Even to his friend, Lefuel he wrote: 

“I am going to be married the next month to Mlle. Anna Zimmerman.  We are all perfectly satisfied with this union which seems to offer the most reliable assurances of lasting happiness.  The family is excellent and I have the good luck to be loved by all its members.”

He mentions briefly in later pages that his father-in-law died a year after his marriage, and that two years later he lost his sister-in-law, to whom he gives several lines of a cordial praise, which he singularly denies his wife, though he states that a year after the marriage she bore him a girl child, who died at birth, and that four years later she bore him a son.  On the afternoon of this day he was to conduct a very important concert; when he returned, he found himself a father.  He is here generous enough to say:  “On the morning of the day when my son was born, my brave wife had the force to conceal from me her sufferings.”

When the Franco-Prussian war broke out, Gounod took refuge in London, and there wrote his “Gallia.”  The soprano role was taken by a certain Georgina Thomas, who had married Captain Weldon of the 18th Hussars.  When she met Gounod, she was some thirty-three years old, having been born in 1837.  She took up professional singing for the sake of charity, and Gounod and she became romantically attached.  She helped him train his choir, established an orphanage at her residence for poor children with musical inclinations, and published songs by Gounod and others, including herself, the proceeds going to the aid of her orphanage.  At this time she claimed to have acquired the ownership of certain works of his.  Gounod thought, he said, that he had found in her “an apostle of his art and a fanatic for his works,” but he also found that her charity had an excellent business foundation, for, when their love affair came to an end, she claimed her property in his compositions.

He refused to acknowledge her right, and when she clung to his “Polyeucte,” he rewrote it from memory.  She sued him for damages, and the English courts ordered him to pay to his former hostess $50,000.  But he evaded payment by staying in France.  Mrs. Weldon was also a composer, and she had edited in 1875 Gounod’s autobiography and certain of his essays with a preface by herself.  The lawsuit as usual exposed to public curiosity many things both would have preferred to keep secret, and was a pitiful finish generally to what promised to be a most congenial alliance.  The love affair began like a novel and ended like a cash-book.

DIVERS ITALIANS