George Eliot (19 page)

The third category comprised tourists. There were an American mother and daughter. The former was ‘kind but silly – the daughter silly, but not kind, and they both of them chatter the most execrable French with amazing volubility and self-complacency’.
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European visitors tended to be more cultured. Mary Ann was mildly pleased to meet Wilhelm von Herder, grandson of the philosopher, who took her boating and from whom she purloined a copy of Louis Blanc’s
Histoire de dix ans, 1830–1840
.

Hurt by the lack of letters from home, Mary Ann turned to this ragbag crew for comfort. Recently orphaned, her need for surrogate parenting was more intense than ever and she worked hard to turn each of the middle-aged female guests into a surrogate mother. Of course, her letters to Cara and Charles were designed to let them know just how well she was doing without them. None the less, she does genuinely seem to have become a favourite in the Campagne Plongeon community. The Marquise de St Germain, for instance, declared that she loved her and fiddled with her hair, making ‘two things stick out on each side of my head like those on the head of the Sphinx’.
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The Baronne
de Ludwigsdorf was ‘a charming creature – so anxious to see me comfortably settled – petting me in all sorts of ways. She sends me tea when I wake in the morning, orangeflower water when I go to bed, grapes, and her maid to wait on me.’
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Madame de Vallière, who ran the pension and was herself a political exile, is described as ‘quite a sufficient mother’.
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Even the brusque and unpopular Mrs Lock turns out, in that insistently repeated word, to be ‘quite a mother’,
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fussing over Mary Ann and making sure she had people to talk to at dinner.

In return Mary Ann offered these women something which was unique in the disappointed, self-absorbed atmosphere of the pension – an empathic listening ear. Charles Bray had been the first to identify the girl’s ability to set her own concerns temporarily on one side, while she absorbed the truth of another. Now she developed the capacity even further, drawing confidences out of people who were long used to hugging their unhappiness to themselves. Baronne de Ludwigsdorf, for instance, ‘has told me her troubles and her feelings, she says, in spite of herself – for she has never been able before in her life to say so much even to her old friends’.
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Mary Ann’s long journey out of the narcissistic self-enclosure of the Maria Lewis letters towards an understanding of other people’s separateness, and hence their likeness, was one which her fictional characters from Hetty Sorrel to Gwendolen Harleth would be obliged to make again and again.

But despite her letters to Coventry stressing how many new friends she was making, life in a Geneva boarding-house was not the romantic idyll Mary Ann had rapturously imagined for John Sibree. The idea of her striding unselfconsciously about the birthplace of her beloved Jean-Jacques Rousseau was quickly dispelled by oppressive Continental ideas of propriety. The constraints on a young woman were far greater than they were for a man. She was expected to dress with more care than she did back home, a demand which bored and worried her. And there was the problem of a chaperon. In Britain a single woman of thirty was assumed to have passed from nubile girlhood to settled spinsterhood and her good name was no longer at risk if she went out in public alone. In Geneva, explained Mary Ann in a letter to Rosehill, there was less latitude: ‘people do not seem to think me quite old enough yet to ramble about at will … I confess I am
more sensitive than I thought I should be to the idea that my being alone is odd. I thought my old appearance would have been a sufficient sanction and that the very idea of impropriety was ridiculous … As long as people carry a Mademoiselle before their name, there is far less liberty for them on the Continent than in England.’
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In other ways, however, Geneva came up to its reputation as a free-thinkers’ haven. In the pension itself, Mary Ann’s lack of orthodox faith made her immediately conspicuous among the pious residents. The Catholic Marquise worried, with an obliquely prophetic quality, that without a formal religion any marriage vows Mary Ann might make in the future would be meaningless. There was some embarrassment, too, when it came to her dealings with a devout British father-and-daughter pair, the Forbeses. Miss Forbes made friendly advances – lending Mary Ann a book, inviting her on a walk, turning up in her room ‘till I began to be uncomfortable under the idea that they fancied I was evangelical and that I was gaining their affection under false pretenses – so I told Miss Forbes that I was going to sacrifice her good opinion and confess my heresies’.

She need not have worried. The Forbeses’ response to the news of Mary Ann’s unorthodoxy was gratifyingly mild. ‘I quite expected from their manner and character that they would forsake me in horror, but they are as kind as ever.’
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The same thing happened a few weeks later when Mary Ann moved out of the pension and into the home of a Swiss couple, the D’Albert Durades. ‘They appear to be evangelical and conservative, b[ut] one finds these views in company with more breadth of cultu[re] here than one can ever augur from them in England,’ she reported in a jibe at the narrowness of nonconformist Coventry culture.
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Doubtless this relaxed acceptance of other people’s faith, or lack of it, was partly due to the city’s atmosphere of religious tolerance and partly to the emotional constitution of the Forbeses and the D’Albert Durades themselves. But it was also the result of a significant interior shift in Mary Ann from the rigidly self-righteous days of the holy war. Now able to acknowledge the beauties and benefits of orthodox faith, she no longer felt the need to hold herself rigidly apart from conventional worship. On Sunday mornings she went to church, taking pleasure in clever
sermons and congregational piety without feeling that she was compromising her own deeply held views.
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She was no longer interested in setting herself up against Christianity, and the tension that hung over her Coventry days melted away.

But behind this façade of happy busyness, Mary Ann often felt low. These weeks following her father’s death revealed just how fragile were the ties holding the Evans family together. By late July she had not heard from any of her siblings, despite having written to all of them twice. In a letter of the 23rd she begged Fanny, ‘I am very, very anxious to hear of you, but I am discouraged to write by post until I have some intimation that you care about me enough to write.’
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A month later she learned through the Brays the reason for her half-sister’s silence: apparently Fanny felt that Isaac’s letters absolved her from having to write. But there had never been any letters from Isaac. The only correspondence Mary Ann had received from Griff was a brief note from Isaac’s wife, Sarah, informing her of the death of her eight-year-old niece Clara Clarke. This would explain why Chrissey had not written, but was no excuse for anyone else. Mary Ann was beside herself. Abandoning her decision to do nothing until she had heard something, she sent Fanny a beseeching letter. ‘Have I confided too much in your generosity in supposing that you would write to me first? or is there some other reason for your silence? I suffer greatly from it … I have not spirit to write of myself until I have heard from you, and have an assurance from yourself that you yet care about me.’
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This was enough, finally, to rouse Fanny to put pen to paper, whereupon Mary Ann punished her by making her wait several weeks for a reply. Fanny, quick enough to spot the power play, did not write for another five months, forcing Mary Ann once again to write another letter on 4 February, begging for ‘only half a dozen lines’.
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It was not just family who were disappointing. The Coventry trio was proving unable, or unwilling, to keep up with Mary Ann’s demands for news, gossip, attention. When deprived of contact with people who could reflect her back to herself, Mary Ann was always in danger of falling into the terrifying belief that she did not exist. ‘I shall lose all my identity unless you keep nourishing the old self with letters,’ she threatened, ‘so pray write
as much and as often as you can.’
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Perhaps Cara, Sara and Charles were repelled by a hunger which arose so clearly out of her own need rather than a genuine concern for how her friends were faring as the family silk business started to go under. Or maybe they felt exasperated by Mary Ann’s drizzle of complaints – a bilious stomach, a trunk which arrived disordered, a lack of warm clothes. The first real sign that the Brays were losing patience with Mary Ann came in response to her floating the idea that she might sell off her
Encyclopaedia Britannica
and her globes in order to raise cash for a piano and instruction in a variety of subjects. These items were stored at Rosehill so, in effect, Mary Ann was asking Cara and Charles to arrange for their sale. Perhaps she was even hinting that they might like to buy them themselves. This time she had gone too far. It was left to Sara to explain to Mary Ann that her constant dissatisfaction and covert demands for sympathy had a wearying effect on those who were forced to listen. Her letter has been lost, but Mary Ann’s reply – pointedly sent to the Brays rather than Sara – contains clues to its gist.

Mary Ann felt doubly snubbed. She knew she had a tendency to talk about herself and to dwell on all that was wrong. Her letters to Maria Lewis had been full of apologies for just those faults. But during the Rosehill years she had felt sufficiently accepted to risk being herself, without constantly apologising for her egotism. Cara and Sara had always seemed genuinely
sympathetic to the difficulties of her situation. Now here she was, being told that she was a whiny bore. In effect, she had been encouraged to lower her guard, only to be told how awful she was when she did. What made it even worse was that Sara had annexed the authority of her brother Charles Hennell, knowing full well that he was a man whom Mary Ann had once loved, and quite possibly still did.

Despite the seeming humility of her response, Mary Ann was sufficiently affronted to hit back. In a letter of 26 October she suggested that while she greatly respected Charles Hennell, she thought Sara and Cara relied far too much on his opinion and had turned him into ‘a
vox Dei
’.
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Perhaps she could not help contrasting the close loving bond between Hennell and his sisters and the cold indifference with which her own brother treated her. None the less, from now on she took care to exclude anything that sounded like a moan from her letters. The tone became resolutely upbeat, with an emphasis on just how well she was getting on with her new life. References to her misery were neutralised with defensive humour: ‘I am determined to give you no pretext for sending me either blue pill or bitters. You shall not know whether I am well or ill, contented or discontented, warm or cold, fat or thin.’
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Actually, she was not doing so well at all. About three weeks after receiving the critical letter from Sara, Mary Ann had quit the pension and moved into private lodgings. After the first excitement of finding herself a favourite among the ladies of Campagne Plongeon, she was beginning to realise she had little in common with them. Kind though they might be, their gossipy, snobbish conversation could be oppressive when one wasn’t in the mood. It had got to the point where she was avoiding going down to the communal salon in the evening. Brusque Mrs Lock had turned out to be surprisingly perceptive after all when she warned: ‘You won’t find any kindred spirits at Plongeon, my dear.’
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Cut off from the intense intimacy which was as necessary to her as oxygen, Mary Ann began to wilt. Even her hair started to fall out. The only way to avoid the depression which had overtaken her the last time she had stayed in a guest-house, at dreary St Leonards-on-Sea, was to find another Rosehill – and quickly. On 9 October she moved out of the pension to become a paying
guest in the home of Monsieur and Madame D’Albert Durade, a cultured middle-aged couple with two sons. ‘I feel they are my
friends,
’ she wrote with barbed emphasis to Fanny, ‘Without entering into or even knowing the greater part of my views, they understand my character, and have a real interest in me’.
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Significantly, it was time for another name change: the D’Alberts gave Mary Ann the diminutive name of ‘Minie’ and she responded by turning them into surrogate parents. Madame D’Albert Durade, in particular, became yet another mother. It was this ‘Maman’s’ liberality with candles which particularly thrilled her. Christiana Evans had been angry with young Mary Anne for wasting candle power by reading in bed, whereas Madame D’Albert Durade ‘scolds me when she comes in and sees me reading by a single bougie’.
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Was it her own family’s niggardliness Mary Ann was thinking of when she wrote pointedly to the critical Brays: ‘You will think me childish to talk of such things, but to me it is so blessed to find any departure from the rule of giving as little as possible for as much as possible.’
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