Aet. 42, to a wealthy, American-born British socialite who was George Moore’s lover starting in 1893, then his lifelong friend. In New York on 25 April 1895, she married Sir Bache Cunard, 3rd Baronet (1851-1925) and moved permanently to England. Her intimacy with George continued after her marriage (which was loveless). Her daughter Nancy Cunard was born 10 March 1896.
George told Jacques Blanche that he was Nancy’s father (see B.H. Clarke’s George Moore and His Friends, 1922). His paternity has been debated and doubted but never admitted publicly or proven.
The poem accompanying this letter was published in the Pall Mall Gazette (15 January 1895) with slight differences. It was derived from “La Maitresse Maternelle” (Pagan Poems) and destined, beginning in 1904, for inclusion in Confessions of a Young Man.
The published title of the poem was “Nuit de Septembre,” possibly referring to George’s first encounter with Maud in September 1893. Here the title of “Barbizon” implies that some of their lovemaking occurred there. Mildred Lawson’s affair with Morton Mitchell in Celibates (June 1895) took place in Barbizon and may be a veiled account of the experience.
In Vale (Chapter 12, pages 280-282) George renamed Maud as Elizabeth (Maud’s sobriquet was Emerald), “the only woman of whom I did not weary. A sister-mistress… her whom I had sought for twenty years… till at length I discovered the divine reciprocation of all my instincts and aspirations, the prophetic echo of my eternity, one summer’s day among a luncheon party [hosted by Blanche] in Auteuil. Certain moments cannot pass behind us, and it does not seem to me possible that I shall ever outlive that moment, when I rose out of my chair to meet my fate, unsuspicious, of course. My fate wore that day the moving tints of a shot-silk gown. I would give many guineas for those few yards of silk, faded and worn today, but which once held — .”
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