George Eliot (20 page)

Every letter thrills with some new piece of kindness bestowed by Madame D’Albert Durade. On 24 October Mary Ann describes her making ‘a spoiled child of me’.
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On 4 December she reports how ‘She kisses me like a mother, and I am baby enough to find that a great addition to my happiness.’ Even the housemaid Jeanie is more nurturer than servant: she ‘says to me every morning, in the prettiest voice “Madame a-t-elle bien dormi cette nuit?”’
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But Mary Ann’s need for mothering was not the only old emotional claim which reasserted itself just now. Madame might have turned out to be a perfect mother, but it was her artist husband who was to fulfil the role of soulmate. After only a fortnight’s acquaintance, Mary Ann was already in raptures with Monsieur D’Albert. Her letter of 24 October must have caused consternation at Rosehill, with its ominous echoes of the sorry Brabant business.

The Brays knew Mary Ann too well to take much comfort from her deliberate emphasis on Monsieur D’Albert’s physical infirmities. Reading between the lines it was quite clear that the middle-aged painter and the young English tourist were busy forming an exclusive bond. Further on in the same letter, Mary Ann lets drop that Monsieur D’Albert has been reading poetry to her. Two days later she tells Charles Bray that Monsieur D’Albert is going to escort her up a nearby mountain. On 15 February she says with self-conscious nonchalance, ‘You will be amused to hear that I am sitting for my portrait – at M. D’Albert’s request – not mine.’
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The fact that Mary Ann continued to mention Madame with great affection in her letters was no reassurance to the Brays. They would have recalled that she had gushed over Mrs Brabant even while in the process of being thrown out by her.

But if Mary Ann’s presence caused tension in the D’Albert Durade household, it cannot have been too great, at least at first. November, December and January passed without obvious disruption. On 9 February Mary Ann wrote to Fanny, with whom she was now in contact, telling her that she planned to be home ‘as soon as the Jura is passable without sledges – probably the end of March or beginning of April’.
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A few days later she told the Brays: ‘Something has been said of M. D’Albert’s accompanying me to Paris, but I am afraid he cannot afford the journey – and alas! I cannot afford to pay for him.’
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So it comes as a surprise to learn that as early as 18 March she set out – on sledge – with Monsieur D’Albert as her escort all the way to London.

What had happened to trigger such a sudden change in Mary Ann’s plans? Had Madame D’Albert, irritated by the idea of Monsieur squandering money accompanying their young guest
to Paris, declared that, for all she cared, he could leave immediately and go all the way to England with the girl? Or perhaps, less sensationally, money was squeezed from the household budget to allow Monsieur D’Albert to take a longed-for trip to visit the London art galleries. Certainly, he made the most of his opportunities in town before joining Mary Ann at Rosehill for a few days of local sightseeing.

There is mystery, too, hanging over their subsequent correspondence. After Mary Ann’s death Monsieur D’Albert Durade explained to John Cross that he destroyed all the letters she had written to him on his return to Geneva because he feared that posterity would misconstrue her use of the familiar ‘tu’ over the more formal ‘
vous’
.
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He was probably right to be cautious, not so much because the world could not be expected to know that Madame had given permission for this verbal intimacy, but because a whiff of scandal invariably surrounded Mary Ann’s dealings with men. In part this was because of the infamous relationship with Lewes, through which all her other friendships were retrospectively viewed, but also because there was always a disturbing intensity to the way in which she attached herself to other women’s men. Mathilde Blind, who wrote the first biography of Eliot in 1883 and got most of her information from Cara Bray, said of Monsieur D’Albert, ‘it is whispered that he suggested some of the traits in the character of the delicate-minded Philip Wakem in the “Mill on the Floss”’.
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‘Whispered’, an odd choice, suggests that there was something about the intensity of Mary Ann’s relationship with the middle-aged hunchback dwarf which struck even the generous-minded Cara as strange.

By the time Mary Ann was a successful writer and happily settled with Lewes, any lingering awkwardness towards the D’Albert Durade household had disappeared. Monsieur D’Albert translated five of her novels into French and, together with Madame, welcomed the couple warmly when they made a trip to Geneva in the summer of 1860. Over twenty years later, with Madame and Mary Ann both dead, John Cross made a final pilgrimage to Geneva and found the physically fragile Monsieur D’Albert ‘carrying well the weight of eighty winters’.
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The move from the Campagne Plongeon to the D’Albert household had brought Mary Ann nearer to the kind of life she
had imagined for herself in Geneva, a kind of glamorised Rosehill existence. Her hosts were touchingly eager to integrate her into their social circle, which was composed of cultured, serious people. There were trips to the theatre and private dramatic readings at home. The regular Monday musical evenings were, she took care to tell the Brays, as good as the ones in Coventry.

In her newfound contentment, Mary Ann let go her usually rigorous programme of reading and study. She had long since abandoned the translation of Spinoza’s
Tractatus
, which she had taken up to cram her mind during the last months of her father’s life. Instead, she told the Brays in a letter of 4 December, ‘I take walks, play on the piano, read Voltaire, talk to my friends, and just take a dose of mathematics every day to prevent my brain from becoming quite soft.’
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Actually, being Mary Ann, she did quite a lot more than that. On Wednesdays and Saturdays she attended a course of lectures on Experimental Physics by Professor Arthur de la Rive.

While all this was pleasantly diverting, the problem of what she was to do with the rest of her life was no nearer a solution. She did not look forward to returning to England, but recognised it as the place where she had her roots. It was becoming increasingly clear to her that landscape was the seedbed of the moral self. Just as Hetty Sorrel in
Adam Bede
fails to develop an ethical sense because she has been yanked out of her native soil, so Mary Ann believed that if she stayed abroad she would be cut off from those old associations and relationships out of which an authentic vocation would emerge. Her inheritance from her father would yield ninety pounds a year and she may also have had a tiny bit of income from her Aunt Evarard who had died in 1844. The total sum was a useful cushion, but not enough for true independence. Significantly, in a letter to the Brays on 4 December, Mary Ann imagines her future role not in terms of the public identity of a writer or teacher, but as ‘some woman’s duty’ involving the care of others or, as we might expect from Mary Ann, a single other: ‘I can only think with a shudder of returning to England. It looks to me like a land of gloom, of ennui, of platitude, but in the midst of all this it is the land of duty and affection, and the only ardent hope I have for my future life is to have given to me some woman’s duty, some possibility of devoting myself where I may
see a daily result of pure calm blessedness in the life of another.’
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For all Mary Ann’s romantic talk about roots, the return to her native landscape was a miserable business. The disappointing behaviour of her family during her stay in Geneva should have warned her about the kind of welcome she could expect. After parting from Monsieur D’Albert in London, she visited Rosehill for a few days, before embarking on a tour of her brothers and sisters. Less than a fortnight at Griff with Isaac and Sarah was enough to make her wonder why she had travelled all the way from Switzerland ‘to come and see people who don’t want me’.
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The visit to Meriden went better, with Mary Ann allowing that ‘Dear Chrissey is much kinder than any one else in the family and I am happiest with her. She is generous and sympathizing and really cares for my happiness.’
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Absorbed in their own routines of family and business life, none of her siblings had time to give their younger sister the kind of sustained concentration she craved. She was probably in a particularly demanding mood, miserable that no vocation had emerged from her renewed contact with the Warwickshire soil. She had always been ready to admit that looking after her father absolved her from having to think about what to do with her life. Now, just as she had always suspected, the prospect of being free to choose how and where to live had her longing for the certainties of the constricting past. What made her situation bearable was that she was beginning to perceive that her unhappiness was not just the result of her own inadequacy, but was an experience shared by many. It was this growing ability to link individual experience with the broader human condition that was to carry her eventually into writing fiction.

In a letter of 4 April 1850 to her old school friend Martha Jackson with whom she was still in sporadic contact, she moves from the particular to the general in what would become one of the defining characteristics of her narrative voice. ‘My return to England is anything but joyous to me, for old associations are rather painful than otherwise to me. We are apt to complain of the weight of duty, but when it is taken from us, and we are left at liberty to choose for ourselves, we find that the old life was the easier one.’
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In fact, she was not entirely without ideas for the future. Elsewhere in the letter she sketches two possibilities. Either she will return to Geneva, or she will stay in Britain, but move to London. A week later she asks Sara to find out about the rates for the boarding-house run in The Strand in London by the publisher John Chapman. ‘I am not asking you merely for the sake of giving you trouble,’ she says, still raw from Sara’s accusations of pushiness, ‘I am really anxious to know.’
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Sara Hennell had first met John Chapman in 1846 when both were living in Clapton, an elegant suburb to the north-east of London. Clapton and adjacent Hackney had long been home to the liberal-minded lawyers, bankers, merchants and manufacturers who made their living in the commercial district of the city. Street after street of symmetrical Georgian town houses shaped a culture which was learned and pious, but also radical and acute. The inhabitants of Clapton were not Establishment people. The men had not been to Oxford or Cambridge, the women were independent and clever, and the boys were just as likely destined for the warehouse as the high court. There were several thriving Unitarian congregations and a string of good girls’ schools. Once the day’s business was done – and Clapton people worked hard for their living – they visited their neighbours to make music, discuss science and philosophy, and fall cautiously in love. It was at just such a gathering that Sara Hennell had first met John Chapman, the publisher responsible for so many of the esoteric and radical books around which this progressive culture coalesced.

In the end, Clapton turned out to be too quiet for John Chapman, who was never happy unless he was living in the midst of mayhem. In 1847 he took the lease on a large house in central London and set about creating the layers of chaos he craved. The bottom floor of number 142 The Strand was given over to his publishing and bookselling business, while the rest of the house was occupied by his family, together with the string of lodgers who followed him wherever he went. The overall effect was to create an avant-garde guest-house where out-of-town writers, intellectuals and scholars could stay in congenial surroundings while visiting friends, meeting publishers or going to libraries. According to its printed blurb, 142 The Strand offered guests ‘the advantages of an Hotel, combined with the quiet and
comfort of a Private Residence’.
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First-class rooms were £2 10s a week and a fire in the bedroom cost an extra 3s 6d. Breakfast was at 8.30, lunch at one and dinner at six. Any man and the occasional woman of letters visiting London during the late forties and fifties was sure at some point to sample Mrs Chapman’s slapdash housekeeping. It was not unusual for twenty people to sit down to dinner. Emerson stayed at 142 and so, from the sublime to the ridiculous, did Dr Brabant. The regular evening parties which had begun in Clapton continued, now swollen by those literary stars who had been too grand to make the journey out to the suburbs.

The Strand also provided something like a permanent home for young people from the provinces trying to make their way in that ramshackle, part-fantasy construction known as literary London. William Hale White, later famous as the novelist Mark Rutherford, lodged there, while Eliza Lynn, the young novelist who had already published two novels, had been a paying guest at Clapton. Just as Rosehill never shook off its reputation for loose living, so the whiff of immorality always clung to the Chapmans’ various households. Perhaps in a defensive recognition that John Chapman and her husband shared more than a love of progress, Cara Bray commented to Sara that it was ‘very peculiar’ of Eliza Lynn to take lodgings in Clapton: ‘how many more young ladies is … [Mr Chapman] going to have?’ she asked tartly.
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