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Following Maurice Kenealy’s example, Georgina published her own paper, Social Salvation, a cut-and-paste job on recent newspaper reports of legal injustice, spiked with republished extracts from her earlier pamphlets, advertisements for her forthcoming concerts, and a youthful-looking portrait of her on the back page. On September 15, 1883, the Daily Chronicle reported a strange story from the South Coast:

Considerable anxiety prevailed throughout the whole of yesterday in consequence of nothing being heard of the fate of the balloon “Colonel” which made, with Captain Simmons and Mr. Small, a local photographer, an ascent from that place on Thursday. They landed at Cap de la Hogue at midnight, having given people on the ground reassurance with a printed bill which read Read The Englishman, founded by Dr. Kenealy, 2d weekly. Read Social Salvation 1/2d monthly, Printed published and sold by Mrs. Weldon.

Readers were left to guess how these pamphlets came to be in the balloon. However, Captain Simmons was wrestling at the controls of Menier’s self-steering invention, which the aeronaut had purchased from Georgina and which showed an exasperating desire to return to its maker.

It was fun to publish the paper, despite the crudity of its production technique and its indifferent sales. It added another arrow to her quiver. But it was not the center of her attention, any more than the concerts she still gave at the Charles Street Chapel in Mayfair or, less romantically, Goswell Road in Clerkenwell. The big battles had to be fought in court, and once Harry had been disposed of, her second most important target was Gounod. The mad doctors paid in full for their impudence and temerity and the part they played in turning her out of Tavistock House. Gounod, however, was a special case. He stood with Harry as an instance of that earlier betrayal she had suffered in the days when the three of them were like brothers and sister. He could never be forgiven his cowardly flight or the subsequent repudiations he made of her once safely back in Paris.

“His letters to me in 1871 . . . besides the numberless conversations we had on the subject gave me the right to believe I had found in him an experienced ally, a robust friend and an honest lodger, but as subsequent events have proved, I found but rejection and deception.” These words were written in an article for the Cosmopolitan which she reprinted in a pamphlet of 1875. That was at a time when nobody had paid her much mind because she had no powers to set things right. If she complained too hard, she would be put down as an example of a type, the hysterical bad loser. Eleven years on, things were very different. She had in her hands now a weapon she fully intended to use. After conferring with Chaffers and checking her legal powers she summoned Captain Harcourt from his lounging post by the door to her office and sent him to Paris to serve a writ on the composer. It was a brilliant stratagem, only too quick to take effect.

After the runaway success of Redemption in Birmingham the Queen expressed a desire that the composer should return to England and conduct a new work in the royal presence. There was as it happened something suitable ready to hand—Gounod had composed an oratorio in similar elevated vein entitled Mors et Vita. It was nevertheless his painful duty to decline Her Majesty’s invitation. The writ Harcourt served made it certain that if he ever set foot in England again, he would be taken up for debt. Though he pleaded with Georgina through intermediaries, she was adamant. His flight from London, the obstacles she believed he had put in her way when she was Valerie de Lotz, and the humiliation she suffered at the Birmingham festival went too deep. Justice must be served!

In personal terms, it was the second of her great victories. Despite entreaties from Littleton, who was making a pleasing amount of money for him in royalties, Gounod never again came to England to conduct. Georgina won both the actions she brought against him, and though she would never collect a single penny in damages, she had scotched the libels drawn down on her by Wolff and the French press.

The news from the mad doctors was equally satisfactory. By the time of the second Winslow trial, Winslow himself was ruined and since he could not afford to engage counsel, was forced to represent himself. He made a miserable job of it.

She was less lucky with Rivière. In the first action she brought against him, the impresario spent £1,600 on lawyers, only to lose the case for a piffling £50 in damages. Rivière had moved from deriding to hating her, an emotion she returned with interest. Her attacks on him intensified. In March 1885 she found herself in the Central Criminal Court defending a crown prosecution on a charge of criminal libel. Everything in the 2,500-word indictment had to do with words she had published since the first case. Rivière now risked his entire wealth to take revenge. No fewer than three leading counsels were ranged against her, including the man she came to fear most among the legal profession, Montagu Williams, Q.C.

Right from the outset, the venom between the two parties was apparent. In cross-examination of Rivière she asked, “You have never trained a choir?”

“No.”

“You, not being a musician, you don’t know how to.”

“What! I beg your pardon. My lord, I can’t stand this! I can’t be abused in this court. I have been conducting concerts for twenty-five years in this country and I think I am recognised.”

“Have you ever given a lesson?”

“I don’t give lessons. What for should I give lessons?”

“Have you ever trained a choir?”

“I have never trained a choir.”

“You just beat with a stick?”

Sometimes abuse like this found favor with the jury. Here it did not. Her defense in the second Rivière case was her worst performance, and there is no doubt that Montagu Williams did his best to draw out and emphasize the egoist in her. In one exchange he forced this retort from a nettled Georgina: “I have taught little children and now I teach grown up people if I can. Judges can sometimes get a lesson from me.”

Williams struck back instantly. “Mrs. Weldon, you teach children, you teach men and you may teach judges, but don’t try to teach me.”

Nor was the jury impressed by the evidence of Captain Harcourt. “I am in consumption and blind and only want St. Vitus Dance to make me a perfect specimen,” he declared, mistaking the mood of the jury. (A little later he was removed from the court for saucing the judge.)

Montagu Williams was two years older than Georgina and, like her, a late starter. He had been a soldier and an actor before taking up the law and had dabbled in journalism and the theater since. The jury had endured a very long and spitefully conducted trial about matters so small, so exact in detail, and very often so far from the point that it became itchy. Williams simplified it all for them in a devastating closing statement:

Here is the whole cause of it. I will tell you what has been the cause from first to last of all this invective—egregious vanity and an insatiable thirst for notoriety. And that is what led to all this. Why, gentlemen, it was patent from every letter that she read. “Why do you give Madame So and So a hundred pounds a week and not to me? I am the person. I am the great musical star. I am the person who is making your fortune.” And because she was not a musical attraction; because she did not bring money into Covent Garden; because she utterly failed; and Mr. Rivière was obliged to remonstrate with her as to the shortcomings of this choir; the history of this black spot, the very origin of all this, was egregious vanity.

She could not hold that Williams was some fusty lawyer who had never lived in the world: he put into his jury address the indignation that comes from experience of theaters and stars and agents. Speaking in a dramatically hoarse voice—he was in fact suffering from cancer of the throat—he managed to compress all the usual prolixity of a Mrs. Weldon trial into one damning word: vanity. When it was her turn to address a closing statement to the jury, she made it one of the shortest of her career.

I am not a young woman, gentlemen of the jury: I have not got a career to look forward to; if I could only get my character into my hands again, it would be to pursue that which I devoted myself to in my youth, sitting quietly at home in my chair, teaching little children. Of course a verdict against me, gentlemen, would be my ruin—you see they have three barristers—the costs would be something tremendous and I could never pay them. They might send me to prison for a year, and there I suppose I might die, because perhaps none of you have been in prison, but I have, and I know how hard it is. I was in the best prison here, but I have never been quit of gout since then. I was half starved, but I was not worse treated than other people are. They were kind women there, but they dared not show it. I was very cold all the time though it was in summer, and the hardships of prison are what nobody can imagine till they have been put there . . . I won’t say any more because I feel I have tired you; and therefore I leave myself entirely in your hands, never believing you will find me guilty and condemn me as a common felon.

After twenty minutes’ deliberation, the jury found her guilty, and she was sentenced to six months without hard labor. She was taken first to Millbank and then five days later to Holloway.