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The catastrophe that had been quietly incubating for seven years now occurred. At the end of January there was an outbreak of measles in Argeuil that left the local children untouched but laid low the entire orphanage. On February 2 Marie ran through the rain to the post office and cabled Georgina: “Come at once. Mireille died at 7 this morning. Letter arrives tomorrow. See consul for birth certificate.” A whole day passed before Angele replied to her sister, and that was only to say they would arrive on the fourth. Georgina scribbled a note to go by post, saying she would catch the train that left Paris at four in the afternoon.

Marie sent a second anguished telegram on the morning of the fourth: “Catch the 11 oclock train. Merthyr close to death. Dagobert very ill. We are desperate. Don’t bring Katie. Measles. Epidemic. Reply.” Marie Helluy was not the village’s favorite citizen, and even though the children had been treated with cold contempt, only the stoniest heart could fail to be moved by the horrors of the house. Georgina’s telegraph reply read, “Will arrive this evening alone. Angele ill. We are desperate. Above all anxious for you two.”

By the time she finally arrived it was nine at night and there was hardly a light left in the village. Mireille’s corpse—she was only fourteen months old and a particular favorite of all the women—lay in the house wrapped in a shroud. The curé had agreed to conduct a burial service the next day but insisted she be interred in unconsecrated ground, in the part of the cemetery reserved for suicides and victims of the guillotine. Marie and Victoria were almost too exhausted to speak. It would seem that no doctor had attended and no help had been given by the neighbors. There were comparatively rich and educated people who lived in Argeuil who might have helped, but they did nothing. The Carmelites stayed inside their gates. The surviving orphans lay in their dormitories much as if they would soon enough follow Mireille. It was a disaster.

Georgina knew then, if she ever knew, that she had failed these children utterly. Neither Marie nor Victoria ever forgave her for being so dilatory. Though the orphans were in their day-to-day care, the legal responsibility for them lay with Georgina, who had fetched them so blithely from London. The orphanage—all the lofty aspirations for a revolutionary music education founded on Mrs. Weldon’s unique talents—now lay in the dark of a small French village mired in shit. The two Frenchwomen listened in horror as Georgina, in a blaze of hysterical rage that all the children could hear, blamed the incontinent and pigeon-chested Dagobert for the death of the beautiful and angelic Mireille, whose tiny body had not even been furnished with a coffin.

She was buried the next morning, a furious Georgina waving in the face of the curé copies of telegrams sent to the ambassador and consul in Le Havre. She wasted the rest of the day ordering a piece of monumental statuary from Paris. (Today Mireille’s grave and—if it ever arrived—the little pink marble angel Georgina commissioned have vanished. Touchingly, if Mireille is still there on the hill outside the village, she shares the ground with another solitary Briton. In the debacle of June 1940 a sergeant of the Black Watch was killed on the road to Argeuil and is buried in the cemetery’s only Commonwealth war grave. Before the Germans left in 1944, they torched the mairie and destroyed the last official traces of the orphanage.)

Georgina’s practical contributions to the measles crisis were negligible. She was prevented by Marie and Victoria from employing her sovereign cure for all things and plunging the children into cold baths: on the contrary, she was made to suffer while the two women heated the house at what she considered reckless expense. She wrote rambling letters to Paris, in one of which she asked Angele to send down a large kettle (une bouilloire). Angele wandered around Pigalle, confused and distraught, before buying and sending a hot-water bottle (une bouillotte).

In a fit of pique—and having spent ten francs on telegrams trying to place the unlucky Dagobert in a hospice or asylum—anything to get him from her sight—Georgina decamped once more to the comforts of the Hôtel du Cygne in Gournay. There she felt free to write to her mother that “the French are the vilest, most dishonest people in the world.” Louisa had good reason to agree with this. She counseled her daughter to return to England immediately. She knew, although she did not disclose, what had already been set in train. She did mention for the first time that Harry had talked to de Bathe. “If I had the temperament or the willingness of flesh and spirit—or the means—I would do all in my power to get you out of there,” she wrote. “But I am powerless! Good for nothing, incapable of what’s needed. I can do nothing but despair and there is in my life enough to make me like that.”

It was unhelpful, as was her opinion expressed in the same letter that Georgina was a great teacher and devoted to the welfare of children. Louisa believed in the fiction of the Gounod clique even more fervently than her daughter. Like the whole family, she believed what Morgan had taught her, that the world was comprised of dark and inimical forces and that the evil far outweighed the good. During his life Morgan had done her thinking for her, but he had been dead ten years. Louisa had since dwindled to the feckless, uncertain creature she had been when he married her. It was true she was elderly (though by no means frail) and lived out of London with Emily and her stodgy husband, Mr. Williams. But she might have done more. She knew very well that Harry was preparing the ground for lunacy proceedings, and she knew in full what that meant. For Georgina to come home, as she pleaded with her to do, would be to see her immediately taken up in a coach at Charing Cross and sent to a private asylum.

 

At Argeuil things were completely out of hand. Rosie had begun to terrorize the other children. She had been seen shaking Mireille the night before she died, she punched the boys black-and-blue, made Pauline drink her own urine, lied through her teeth to Marie and Victoria. Perhaps more clearly than Georgina, she could see the end coming. The house was filthy, the weather outside was vile. Rosie, like the others, was trapped. It was a fond boast of Georgina’s that if you gave her a child, any child, she could in three months transform its character. She added, with unconscious irony, that if she broke the routine for more than a day or two, the child would revert to what it was. Rosie was the evidence. She had only to look at Marie and Victoria (who liked to be called Valentine) lolling in bed and drinking tea while the children howled in hunger to recognize the world from which she had come originally. She could be slapped, even whipped, but she had identified the weakness at the heart of things. This was a childhood not much up from the life of the tenements from which she had come.

It was in trying to find a place for this termagent that Georgina discovered Gisors, farther south than Gournay and much larger. Gisors is ancient. The Epté River runs through the town, which is overlooked by a castle called the Château Fort. Since medieval times there had been a charitable endowment to care for the sick, and this had now devolved to an order called Les Dames de St.-Thomas de Villeneuve. To Georgina’s surprise and delight, she found that only ten or so years ago, a brand-new hospice had been erected on rather a noble scale to care for twelve men and twelve women of the town, as selected by the sisters. Of these good women, Sister Françoise turned out to be an amiable and levelheaded Irishwoman, who very soon knocked the recalcitrant Rosie into shape, though it might be truer to say that Rosie had at last found a reliable adult to help her. The change in the teenager was so dramatic that Georgina opened negotiations to bring all the children there. This plan required the nuns and their lay administrator to bend the rules of admission and in particular find extra accommodation—though there was some, if one counted the outhouses and stables. It was a question of money. Georgina, they realized, had money.

The hospice was sited in ample grounds not far from the market square, and by the standards of the nineteenth century, its provisions were generous in the extreme. As a building it was not less grand than Tavistock House itself—in fact, it was rather better suited to its purpose. A branch of the Epté ran through the grounds, which were laid out for the cultivation of vegetables. When they weren’t digging, the hapless menfolk fished. For the care of only twenty-four indigents, most of them the victims of cider drinking, it was a quite spectacular endowment. Taking nine Protestant orphans into care was clearly outside the immediate remit of the order. Rosie, who had been set to work in the sewing workshop the hospice organized, had made a very good impression, and Georgina herself turned on all her charm. The deciding factor as to whether the orphanage transferred to Gisors or not was, of course, Harry’s money. Georgina did not mention that Marie and Victoria had washed their hands of the Argeuil arrangements and that the only other alternative was that the children would be sent to Paris and dumped.

On March 8 Harry’s solicitor sent Georgina a letter in which he announced his client’s intentions to sell the lease of Tavistock House. A London friend, Lise Grey, had been to the house to discover what had happened to the Lowthers. She reported Menier in occupation with his drunken cronies and an impudent English mistress. Louisa Treherne wrote once more to beg Georgina to come home. Still she vacillated, trying to settle the future of the orphans. At last came the letter that spurred her to action. Harry had finally lost patience with her, thrown Menier out, and repossessed the property. No singing career, no famous orphanage, and now—if she was not careful—no house. She left at once for London.