4
The unlucky Gwen Jones died before Georgina’s Academy of Singing could propel her to similiar stardom. After a bitter Mrs. Jones had withdrawn her other children, there were new pupils, though none of them well born. The academy was foundering. Talking to Gounod, Georgina had been fascinated to hear his stories of the Orphéon de la Ville de Paris. This was a school for child singers, drawn largely from the underclass of Paris, and supported in its work by a benevolent and sentimentally disposed government. It was a kind of showcase for the theory of trickle-down culture. Gounod had been its director for eight years at a time when Georgina herself was still a child. The idea of bringing culture to the unwashed began to attract Georgina more than sharing it with the daughters of those who had rejected her. The words orphéon and orphelinat began to conflate in her mind. What could be more appropriate than a choir not merely of children but of orphans, of which there were any number in London?
The underlying psychology of this seems obvious. A childless woman abandoned by her own class and with some revenge to take on the world as a consequence has hit on a dramatic way of expressing both her contempt for fashionable society and her love of music. But when these plans are undertaken by Georgina Weldon, the distinguished soprano and protégée of Gounod, edges begin to blur. Tavistock House had only so many uses. Was the academy to become an orphanage? Could it really be both, as well as the London address of one of the Queen’s favorite composers?
At the end of November Gounod returned from Paris. Things with Anna had not resolved themselves, and he turned up on the Weldons’ doorstep in a state of nervous collapse. “He fluttered into our nest like a wounded bird: he crouched down in his bed like a poor hunted animal, and there he lay for several days without moving.”
The doctor was sent for and reported enthusiastically that the distinguished Frenchman was in danger of cerebral attack, as well as having eczema and badly congested lungs. He had found the smoker in Gounod, but maybe the eczema and cerebral dangers were misdiagnosed. Gounod was exhausted. Georgina herself, apart from that one problem with her womb, had the constitution of a horse, and mental depression was completely foreign to her. The poor hunted animal listened in alarm as his lover, her husband, and the doctor discussed what to do. Water, obviously: he must be plunged into more cold baths. But then he must learn how to sweat. He must be wrapped in furs and his body sealed with india rubber sheets.
Poor Gounod! He had fled Paris for the second time because he felt his wife did not love and honor him the way she should and was now a prisoner in a room heated to sixty degrees Fahrenheit, trussed up like a turkey and implored to sweat. Georgina would bathe him, lather him with the vigorous strokes recommended by the doctor, and then hurl buckets of cold water over him, before returning him to bed in his furs. He complained of colic and as a reward was visited over Christmas with dysentery. For once in his life, a woman had called his bluff.
Georgina had been raised by an expert in emotional tyranny, and this was a very complex psychodrama playing itself out. With or without a physical content, it was a ménage à trois with a strong sexual character—the complaisant husband, the besotted wife, and the tortured third party. Emissaries arrived from Paris to rescue Gounod: the abbé Boudier, Gounod’s confessor; Jules Barbier, a librettist with whom he had worked; and inevitably, Dr. Blanche. The psychiatrist at least may have seen what was going on as not a struggle for the body of his erstwhile patient, but more a wrestling match with the whole idea of genius. Like his operatic creation, Gounod was flirting with the devil. What Georgina was fastening on was what he was trailing before her—his talent, his genius. Of course, Gounod had a much firmer grasp on it than she could ever realize, but that was the nature of their tug-of-war. None of the Parisians who came to plead with him could help him. He was enjoying himself.
Early one morning in 1872 there was an almighty quarrel with Georgina. He dragged himself from his sickbed and dressed for the howling gale outside. If he was hoping to be dissuaded from sallying forth, he was disappointed. She said nothing. The battle of wills was conducted in stony silence. Gounod pulled on his topcoat extremely slowly, with many a reproachful glance. Still she said nothing. Finally, jamming her sealskin hat on his head, he made an operatic exit and plunged out into the elements. He came back in the early afternoon, by which time Harry had arrived home from the College of Arms. Ernest Gye of Covent Garden was present, having been invited to lunch. After a moment or two, and without explanation, Gounod left the house a second time, in front of an astonished Gye. Harry ran after him. The two men wrestled in the dark and smog of a London winter, Gounod clinging to the railings of Tavistock Square, Harry trying to dislodge him. At last he was half carried home, Georgina’s dogs yelping at the door.
Gounod had prepared in his mind a suitable climax to the scene. Rushing to the desk where he kept his manuscript of Polyeucte, he seized it and tried to throw it on the fire. Only now did Georgina play her part in the elaborate drama:
With strength lent me by the horror of despair, I threw myself on Gounod with all my weight. I knocked him down; I rolled on him; we tussled violently for possession of the treasure. I tore it from him; I flung it upon the sofa; I suddenly picked myself off the floor; I sat up on it and screamed: “You shall kill me first, but you shall not burn Polyeucte!” My strength then gave way, I burst into sobs, I stretched out my arms to him—“My old man! My old treasure! Why are you so wicked to me?”
No librettist could have invented that last remark. The score stayed on the sofa, the fire crackled harmlessly in the grate, the moment passed. The element of transposition she had achieved—his wickedness, her embattled innocence—seems to have gratified Gounod. He had played a highly dangerous game, involving all three of them, and now disheveled, with wet boots, his arms blue with bruises from Harry’s viselike grip, he was back where he had been, a prisoner.
Harry, who was present when they rolled about the carpet, was looking at two consummate actors, but he must surely have also recognized two very unstable people. Were the messiah of the new music to die of pneumonia from this and similar escapades, where would that leave him? Could he always count on the composer to draw back from actual physical violence toward Georgina or indeed anyone else in the household? Could such despair lead to suicide even? These were not idle questions. Gounod had already disclosed that he sometimes carried a loaded revolver. While what went on in the drawing room of Tavistock House behind closed curtains was purely their own affair, where was all this leading?
The scene Harry witnessed over the Polyeucte score touched on his own future. Should he ever wish to divorce Georgina on grounds of adultery, he had, he considered, enough evidence to bring an action. (The unfortunate party he had in mind was Sir Henry Thompson, whose incriminating letters to Georgina Harry had been careful to keep.) But if it could be shown she was mad, then his suit would be nullified. Such a thing had actually happened in a famous case only a year earlier, when Sir Charles Mordaunt tried to divorce his wife, citing members of the Marlborough House set and calling the Prince of Wales as a witness. Lady Mordaunt admitted adultery and even named the father of her just-born child as Lord Cole. The case created immense interest. Defending the action, the lawyers had Harriet Mordaunt examined by doctors and declared insane. She was removed to an asylum. Accordingly, her husband had no means of divorcing her. But Mordaunt had hired Sergeant Ballantine to act for him, and Ballantine, to the wrath of the Prince of Wales’s set, contended that the lady was merely feigning madness, thus forcing into court all the evidence, including that offered by the Prince. In the event, the jury found Lady Mordaunt unfit to plead by reason of insanity, and the action for divorce collapsed. For Harry, this was a recent and notorious reminder of a key point of law. Too many tussles on the carpet like this and he would never be free to marry Annie Lowe.
Georgina, of course, did not consider herself mad. Quite the contrary: her abounding mental health was saving Gounod from going mad. She was his help
meet and his salvation. What had caused this whole episode, of which Harry had witnessed only the climax, was really quite sinister. That morning, Gounod had received a business letter which Georgina had opened. When Gounod came upon her, she was framing a reply. Amazed, he asked what she thought she was doing.
“He asks when you can see him. As I know you do not want to see him, it is very easy for me to write to him to say you are unable to see him. You have only to sign the letter.”
“I begin to think, my dear,” Gounod responded angrily in rising cadences, “that my friend Barbier is right when he speaks of that unjustifiable influence which has set itself up to judge over my affairs, my works, my friendships, my life, my duty and even my conscience, over my letters, my answers, over every mortal thing.”
Georgina insisted that she knew best. It had been for this reason Gounod stormed out of the house—to go and find the author of the letter and take his affairs back into his own hands. In March he wrote an extremely long letter to his wife, which begins:
Chère amie,
The state of moral and physical health into which I have fallen prevents me from returning just now to Paris. The too familiar atmosphere that awaits me there, an atmosphere poisoned by the most odious wickedness, has become too noxious, too deadly, for me to expose it to the little strength remaining to me and the peace of mind which providence has spared me. Your lack of faith and tendency to believe evil without proof have for many years thrown into my life a poison which consumes and destroys it, and this has decided me to prolong my exile, perhaps to perpetuate it.
The surviving text of this letter is in Georgina’s handwriting and was found among her papers at her death. Was it a copy or a draft? Either way, Anna Gounod could only conclude that she had lost her husband to the adventuress of Tavistock House. According to Georgina, Anna was telling friends in Paris that the Englishwoman would sleep with anyone for five pounds a night. Bizet, meanwhile, warned that Gounod should not be allowed anywhere near a school for young girls. Whatever tact and generosity had existed before, there was nothing now to stop the relationship from becoming public property.
5
Somehow or other, in the midst of all this, Gounod managed to work. More than sixty-three songs, two masses, psalms and anthems, and the scores of Polyeucte, Jeanne d’Arc, and Georges Dandin come from that period. In the afternoon and evening of most days his admirers and the plain curious called on him. Georgina inaugurated Sunday at-homes where the guests included Edgar Degas. In effect, Gounod had his London salon. He adapted to his surroundings sufficiently to cast off the brown suit in which she had first seen him at Benedict’s and took to wearing a loose red shirt and on occasion a soft jacket and flowing necktie. One visitor mistook him for Garibaldi. He smoked cigars, chatted amiably, revived all his old greenroom stories and was told some in exchange. In 1872 the Parisian cartoonist Petit depicted him as Paris imagined him to be. He is in red troubadour clothes, playing a guitar with only three strings and looking wet-eyed and troubled. In the bottom right of the design a tempestuous woman is attacking the piano. Staves of music rise to make a frame around the picture, falling at last on the protesting head of a roadsweeper crouching in the bottom left. Gounod could afford to ignore such things. The test of his time in England was whether he could create, and he found that he could.
“I internally approved every word, every gesture of Gounod’s,” Georgina wrote many years later. “I discovered that Gounod grew more and more like the ideal I had so long imagined him to be. I had imagined him just, without earthly desires, wrapped up in God and his heart full of love for his fellow creatures.”
If it was not quite like that, perhaps the reality was better. The Gounod she had more likely imagined was someone not unlike herself—impetuous, untidy, and at heart deeply irrational. When he said God sent angels to dictate melodies to him, it seemed plausible to her that all art arrived in this way. In this she was no more ignorant than most people of her class. In her amateur career, ballads and songs had been either noble in a hearty sort of way or pathetic, enough to bring an audience to tears. She had the source of the second stream right there in the house. Cajoling, prompting, dominating by turns, she filled his day and he hers. If the results were sometimes unfortunate, he seemed to have suffered them with extraordinary patience. He was, for example, very fond of painting.
“Come on, old man,” I would say to him, “your sands are very pretty, very sweet, very soft, but you have no distance. Put at the back on the line of the horizon to the left a little hill. Now then, old man, if you had a little sunset to the right, that would mark the horizon.”
“There it is, the sunset. Don’t you see that faint crimson line? There it is.”
“No, it all seems sand to me, and you have little crimson dashes all over the place, so one can’t make out the sunset at all. I can assure you that no one would dream of it being a sunset.”
By degrees, when he was in a good humour I would get my sunset. That gained, I would say, coaxing him judiciously, “Now my dear old man, you must really draw something in the foreground—a few briars, a little brushwood, a little stream.” Sometimes he would silently hand me his brush. I would then show him what I wanted.
In the history of the College of Arms, Harry’s brief biographical note includes the statement that he once ran a circus. One wonders whether this wasn’t a rather good joke at the expense of his colleagues. In many ways Tavistock House was a circus and Georgina rich entertainment. The people who came to visit were really more curious than friendly. If you were French—certainly if you were Parisian—you would want to see for yourself the woman who had abducted Gounod. Such visitors found Georgina not at all wanton but alarmingly forthright. She was without question eccentric, and she could be vindictive, but no one could deny she had colossal energy. Some of this was emotional fervor—she often spoke before she thought, or attributed good to an idea because it was in some vague way “worthy” or “elevated.” But she also had a tremendous physical presence. Nothing daunted her. No challenge was too great. Part of her gift was never to see the absurd in life. It made her amusing to others, certainly, and a sense of humor might have saved her from some of the more irresponsible actions she took. But not to see the absurdity in things was more of a strength than a weakness. It absolved her from ever being wrong.
“Dear Mrs. Weldon,” Charles Bulkely wrote to her about the academy:
What are we to understand? In aid of the education of young girls? Education in what? Spooning, learning to work the telegraph or perhaps a thorough education in the use of the Globes? Dear Mrs. Weldon, economy is everything. Don’t remove from your present quarters or we shall have the expense of sending you back again. However, supposing you should have any pupils who might require what is termed a more finished education, please remember Charlie Bulkely’s seminary where morals and calisthenics are combined with love and strong drink.
It was the kind of joke she needed to have explained to her. Whatever Gounod was to her, and whether or not they were actual lovers, he had unlocked something in her that Harry and his Beaumaris cronies had never done. With him in the house she was nearer to what she believed herself to be—talented, artistic, and, most important, sought after. This was a house of devotions, to each other and to music. It was nothing like the salon Sara Prinsep had created for Watts, though that comparison may have crossed her mind. There were too many crosscurrents, too complicated a cast of characters. Bewildered orphans she had found in the street mingled with the sons and daughters of those who believed she was running a respectable school of music. Gounod appeared from time to time from the upstairs study, his head full of music, his eyes full of sentimental tears.
One of Georgina’s pupils was the young Danish tenor George Werranrath, whom Harry would one day come to cite in his adultery suit. Werranrath is treated badly by Georgina in the Mémoires, where she describes him as an illiterate baker’s boy. However, long after all the muddle and uproar of those years
had died away, he wrote a highly literate account of Gounod’s work method while in residence at Tavistock House:
He would “think out” his theme sometimes in a house full of people. The noise and confusion would not disturb him, but on such occasions his friends understood they were not to distract him. In writing for the orchestra he would write each full chord for all the instruments instead of writing out each part separately. He rarely made alterations. Having thought out the subject for a few hours, he would sometimes make a few private marks, a kind of musical shorthand, over the words, and then played and sang the whole thing as it was in his mind. Even at this time the whole conception of the Redemption was in his brain and he frequently alluded to it.
In the spring of 1872 Gounod assembled a choir of twelve hundred voices and soloists for a season of concerts at the Albert Hall. The choir was formed into a society, an initiative of Gounod’s himself, and joined forces with an existing and well-regarded choir under the direction of Joseph Barnby, which had been promoted for the past four years by Novello’s. Gounod was given permission to call the new choir the Royal Albert Hall Choral Society (later the Royal Choral Society). The Queen accepted an invitation to attend the first concert. Gounod’s new partner, Barnby, was organist and choirmaster of the fashionable church of St. Anne’s, Wells Street. He had studied at the Royal Academy with Sullivan, where they had competed together for the first Mendelssohn Scholarship. He was by no means the junior or inexperienced partner in the enterprise, and his choir had been commercially exploited in a successful series of oratorio concerts.
The Disastrous Mrs. Weldon Page 14
