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Gounod was nineteen years older than Georgina and may have worried that the slim good looks of his youthful self had fled forever. But if he had anxiety on that score, it was unfounded. He was exactly the kind of man Georgina had been looking for in one guise or another since childhood—an older, more mature figure with a knowledge of the world, a practicality and assurance she need not try to match. Gounod would provide the worldliness and she the romantic idealism. She soon discovered things about him that surprised her by the way they chimed deliciously with her own personality. Gounod was an artist, but he was also a troubled man. He was more like his caricature than he cared to admit. He had, she saw, his mystical, incoherent side, his sense of the unutterable. He had a haplessness and childlike innocence when it came to subjects other than Wagner, whose music he admired—for example, such mundane matters as contracts and royalties, or more tellingly marriage and children. He had secrets, emotional luggage he carried with him that he hinted would make her hair stand on end, and was sentimental to a fault. Of course it mattered to Georgina that he was famous, and he did not blanch when she applied the term “genius” to his musical talent. His calm acceptance of her adulation was proof in itself of genius. But maybe his greatest attraction to Georgina was that, like her, he longed to be loved. It did not matter that he was loved, that his loyal wife loved him. The love he wanted was unspecific and not even particularly sexual. She recognized that in him straightaway. This great man was made just like her. His heart was bleeding and his mind misunderstood. As to the rest of him, his gifts and personality, there was an obvious way of describing his allure. Charles Gounod was everything that Harry Weldon was not.

The starting point for their relationship was very flattering. A few days after their first meeting, he called at St. James’s Hall, where she was rehearsing, and overheard her singing Mendelssohn’s “Hear My Prayer.” His admiration for her voice was immediate and unfeigned. His good opinion was worth having. Gounod had known Pauline Viardot when he was Georgina’s age, and Viardot was still counted as one of the greatest operatic sopranos of the century. For her he had written Sapho and, the gossip ran, shared her favors with her weak and complaisant husband and the unlikely third party Ivan Turgenev. That was one of his murky secrets. Like Gounod, Viardot had fled the war and was living at Devonshire Place, off the Marylebone Road. Turgenev, who had secretly helped to fund her, had rooms a few streets away. (He had brought back from the war a characteristic Turgenevian story. The distant shelling of Strasbourg had brought down the chimney stack of the villa in which he was staying. He had noticed this chimney when he first took up the let of the property and mentioned it to the architect, who happened to be French. “That stack, m’sieu, is as strong as France itself,” the man replied.)

In more recent years Gounod had worked with the equally illustrious Marie Carvalho, who had created the part of Marguerite in Faust. Gounod might be two-faced about many things, but a professional tribute from him was not likely to be dishonest. Having heard Georgina sing, he said at once, “I was struck by the purity of her voice, by the sureness of her technique and the noble simplicity of her voice, and I was able to prove to myself that Benedict had not been exaggerating when he spoke to me about her remarkable talent as a singer.” It was, he added in a memorable phrase, “un voix des deux sexes.”

This is a very startling commendation, and we suddenly see her exactly as she saw herself, but through the eyes and ears of another. Gounod was without question a colossal flirt, but he was also a complete professional, beside whom Fred Clay was merely a Treasury clerk with an imperial beard and modest musical accomplishments. Gounod was the real article. Many people—Liszt was one of them—believed him to be the supreme composer of his generation. There is dispassion in his estimate of Georgina’s voice: about things like this, we would like to believe, artists do not lie. They may lie about money or love, but not this, not art. At the time he first heard her sing, he had no way of knowing who she was and to what use she had put these talents.

She met him, in fact, at a disastrous moment. After the humiliation of the Dudley House concert, she had undertaken a debut tour of Wales and Anglesey with Gwendolyn Jones—“Beauty and the Beast,” as she put it, casting herself in the role of Beauty. It had not been a success. The halls they booked were drafty and unwelcoming, audiences were sparse, and local agents were nowhere near as scrupulous in accounting for the box office as she would have liked. Not everybody in North Wales wanted to go out on a cold and blowy night to hear two unknowns sing. Contrariwise, at the end of the tour where there was at last a decent audience, Arthur Deacon, the accompanist, was so annoyed at the incessant chatter during the recital that he closed the piano lid and left the stage. He did much better than that even. Before the concert ended, he had left the hall and the town in which it was located.

Back in Denbighshire, Mrs. Jones had begun to revise her estimate of Mrs. Weldon’s plans. The tour had been an artistic and financial failure, and Tavistock House, the seat of the National Academy (for that was how it was being puffed now), was still no more than Georgina’s private residence and a rackety one at that. Gwen was ill. In fact, she was dying. Disgusted, Mrs. Jones withdrew her remaining daughters a year later.

The day after meeting Gounod for the second time, Georgina called on him and asked him for an engagement to sing at a charity concert being got up for the victims of the Siege. He asked her to stay for tea. Together they sat down and sang the entire score of Faust. According to Georgina, Anna Gounod and old Mrs. Zimmermann were entranced—“it was a perfect shower of tears and compliments”—and both ladies told her she was “born for Gounod.” He himself declared that she was the Pauline for which he had been searching in his efforts to complete his opera Polyeucte. The meeting was a small triumph. Nobody of comparable musical rank had endorsed her talent with such enthusiasm. A real musical oracle had spoken, and she had jumped from nothing to everything in the space of a single afternoon.

That night in Tavistock House there was an opportunity for a clearer, calmer appraisal. In purely personal terms his praise had been intoxicating, but if she was thinking as a businesswoman, a fellow professional—which is what she had after all chosen to be—it was not the most helpful outcome of the encounter. There was more to come. What she needed from Gounod was some endorsement of her plans in the here and now—her academy in the making. The slightest assistance in this area would be worth a ton of publicity in any other form. Perhaps anyone other than Georgina would have seized on this aspect of their meeting and tried to think up ways of exploiting it. There was not the slightest doubt that he found her physically desirable and that some of his warmer exclamations were founded on that. But he was a great composer, and a golden opportunity was staring her in the face. For the time that he was in London, Gounod could make a huge material difference to her plans. It was for her to make of it what she would.

George Moore remarked of Gounod that he was “a base soul who went about pouring a kind of bath water melody down the back of every woman he met.” This was exactly the attention Georgina wanted, and it replaced common sense. The academy was completely neglected as they began a flirtation which, while it still had a musical content, soon extended to looks and sighs, letters, and on his side prayers. The experience was not unlike living inside a Gounod song. In the beginning she may not have been able to control the course of events as well as she would have liked. He was hardworking, he was impetuous and temperamental as many artistically gifted men are, but he was also venal in a quite astonishing way. Georgina wanted a hero. As Mme Gounod could have told her from long experience, she was getting a little boy. The solution that occurred to Georgina was simple. She must reinvent him.

Gounod had already made settings to some well-known English poems and was mulling over a much larger work. It was to be an imposing allegorical commentary on the fate of his country, for which he himself would supply the text. His London publisher, Novello’s, arranged for the first performance to be heard in the newly completed Albert Hall on the occasion of the International Music Festival. It was an inspired piece of publicity. Immediately after the fall of Sedan, the Queen had heard with satisfaction a sermon preached to her, of which the text was from Isaiah: “Woe to the crown of pride, to the drunkards of Ephraim, whose glorious beauty is a fading flower.” But the Siege and the agony of the Commune swung the public mood toward pity for the French. When Georgina saw that what Gounod had written was on the theme of a martyred France, it was another cause for grateful tears. She soon described him, with typical exaggeration, as “the Messiah of the Gospel of New Music.” This sounds foolish in hindsight, but when on May 1 Gounod made his contribution to the international festival with an oratorio he entitled Gallia, the composer, who also conducted the performance, was cheered to the roof. The reception accorded him quite overshadowed Sullivan, whose On Shore and Sea premiered on the same night.

Gounod had been in England only eight months. As he walked off the podium, he must have calculated that there were new triumphs he might accomplish here to enhance his somewhat faltering muse. No one outside France had ever completely come to grips with Faust, and his fame with English audiences rested more on Roméo et Juliette. But now he had the royal plaudit for a very different kind of work. Away from the concert platform he had an outlet for his more personal musings. Putting it bluntly, he had someone who had never heard his stories before and so did not wince when he told them. Sitting in the audience, Georgina saw through tearstained eyes a man she had begun to consider “a god,” though one whose human attributes she more than anyone else in London had secret knowledge of.

Gounod was a tentative and uncertain dramatist in some of his operas, but he knew how to make an effect. A fortnight after the triumph of Gallia he burst into Tavistock House in a distraught state. In an impassioned speech to both Weldons he bared his soul. They struggled to understand him as he marched up and down their drawing room, talking a torrent. But it was all quite predictable and when at last it came out, quite banal. He could not stand to live with his wife any longer. After twenty years of marriage he had no alternative but to separate from her. His artistic life was being ruined. Exclamation marks spattered the carpet.

Anna Gounod was one of four daughters born to Pierre Zimmermann. In appearance she was thin, with a small head on a high neck. Not many of Gounod’s intimates liked her. Bizet detested her. Georgina (once she got the new lie of the land) thought her ugly—“a Japanese crockery dog . . . a little old brown woman”—and commented blithely, “She was odious, I confess; but I pitied her. Why had God made me so amiable and her so disagreeable?”

Part of the reason for Anna’s disposition was Gounod’s habitual philandering. He tended to fall in love with his younger admirers (it was said the younger the better), and there was a history of such brief liaisons, for the moment unknown to Georgina. In character these interludes were all more sentimental tosh than anything else: Gounod liked to exact devotion, not desire, and repaid it with long, liquid looks, whispered secrets, sighs. The lover in Gounod was a perpetual adolescent, and Anna could not help but notice an old pattern reestablishing itself. Her husband and Mrs. Weldon were becoming a mild scandal in both London and Paris, and it was time to go home.

The house in St.-Cloud had not survived, and though the last shot was not fired in Paris until May 25, the provisional government was in control, and a terrible vengeance was being wrought on the Communards. In the midst of all this, their old friend Auber, director of the Conservatoire, had died and the post was vacant. These were practical reasons not to dally in London, but there were also patriotic considerations. Were the Gounods to be counted cowards in the new Republic; or, worse still, traitors?

Gounod had opened his heart to the Weldons on May 16. Five days later Anna went back to France, taking her children with her. It says much for her courage and patriotism. A week or so later Mme Zimmermann followed. On June 19, on the first anniversary of Georgina’s arrival at Tavistock House, Gounod moved in, bringing with him all his possessions, several valises of music he had already written while in London, and the unfinished score to the opera Polyeucte.