The defence offered by Schwarzenberg for his behaviour was his suspicion that Jane was having an affair with a Monsieur Labuteau, who until 1830 had been an officer in the élite royal Guarde du Corps of the erstwhile Charles X, and was a scion of one of the great French families.3 That this young man was an admirer of Jane’s may have been true. Apparently he acted as an escort on several occasions; even in Paris a woman could go nowhere alone, and during the late stages of her pregnancy she had been glad of his arm. But that Jane had betrayed Felix with him was untrue, and she indignantly denied the charge;
If to gaze upon thee waking with love never ceasing
And fondly hang o’er thee in slumber when laid,
Each tender dear moment my passion increasing,
If this is betraying, thou hast been betrayed.
… if thy comforts by every fond art to enhance
Thy sorrows to lighten, thy pleasures to aid,
To guess every wish and obey every glance,
If this be betraying, thou hast been betrayed!
J.
Paris 18314
At the bottom of the rumours concerning Jane’s fidelity was the prince’s handsome sister, Princess Mathilde, whose ambition for her much loved younger brother was boundless. She saw nothing but disaster in his relationship with Jane and feared that if the couple married in France, as suggested, his career was finished. Mathilde enlisted the aid of a Schwarzenberg cousin (there were several Prince Schwarzenbergs in Paris) to ensure that Felix heard of Jane’s friendship with Monsieur Labuteau in an unfavourable light.5 The seeds of suspicion were well sown and provided Felix with self-justification for his own shameless behaviour.
Jane was well aware that the Schwarzenberg family were ranged against her and were almost certainly responsible for Felix’s rescinding his earlier semi-agreements to marry her. But an interest in Monsieur Labuteau was never even mentioned by Jane; not in her poetry, nor in subsequent letters to close friends, in which she denied the allegation, nor in her surviving diaries. She was accustomed to having a court of admirers, and the young man clearly meant nothing to her beyond a convenient and pleasant escort.
Immediately after Jane’s confinement, Felix too appeared to believe that there was nothing in the story he had been told. In a note to Jane he confirmed that he had now ‘entire faith in her’, though for a time, he wrote, he had believed her ‘incapable of speaking a word of truth’.6 However, only a few months later, in May 1831, the couple had a further violent disagreement on the same subject and they left Paris, separately. Felix went home to Austria, Jane took little Mathilde and fled to Calais. Shortly afterwards she travelled to Dover, where she was met by Lady Andover and Margaret Steele; the three women and Didi lived there for a while in a cottage rented by Jane, using the name Mrs Eltham.
Jane wrote to Felix to try to heal the breach. His reply, from his father’s castle in Austria, was frigid. She may have forgotten the events of that last fortnight in Paris, he said, but he could remember all too well. First, he said, ‘there were my suspicions, which would soon have been laid aside had you not made such lame excuses for the unaccustomed hours you kept.’ As a result he had had her watched until he knew all her movements, and there was no room left for doubt that the stories he had been told about her were correct. His old suspicions of her untruthfulness had returned, and now there was no possibility of ‘the happy union to which I had looked forward’ and by which he might have reinstated Jane ‘in the position which you had lost’.7
To anyone but the besotted Jane, his reliance on this trumped-up case as an excuse to end their relationship would have said everything there was to say. But she had not been unfaithful, she knew there was no truth in the accusations, and therefore believed that if she could just see him and explain matters all would be as before. After talking it over with her mother and Steely, Jane, again rejecting their advice, decided to go to Felix to deny what his cousin had told him and to defend her behaviour immediately prior to their quarrel. She was still passionately in love with Felix, and she had a naïve belief that love, and the truth, would triumph in the end.
Lady Andover and Steely became agitated at this plan, believing that Felix was a thoroughly self-centred man whose personal ambitions were more important to him than Jane. His treatment of her to date was clear proof that this was the case, Steely said. She would never change her opinion of the man she saw as a complete bounder.8 But Jane would have none of it, still believing that she and Felix could return to the heady early days of their love affair. In late July she left England for Europe, arriving during August in Munich, where she evidently expected to meet Felix.
In fact Felix was lying low at his family home in Bohemia. According to his biographer he was ‘in low spirits and poor health because of the Ellenborough affair and the perpetual whirl of activity and excitement in Paris’ which had ‘left their mark.’9 We must assume Felix believed that Jane had been unfaithful to him, which might have justified his anger had he been entirely faithful himself. But the fact remains that when he met her she was a respected and well-established member of the highest society in England, living in the utmost comfort and security; he had avidly pursued and seduced her, eventually enticing her away from her husband and family. He had fathered two children by her, one of whom (Didi) still lived, and yet because of rumours which could not truly be substantiated (though evidently he was satisfied of their veracity) he was content, apparently, to abandon her to the uncertain fate of an unprotected woman with a ruined reputation trailing around Europe with their illegitimate child. Although Schwarzenberg’s supporters in England described him as ‘very honourable and right, and ready to make every reparation in his power’,10 it is not surprising that his nickname ‘Cad’ became synonymous with ignoble behaviour.
One wonders why Jane chose to go specifically to Munich at this point. Of course, she had to go somewhere other than England, where her notoriety was such that she could never have been received in society. She was still not yet twenty-five, and beautiful. She had a comfortable income and a zest for life; she could not hide away in a rented cottage for the rest of her days. In Paris there was nothing for her as an unprotected woman with a reputation, and besides she now hated the city where her hopes had turned sour.11 A previous biographer suggests that she chose Munich because the British Ambassador there was Lord Erskine, a good friend of Jane’s grandfather.12 Jane had grown up with the large family of Erskine sons and daughters who might be depended upon not to bar her from their home nor be too critical of the scandal surrounding her name.13 There may have been more than one reason, however.
Diplomats are not normally at liberty to leave a situation merely because of a disagreement with a mistress (if such were the case, diplomatic legations could hardly continue to function). Since Felix had been openly keeping Jane as his mistress in Paris for over a year, it is doubtful that he was whisked away by his superiors to avoid another ‘incident’, as he had been in London. Clearly the disagreement between Jane and Felix coincided with the end of the prince’s time at the Paris legation anyway; it had only been a temporary assignment for the sake of expediency. He was almost certainly aware that his next posting would be to Germany, and Munich was the most likely base.
Formerly a stolid provincial town, Munich was at that time enjoying a renaissance.