The Weldons and Gounod arrived back at Tavistock House at 7 o’clock in the evening on Friday 1 December 1871 after a terrible crossing of the Channel during which they had all been seasick. It had been arranged that Gounod would stay with his friends for three weeks and then return to Paris for Christmas. In the event, he was to be with them for three years.

The composer appeared to be seriously ill. ‘He fluttered into our nest like a wounded bird’, wrote Georgina, ‘he crouched down in his bed like a poor hunted animal, and there he lay for several days without moving.’ She summoned her own homeopathic physician, Dr Thomas McKern, who examined the patient. A member of the Plymouth Brethren, ‘who shun music as the work of Satan’, McKern had never heard of Gounod. He told Georgina and Harry that their friend's condition was much worse than they had supposed. He was ‘poisoned with eczema’ and might suffer a cerebral attack at any moment. Both lungs were ‘highly congested’ and his bronchial tubes were ‘in a state of chronic irritation’. McKern prescribed some of his own homeopathic medicines and ordered a course of hydropathy. He also recommended rest and quiet.

Every morning after this, Gounod stayed in his bedroom on the third floor of Tavistock House, wrapped up in wet sheets and blankets and smothered in rugs, furs and waterproofs for up to six hours, watched over by Georgina's old pug, Dan Tucker. The aim of this treatment was to make the patient sweat. Whilst Gounod was thus incarcerated, Georgina would climb the stairs from the ground floor room where she gave her music lessons every half hour or so to check on his progress; and Harry would return from the College of Arms two or three times in a morning to ask ‘Has the old man perspired? How long will he be today before he perspires?’ If the answer was satisfactory, the ‘old man’ would be released from his bonds, though he was strictly forbidden to smoke or take snuff, and Georgina insisted on cooking all his food on a gas stove close to him. She fed him herself, ‘through the spout of a little porcelain jug’.