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Once Gounod was gone, the degree to which their financial affairs had mingled became apparent. A fortnight after he took his farewells of her at Charing Cross, repeatedly begging her to visit, standing at the window to his departing train with tears running down his cheeks and wetting his beard, she received a reply to her anxious inquiries after his health and well-being.

My dear Mimi,

I can no longer hide from you the profound and bitter grief which your letters since I have been here have caused me, they have upset all my heart and brought the height to the trouble of my existence.

I have lived three years near you: in your hands, under your guardianship. What I have accomplished of work you know, you have been the witness of that which I have expended in strength, acceptance of anguish, endured of suffering of all kinds.

That you have wished for and looked for my good I feel assured, but you have pursued the realisation of it by generous devotion to an absolutely chimerical end: many times, you know, I have attempted to oppose a resistance and my objections; I have been obliged to renounce to them each time if I dared say a word.

To re-enter into this life of anxiety, of submission to the terror of saying the least word, of the sacrifice of my own thoughts so as to feel myself paralysed, is beyond my strength . . . Since you have desired my peace and my tranquillity, do not dream of reopening for me an existence which can bring neither you nor us peace. All that which is admirable will never destroy your instinct for command, nor my repugnance to this entire annihilation of myself and my child, the thought of which terrifies me. The part which I am now taking is imperiously commanded to me by the feelings of exhaustion produced by the struggles of these last years. To attempt to argue against this decision is useless and can but aggravate what I suffer. I know that the wish for my repose and the re-establishment of my health passes in your eyes before all—the cares you have taken of me when I was ill have sufficiently proved this. May God keep you

Your dear old man who kisses you,

Charles Gounod

However clumsy the translation Georgina made of it into English, the meaning was unmistakable. She already knew that he was never coming back, but there was more to it than that. Gounod wanted nothing more to do with her. This was devastating. In her eyes at least she was his musical associate and there was money as well as art involved. She was his English apologist and historian, as well as being the holder of several important copyrights. She was his muse, his Pauline, the next great soprano in his life. It was perfectly true she had prepared for this last role in a very unusual and maladroit way, but she was shrewd enough to see that without him she was nothing. She sent a man named de la Pole to Paris to act as her agent and find out what was going on. Gounod responded by asking her to send in a bill for the time he had spent at Tavistock House, just as though she was a common lodging-house keeper. At the same time he asked her to make an inventory of all his possessions left in the house, which she was to pass to the French Embassy, which would then arrange to have them collected.

This was mean and unfeeling at the personal level. It was also an attempt to divest Georgina of any commercial undertaking made between the two of them. For it now came out that far from being merely his landlady, there had in fact been such undertakings. She considered the copyright in some of the works he had composed in London to have been gifted to her, most particularly (and unjustifiably) the score of Polyeucte. Moreover, she was prepared to remind Gounod that he had once agreed that after setting aside a dowry for his daughter of 100,000 francs, the residue of all his future royalties would be devoted to the orphanage. Her view of his stay was that she had acted as “agent general” to him, going the rounds of the publishers, writing his publicity, doing his secretarial work, and fearlessly facing the vampire business world of music he affected to despise. She said, with some justification: “I had played the devil so that he might appear an angel.” The results might have been unfortunate, but there was truth in the remark, which she further refined as this: “I had been the monkey among the crocodiles.”

It was a mistake of Gounod’s to ask for a bill—Harry could have warned him what would happen. She sat down and itemized every last expense. The first section throws useful light on his stay.

In the first place, Mrs. Weldon only wishes he would refund to me the sum I have spent on the engraving of several of his works	£282.0.0
M. Gounod’s pension for 7 months, washing, carriage, wines, etc	£140.0.0
Solicitor’s account	£110.0.0
Subscription and entrance fee, Royal Yacht Club	£8.0.0
English translation, Joan of Arc	£16.0.0
Doctor’s bills and medicines for 2 years	£45.0.0
	£601.0.0

All of this money had been expended by Harry in the first place, and for three years in London it does not seem an unreasonable amount. But she was merely warming to her task; these were the trifles of the account. “The first thing which I consider undoubtedly due to me by M. Gounod is £3000 as compensation for having prevented me from carrying on a profession by which I was earning money for my orphanage.” This was much more contentious and must have left Gounod with his jaw on the table. But there was a greater sum yet to be subtotaled:

Damages as compensation to some extent for the injuries done by infamous calumnies, lies and libels

£5000.0.0

The grand total came to £9,791.13.9, a sum she must have known she could never recover. Gounod did not have that kind of money, and no court in France or England would entertain damages of £5,000 for hurts it could be easily proved she had brought down on her own head. She was a woman scorned, and it brought out the vindictive streak in her. A concert of Gounod’s music in Liverpool was canceled because she would not release the copyright in some of the works, and there was a particular piece of pettiness with the score of Polyeucte, which she had wrestled for on the carpet in such a thrilling way and which she now absolutely refused to surrender. Gounod had a very strong case against her for theft but seems to have balked at the thought of bringing her to court. Enraged, he set about rewriting the entire score from memory. Whether she had wind of this or not, he had only just completed the task, which took him almost a year, when she sent him the original, every page of which was slashed through with blue pencil.

Gounod was by now fully rehabilitated in Paris. In March 1875 he attended the first performance of Bizet’s Carmen at the Opéra-Comique. Massenet and Saint-Saëns were also in the audience. The master displayed his usual capacity for duplicity when it came to the careers of others. After hugging and kissing Bizet repeatedly during the second intermission, he sensed the production was going to fail. In the third act he leaned back in his box and murmured, “That melody is mine! Georges has robbed me: take the Spanish airs and mine out of the score and there remains nothing to Bizet’s credit but the sauce that masks the fish.” Those who heard him smiled wryly. The London years had not altered him after all.

In June he attended Bizet’s funeral at the church of La Trinité in Montmartre. Claiming to have come direct from Bizet’s widow, who was prostrate with grief and unable to attend the funeral, he began to read from a speech scribbled on a scrap of paper. With a trembling voice he quoted Geneviève Bizet’s words, entrusted to him as one of the composer’s most cherished friends. “ ‘Those six years I spent with him,’ she told me ‘there was not a minute, not one minute that I am not proud and happy to remember.’”

Gounod paused, bit his lip, and then burst into tears. Everyone knew that Geneviève had granted no such interview to Gounod and the words she might have spoken had been stolen out of her mouth by this master of self-dramatization. Gounod was back in the bosom of his reputation.