, and without any sort of ornament or lining; alternatively, it was decently lined and embellished in white, and covered with a light blue cloth.10 She was buried beneath an acacia tree in the cemetery close to the park and near the top of the hill above the river.

  After the funeral Miss Sketchley is said to have served a cold collation of fruit and wine. She then left Saint-Cloud, just possibly taking the diamond ring Dora always wore, and returned to London, where she is said to have drawn the last instalment of her late mistress’s allowance before disappearing for ever; the next report is of the dead woman’s few remaining possessions being auctioned by order of the French police.11 Dora’s life insurance policies had presumably been allowed to lapse, and she left no will. When General Hawker arrived, three days after the funeral, there was apparently nothing more to be done. No one seems to have told him that the funeral expenses had not been paid.