Louisa Lowe’s timely intervention had saved Georgina from spending what might have been the rest of her life in Brandenburg House. The rest she had done for herself. Mrs. Lowe was soon to find that the cause of lunacy law reform could not have two champions, and the women fell out in rather an acrimonious way. There was always much that was straightforwardly dislikable about Georgina. She was not always as honest or as generous as the situation demanded, and she could be ungrateful. These are common enough human characteristics. But though she had experienced a profound shock in the mad doctors’ episode, she had come out of it with the conviction, not that she was in need of help, but that she had somehow received an almighty blessing. Events had made her a Jeanne d’Arc. Her mind had latched onto the key point:
A wife has no recourse against her husband for an attempt on her liberty such as I’ve experienced. She cannot bring a complaint against him for conspiracy, defamation, imprisonment, assault and battery in a civil court. It’s not her rights that are safeguarded. The reputation of a woman is the thing of her husband: if it pleases the husband to ruin her, he is the master and she has no legal right to complain. Against any other man or woman, who has not sworn an oath before God to honour and protect her, she has her remedy. Against her husband, nothing of the kind.
Mrs. Lowe was also a wronged woman, of course, and the Lunacy Law Reform Society was set up expressly to help just one aspect of married women’s legal inequality. But to Georgina’s tastes, Mrs. Lowe’s methods were distressingly pedestrian. That was not what was wanted at all. Lunacy reform required a heroine. It required grand opera. By the time May was out, the direction the last part of Georgina’s life would take had been set. From now on, if men—Harry, Dal, “that boiled lobster Neal,” the revolting Menier, and anyone else that crossed her path—wanted a fight, they would get it.
Only a fortnight after Georgina’s flight with Mrs. Lowe, Harry wrote to Dal, indicating his capitulation:
My dear Treherne,
I asked you last night for time to reflect on the arrangements you have made with my wife, begging me out of consideration to yourself and above all giving way to the urgent supplications of your mother “to give my wife yet again one more chance”; and so stop measures I believe it to be my duty to undertake in order to protect my wife; and which I still believe should have been taken. For as long as matters go along as they should, I consent to abandoning my pursuit of her and things can continue as they have done formerly.
Georgina had won back the house and an allowance of £1,000 a year. The terms of surrender were probably dictated to Harry by Mr. Neal, who had pressed Dal to secure a signed agreement from Georgina to behave herself in future. The solicitor knew that this paper and its conditions as to her future conduct were almost worthless. The last paragraph of the letter contains an understandable note of chagrin coming from Harry direct: “Believe me, nobody will rejoice more than me to see these conditions fulfilled, but I beg you to believe that I have only adopted this way of going about things out of deference to the urgent desires of yourself and your mother.”
The conspirators had fallen out, and there was a flurry of correspondence in which Georgina’s mother in particular tried to bat away the accusation that she had pressed Harry to have her daughter committed. The truth was that she had done nothing to dissuade him, and had it all not been so horribly botched, she would have seen Georgina go into a private asylum without a qualm. Her protestations of horror at what had happened and her insistence that she was innocent of any complicity in it were mealymouthed. Harry now saw the perfidy of the Trehernes in full. He and he alone was going to have to carry the can for what had happened. This time he had lost the battle and the war. If he was not prepared to fight again on the same ground—and he wasn’t—then life for Harry Weldon in the future was going to be pure hell. He knew better than any of them what Georgina was capable of when it came to revenge.
It was not in his wife to let bygones be bygones, or to take time to digest what had happened. The Gounod clique was already conflated in her mind with the Menier clique. Now, thrown into the same geometrical stew, circles within circles, was the Weldon clique—Harry, her mother, and Dal. The three conspiracies interlocked. At the very time that Dr. Edmunds pronounced her mentally capable of managing her own affairs, she was agitating that the appointment of St. John Wontner to defend her interests in the Menier trial was somehow engineered by Forbes Winslow. In vain did Wontner point out that for thirty years or more his firm, along with Lewis and Lewis, had been the doyens of criminal law practice in London. He was there to help—indeed he had been appointed by the Treasury Solicitor expressly to make sure she came to no harm. Instead of being grateful, she was incredibly rude to the poor man. He lacked vision. His position was compromised. He completely failed to grasp the bones of the case.
She spelled it out to him, as to a child. Gounod was at the back of Menier, Harry at the back of Forbes Winslow. There was nothing that could not be ascribed to the fell designs of these three cliques. Who had threatened her with the St.-Lazare in Paris? Gounod. Who had done his bidding? Menier. How had Menier been encouraged and secretly funded? Harry. Who had egged Harry on with her allegations of hereditary madness? Her mother. Who was her mother’s creature in the attempt to get her committed? De Bathe. And why had Harry supported de Bathe in this scandalous way? Because he had at one time wanted to marry Mary de Bathe. On and on, random pieces of jigsaw jammed together to make a picture.
It was useless for Wontner to try to narrow the subject to a case of theft. Nor could he employ what normally worked in such cases—a man’s guiding hand to a beautiful lady. She swept that aside with contempt. They had tried to call her mad and she had defied them. Now would come revenge, now would come retribution of a biblical proportion. When she at last got hold of de Bathe on his return from Baden-Baden, she faced down him and his dizzy wife in their own drawing room. At first the general denied any participation in the plot, but at last she drew from him the miserable confession that he, too, had signed the committal order. She told him what she intended all her enemies to hear. “I said ‘General de Bathe, you will repent this.’ I turned to her and said ‘You will both repent this.’”
The first casualty in her campaign to vindicate herself was her family. Her mother was struck with terror by the bitterness Georgina exhibited on that subject:
A father and mother bring you into the world for their own
pleasure and not at all with the intention of rendering the least service to those who deserve it. They are obeying the laws of procreation. They owe their offspring nothing. In nature every animal chases away its young as soon as it can look after itself. The little ones only love their mother for what they can get out of her . . . In human nature, to the contrary, a child will love and cherish its parents or those who have brought it up only so long as it’s possible to retain the least illusion about them . . . but then, oh yes indeed, then, when its eyes are opened—goodbye! I don’t deny that happy families exist, but they are extremely rare. For all the rest, it’s hypocrisy, banalities, Panurgism and “what will people say?”
Menier was sent to trial at the Old Bailey in September. The case was heard by Sir Thomas Chambers, one of the first in which he sat as recorder, and it easily outdid the Gounod trial for absurdity, monumentally irrelevant testimony, and farce. Much did Georgina care: here was an opportunity to outline the conspiracies ranged against her, of which theft was but a tiny part. Try as he might, Wontner could not keep her to the point, and the judge professed himself astonished at the violence of her language. After a chaotic three days, the jury found for her, but the idea that Menier should spend five years of his life breaking stones did not appeal to them. To the guilty verdict they added a recommendation for mercy, clearly indicating that they thought Menier and Georgina were far better known to each other than had come out in open court. The innuendo was unmistakable.
The publicity surrounding the trial continued long after it was
over. The London Figaro commissioned weekly installments of Georgina’s autobiography, which forced an embattled and disheartened Harry and an alarmed de Bathe to bring down a criminal prosecution for libel on the head of its editor and publisher. So much the better! Let it all come out! Forbes Winslow was sharply criticized in the pages of the British Medical Journal for his part in the affair; Frederick Flowers weighed in with a thoughtful legal opinion on the case. Now, wherever lunacy law reform meetings were organized, Georgina easily usurped Mrs. Lowe as the star attraction. Soon enough, she broke away with an initiative of her own:
Mrs. Weldon invites all persons—lovers of justice—to attend her AT HOMES. Evening dress is not de rigueur, and every class of person is WELCOME. Mrs. Weldon gives these Lectures on the principle that “a drop of water will wear away a stone.” Although her room can hold but 250 persons, still she hopes that her limited public may unite with her in doing all they can towards LUNACY LAW REFORM and the showing up of the practices of MAD DOCTORS.
Every Tuesday and Wednesday she gave these at-homes, at which she read from her own pamphlets and ended by singing from Gounod’s Biondina. Many lost and lonely people took up her invitation. She was a gifted raconteuse, and her towering indignation at the stupidity of the establishment was exactly what her audience wished to hear. Nobody of any consequence came, but those who were potential victims of the system—and those over whom the shadow of the law had already fallen—fell in love with her courage and ferocious energy. They had the additional thrill of listening to their heroine in the very house where she had bested the mad doctors and exposed them for what they were. There was no admission fee to these meetings, but at the end of the evening a collection was taken up. Those that gave had sat through a unique testimony brilliantly staged. They went away uplifted.
Publicity, as she had always said, brought fame. Publicity was like fire, dangerous and unbiddable. She could easily afford to ignore anonymous letters like this, which once may have caused her hurt: “My dear, fools are like poets, they are not made but born. I know, I was born so. And I recognise a full-blooded member of the family in you.”
The man who wrote this was a loser. He couldn’t, as she could, understand the crackling urgency of publicity, its flamelike fascination for the weak and the fearful. And in its wake came something much more valuable, a phoenix glory not given to everybody. Natural-born fool or not, she was famous now. In October, when she sang at a Promenade Concert at Covent Garden, the house rose to its feet in acclamation. The whole house, as one person. She stood onstage, heart pounding, eyes glittering in triumph, a little short woman who had made her own luck, listening to the cheers ring around the auditorium, bows clattering on the orchestral strings. Trying to take it all in, she realized with a wild leap of the heart that she was being pressed to an encore. In the past, Sullivan had conducted at the Promenades: when had that ever happened to him?
Rivière
1
Georgina had been engaged for the Promenades by a small-time impresario named Jules Rivière. He was more of a showman than a musician, an astute Frenchman whose background was in selling stoves. What he did not know about music he made up for with nerves of steel and an unerring instinct for the popular. In a way he was like Georgina herself—nobody believed in the value of publicity more than he. When she received her standing ovation, he knew it was as much a consequence of her summer of notoriety as her rendition of “The Sands of Dee.” When the brief season ended, he engaged her for a second short series of concerts in Brighton and the same thing happened—she drew audiences much larger than were warranted musically. Rivière realized he had that most precious of journalistic commodities on his hands—a good human interest story. People came to see her out of curiosity, and if they rose to their feet after her recital, it was because she had surprised and perhaps even shamed them a little. That clear voice, the unaffected diction and unfussy stage presence: whatever madness was, it was not this. As the audience filed out from the theater, many sought out lunacy law reform leaflets from a booth provided in the foyer. Poor Mrs. Weldon had attracted, for the moment, the ultimate Victorian approbation—she was now poor dear Mrs. Weldon. Rivière admired her willingness to be exploited.
“I’ll do my best to get accused of murder!” she told him breezily. “What brings money and crowds are people accused of crime. If only Peace could be resuscitated and whistle ‘Pop Goes the Weasel’ in a comb at the Promenade Concerts, you would have 10,000—what do I say?—100,000 nightly who would pay 2s. with pleasure and delight.”
It was unusual for the impresario to have an artiste grasp the fundamentals of concert promotion in this way. Before he knew what was happening to him, he had agreed to a deal much wider in scope. He would create a permanent choir for her. The billings would read “Mrs. Weldon’s Concerts, conducted by M. Rivière.” Though his middle name was Prudence, the impresario had fallen for her. He was among the last of the older men in her life, and though he was careful to say how happily married he was, there was all the same something intoxicating about her. At the very outset of their correspondence, she playfully dubbed him “the General.” “With a Lieutenant like you, a General ought to be victorious,” he murmured. Dinners and tête-à-têtes followed.
Georgina was soon trying to force on him a choir of 250, which happened to be the number of seats in the rehearsal room at Tavistock House. They would be paid by the allocation to each of £10 of free tickets to the next Promenade season. Too late, Rivière felt the first ground tremors of the earthquake beneath his feet. He objected that what the theater world calls “papering the house” like this was completely uneconomic—he was giving away £2,500 of potential income—as well as being impractical. He reminded Georgina that in the Promenades the orchestra pit was boarded over and the musicians seated onstage. In the space left, a choir of thirty would be spectacle enough. Anyway, he very much doubted that for the grander vision she was touting there existed that many good-looking young women—and looks were as important as musical talent. “The fellows who pay their shillings like to see fine girls,” he explained to his new partner. Georgina scolded him for being cautious and unimaginative, and used as an example of her drawing power her glorious part in the Gounod Choir. He brushed this aside with admirable candor. “I am popular, it is true. But Gounod was the lion of the day. I went to see him at St. James’s Hall. I would not go to see Rivière.”
Something else troubled him, a more delicate matter. Angele was back. Left with the wreckage of the orphanage, she had disposed of some of the children in Paris. Others had gone to Gisors, some to Rouen. With Menier locked away, Angele felt safe enough to come to London, fall on her knees, and beg forgiveness from Georgina. It had not been too difficult (though it must have been excruciatingly embarrassing) for her to wheedle her way into Georgina’s bed again. Rivière, who knew his Paris probably better than he did London, could see at once who and what Angele was. He did not like her and he let it show. What he wanted from Georgina, though he had to embroider a little to describe it, was the pure article—an eccentric and overweening egotist eager to be exploited. What he didn’t want, what the public might not yet be ready for, was rumor that the put-upon heroine of the courts had a woman as her lover—not just any woman, either, but the wife of her despoiler. When he had taken Georgina down to Brighton to sing, she had been received and feted, among others, by Lady Downshire, wife to the second Marquis, and by the political and diplomatic de Bunsens. This was exactly what Rivière wanted to see. His artiste drew crowds because she was a lady, or as much of a lady as the general public could tolerate. He did not doubt she could sing, but if Rivière had found a blind girl on crutches, a hottentot, or a dog who could sing as well, he would have booked them. She was a novelty act, and he had supposed she perfectly well understood this.
At the first rehearsal for the new choir, only twenty people turned up. Rivière was not in the least dismayed. He could always find ten attractive girls to make up the numbers.
Georgina ignored him and, egged on by Angele, spent her own money on advertising extensively. As with all her plans, appetite was everything. She did not need Rivière to tell her how to go about her business—evading the mad doctors, it was clear to her now, had been no more than a conduit to the real fame that beckoned. The public was clamoring for her and would soon wish for no one else. Meanwhile, one did not take all London by storm with a choir of thirty! What was needed was a choir to rival all others, ready to reduce to rubble the most bitterly defended redoubts of the musical establishment where snobbery and ignorance lay entrenched.
What began as collaboration was now a fight for supremacy. She sold her Watts portrait to raise money, sent other items into pawn, and three times evaded the debt collectors. She found that being notorious was costing her rather more in time and money than she had bargained for—the law was drawing her in like quicksand. (She once walked through the door of her new partner’s office declaring, “I have been to three police courts today and blown up two magistrates.” Such talk did nothing to calm him.) “Do not spend your money on advertisements,” he advised her sardonically, “or you will have 5,000 one of these days, and then you will have to get a Weldon Hall built in Regent’s Park.” She thought this very poor stuff: by August 1879 she had enrolled 350 singers.
The Disastrous Mrs. Weldon Page 26
