The Disastrous Mrs. Weldon

by Brian Thompson

  The appendix to each volume has as full a collection of letters as she could furnish bearing on the matters under discussion. While her mother lived, Georgina pestered her unmercifully to find all the family correspondence and return it to Gisors. She tried to make the record complete and in the process incriminated herself without apparently realizing it. It is in a letter to Louisa that she at last mentions how she may have struck orphan Freddie once too often. In another section she publishes an open letter she sent to the editors of every London newspaper at the time of Weldon v. Weldon. It is a prime example of the dangers in her method. In order to get her conjugal rights restored, the single question she had to answer at the hearing was whether she had committed adultery. In a formula devised by her counsel and Harry’s she had only to say one word about that: “No.” Instead she named Sir Henry Thompson, Cadwalladwr Waddy, and George Werranrath as persons with whom she had been accused of sleeping. The judge who heard the case was incensed.

  “If you hadn’t repeated them, those names would have remained unknown.”

  “But I wanted them known, because people have said—”

  “I wouldn’t have let you into the witness box if I had known you were going to repeat those names.”

  “I know that alright,” Georgina replied.

  Thompson and his wife were still alive when the Mémoires were published. It caused Georgina no qualms if these revelations caused them pain, any more than it did to apostrophize judges and lawyers still living as “dirty old monkeys,” “old goats,” “redfaced old lobsters.” She explains that no London editor would pick up the story of her imprudent behavior with Sir Henry Thompson, though all the provincial papers did. To her mother she wrote:

  The case has been completely hushed up and there has been a universal conspiracy of silence. Not a name has been reproduced in the [London] papers. That reticence can only have one reason in the eyes of the world, above all when one knows what happened, and what my own mother and my own brother have had to say . . . Your letters, and I suppose those of Dal, Emily and Bill have been the secret weapons Mr. Weldon has used against me and are the secret weapons I can see everywhere . . . They are private letters that have ruined me publically. Your private protestations to me are absolutely useless. They want me to believe that you don’t have the intention of doing me harm, but it’s impossible to understand your full intentions or your goal. You don’t know what you want, nor what you want to say. As for Dal, Zizi and Bill, that’s another matter. They’re harming me just for the pleasure of putting a spoke in my wheels. And [she adds in an acid footnote] as a way of doing me out of my inheritance.

  Dal, Emily (Zizi), and Emily’s husband were all still living when this letter was finally published. It soon becomes clear to the English reader that one reason for writing in French and publishing in France was to give her the freedom to libel people with impunity. She admits this. “I said to my publisher, Darantière, that as what I was writing was defamation to a superlative degree, I would like to prepare a document for him by which I would undertake to keep his own liability completely safeguarded.”

  Darantière was understandably alarmed, and not much reassured, when she refused to sign the standard disclaimer he sent her and instead substituted one of her own. In the event of a prosecution, she offered to pay all his costs. The price was that he should publish it all, without attempting to edit it or withdraw it. She added artlessly, “I have already been caught out in England. I guaranteed all the costs of an editor who printed my truths in his paper (Regina v. Mortimer). De Bathe and my husband had the impudence to threaten criminal proceedings against him; and this coward, instead of continuing publication and establishing the truth, was either bribed or stupid enough to back down and got three months in prison.”

  Only some of the letters she published reveal a more intimate and domestic side to her. They are few and far between, but they come like islands in an ocean of unrelenting fact. She wrote to her mother:

  If I was like Benedict, who can do without sleep . . . but I must have my nine hours, during which I sleep like a nest of dormice, or like my little canary who sleeps no matter what the noise, even though the little rascal refuses to be put to bed before half past eight. He is completely tame and generally flies free. I am horribly afraid of losing him. I tamed him myself and I am, it goes without saying, completely tyrannised and made an idiot of by him. And there’s an argument for Dr. Winslow!

  By far the longest letter she allowed into print is the one most damaging to her reputation. It is the hysterical paen of hate she wrote to Angele as a form of ultimatum shortly before being flung out of Gower Street. The letter comprises 117 numbered paragraphs and uncovers aspects of their life together that no one completely sane would have contemplated publishing. In it we learn that Eugénie, the governess appointed by Angele to look after the two remaining orphans in Brixton, had two sisters, and Georgina accuses her lover of debauching all three of them. The servants were drawn into the hell that Angele seems to have created, being told things about the past they should never have had to listen to, asked to inform on their mistress, squabbling among themselves. The actor who played opposite Georgina in the play based on her life, Not Alone, was a young man named Clifford.

  They all knew about your intrigues with Clifford, and everybody except me knew that Clifford was sometimes hidden in the house for three hours without being able to escape (me being the stumbling block) that Eva kept watch for you, that she was supposed to warn you of my approach by ringing a little bell or making a cough, and the day I did find you on Clifford’s knee (an old woman like you, on the knee of a vulgar actor) and Eva followed me, you gave her a good mouthful because she hadn’t rung hard enough, the fact being that you were licking your lips so hard you couldn’t hear anything. How you must have mocked me when I said “If it hadn’t been for my presence of mind that child would have seen something” . . . Eugénie, as you know very well, caught you in your chemise—naked—in your bedroom with Clifford. And you made her come in! And then made Clifford leave, who tried to put his arms round her as he went. “No,” she said, pushing him away, “save the dirty business for Madame.” After he was made to go, you said to Eugénie “Have you noticed the effect, the power I have on men? Did you see how pale Clifford was? White as a sheet!”

  The letter runs to forty printed pages and stops at nothing—Angele’s thefts, her deceptions, her sexual preferences, the whole life between them laid bare. There are paragraphs devoted to how Angele inflated the cost of hats or purchased without Georgina’s consent eau de cologne, pillows, handbags, soap. And there are paragraphs that make the heart stand still: “Aren’t you ashamed to tell these young girls such things? Isn’t it infamous and ignoble enough that you told the story of Antonio, giving them to understand that I was much older instead of a child of four or five and saying: That will give you an idea of what she is by natural inclination. And then: She likes to pass for this or that—think about it, a husband who used to take her up the rear and she liked it!”

  The publication of this letter points up the basic structural fault of the Mémoires. The longer Georgina went on, translating, assembling, glossing, the more she lost touch with what she was trying to achieve. The letter to Angele serves no practical purpose by being included and adds nothing to the story she was trying to unfold of the injustices of the English legal system. One reads it in the same way one might listen in horrified silence to a drunk at a party. There is a nightmare quality in it, like hearing someone destroy herself for no good reason, when a moment’s reflection would have stopped her mouth. Since the greater part of the whole six volumes sets out to prove that Mrs. Georgina Weldon was not mad, the pain of material like this is all the greater. From a letter to her mother written in 1881, again included for no good reason:

  You’ve told me I have not appreciated Mr. Weldon in the right way. As if I didn’t know that only too well!!! He has shown now what he has for guts. One of his old teachers, the R
everend W. O’Reilly told Madame Menier he was capable of no matter what cowardly or ignoble act. When he was only sixteen, he seduced one of his mother’s housemaids and chased after her without pity and of course he was never suspected of it. The poor girl got pregnant. He threw live cats down the lavatory—always denying it, it goes without saying.

  There are dozens of such gratuitous “truths” strewn recklessly, as, for example, that she did not sleep with Harry after they moved to London because he suffered from the pox; that Dal was an alcoholic; that her mother was weak in the head. She did not have it in her to write with any literary merit, but the colossal effort she put into the manuscript to make it a complete account was self-defeating. It was the dossier method run amok, and in the end it undid her. In life, as in the law itself, there are some things best left unsaid. Before he left London forever, Dal had written to her:

  Plenty of people, and I too, accept that you’ve been treated abominably, everyone’s ready to admit that; but also, that you’ve lacked judgement or have been very badly advised. To make comparisons between yourself and Patti doesn’t serve any good purpose. It’s her success and not her immorality that makes her what she is. You too, you’ve had your success, a great moral success, for in spite of all your vicissitudes, you’ve kept your honour and your name intact.

  Moreover, you must be considered a real benefactress to humanity, for thanks to you and the bloody exposure made of their iniquities, the lunacy laws will certainly be much improved. Of that there’s not the shadow of a doubt. Equally, you have succeeded in unmasking plenty of other abuses—but it is exactly because of your success in this direction that you’ve made so many enemies . . . You have set against you a numerous and powerful class of the population.

  It was about as generous a statement as Dal was capable of, and it has the ring of truth about it. Maybe for that very reason she glossed the letter in a footnote: “The reader will think perhaps that my brother is pulling my leg: but no! He declaims like Solon and everything he says is completely contrary to the facts.”

  4

  Gounod died in October 1893 at his second home in St.-Cloud. In his last years he was frail and going blind, and toward the end his doctors forbade him to work. Instead, he rejoiced in playing l’Abbé Gounod, the silver-haired old patriarch, replete with honors and a friend to humanity. Almost to the end he would travel every Saturday to attend the Institut, carrying in his pocket the exact amount of money necessary, counted out into his palm by an ever-watchful Anna. One day he hailed a cab at the St.-Lazare station, and at the end of the journey the cabman said, “Monsieur Gounod, I’m proud to have driven the composer of Faust.” Gounod patted away the compliment with good-humored wit. “My friend,” he said gently. “You’ve a fine turn of speed. You would have made a good conductor.”

  The little vanities of old age sat well with him. He liked to muse aloud on art and religion, safe in the belief that his epoch had done him the honor his life in music deserved. Like a good priest, the personal agonies his work had cost him were smoothed away until what was left was the goodness, the light within. He was very rich. When he said things like “God loves those whom He admits into suffering,” his listeners in their thirties and forties took it to be a noble and pious reflection that had nothing to do with the material circumstances of his life.

  The end came with a fine operatic pathos. On October 15, while Anna and her daughter played dominoes at his back, Gounod sat at his desk smoking his faithful clay pipe. He was looking over the score of his Requiem. When Anna looked around to say something to him, the pipe was still burning, but Gounod’s head had fallen forward onto the table beside it. He lingered for two days, a crucifix clenched in his fist, before dying at half past six in the morning of October 17.

  There was a state funeral in the Madeleine in Paris ten days later. After that, the coffin was taken to Auteuil, where it was interred in the family vault. The French newspapers received indignant letters from an unknown woman in Gisors, reprehending Madame Gounod for not insisting her husband be laid to rest in the Panthéon. Georgina managed to stop herself from attending the funeral. She wrote in her diary, “Poor old man—how I did love him and how hard all hope died.” It was a telling remark. Was the hope that he should snatch her up from a failed marriage and share his genius with her? If so, hadn’t he offered to do that when he suggested he accept the post of director of the Conservatoire and bring her to Paris with him in 1872? In the end, Gounod can be forgiven for misunderstanding the depth of her feelings toward him. She was saying something to her diary that she had never really expressed to him or indeed to any other man. To love was to give, and it was not in her to be so vulnerable as that.

  She had kept up her interest in spiritualism, and now that Gounod was on the Other Side, Charlotte, Georgina’s maid, suddenly discovered psychic powers. With the help of her boyfriend she arranged séances in which the shade of the great composer came to Gisors to tease and chide. What Charlotte knew about Gounod was mostly gathered from her mistress’s conversation; and what she knew about spiritualism was borrowed from the shocked hearsay of her parents. Accordingly, Gounod’s ghostly visits to the hospice were sometimes more like cheap stage illusions. Cups bounced off the table, and chairs were mysteriously flung against the wall. Every word the spirit Gounod uttered was written down afterward in all its banality. His tone was generally forgiving and he liked to josh his old admirer. But Georgina was disappointed. Where was the genius in him, the messiah of new music she had done so much to promote? He was talking to her like the shade of a jovial butcher or a man who had gone to his grave as a hearty but short-tempered baker. He was talking in fact like a Gisorard.

  This was a fault he learned to correct. He began to write to her in regular alexandrines, of the sort written by Hugo and studied by children in school. His themes narrowed. What he wanted to express in this spirit-poetry was the evils of the justice system as experienced by honest litigants. Now what he said was received with enthusiasm, all the more so because Charlotte produced these couplets when she was in deep trance and so could not be accused of deception. It was automatic writing! Charlotte sat at the desk with her eyes rolled back in her head and took down by dictation what Gounod had to say as Georgina looked on, spellbound. Her boyfriend hovered nervously in the corner, willing the girl not to get it too wrong. When she let the pen fall saying she was exhausted, it was often no more than the truth. Then, helped by the money Georgina had paid for the séances, Charlotte left with her young man for London. Gounod left with her.

  Georgina seldom went outside the walls of the hospice in these years, and her pleasures and appetites grew simpler. Ever since her first imprisonment in Newgate she had suffered from what she diagnosed as gout but was probably arthritis. Her hands slowly seized up. By the time of her sixtieth birthday, her unremitting labors on the hospice gardens had paid such dividends that she could to some degree sit back and enjoy the fruits. Her undergardener, Petit Pierre, was one of the hospice inmates, an old and slow-witted simpleton who was devoted to her. The greenhouse she designed with doors on rollers was a great success, and she had grown interested in bees. She had hives built and she corresponded with local apiarists. If she was sometimes lethargic and could no longer command Petit Pierre to fetch water from the stream or rake up leaves with quite the vigor she once had, it was only understandable. She was growing old.

  The Dreyfus Affair interested her (and would have done so more had she known of the part played in the family’s search for justice by a Normandy psychic, Léonie, who helped Mathieu Dreyfus to understand what had really happened to his brother). Georgina was naturally a Dreyfusard, and there were other stories in the French press that she followed keenly, always of injustice done in the name of the law. Crimes against women particularly interested her, such as the false imprisonment at home of a girl by her own family in the city of Poitiers, a famous case. The local magistrate in Gisors was a man named Delatin, and she sometimes went to court to list
en to him. She admired his suavity and imperturbable good humor. Slowly, inexorably, life caught up with her. Petit Pierre died, Delatin was transferred to Le Havre.

  In 1890 Dal’s boy, Phillip, came to see his notorious aunt. She drew a tactful veil over what she thought of his father and complimented the young man for having learned from Dal the art of writing a letter. She explained:

  A circle of Dante’s Inferno should be set aside for people who neglect to answer letters. You will find it is the busy people in this world who are the best correspondents; it is also a question of proper method. Owing to the telephone the letter will become as obsolete as the snuff-box in times to come. One has only to compare the correspondence in memoirs of the eighteenth and part of the nineteenth centuries to realise the gradual decay in correspondence.

  Phillip Treherne adored her. She never mentions in the Mémoires how, late on, she found a new lease on life, teaching herself Braille and going from time to time to Paris to read and sing to a music school for the blind. Her nephew tells us that story. Georgina made a huge impression on him, and they corresponded regularly for as long as she lived. She went to his wedding, he was present at her funeral.

  This serious and bookish young man also made her a wonderful gift, something that came about from a chance meeting he had in Paris. One evening in 1898, he was sitting at a café table in the rue Scribe when a shabbily dressed but striking-looking man came and sat down nearby. Phillip Treherne recognized him as the disgraced and ruined Oscar Wilde. He introduced himself, and they talked pleasantly of books and literary figures until midnight. Three days later Phillip went to Gisors and told his aunt of this encounter. He wanted her advice. Wilde had invited him to visit his rooms in the Hôtel d’Alsace. Georgina was cautious: