The Disastrous Mrs. Weldon

by Brian Thompson

  Harry was not above using the bond that existed between them. A few days after Angele left for England, Georgina received news that he was trying to get the divorce hearing heard in camera. “I’ll move heaven and earth to put a stop to that little game,” she wrote to her mother on May 28. When the letter was finally published, she glossed it with this note:

  Mr. Weldon had made his solicitors and lawyers really believe I was given over to a vice of which one cannot speak—although not a matrimonial offence recognised by the law. The lawyers acted in good faith, as did the judge, but you must understand very clearly that Mr. Weldon, who knew the truth, well appreciated that he was able to play the role of a generous man who would rather suffer himself than reveal the true wickedness, the real mania of someone he loved so much . . .

  On June 7 she came back to England, staying with Salsbury in Oxford Street. It was some small consolation that shortly after she arrived, she heard that Dal was bitten by a dog and laid up in bed for a fortnight. She may also have had trouble concealing her satisfaction at the news that Emily’s husband, Bill, had sent in his resignation to the duke of Newcastle and was planning to move south and buy a restaurant. “The fortunes of the Trehernes have never been at a lower ebb than this year,” Louisa wailed. She discussed waistlines with her daughter, who was trying to slim. Georgina had inherited the Dalrymple stomach, and Louisa advised her to conceal it artfully behind shawls, as she herself did. It was all trivial. The courts were on vacation, the weather was unpleasantly close and warm, the bank and some of her creditors were pressing—after only a few weeks Georgina retreated across the Channel once again.

  In December, while Georgina was right in the middle of deciding how to avoid being represented as a vicious and heartless lesbian, the bomb that had been ticking since 1863 finally went off. She rushed home to England and wrote to her mother, straight from the ferry:

  While I am very tired with my travels today, I must write to you, since I have been very shaken up to learn by the purest of chances that Mr. Weldon has a son (who it seems resembles him like two drops of water) who’s about thirteen years old, and with his mother is often to be found with Mr. Weldon on board a Houseboat at Maple-Durham! I am in a fury!!! She, it seems is wonderfully turned out—and she’s a dressmaker . . . Now we see the reason why he abandoned me at Muhlberg the winter of 1869–70. Remember how I was tormented on that rat’s behalf? I’ve got your letters. Have you got mine, expressing my love and anxiety on his behalf? Yours did their best to reassure me. It makes me furious, all the more because he knows how much I would have been happy to have a baby to raise. I told him that no matter what bastard he were to have, I would be happy to raise it.

  It was a terrible confession to have made, wrenched out of her by real anguish.

  No sooner had she sent this letter than she received one from Angele’s mother. Old M. Helluy had died in November, and Mme Helluy, who was far, far from the source of all these alarms and excursions, wrote a piteous and semiliterate letter asking for help. It was almost certainly dictated by Angele. As she always did, Georgina replied promptly. Her letter was courteous and kindly. She invited Mère Helluy to come and live under her roof in London, forgetting for the moment she did not have one.

  In three days the deepest parts of her had been laid bare, both the hidden grief of being childless, a thing she never spoke about to others and which neither friends nor enemies took into account; and the streak of generosity and willingness that ran through all her actions. Mère Helluy had no more means of coming to London than she had of emigrating to Tahiti, and what she wanted was a bit of the money that Angele assured her was there for the taking; but that was not the point. Georgina believed without thinking about it that she could, and had the old lady come, would have tried to do her best for her. Not for very long, perhaps, and almost certainly without a happy outcome, but heartfelt.

  It was Christmastime in Oxford Street, with brass bands playing at street corners and a distressing number of peddlers selling children’s toys. In a fit of despair Georgina went out and bought a hat for £25, of embroidered velvet with a plume of ostrich feathers. She justified the expense by explaining she must have something suitable for the divorce court proceedings that could not much longer be delayed. In her heart she was competing with the elegant and sophisticated Annie Lowe wrapping presents for her son, somewhere in that dream of domestic bliss from which fate and Harry Weldon had excluded her forever.

  The Courts

  1

  In the new year a sulky Angele returned from Clermont Ferrand alone and resumed disgruntled occupancy of 33 Loughborough Road, Brixton. The children were noisy and obstreperous and Georgina seldom there. Angele consoled herself by taking Eugénie Morand, the orphans’ tutor, drinking with her at the London Aquarium—a pickup place for lonely men and women. Life was turning her sour. She had some solace from being in sole charge of a house for the first time in her life, and while the neighbors may have found the children a trial, they could not help admiring Angele’s way with lace and chenille. On fine days, Georgina’s canaries sang in cages in the garden, which was much more scrupulously tended than the one belonging to Tavistock House. Harry’s money, passed on via Georgina, was bringing out the stifled bourgeoise in the Frenchwoman. The days of running after her crazy Englishwoman were all but over, and Georgina was more like a lodger than a lover nowadays. Still married to Menier, Angele hardly expected to see him again, or any of her confederates from Montmartre. There was nothing for her in Clermont Ferrand except a grieving mother. She was stalled. Many of her neighbors in Loughborough Road were materially worse off, but was it really her destiny to sit listening to the trams and waiting for the story to take a new twist? She amused herself by practicing Georgina’s handwriting.

  In July 1882 Harry suddenly gave everything a new impetus. Georgina was served with a summons to show cause why the respondent should not be at liberty to withdraw his defense and submit to a decree for the restitution of conjugal rights. She had to read it several times to confirm the sense, but at last she was persuaded: Harry had given up the fight. It was rumored he was suicidal and in failing health, and it may also have been that threatening to ruin the reputation of Sir Henry Thompson by dragging his name through the divorce courts was more than his Garrick friends could stomach.

  A week after being summonsed Georgina appeared before Sir James Hannen, president of the Probate, Divorce and Admiralty Division, and was asked by counsel, “Have you committed adultery?” “Certainly not,” she replied, “it is an infamous lie and Mr. Weldon knows it.” It was all that was required of her in law, and Hannen and the jury gave her the triumph she had been denied for four years. She wrote Harry a four-thousand-word letter in which she demanded conjugality with a facetiousness that barely disguises her contempt.

  How can you suppose I can wish to live anywhere but under your roof? There, at least, I am safe. If anything happened to me there, the suspicion would fall on you and you would risk being hanged. You would not like that. Remark, if you have not before, how like your skull and chin are to Lefroy’s [a notorious murderer]. Your voice, Lamson’s soft and pleasant voice. It is not my fault, my poor old man, if you have these instincts. The most elementary rules of phrenology will teach you and show you I have the most perfectly shaped head. I can no more help being good than you can help being bad.

  She might have done better by discussing with him what to do about Annie Lowe and under what roof they would resume relationships. There was the question of the house in Brixton: was Angele now to be director of the orphanage, which Georgina persisted in calling it, though her practical involvement in it had dwindled to nothing? If she dumped Angele, was Harry to find some sort of pension for the Frenchwoman? These were practical and immediate questions, though she did not fully realize that it was one thing to get a court to say they must live together and quite another to make it happen. She could not command it, and the lawyers were (though she did not know it yet) uneasy at th
e ruling. It could not be good law to be able to bring a husband to prison for failing to cohabit with his wife—though until now it had not seemed strange to punish a woman in this way. Harry had not attended the court hearing and he ignored her victory letter. After a pause, he let it be known through Neal that rather than submit to the findings of the court in deed as well as word, he would sell up and leave the country. Even though he had risen in the ranks of the Heralds—he was by now Windsor Herald as well as treasurer of the College—he would give it all up and flee.

  In August an even more glittering triumph was in prospect. The Birmingham Musical Festival Committee had at last decided to offer the first performance of The Redemption, the work Gounod had tried to dedicate to the Queen in 1873 with such disastrous results. Georgina felt a special empathy with this oratorio, having been present at its gestation. She had heard some of its gloomy chords echo down the stairs at Tavistock House and discussed the work with its composer on many an evening. It was with tremendous excitement that she learned the Birmingham festival had tempted Gounod back to England to conduct the first public performance. In April she had gone in secret to Paris to attend the first night of what proved to be his last opera, Le Tribut de Zamora. For the occasion, she wore an enormous medal given her from an unlikely source—a French society for “the improvement of morals.” With this as her breastplate, she found the libretto of the opera—the sale of virgins by auction—a disgusting subject and Gounod disheveled and elderly. She made no attempt to speak to “the old man” and sent him no flowers or tributes. Nevertheless, though she attended the theater incognito, she was sufficiently vain to feel certain she had been recognized with sympathy by many in the distinguished audience, which included Gambetta and the President of France. It was a golden moment, and now she had a chance to repeat it on home soil. Gounod, who had embraced her country only to desert it, should now see her in the stalls at Birmingham, not as a humiliated mistress, but as a person of consequence.

  She arrived in Birmingham to find the hotel of her choice full—full, or, as she immediately suspected, the management was lying in its teeth. She walked to the Town Hall and hung about outside, listening to the work being rehearsed, too nervous to go in. Inside, Gounod was not less tense. He knew she had been in the audience for Le Tribut de Zamora, and Redemption held as many memories of Tavistock House for him as it did for her. It was inconceivable that she would stay away. If Georgina is to be believed, he had also received certain anonymous letters claiming she was coming not merely to enjoy the show, but with a loaded revolver in her purse. Angele’s handwriting practice had not been in vain.

  Meanwhile, the whole of Birmingham was talking of nothing else but Gounod’s visit. It was said that the festival veteran Sir Julius Benedict, who was premiering a cantata called Graziella, the last work of a life now seventy-seven years old, was infuriated by the public indifference in the city to any topic but Gounod. There was almost a frenzy of anticipation in the city. The chairman of the festival was the lord mayor of Birmingham and also the proprietor of the Birmingham Post. The publicity attending the premiere of Redemption was enormous. It was reported in the Post how Cardinal Newman had begged permission to visit rehearsals of this mammoth work, for which the festival committee had paid a record sum. Readers learned that the musical score ran to 560 pages, the subject matter ranging from the Creation to the Crucifixion. No first night had been waited for with more impatience since the days when Mendelssohn first performed as an organ recitalist and conducted St. Paul in the year of Georgina’s birth. In the circumstances, it would have been more surprising if Georgina had not gone to Birmingham.

  On August 30 she set off for the Town Hall with her ticket and a copy of the score under her arm. Some way from the entrance, she was met by a festival steward and an inspector of police. They gave her a note from the management saying she would not be admitted, and when she tried to push past them, she was restrained. It was Rivière and Covent Garden all over again. The audience filed past in their thousands, the doors were solemnly closed, and what was widely considered the summation of the oratorio tradition, a work worthy to be compared to the great Handel himself, took place without her. It received a rapturous reception. For Gounod it set the seal on an illustrious career and was a total vindication of his English sojourn. Redemption, though hardly ever performed nowadays, was taken up with an almost hysterical enthusiasm. It was no surprise that Benedict had been outfaced: no composer could have stood comparison with the Frenchman, for whom the festival was a complete and unqualified succès fou. As the last bars spilled out from the auditorium onto the streets outside, carried by a choir of 400 and an orchestra of 180, Georgina was still squabbling tearfully with the festival staff and trying to get the police to make an arrest for assault. She was given the name of a local solicitor and told to be on her way.

  At the end of the work, Gounod was carried back to his hotel in the full triumph of his achievement, his hands patting away the plaudits in mock modesty. He was probably never told what had happened to his little singing bird, his dearest friend, his English muse, nor did he inquire. Henry Littleton was waiting at the door to his suite to congratulate him. By one of those ironies that help define professional art, he had placed the rights of this work with the old enemy, Novello’s. He may once have threatened to go to prison rather than pay Littleton his piddling damages, but things were different now. The newly elected grand officer of the Legion of Honour shook hands on a deal that was to net him many thousands of pounds. He could afford to dismiss the promoter with a wave of his hand and go in search of a good wine and as many pretty girls as wished to worship him. Georgina returned to London by late train.

  Twelve days later she purchased a copy of the Married Woman’s Property Act of 1882, studied it with the greatest care and interest, and realized she had at her disposal the means of revenge, not only on l’Abbé Gounod and his sickening hypocrisy but on all the others who had ever crossed or double-crossed her. It was like being given the keys to a palace. Under the provisions of the act, the fiction of unity that had dogged the legal interpretation of married life was at an end. She was now in law a femme sole with freedom to bring a civil action in her own name. The keys unlocked one door after another—behind which cowered the Birmingham Festival Committee to be sure, but many others. She had told de Bathe that he would repent of his actions, and now she had the means. It was dizzying. There was almost no one beyond her grasp—the four mad doctors, Rivière, and of course Gounod. Tucked away in her closely indexed correspondence was a letter by the maestro asking her to itemize his bill for the time spent in Tavistock House; and her extensive account by way of reply. She had not received a penny from him; now he would be brought to his knees before the majesty of the law, as interpreted not by some fusty clown in a horsehair wig, but by Georgina Weldon, plaintiff in person.

  2

  Revenge, say the Italians, is a dish best eaten cold. Before the act that gave her power to plead her own case in civil actions, Georgina’s appearances in court had been as witness or defendant. She was well known within the legal profession for being a wrecker, with only the sketchiest understanding of how trials were conducted, an ignorant woman with an overinflated idea of herself. She was good for fees. Those who had dealings with her and went on later to deride her in their clubs had overlooked one thing. She might know nothing of the law, but she most certainly had a histrionic ability that if it were ever trained would be a formidable weapon. All she needed was the knowledge with which to back it up.

  A few months after she first read the Married Woman’s Property Act, she met a man after her own heart, an elderly solicitor named William Chaffers. Some time earlier, Mr. Chaffers had been aggrieved to notice that a titled gentleman had secured tickets to the royal enclosure at Ascot for a lady of loose morals. This would not do, and he wrote to the Lord Chamberlain to say so. The lady proved to be the wife of the knight in question—a fact Chaffers may well have known. He was prosecuted for
attempted blackmail. However, on the morning that the wife was to be called to give evidence about the respectability of her origins, she fled the country and the case collapsed. Chaffers’s victory was short-lived: though innocent as charged, he was struck off for his impudence and had since eked out a miserable and understandably embittered existence. This was exactly the sort of boon companion Georgina needed. Chaffers taught her the language of law and how to prepare a plea.

  In September writs were served on Neal, Winslow, Rudderforth, Rivière, the editors of the Daily Chronicle and the London Figaro, Semple, de Bathe, and finally Harry. “Now I must look out the other ruffians,” she commented grimly.

  The writs had been issued from premises in Red Lion Court at the head of Fleet Street, more or less opposite the Inner Temple, where Morgan had sauntered in the days of his youth. They struck their recipients dumb with amazement. Harry had been served in the Garrick, his solicitor Neal at the office. When they conferred, it was clear she proposed to mount an all-out attack on the mad doctors episode, with the incident on the stairs at Covent Garden as a side dish. The provisions of the 1882 act gave her the powers, and no other woman in England had acted so swiftly upon them. To call it alarming was an understatement. Neither Harry nor any of the others gave a damn for her plaint against Rivière, though Neal was at a loss to see what possible action she could bring there: she had been found guilty of criminal libel and gone to jail for it. The events surrounding the four doctors, Harry, and de Bathe were a different matter. While the affair was now five years old and though the public had a short memory, the notoriety surrounding Mrs. Weldon’s “escape” had not gone unnoticed by learned judges. The doctors involved were quite horrified at the thought of being dragged through the courts. Winslow in particular had most to lose.