The bombshell for Ada Lovelace was the news that Medora Leigh was the product of that incestuous relationship, and thus Ada’s own half-sister. ‘I should tell you that I did not suspect the daughter as being the result of it [the incest],’ Ada responded. Evidently discomfited by the idea, she challenged it. How could her mother have come to such a monstrous conclusion? ‘The natural intimacy & familiarity of a Brother & Sister certainly could not suggest it, to any but a very depraved & vicious mind . . .’
Ada’s reaction was understandable in a young woman who suddenly saw her own position – that of the treasured and sole product of an exceptional marriage – under threat. When no answer came from Paris, she took counsel with William. The news from France was worrying and unwelcome. Nevertheless, both husband and wife knew how obstinate Lady Byron could be. Like it or not, Medora Leigh (or the widow Madame St Aubin, as she was being described in Paris to cover the awkward presence of little Marie) must be accepted, not as a cuckoo in the nest, but as part of the family.
Evidence of the furious anger that Ada was forcing herself to suppress would only emerge two years later. By March 1843, when time had brought about a considerable change both in Lady Byron’s feelings, and those of her demanding protégée, Ada would be ready to speak out and unmask her true feelings. But back in the spring of 1841, as she prepared to join the Paris household, she remarked only upon the fact that her mother had grown nervously solicitous. Urging her habitually informal daughter to pack at least one good dress for a court presentation, an almost supplicant Lady Byron promised to clothe her sweet Bird in the finest of Parisian plumage, to purchase whatever type of harp Ada might wish to play, and to leave plenty of time for Ada’s own amusements.
‘You hold out great temptations,’ Ada dryly responded on 12 March. Nevertheless, she stated that her visit would be brief, while ill health made it unlikely that her husband (he was being nursed by his sisters) would come at all. Irritated at being obliged to defer her mathematics lessons, Ada promised the De Morgans that nothing would cause her to abandon her studies.
Indeed the last fortnight is rather a convincing proof that nothing can. I have been out either to the Opera, German Opera, or somewhere or other, every night. I have had music lessons every morning, & practised my Harp too, for an hour or two, & I have been on horseback nearly every day also. I might add many sundries & et-ceteras to this list.
I must however maintain that Differential Calculus is king of the company – & may it ever be so!
Ada’s unfaltering interest in Babbage’s unbuilt machine, as much as the seriousness of her friendship with the ageing and frustrated inventor, is well illustrated by the fact that one of Ada’s first visits in Paris was to the home of the great mathematician Jean Arago. Head of the Paris Observatory, Arago had been Babbage’s facilitator in obtaining the silk portrait of Jacquard for his 1840 visit to Turin and it was Babbage who now provided Ada with the introduction to a man of whom she stood in some awe. Back at Place Vendôme with her mother and their old friend, Mary Montgomery, Ada found herself reluctantly surrendering to the persuasive charm of her newfound sister.
Graceful in her manner and tall in stature (a doting Annabella nicknamed Elizabeth Medora ‘Lanky Doodle’, while permitting her niece – and no one else – to address her by Byron’s old pet name of ‘Pip’), ‘Madame St Aubin’ seemed content with an arrangement that kept her in a private suite of rooms, ones from which little Marie and her mother had no rights of access into Lady Byron’s home without prior invitation. ‘I therefore go there whenever I choose,’ Ada wrote to her husband on 8 April, adding that her initial feelings about Medora were ‘very favourable . . . She impresses me with the idea of principle very strongly.’
Ada, like Miss Montgomery and Annabella, swallowed the stories that Medora told without a blink. ‘How comes it my Mother is not dead, mad or depraved?’ Ada asked William:
A new language is requisite to furnish terms strong enough to express my horror & amazement at the appalling facts! – That viper Mrs L[eigh] – crowned all by suppressing letters of my mother’s to my father when he was abroad after the separation, & forging others in their place. She-monster!*
Adding to the bitterness of a lengthy letter that Ada would write to Medora two years later was the sense of how much she herself had fallen under the spell of a persuasive liar. Out in Paris, while her mother arranged to exchange her expired ten-year leasehold of Fordhook for a similar arrangement with two adjoining houses near Esher (conveniently close to Ockham), it was Ada who gave the hardest thought to how Medora could most decorously be housed in the smaller of the two. Following her own formal presentation to the French King, Louis Philippe, Lady Lovelace spoke to Madame de Talleyrand about two former employees, Nathalie and Victor Beaurepaire, who might suitably serve as Madame St Aubin’s private servants at Esher, enabling her to live like a lady of means. (And so, until the money ran out and the Beaurepaires took to blackmail, indeed they did.)
The Paris party returned to England in May 1841. The new houses at Moore Place were in need of considerable refurbishment before they could be inhabited. Ada, living between Ockham and St James’s Square during that part of the year, was reluctant to provide houseroom for a sister who, she probably surmised, might
