Lausanne

Lausanne is where the young woman was sent to convent school, an education that gave her new skills and manners while training her for a narrow social role. In her later account, the place stands between a childhood of domestic labor and a marriage that offered escape from her father but brought its own form of mistreatment.

The Convent School

A week after the preceding events, she was taken to a convent school in Lausanne. She declines to describe her foreign education in detail, but makes clear what its instruction was intended to do: her mother had trained her to be a working man’s domestic slave, while the nuns trained her to be a rich man’s domestic toy. The contrast turns the school into more than a setting for study; it marks a change in the class position for which she was being prepared, without freeing her from the expectation of service.

Education and Return

At the convent she learned French, dancing, and piano, acquired the bearing expected of a lady, and learned to discuss current events as they were reported by Conservative newspapers. The nuns believed that husbands might prefer wives who knew something of the world, so this knowledge was shaped by the anticipated tastes of men rather than by an independent future for their pupil. When she was sent back, her mother was dead. The account thus places the end of her schooling alongside a decisive loss at home, without supplying further details about the journey or the circumstances of her mother’s death.

From Lausanne to Marriage

After her return, she married General Sir Aubrey de la Pole Blessington. He was indifferent to what she knew, though he danced beautifully despite his wounds; his uniform and public fame formed part of the attraction, as did his wealth and the prospect of escape from her father. She remembers feeling truly happy on her wedding day. That happiness did not last: on the wedding night she discovered why his fellow officers called him “The Arctic Pole,” yet blamed herself for what she experienced. Lausanne’s lessons had prepared her to perform the role of a wife, not to recognize or challenge the terms of an unhappy marriage.

Memory and Meaning

Later, Godwin Baxter urged her to remember her experiences in Manchester, Lausanne, and Porchester Terrace with intelligent interest rather than to forget them. She resisted, insisting that the pain of those different worlds seemed to have no connection beyond its hurt. His image of opening a doll’s house offered a way to see them together: the school’s training, like the other institutions and households she had known, belonged to a social order that assigned women and servants their places. Lausanne therefore recurs in her recollection not as a fully narrated episode but as one part of a linked history—education that enlarged her abilities while reinforcing the constraints under which she was expected to live.