The Beauty of Her Age: A Tale of Sex, Scandal and Money in Victorian England

by Jenifer Roberts

  Yolande, already ostracised by society, might have preferred to have become the second Mrs Claremont; faced with Edward’s refusal to have his adultery aired in public, she settled for his constant presence in her life. To formalise the arrangement, she gave him a plain gold ring which he wore every day. She also acquired a leasehold house in Gloucester Street, Portman Square, and transferred the property into Edward’s name. It would be used as a London townhouse and also as a base for Edward’s adult children.

  Not only did Edward refuse to consider a divorce, he also insisted that his wife remain with him. Frances Claremont (Fanny) was a quiet, self-effacing woman who disliked large gatherings and had rarely accompanied her husband to the balls and functions of Second Empire Paris. She had been hurt and bewildered by the attentions he lavished on Yolande, as well as by his absences in winter when he spent several weeks in Lynford Hall. Now she had to move in with the woman who had effectively taken her husband from her. In late October 1871, she packed up her possessions and travelled to Lynford with her three unmarried daughters. It was the start of the ménage-à-trois.

  Yolande was eager that Edward’s friend Richard Wallace, who had moved to London after the Commune, should join them in Norfolk for a few days’ shooting during their first winter together. Edward passed on her invitations and Wallace wrote several non-committal replies. In November, he had ‘a great deal of business on hand which will require my presence in town [but] I shall certainly avail myself of her offer to run down some other time and spend a few days with her quietly’. In January 1872, referring to the dog which had accompanied him on the streets of Paris, he was still ‘overwhelmed with business … We always intend profiting from Mrs Lyne Stephens’s kind invitation and when we do, Swipe shall accompany us and will, I hope, devour all the cats, rats and mice, but spare the poodles.’

  In February, Yolande and the Claremonts moved to Roehampton, where the ménage-à-trois took the residents by surprise. Although most of them had never seen Yolande, they took a jaundiced view of Edward’s motives. According to Constance Smith, who lived nearby:

  General Claremont … made himself so indispensable to her that he obtained the management of her property; and with his wife and children became permanent members of her family, and took up his abode wherever she was. He was not a man of good character, and his unhappy wife, who was an excellent person, disliked and resented the dependent position bitterly. She had, however, to submit, and we used to see her Sunday after Sunday in Roehampton church with her handsome daughters.1

  In April, they moved to the Hôtel Molé in Paris, where Edward employed men to rebuild the fences and plant trees in the garden to replace those which had been cut down and burnt during the siege. He employed builders to restore the roof which had been damaged by shells during the battle to reclaim the city from the Commune.

  Every year, the ménage-à-trois would follow the same routine: the shooting season in Lynford, the spring and early summer in Paris, the autumn and late winter in Roehampton. Edward made all the arrangements as Yolande’s carriage horses and her household of servants – Italian butler, French under-butler, chef and lady’s maid, English housekeeper, footmen, housemaids, coachman and grooms – moved from one house to another and crossed the Channel to and from Paris.

  He took charge of her administrative and financial affairs, managed her properties, kept detailed accounts, and dealt with the household servants and ground staff. It was a very different life to the fifteen years he had spent as military attaché in Paris and involved the loss of many of his friends in the military with whom he could no longer converse on equal terms.

  He had an opportunity to see his French friends again in January 1873 when the final act of the Second Empire was played out on English soil. After the war, Louis-Napoleon had joined his wife in England. A friend lent them a small stately home in Chislehurst and Edward visited them there in the spring of 1872. The emperor’s health continued to decline and, when he died the following January, his funeral was an extraordinary event for a small town in Kent. ‘It would be far easier,’ wrote The Times:

  to give a list of the celebrated men of the Second Empire now living who were not to be found [at the funeral] than of those who were. The Imperial household, in all the magnificence of exalted rank … was restored to the full strength at which it stood before the war, not one member, we were assured, being absent. Former ministers, ambassadors, councillors of state, and deputies might be counted by the dozens … Meantime the crowds outside the gates had been growing until the half-mile of road between the lodge and the chapel was thickly lined on either side … there were Frenchmen at every part of the road, and such a gathering of one foreign nation there has probably never been seen in England since William the Norman brought over his barons and their following.2

  The funeral service was held in the Catholic chapel in Chislehurst, with an estimated 20,000 people lining the streets to watch the cortège pass by. A large number of French army officers were present, including Marshal Canrobert who had twice praised Edward’s conduct during the Crimean War. ‘Marshal Canrobert is ill and ought not to have travelled,’ commented The Times, ‘yet he is here.’

  Edward also made the journey to Chislehurst to pay his last respects to Louis-Napoleon and renew his acquaintance with Marshal Canrobert, General Trochu and other friends in the French military. He was not Yolande’s only lover to attend the funeral. After the death of his American wife, Félix de La Valette had married a daughter of the Comte de Flahaut. They crossed the Channel for the occasion and the new Marquise de La Valette played her part at the funeral as ‘a lady of the Empress’s household’.

  The Second Empire had fallen. There was no more royalty in France, no more glittering court balls at the Tuileries, but life had returned to the streets and rebuilding work was well underway. During their stays in Paris in the spring and summer, Yolande and Edward attended performances in the Salle le Peletier. As they watched the new generation of ballerinas, Yolande – now sixty years old – was overheard to murmur ‘how shocking’ at the amount of leg displayed on stage.

  The wood-and-plaster building, the scene of so many of her triumphs as a dancer, burnt to the ground on the night of 28 October 1873. A new opera house was already under construction, ordered by Louis-Napoleon after a failed assassination attempt outside the Salle le Peletier in 1858. Realising that the narrow Rue le Peletier presented an opportunity to potential assassins, he instructed the architect Charles Garnier to design a more opulent theatre in a more open location.

  The structure of the new building was complete by the time of the Franco-Prussian war, when it was used as a hospital and ammunition store. Work resumed a few months after the defeat of the Commune and the grandiose Palais Garnier opened its doors in January 1875, about the time Edward advised Yolande to give up the Hôtel Molé. It was too large a house to manage during the many months of the year that the ménage-à-trois was in England.

  The Hôtel Molé was sold on 26 June 1875 to the politician Baron Gérard. In its place, Yolande rented a first-floor apartment at 122 Avenue des Champs-Élysées, an eighteenth-century mansion built around a central courtyard, which occupied a corner plot between the Champs-Élysées, the Rue Balzac and the Rue Lord Byron. The rooms in the apartment led into one another around the courtyard and Yolande furnished them with the fine furniture and old master paintings from the Hôtel Molé.

  The first eight years of the ménage-à-trois saw the marriages of four of Edward’s children. The first was in June 1872 when his second son was married in St George’s, Hanover Square. This was followed by his three daughters all marrying army captains: Charlotte to Cecil Thorold in September 1875; Emily to Fletcher Littledale in June 1878; and Olivia to the unfortunately named Algernon Bastard in September 1879. These marriages took place in St Mary’s, Bryanston Square, the parish church for Gloucester Street.

  Edward was now known as ‘the General’, even by his wife and children, and Yolande insisted
on being called ‘Madame’. Jealous of their youth, she showed little interest in the Claremont daughters. Of the three sons, George was a captain in the army, serving in the West Indies; Edward (Teddy) was in the navy, a lieutenant on HMS Duke of Wellington, the flagship of the Port Admiral in Portsmouth; and Henry (Harry) had left England in the summer of 1871 to join a cousin who owned a coffee plantation in Ceylon.

  Only Teddy was in England during the early years of the ménage-à-trois. With an ability to charm, he became Yolande’s favourite among the Claremont children; when he married in 1872, she gave him a settlement of £10,000 (£1 million).

  Apart from Teddy and his sisters, no one visited Yolande in Roehampton. Life was more sociable in Lynford when Edward invited his friends to join him for shooting parties and Christmas was always celebrated in the hall. Edward’s daughters brought their spouses and Yolande invited her neighbours and tenants to evenings of music and amateur theatricals.

  Teddy retired from the navy in 1875. In the same year, Harry returned on leave from Ceylon and joined the family for Christmas. The two brothers performed in the amateur theatricals on 27 December in a farce titled The Area Belle. According to a local newspaper, ‘Mr E. Claremont sustained with marked effect the character of Tosser, Mr H. Claremont appeared as Walker Chalks’, and their future brother-in-law, Algernon Bastard, ‘played the part of Pitcher with much ability and created frequent roars of laughter’.

  The following year, Edward was appointed a trustee of the Lyne Stephens estate in place of Sir Richard Williams-Bulkeley who had died the previous summer. His fellow trustee was the younger Sir John Lubbock (whose father died in 1865), while the legal management was in the hands of Horace Pym, a young lawyer who had entered into partnership with the elderly Meaburn Tatham in 1870.

  Horace Pym was a big man with ‘an ebullient personality’ and a gift ‘for friendship and infectious sociability … Invited to a party in the evening, he often appeared in the office next day, rubbing his hands, with a new job in his pocket.’ He was always available to his wealthier clients and ‘was once reputed to have sprung up from a dinner table and hurried away without hesitation when word came that a client required his help’. Aware of the opportunity offered by his legal management of the Lyne Stephens estate, he set out to flatter Yolande, making many visits to Grove House and Lynford Hall to discuss matters of detail.

  The government had now repented of its treatment of Edward Claremont, of using him as a scapegoat for the failures of the British Embassy during the Siege of Paris. In March 1877, he was given an award for distinguished or meritorious service. Seven months later, he was promoted to the rank of lieutenant-general, an honorary rank because he was no longer serving in the army or the diplomatic service. This was, perhaps, some recompense for the ignominious end to his career.

  After his service in the Crimea and as military attaché in Paris, he might have expected greater honours, probably a knighthood. He had, effectively, given up the prospect of such honours for Yolande, her money and her power of weeping. He was living in luxury, he was waited on by an army of servants, but he was also bound to a woman who was becoming more imperious and demanding as the years went by.

  His failure to respond to the order from the Foreign Office in January 1871, his inability to stand up to Yolande when she begged him to stay in Lynford Hall, led inexorably to his decision to live with her in the ménage-à-trois, a decision made when he was in distress and not thinking clearly.

  Nineteen years after making this decision, he wrote a letter to his sons, a letter which he attached to his will to be read after his death. It included these words: ‘God knows I have plenty of faults and require mercy. I have often swerved from the path of duty – take my word for it, it does not answer even in this world. I have always suffered for it and always regretted it.’

  17

  MADAME AND THE GENERAL

  I know how ghastly it is when no one else is here and how very uncertain the tempers are.

  Harry Claremont, Lynford Hall, 13 November 1881

  Regret is not an emotion that Yolande would have recognised at this stage of her life. She was just happy to have Edward with her, looking after her affairs and constantly by her side. At the same time, she was almost totally indifferent to his family. Fanny she effectively ignored and, with the exception of Teddy, she was ungenerous to his children. The daughters received no marriage settlements; George, abroad with his regiment, formed no part of her life; and she saw little of Harry before he returned from Ceylon towards the end of 1880.

  Harry had intended to run a coffee plantation but his arrival in Ceylon in 1871 coincided with an outbreak of coffee-leaf rust which devastated every plantation on the island. Several planters converted their estates to tea production, which expanded dramatically during the 1870s and became profitable at the end of the decade, just as Harry decided to leave the colony. He returned to London and, on 20 June 1881, he wrote to a Mr and Mrs Walker in Eastbourne:

  I write to tell you that I have asked your daughter to be my wife. I have known her only ten days it is true, but I love her dearly. I did not mean to let her know what my feelings were towards her just yet, but somehow I couldn’t help myself … I unfortunately have very little to offer her. What I have is all invested in Ceylon and I regret to say that investments there are not what they once were. I have enough however to make her comfortable and I think I can make her happy, at any rate I will do my best … Please forgive me for trying to rush you. I can’t help it.

  Katherine Walker’s parents were unenthusiastic about Harry’s lack of prospects. ‘I can quite understand your desire that we should wait for a time,’ he wrote again on 23 June. ‘I hope to get the promise of something to do shortly and then should ask you again to entrust your daughter to my care.’

  In July, Yolande invited Katherine (Kitty) to stay in Grove House, where she could meet her future father-in-law. The visit was not a success. Edward’s behaviour was, according to Harry:

  most disagreeable … he did not see how we were to be married and thought that long engagements were such a mistake. He thought that I should never marry unless it was for money and that he did not wish me to have to go through all the bothers that he himself had … He was so put out at the whole affair that he could not be at all himself.

  Edward was feeling trapped. It was his financial ‘bothers’ which had led him to become dependent on Yolande and his irrational anger at Harry’s proposed marriage is a clue to his state of mind. He took four months to calm down before he met Kitty again in Lynford Hall.

  ‘I am glad to hear that you will be asked here,’ Harry wrote from Lynford on 13 November. ‘I hope you will enjoy your visit more than I am afraid you did the Roehampton one. I hope everything will come right, but you must have a little patience.’ He would understand if Kitty chose not to come because the men would be out all day shooting and she would be left alone in the house with Yolande and Fanny Claremont: ‘I know how ghastly it is when no one else is here and how very uncertain the tempers are.’ He was, he wrote, ‘very bored by it all’.

  Harry may have been bored at Lynford, but he was learning to pay attention to Yolande, to flatter her as his father did. She had given Teddy a marriage settlement of £10,000 and he was hoping she might do the same for him. The offer was not forthcoming, although Yolande did offer an alternative. In February, a telegram addressed to Kitty arrived in Eastbourne: ‘Mrs L.S. regular brick. Makes allowance four hundred a year. Just been told. Can’t keep it in. Harry.’

  This represents about £44,000 a year in today’s money, enough for the Walkers to agree to their daughter’s marriage. Edward, too, came round to the idea. He wrote to Kitty on 2 March:

  I am credibly informed that you have made up your minds to disregard my advice and have determined to be very foolish and very imprudent! You know I must have my little joke, but seriously I hope to behave very well in future and do all I can to conduce to your happiness.

  The ma
rriage took place in St Peter’s church, Eaton Square, on 1 June 1882. Fanny attended the ceremony, but Edward and Yolande were in Paris. The excuse for not returning to London was Edward’s health. ‘I am not at all the thing,’ he explained to Kitty, ‘and see no chance of being able to go over to England and being present at your marriage.’ Yolande wrote too:

  I am very sorry that circumstances have made it impossible for me to go back to England before the end of June. It will be a great privation but my sincere and affectionate wishes will accompany you at the foot of the altar … The General, I am happy to say, is getting alright. He is obliged to take much care of himself, the weather is so very treacherous just at present.

  Harry and Kitty spent a few days in the West Cliff Hotel in Folkestone before crossing the Channel to spend their honeymoon in Yolande’s apartment in the Champs-Élysées. ‘We arrived in Paris yesterday,’ Kitty wrote to her mother on 11 June:

  Mrs Lyne Stephens and the General came to meet us in the carriage and were very cordial and nice. This apartment is too lovely. The rooms are all a dream, all opening out of each other, full of curios in the shape of china, pictures, tapestry, etc. My room is very pretty, the curtains of copper coloured brocade and pale blue walls … The General is going to take places for the opera and the theatres, and Mrs Lyne Stephens says she has a lot of jewels for me to choose from.

  When Harry’s first child was born in London eleven months later, Yolande wrote to Kitty in her spiky, forward-slanting handwriting:

  I can understand your great happiness and joy at being a mother. I can well imagine what you feel. Many years of my life were passed in expectations and as much in regrets, till I became quite resigned to the will of God, thinking that whatever happens to me is done for my own good. Grandpapa seems very pleased with Miss Claremont and, as for myself, it will be so jolly to hug and kiss her. I hope she will let me do so without crying … Kiss baby for me and tell her that she must love me a little.