3 
Harry survived Georgina’s onslaught. He rose inexorably in the College of Arms and as Norroy supervised the ceremonies surrounding the interment of Gladstone in Westminster Abbey in 1898. He was acting Garter king of arms for the funeral of Victoria and the accession of Edward VII. In time he brought Annie Lowe ashore from the houseboat at Windsor to a cottage at Shiplake in Oxfordshire. They lived in separate houses—hers was called Hope Cottage. In 1915, as soon as he decently could after Georgina’s death, he married Mrs. Lowe. Soon after, he was given his Grand Cross of the Royal Victorian Order. He died in 1923.
Angele left England four or five years after Georgina and settled in Levallois-Perret, a suburb of Paris. There she set up as a piano teacher and a small-town fabulist, much in the manner of her former lover, claiming, among other things, an intimate friendship with the director of the Paris Opéra. He wrote to tell her to stop the nonsense. One afternoon a young girl serving in a post office in another banlieue of the city was startled to be addressed by a portly and elderly customer, her eyes streaming with tears. “Don’t you recognise me?” the woman sobbed. “It’s me—Auntie!” Bichette backed away in terror, calling for the postmaster to summon the police.
Angele died in November 1898, leaving a generous amount of furniture to her nephews and nieces (but not Bichette). In the will she left five hundred francs for the poor, to be distributed by the newspaper L’Aurore. Someone in the reporter’s room confused her with the widow of the chocolate manufacturer Menier and composed a fulsome paragraph of thanks to a distinguished citizen of France noted for her many charitable acts.
Angele survived her husband by six years. Anarcharsis Menier died in January 1892. He had come from a village outside Bordeaux and as a young man was anxious to make his fortune on the grand scale. After two terms of imprisonment, one in London, one in Paris, and the utter failure to dream up an investment swindle worthy of their talents, he and his brothers (ever on the lookout for the coming thing) started selling steam baths and respirators at Bois-Colombes, twelve kilometers from Paris. The various Appareils Menier that came from their “laboratories” won a bronze medal at a hygiene exhibition in Dijon, the town where Georgina’s Mémoires were eventually published.
Louisa Treherne died in 1894. The woman who had been taken to Florence for her health and whose letters seldom omit mention of her various ailments, lived to be eighty-three. Late in life her will had been altered, and save for an unimportant minor legacy, Georgina did not benefit from it. It led, of course, to an acrimonious contest in the courts.
Dal had astonished everyone by meeting and marrying a merry widow in 1883, at the very bottom of his fortunes. A brasserie in which he had invested in Muhlberg went bust, and by chance and a generous helping of luck of the sort not often vouchsafed to a Treherne, he managed to find his consolation prize in life. The lady was the young and beautiful widow Countess Waldstein, possessed of huge and lawyer-infested estates in Bohemia. His stepson Hugo inherited what was left of the great Dux estates in 1894, including the house in which Casanova had been the librarian. The countess gave Dal a son of his own, Phillip, who wrote the first biography of his aunt in 1923.
Of the orphans who survived Georgina’s experiments in music education, nothing is known. In Paris, Gisors, Rouen, London, and somewhere in Canada, their descendants are walking about today in complete ignorance of what splendor and misery there was in being one of “Grannie’s” children. If Freddie was buried under the mulberry tree in Tavistock Square, as Georgina hinted but could never bring herself fully to admit, his grave is marked today by the headquarters of the British Medical Association, which occupies the site. Mireille’s tiny bones are lost or scattered in Argeuil. In the whole orphanage, only the peripheral figures of the Rawlings brothers made even the tiniest mark in history. Two of them became small-time music-hall impresarios.
George Werranrath, whom Harry suspected of adultery, went to New York in 1876 and became the principal tenor of the Brooklyn Cathedral Choir. He married and in August 1883 his wife gave him a son, Reinhart. The father taught the son to sing, and in time Reinhart Werranrath appeared with Caruso at the Metropolitan Opera House, playing Silvio in Pagliacci and the part of Valentin in Gounod’s Faust. He died in 1953, not before leaving a permanent record of his baritone voice on discs cut with the Victor Opera Quartet.
As for Georgina, once in Gisors, she quickly recovered her composure and admitted to herself that the time she had on her hands was never really going to be spent in reflection and contemplation. The greatest part of her possessions on earth was her vast collection of legal papers. When they followed her across the Channel (after the inconvenience of a London dock strike), she at once set to work indexing them. Slowly but surely, they fell into place, and the deed boxes in which she stored them lined the walls of her room. In the sifting process new injustices were revealed and new lines of inquiry opened up. No detail was too small to be overlooked. The Mémoires are stuffed full of tales of the hunt for missing documents, dismay at willfully destroyed letters or joy when others were miraculously recovered. Her whole daily routine was dictated by this obsessive exactitude. Never a day passed when she did not study and annotate, combing through ten years of turbulent history.
It soon occurred to her that her labors merited a book. But what kind of a book should it be? Over the years, she had written half a dozen small pamphlets published at her own expense, and it was these that seemed to her to be the model for the work she contemplated. Sitting at her desk in the hospice, looking down the short road that led to the market, she slowly came to see the theme as an exposé of the English system of justice, nominally addressed to the French (who were going about their business buying potatoes in sublime ignorance of its value to them). The post office was at the end of the road. Unless it was in response to a letter of hers, there was seldom any news from England. No one visited from London, and her journeys to Paris were few and far between. As she pondered what to write, the loneliness of her life overcame her. Without a real friend in whom to confide and constantly playing the mysterious milady with the hospice staff, she chose exactly the wrong book to write. She compounded the error by deciding to write it in French. This required the translation of hundreds of thousands of words and drove her even further within herself. Once, she thought she would be lost without Tavistock House to keep her dream alive. Now it was her room in the hospice, smelling of moldering paper and cigarettes, that drew her back out of the sunlight and the vegetable gardens which she had more or less taken as her own.
When the Mémoires came to be printed, they were furnished in the French fashion with a table des matières for each volume. The synopsis of the first eight pages of volume III gives an indication of the way the book was assembled:
2. La Menier “accomplishes the sacrifice” of leaving Bichette with Marie Helluy. Her return, 28 June 1877. Mme Paul Julien. Loans and advances. French system of pawnbroking. 3. La Menier jealous. Watch sold to M. Landrec. 4. La Menier throws suspicion on Rosie of stealing it. 5. The big wardrobes from The Minories. Extracts from my journal. Menier an egg seller and Director of the Liberté Coloniale, 27 June 1877. 6. Scenes from La Menier. The mattress. Marie Helluy arrives with Bichette, 30 July 1877. 7. La Menier proposes placing the children at Argeuil. Endless uproar. 8. Terrible row with La Menier 10 August. Version of this same row with Marie Helluy . . .
The appendix to each volume has as full a collection of letters as she could furnish bearing on the matters under discussion. While her mother lived, Georgina pestered her unmercifully to find all the family correspondence and return it to Gisors. She tried to make the record complete and in the process incriminated herself without apparently realizing it. It is in a letter to Louisa that she at last mentions how she may have struck orphan Freddie once too often. In another section she publishes an open letter she sent to the editors of every London newspaper at the time of Weldon v. Weldon. It is a prime example of the dangers in her method. In order to get her conjugal rights restored, the single question she had to answer at the hearing was whether she had committed adultery. In a formula devised by her counsel and Harry’s she had only to say one word about that: “No.” Instead she named Sir Henry Thompson, Cadwalladwr Waddy, and George Werranrath as persons with whom she had been accused of sleeping. The judge who heard the case was incensed.
“If you hadn’t repeated them, those names would have remained unknown.”
“But I wanted them known, because people have said—”
“I wouldn’t have let you into the witness box if I had known you were going to repeat those names.”
“I know that alright,” Georgina replied.
Thompson and his wife were still alive when the Mémoires were published. It caused Georgina no qualms if these revelations caused them pain, any more than it did to apostrophize judges and lawyers still living as “dirty old monkeys,” “old goats,” “redfaced old lobsters.” She explains that no London editor would pick up the story of her imprudent behavior with Sir Henry Thompson, though all the provincial papers did. To her mother she wrote:
The case has been completely hushed up and there has been a universal conspiracy of silence. Not a name has been reproduced in the [London] papers. That reticence can only have one reason in the eyes of the world, above all when one knows what happened, and what my own mother and my own brother have had to say . . . Your letters, and I suppose those of Dal, Emily and Bill have been the secret weapons Mr. Weldon has used against me and are the secret weapons I can see everywhere . . . They are private letters that have ruined me publically. Your private protestations to me are absolutely useless. They want me to believe that you don’t have the intention of doing me harm, but it’s impossible to understand your full intentions or your goal. You don’t know what you want, nor what you want to say. As for Dal, Zizi and Bill, that’s another matter. They’re harming me just for the pleasure of putting a spoke in my wheels. And [she adds in an acid footnote] as a way of doing me out of my inheritance.
Dal, Emily (Zizi), and Emily’s husband were all still living when this letter was finally published. It soon becomes clear to the English reader that one reason for writing in French and publishing in France was to give her the freedom to libel people with impunity. She admits this. “I said to my publisher, Darantière, that as what I was writing was defamation to a superlative degree, I would like to prepare a document for him by which I would undertake to keep his own liability completely safeguarded.”
Darantière was understandably alarmed, and not much reassured, when she refused to sign the standard disclaimer he sent her and instead substituted one of her own. In the event of a prosecution, she offered to pay all his costs. The price was that he should publish it all, without attempting to edit it or withdraw it. She added artlessly, “I have already been caught out in England. I guaranteed all the costs of an editor who printed my truths in his paper (Regina v. Mortimer). De Bathe and my husband had the impudence to threaten criminal proceedings against him; and this coward, instead of continuing publication and establishing the truth, was either bribed or stupid enough to back down and got three months in prison.”
Only some of the letters she published reveal a more intimate and domestic side to her. They are few and far between, but they come like islands in an ocean of unrelenting fact. She wrote to her mother:
If I was like Benedict, who can do without sleep . . . but I must have my nine hours, during which I sleep like a nest of dormice, or like my little canary who sleeps no matter what the noise, even though the little rascal refuses to be put to bed before half past eight. He is completely tame and generally flies free. I am horribly afraid of losing him. I tamed him myself and I am, it goes without saying, completely tyrannised and made an idiot of by him. And there’s an argument for Dr. Winslow!
By far the longest letter she allowed into print is the one most damaging to her reputation. It is the hysterical paen of hate she wrote to Angele as a form of ultimatum shortly before being flung out of Gower Street. The letter comprises 117 numbered paragraphs and uncovers aspects of their life together that no one completely sane would have contemplated publishing. In it we learn that Eugénie, the governess appointed by Angele to look after the two remaining orphans in Brixton, had two sisters, and Georgina accuses her lover of debauching all three of them. The servants were drawn into the hell that Angele seems to have created, being told things about the past they should never have had to listen to, asked to inform on their mistress, squabbling among themselves. The actor who played opposite Georgina in the play based on her life, Not Alone, was a young man named Clifford.
They all knew about your intrigues with Clifford, and everybody except me knew that Clifford was sometimes hidden in the house for three hours without being able to escape (me being the stumbling block) that Eva kept watch for you, that she was supposed to warn you of my approach by ringing a little bell or making a cough, and the day I did find you on Clifford’s knee (an old woman like you, on the knee of a vulgar actor) and Eva followed me, you gave her a good mouthful because she hadn’t rung hard enough, the fact being that you were licking your lips so hard you couldn’t hear anything. How you must have mocked me when I said “If it hadn’t been for my presence of mind that child would have seen something” . . . Eugénie, as you know very well, caught you in your chemise—naked—in your bedroom with Clifford. And you made her come in! And then made Clifford leave, who tried to put his arms round her as he went. “No,” she said, pushing him away, “save the dirty business for Madame.” After he was made to go, you said to Eugénie “Have you noticed the effect, the power I have on men? Did you see how pale Clifford was? White as a sheet!”
The letter runs to forty printed pages and stops at nothing—Angele’s thefts, her deceptions, her sexual preferences, the whole life between them laid bare. There are paragraphs devoted to how Angele inflated the cost of hats or purchased without Georgina’s consent eau de cologne, pillows, handbags, soap. And there are paragraphs that make the heart stand still: “Aren’t you ashamed to tell these young girls such things? Isn’t it infamous and ignoble enough that you told the story of Antonio, giving them to understand that I was much older instead of a child of four or five and saying: That will give you an idea of what she is by natural inclination. And then: She likes to pass for this or that—think about it, a husband who used to take her up the rear and she liked it!”
The publication of this letter points up the basic structural fault of the Mémoires. The longer Georgina went on, translating, assembling, glossing, the more she lost touch with what she was trying to achieve. The letter to Angele serves no practical purpose by being included and adds nothing to the story she was trying to unfold of the injustices of the English legal system. One reads it in the same way one might listen in horrified silence to a drunk at a party. There is a nightmare quality in it, like hearing someone destroy herself for no good reason, when a moment’s reflection would have stopped her mouth. Since the greater part of the whole six volumes sets out to prove that Mrs. Georgina Weldon was not mad, the pain of material like this is all the greater. From a letter to her mother written in 1881, again included for no good reason:
You’ve told me I have not appreciated Mr. Weldon in the right way. As if I didn’t know that only too well!!! He has shown now what he has for guts. One of his old teachers, the Reverend W. O’Reilly told Madame Menier he was capable of no matter what cowardly or ignoble act. When he was only sixteen, he seduced one of his mother’s housemaids and chased after her without pity and of course he was never suspected of it. The poor girl got pregnant. He threw live cats down the lavatory—always denying it, it goes without saying.
There are dozens of such gratuitous “truths” strewn recklessly, as, for example, that she did not sleep with Harry after they moved to London because he suffered from the pox; that Dal was an alcoholic; that her mother was weak in the head. She did not have it in her to write with any literary merit, but the colossal effort she put into the manuscript to make it a complete account was self-defeating. It was the dossier method run amok, and in the end it undid her. In life, as in the law itself, there are some things best left unsaid. Before he left London forever, Dal had written to her:
Plenty of people, and I too, accept that you’ve been treated abominably, everyone’s ready to admit that; but also, that you’ve lacked judgement or have been very badly advised. To make comparisons between yourself and Patti doesn’t serve any good purpose. It’s her success and not her immorality that makes her what she is. You too, you’ve had your success, a great moral success, for in spite of all your vicissitudes, you’ve kept your honour and your name intact.
Moreover, you must be considered a real benefactress to humanity, for thanks to you and the bloody exposure made of their iniquities, the lunacy laws will certainly be much improved. Of that there’s not the shadow of a doubt. Equally, you have succeeded in unmasking plenty of other abuses—but it is exactly because of your success in this direction that you’ve made so many enemies . . . You have set against you a numerous and powerful class of the population.
It was about as generous a statement as Dal was capable of, and it has the ring of truth about it. Maybe for that very reason she glossed the letter in a footnote: “The reader will think perhaps that my brother is pulling my leg: but no! He declaims like Solon and everything he says is completely contrary to the facts.”