The Life and Death of Mary Wollstonecraft
Page 17
Whatever her proclaimed aversion to the emancipation of her sex, then, she herself was not a docile or satisfied woman. She bore one child, a daughter who was breast-fed dutifully but painfully and was a disappointment to her. There were no more babies; instead, in her position as ideal but dissatisfied wife, she began to collect young men. For a time there was a plan to found a rural community, a French Pantisocracy of sorts, with Brissot and Bancal and Lanthenas, but Manon's energies found a wider field through her husband's membership of the Jacobin club. They went to Paris in 1791. He was appointed Minister of the Interior in March 1792, dismissed for his hostility to the king (it was probably Manon who drafted the offending document), and recalled after the proclamation of the Republic. His subservience to his wife was common knowledge, not just a matter for jokes in the gutter press but something to be referred to in the Convention itself.
By the winter of 1792 Manon was endangering herself by her political meddling; she was also in love with the conventionnel Buzot. Her principles were such that she rejected the ‘impulsions brutales des sens’ and did not become his mistress (he was married too) but told Roland of her love and was bewildered and angry when he reacted to her high-minded behaviour with indignant jealousy. In December Roland was still minister, Madame had her dinners, her salon and her influence. But she knew the situation was moving against her in the Convention, and she sent her daughter to the country for safety.
Whatever contact there was between Madame Roland and Mary occurred between this moment and the end of May 1793, when the Girondins were arrested. Manon was prejudiced in favour of clever Englishwomen – like Mary, she revered the republican historian Catherine Macaulay – and there were obvious similarities in their backgrounds and ideas in spite of the difference over feminism. Manon may have influenced her English friend away from any incipient sympathy for the revolutionary leaders to the left of her own position. Certainly she painted such a delightful picture of her habitual way of life before the dark days of 1793 that Mary was carried away with enthusiasm for it, and wrote this account of its pleasures and virtues:
It is a mistake to suppose that there was no such thing as domestic happiness in France, or even in Paris. For many French families, on the contrary, exhibited an affectionate urbanity of behaviour to each other, seldom to be met with where a certain easy gaiety does not soften the difference of age and condition. The husband and wife, if not lovers, were the civilest friends and tenderest parents in the world – the only parents, perhaps, who really treated their children like friends; and the most affable masters and mistresses. Mothers were also to be found, who after suckling their children, paid a degree of attention to their education, not thought compatible with the levity of character attributed to them; whilst they acquired a portion of taste and knowledge rarely to be found in the women of other countries. Their hospitable boards were constantly open to relations and acquaintances, who, without the formality of an invitation, enjoyed their cheerfulness free from restraint; whilst more select circles closed the evening, by discussing literary subjects. In the summer, when they retired to their mansion houses, they spread gladness around, and partook of the amusements of the peasantry, whom they visited with paternal solicitude. These were, it is true, the rational few, not numerous in any country – and where is led a more useful or rational life?
... Besides, in France, the women have not those factitious, supercilious manners, common to the English; and acting more freely, they have more decision of character, and even more generosity. Rousseau has taught them also a scrupulous attention to their personal cleanliness, not generally to be seen elsewhere: their coquetry is not only more agreeable, but more natural: and not left a prey to unsatisfied sensations, they were less romantic indeed than the English; yet many of them possessed delicacy of sentiment.26
There is no mistaking the envy in Mary's voice. Still, it is as well to remember that in England and Ireland she had seen an equivalent way of life only from the standpoint of governess or paid companion, whereas in France she felt herself a social equal of Madame Roland. Nor would Madame Roland's servants have endorsed the account of the attractions of her way of life; indeed, some of them testified against her at her trial.
There is one other curious and tenuous link between Manon and Mary, forged by the fact that they shared an admirer in the conventionnel from Clermont-Ferrand, Paine's friend and translator, Bancal des Issarts. In 1790 he had carried on a sentimental flirtation with Manon which had culminated in his rather rapid departure for London, but they remained on good terms and corresponded regularly thereafter. Her last letters to him were written early in 1793 and concerned his sudden passion for another woman, which he decided to confide to her. Manon offered to assist him in his wooing; the lady in question, an Englishwoman, was referred to only by her initials, as M. W.
It has always been assumed that these letters stood for Helen Maria Williams, because Bancal did in fact propose to her nearly four years later, in 1796, and he certainly knew her in 1792.27 But if it was Helen, we have to explain away not only the dropping of the initial of the name by which she was always known, but other things too: M. W. is afflicted with a deep melancholy which Madame Roland urges Bancal to turn to his advantage by comforting her:
M. W. vous accorde estime, intérêt, amitié, sympathie; merités sa reconnaissance et son attendrissement; gemissés avec elle du sujet melancolique de ses regrets; que votre passion généreuse devienne pour elle le premier, le plus doux des consolateurs; aimès-la assés pour désirer véritablement d'adoucir sa tristesse; song's qu'elle ne peut encore parfaitement vous connaître et vous apprécier.28
Mary's distress over Fuseli was known to many of her friends, and she was new to Bancal's circle (‘elle ne peut parfaitement vous connaître’), whereas Helen had been in Paris for some time. Mary was intending to leave again soon, Helen was installed; and surely Madame Roland, who knew Helen well, must have heard a whisper of her public liaison with Stone, and would have hesitated to urge Bancal on with the words:
Ou j'entends absolument rien au cœur humain, ou vous devez devenir le mari de Mlle… si vous conduisez bien et qu'elle demeure ici trois mois. Constance et générosité peuvent tout sur un cœur honnête et sensible qui n'a point d'engagements.29
But Bancal was not a successful wooer. In March he had to leave Paris under orders from the Convention to talk to Dumouriez, and the departure saved his life even if it lost him his chance with Mary. Dumouriez handed him over to the Austrians, who kept him in prison, and he did not return until after the Terror. By the time he proposed to Helen in 1796, unavailingly of course, Mary had long since left France. Bancal proceeded to become very pious and later conducted a furious campaign against the divorce laws: he said they were undermining Christian marriage. He gave up the attempt to find himself an intellectual wife, married a French provincial girl and fathered a large, dull family in perfect respectability. If he ever thought back to the Nouvel Ordre social, Manon, Tom Paine and les ang-laises, he was too discreet to mention them.
Mary was also given the chance to leave France in February 1793, perhaps by Stone, who made a mysterious trip to England just then. She turned it down. War had been declared on 1 February; it was seriously suggested in the Convention that a separate address should be delivered to the people of England, explaining that the war was against King George and his government and not against them, but Marat, who knew England, exploded into cynical laughter at the idea and it was scotched. He was right: the overwhelming majority of the English rallied as usual to the prospect of fighting the French.
A few sympathizers with the Revolution remained in England. There were educated Dissenters, the members of the political clubs, scattered provincial ladies and gentlemen such as Roscoe, the radical novelist Bage, Thomas Poole in Somerset and Eliza Fletcher in Edinburgh. Some were threatened with knocking down, some merely cut. Mrs Fletcher was accused of practising with a small home guillotine on her backyard hens against the day when la
rger victims should become available.30 The boys of Winchester staged a rebellion of their own in February, planting the red cap on the Founder's Tower, and there was a handful of young literary idealists at large who were all ardent for liberty: Southey at Oxford, Coleridge at Cambridge and Wordsworth in London, kept in check from publishing his violent republican propaganda only by Johnson's paternal vigilance.
Correspondence between the two capitals grew more difficult. Letters were liable to be seized by the police on either side of the Channel, and the mail boats ceased to ply in March. Mary's letters to Roscoe for this period have disappeared, and many to her sisters; but she continued to receive money from Johnson, cashing the orders as they arrived through Christie.31
In London one of her acquaintances entered into a mildly conspiratorial activity: William Godwin entrusted to a revolutionary friend John Fenwick, who went over to Paris at the end of February, a copy of his newly published Political Justice. A little later Godwin himself called boldly on the departing French ambassador Chauvelin with a letter addressed to the Convention. Chauvelin described the incident in a letter of his own:
Au moment oú je quittais Londres William Godwin vint me prier d'offrir en son nom à la convention nationale un ouvrage qu'il venait de composer sur les institutions politiques. Il joignit à cet ouvrage qui ne m'a été remis que depuis peu de jours, une lettre à la convention qui lui sera une nouvelle preuve, qu'en devenant l'effroy des tyrans et des esclaves, la nation française n'a pas cessé d'être l'espoir et la consolation des hommes ver-tueux et libres de tous les pays.
Paris le 26 avril, l'an 2 de la R.32
To Godwin, France still appeared as the hope and comfort of the virtuous and the free, but in Paris itself nobody was quite sure any longer who was virtuous and who free. On 15 February Condorcet submitted his finished plan for the new constitution and found it opposed by Robespierre and the Jacobins on the grounds that it was not democratic enough and gave too much power to the provinces. The Girondins rallied to Condorcet, and the rift grew more dangerous. By the end of the month there was rioting in the streets, something Mary had never experienced before. Soon she was to see not only shops plundered but the presses of unpopular journalists destroyed: it was scarcely the freedom she or Godwin had in mind when they praised the Revolution.
[12]
Imlay
FROM the time war was declared on England, life in Paris had been growing more difficult. There was inflation, less food was coming in from the countryside, and people were short of sugar, soap and candles. At night they waited in long lines outside the bakers’ shops: the modern use of the word ‘queue’ was invented in Paris in 1793. Foreigners, as long as they had foreign currency, were not too badly off, but they began to be regarded with more suspicion. On 24 February they were ordered to renew their passports, and inn-keepers were warned to look out for them and report on their movements. Mary was not in any difficulties as long as she remained in the Marais with the Fillietazes, but she could not help being aware that she was an object of suspicion, carefully observed by a hostile bureaucracy. New committees were set up to control goods and people; in March a special body was established for watching aliens, who had to declare all their sources of income and produce six witnesses apiece to their respectability before being issued with a certificate of residence. She now thought of leaving for Switzerland, where life would be easier, but she could not get the appropriate passport, so she stayed on.
At the end of March a decree was passed obliging every citizen to inscribe the names of all residents in his house on the door; the citoyenne Marie Wollstonecraft saw herself emblazoned in the rue Meslée. She was not pleased by the terminology of the Revolution, and dismissed ‘sans-culotte’, ‘citoyen’ and ‘égalité’ as inventions fit only to cajole the minds of the vulgar, who were now certainly in the ascendant in Paris.1 Things grew still worse: in the north General Dumouriez defected, in the Vendée there were uprisings of great ferocity. The Comité de salut public was set up. Rumours circulated that the English were planning to invade Brittany and that Pitt was paying women to attempt political assassinations. On 12 April all foreigners were prohibited formally from leaving the country. The expatriates who remained, trapped in this uncomfortable situation, drew together anxiously.
While public affairs were menacing and unpredictable, Mary retreated from any attempt to comment on them. And almost immediately something happened to transform her life and turn her energies in a new direction. In itself the adventure was banal: she met an American army captain who seduced her.
His name was Gilbert Imlay; on first meeting him at the Christies early in the year she took a dislike to him and avoided his company. Probably she formed a fairly true estimate of his character and intelligence at the start. In any case, with her views, she would be inclined to look askance at a man who boasted of being a captain in the army (even the American army) and was now engaged in business.2 But he was able to present other facets: he was a writer, and he told Mary he was keen to return to the American wilderness and establish himself as a farmer once he had made enough money to buy a decent piece of land. What he did not mention, naturally enough, was that he had left a pile of debts behind him when he quitted America in 1786, and that he would be greeted by a lawsuit or two if he did return. He did not tell her either that he was actively planning, throughout April and May, to join in a proposed French expedition against the Spanish colonies in Louisiana.
Where he had lived and how he had supported himself during the last six years was a mystery, but he had found time to write two books. His Topographical Description of the Western Territory of North America had been published in London in 1792 and was admired by prospective emigrants for its useful and entertaining picture of life in the Kentucky backwoods. It is still readable enough. It was on the basis of his high opinion of this book that Thomas Cooper introduced Imlay to Brissot in March 1793 and the Louisiana plot was hatched. Imlay's other book, about to be published in London when Mary met him, was a novel called The Emigrants. Cast in a series of letters and intended to contrast the liberty of the new world with the degeneracy and artificial manners of the old, it was a wholly atrocious piece of work. If it appealed to Mary at all it must have been because it advocated divorce and contained a portrait of a brutal and tyrannical husband.
Imlay was on good terms with Barlow and Christie. There may even have been some innocent plotting amongst them to bring the affair with Mary about: she was thirty-four in April and Gilbert a bachelor of thirty-nine. He was a handsome man, tall, thin and easy in his manner, ‘a most natural, unaffected creature’;3 and he knew how to apply the flattery of the wooer who is held back in his pursuit by no scruples at all, unlike other men who had been interested in Mary. It gave him a considerable advantage. Imlay boasted of his zest for life, of having roamed in the wilderness. He told Mary that he had lived with other women before and that he considered marriage a corrupt institution; and she had not a glimmering of worldly wisdom to suggest that this meant he held himself free to deceive and leave her too in due course. Evidently he mentioned a previous mistress who had been a ‘cunning woman’, enabling Mary to think tenderly of him as the victim of other women's wiles: it is old seducer's talk.
Once she began to fall in love, she constructed a mental image of him which bore little relation to his true character. In her very last letters to him she refers to his image, clinging to it as some sort of justification for having involved herself with him in the first place; and probably Imlay too for a while imagined himself into the flattering new role in which he could perform to a new audience. His business troubles could be half forgotten; his American background allowed him to play the noble savage and critic of corrupt European manners; at times the dream of returning to a life of arcadian simplicity could be evoked too. When he described a backwoods farmhouse and a family of six children, it fitted in wonderfully with an old Wollstonecraft family dream: Mary's mother had spoken of a cabin in the New World.
By mid-April his attentions to Mary were marked enough to be noticed by Barlow, who mentioned the matter to his wife in a letter, and by one of Paine's friends, who saw them together often at the Christies' evening gatherings, which were growing increasingly gloomy with the deteriorating political situation. But whatever Mary felt on behalf of her French friends, she had moved into a different mental world. ‘Her confidence was entire; her love was unbounded. Now, for the first time in her life, she gave a loose to all the sensibilities of her nature,’ says Godwin, writing of this love of his wife's as though it were the source of all his knowledge of the emotion:
… her whole character seemed to change with a change of fortune. Her sorrows, the depression of her spirits, were forgotten, and she assumed all the simplicity and vivacity of a youthful mind. She was like a serpent upon a rock, that casts its slough, and appears again with the brilliancy, the sleekness, and the elastic activity of its happiest age. She was playful, full of confidence, kindness and sympathy. Her eyes assumed new lustre, and her cheeks new colour and smoothness. Her voice became cheerful; her temper overflowing with universal kindness: and that smile of bewitching tenderness from day to day illuminated her countenance, which all who knew her will so well recollect.5