Gounod had been welcomed back to France in the summer of 1874 as a prodigal son who had at last escaped from the chains of an English enchantress. It had not been long before the tales about him and Georgina, which had been circulating in the French press for several years, had reappeared, newly expanded and embellished. A particularly offensive article by the journalist Albert Wolff had appeared in the Parisian newspaper, Le Gaulois, on 24 August. Wolff asked ‘Was there ever a more singular history than that of Gounod and the Englishwoman? Since the woman Dalilah, who cut off Gaffer Samson's hair, never was seen anything so curious.’ The composer had, he wrote, sacrificed ‘first his family; then, step by step, his dignity’ to ‘the fair-haired one’. He believed he had loved an angel, ‘and, in reality, he had sacrificed his best years to a propriétaire [lodging-house keeper]’.

Gounod did nothing to contradict these stories, claiming that Georgina was ‘violent, passionate and mercenary’, and that she had beaten him. He told everyone who would listen that he had been ‘the victim of this infamous couple’ who had ‘fleeced him of everything he possessed’. He had not really been ill whilst he was at Tavistock House, but the Weldons had made him believe that he was in poor health in order to keep him a prisoner and prevent him from returning to his wife and children. Georgina had ‘drawn him into her nets by putting on Charity's mask’; her pupils were myths and her school a swindle. The ‘children’ of the household ‘consisted of three little pug dogs who dirtied all over the house’. The Weldons had even plotted to involve him as a co-respondent in their impending divorce proceedings, ‘so as to extort an enormous sum as damages out of him’. When news of her daughter's treatment by the foreign press reached Louisa Treherne, she wrote to Harry in a vain attempt to persuade him to restrain his wife, asking ‘Will G. ever stop making herself public?’ Making a public spectacle of herself was most definitely not the behaviour of a lady. To the dismay of Harry and the Treherne family, this was only the beginning.