Money – or rather the lack of it – was now a pressing problem. Georgina had opened a music shop in Great Marlborough Street in 1876, but this lost money and she closed it after a year. Then the hotel-keeper Alfred Nodskou went bankrupt owing her £1000, and Harry threatened to halve her allowance of £1000 a year, claiming that his financial circumstances had changed. It was now obvious that the Rawlings boys had no intention of giving her a share of their earnings from playing the hand bells that she had bought for them. Georgina suspended all payments to them and ordered them to return the bells and her piano. The Gounod choir had now almost ceased to exist and it was clear that the ‘Sociable Evenings’ were never going to produce enough money to support the orphanage. Everything seemed to be going wrong.

Anacharsis Ménier reappeared at Tavistock House at the end of March 1877, ‘as greasy and dirty as ever’, claiming that he was about to make his fortune out of his interest in ‘millions’ of acres of land in New Caledonia. He was full of plans for the revival of La Liberté Coloniale and persuaded Georgina that it might be a useful means of conveying her ideas to a wider public. Ever hopeful, she sent £50 to the newspaper's office. Ménier also enlisted her help with his attempts to recover a prototype of his military balloons which had been sent to Woolwich to be assessed by the War Office, offering to give Georgina a third of the profits from the balloon if she could get it back for him.

In April, Angèle left for France without her husband, having agreed to take Bichette to her sister in Normandy. Georgina refused to allow Ménier to sleep at Tavistock House whilst his wife was away because he was ‘so dirty, spitting about the house, untidy and disorderly’, so he took up resi-dence at the Liberté Coloniale's London office. Though she disliked Ménier, Georgina trusted him, and he came to dinner almost every day and made himself useful by going to market and running errands.