“Oh, your name is on every tongue in the literary world,” said Johnson. “With near-universal praise.”
“Only ‘near’?” said Mary, with a wincing smile.
Mrs. B took that as her signal that Mary needed to shift position.
“The few who don’t admire it simply don’t understand it. Their souls are all shriveled up, and they don’t know what to do with such fresh honesty.”
Mrs. B helped Mary shift her weight and turn toward him. Johnson wanted to help but didn’t know how.
“It’s your opinion that matters,” said Mary, when she settled in. “Well, you and Mrs. Blenkinsop.”
Johnson took the midwife in. “Even got you reading it, have they?”
“Best I can, sir.” She tucked Mary’s covers neatly around her. “I didn’t know people could write books like that.”
“That’s because they haven’t. I don’t quite know how she’s done it, but it’s a new mode altogether.”
“The way she turns feeling into thinking and thinking into feeling—” Mrs. B stopped herself. She’d said more than she meant to.
“No, I agree. It captures the mobility of her soul.”
“I’ve never been outside England myself. But I feel like I have, when I read it.”
“Exactly. Why, I suspect she’ll make a fashion of long, solitary, questing journeys. Very romantic. Probably all to the frozen North!”
“Wouldn’t that be something?” said Mrs. B.
“It’s almost as if she travels beyond the bounds of mortality itself.”
“I’m not dead yet!” said Mary with a quiet laugh.
“Oh, I’m such a buffoon,” said Johnson. “Of course you’re still here. Look at you.”
Mary seemed tired, but Mrs. B could tell they didn’t want to let each other go. Her eyes closed after a while, she drifted off, but Johnson stayed by her side for the longest time, holding her hand in both of his, eyes glistening with tears. When he finally got up to go, he kissed Mary on the forehead, and thanked Mrs. B for letting him sit with her.
Fordyce was there after his lunch, when Mary woke with a start, hot cheeks, and a racking cough. She looked wild-eyed and frightened, as if she’d had a terrible dream, or delirium, and couldn’t quite catch her breath from it. Her pulse was racing, and she clutched her stomach in pain. He examined her joints—knees and elbows—and found them red and inflamed. Mrs. B tried to cool her with a damp cloth, but the fever was coming on fierce. She was tired of the fight, and fell into a hard sleep.
“It isn’t good, Blenkinsop,” said the doctor. “I don’t like it at all.”
“Is she dying, sir?” said Mrs. B in her straight-out-with-it way, though she knew the answer already.
“Well, let’s not build a coffin just yet, shall we?” Fordyce slumped in a chair, splayed his legs. He worried the cloth on his thighs, that way men have, and studied the patient from six feet away. Finally he filled his big belly with air, and sighed. He wasn’t obviously drunk, but contemplative, more than usual.
“I haven’t lost a spouse,” he said. “Lost two sons, though, and that was plenty. George, he was an infant, barely two months. Influenza. But William. He drowned in the Thames. Eleven, he was.”
“I’m sorry, sir.”
“I’ve two daughters, though, Matilda and Margaret. They look after me, get me through it. Good ones, they are.”
“’S right to count blessings. To think what we have and not what we’ve lost.”
He looked at Mrs. B, his hooded eyes filled all the way with tears.
“You never get over it, Mrs. Blenkinsop. Not ever.”
He sat for a while, then tottered to his bag, pulling out a small amber bottle. “Twenty drops of laudanum ought to get her through the night.”
Mrs. B shook her head. “None of that, sir. She won’t have it.”
“Well, then. Let’s hope for some rest for her. I’ll be back in the morning.”
He snapped his bag shut and started to go.
“Will you tell Mr. Godwin? Before you leave?”
Fordyce stood on the threshold and considered it. “We mustn’t tell Godwin, not yet. But in the morning, let’s start her on a wine diet, shall we? The least we can do is ease her way.”
Mary W
I am broken, little bird, and Paris is broken with me.
“Be my eyes and ears,” said Johnson. But I’m on the outside looking in, or rather, the inside looking out, deep in the Marais, closed up on the sixth floor of 22 rue Meslée, tall shuttered doors and iron-grilled windows, with a cold that consumes me. My hosts, called away unexpectedly, have left me with a surfeit of servants who think it a favor to give me peace, quiet, and not just a room but a whole floor of my own, when what I’m desperate to have is conversation. But what would I do with it? All my fine French phrases fly away, while theirs swirl so fast around me I can’t catch them. If I can barely ask for a baguette and some butter, how will I ever form sentences on this great turnabout in human affairs? I know I’ve sought refuge in another country to heal my wounded heart and lose myself in the grand sweep of history. I tell myself that dreary winter must give way to spring, and if men and women can reimagine the world, why not I reimagine my life?
The day after Christmas, at nine in the morning, I heard a few solemn strokes on the drum and the wheels of a cart. I climbed the stairs to the attic to watch the king pass through eerily empty streets in a hackney coach, on the way to being tried. A throng of guards in blue coats and red collars clustered around to keep would-be rescuers away. The air was so still, as if all Paris held its breath. People flocked to their windows, but all the casements were shut. I can scarcely tell you why, little bird, but tears flowed from my eyes when I saw Louis sitting with more dignity than I expected from him, on his way to a near-certain death sentence.
That night I couldn’t dismiss the lively images that had filled my head all that day. And when the true dark descended, bloody hands shook at me, and death in frightful shapes took hold of my imagination. For the first time in my life I couldn’t put out the candle for fear of being extinguished myself.
Three weeks later Louis was dead. Again, I dissolved to insensible tears when I heard it. I knew the world would never be the same, a king tried and executed as any ordinary citizen, as he should be. But as soon as his head dropped from the guillotine, it was said, people rushed to plunge their hands into his blood and shout “Vive la République!” I couldn’t help but feel that the turning tide had murder in it, and wondered at what cost in human dignity, this change we sought.
When I finally ventured out, I found a city scarred. Dirty streets, splashing mud, sinkholes between paving stones. Gray everything. The buildings were tall and close together, the streets so narrow I couldn’t even see the sky. Taking a walk consisted of pressing my body against a building every few steps to avoid being run over or splashed by a speeding carriage. Pulled-down statues of saints and monarchs left empty pedestals and marble piles. Haunting signs, never removed, warned not to cheer for the now-dead king. The names of shops, streets, and bridges eradicated any tinge of the royal, but no maps of the new city existed.
“Don’t speak English on the streets,” said Helen Maria Williams, a London writer who’d preceded me in her move to Paris and invited me for tea. “You might be a noble in disguise.”
“Do I look like a noble?” I said.
“Or an English spy.”
Helen Maria, with her far better French, had quickly become a well-known salonnière in Paris. At Chez Williams, generals, diplomats, and politicians mingled with poets, philosophers, artists, and actors—old and new, French and foreign. It was a heady atmosphere, every conversation charged with a sense of personal danger, even if softened by fancy fabric and fine manners. She was fond of saying that her love for the French Revolution was born of her nature, and that her political creed was entirely an affair of the heart. To understand the general good, she said, one need not possess the wisdom of a philospher, only the
sensibilité of a woman.
She had wide blue eyes that took up most of her face, a long, thin nose, a petite slip of a mouth, abundant curls, and dressed like a Greek goddess. It was all the fashion now not to be fashionable, to eschew the elaborate silks, satins, and pinched waists of the old regime in favor of light cottons, gauze, and sheer India muslin, high waists and slitted skirts that showed a woman’s true form and liberated even her stride. Helen Maria’s only jewelry was a double chain of pearls wrapped about her slender neck, a delicate armor. I could have loved her myself.
It was well known that she protected Girondists on the run. We’d all seen them lose ground to the more radical Jacobins, who seemed hungry for everyone’s head. Only a few months before, the people of Paris had butchered thousands of prisoners—priests, beggars, prostitutes, royalists, and ex-courtiers—anyone deemed an “enemy of the Revolution.” Women were raped and men tortured before jeering mobs. But the most indelible image in my mind was that of the Princesse de Lamballe, Marie Antoinette’s close friend, rumored to have been stripped naked, breasts and vulva cut off, and dragged through the streets when she refused to disavow the queen. It was at least true that they cut off her head and mounted it on a pike outside the queen’s prison window. The wild cruelty of it, so far beyond the meant-to-be-more-humane guillotine, haunted me. It was natural that English enthusiasts began to have doubts, some turning away from the Revolution in disgust. Eliza and Everina had begged me not to go to Paris, even Johnson had second thoughts, but I was determined to go, and stubborn, as I so often am.
But with our king now throwing in against France, all English were the enemy.
“I’m beginning to wonder whether we’re guests or prisoners, the brave ones or the fools,” I told Helen Maria, thankful to be sitting in a drawing room where the language, even the gestures, were ones I recognized, with someone who felt like a kindred soul.
“It’s hard to be certain of anything,” she said. “You must know by now that Paris is a nest of gossiping vipers and vile rumormongers: who’s escaped, who’s invading, who’s planning a coup, who’s under arrest? And most important, who’s bedding whom.”
I smiled. In a world turned upside down, the old morality reeked of the ancien régime. No one seemed to take marriage vows seriously or thought discretion necessary. Divorce was legal. Love affairs, and the rushing in and out of them, were an apt expression of the moment’s purest ideals. And why not? I’d argued for it myself. If people could overcome the tyranny of kings, why not the tyranny of unequal marriage? Sexual liberty and political liberty now went hand in hand. These were lives lived in the open. A revolution in full flower.
“I barely speak the language,” I said. “How will I know the false reports from the true?”
“Well, don’t believe it when they call me a ‘scribbling trollop’ or a Jacobin prophetess with bloody talons.”
“You have my word,” I said.
A shadow crept across her pretty face. “The one true thing is the hard slice of the guillotine. What’s not known is whose head will be next. But not many of our countrymen and women are staying to find out. What about you, Miss Wollstonecraft?”
I clasped my hands in a tight ball. Should I go or stay? I still felt newly arrived in Paris, still believed in bearing witness, held true to the ideals of the Revolution, and hoped it might yet right itself. But I wanted to live.
“The carriages are filled with fleeing Brits,” she said. “I can get you a place in one, but it’s the only spot I know. If you can leave tomorrow.”
I twisted Fanny’s ring on my finger. I felt Helen Maria’s pure and sensitive heart, her patience while I thought it through. I was a free woman here, but with nothing, and no one, to protect me. But had I ever had anyone to protect me?
“Well,” I said with a false shrug. “It’s natural children do mischief when they meddle with edged tools. We shouldn’t be surprised.”
She leaned even closer and put her hand on mine, as if to say, I know you’re afraid. We all are.
A servant brought out a bottle of champagne and poured us two glasses. She raised hers to mine. “If you intend to stay, I will show you a Paris you will love, that will love you back. Here you’re free to follow your heart, wherever it takes you. We’re all having a bit of the Revolution for ourselves. And you shall have yours.”
We clinked our glasses and drank to that.
I didn’t tell her that the pain of missing Fuseli was intense and real. I wanted relief but still believed joy impossible for me, in this life, anyway, even if I saw it all around me, couples throwing off social mores, and living for the sake of love alone.
Perhaps out of fear of being hurt and humiliated again, I was suspicious at first of the tall, handsome American, Gilbert Imlay, who appeared in my life like a leading man on the stage. Frontiersman, adventurer, businessman, land speculator, diplomat, writer—he was charming, direct, often lighthearted, sometimes shrewd to the edge of unscrupulousness—almost anything one wanted to see in him. Like that great shape-shifter Zeus, Imlay could be gopher, swan, cloud, or a shower of gold.
It was April, spring finally peeking through, and I felt it all the way to my toes. Tulips in Luxembourg Gardens. The fruits of my French study finally paying off, a feeling that I belonged and was right where I ought to be. We English who’d chosen to stay drew together anxiously—at salons, the theater, parties, and private dinners, where I was celebrated as author and philosopher, where women and men flocked around, flattering me: I had a charming grace, a fascinating look; I was voluptuous; they admired the way I let my hair fall carelessly out of its pins, the softness of my voice, the sharp blade of my wit. They liked the sound of my muscular name in their mouths: Wollstonecraft.
We were at White’s Hotel in the 2nd arrondissement, at a gathering of French, English, and American cosmopolites who considered themselves stalwart citizens of the world, all love of liberty and hatred of kings. Helen Maria was there, people from Paine’s circle, others I’d met once or twice at Johnson’s table, including the American pamphleteer and poet Joel Barlow and his wife, Ruth. After a toast to the British women authors who’d been friends to the Revolution, I could feel Imlay watch me as I threw about my new French, laughed with my head tossed back, interrupted, argued, said precisely what I thought about everything, to everyone. And when I didn’t know how to say what I meant, I said simply “Oui, oui, oui!”
“Be careful with your ‘Oui, oui, oui,’” said the mystery man. “In case you chance to say ‘Oui’ when you don’t mean to, par habitude.”
It could have been a line straight from Fuseli’s mouth, but this man wasn’t like him at all. Where Henry was compact, intense, refined, and florid, Imlay was as open as a prairie field, the new country of America personified. Optimism with ambition, openness with raw desire, energy unbound. He was forthright in his flirtations, witty, but unaffected. I guessed him about forty, with thick hair swept back from his tanned forehead and wrinkles around his eyes when he smiled, which he did easily. His face was angular, his complexion ruddy. He had a natural dignity that comes from a love of forests and wide-open spaces. He looked like a man who’d slept on the ground under the stars, eaten fish from rivers, and liked it. He was brawny but graceful, in a simple white shirt, stiff collar, and brown jacket—some said he fashioned himself after Daniel Boone—but there was a softness in him too.
At first I resisted Imlay’s charms, put off by his self-possession, but soon warmed to his poetic descriptions of exotic Kentucky, its rolling fields and farms, an unimaginable expanse of wooded wilderness—an Arcadian dream where strong men and strong women were building new lives as equals in the effort. Freedom, he said, was enthroned in the heart of every citizen, and their only master. We were both friends of the Revolution in France, but feared where it was headed. We agreed the king’s death had done little to improve people’s lives. Bread was as dear as ever, and they were still poor.
I read Imlay’s novel (surreptitiously) over t
wo nights, and found him arguing against the slave trade, the massacre of native tribes, inherited wealth, monarchy. He called marriage “a state of degradation and misery for women,” and apparently believed, as I did, that all impositions on freedom, including strict divorce laws, were anathema to the liberty of all. Even more, he’d written about a heroine—“a beauty in tears”—victimized by a despotic husband partial to drunken sex. I couldn’t help but think of my own father, my sister Eliza, or shake the feeling that I was looking at myself in a mirror. I had never wanted to be a man, but if I ever did, I would have been Imlay down to his boots.
Soon we were tête-à-tête as soon as we came together, only stopping when we parted, and then found it hard to part at all. As spring swelled, we took long walks around Paris, which I now saw like a fairy scene that touched my heart: charming boulevards, elegant gardens, the sweet smell of clustering flowers.
“That first night when I saw you,” he said. “I secretly made you my singular mission.”
“What, to conquer me?”
“We Americans don’t conquer so much as throw off our oppressors, and then make deals in our interests.”
“What about my interests?” I asked.
He laughed and pulled a pink blossom off a tree and smelled it, almost unconsciously, before flicking it into the wind. “It seems clear you stand for yourself, Miss Wollstonecraft, and value your freedom as much as any man values his.”
“I am not in pursuit of a marriage ‘deal,’ as you can imagine, Imlay, but I do believe that mutual affection might be the principal solace of human life. The thing that makes everything else tolerable.”
“Do you speak from experience?” he said.
“Do you?”
He stopped and looked away from me, down the arcade of leafing trees that lined our way, with his hands on his hips. I could see the answer on his face. Gilbert Imlay was blushing.
“Let me just say that I’ve dabbled in affection, probably exceeding what I should have, but not the mutual sort. Mostly I find there’s one person more in love with the other, whose ‘affection’ grinds down all gratification into guilt.”
Love and Fury Page 20