Prologue  

One rainy evening in September 1889 the nuns of a small hospice in Gisors, France, on the north bank of the Seine, answered the night bell to find on their doorstep an Englishwoman called Mrs. Georgina Weldon. The luggage at her feet was modest—two pugs, some caged birds, and, peering from his wicker basket, a bedraggled monkey called Titileehee. Mrs. Weldon, who spoke rapid and idiomatic French, was not a woman to be argued with, and she was soon inside and shaking out her cape. The lateness of the hour was quickly explained. She had come hotfoot from London, her house stolen from under her by an accursed Frenchwoman she had considered to be a lifetime partner. In the background of the story was an estranged husband connected to the College of Arms, a man who was friend to princes. As she rattled on in her guileless, headlong fashion, the startled nuns learned how the less proximate cause of her ruin was the cowardice and ingratitude twenty years earlier of the celebrated composer Charles Gounod. That got their interest. Gounod was a revered national figure in his seventies, as much noted for his piety these days as for the operas he had composed in his golden years.

Over the next few days the garrulous Mrs. Weldon continued her catalogue of misfortunes. In her time, she had been falsely accused of lunacy, fought vigorous actions in the English courts in defense of her married rights, run an orphanage and several large choirs. She had served a prison sentence in Newgate for publishing “a false and scandalous libel,” only to be cheered through the streets by her adoring public on her release. She served a second term in Holloway for an identical offense, and this time on her release her followers unshipped the horses from their shafts and dragged her carriage to Speakers’ Corner in Hyde Park, from where she addressed a crowd estimated at 17,000.

The nuns grew nervous. This was many more than the population of Gisors. Ah yes, Mrs. Weldon went on, but it didn’t end there—she was famous in so many ways! Her face had appeared in advertisements for Pear’s soap on Clapham omnibuses, and as well as singing at the Paris Opéra, she had in more needy circumstances trod the boards of the London music halls. Nor was she in Gisors by chance. Twelve years previous she had found this selfsame hospice a haven and a blessing for a few months, as some of the older nuns might remember. And now here she was again at the mercy of the good sisters, seeking only calm and repose. A thought crossed her mind: had she mentioned she was once accused of going to look for Gounod with a loaded revolver?

The nuns admitted her out of charity and she stayed for twelve years, remaining more or less within the walls of the hospice all that time and seldom venturing outside. It was soon clear she was not there from considerations of piety. She was not a Catholic, nor was she very devout in any other direction, unless an alarming and scandalizing enthusiasm for summoning the spirits of the departed could be counted as such. Though her bills were paid more or less on time, there was much that was vexing about her behavior. She insisted on adopting the working dress of the hospice, which she wore with a theatrical dash quite contrary to the spirit of humility it signified. Her French was salted with Parisian slang, and she used it to command all those little things that were to her the necessities of life: stamps and writing paper, food for her pets. She played no part in the religious observances of the establishment but was not above the criticizing its management. (It was a matter of awe to some of the nuns that shortly after she arrived the cesspit was emptied at her insistence for the first time in thirty years.) She was fond of gardening and threw herself into the reorganization of the herb and vegetable plots, as well as designing and having built a better sort of cold greenhouse. She developed a passion for beekeeping and corresponded vigorously with local experts. Her peas, she asserted, were the admiration of all who saw them. You might travel by train to Paris without seeing better.

 

Georgina Weldon was fifty-two when she first entered the Hospice Orphelinat de St.-Thomas de Villeneuve. She was given rooms on the third floor, and one of her earliest acts was to hire a maid, a local girl called Charlotte. Since the other occupants of the building were elderly and alcoholic paupers, this caused a stir; but an even greater surprise came when the rest of her luggage arrived from England. Very quickly, two walls of her salle de séjour were lined out floor to ceiling with deed boxes. They accounted for only a fraction of the twenty-eight trunks of written and printed materials this strange Englishwoman had lugged across the Channel. The record of her life—if that was what all this paper indicated—was a staggering minuteness. As the French themselves say, God was in the details.

It became clear to the nuns that Mme Weldon’s principal obsession was with herself. As well as the whiff of sulphur that seemed to rise from not one but dozens of court actions she had undertaken, there were in these papers the lighter fragrances of earlier and better times. The material for an autobiography had never been more assiduously gathered, and in addition to this massive chronofile, which included menus and theater programmes, cartes de viste, letters, sheet music, legal transcripts, and yellowing telegrams, were the handsomely bound diaries and journals she had commenced as a child, and a splendid visitor’s book from a house in Tavistock Square that had once belonged to Dickens. She, who had once published her own newspaper, was setting up in Gisors with the intention of putting all this material into shape, not merely for her own pleasure but as a lesson for future generations. She was there to write her memoirs.

There was something artless about Mrs. Weldon, for all her protestations of genius. Gounod came into the story because—she claimed—she was, like him, a musician of the first rank, a singer and music educator such as the world had never before seen. His good opinion of her, which she freely embroidered now, had not stopped her in the past from demanding her husband horsewhip him on the steps of the Opéra. The more perceptive of the Sisters of St.-Thomas came to realize there was serious folly in her. She was more like a thwarted and disappointed child than the biblical Jeremiah she often invoked. However, if she was fool, she was a holy one. And there was one manner in her that was unchanging. Not very tall and no longer in possession of the beauty it was easy to see she had once owned, she nevertheless exuded a kind of upper-class English arrogance, a certainty that seemed to come from an aristocratic background only to be guessed at by the simple and pious folk in Gisors. This was the most cherished part of her persona. The nuns, with their blunt nails and chilblained feet, were left in no doubt they were dealing with a lady.

The memoirs she set about writing were to be vindication of all she had attempted in the name of art and love. She wrote in French, partly because she wished to address the work to her host nation, but much more plainly because any attempt to publish in English would most assuredly bring her before the courts again. The memoirs were a forest of libels directed against anyone who had ever dared to cross her will. She had already chosen this invocation, from Lamentations:

O vos omnes qui transitis per viam: attendite et videte si est dolor sicut dolor meus.

And indeed, had anyone ever seen a misery such as hers? The prophetical Mrs. Weldon had suffered affliction in full biblical measure. However, unlike Jeremiah, she had not the slightest intention of taking it lying down. That had never been her way. Smoking cigarettes with a furious intensity, breaking off only to scold her maid or bully the gardeners, she roamed back over the turbulent events of her life. They grew to like her at Gisors. M. Robine, the lay administrator, felt he understood her. The narrow purpose of her efforts to expose the English system of justice was soon overwhelmed by her passion for digression. Robine knew enough about how the world wagged to see she was storing up trouble for herself with every page she wrote. One day she waved a letter in his face. London society ladies were preparing a tribute to Victoria on the occasion of the Queen’s Diamond Jubilee. Mrs. Craigie had written: “No representative gathering of the women of England would be complete without Mrs. Weldon.”

That might have been a good time to publish. Better still, it might have signaled peace and sent her home to England with her reputation restored. Instead, the galley proofs piled up in the offices of her long-suffering printers in Dijon while she hunted down letters she had sent a quarter of a century earlier. The Dreyfus Affair captured her attention for a while. Was she not the English Dreyfus, she asked her readers? A nephew met Oscar Wilde in Paris, and she wrote to him, sympathizing with his plight but deploring his crime. Wilde replied with courage and wit. She was much preoccupied with the legend of Louis XVI’s son and his escape by substitution from the revolutionary terror. These matters and her peas and honey delayed completion of the great task she had set herself. In the end the Mémoires were not finally delivered from the printer until the new century. The work ran to fifteen hundred pages, bound up by the firm of Darantière in six volumes.

Even in French the Mémoires shriek. Georgina finally went back to England in 1901 to publicize them, and those few friends who remained in London persuaded her how dangerous and unwise she had been to have them printed at all. One of her principal targets in the work was her husband Harry, who was not only still alive but Acting Garter King of Arms, the most senior heraldic officer in the land. As such, he had stage-managed the funeral of Victoria and was now charged with the salvage of Edward’s Coronation, postponed by the King’s illness. Even Mrs. Weldon’s most loyal supporters—and they were mostly women—were scandalized by the work. It was no good her telling them that the Mémoires were in print and on sale in France (though in fact she held most of the stock in boxes under her bed). Nothing good could come of promoting them in England, least of all their principal objective, her life vindicated at the bar of public opinion. In France itself they were not the sensation she had hoped and longed for over all those years of scribbling. She sent out presentation copies, sold a few sets of the work to unsuspecting customers, received no reviews. It was the bitterest blow. The whole enterprise sank like a stone into a lake. Was this to be the fate of what the medium Desbarolles had once assured her would be the most useful memoirs of her day and likely to last a century?

In 1996 a copy of the Mémoires bobbed to the surface in a French bookseller’s catalogue. I read them with mounting incredulity in the garden of a house near Cognac, trying to fit a face to the name. Who was this engaging, maddening, self-deceiving Victorian? The work has little or no literary merit and is muddled, contradictory, and sometimes incoherent. The French in which it is written was a matter of wonder to my neighbors. The things it describes were far from their own concerns as small farmers and winegrowers. “Why are you bothering your head with this good woman?” the sardonic Mme Ayraud asked me over dinner one evening.

A short distance from where we ate, there is a village called Chez Audebert. At some time in the nineteen forties, in the garden of a house right on the main road, a simple man began making three-quarter-size statues in cement. He started with angels and children but gradually broadened his interests to include de Gaulle, Elvis, and Marilyn Monroe. There is a man who might or might not be Jean Gabin and another who resembles Danny Kaye. The sculptor of Audebert made dogs, most of them with impudent, knowing grins; birds—owls—and lions. There are nudes of young girls with their arms held out in innocent welcome; knock-kneed schoolchildren; and peasants like himself lurching home along a dusty track. Some of the people depicted carry briefcases and smoke jaunty pipes. Gradually his garden filled up with maybe a hundred statues all arranged higgledy-piggledy. When he died his widow left the gate open for anyone to visit, and so it stands today. Whenever two or more people are in the garden, the living are quickly trapped in the arms and legs, breasts and buttocks of this mysterious sculpture park. If they are motionless for a moment, it is sometimes difficult to separate them from the statues all around.

We don’t know why the Audebert villager made these sculptures, and they are regarded with an embarrassed condescension by his neighbors. Mme Ayraud’s comment is typical: “Pouf! He was not an artist, he was a poor man who had big ideas. That sort of thing never works.” It is true that one Audebert figure on its own would be disappointing. A hundred are a different matter.

The great attraction of the Mémoires Weldon is a similar plenty. Georgina wrote as she spoke, pell-mell. The pages are crowded, noisy, exuberant, and give a view of the nineteenth century that is not often recorded. As to her purpose in writing, one of the striking things about Georgina Weldon’s search for justice is the degree to which she incriminates herself. Many of the things that can be held against her—her highhandedness, her occasional cruelties, the want of a sense of humor that might have protected her from some of her disasters—come direct from her own narrative errors. The more she struggles, the deeper she sinks.

There is nevertheless great beauty in her story. “It’s the faith in what is good, what is beautiful and just that has armed my natural convictions,” she wrote. “Gounod always called me his Jeanne d’Arc—others have called me Madame Don Quixote, a visionary, a utopian.” After all the flimflam and absurdity that dogged her has been discounted, these are the words that stick in the mind. How true they are is the subject of the present book.