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.