6  

Georgina was delighted with Henry Littleton’s action. To her he was no more than a “tradesman,” an expression she had already used against Choudens, his French counterpart. She dismissed him breezily as “that little sweep.” She and her dear old man would go to court and wipe the floor with him.

Harry sensed trouble, all the more so after learning from his friends at the Garrick Club that the proprietor of Novello’s had engaged Sergeant Ballantine to act for him. Georgina scoffed at such naïveté—everybody knew lawyers were nothing but “curs.” Harry was not reassured and roused himself to an unusually dramatic act. The night before the trial he packed an overnight bag and left the house. This should have put Georgina at least on the qui vive, for generally speaking Harry was afraid of nothing and no one. She derided him to Gounod as fleeing the scene “with death in his soul,” as though he lacked the stomach for a fight. Harry knew what he was doing. What had hastened his departure was the knowledge of how much havoc was likely when Georgina went on the stand as a character witness, which she fully intended to do.

The sixty-year-old William Ballantine was among the bar’s most skillful cross-examiners. He was a well-known and bonhomous Garrick Club figure who liked to count its writer and journalist members as his closest friends. Littleton could not have chosen counsel more wisely. By engaging such an eminent and popular silk he signaled his intentions to all his other clients. Like the trial itself, retaining Ballantine was a piece of shrewd publicity. Novello’s headquarters in Berners Street rejoiced under the imposing title of the Sacred Music Warehouse, words blazoned across the building in Gothic lettering picked out in gold. Sacred Music must be above reproach and only the best engaged to defend its citadel. Once the case was won, as Littleton was sure it would be, he could rely on Ballantine’s bluff and gossipy nature to send the story around artistic London. There was no particular personal animus against Gounod in all this, though the composer had behaved ungraciously and with much ill will in his dealings with his publisher. It was business. Littleton was determined to stop Gounod dead in his tracks.

Though she came from a family background famous for threatening litigation, it was the first courtroom in which Georgina appeared. The case was heard before Mr. Justice Denman in the Court of Common Pleas. It was a jury trial, and from the first Gounod found proceedings hard to follow. He gave his evidence in halting English and seemed bemused by the unfamiliar legal process. After a few exchanges he asked for an interpreter, and one was agreed to between the parties. The facts of the case were painfully easy to establish—indeed at law the composer did not have a leg to stand on. Gounod mumbled and blustered like a stage Frenchman, sometimes employing his interpreter, sometimes striking out on little arias of his own. He made a very poor impression on the jury. At last Georgina was called to the stand. She describes her evidence before Ballantine at considerable length.

Ballantine wriggled like an eel, sniggered, pulled down his gown over one shoulder, put his leg on the bench, and said, “Now we are going to hear what this young lady has to say!”

I looked at him, the picture of serenity, and gently murmured: “I am not a young lady, Sergeant Ballantine.”

Ballantine looked at me—I do not think he had ever been so surprised in his life. Imagine a wild bull looking at a red rag for the first time! He then stooped over the desk and whispered to a solicitor sitting beneath us. The solicitor looked up. He nodded yes. I fancy Ballantine’s question was “Is that impudent hussy Mrs. Weldon?”

He gave a little sharp cough.

“You are Georgiana Weldon?”

I began to feel a certain pity and said, “Sergeant Ballantine, would you like to know my name?”

I said so in the same tone I would have used to a child crying for a toy. “My name is Georgina.”

The judge was beginning to smile, the jury to titter. I was so calm, so candid, so innocent . . .

There was more of this knockabout. Was her husband Captain Weldon? No, he was not. He was not? No, he was Mister Weldon. Ballantine showed her a copy of the Times and asked her if she recognized a newspaper article in it: she said she did not. The paper was returned to counsel and a section marked in blue pencil. She allowed that she did recognize the indicated passage as a letter.

I turned to the jury: “Gentlemen, they do not wish to hear what I have to say. Have you ever heard anything more ridiculous? Neither party know what they are talking about. Mr. Gounod has been most shamefully robbed by these publishers, by all the publishers . . .” I could have run on forever. I thought I was doing the usual, proper, sensible thing!

That was the problem. What the court would and would not allow under the rules of evidence was of no consequence to her. She had discovered her stage. In the end she was forced out of the witness box “amid a universal din.” Counsel on both sides were outraged—Ballantine, she says, shaking his fist at her as she left. According to her, Denman had tears of laughter running down his face. She, Mrs. Georgina Weldon, artist and lady, had ridden to the defense of the embattled French genius and musical messiah. It never crossed her mind that she had made a fool of herself. On the contrary, she had exposed the legal profession as incompetents.

There was only one small disappointment in such a day of triumph. Gounod lost the case, Denman awarding forty-shilling damages and £100 costs. The judgment was delicately nuanced: Gounod was guilty, justice had been done, and the size of the damages was a gentle indication to Littleton that honor had been satisfied. The publisher was quite content. There were ways and ways of getting satisfaction from the courts, and the learned judge had shown some shrewd calculation of the balance between guilt and ignominy. Gounod had been reproved at law, and that was an end to the matter.

Unfortunately, the parties who filed from the court reckoned without Georgina’s taste for moral indignation. She now hit on a brilliant idea: Gounod could refuse to pay costs and thus force Littleton to have him sent to prison. This was a way of perpetuating the quarrel and returning the moral victory to him. Without too much hesitation Gounod agreed, signing away what goods and assets he had to her as payment of a notional debt between them, so preventing them from being distrained by the court. They waited to see what would happen. The answer was not long in coming. Littleton was not so forgiving that he was prepared to make himself look ridiculous—he wanted his costs. Georgina was thrilled when the ruse worked. After a few weeks bailiffs did indeed visit the house and were turned away empty-handed. Newgate now beckoned—the old man would be made a martyr to the English law. Gounod assured her he was quite prepared to go through with it. Indeed, he claimed to be looking forward to imprisonment: “On the 28th of the month [July] I shall go into my convent. In prison I shall orchestrate the imprisonment of Polyeucte and my Mass of Guardian Angels.”

This absurd situation was unexpectedly resolved by a third party. At the last moment Hortense Zimmermann, Gounod’s mother-in-law, paid the money into court, probably as a consequence of anguished representations made by his more rational English friends.

Mrs. Brown was the woman who had harbored the Gounods in their first days of exile, and now she came down from Blackheath to roundly accuse Georgina to her face of bringing the composer’s name into disrepute. She had made a bad thing worse. Whatever the rights and wrongs of the case, it was never Littleton’s intention to see Gounod in jail, as the Lord Chief Justice himself had observed. Mrs. Brown remembered Gounod as a quiet and sometimes annoyingly pompous man, very jealous of his reputation. She was staggered to see what he had become, with his quasi-bohemian clothes and confected outrage. Nor did Mrs. Brown like the way Georgina spoke for him as his legal consultant and artistic helpmeet. When she looked around more closely at Tavistock House, Mrs. Brown was even further disturbed. Who on earth were all these noisy children, trashing the garden and running helter-skelter through the house? Gounod was sheepish about that but otherwise stubborn. He knew what he was doing. If he said so without completely wholehearted conviction, that was because every last word he spoke was monitored by the watchful and interfering Mrs. Weldon.

For her part, Georgina was mortified that the costs had been paid, doubly so that the money had come from what she saw as a tainted source—what she described as the Zimmermann clique. In a midnight conversation with a friend of Gounod’s named Franchesi, she revealed that she wanted to see the old man in jail. She explained why in very significant terms: “All the world would have known how Gounod was put in prison; all the world would have flocked to see him—the poor martyr! You think, perhaps, it is merit which attracts the public. Alas! I have learned quite differently; it is only absurdity and publicity which draw. Never mind what is advertised, people will speak of it everywhere, and they will be bamboozled into believing it necessary to existence.”

This was true for her, but not for Gounod. Though he was fractious and took offense easily, he had never done anything so nakedly stupid as this. Very late in life, he wrote an anodyne autobiography. One would be hard-pressed to get an idea of who he was from what he wrote—but the work does include this passage, about the need the public has for artistic heroes: “To be brief, our houses are not in the street any more; the street is in our houses. Our whole life is devoured by idlers, inquisitive folk, loungers who are bored with themselves, and even by reporters of all sorts, who force their way into our homes to inform the public not only as to our private conversation, but as to the colour of our dressing gown and the cut of our working jackets!”

Some of this is an embellishment of the old cliché that the artist stands above the fray. It also excuses Gounod from revealing anything about himself of even a modest nature. The words were written at a time when the composer had become a national monument. By now his musical interests had dwindled to undemanding and unimportant church music. It amused him to pause and correct the tempi of certain works played on street barrel organs, explaining to the operators in a gentle, saintly way that he was the author of the pieces they were cranking out. Often, in more august company, he would express a sense of remorse at what had been in his life, tantalizing his auditors and leaving them to guess at what awful things he might be concealing. But there is nothing new here either, for Gounod had spoken like this since early manhood. It was part of his view of himself to half confess to dreadful deeds. In the autobiography there is no mention of Georgina or the rupture with his wife.

At the time of the trial, however, the critic Albert Wolff wrote a piece for the Paris paper Le Gaulois that expressed the French view of how he was perceived during his years in London:

Was there ever a more singular history than that of Gounod and the Englishwoman? Since the woman Delilah, who cut off Samson’s hair, never was seen anything so curious. Events of late years turned the composer into the London gutters. There he makes the acquaintance of an Englishwoman. At her feet, he forgets all—family and country! Passion had taken possession of the artist’s brain and driven from it the remembrance of all that was decent . . .

There is much more in the same vein. Wolff supposed it to be a case of sexual obsession, which we can say fairly certainly it was not. Had it been, Georgina would have gone with Gounod to Paris when he was offered the directorship of the Conservatoire. Moreover, the lovers—had they been lovers in the way Wolff imagined—would have had to do something about Harry. Not even the most complaisant Victorian husband could tolerate being cuckolded in his own home. The Rouge Dragon Pursuivant would have been forced to show his claws. If it had been a story of a sexually insatiable woman fastening on a man and dragging his talents and reputation to the bedroom, things would actually have been much easier to explain and resolve. But it was not like that at all. The strangest thing about the infamous Tavistock House ménage was how both men managed to be bewitched by her, without lust coming into it. What they were responding to was her manic energy. The whole time Gounod was preparing to martyr himself by going to jail, the first floor of the house was being noisily altered to make a second music room where Georgina herself might have a choir, the equal of the Gounod Choir. This was the real clue to her relationship with “the old man.” Hero worship went only so far to explain it. She was in some way his rival, as well as his acolyte.

Shortly after Lunn’s piece “Paper Reputations” Georgina published a flyer, intended as a reproof to her critics.

1. To those wishing to know if Mr. Gounod gives lessons in singing or harmony:

No, never, upon any consideration.

2. To those wishing to know Mrs. Weldon’s terms for teaching grown up pupils or amateurs:

£600 lodged in the London and Westminster Bank to Mrs. Weldon’s credit. In the case of a professional, the conditions are that he (or she) must remain for two years regularly training his (or her) voice under Mrs. Weldon’s superintendence. The £600 being sufficient to keep any young man or woman respectably for two years in London; the balance of that sum to be forfeited by the pupil should the engagement be broken by him (or her). An amateur would not be accepted on any terms except £600 down, and Mrs. Weldon hopes she may never have those terms accepted.

3. To those wishing to ask Mr. Gounod’s opinion as to their own, or any other person’s musical capacity, voice, etc:

Mr. Gounod can see no-one on this subject.

4. To those wishing to know what Mrs. Weldon thinks on the same subject:

Mrs. Weldon knows that if anyone chooses to practise conscientiously for two years under her supervision, any one can make a good deal of his (or her) voice and style. But Mrs. Weldon, from experience, is of the opinion that it is impossible for a grown up person to practise patiently for the time specified, and recommends everybody not to try it.

The builders knocking bedrooms together, the orphans running about the house, the legal wrangles, and now the adult choir peering around the door. No sooner had the music room been established than she was forced to vacate it: Gounod, who worked above on the next floor, could not bear to hear the racket. It is dizzying to think of them all arguing, shouting, weeping, cursing. There seems to be nobody in charge, nobody to focus Georgina’s energies. What Harry did from day to day is perfectly understandable—he went to the College of Heralds, thence to the Garrick or to wherever he had hidden Annie Lowe. At night he came home and viewed the wreckage of his house with that peculiar dispassion Georgina had for so long mistaken as indolence. Harry was not a saint, as he was to prove, but he did have one saintly quality—a monumental forbearance. To the limit of his interest (and his own sketchy knowledge of how artists actually lived) he behaved supportively to them both. When Gounod was ill, he nursed him. He found money for Georgina’s ideas. On Sundays he suffered the company of people quite unlike himself and plied them with wine and refreshment paid for out of his own pocket. In this way, for example, he shook hands with the painter Degas.

It was not true, as Wolff and Gounod’s other Parisian critics asserted, that Georgina had emasculated the composer’s talent. No one can say what might have happened had he reconciled himself to Anna—had he never fled the war, even—but he worked quite as hard in England as he would have done had he never met the scandalous and ridiculed Mrs. Weldon. “Old man has rewritten his Paternoster again . . . Old Man has composed a most beautiful song on the words of the Song of Solomon, ‘My beloved spake’ . . . Gounod composed a Biondina last night, lovely little Italian thing . . . Old man quite finished Jeanne d’Arc, three months and three days after he first saw the libretto . . .”

The real story of Tavistock House is what Georgina did. The saddest thing of all about her is that everything she attempted was for a more or less high purpose—art, love, God. She thought she knew about these things, but she didn’t. She was an executant in an artist’s world, a nanny in the world of love, a Tory when it came to God. There was a strong element of calculation in her efforts to keep everyone happy. For as long as Gounod stayed, she was saved from the outright descent into nonentity. Her aristocratic connections had vanished completely. Nobody came to the house from the world she had left behind her, and she received no invitations from the people she had once claimed as dearest friends. All those doors were closed to her forever.

The success she wished to make of her own talents was obstinately stalled. She was out of society but without the compensation of being accepted in the world of music. Over all that—all the frenzy and bustle of the last two years—hung a studious silence. Benedict, who had effected the introduction to Gounod, was mortified at the consequences. She had flirted with Clay, without ever understanding that his real loyalties were with Sullivan (they were bachelor friends), and of Sullivan she could not speak harshly enough. The few English musicians who came to the house—and they were few—came to see Gounod, not her. Nothing she did on her own account seemed to work. She was, in the eyes of her contemporaries—and now the courts—a willful and talentless woman who happened to harbor the rather aberrant French composer M. Gounod, but under such circumstances that it was impossible to speak of her in polite society.

In the spring of 1873 the remnants of the Gounod Choir, augmented by the Weldon Choir, gave six concerts at St. James’s Hall, conducted by Gounod and once again comprising almost exclusively his own work. The promoter was a music publisher named Goddard. People came to these concerts because there was new work to be heard, of course, but the hall—on the site now occupied by the Piccadilly Hotel—was also the venue of two restaurants and a banqueting suite. The blackface troupe the Christy Minstrels performed in the second of the two auditoriums. Georgina was not the first person to travel west from Tavistock House to perform there—Dickens used it as a place to give his readings, the last in the year of his death, when he took his farewell of his audience amid scenes of frightening hysteria. The seats were hard, smells wafted up from the kitchens from time to time, and things were a long way from the opulent, but it was success of a kind, especially for her. Gounod was not so impressed. The choir was too small for the main auditorium, which seated two thousand, and Goddard insisted that it be spread wide on the stage to give the illusion of something bigger. Georgina took the solo soprano parts and her pupil Werranrath the tenor.

There was talk of moving on from the Exeter to the newly reopened Alexandra Palace with this choir, and so enter into direct rivalry with the programs of music at the Crystal Palace. It was a characteristic piece of overreaching on her part, for at Crystal Palace could be heard performances at which the choir and orchestra alone numbered three thousand and all the principals were drawn from the Royal Italian Opera. Fortunately, providence saved her from yet another fiasco. Sixteen days after Alexandra Palace was opened in May, a hot coal fell from a workman’s bucket and the whole building was burned to the ground.

The first enchantments of the relationship had long fled. Gounod’s towering rages, often followed by a headlong dash into the streets, came more frequently. The loaded revolver was referred to so often that on one occasion Georgina summoned the police to find him and fetch him home. They argued volcanically about nothing in particular: a hand of cards set them off on one occasion; in another month, criticism of the state of his trousers was the trigger. When they took Gallia to Spa, in Belgium, with Georgina as baggage master, she insisted that two of the dogs come along: Dan, the pug Harry had bought her when she lost the baby, and Tity, who was pregnant. They managed to get the choir to Spa without incident but then found they had left the dogs behind at the frontier. Georgina was distraught. Telegrams must be sent! Stationmasters must be alerted! The police must be mobilized! Gounod exploded.

Those brutal dogs. Why have you brought them? Why submit ourselves to such a nuisance? All the better if they are lost! You, you can’t live without your pugs! Is there a thing in this world more insupportable than a woman who cannot move without dragging after her animals of all kinds, birds, beasts, parrots, frogs, tortoises, hedgehogs? If they are found I insist on your opening their basket and letting them run wherever they please! As for me, if those pugs darken our doors again, I take the first train, I return to Tavistock and you’ll do the season at Spa without me!