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In November 1873 Gounod wrote to a Frenchwoman who was a member of the Queen’s household.

Dear Mlle Norele,

I have composed and written myself the poem of a great sacred trilogy, entitled The Redemption.

The music of this composition is the most important work of my life. I offer to dedicate it to Her Majesty Queen Victoria. I ask Her Majesty’s gracious patronage and confidently await Her Majesty’s commands for the first execution of The Redemption in the Royal Albert Hall.

I will now give my reasons for wishing this. I had hoped to found in this Hall, which is the most beautiful and magnificent one in Europe, and which is dedicated to the memory of a venerated and revered Prince, a great Institution devoted to Sacred Music. I have been shamefully expulsed, iniquitously turned out of the position of Founder-Director to which I had been appointed. I feel, and I know that I am truly inspired to say, that I am worthy of fulfilling this mission through my faithful and religious love for my divine art. I have the profoundest contempt for the illnatured plot of which I have been the object: but nothing will make me forget the great artistic future of the Royal Albert Hall which has been my dream. I wish to re-enter there with a work worthy of the place and of the name it bears, and this must be by the Queen’s own hand.

Every single note of this (which incidentally bears strong traces of Georgina’s composition) is falsely struck. Gounod was not turned out of his post, but left it of his own accord. The “Institution” the letter mentions was in greater part a commercial booking agency. “Gounod’s choir” was at least half, in terms of personnel, Barnby’s choir. It would not need much knowledge of the London music scene on Mlle Norele’s part to know that Joseph Barnby had for twelve years been music adviser to the firm of Novello & Co. and was now confirmed as director of the Royal Albert Hall Choir, which Gounod had so lamentably let fall. The “contempt” Gounod felt for the “illnatured plot” was hardly silent—the whole issue of the Albert Hall and its musical policy was being vigorously aired in a paper called the Cosmopolitan, under the vitriolic pen of someone named Mrs. Weldon. When this was pointed out to Gounod in Mlle Norele’s reply, he denied all knowledge of it.

Georgina now wrote a letter to Mlle Norele under her own signature. She confessed to having written the offending articles but indicated she would be perfectly prepared to withdraw them in return for royal patronage of a “National Training School of Music in South Kensington,” of which she would feature as principal director. Taking these letters together, both written from the same address, we see a peculiar and murky picture emerge for consideration by the Queen’s advisers. The composer Gounod may well have taken it into his head to ask permission to dedicate a work to the Queen. That was a simple enough request, of a kind often made; nor was it completely out of the question that Victoria might graciously consent. The soupier and more sentimental elements in Gounod’s music appealed to her. In his letter there were some disagreeable remarks concerning others that he had no business to make, but that could perhaps be put down to his nationality.

Georgina’s letter was different. Leaving aside the veiled threat of blackmail, the writer of this letter seemed not to have been aware that a National Training School had been mooted since 1854, nor that the Queen’s second son, the gallant naval officer and passionate violinist the Duke of Edinburgh, had recently chaired a public meeting in which it was agreed to form one. Moreover, the writer of this letter describes Sullivan as “a little gentleman teeming with bad manners and impudence,” not knowing—or not caring—that he it was who had already been offered the directorship of the new school by the royal Duke and his committee. Mlle Norele made some discreet inquiries about the relationship between Gounod and the mysterious Mrs. Weldon and was shocked enough by what she heard to bring the correspondence to an abrupt end.

Whether she was ignorant of the birth pangs of what in fifteen years’ time would become the Royal Academy of Music or whether she knew of the baby and merely wished to replace it with one of her own, either way Georgina had caused Gounod’s London reputation a further shattering blow. For as long as he remained connected to her in the public imagination, his standing would always be compromised. In Paris he was being spoken of by his colleagues as “the Englishman Gounod.” The strain became too great. He started to suffer what Georgina called “cerebral attacks,” which no amount of hydropathy could cure. In one of the more touching episodes of his stay in England, Harry took him off to the Royal Saxon Hotel, Margate, where they walked the promenade and took the sea air. Perhaps he, first among the three of them, saw that Gounod could not take any more. The Frenchman, bowed and elderly beyond his years, was exhausted, not by love, or even by work, but by endless niggling controversy. He had made it clear to Anna Gounod in terms strictly overseen by Georgina that he was prepared to live as man and wife again, provided it was in England and she accepted the Weldons as his friends. This she was not prepared to do. She saw that Gounod wanted what he had always believed possible—to remain a man of honor and at the same time enjoy the kind of quasi-sexual adulation that could only do him harm. She refused to accommodate him. She would not come to London; he must return to Paris.

Harry was sympathetic but noncommittal. He had his own secrets, which he was certainly not about to divulge to Gounod. It makes a pretty picture, the two of them with their canes and cigars, wandering along the promenade. In the end Gounod seems almost closer to Harry than to Harry’s wife. Some of the exile’s kindlier thoughts on the English applied as much to the husband as to the turbulent Georgina:

The friendship of English people has the particular quality of not only being invariable in its constancy, but indefatigable in its activity. It is not a friendship which folds its arms, and is content with smiling at you when it meets you or when it wants you; it is a certain friendship which will not pay by a joke the pleasure of pulling you to pieces between friends; it is a courageous friendship which neither disguises its feelings nor its convictions, and with which one knows what one is about . . .

When he showed her these words, he asked, “Is that not a good portrait of you?,” and she was touched and flattered. But they apply equally to the patient and good-humored Harry. And if that is so, they give a line to the way Harry suffered the wilder excesses of his wife. Georgina tells us in her Mémoires how Harry detested the world of artists. This does not ring quite true either. The amiable Garrick member knew as little about the interior life of art as his wife—but how they lived, what they wanted from life, the troubles they made for themselves, of all this he had firsthand knowledge.

In April when she came down to join them at St. Leonard’s on the Sussex coast, the three of them sat on the beach more like two brothers and their sister than anything else. Gounod made her a last gift, copyright in a musical setting of Lord Houghton’s poem “Ilala.” He was ill, he was tired, and he could see no way ahead. The permanent exile that he had proposed for himself was much less attractive in fact than in fantasy. The failed priest in Gounod, which had grappled for his own soul and struggled with the world and the flesh, was looking for a benign retirement. L’Abbé Gounod, the much-loved, much-respected putterer, surrounded by his books and his scores, his pipes and snuff, was a more attractive picture than Gounod the firebrand, the martyr to love and the law. He made a very unsuccessful Englishman, as his wife and friends had always pointed out. L’Abbé Gounod, adored by his congregation, at peace with God, talking to angels, could only exist in France. Chaffing Harry for stretching out on the shingle “like a lizard” and studying her dear old man covertly, Georgina did not realize that he had already written to Paris.

Three days after her thirty-sixth birthday, the two of them set out from Tavistock House to visit Mrs. Brown at Blackheath. Georgina insisted on bringing two of her dogs, the decrepit Dan Tucker and a puppy called Whiddles. Along the way, the puppy began to scream frenziedly. It was having fits. They stopped the carriage and an anxious and angry crowd gathered, shouting, “Mad dog!” Georgina went to a nearby house to ask for a bowl of water. When she came back to the carriage, she found it surrounded by a mob. Inside, Gounod lay cowering against the cushions. The placidity he had shown in setting out was replaced by acute nervous excitement. She remounted the carriage and with the crowd battering on the doors, told the coachman to drive for his life. They arrived helter-skelter at the Browns’, Gounod “more dead than alive.” Before they could take lunch, ministrations had to be made of castor oil to Whiddles, who was locked up in an empty henhouse, and at the end of the afternoon Georgina drove away alone, leaving Gounod in the charge of Mrs. Brown. He was to stay the night to calm himself. But to her surprise and dismay, Gounod showed no signs of wishing to return home next day. After a week of anxiety and indecision she went back to Blackheath and found him in bed, “wandering in his mind.”

The Browns were much upset, never having seen their friend in this state before. Georgina knew a great deal more about Gounod’s capacity for self-pity than Mrs. Brown and tried to rally the poor woman. The master was ill but would soon be better, of that she was sure. Gounod cowered in his bed, feigning sleep. Even Georgina in all her aberrancy could not have been completely prepared for the enormous thing that was about to happen. She ushered the Browns from the room and lay down on the bed beside him. After a long silence she suddenly felt herself covered by “an immense net with great meshes of rays of lights” and saw written in the air the sentence “Woman, Behold Thy Son.” These manifestations were as real to her as the jug and basin in the room, the wallpaper, the drawn curtains. They left her shaken but triumphant. She did not communicate the experience to Mrs. Brown.

On June 6 she returned to Blackheath to find a strange Frenchman in the parlor, a young man named Gaston de Beaucourt. When she asked to see Gounod, de Beaucourt positioned himself in front of the door. “No, madame, Gounod is better, but you cannot see him.” She pleaded, she begged, she sobbed. She took herself off to a room adjoining the sick room and wailed at the wall, hoping to move the composer to call to her. Then she discovered that Gounod had been moved to another room altogether and she had been wasting her breath. She came back downstairs and pleaded with the company. Mrs. Brown was especially disturbed, and after an hour or so of entreaties de Beaucourt relented. Georgina might see him for five minutes. At this very moment, arriving pat upon cue like a character from one of his operas, Gounod appeared at the doorway, shocking her by his haggard appearance. His clothes seemed to hang from him.

“ ‘My Mimi,’ said he folding me in his arms and kissing me over and over again, ‘what a long time it is since I have seen you! Why do you desert me?’ I gave M. de Beaucourt a look. He was sitting just behind Gounod, and he was making signs to me to leave, pointing at his watch. I, stupefied, confused, agitated, pulled from behind by the two women, said suddenly to him—‘Goodbye, my dear old man.’”

She left the house with a heavy presentiment of the end. The next day Dr. Blanche arrived from Passy. It at last became clear to Georgina what had been arranged. Gounod was leaving for Paris and would never return. In her heart she suspected he was not so much being spirited away as fleeing: she knew him well enough to see that his feeble protestations to the contrary were a pretense. With Blanche and de Beaucourt in the house, responsibility for his own actions had been nicely delegated and he could play the part of the wandery invalid. On Monday she returned to Blackheath and gave him a letter she had written, stained with her tears. He did not read it but put it in his jacket. They then sat at the piano and in a grotesque parody of what they had been together, he accompanied her in this:

Watchman, what of the night?
Do the dews of morning fall?
Have the Orient skies a border of light
Like the fringe of a funeral pall?

Right to the end farce was mixed with real emotions. The two Frenchmen bustled him to his feet. Gounod jammed on a panama Harry had once given him and took tearful and repetitious farewell of Mrs. Brown and her daughter. His bags were put into a carriage along with those of his two keepers, and he drove to Charing Cross, followed by Harry and Georgina in their victoria. On the platform of the boat train, where four years earlier German students had sung and chanted “Nach Paris!” on their way home to fight for the fatherland, the composer orchestrated his feeble farewells, into which were mixed protestations that they would meet again within the month.

I did not shed one tear, nor even had tears in my eyes. Gaston de Beaucourt must have seen that I was able to “control myself.” The railways clock marked 1.20. Gounod was in the carriage: my husband and I both stood near the door.

He sobbed, he yet held our hands tight in his, without being able to utter a word.

“Come, my dear old man,” said my husband to him tenderly. “Don’t cry so much. I promise you that Mimi shall rejoin you in ten days!” The guard came up— “Take care, sir—the train’s off.”

Georgina went back to Tavistock House and slept for four hours. As surely as if he had been Moncorvo, she knew she would never see him again. What made it all the more poignant was that in the house were the pitiable relics of a three-year relationship: the rest of his clothes, his pens, his pipes, books and manuscript papers, his evening dress, the bits and pieces of a man’s wardrobe that in the absence of the man himself become ugly somehow, and foreign. In a drawer downstairs was the only copy of his Polyeucte. Even that had been sacrificed in the absolute necessity for him to get away.