A Monkey Among Crocodiles: The Life, Loves and Lawsuits of Mrs Georgina Weldon – a disastrous Victorian [Text only]

BRIAN THOMPSON

DEDICATION

FOR WALTER

EPIGRAPH

I don’t think there’s ever been a human being put down on this earth afflicted by a temperament as shy and reclusive as mine. A shyness pushed to the point of suffering by a nervousness nothing could overcome. There’s nothing more marvellous, nothing’s ever happened that’s more singular that I, among all the women in the world, find myself so to speak engulfed by the stormy existence that has been my lot since 1868.

My Orphanage, 1877

Look at Sarah Bernhardt – does she have my beauty, my voice, my worth, etc? So from where does she get her fortune? Fame!

Georgina to her mother, 1877

Quand on tombe, on tombe jamais bien.

Dumas fils

CONTENTS

Cover

Title Page

Dedication

Epigraph

Prologue

1. Thomas

2. Florence

3. Going Home

4. Treherne

5. Weldon

6. Gounod

7. Tavistock

8. Menier

9. Argeuil – Paris

10. The Mad-Doctors

11. Rivière

12. The Courts

13 Finale

Keep Reading

Select Bibliography

Copyright

About the Publisher

PROLOGUE

One rainy evening in September 1889 the nuns of a small hospice in Gisors 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 aged 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 a 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 composer Gounod. Here at least was a name they could identify. 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 defence of her married rights, run an orphanage and several choirs. She had served a prison sentence in Newgate for publishing ‘a false and scandalous libel’, only to be driven through the streets by her adoring public on her release. She served a second term in Holloway for an identical offence and this time on her release her followers unshipped the horses from their shafts and dragged her carriage to Speaker’s 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 Opera, she had in more needy circumstances trod the boards of the London music halls. Nor was she in Gisors by chance. Twelve years ago 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 scandalising 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 behaviour. 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 criticising 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 reorganisation 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 Saint 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 from 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 of staggering minuteness. As the French themselves say, God was in the detail.

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 materials for an autobiography had never been more assiduously gathered and, in addition to this massive chronofile, which included menus and theatre programmes, cartes de visite, 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. Georgina Weldon, she insisted to anyone who was foolish enough to listen, had a story to tell. 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, like him, she was 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 prevented her in the past from demanding that her husband horsewhip him on the steps of the Opéra. The more perceptive of the Sisters of St Thomas came to realise 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 a 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 of Gisors. This was the most cherished part of her persona. The nuns, with their blunt nails and chilblained feet, were left in no doubt that they were dealing with a lady.

I was part of the fashionable world which in truth fashionably ignores everything except the meetings and soirées devoted to who is who, or who is going to marry who; why Lady A. found herself uninvited to the ball given by Lady B.; or by what means Mrs C. dresses herself so magnificently; or how vexing it has been for poor Lady D. to lose one of her footmen, the one who made such an ornament of the other. The latest book, the winning horse, parliamentary gossip – arguing of course for what is best for the Party and not the country … it never occurred to me to dissent, nor to reflect. I flowed with the current, chatted well, listened attentively – and I was, which I am certainly not now, an excessively popular person.

The memoirs she set about writing were to be a 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.’

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. Gounod, who figures large in the story, died in 1893, four years after she came to the hospice. Once the formalities of a State funeral had been got out of the way, he started to appear at seances she held, saying teasing and affectionate things he had not said to her face for twenty years or more. It was quite remarkable good luck that Charlotte, the maid, had turned out to be such a gifted medium, though it may not have pleased the nuns to have her summon Gounod’s lumbering shade. But then, when Charlotte left, the composer left with her. Mrs Weldon bore the loss with equanimity. She wrote on steadily and patiently, while the pugs snored in the basket at her feet and Titileehee the monkey chattered in his cage above her head.

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 that 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 signalled 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, sympathising 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 1500 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 publicise 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. 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 scandalised 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 neighbours. The things it describes were far from their own concerns as small farmers and wine growers. ‘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 neighbours. 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 high-handedness, her occasional cruelties, the want of a sense of humour which 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 flim-flam 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.

I should like to thank some people for their help and wise comments. Mrs Wendy Hill followed the London end of the story with a sharp eye for topographical detail. In Paris, Kay Dumas plunged into the Bibliothèque Nationale shortly after its removal to new premises and survived to tell the tale. I am grateful to the staff of the Bodleian Library; Trinity College Cambridge Library; East Sussex County Records Office and the Staff of the Brighton Central Library. Elizabeth North gave me support and a novelist’s insights into the central character and suffered her presence in the life we share with unfailing good humour. As every author knows, some works are happier to see through to a conclusion than others. This has been a happy book, for which I am indebted to David Miller and Rebecca Wilson, more than I can say here. Finally – and to adapt a useful phrase from the screenwriter William Goldman – the energy and enthusiasm of a brilliant editor, Arabella Pike, ensured that when the thing was fixed, it was fix-fixed.

BRIAN THOMPSON

February 1999

1 THOMAS

Georgina Weldon was never quite the performer and entertainer nor the grand lady or talked about social lioness she so fondly invented for her readers. Her story starts with parents and a childhood of such a cranky nature that they must be examined with the care she gave to later episodes of her life. Her troubles started the day she was born, when she was presented with a mask fashioned for her by parents who were the kind that could not distinguish easily between the truth and a lie.

She came into the world on 24 May 1837. All day long the London streets were filled with people, running to see the Life Guards pass by or hanging on the Hyde Park railings to gawp or jeer at the rich. The greatest aristocratic houses in England were represented by the comings and goings of their lumbering and oversprung coaches, issuing from the squares about Mayfair and Belgravia. In the tens of thousands that milled about on foot there was that strange unvoiced sense of the exceptional that sometimes characterises how mobs behave. Londoners normally turned out in such numbers only to riot or exhibit their feral curiosity – a fortnight earlier, for example, 20,000 had gathered at Newgate to watch the murderer Greenacre hanged. Today the mood was different. The word sightseer was a brand new coinage and exactly suited the occasion. Placid and orderly citizens of all classes wandered down the Mall to inspect the newly completed but untenanted Buckingham Palace, where it was said few of the thousand windows would open and many of the doors were jammed in their frames by green timber and shoddy workmanship. Directly in front of the place squatted the enormous and foreign-looking Marble Arch, on top of which was to have stood an equestrian statue of George IV, a piece of triumphalism only averted by his death and the colossal overspend on the whole project.

There were many such examples of the new and the bold to gaze on. London, in its West End, was being almost entirely remodelled. Ancient lanes and houses had been pulled down and greenfield sites opened. Behind Buckingham Palace, the ingenious Mr Cubitt was bringing soil from his excavation of St Katherine’s Dock at Tower Bridge along a canal that cut up from the Thames to the site of the present Victoria station. His purpose was to fill the marshy land round about and complete the building of Belgravia for his client, Lord Grosvenor. It was the showpiece of property development in the entire city. Filling marshes, levelling huge tracts was becoming a commonplace in that part of London. Thomas Cubitt’s plans for neighbouring Pimlico involved the wholesale tearing up of ancient market gardens: farms, even rivers were not to stand in his way. Though it was true the speculation in property was running into something of a slump, the check was only temporary. The scale of new building in the capital was greater than anything seen before. For a brief moment this sunny Wednesday, London stood still and took stock of itself.

For the nobility it was an important working day and most of those who peered from their coaches were in court dress. They were summoned in celebration of Princess Victoria’s eighteenth birthday, which began with the formalities of an audience in the Drawing Room at Kensington Palace. It was an occasion of the greatest significance, for under the constitutional arrangements made for her, the Princess at last burst free from the clutches of her mother the Regent. Those people of rank who attended the young Victoria that morning witnessed a telling little piece of theatre. One of the many visitors she received was the Lord Chamberlain, who had ridden from Windsor with a letter from the King. The Duchess of Kent held out her hand to receive it on behalf of her daughter. Lord Conyngsby ignored the gesture and very pointedly gave the letter direct to the Princess. What was long promised had now become fact: the next monarch would be this almost unknown, unmarried young woman. As everyone understood, her accession was not far off. George IV had been fifty-eight when at last he became king and his brother William IV succeeded him aged sixty-five. The taint of madness and scandal hung over both reigns. If God should spare Victoria, Britain could anticipate a profoundly different future.

As soon as she was old enough to understand, Georgina’s father harped on the connection between these great events and her own birth. There was nothing particularly teasing about it either. Both parents made so much of the coincidence that she confessed later, ‘It filled my childish fancy with a vague idea of superiority and relationship with the Royal Family.’ Such ideas, which are normally no more than a harmless family joke, are supposed to wane with the passing of time: unfortunately, this one stuck. Georgina was to live her whole life with the unquantifiable feeling of superiority derived from that day. Encouraged by her manically snobbish parents, she was, she believed, blessed by greatness in some way; at the very least born to a rank in society which furnished its own recommendations and which needed no apology or explanation. She was a full part of the old aristocratic supremacy and the same gentle zephyrs that blew on Victoria’s reign would also fill her sails. When things turned out rather differently – and it would be hard to imagine two less compatible Victorian histories than those of the Monarch and her subject – then the fault lay not in her but other people.

It was certainly a wonderful day on which to be born. All England was en fête. The King lay at Windsor, unloved and unregarded, while at Kensington Palace his niece received twenty-two loyal addresses delivered by hand from every part of the country. In the evening hundreds of noble guests attended a State ball where there was much quizzing of the short and excitable Victoria, who showed her gums rather a lot when she laughed. Once again, the King was conspicuous by his absence. Wellington had attended George IV in his last days and with his usual brutal candour let it be known round the room that the brother was in even worse plight. Lit by hundreds of candles, the noblest in the land gossiped on the white and gilt chairs set for their comfort. The sole topic of conversation was the future Queen.