Mary Lovell - A Scandalous Life - The Biography of Jane Digby

One wonders what Jane had expected when she gave up her husband, name and position to run into Felix’s arms. She may well have assumed (despite her father’s warning) that Felix would marry her, and it is doubtful that she suspected the reality which ultimately faced her. To have had a love affair with a dashing foreign prince when she had few responsibilities, and to conduct it while under the nominal protection of an aristocratic husband, with no doors closed to her, was one thing. It was quite another to live almost as a demimondaine , a woman disgraced and regarded as not quite acceptable in circles which had once clamoured to receive her. Jane held her head up and pretended to ignore slights, but she was deeply hurt.

She had plenty of invitations until her pregnancy began to show, but it was never possible for her to accompany Felix to state banquets and formal diplomatic functions. She was not received at court, and many houses were closed to her. Her days were spent visiting acquaintances, attending salons, riding in the Bois de Boulogne; notoriety hung around her and she knew that those who stopped to stare at her now were not merely admiring her beauty as in the past but identifying her as the disgraced divorcee.

As the heat of the summer settled upon Paris, revolution seethed, forcing the abdication of King Charles X in favour of the Ducd’ Orléans. Felix became involved to an extent that later enabled him to produce a treatise called The Revolution of 1830 which earned him praise in Austria for his analysis of the control of mobs. It was a way back to favour after the adverse publicity of the previous spring. His love for Jane was not strong enough for him to risk his brilliant career for it, let alone his security and reputation.

The relationship for which Jane had risked everything had already started to go wrong by the autumn of 1830, according to a letter written by Felix, which refers to frequent disagreements between them. 19 This friction almost certainly stemmed from the prince’s refusal to agree to a marriage under French law as suggested by Jane’s father, which would bypass the restrictions of his own country. At one point Felix had appeared to be giving the possibility serious consideration, though he was always aware that the illegality of such a move in his native Austria would affect his career. The story that Jane and Felix were to marry imminently was so widely accepted in Paris salons that it was reported in The Times and Jane received several congratulatory letters. 20 However, under pressure from his family and possibly Metternich, Felix finally rejected this solution to the problem.

In October, Jane received news from home about George Anson. Her ‘first love’ was to be married to Isabella, daughter of Lord Forrester – a noted beauty who had been in love with George for years. Their betrothal had been delayed, undoubtedly because of the possibility of George being implicated in the Ellenborough divorce. Other news was not so happy: George’s younger brother William, serving in His Majesty’s Navy, had been killed aboard his ship; two of the young Anson boys who had shared Jane’s lessons at Holkham were now dead.

Her teenage affair with George, and the misery it had caused her, now seemed as though it had happened to someone else. But the uncertainty in her relationship with Felix began to affect her health. In this unhappy state, shortly before Christmas, Jane gave birth to a son, whom she called Felix after his father. The child died ten days later.

Jane had hoped that a son might induce Felix to marry her, and for that reason she had welcomed his birth. Her poetry makes it clear that the death of her baby put an end to her ‘bright vision’ of marriage to his father. In an agony of guilt, loss and self-reproach she wrote of her worship of the prince and her sentiments that perhaps it was best the child had not lived ‘to share [my] destiny of shame’. 21

Two days later Felix sent her a note of consolation for her loss, regretting the many dissensions they had had during the past year. 22 It was not very consoling to Jane. Felix was hardly ever with her. She had begun to fear that there was little hope of ever becoming his wife and that even the likelihood of remaining his beloved mistress was far from assured.

During the period of Jane’s third confinement, and especially after the death of their baby, one might have expected that Prince Schwarz-enberg – in common decency – would spend more time with the woman who had given up so much for him and who, lacking any family support, was otherwise alone. However, on the good authority of the wife of the British Ambassador in Paris, we know that his thoughts were not with Jane. ‘Poor Lady Ellenborough is just going to be confined’, Lady Granville had written to the Duke of Carlisle, ‘and Schwarzenberg is going about flirting with Madame d’Ouden-arde.’ 1 Nor did his behaviour improve after the death of Jane’s baby, according to Schwarzenberg’s friend and colleague, Count Apponyi, who noted that ‘Felix Schwarzenberg is paying court to Mme Hatzfeld, they are inseparable in the salons. Mme d’Oudenarde, to whom our attaché paid his first homage, is very jealous and cannot believe he would drop her for a red-haired German.’ 2

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 1831 4

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.