Ada visited her mother in Leicestershire at the beginning of 1843, while her husband travelled to Germany, seemingly to glean new architectural ideas for the ongoing transformation of East Horsley Place into Horsley Towers, his own magnificently idiosyncratic take on a Bavarian schloss.
In 1843, the cost of William Lovelace’s Surrey fantasia (fifteen woodland bridges, new access roads, a lake, cloisters, a chapel, a courtyard, a tower and a gigantic hall formed only a portion of the grand project) was mounting by the minute.
Lavishing money on his building projects, William remained tight-fisted with his wife. Anna Jameson, writing to the Noels in Dresden in January 1843, chattily confided that Lady Byron wished her extravagant son-in-law would augment a £300 a year allowance that scarcely enabled Ada to pay the wages for Suzette, her new French maid. (Ada would soon solve the problem by eschewing maids altogether.) But it was Annabella herself who had set the level of Ada’s allowance. Why, seeing Ada in need, did her mother not intervene?
The answer may have lain in Lady Byron’s growing awareness of her son-in-law’s chief weakness: a fierce family pride that, with time, would encase him like a suit of armour. William Lovelace was already smarting from the news that the country would not welcome his services as secretary of state. (He had put his name forward in 1840.) A humbled Crow, it is fair to guess, would have brooked no Hennish interference. Annabella wanted no scenes, but Ada’s lack of money, combined with her husband’s flair for spending it, would become increasingly problematic as the decade wore on.
It was not money worries but the increasingly bizarre behaviour of Medora Leigh, out in France, that offered the severest challenge to Ada’s concentration as she worked to complete her seven notes to Menabrea’s Memoir. Passionately loyal to her mother and furious at the way that Lady Byron’s generosity had been abused, Ada found it impossible to remain detached during the final stages of her mother’s ill-judged attempt to offer maternal care to an increasingly aggressive young woman.
By March 1843, word had reached London that Medora was seeking legal support for her rights as Lady Byron’s adopted daughter from Pierre Berryer, one of France’s foremost lawyers. Delegated to act as Annabella’s representatives, Selina Doyle and her sister Adelaide reported from their own Paris lodgings that Miss Leigh was living at an expensive hotel on Place Vendôme, claiming that it befitted her rank. She had taken the story of how she had been brutally cast aside by Lady Byron to the ear of a sympathetic Henry Bulwer (brother of the more famous novelist) at the British embassy.
It was at this point that Ada revealed her own pent-up feelings. Again and again, in a letter scrawled across many tightly written pages, ‘Elizabeth’ (Medora no longer) was invited to remember the poverty from which she had been rescued by ‘my mother . . . She, on whom of all people in the world you have the least natural claim’. Had Miss Leigh forgotten all that she owed to them? ‘Remember what you were at Paris – grateful for any countenance from me. You had scarcely dared to hope it . . .’
You have but one course to pursue – submission to your benefactress; and if you have one spark of good feeling or of prudence, you will at once hasten to acknowledge your rash and ungrateful conduct and regret for it.
Ada’s letter was of little help in resolving an increasingly rancorous dispute, but by April, out in Paris, a new avenue of possibility had opened. Selina Doyle had heard Victor Beaurepaire speaking in a curious way about Miss Leigh. Commenting upon one of her rare moments of tranquillity, he remarked that it made her easier to handle. (‘Elle est plus tranquille aujourd’hui et prête a faire tout ce qu’on veut.’)
Was Medora perhaps mad? The juvenile educationalist Louisa Barwell, requested by Lady Byron to set down her recollections of a memorably uneasy stay at Moore Place in 1842, readily confirmed that Miss Leigh had appeared to her to be deranged. (‘I think I then told you that I believed her reason was not sound, and whenever I have since reflected upon her conduct, I have always come to the same conclusion, that she was insane – and this has been in my own mind a melancholy excuse for all the sad & distressing conduct I then witnessed.’)
On 24 April, Annabella despatched her old friend Dr King to Paris with a letter of ultimatum. Either Medora could accept Lady Byron’s orders, or she could face being completely cut off. Seeing what might be coming her way – Dr King had recently opened a genteel asylum in Brighton – Medora turned upon her visitor. An offer (one that Lady Byron had not authorised Dr King to make) to increase her allowance from £150 to £300 – the same sum that was annually paid to Ada by her husband – was scornfully rejected. Reviewing the visit in her hand-scrawled memoir, Medora recorded that the meek and somewhat bewitched Dr King had been both intimidating and abusive.
Fixed at the forefront of Medora’s mind was the fact that the £3,000 deed yielded up in 1842 by Mrs Leigh now belonged by rights to herself. It seemed to her that Lady Byron, who had lodged the document with her own solicitors precisely in order to prevent Medora from cashing it in, had actually stolen her property. (That the £3,000 gift could only be validated by Lady Byron’s death was not the kind of detail to interest a destitute young woman who believed that the world had wronged her.)
It was the quest for the deed – and further funding – that brought Nathalie Beaurepaire, swiftly followed by Medora, little Marie and a kindly admirer called Captain Barrallier, back into Ada’s life.
By June 1843, when Medora arrived in England on the arm of her new chevalier (she did have a perfect genius for finding them), Ada had reached the final stages of writing up her notes to Menabrea’s article. It was that month in which she decided to make use of the Bernoulli numbers to demonstrate the superiority of the Analytical Engine over all earlier designs. By the beginning of July, Ada was ready for Lovelace to ink in the pencilled numbers on her laboriously calculated chart.
Sadly, none of the correspondence between Babbage and his interpreter has survived from the earlier months of Ada’s endeavours. By June, however, an agreeably collegiate relationship had been established: it was one that entitled Ada to describe herself to Robert Noel, on 9 August, as ‘a completely professional person’. Dates, especially on Ada’s side, frequently went by the board as she dashed off a flood of requests, reproaches, entreaties and teasing messages to Babbage. Written on tiny sheets of paper, they were – on at least one occasion – carried to the local railway station by Ada herself, running along as fast as she could go. At other times, they were conveyed to Dorset Street by one of the smartly liveried footmen who, as Ada had once told De Morgan when something went awry at St James’s Square, must get used to her own special way of doing things, if they wished to please . . .
Pleasing Ada, in the summer of 1843, meant carrying her latest missive from St James’s Square to Marylebone, waiting for Babbage to write out his response and then hastening back through the dusk to a pale, reed-thin and often breathless Ada, pondering the challenging details of one of her charts or hunched over her latest tussles with that difficult trigonometrical Note E.
Determination is the quality that shines through all of Ada’s endeavours. ‘I will have it well, & fully done; or not at all,’ she instructed Babbage on 26 June; a few days later, she was ready to boast that her husband, an admiring observer of her tables and diagrams, was ‘quite enchanted with the beauty & symmetry that they displayed’. Flirtatiously, she wrote of herself as ‘a fairy’ and made fun of her chivalrous courtship by Frederick Knight,* the Lovelaces’ closest neighbouring landowner at Ashley Combe. ‘I am anything but My Ladyship to him,’ she teased before scolding Babbage for altering her notes and revisions when (‘poor little Fairy’) she was working ‘like the Devil on his behalf’. ‘I must beg you not,’ she rebuked him on 1 August, as she finalised Note B. And, in the same letter: ‘I wish you were as accurate, as much to be relied on, as I am myself.’ Her criticisms were not groundless: on one occasion, Babbage carelessly deleted an entire paragraph of her work. ‘I suppose I must set to work to wri
te something better, if I can, as a substitute,’ Ada sighed. ‘However, I should be decidedly inclined to swear at you, I will allow.’
Babbage’s mistake was not the only cause for curses in the late summer of 1843: ‘. . . the fact is I am plagued out of my life just now,’ Ada admitted to him on 19 July. Lovelace was fretting about the cost of his new building projects; more to the point, the unpaid Beaurepaires were growing increasingly truculent. To send a letter to Annabella emblazoned, across its envelope, ‘Lady Byron – Femme de mauvaise foi’ was bad enough, but now Nathalie had carried her tale of woe to the French embassy in London, where Ada was blamed for having originally engaged the couple in Paris under false pretences. (Medora’s status as an unmarried mother, which had been concealed by Ada and Lady Byron, would have caused any high-grade servants to reject that work as prejudicial to their own reputation.) Sighing, Ada laid aside her ‘Notes’ to pay a visit of her own to the Comtesse St Aulaire, the ambassador’s friendly wife. Lady Byron, angry and alarmed at the growing prospect of a public scandal, wanted a full report.
Nathalie had proved to be a compelling storyteller. Madame St Aulaire had apparently heard everything to do with Medora, and, alas, ‘everything else too . . .’ Naturally, the ambassador’s wife (who would become a close friend of Ada’s) was filled with ‘indignation and horror’, but not enough to stop her from listening to an hour’s worth of delightfully shocking tales. It was with some difficulty that Ada obtained her hostess’s reluctant promise of total discretion.
Written on 25 July, Ada’s long letter to Lady Byron allows us to see how delicately she had to juggle the different aspects of her life. First, she gave her mother a full and detailed account of the interview with the ambassador’s wife. Only after sympathising with the toll that ‘this horrible affair’ must be taking upon Lady Byron’s delicate health, did Ada admit that she herself was now suffering from acute and almost daily pain.
Sir Charles Locock, known as ‘The Great Deliverer’ for his services to the Queen, had been devoted to Ada ever since he attended her for the birth of her first child. Lady Lovelace’s medical symptoms baffled him. As soon as he thought he had found the answer, another variant emerged. Wanly, she joked to her mother about the ‘amusement in being so curious a riddle’; heroically, she accepted that no imminent relief from suffering was in sight. Locock had even told her that her mysterious ailments might be beyond cure. That fatalistic edict, offered when Ada was only twenty-seven and at what felt like just the beginning of her professional life, was hard to accept. It was entirely typical of Ada to turn a sentence of permanent invalidism into a chance for new opportunities. Why should not pain be connected to her intellectual progress? What if she looked upon it as a condition of – rather than an impediment to – ‘all that wonderful & available mental power which I see grounds to believe I am acquiring . . .’?
I will willingly bear anything if this be so. What would be to me dreadful, would be mind & activity impeded by health. Give me powers with pain a million times over, rather than ease with even talents (if not of the highest order).
It is easy to mock the extravagance of Ada’s valiant declarations – she wrote in this same letter of 25 July about ‘the great laboratory of my brain’ and in another that she dashed off earlier in the same month to Babbage, about the ‘almost awful energy & power [that] lie yet undevelopped [sic] in that wiry little system of mine’. She boasted, too, in that same letter to Babbage of 4 July, about how, within a decade, ‘the Devil’s in it if I haven’t sucked out some of the life-blood from the mysteries of this universe, in a way that no purely mortal lips or brains could do’.
Ada had been advised by Locock to use prescribed measures of both laudanum and claret to assuage her sufferings, but the clarity of her scientific writing shows how little impact that remedy had upon her intellectual powers, even when she spoke of drinking three glasses of wine for supper. Few people, not even a mother who had no taste for fanciful hyperbole, mocked Ada during her lifetime for her ambitious imaginings. Perhaps, knowing Lady Lovelace at first-hand, her friends and family understood – far better than we through the exalted medium of her letters – how much a young woman who was not yet thirty needed to create the image of herself as an indestructible and almost superhuman force. Armed with that prodigious ideal, Ada could combat the recurrent periods of intense physical pain that assailed her with ever increasing ferocity.
The almost daily shunting to and fro of Ada’s notes and Babbage’s revisions was still in play at the beginning of August, the month in which Richard Taylor’s volume was due to be printed. Reading over her notes once again, Ada reported to Babbage that she was ‘quite thunderstruck at the power of the writing’. It pleased her especially that there was no sense of the author’s gender. She was in agreement with her husband that each of the notes should carry the initials ‘AAL’, simply by way of an identity to connect to any future work. Ada, in 1843, had no doubt that there would be plenty of that.
Writing to her mother in an undated letter during this same summer, Ada stressed the relief that mathematical work had offered as an escape from ‘the tortuous & nefarious documents & affairs which have recently so painfully engaged much of our energy & attention’. The reference was to the fact that Medora, having finally obtained the deed, was still causing trouble. John Hobhouse made astonished note in his diary for 15 August that a young woman called Miss Leigh had contacted him, claiming to be Byron’s daughter and asking for money. (‘Can it be the daughter who eloped with Trevanion who married her sister?’ Hobhouse asked himself, indicating by his marked emphasis that he knew exactly what the rumour was.) Even Augusta herself was approached (‘I once more remind you that I am your child’), but without success, since Mrs Leigh had nothing left to give. Possibly, Annabella or Ada did help out. Somebody other than Barraillier must have provided the funds that kept Medora and Marie fed and sheltered in London until May 1844, when Medora finally managed to cash in the deed and returned to France.*
Back in August 1843, a proud Ada finally presented Lady Byron with the literary child she called her ‘firstborn’. Not aspiring to be either so eloquent or brilliant as his grandfather, he was nevertheless, so Ada believed, worthy of pride. At the very least, he bore testimony to ‘a most indomitable industry . . .’ A bold prediction followed. ‘He will make an excellent head of (I hope) a large family of brothers & sisters . . .’
Annabella could have asked for nothing more. It was all she had wished for. ‘Mother of Ada’, she cooed. Had Ada not demonstrated by her work that this maternal title might be ‘as good a passport to posterity (if I am to have one) as “the wife of Byron” ’.
It was just as the end of Ada’s intellectual labours came into sight that a new problem had arisen. The primary purpose of publishing her translation and the added notes had been to revive public interest in Babbage’s new invention and to secure enough of an investment for it to be built. It was completely without warning, at the beginning of August, that Babbage produced a preface of his own and declared his wish for it to be integrated with Ada’s article.
This was appalling news. No master of diplomacy, Babbage had seized upon the excuse of writing a preface – one which both Ada and the publisher read with growing dismay – to harangue the British government for having let him down. Such a public display of aggression threatened to undo all the benefits of Ada’s endeavours. Asked to reconsider, Babbage lost his temper. He would do no such thing. If Lady Lovelace didn’t like his preface, then Babbage would publish it with Taylor, while she, having requested the publisher to release her, could take herself and her precious work elsewhere.
Towards Babbage, Ada remained admirably calm and rational. Writing to her mother about him from St James’s Square on 8 August, she described herself as harrassed and perplexed. ‘We are in fact at issue,’ Ada admitted, adding that she had reached the conclusion that their friend was ‘one of the most impracticable, selfish, & intemperate persons one can have to do
with’. A new and ‘very frightful’ crisis in her health could be directly attributed to the misery of being torn in two directions by Babbage and by the editors, while striving to keep the peace.
Two days earlier, Ada had gone so far as to inform Mr Babbage that his current course of action was ‘suicidal’. By the middle of the month, she had taken advice from William and her staunch supporter, Charles Wheatstone. Back at Ockham, Ada composed a fourteen-page letter (it was written on uncharacteristically large sheets, almost as if she meant to convey the impression of a legal document) to her recalcitrant colleague.
The degree of Wheatstone’s involvement remains unclear, but it seems likely that he supported the intriguing proposal that Ada now presented, with her husband’s approval. The letter began with flattery, reminding the touchy inventor that Ada’s only wish was to see Babbage’s genius given its due. On the matter of publication, however, she stood firm; there would be no withdrawal.
It was only after this that Ada proceeded to the plan that had perhaps been in the minds of herself, Lovelace and Wheatstone all along. How would Babbage feel about allowing Lovelace and herself to take over the project? Babbage could appoint his own referees, but – in return for allowing his friends to conduct the business of getting the Engine built – he must promise to place himself at Ada’s disposal. Carelessness would not be tolerated: ‘& can you promise not to slur & hurry things over; or to mislay, & allow confusion & mistakes to enter into documents & etc.?’ While he, Babbage, would naturally retain complete control of the machine’s design, all else would be arranged by his patrons. What did he think?
In Byron's Wake Page 29
