Meanwhile, Stephens’s brother-in-law had married again the previous November and was continuing to live with Charles in Portman Square and Chicksands Priory. Stephens found this distressing; it seemed to him that the new wife had usurped Louisa’s place in the family home. Unwilling to spend the summer with them in Portman Square, he suggested to Rowland Errington that they cross the Channel in March and spend the next six months together on the Continent.
They returned to England in September, a few weeks before the announcement of another general election. Once again, his father persuaded Stephens to stand for parliament, this time as a candidate for his home town of Liskeard in Cornwall. It was known that he had voted against the Reform Bill, so his election address had to be worded carefully. It was drafted on 25 November 1834 in Chicksands Priory:
My name is not altogether unknown to you, my family having long been connected with your town and neighbourhood. With regard to my principles, I am firmly attached to our unrivalled Constitution and therefore opposed to any sudden or incautious changes, while at the same time, I am not one of those who think that all improvement is impossible, or would resist the reformation of acknowledged evils. Such legislation would receive my most cordial support as would have for its object the protection of those great interests from which spring the prosperity of our country. I mean the agricultural and commercial, both of which … appear to be endangered from the efforts of those who can see no safety but in perpetual change.
He concluded the address with the words ‘it is my intention very shortly to pay my personal respects to you’, but he never made the journey to Liskeard. Instead he withdrew from the contest and transferred his candidacy to Sudbury in Suffolk, where the existing member was retiring and where his father thought he had a greater chance of success. He spent a few days in Sudbury over Christmas:
About four o’clock on the 22nd, Stephens Lyne Stephens entered the town and declared himself a candidate in the Conservative Interest. He commenced a spirited canvass, which he concluded on the 25th with every prospect of a triumphant result. After addressing the electors from the window of the Rose and Crown, Mr Lyne Stephens left the same evening for town.10
At the poll on 12 January, Stephens received the least number of votes. He then returned to Melton Mowbray for the last three months of the season. During the summer of 1835, he avoided the company of his brother-in-law and spent as little time as possible in Portman Square. In the early autumn, Charles and the Bulkeleys moved to Chicksands Priory where, on 20 September, Bulkeley’s second wife gave birth to a daughter.
Two weeks later, Stephens arrived at Chicksands to host a shooting party. The two brothers-in-law were hardly on speaking terms and, one evening, when the house was full of guests, their feelings of bitterness and resentment erupted into an angry confrontation. According to Francis Lyne, one of Stephens’s cousins:
Captain Bulkeley quarrelled with my cousin Stephens and challenged him. Two officers of the Guards acted as seconds. As men of honour and gentlemen, they did the best they could and there was no fighting, but the commotion in the house was very great and, when it reached my uncle’s ears, he said that a man who would seek to take the life of his son should not rest under his roof. Early next morning, Charles Bulkeley, with his wife and children, left the house to know my uncle’s face no more.11
Eight months later, Charles decided to give up Chicksands Priory. The ancient building had given him status, but it was remote and secluded and a solitary place for an elderly man to live alone. After Stephens hosted a final shooting party in October 1836, he and his father packed up their possessions and returned to Portman Square.
On 3 November, Stephens left London for Melton Mowbray. That same evening, Yolande opened her third London season, dancing in the second act of The Maid of Cashmere at the Theatre Royal, Drury Lane. On 6 November, Stephens and his friends enjoyed the opening dinner of the season and the Quorn hounds met for the first time the following morning.
During the winter, several sportsmen arrived in Melton Mowbray with stories of Yolande and her ‘lascivious’ Cachucha. Stephens had missed her previous London seasons (he was in Melton Mowbray in 1833; the following year he was travelling on the Continent). When news arrived in February of her further engagement at the King’s Theatre, he wrote to his father asking him to buy a private box. On the 28th, Charles made a note in his account book: ‘Payment to Laporte, opera box, £273.’
Every year, the hunting season ended with the Croxton Park Races which, in 1837, took place on 5/6 April. Three stewards were appointed – Lord Wilton, Lord Forester and Stephens Lyne Stephens – and the races attracted particularly large crowds. ‘There were more strangers of rank and fashion than usual’, reported the newspapers, ‘and large dinner parties most evenings at the New Club.’
After the races, Stephens hurried home to London. On the evening of 13 April, he left Portman Square and made his way to the King’s Theatre in the Haymarket. It was the evening of Yolande’s benefit performance and he was eager to see what all the fuss was about.
6
THE LAST ADVENTURE
She danced like a fairy and died as a sylph should die; her tiny wings dropping from their place, her gentle form bending like a reed, and her whole frame not struggling but fainting into death.
Morning Post, on Yolande’s performance in La Sylphide, 26 April 1837
The auditorium was humming with anticipation, crowded with men and women of society eager to catch a glimpse of the celebrated Duvernay. ‘Not only was every place which could command a view of the stage occupied,’ wrote the critic of The Times, ‘but many were content to traverse the lobbies for an occasional sight of it.’
As Stephens took a seat in his new private box near the stage, he was aware of a sense of dissatisfaction. In the ten years since his father inherited the fortune from Portugal, he had received monthly allowances totalling £80,000 (£8 million), more than enough for a life of indulgence, extravagance and pleasure, only briefly interrupted by a few sittings in a short-lived parliament. At the same time, he had failed to take advantage of many of the opportunities which had come his way.
He had missed a sojourn in Portugal, the source of his father’s fortune, because of his absence from his regiment. He had turned down the offer of a baronetcy in deference to his father who was gambling on Lord Liverpool retaining his health. His parliamentary career was undistinguished: he never once spoke in the House and he missed debates on the Reform Bill, one of the most important bills in parliamentary history, because he preferred to be in Melton Mowbray with his horses.
He mixed with high society in Crockford’s, on the racecourse and in the hunting field, but he was disadvantaged by the nature of his father’s wealth. The Lyne Stephens fortune was made in trade and industry at a time when society treated all such work with disdain. He had inherited his father’s lack of stature, but not his self-confident personality. He was acutely conscious that society looked down upon him as a nouveau-riche, a parvenu.
Living alone with his father in Portman Square, mixing only in male company in Melton Mowbray, he felt nostalgic for the female companionship that surrounded and comforted him when he was a child. He missed his mother, who died during his second year at Cambridge, as well as his four sisters, who had all died so young.
The noise in the auditorium quietened as the curtain rose to reveal Yolande standing on stage in her pink satin dress trimmed with black lace. As the orchestra played the first note, she snapped her castanets and began to dance. For the last two chapters she has been frozen in time, waiting for Stephens to take his seat in the opera box. Now, as she finishes the dance and comes forward to acknowledge the applause, an idea begins to take shape in his mind.
Not only might this beautiful young woman provide the female companionship that was so lacking in his life, but society might regard him more favourably if he could persuade such a celebrated ballerina to become his mistress. It was considered a ‘great accomplish
ment’, as Tom Duncombe, one of his gambling friends, described it:
to cultivate intimate relations with the reigning favorita. It passed for admiration of genius. The ‘protector’ of the beautiful danseuse was certain of exciting the envy of his less fortunate associates, till the lady left him for a more liberal admirer. This was so expensive a luxury that only an opera-goer with a handsome income could venture to indulge in it, but it was so fashionable that married men, even elderly men, were proud of the distinction.1
Yolande’s contract was due to expire two days after her benefit performance, after which she would soon return to Paris. Stephens had little time to devise a plan of action, but events turned in his favour. On 24 April, the King’s Theatre published an announcement in The Times and other newspapers:
Mr Laporte has the honour to inform the supporters of the opera that, in compliance with the numerous wishes of the subscribers, he has with difficulty succeeded in effecting an arrangement with the director of the Paris Opéra, which has enabled him at considerable expense to make a further engagement of Mademoiselle Duvernay who will appear in the favourite ballet of La Sylphide tomorrow evening.
Yolande would remain in London until the season ended in August, a concession for which Laporte paid Henri Duponchel £300 and Yolande agreed to add a further four months to the length of her contract in Paris. She had also agreed to dance at the King’s Theatre between April and July the following year, an arrangement which had not yet been confirmed with Duponchel.
During the previous nine days, Stephens had invited her to dinners and given her gifts of expensive jewellery. She had shown no interest. Now he had time to devise an alternative strategy. He approached Laporte at the King’s Theatre, who advised him to target Madame Duvernay, a woman who was happy to be paid for her daughter’s favours.
Hoping that a French aristocrat would be the right man to conduct negotiations with Yolande’s mother, Stephens called on Count Alfred d’Orsay, a man he had known for several years. They were founder members of the Garrick Club, as well as fellow members of Crockford’s, and d’Orsay hunted from time to time at Melton Mowbray.
Over 6 feet tall, strikingly handsome and always most exquisitely turned out, Count d’Orsay was known as the king of the dandies. He drove around London in a green coach, its white wheels striped with green and crimson. ‘When I saw him driving in his tilbury,’ wrote Captain Gronow, ‘he looked like some gorgeous dragonfly skimming through the air.’
D’Orsay took on the task with pleasure. An habitué of the theatre, he already knew Yolande; he had entertained her to dinners during her London seasons and given her gifts of jewellery and fans. Stephens gave him some leeway in the negotiation – money was not an issue and he was flexible on the length of the arrangement – but he insisted that she should leave the stage and remain with him in England. Her celebrity was too great to risk the attentions she would receive from other men.
Yolande was staying with her mother and le Bélisaire in an apartment in the Haymarket. D’Orsay made several visits to talk privately to Madame Duvernay and her lover, and had no difficulty persuading them of the merits of Stephens’s proposal. Persuading Yolande was another matter. Of all the men clamouring for her favours, he was ‘the suitor she liked the least’. She was stubborn in her refusal and dissolved into tears whenever his name was mentioned.
On 25 April, she danced the title role in La Sylphide for the first time in London. ‘She danced like a fairy,’ wrote the critic of the Morning Post, ‘and died as a sylph should die; her tiny wings dropping from their place, her gentle form bending like a reed, and her whole frame not struggling but fainting into death.’ This is a poignant image. The sylph was dying, just as Yolande’s life on the stage would soon be slipping away as Stephens, d’Orsay and her mother negotiated the price of her future.
On 29 April, the King’s Theatre staged a performance of Mozart’s Don Giovanni, in which Yolande and her Cachucha were inserted into the first act. The Times was unimpressed:
Don Giovanni, Duvernay and the Cachucha combined their influences last night to produce one of the most crowded and fashionable audiences of this or any other season. The house was literally crammed in every part … Much as we admire and have praised Duvernay in the Cachucha, we hold it to be a sort of impertinence to introduce it in the middle of the first finale of Don Giovanni, where it forms an interruption to the design, and becomes a blot instead of a beauty; but the house was in too good humour to be severely critical and it obtained its invariable honour of an encore.
Princess Victoria was in the audience that night. She was ‘very much delighted and amused’, but noticed that Yolande was looking tired: ‘Duvernay danced the Cachucha in the ball scene at the end of the first act of Don Giovanni with her usual grace and was encored; she looked wretchedly thin and pale.’ Seven days later, Victoria watched a performance of Le Brigand de Terracina: ‘Duvernay looked very pretty, only she is grown so dreadfully thin. She danced very quietly in a pas de trois.’2
Yolande was suffering from stress and conflicting emotions. She was twenty-four years old. She loved dancing. She loved the stage. She loved the applause from the auditorium and the attentions she received from men of society. She loved the jewels, the expensive dinners, the bouquets of flowers. She was still in love with Félix de La Valette who would soon return to Paris, his short-term contract in Stockholm having come to an end.
At the same time, she was uneasy about returning to the Paris Opéra under the new direction of Henri Duponchel. Even after their affair had ended, Véron continued to treat her with affection and favour; Duponchel would not be so easy to charm. She was the most beautiful, the most sensual of the opera-dancers but, as the critics noted in 1834, Marie Taglioni was more graceful and light on her feet.
She was also surpassed by Fanny Elssler who had created the Cachucha in Paris six months before Yolande danced the role in London. ‘I had always admired Duvernay’s … Cachucha,’ wrote the new Queen Victoria after watching Elssler perform the dance on 26 June 1838, ‘but had never seen the original; and I really was quite charmed. Duvernay ought not to be mentioned on the same day after seeing Elssler.’3
Taglioni had recently departed to spend three years in St Petersburg but Elssler remained in Paris, a city to which Yolande must soon return after an absence of six months. She remembered the lukewarm reviews she received after returning from six weeks in London in 1833. ‘Rarely does an artiste improve by touring,’ wrote the critic of the Courrier des Théâtres. ‘On her return, the public, which had grown accustomed to her defects, grew critical of her very talents … and having little to lose, she was found to have made no improvement.’
By 6 May, when Princess Victoria commented that Yolande had grown ‘so dreadfully thin’, she had been withstanding her mother’s pressure for eleven days. The prospect of leaving her home in Paris, of losing Félix de La Valette and spending three years with a man she found unattractive, was distinctly unappealing. On the other hand, she was at the height of her celebrity. She might never experience such adulation again, while Stephens’s offer would make her rich for life. She held out for a few more weeks, but her spirit was failing. Even a revival of the vulgar ‘cashew-nut dance’ on 21 May – which this time was ‘most heartily hissed by the audience’ – failed to incur her displeasure.
She finally gave in at the end of the month. As a reward for persuading her daughter to accept the proposal and for consenting to have no further control or influence over her life, Madame Duvernay and le Bélisaire were paid £8,000 (£800,000). Yolande would receive an allowance of £2,000 a year, to convert into a life annuity from June 1840 on condition that she remained faithful in the meantime. The total cost of the transaction for the first three years was £14,000 (£1.5 million).
What happened next was told by Antoine Coulon, choreographer of Le Brigand de Terracina, who had partnered Yolande at her début performance in April 1831. The story was written down by Louis Gentil, contrôleu
r of materials at the Paris Opéra, in a notebook he kept to record anecdotes and gossip about life in the opera house. He titled the story ‘The Last Adventure of Pauline Duvernay’.4
Soon after the agreement was signed, Félix de La Valette arrived in London on his way home to Paris. Eager to see Yolande after an absence of seven months, he made his way to her apartment where ‘he was soon in her arms again. They passed a delicious night together and a rendezvous was made for the next evening at the theatre.’
The following morning, Madame Duvernay sent an urgent note to Portman Square to alert Stephens about La Valette’s arrival. That evening, after watching the performance, La Valette made his way backstage to Yolande’s dressing-room. He was stopped by a footman in livery standing guard outside the door.
‘You may not enter, Monsieur le Marquis,’ said the footman. ‘You may not enter the dressing-room of Mademoiselle Duvernay.’
A puzzled La Valette sought out Antoine Coulon, who told him that Yolande was ‘the idol of all the dandies’ in London. ‘The suitor she liked the least,’ he said, ‘is the son of a businessman, retired from commerce with an income of £140,000. After many coquettish but real refusals, he approached Monsieur Béliser who lives with her mother.’ Coulon explained that Madame Duvernay had persuaded her daughter to accept ‘such an advantageous proposal’ and asked La Valette, on Yolande’s behalf, ‘to relinquish his hold on her affections and return to Paris’. She would, he said, ‘always remember your love for her and the sacrifice she asks of you to ensure her happiness’.
La Valette had no money of his own and no wish to lose a mistress whose earning power was much greater than his. He asked two of his acquaintances to act as seconds and sent them to Portman Square to issue a challenge. This was the second time in two years that Stephens had been challenged to a duel. Alarmed at the prospect of having to fight for the woman he had worked so hard to win, he agreed that he would meet La Valette on Putney Heath but asked that La Valette should first talk to Yolande.
The Beauty of Her Age: A Tale of Sex, Scandal and Money in Victorian England Page 6
