The Life and Death of Mary Wollstonecraft Read online

  And there were still some who shared her optimism; in November a dinner given by the Friends of the Revolution drank forty toasts, including one to the patriot women of Great Britain.

  But the position of the English democrats was becoming more dangerous. A Dissenting minister called Winterbotham was sentenced to two years’ imprisonment for preaching against the monarchy. Roscoe found himself ostracized in Liverpool. Johnson fell ill in November, his asthma no doubt affected as much by the political situation as the weather. Barlow left for Paris yet again, leaving poor Ruth alone to face the unpopularity his writings had brought. The coffee houses and taverns began to refuse radical clubs permission to meet on their premises, intimidated by threats of having their licences withdrawn. A magistrate newly returned from a spell of duty in Newfoundland, John Reeves, was so outraged by the tone of the London democrats that he founded an Association for Preserving Liberty and Property against Levellers and Republicans; the government lent its support and the forces of the right were soon stronger than ever. Even Jeremy Bentham, who had been prepared to advise the revolutionary theorists in France, set out one morning to join John Reeve's’ association, though he was deflected on the way by a friend and later thought better of it.22 News came from Manchester that another Church and King mob had attacked the house of a well-known radical, Thomas Walker.

  Rather than stay in London and be miserable both about her personal life and the political situation, Mary decided to set off for France once again, alone and determined not to falter. There she believed she might forget her private sorrows under the sheltering wing of an exaltedly virtuous government, and in the company of fellow idealists of all nations who made their headquarters in Paris.

  [11]

  Paris: Expatriates and Politicians

  On 12 November Mary had written to Roscoe, warning him that he should not visit London in the near future if he hoped to see her:

  I intend no longer to struggle with a rational desire, so have determined to set out for Paris in the course of a fortnight or three weeks, and I shall not now halt at Dover I promise you, for as I go alone neck or nothing is the word.1

  The ‘desire’ was of course her wish to live with Fuseli, the ‘rational’ no more than a claim set up in defiance of whatever disapproval or dismay her friends might express or even feel. Otherwise her unhappiness broke out in facetiousness; she could not resist mentioning that gossip had married her to Johnson, an idea patently absurd to Roscoe or any of their personal friends. ‘I am still a Spinster on the wing’ she added, superfluously. ‘At Paris, indeed, I might take a husband for the time being, and get divorced when my truant heart longed again to nestle with old friends.’

  The joke covered her anxieties about her continuing state as a spinster, something that brought not only pain but ridicule too as she grew older. William Hayley, a popular writer whom Barlow had been visiting, had lately published a three-volume study of old maids, weighted with pseudo-learned references and a scattering of doubles-entendres, which attributed to them an almost automatic development of malice, envy and meanness as a direct result of their biological failure. Bluestockings married and unmarried had turned on Hayley and scoffed at him for his ‘batter'd theme’2 but the very fact that it was battered pointed to a generally accepted attitude; indeed it was hard not to grow sour, prim and envious if the circumstances of life excluded you from knowledge and affection. Mary knew it; she could be all these things on occasion.

  Her reference to divorce, imagined as a freedom to be used by the aggressive and inconstant woman, not a rejection or humiliation, said something else about her state of mind. Fuseli had allowed Sophia's patience to triumph over Mary's pursuit, but Mary could not imagine herself in Sophia's position; she must always be the agent, and she obviously took some pleasure in her little picture of herself choosing and rejecting men lightheartedly.*

  As good as her word, she set off on 8 December, not bothering to store her furniture since she intended to be home again in about six weeks. Johnson, even if he was not her husband, could at least keep an eye on Store Street while she was away. The trip to the coast took twelve hours, almost as much in darkness as light, a mournful seasonal reminder of the difference between the false start of the summer and her present lonely journey. But she was always a good traveller, and had the enthusiasm of the political pilgrim to buoy her up. It was needed; Channel crossings were unpredictable and usually meant delays and discomforts at all stages. Inns were draughty, boats dirty; a good wind might blow you from Dover to Calais in five hours, a calm could mean hammocks slung across the cabins and two days aboard. Mary's boat seems to have made reasonable time and presently her feet were set down by French sailors on French shingle. Here was the new society she had wanted to see so much.

  Other travellers to France during this period complained of the delays occasioned by filling in detailed passports, the instructions that they must be kept handy for inspection on the road at all times, the emphatically proffered advice on showing solidarity with the regime by wearing (and paying a good price for) tricolour cockades. Mary can have had no objection to putting a red, white and blue ribbon in her hat but it was no charm against the fatigue of the rest of the journey. Another two days by coach had to be endured, over the wet and potholed roads, through St Omer, Arras and Péronne, and so to Paris. Tired out, and beginning to catch cold, she arrived during the first days of the trial of the king, which had opened on 11 December. The beauty of the city, mud-grey under its soft and changeable sky, did not appear to her for the moment.

  Paris struck most Londoners as a nasty place, with its narrow, filthy, ill-lit streets, its lack of pavements, its furious drivers spattering dirt with their coaches and fiacres, its mannerless pedestrians democratically and mercilessly shoving their way along. The English judged the French as conceited and contemptuous people on the whole; they found the beggars, with their hands in muffs and their huge revolutionary rosettes, cheeky; and the women, who went rouged and hatless in the streets, shocking. A year before Mary's visit there had been an atmosphere of general euphoria to redeem this, and the crowds in the cafés and the places had been good-tempered; but since August there had been a change. Just before the massacres in September, Lady Palmerston was struck by the ‘total absence of everything like a person of fashion, or a carriage better than a fiacre… there's an air of ferocity and self-created consequence in the common people very uncomfortable.’3 To Mary, the absence of fashionable society and the confident air of the common people were welcome enough, but she was bewildered and a little nervous all the same. Things were not quite as she had imagined or as Christie had described them.

  She had arranged to lodge with a family; the wife, Aline, was the daughter of Madame Bregantz who ran the Putney school at which Eliza and Everina had ‘taught. As at Newington Green, one has the sense of a network of industrious, educated and careful women who helped one another with modest but efficiently planned arrangements. It was necessary in any case for Mary to take private lodgings of this sort; a room in a hotel was far beyond her means. Aline was quite newly married, to Monsieur Fillietaz, a merchant. The rue Meslée, where his house stood, was north of the river, in the Marais, an ancient district where the buildings turn tall blank faces to the narrow streets, looking inwards instead over private courtyards. Close by was the Temple, the square-towered medieval building in which the royal family was held; the first thing Mary must have noticed as she arrived was that the streets were full of soldiers and knots of people gathering to catch a glimpse of the king as he travelled to and from his prison, or of his wife and children taking their daily walk in the gardens. Sympathizers collected discreetly at the closed windows of the houses overlooking the gardens; the hostile stood in the streets to jeer.

  This was unpleasant, whatever view one took of the monarchy. And there was another shock to be faced on arrival: neither Aline nor her husband was at home. Perhaps for them it was not the best time to be receiving an English guest, even
one with connections in high places, whose occupants changed after all so quickly. Merchants, whose clients were largely aristocratic, were already in difficulties and frightened of attracting attention in any way. Monsieur and Madame Fillietaz remained out of town for some weeks, whilst Mary struggled to take her bearings as best she could.

  In London she was used to walking almost everywhere, but it seemed impossible to go about Paris on foot, and the cost of a hired carriage was more than she liked to spend. So at first she stayed indoors in the Fillietaz mansion, empty except for its band of chattering servants, curious and not perfectly polite to the English lady. They pretended to understand her requests but failed to carry them out: when she asked for something, ‘dust was thrown up with a self-sufficient air’4 but nothing was done. Mary was annoyed to find she could not manage even simple matters in the spoken language; after all, she had translated Necker some years before. So she wandered about the vast house, ‘one folding door after another’, feeling increasingly exasperated and forlorn. She was used to being snug; her cold deteriorated into a cough; no doubt she felt a simple, painful homesickness for Store Street, St Paul's Churchyard and the attentions of her familiar maid.

  On 26 December, while she was still waiting for the Fillietazes to come back, she saw Louis being driven through the silent streets lined with guards, and wrote an account of the scene to Johnson. It impressed and frightened her:

  I have been alone ever since; and, though my mind is calm, I cannot dismiss the lively images that have filled my imagination all the day. - Nay, do not smile, but pity me; for, once or twice, lifting my eyes from the paper, I have seen eyes glare through a glass-door opposite my chair, and bloody hands shook at me. Not the distant sound of a footstep can I hear. – My apartments are remote from those of the servants, the only persons who sleep with me in an immense hotel… I wish I had even kept the cat with me! - I want to see something alive; death in so many frightful shapes has taken hold of my fancy. - I am going to bed – and, for the first time in my life, I cannot put out the candle.5

  This is a very different tone from her brisk dismissal of violence to Roscoe in November. Now she felt horror, and her nightmare fantasy – it cannot have been literal truth – of the bloody hands and glaring, peeping eyes, reads like a forecast of the Terror.

  What she had witnessed was merely Louis's journey to attend his trial on the day of the opening of the defence, and yet she seemed quite certain he was going to die. The only possible explanation for this is that she had already discussed the outcome of the trial with people who knew the king as good as dead once he appeared before his judges: possibly Christie, who was a friend of Danton6 and may have repeated his opinion to her. It was through Christie that Mary received money orders from Johnson, so he must have called on her in the rue Meslée early in her stay in Paris.

  Soon after this the Fillietazes did turn up at last; they proved polite and friendly, but disappear from Mary's letters again almost as soon as she has commended their good manners. And although she seems to have stayed in the rue Meslée for some months, it was no more than a convenient lodging; she began to go out more and more, spending her time with friends from London, with other foreign groups and with various French politicians.

  The life of the expatriate community in Paris during that winter and spring, tied as it was to the shifting fortunes of the French leaders, is difficult to piece together; it disintegrated rapidly and was overtaken by a holocaust. Many witnesses died. Survivors were often frightened or ashamed to recall the part they had played, and fell into the carefully guarded silence of those who have put away childish things and regret they ever had truck with them. Snatches of reminiscence, letters and legal documents build up a picture of sorts, but it remains fragmentary: a few facts, a few guesses, a blurring of gossip.

  White's Hotel was the centre of the English and American activities; here both Paine and Barlow lodged, and a series of dinners was held during the autumn and winter, attended by most of the expatriates. The dinners engaged the attentions of the English government spy and, of course, of French observers, who formed some exaggerated notions of the extent of English support for the Revolution. Those who attended them were united by a hope that revolution would occur in the British Isles, but were not in a position to do very much to bring it about; looking back, it is easy to be wise about the vanity of their hopes, but impossible not to admire some of them. Paine was one, the lawyer John Frost another; he had been a reformer since 1780, when Pitt had been his friend and associate. In September 1792 Frost, as delegate for the Society of Constitutional Information, had accompanied Paine across the Channel (he reported back that Paine's only complaint about his reception was the intolerable amount of kissing French politicians inflicted on him).7 Frost returned to England at once, but came back in November with Barlow, whose expenses he paid on this occasion; he also carried a letter from the SCI offering support to the French government and promising a gift of one thousand pairs of shoes for the French army. Opinions are divided as to whether the shoes were delivered to Dunkirk or intercepted by the English authorities; what is certain is that they annoyed Pitt. Citizen Frost knew by now that he would find a cold reception when he returned to England.

  Christie's activities also impressed the French and worried the English government, who watched his correspondence and held him in deep suspicion as an ‘associate of Condorcet, Horne Tooke and Thomas Payne’.8 Riots in Forfarshire were attributed to his influence, and the same troubles were noted with satisfaction in France:

  Déjà l'Ecosse parait imbue de nos principes. Voyez à Dundee M. Dundas brulé en effigie; voyez-y l'arbre de la liberté planté par le peuple; voyez-le abattu dans la nuit par deux aristocrates, et voyez enfin le lendemain leurs maisons rasées par le peuple.9

  Christie, like most of his friends, seems to have hoped the people of Great Britain might rise up against their rulers in effective local protests without any more encouragement than the peaceful attempts of the corresponding societies to organize a convention. In a sense, they were counting on the government to make things intolerable in order that the revolution should be brought about. They wished to remain unimpeachable themselves, and were not prepared to organize violence, though prepared to overlook a little in France.

  Other young men in Paris that winter were Henry Redhead Yorke, a fiery boy from the West Indies ‘madly in love with ideal liberty’, and Jeremiah Joyce, the Dissenting tutor of the sons of the great Lord Stanhope. Then there was James Watt, son of the great engineer, and Thomas Cooper from Manchester, who said the four months he spent in Paris were the happiest of his life, and worth any other four years. Watt's friend Wordsworth was also lingering to hear of the birth of his child in Orleans, where he had left Annette Vallon with friends, promising to return and marry her. A daughter was born on 15 December; once the news arrived he set off for London to try to earn some money and promote the revolution in England. He made straight for St Paul's Churchyard and Joseph Johnson, and began work on a political pamphlet.*

  Christie and Barlow were both in business as well as politics. Another businessman with a streak of opportunism was Priestley's friend from Hackney, John Hurford Stone. Stone's wife and children were settled in Paris, but his affections were now engaged quite openly by the poet Helen Williams. She welcomed Mary warmly to her salon in the rue Helvéius, and must have carried her off to dinners at White's, where songs of her own composition were sometimes sung after the toasts. Helen was irresistible, a plump, fervent and ringleted creature who had long been famous in London for her cultural tea-parties and her enthusiasm for liberal causes; her books were subscribed by bishops, Wordsworth addressed one of his earliest sonnets to her when he was an undergraduate. * Fanny Burney noticed how pretty she was, ‘but so excessively affected that I could not talk to her’.10 When the Revolution came, Helen had begun to alarm her friends with something more than affectation: Walpole bracketed her with Anna Barbauld (‘Jael and Deborah’) as a revolutio
nary fiend, and she was thought to be ‘sacrificing her Reputation to her Spirit of Politics’ when she crossed the Channel in the company of Stone.11 Later she defended her behaviour by accusing Rachel Stone of being a notorious adulteress; whether this was true or not, Helen took Stone's name some time before he obtained a French divorce.

  Mary was unruffled by these irregularities. She wrote to Everina that:

  Miss Williams has behaved very civilly to me, and I shall visit her frequently, because I rather like her, and I meet French company at her house. Her manners are affected, yet her simple goodness of her heart continually breaks through the varnish, so that one would be more inclined, at least I should, to love than admire her. Authorship is a heavy weight for female shoulders, especially in the sunshine of prosperity.12

  Mary could be tactful when she chose; Miss Williams was not her ideal of womanhood, but she was doing her best, attending classes in Roman history and mathematics at a lycée in order to improve her education although she, like Mary, was over thirty. She was intimate with Madame de Genlis; she cultivated the society of French politicians and she habitually went to the Jacobin club with Madame Roland to hear the speakers. What she particularly admired about the atmosphere of Paris, she said, was that the old-style gallantry in which women sought only to please and men to flatter had given way to something better: ‘une estime mutuelle, un intérêt commun pour les grandes questions du jour’.13 The questions of the day were certainly great, but they did not entirely stand in the way of old-style gallantries, either between Helen and Stone or amongst other members of their circle. They could even be said to have acted as a stimulant to some.*

  The other household Mary visited most often was that of the Christies. They were lavish in their hospitality, and liked to arrange outings to the theatre, the ballet and the opera as well as evening parties and, when the weather allowed, excursions into the country around Paris in which Mary was usually included. Here again she could not avoid witnessing several emotional entanglements which suggested that marriage was indeed changing its nature in revolutionary society. Catherine Claudine had returned to Paris with Thomas's baby daughter Julie, and he seems to have persuaded her to hand the child over, either to his wife or some other person in his employ. He was also intent on diverting his sister Jane from her engagement to one of Lafayette's adjutants, now in exile and no longer a suitable potential brother-in-law for a supporter of the French government. The German naturalist Georg Forster, who was in Paris in 1793, has left a good picture of the Christies; he met them soon after making friends with Mary, whom he described as ‘a very pleasant woman and very forthcoming, more so than other Englishwomen’.