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Gounod died in October 1893 at his second home in St.-Cloud. In his last years he was frail and going blind, and toward the end his doctors forbade him to work. Instead, he rejoiced in playing l’Abbé Gounod, the silver-haired old patriarch, replete with honors and a friend to humanity. Almost to the end he would travel every Saturday to attend the Institut, carrying in his pocket the exact amount of money necessary, counted out into his palm by an ever-watchful Anna. One day he hailed a cab at the St.-Lazare station, and at the end of the journey the cabman said, “Monsieur Gounod, I’m proud to have driven the composer of Faust.” Gounod patted away the compliment with good-humored wit. “My friend,” he said gently. “You’ve a fine turn of speed. You would have made a good conductor.”

The little vanities of old age sat well with him. He liked to muse aloud on art and religion, safe in the belief that his epoch had done him the honor his life in music deserved. Like a good priest, the personal agonies his work had cost him were smoothed away until what was left was the goodness, the light within. He was very rich. When he said things like “God loves those whom He admits into suffering,” his listeners in their thirties and forties took it to be a noble and pious reflection that had nothing to do with the material circumstances of his life.

The end came with a fine operatic pathos. On October 15, while Anna and her daughter played dominoes at his back, Gounod sat at his desk smoking his faithful clay pipe. He was looking over the score of his Requiem. When Anna looked around to say something to him, the pipe was still burning, but Gounod’s head had fallen forward onto the table beside it. He lingered for two days, a crucifix clenched in his fist, before dying at half past six in the morning of October 17.

There was a state funeral in the Madeleine in Paris ten days later. After that, the coffin was taken to Auteuil, where it was interred in the family vault. The French newspapers received indignant letters from an unknown woman in Gisors, reprehending Madame Gounod for not insisting her husband be laid to rest in the Panthéon. Georgina managed to stop herself from attending the funeral. She wrote in her diary, “Poor old man—how I did love him and how hard all hope died.” It was a telling remark. Was the hope that he should snatch her up from a failed marriage and share his genius with her? If so, hadn’t he offered to do that when he suggested he accept the post of director of the Conservatoire and bring her to Paris with him in 1872? In the end, Gounod can be forgiven for misunderstanding the depth of her feelings toward him. She was saying something to her diary that she had never really expressed to him or indeed to any other man. To love was to give, and it was not in her to be so vulnerable as that.

She had kept up her interest in spiritualism, and now that Gounod was on the Other Side, Charlotte, Georgina’s maid, suddenly discovered psychic powers. With the help of her boyfriend she arranged séances in which the shade of the great composer came to Gisors to tease and chide. What Charlotte knew about Gounod was mostly gathered from her mistress’s conversation; and what she knew about spiritualism was borrowed from the shocked hearsay of her parents. Accordingly, Gounod’s ghostly visits to the hospice were sometimes more like cheap stage illusions. Cups bounced off the table, and chairs were mysteriously flung against the wall. Every word the spirit Gounod uttered was written down afterward in all its banality. His tone was generally forgiving and he liked to josh his old admirer. But Georgina was disappointed. Where was the genius in him, the messiah of new music she had done so much to promote? He was talking to her like the shade of a jovial butcher or a man who had gone to his grave as a hearty but short-tempered baker. He was talking in fact like a Gisorard.

This was a fault he learned to correct. He began to write to her in regular alexandrines, of the sort written by Hugo and studied by children in school. His themes narrowed. What he wanted to express in this spirit-poetry was the evils of the justice system as experienced by honest litigants. Now what he said was received with enthusiasm, all the more so because Charlotte produced these couplets when she was in deep trance and so could not be accused of deception. It was automatic writing! Charlotte sat at the desk with her eyes rolled back in her head and took down by dictation what Gounod had to say as Georgina looked on, spellbound. Her boyfriend hovered nervously in the corner, willing the girl not to get it too wrong. When she let the pen fall saying she was exhausted, it was often no more than the truth. Then, helped by the money Georgina had paid for the séances, Charlotte left with her young man for London. Gounod left with her.

Georgina seldom went outside the walls of the hospice in these years, and her pleasures and appetites grew simpler. Ever since her first imprisonment in Newgate she had suffered from what she diagnosed as gout but was probably arthritis. Her hands slowly seized up. By the time of her sixtieth birthday, her unremitting labors on the hospice gardens had paid such dividends that she could to some degree sit back and enjoy the fruits. Her undergardener, Petit Pierre, was one of the hospice inmates, an old and slow-witted simpleton who was devoted to her. The greenhouse she designed with doors on rollers was a great success, and she had grown interested in bees. She had hives built and she corresponded with local apiarists. If she was sometimes lethargic and could no longer command Petit Pierre to fetch water from the stream or rake up leaves with quite the vigor she once had, it was only understandable. She was growing old.

The Dreyfus Affair interested her (and would have done so more had she known of the part played in the family’s search for justice by a Normandy psychic, Léonie, who helped Mathieu Dreyfus to understand what had really happened to his brother). Georgina was naturally a Dreyfusard, and there were other stories in the French press that she followed keenly, always of injustice done in the name of the law. Crimes against women particularly interested her, such as the false imprisonment at home of a girl by her own family in the city of Poitiers, a famous case. The local magistrate in Gisors was a man named Delatin, and she sometimes went to court to listen to him. She admired his suavity and imperturbable good humor. Slowly, inexorably, life caught up with her. Petit Pierre died, Delatin was transferred to Le Havre.

In 1890 Dal’s boy, Phillip, came to see his notorious aunt. She drew a tactful veil over what she thought of his father and complimented the young man for having learned from Dal the art of writing a letter. She explained:

A circle of Dante’s Inferno should be set aside for people who neglect to answer letters. You will find it is the busy people in this world who are the best correspondents; it is also a question of proper method. Owing to the telephone the letter will become as obsolete as the snuff-box in times to come. One has only to compare the correspondence in memoirs of the eighteenth and part of the nineteenth centuries to realise the gradual decay in correspondence.

Phillip Treherne adored her. She never mentions in the Mémoires how, late on, she found a new lease on life, teaching herself Braille and going from time to time to Paris to read and sing to a music school for the blind. Her nephew tells us that story. Georgina made a huge impression on him, and they corresponded regularly for as long as she lived. She went to his wedding, he was present at her funeral.

This serious and bookish young man also made her a wonderful gift, something that came about from a chance meeting he had in Paris. One evening in 1898, he was sitting at a café table in the rue Scribe when a shabbily dressed but striking-looking man came and sat down nearby. Phillip Treherne recognized him as the disgraced and ruined Oscar Wilde. He introduced himself, and they talked pleasantly of books and literary figures until midnight. Three days later Phillip went to Gisors and told his aunt of this encounter. He wanted her advice. Wilde had invited him to visit his rooms in the Hôtel d’Alsace. Georgina was cautious:

It’s distressing to think that this unhappy man, so gifted with real talent, has been lost entirely by his own fault. But I think he’s been cured of his deplorable instincts. My pals in the Law Courts have assured me he has completely repented and that he has said he doesn’t know how he could have been such a boor [brute] and such an idiot. If he’s sincere, I think you might reply to his invitation. I’ll find that out for you. Ever since these friends at the Law Courts told me all this, I have really wanted to write him a word of sympathy. But I didn’t have his address. Since he’s given it to you, I have it, I’ll write to him, and I’ll soon know if he repents. If that’s not so, I counsel you not to accept his invitation.

She did not keep a copy of the letter she wrote to Wilde. The one remark she could remember of her sympathy toward a fellow martyr was this: “I can’t tell you how happy I would be to think that you have repented of your insane and unnatural conduct.” Wilde replied at once, and his letter is worth quoting in full:

My dear Mrs. Weldon,

So Phillip Treherne is your nephew. I wondered if he was kith and kin with the lady whom friends of mine remember as the beautiful Miss Treherne and whom the world will always remember as Mrs. Weldon. But we talked of books and art and the idea passed from my mind. How cultivated he is, and so well bred in his gravity and courteous ways. I enjoyed meeting him very much and hope he will do well. For the moment he has perhaps too much appreciation of the work of others to realise his own creative energy.

Yes, I think that, aided by splendid personalities like Michael Davitt and John Burns, I have been able to strike a heavy and fatal blow at the monstrous prison system of English justice. There will be no more starvation, nor sleeplessness, nor endless silence, nor eternal solitude, nor brutal flogging. The system has been exposed and so doomed. But it is difficult to teach the English either pity or humanity. They learn slowly. Next, the power of the judges (an entirely ignorant set of men—ignorant, that is, of what they are doing), their power to inflict most barbarous sentences on those that are brought before them must be limited. At present a judge will send a man to two years hard labour or five years penal servitude, not knowing that all such sentences are sentences of death. It is the lack of imagination in the Anglo-Saxon race that makes the race so stupidly, harshly cruel. Those who are bringing about prison reform in Parliament are Celts to a man, for every Celt has inborn imagination.

For myself, of course, the aim of life is to realise one’s own personality, one’s own nature, and now as before it is through Art that I realise what is in me, and I hope soon to begin a new play; but poverty with its degrading preoccupations with money, the loss of many friends, the deprivation of my children by a most unjust law administered by a most unjust judge, the terrible effect of years of silence, solitude and ill-treatment—all these have of course killed to a large extent, if not entirely, the great joy in living I once had. However, I must try, so the details of Prison Reform will have to be worked out by others. I put the fly in motion but I cannot turn the wheels. It is enough for me that the thing is coming—so that what I suffered will not be suffered by others. That makes me happy.

One word more. Your letter gave me pleasure. Charity is not a sentimental emotion; it is the only method by which the soul can attain to any knowledge—to any wisdom. Very sincerely yours, O.W.

Wilde was ill and had only two more years to live when he wrote this. It says wonders for his forbearance that he did not comment on Georgina’s desire that he should exhibit remorse for what he was. Nor did he mention that he would have perhaps avoided his own prosecution if he had not made the fatal mistake of bringing a suit against the Marquis of Queensberry for criminal libel. Wilde’s experience of the courts and the dangers of challenging the establishment was brief and chastening indeed. In February of 1895 he was the acclaimed author of that glittering new play The Importance of Being Earnest. On May 25 of the same year he began serving two years’ hard labor at Reading Gaol. In the circumstances his letter to Georgina Weldon was extraordinarily gracious. Repentant or not, he wrote her the most sympathetic commendation she ever received.