The Disastrous Mrs. Weldon

by Brian Thompson

  Angele came originally from Clermont Ferrand, where she had left long-suffering peasant parents and hopes of a small inheritance from an ancient family relative—a house without a roof and half a hectare of land. There were three sisters in the family, and they had all left for Paris as soon as they could. Angele wanted to be a dancer but soon found herself on the streets, where she was picked up by Menier. Since that time she had lived a kind of fantasy life with the two Menier brothers, flitting from one apartment to another in Montmartre. She was tough in the way that whores had to be, but also hapless in the way they sometimes are. For her, even having the shambling and unkempt Anarcharsis as her rod and staff was a step up. With him, although many times sinking back into hysterical self-recrimination, she could reinvent herself. She genuinely adored her niece Bichette, to the point where she drove her husband mad with exasperation: the desire to have the child as her own was an obsession.

  Menier, on the contrary, cared very little for other people. He merely wanted to be rich. The Second Empire had failed him, but the Third Republic was the same gold mine waiting to be dug. Angele disgusted him. She was clever, in a narrow streetwise sense, but vacillating and vague. She was also much more interested in women than men, something Anarcharsis bore with complete indifference. What he looked for in a woman was a workhorse. Love and romance did not come into it. What his life required was a clean shirt and the loan of a few sous. From time to time, as now, it helped to have her with him as his dutiful wife, to add color to his fraud. They were partners only in crime.

  Which of these two first saw financial salvation in the strange setup at Tavistock House it is difficult to determine. It could not have escaped Menier’s keen eye that on his earlier visit there had been two men on the premises, living in a cloud of cigar and pipe smoke, and now there were none. This was all the more noticeable because Georgina never employed a male servant of any kind. By the time Menier saw Tavistock House a second time, it had become a ménage of women and children. The faithful Marian Westmacott’s mother was cook, there was a maid of all work named Tibby Jordan, and Georgina kept up a personal maid named Villiers. It was hardly a rich person’s house, although it was by Menier’s unexacting standards well appointed. It was better than what he was used to. In most ways he was hardly more than a petty criminal and thought like one. Although his more major schemes were awe-inspiring (he and his brother were now working up an idea to sell colonists plots of farmland in the most southerly dunes and wastes of the Sahara), his immediate problems were always more pressing. He was one of those men who dress and act as though millions are about to pass through their hands, but whose gloves are patched at the finger ends and who dare not cross their legs in a chair for fear of showing the holes in their boots. As for Angele, though she was without doubt what the French would call une sournoise—a sly devil—she was also a woman without a home to call her own. Menier’s sharp eye might dart about the room valuing all the readily portable items. Angele, weary and dispirited, saw a haven.

  In the end, using Georgina’s money, they recovered Bichette and took her back to Paris, putting up “the house in Clermont Ferrand” as collateral for the loan. Angele proved not to have the practical skills that went with a mother’s instincts. She liked dressing the child and taking it for walks, but was easily depressed by her own many failures and shortcomings. Bichette’s frequent minor illnesses gave her panic attacks: if the child ran a temperature, it was her fault because she had been such a wicked woman. The poor girl was shuttled to and from Brussels and Paris like a railway parcel. Meanwhile, Anarcharsis worked up his new scheme to sell the Sahara to people looking for a little adventure with their savings. However, selling sand dunes to the credulous was proving even more difficult than selling them jungle ravines. La Liberté Coloniale kept up its offices and letterheads yet published less and less frequently. Soon there was nothing left but the office stationery. Anarcharsis’s brother Auguste did not conceal from him his opinion that Anarcharsis had married an idiot. Things were getting black. Then something wonderful happened. In August 1876 the Meniers received a letter from Georgina asking Angele to come to London and live with her there. She would pay her keep by helping in the orphanage.

  Angele jumped at the chance, bringing Bichette with her. Once again the house resounded to cries and alarms in French, for Angele, though she was willing enough and dutiful as much as she knew how to be, found it hard to follow the ways of the orphanage. What struck Georgina as normal upbringing for children scandalized her. The plump and unhappy Bichette sat in the middle of all the chaos, dressed like a doll, unable to understand a word of what was going on. It was just as well. Georgina detested her and said so. Angele was mortified. Maybe she had made a terrible mistake. However, one could not live with Georgina long before one’s hold on ordinary reality began to slacken. Like Harry and Gounod before her, Angele felt herself seduced and then overwhelmed by the sheer animal exuberance of her employer.

  Slowly, inevitably, the two women fell into a pattern relationship. Georgina cut her hair short and became the dominant force, Angele assuming the role of the blonde with bewildered but bewitching eyes. After a while, she began to ape Georgina’s style of dress. The two women dressed in black, their clothes cut with almost military severity. For walking out, they wore coats with coachman capes faced in dark silk. The relationship gradually deepened. They began calling each other Minette and Noireaud (Blackie) interchangeably. In speaking French Georgina habitually used the familiar form to her new assistant and in writing notes to her, and speaking of herself, adopted the masculine gender. They shared the same bed.

  In February 1877 Menier came to England for a few weeks and discovered much had been going on in his absence. The first morning of his stay he was startled to see Georgina walk from room to room naked. It was also very marked that when he demanded to sleep with his wife in a bed appropriate to his needs, it threw his hostess into a rage. He later embellished this by claiming that he was several times forced to repel her own advances, a charge Georgina hotly denied. The children scurried about, their feet blue with cold, their misery a sorry contrast to the pampered Bichette on whom Angele lavished her love. Meanwhile, the plaster was beginning to fall from several of the ceilings, the taps leaked, the garden was overgrown, the maintenance that might normally have fallen to the direction or overseeing of a butler or manservant was neglected. There were no fewer than twelve pianos in the house, and one by one they fell out of tune. It did not help that the Duke of Bedford’s other properties on that side of Tavistock Square were equally run-down. Perhaps only now did Menier begin to consider his wife’s lover—for what else had she become?—a bird ready for plucking. The swindler in him sensed there was urgency in the matter.

  He was right. Since leaving Tavistock House, Harry had made no effort to keep in touch with Georgina. He was hardening his heart for a dreadful and irreversible course of action. On March 19 he wrote to a devastated Louisa Treherne in Sparken:

  About three weeks ago I received a visit from Major General Sir Henry de Bathe: he had been to see Georgina at her urgent request. He told me he regarded it as the duty of a friend, given his friendship for her and for me, after what he had seen on this occasion and heard from her own lips, to make her visit one or two specialists of the first rank, like Munro or Forbes Winslow: for the impossible schemes she poured out to him; the filthy state of the house; the childish running of it absolutely convinced him that in her own interest, mine, that of her family, as much as that of the poor things she is trying to look after, at the very least a responsible opinion might be given to the state of her mind. Before deciding what to do, I would like if possible to have your consent and that of Dal, to whom I would have written had I known where to find him.

  Calling Henry de Bathe to the house was an extremely reckless thing for Georgina to have done. He was another Garrick Club crony of Harry’s, a Dubliner of ancient family reckoned by his generation one of the most good-looking men in England.
De Bathe had fought in the Crimea, was said to maintain three separate households, and had quite recently married a seventeen-year-old girl, younger than his own daughters. No house in London would receive him, according to Harry, and Georgina had been pressed to do so when they first came to Tavistock Square. For this she had the general and his lady’s warmest thanks.

  Whatever “urgent request” called him to the house on this occasion, it was a peculiarly ill advised cry for help. De Bathe, though he was styled a major general and had recently inherited his father’s title, was no longer on the army active list. Though he did not disclose this to Georgina and she seems to have been sublimely unaware of the fact, he was the new governor of St. Luke’s Asylum. It was this that gave him the license to suggest signs of mental instability in Georgina. Whatever was said between the handsome Irishman and his formerly helpful hostess, he did not stay above half an hour. Harry’s explanation of events—that he had “received a visit” from this concerned family friend—was a way of couching things in a suitable fashion for Louisa. She did not know that the two men and Freddie Warre were almost daily drinking companions. By asking de Bathe to the house, probably to complain about Menier’s behavior, Georgina had unwittingly dug a trap for herself and fallen into it.

  De Bathe was not an especially intelligent man, but neither was he wicked. The thing likely to have shocked him as much as anything else was the presence of the Meniers, people with no clearly defined role yet apparently on terms of extreme intimacy with Georgina. (Quite recently, Anarcharsis Menier had sold two enormous wardrobes to Georgina for £40, without mentioning he had a day or so earlier stolen them from a house in the Minories, where he kept an office.) The house was filthy and in poor repair, and Georgina talked to her friend de Bathe in an odd, torrential way that genuinely alarmed him, but he must also have mentioned to Harry the shady French couple as people likely to do Georgina financial harm.

  The sensible thing to have happened was for Harry to have roused himself and gone to Tavistock House to see for himself. That he did not do so is an indication of his general way of avoiding a crisis by ignoring its existence. However, this time there was more to it. De Bathe had given him the opportunity he needed to start lunacy proceedings. He needed the support of Georgina’s family if he was to rid himself of his wife by these means. Louisa Treherne replied to Harry a week later:

  Your letter coming like a clap of thunder—though not entirely unexpected—has grievously surprised me. I’ve sent it to Dal, who will have it in four days more or less, perhaps three. Dr. Blandford would be an excellent man to consult but it seems to me this would be premature. I hope very much you will not do anything precipitately. I feel really too unhappy. I had prayed to God to let me die before this terrible thing came to pass. You have precipitated this sad event by leaving your house at her behest.

  The presence of Anarcharsis Menier and his wife at Tavistock House had certainly not helped matters. Georgina, though she did not know it, was dealing with crooks. Menier was a professional trickster and fraud, a type she had never before met. Servants might turn out to be dishonest, in which case they were dismissed. They stole wine or inflated grocery bills. They gave money that was not theirs to canoodling soldiers or men they met in the park. Combs and brooches might sometimes go missing or laundry come back an item short. These crimes were more often than not impulsive and amateur—a good cook or a trustworthy butler was expected to police the household and keep some sort of order as part of the terms of his or her own employment. Many times in the past Georgina and Harry had left the house in Tavistock Square in charge of their servants for weeks and sometimes months at a time, without trouble. Only a fool of a servant would mistake Georgina’s torrential lifestyle for weakness. Nobody knew better than she how to make lists and keep accounts. The house might be unkempt and the mistress of it eccentric by the neighbors’ standards, but there was always enough of the grande dame about Georgina to command respect from her women servants, and in little things she was pernickety to a fault.

  Menier was a very different kettle of fish. Who he was, what he wanted, was hidden behind layers of imperturbability. He was deep. It pleased Georgina to deride him, and she too readily assumed that Angele hated him. When she caught him in minor acts of theft, she treated him like the grubby little opportunist that he was. She had never met anyone whose mind-set was wholly criminal, and she underestimated him. His plan was to make both himself and Angele indispensable to Georgina, and despite the almost daily volcanoes of indignation and outrage, this is what happened. In fact, the storming arguments helped. In a grotesque parody of the Gounod years, she was tricked into believing that she was in charge of her life, simply by exercising the force of what always seemed to her a superior personality. She had taught Gounod how to paint. Now she would teach Menier how to behave.

  This attempt at education and everything else she set her hand to at Tavistock House were costing Harry dearly. She never asked whether he could afford to keep her in this fashion, or for how long he could continue. Annie Lowe was discovering his natural indolence just as Georgina had done before her. He made no move to shift her from her Windsor houseboat, although she was clever enough or grateful enough not to ask for it. She may have noticed something unusual about him that had escaped Georgina. Harry was one of those rare Victorians who showed no interest in property or furniture. For a man who had lived in such a famous house he showed a decidedly un-Dickensian lack of enthusiasm for the Tom Tiddler’s ground of a quiet study or a well-designed conservatory. He was in temperament an almost perfect bachelor and held a single man’s view of material possessions.

  Nevertheless, the present arrangements had begun to cause him concern. Quite as disturbing as de Bathe’s report of his wife’s state of mind, which he already knew of as well as anyone, was the condition of the house he had left her in. The lease had been drawn up under the old Duke of Bedford, but the eighth Duke, who inherited the title in 1872, was showing a much more active interest in his properties, and his London agents had begun to look askance at the uses to which Tavistock House was being put. Harry knew very well that an orphanage of fifty children was a fantasy and would never reach fruition. He could not be sure that under the existing terms the new Duke would tolerate even ten children, all of them unrecorded by age or birth. Nor did it do His Grace’s reputation good to have one of his properties advertised up and down Oxford Street on the side of a converted milk float. Harry was being edged ever nearer to a decision. The Georgina problem was—by his own lackadaisical arrangements and failure to keep an eye on things—also the Tavistock House problem. Something had to be done.

  Now that the word “madness” had been spoken, they were all of them on a road that had no turning. When Harry mentioned the doctors Munro and Forbes Winslow, and Louisa countered with the pitiful suggestion of George Fielding Blandford, they were not talking of medical men who might help or cure Georgina. They were talking—and they both knew it—of three men who made a business from consigning their patients to private asylums. They were in the language of the day mad doctors. Blandford owned an asylum in Long Ditton, and Forbes Winslow was the proprietor of Brandenburg House in Hammersmith. However sympathetic to mental illness they might be personally, their business was grim and unforgiving. People who went into madhouses seldom if ever came out. Incarceration was itself the cure. Broadly speaking, you went into a madhouse to learn to behave yourself, live there quietly, and die. Louisa’s hesitation—“I hope very much you will not do anything precipitately”—was an acknowledgment of the irreversible nature of any decision they might take. Practically, nothing could be simpler than to commit someone to an asylum. All the application required was the signature of two doctors.

  Anarcharchis Menier had come back to England with a brand-new moneymaking idea. As a veteran of the Siege of Paris he was well placed to observe the worldwide interest shown in the balloon ascents from the beleaguered city. The most famous of these had been that of Léon-Michel
Gambetta, on his way to organize resistance from outside the capital. Setting off from the Butte de Montmartre in light airs, and trailing a massive pennant declaring Vive la République!, Gambetta had twice nearly fallen into Prussian hands. Though he had gone aloft with the intention of reaching Tours, he had landed near Amiens, a generous 180-degree error of navigation. Narrowly avoiding death after crashlanding in the canopy of a wood, his hand grazed by a Prussian bullet, he had staggered away from the most famous balloon escape of them all. By such slender threads had hung the Third Republic!

  Anarcharchis Menier had pondered this and come up with the solution—the self-steering balloon. And the business had progressed beyond an idea. He went back to Paris to fetch the prototype, which was subsequently stored in the front garden of Tavistock House while he tried a sales pitch on the Woolwich Arsenal. No matter that he knew as little about ballooning as he did about small Pacific Islands or the Sahel: all that was required was that the British Army run trials. He would soon be rich beyond his dreams.

  That summer, the Duke of Bedford’s agents asked Harry what a balloon was doing in the front garden, something for which he did not have a ready answer. It was Georgina’s idea to design a sash around the belly reading “Mrs. Weldon’s Orphanage,” which was actually fitted, and mystified the army on the few field trials they made. Things were going from bad to worse. De Bathe, the gallant veteran of the 89th Regiment, did not fail to add this to the list of dangerous improprieties he had discovered. But Georgina now capped all. At this moment of greatest danger to herself, she asked Menier to take charge of all her affairs and act as her agent and steward, sending him off to the bank, whence he returned, incredulous, with eight £50 notes. Without the slightest effort on his part, he had been given the power over her that he had been plotting all along to acquire. Some of this was sheer stupidity on her part, but there may have been an unconscious vanity in it too.