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Argeuil is a surprise. It is a handsome lopsided village on the road south from Forges. On the left is a handsome manoir and to the right the church, the mairie, and a little terraced hotel called Le Lion d’Or. What makes it so pleasant is a large sandy square, surrounded on three sides by tall farm buildings and two- and three-story bourgeois residences, some of them eighteenth-century. It was in one of these that Marie Helluy had her failing business, now to become the Weldon Orphanage. The village is light and airy, partly as a consequence of the church grounds having been absorbed at the very end of the nineteenth century. The cemetery, which had straggled into the main square in front of the church, was moved up to a knob of land three hundred meters away. The view from there is of rich pasture, though the Fôret de Lyons is just over the horizon, extending southward toward Rouen and the Seine. Argeuil is by no means la France profonde. The church is small and unimpressive, the hotel cramped and ancient, but by the standards of many another commune in neighboring départements, Argeuil is now and must have been then a sturdy and well-heeled place.

Angele had the gift of saying and doing what she thought people wanted to hear. During the London months she had begun to speak about the orphanage in the same high-flown way as Georgina herself, with more emphasis on the power of music in the upbringing of young children than the usefulness to them of soap or three hot meals a day. Her sister Marie Helluy was a shock to Georgina. Tall, skinny, and bad-tempered, she was distressingly down-to-earth and practical. She swore like a trooper, cooked uninspiringly, and often had to be rousted from her bed in the morning, which she shared with her friend and lover, the younger and more moody Victoria Claisse. The curé and the other communal dignitaries had never had much time for Marie Helluy and her ill-managed nursing home, but were utterly astounded to see its transformation now. Lallygagging about the streets and besieging the bakery for their morning bread, a handful of Protestant English children broke the peace and calm of Argeuil, none of them clear as to where they were or what they were doing there.

They were children unlike any seen before in the village. Their experience was bounded by Tottenham Court Road as far as Oxford Street. They had seen trees before and in those trees rooks and pigeons, squirrels, even. What they had not seen was a hundred head of cattle being driven down to milking or the utter dark of countryside after sunset. Having lived communally in Tavistock House, they had an elastic sense of property. Georgina had taught them to walk with their arms swinging, and now they marched about like ungainly marionettes, bellowing at each other, shouting and thieving. Argeuil folk quickly learned to despise them. There was a small community of Carmelite nuns next door to the hotel, to whom matters of charity were normally entrusted, and the villagers had—like all French men and women—a keen sense of propriety. C’était pas propre, cette galère. They were also highly suspicious of the voluble directrice whose principal point of interest in the life of the community was the post office, to which she repaired daily. A rumor grew that this was a man dressed as a woman, probably someone from Paris. To be from Paris was the ultimate opprobrium.

It might have been different if the orphanage had descended on Argeuil at another season of the year, when the days were longer. But they came when the village was battened down for the winter and women in particular hardly left the house. If they did, it was to buy vegetables they had not grown themselves or to walk to church. It was startling to see, looming out of the rain, children with a London pallor, dressed in oddments and shouting in jagged and ugly English. The more bourgeois families kept an aloof silence. Their farmhands were puzzled. To all of them, it was completely inexplicable why anyone should want to bring an orphanage to their doors. Used to charity as an outward expression of religious devotion, it troubled them that this establishment had no connection with the church. For women used to obeying their men, as well as working alongside them in the fields, it was equally shocking that the children were in the charge of four women, with no man to make the ultimate decisions. How could that possibly turn out for the good? If Angele and Georgina were married, as they said they were, then where were their husbands?

At first, Georgina found Marie Helluy’s strength and acerbity refreshing. There was certainly nothing namby-pamby about her. She slogged her way through the day, cooking and cleaning, bellowing warnings at the startled orphans, wagging a spoon in their faces. With no children of her own, and little English, she nevertheless soon let it be known who was boss. At night she had the habit of playing cards and smoking, a bottle at her elbow. The table talk was uninspired. Marie and Victoria had never heard of Gounod and made it clear they did not give a fig for music, art, or anything else. Their preferred topic was money. Like their neighbors, their day was made up of work, hard physical work that in London had been undertaken by the Westmacotts and Tibby Jordan. Here, there was no mistress and servants—the four women mucked in together, Georgina proving the least resourceful, Angele the most accident prone. The children were smacked and beaten and threatened. On occasion they were ceremonially thrashed. They fared badly at meals. A village rumor was that Helluy bought horse oats for a household that had no horse, with the implication that the children lived on them. All of them—and all the women—were infested with lice. There was never enough hot water and no plumbed bath. At night, with nothing to do but drink and smoke, the stories began to come out.

Angele’s background was soon laid completely bare. She had been seduced by a married man in Soissons when she was sixteen, by whom she had a stillborn child. This man made her a small allowance and gave her some sticks of furniture. Anarcharsis had not taken her off the streets and made an honest woman of her overnight: he had pimped her for seven years before he married her. It was in vain for Angele to protest that she had danced at the Folies Marigny under the name of Mlle Lucienne: Marie knew it all.

Georgina disclosed some of her own adventures. She told them how the elderly and utterly respectable surgeon Sir Henry Thompson had come to her in the guise of “the Moth,” helplessly attracted to her flame, and how letters signed by the Moth had been discovered by Harry, who threatened to use them against him. He had also found the Moth and the Flame in the bedroom of a house they rented from time to time in London before Tavistock came along. This was greeted by ribald laughter. But her most reckless confession was one that, if true, throws new light on the Florence years. She claimed she had been abused as a child by Antonio, Morgan’s butler. She told this story perhaps to impress, perhaps because there were few topics of conversation other than sex. For the other three women it was a scandal, yet a familiar and unexceptional one. For us it leaps out of the story like a tongue of fire. This was a family secret with a vengeance. At some point in her childhood, Georgina had virtually the power of life and death over a grown man, for had she told her father of what had passed, surely Morgan would have given his butler up to the authorities. An even darker possibility is that he was told and did nothing.

When the fire was banked and the lantern turned out, these four women would go to two double beds, to whisper in the dark and all but Georgina to plot. Marie had already formed an opinion of her employer as far as the orphans went: “For her they are marionettes to show off and if their health suffers, it’s nothing but a detail. What do you say to what she told me: that since grown ups enjoy playing around with each other, she could not see why one stopped children doing the same thing?” Marie’s solution to these sexual explorations was a version of the straitjacket in which the hands of the children were separated one from another in canvas cuffs held apart by a rigid bar.

The children’s general health was poor. Nobody came to the house, and no doctor had been appointed to be the medical supervisor of the orphanage, any more than there had been one in London. The ten orphans were underfed and disoriented. While the older ones experimented with sex, the young ones incurred Georgina’s wrath in particular for failing to get up in the night to totter to the lavatory. There were huge rows about this, and dire punishments were meted out—the most incontinent children were shut in cupboards for their shortcomings. The gossip came back from the outraged commune that what was going on here was not a charitable work, but some sort of secret cult. Otherwise, why would the unhappy orphans bear such ridiculous names—Sapho, Baucis, Dagobert, Mireille, and Merthyr?

After only eight days, Marie tested her new employer’s willingness to be parted from her money. In her capacity as a trained nurse she tried to persuade Georgina that Angele was tubercular and the only possible solution for her was to go to Bordeaux. Georgina was startled. Angele had always seemed to her to have disgustingly good health. Bloody handkerchiefs were produced. Angele skulked behind doors and refused to answer straight questions. Marie chided Georgina for her heartlessness and brushed away her objections. It came down to a matter of generosity. Who was going to pay to save Angele? If money could improve her lot, who would be so heartless as to refuse it? She pressed on Georgina the urgent need for the patient to go to Paris at the very least and there have a thorough chest examination. Maybe, if things were as bad as they looked, Angele would have to go away into the country and languish there. But, Georgina asked, were they not already in the country? They were, but it was the wrong kind of air. Bordeaux was the only possible place, the choice of which bewildered Georgina, though it was probably the most distant city Marie could come up with on the spur of the moment. Questioned further, Angele was evasive and shamefaced.

Georgina took herself off to Gournay, a few kilometers farther south, to complete her translation of Gounod’s Jean Dacier libretto and ponder what to do. Gournay, she found immediately, was more to her taste. She put up at the Hôtel du Cygne and found the proprietor, M. Bournisien, very sympathetic. She even discussed with him the idea of bringing some of the orphans there, and in this she was undoubtedly influenced by the comforts on offer. The little town had paved streets and real shops. Its broad square was lit by the windows of cafés, and, though she was a celebrity of a kind, there was none of the impudent curiosity of village life. Nor were there any of the chores associated with the orphanage: it was pleasant to have servants again and a decent table d’hôte. She sent Angele the menu.

As Marie Helluy was discovering, Georgina was easily hooked, but an extremely difficult fish to land. She came back to Argeuil with this plan: she and Angele—and the odious Bichette—would go to Paris together forthwith. Even a few weeks in Gournay had convinced her that her best contribution to the success of the orphanage was to shine on a large and well-lit stage. She would go to Paris with a new name—Valerie de Lotz, international soprano—and put the rest of her ambitions on hold. Angele would go as her companion and servant, or not at all. All talk of doctors was scotched, and there was to be no more mention of Bordeaux. Enough money was set aside to keep the orphanage in its present unsatisfactory premises, but once in Paris, when singing engagements began to pour in, she would settle them all in happier circumstances. Marie and Victoria accepted this plan with gloomy resignation: they had been outflanked and were stuck with the children. In early December Angele and Georgina set off with Bichette by farm cart to Forges, where they caught the train to Paris.

They came as fairly respectable-looking women, but without money. The Paris of the boulevards was out of the question, although Georgina did suggest they stay to begin with at the Grand Hôtel, an establishment of the highest rank, beloved of English tourists and right next door to the Opéra. Angele—cunning Angele!—led her instead to the Café Rocher in Pigalle. After a while a man sidled up to them. Were they by chance looking for somewhere clean and respectable to stay, in which case he could recommend the Hôtel d’Alexandrie in the rue Lafitte? He could, if they wished, take them there now. The proprietor of the Hôtel d’Alexandrie was a man named Marx, and it turned out that their young guide was his son-in-law. Marx, acting out of apparent disinterest, soon introduced them to an elderly couple named Mayer, very sympathetic to their situation and lovers of music and the arts. Georgina was delighted. It only sank in later that all these people were already known to Angele—they were all part of the Menier gang. In fact, Mme Mayer was Bichette’s godmother. The offices of La Liberté Coloniale were around the corner from the hotel.

There was a larger Paris, and she made some acquaintances on her own account. She met and entranced an old roué, Edward O’Sullivan, former U.S. ambassador to Portugal, whose mistress was a society medium by the name of Mme Rohart. It was perhaps through this last contact that she ran across the mystically minded Edward Maitland again, the man who advised her to find the woman in herself and discard the boy when she was twenty. He had come to Paris to be with the extremely beautiful Anna Kingsford, wife of the vicar of Atcham in Shropshire, but far too clever for him. Mrs. Kingsford was training to qualify as a doctor, a profession not open to women in Britain yet. Both Maitland and Anna Kingsford were interested in esoteric religion, a subject, happily, Georgina did not attempt.

There were other distractions, slightly less lofty than the company of Edward Maitland. On one occasion Georgina was taken to a store and had an oriental shawl bought for her by the agent of an Indian prince. On another it was a rich Egyptian pasha who declared himself overwhelmed by her charms. This was all more familiar and agreeable social territory for Georgina. She describes carting Angele around to these and her other new friends. One night she took her to a reception at the impresario Charles Salazar’s house. He was the man she had engaged to promote her concerts. “All there were shocked; it made no sense that a wellbred woman allowed herself to be accompanied by a creature who had absolutely nothing to recommend her . . . Poor Menier was penniless and ugly and myself, I attributed this furious reaction against her to prejudice.” She met the great tragedienne Sarah Bernhardt, who did not impress her, and took her favorite orphan, Sapho-Katie, to tea with a dyspeptic and bored Victor Hugo, an old and wandery man in his seventies who said nothing of any interest but seemed not to share her opinion of the child, even though she was made to recite a few lines of the master’s oeuvre.

At the back of all this socializing was, of course, the Gounod question: did he know she was in Paris, and if he did, what was he going to do about it? At one of Mme Rohart’s séances the shade of Gounod’s mother, Victoire, spoke to her. Georgina’s main interest in the spirits of the dead was to have their opinion of the living. The life to come was far too distant to interest her: what she appealed to in the spirit world was a sort of High Court ruling on the world below. Madame Gounod did not let her down. The view she held of her boy Charles was much the same as Hannah Weldon’s opinion of her son, which was a proof of the Other Side’s perspicacity. Mère Victoire gave a warm endorsement of Georgina’s plans: “Unite and work, and you will accomplish the devoted mission that the Almighty blesses; and the dead souls of all those young beings will follow you and bless you in their turn. Hope! In six weeks, not a day more or less, you will accomplish your mission.” This was held by all present to indicate New Year’s Day of 1878.

Meanwhile, Gounod himself was hiding behind his lawyers and being obstructive and unforgiving. He refused to release copyright in his own works for a concert that Salazar had arranged for Valerie de Lotz. L’Evénement carried the announcement that the concert had been canceled “by a superior order”—that is, suppressed. Salazar failed to advise those who had already bought tickets and refused refunds to those who complained. Georgina hardly noticed. The bitter blow for her was to realize that Gounod, at whatever distance, could still be mean and vindictive in this way.

Five days after the cancellation of the concert, Angele went out to do the morning’s shopping. They had moved from the Hôtel d’Alexandrie to unfurnished rooms in the rue de Luxembourg, and as she set off, Angele was approached by a man right outside the door. He was well dressed with a ribbon decoration in his buttonhole. He asked her if she was Georgina Weldon. Angele said no, she is up there on the entresol. You have only to knock and she will answer. “Ah,” the mystery man said, changing tack, “you must be Madame Menier and it’s you I really want to talk to.” He suggested they walk together a little, and Angele agreed.

“After a few idle remarks he asked me if I had it in mind to return to England,” she explained to Georgina. “I replied that I couldn’t leave you. ‘Oh, you could very easily leave her for a few days, couldn’t you?’”

Angele was terrified, the more so when the mystery man outlined a proposition to her. They would go to a bank, and for any sum she named, they would leave at once for England. She immediately thought of Menier, supposing the scheme “some unhealthy idea of his.” She agreed in principle, saying only that she must tell Georgina and—an appealing touch—prepare lunch for her. Ah no, he said, that was the sole condition. They must leave for England now, this instant. Shouting that he gravely mistook the person with whom he was dealing, she turned on her heel and fled, followed down the street by an elaborate and ironic salute as the man lifted his hat and made a sweeping bow after her.

When she heard this, only moments after it happened, Georgina collapsed in a chair. Her reaction was very significant.

“Don’t you see? It was a terrible ambush . . . They would have got you away from me, then come to tell me there had been an accident, that you were in hospital and calling for me. I would have left without suspecting anything, and ended up in Blanche’s asylum!”

This is the first clear indication that Georgina herself realized that others might think her mad. The séances she had attended suddenly took on a new and dangerous meaning. A belief in spiritualism was looked on more askance in England than in France and the rest of Europe, where the celebrated example of the Edinburgh-born Daniel Dunglas Home was held to be a baffling instance of supernatural powers. Home had recently followed the Prussian Army from Sedan to Versailles and been consulted by the Emperor of Prussia in the Hall of Mirrors. Home received an elaborate gift of jewels from him, just as he had done over the years from the Emperor of Russia and many others. It was considered an indication of Home’s probity that the medium never asked for a fee. It was true that Robert Browning had tried to denounce him twenty years earlier (in the less romantic venue of a house in Ealing) as “Sludge the Medium,” but that was only because Elizabeth Barrett Browning believed in him with such unsettling conviction.

Though many in England were as disgusted as Browning by table rapping and disembodied hands and spectral mist, an interest in spiritualism was not thought in itself a symptom of insanity. John Brown, the Queen’s servant, was widely believed to act as her spiritualistic medium in the search for the dear departed Albert. If true, that might make Brown a scoundrel, but it could hardly be held to indicate the Queen was mad. Nevertheless, belief in spiritualism was very often thought a contributory factor to more marked delusions. It was, so to speak, a dangerous game to play. As for Georgina, she always believed her interests in spiritualism and phrenology were as rational as her enthusiastic embrace of vegetarianism or her support of antivivisection campaigns. As she saw it, it was ignorance and envy in others that led to accusations of insanity. People who dared to be different were forced into a form of internal exile.

She knew her sudden and peremptory decision to remove the orphanage to France might have been considered an irrational act. However, though she had left London in ostensible high spirits, her diary revealed another, more realistic mood: “I never felt so profoundly sad to leave my home—so uncertain, so upset and discouraged. It’s the first time in my life that I’ve resolved to do something or taken a single step without attempting to foresee the outcome.”

One of the reasons for leaving that weighed with her was the continual theft of small objects and sums of money at Tavistock House, for which Rosie Strube was blamed more often than not. Though the results of the move were so far disappointing, the wish to put the orphanage on a new footing was justification enough for uprooting everybody. Even so late as this, it did not occur to Georgina that it might be the Meniers and their Paris cronies, not the children, who were systematically robbing her. She was perplexed not to hear from the Lowthers but no more than usually suspicious of “the imbecile” and “cretin” Anarcharsis, as she styled him. When Angele rushed in to tell her of the stranger met in the street, Georgina had a ready and to her mind much more obvious explanation. Who else could the mystery man be other than an emissary of the Gounod clique, and what motive could he have had other than to remove Georgina Weldon from the Paris music scene by the surest route? This was a story about someone trying to blight her music career. It was not Menier who was doing her wrong but Gounod.

Her elderly American friend O’Sullivan was summoned to the house, and the advice he gave was highly practical. He recommended she apply to the police for protection. She promised she would think about that. On Christmas Eve, however, the hotel proprietor Marx came around to say that no less a dignitary than the commissaire de police had been to the Alexandrie to ask a few questions. Georgina’s worst fears were realized. This must be Gounod’s work. Like a good swindler, Marx picked up the cue immediately. According to him, the composer had indeed been to the police, complaining that “the Englishwoman” was without means and quite mad, and should be taken not to the clinic at Passy, but to the much more sinister public asylum of St.-Lazare. O’Sullivan was sent for again, and he pressed her strongly to go to the police and ask for an interview, which she did. The unfortunate Commissaire Brissart was made to listen to an hour and a half’s harangue, at the end of which he ushered her from the office, promising to make Gounod leave her alone. But on New Year’s Eve Marx was back. The police had been to the hotel a second time, making inquiries.

There are question marks hanging over all this. The only description of the stranger in the street came from Angele—neither Georgina nor the concierge saw him and he never returned. The police already knew something about the two strange women of the rue de Luxembourg, because earlier in December Georgina had hired a maid, a young girl named Emilie who turned out to be a runaway. At Christmastime her irate stepfather came to fetch her home. Nettled, Georgina accused him of wanting her back in order to debauch her, and he went straight to the gendarmerie. It does not therefore make sense that the police should inquire for her at the Hôtel d’Alexandrie when they already knew where she lived. While it is probable that Gounod would have been only too pleased to see the back of her, it was completely out of character for him to go in person to the Ninth Arrondissement to talk to Commissaire Brissart. When it came to accusations of mental derangement, Gounod was like a man standing in a glass house with a stone in his hand. Furthermore, apart from trying to steal copyright in his work (for which he had the Salazar concert suppressed), Georgina had done him no wrong.

There is certainly an element of conspiracy about all this in which the sly and shifty Marx played a part. Yet Marx was acting for others. The hub of any conspiracy must have been Angele herself. Their apparently friendly and supportive neighbor Prosper Mayer, whom Georgina had not known from Adam in October, and who had never visited Argeuil, felt himself perfectly able the following March to accuse her of murdering Freddie, one of the orphans. This had to have come from Angele. Desperate to be loved, hopelessly incompetent in all the little things, Angele was undoubtedly the real traitor, but also the only one of them who ever really respected Georgina. She loved her. “You, I hate you,” she cried out once in exasperation. “You are so good!”

The word “clique” was one of Georgina’s favorite borrowings from the French language. The term was only mildly pejorative when used by native speakers, but Georgina widened its meaning to indicate criminal conspiracy. If in this way the Menier clique was more dangerous to Georgina than Gounod and his supposed myrmidons, there was an immediate reason. On one of her social forays in Paris she had come across a Miss Leigh, who with her sister ran a refuge for fallen women. Miss Leigh had a property for sale in Neuilly which Georgina saw at once would suit very well as the final resting place of the orphanage. Overeager as always and long before the lease had been signed, Georgina began to lay down rules of behavior for Angele when they took up residence. She was to mend her ways and behave more circumspectly. They would no longer live as lovers, but as mistress and servant. The test of Angele staying would be her sobriety and circumspection—Georgina’s beauty and talent could no longer be compromised by some Parisian lowlife.

An injured and apprehensive Angele told Marie Helluy of the planned purchase, and on January 9 she came from Argeuil to see the place for herself. (She, after all, was destined to do the donkey work.) Miss Leigh could perhaps stomach Angele, but Marie in a foul mood was something new to her experience. “The great beanpole rejected it with utter disdain,” Georgina wrote, adding bitterly that Gounod’s rich friends had in any case poisoned all Neuilly against her. The devoutly evangelical Miss Leigh consulted with her sister and then revoked the contract that had been drawn up.

Georgina had written to Menier in London a few times but had no answer. Now Angele received a letter from her husband which she scanned hastily and then threw into the fire. To someone of Georgina’s way of thinking this was unimaginably stupid. Letters were to be saved and filed and, if necessary, used against their authors at some later date. She tried to find out what Anarcharsis had said to upset his wife so, but Angele refused to tell her. It was a very unwelcome reminder of Tavistock House nevertheless.

Georgina had written to her mother with a jocular account of the threat to have her committed to the St.-Lazare, and Louisa had replied in terror, begging her to come home. Georgina tut-tutted, saying she had a tongue in her head and was perfectly capable of outwitting the Paris police. But her resources were stretched to the utmost. Maybe she already knew she could not trust Angele—but on the other hand, she could not live without her. Meanwhile, she had made her mark in Paris in a demimondaine sort of way, but not as a singer. Bernhardt disappointed her; Hugo, for all his encouraging interest in spiritualism, was a bad-tempered old fool. The most interesting musician she met was someone named John Urich, who stubbornly refuses to rise from the biographical dictionaries of the period. Angele had the sulks. In Argeuil Marie Helluy was simmering like a boiling washpot, and in London Menier’s grubby hands were beginning to meddle in some way she could not quite determine.