Resolution

by A. N. Wilson

  The inhalations and exhalations on the bridge were an attempt to make his thoughts have some kind of order – for the impressions, memories, voices which danced about in his skull made a phantasmagoria of confusion, in which his wife and children, Lux, his father, Captain Cook, General Custine and the lugubrious police chief, Guénot, skipped a danse macabre, and in which the brown waters of the Seine appeared like those of the Tiber in the Sibyl’s vision at the mouth of Virgil’s hell, foaming with blood.

  Guénot, the investigator, among all the participants of the danse, now brought the music to a close. The kaleidoscope settled. He began to breathe normally. George realized that the one saving fact of his time in Paris had been his own instinctive lack of candour on paper. In his letters to Heyne, to Reinhold, as to Therese or to Huber, he had not acknowledged that his marriage was over. He wrote as if she had taken the children into safekeeping, but that one day soon they would be reunited.

  Nor had he written any word of criticism of the Jacobins and their regime. It soon had become clear to him that all letters, written and received, were subject to censorship. It was not pure cynicism, however, which had made him continue to profess his belief in the Revolution. He genuinely did so.

  Now, standing on the Pont St-Michel, he felt within himself the unmistakeable symptoms of disillusion. After the heady few hours of champagne comes the mild headache, the sense of slight depression. After six months of Rosicrucianism in Kassel, enthusiasm in which even the sober-minded Sömmerring had shared, came the cold grey of dawn, the shame at his own capacity to be deluded, the thrill of freedom. (I don’t have to believe all this stuff!) How could the execution of Lux not, quite literally at a stroke, have destroyed his faith in the Revolution? Yet whereas the loss of faith in Rosicrucianism humiliated him, made him feel weak in his own eyes, as well as the eyes of the world, the present moment of enlightenment gave him a quiet strength. He felt, quite simply, Resolution.

  If he could not return to Mainz, then his best bet was to remain in Paris, until the chance came of an escape . . . to England. He had made friends in Paris with a Scottish family named Christie, and with Mary Wollstonecraft and her circle of radical friends. Already one of them had suggested he returned with them to London to help set up a radical press . . . If he were patient, if he were careful . . . He was not going to allow Therese to destroy all his peace of mind and to take his children, any more than he could allow Robespierre and Guénot and the other cut-throat self-righteous maniacs to destroy his belief in . . . whatever it was which had led him to belief in the Enlightenment. And herein was the difference between this loss of faith and the loss of faith in Rosicrucianism. Awaking from the Rosicrucian nightmare he had felt merely that he had been a colossal chump. Present feelings were different. He had not been a fool to delight in the end of superstition and tyranny. He had not been a fool to believe that, in pre-Revolutionary France, a man of humble birth, such as Captain Cook, would have found it all but impossible to rise to eminence . . .

  Nevertheless, the all-too-familiar sensation of losing his faith swept through him as he paced on from the bridge, up the river, down the river, until tiredness overcame him and he returned to the patriotic Dutchmen.

  When he had reached his little room, which was near the eaves and was very hot, he sat down at his writing table. His brain had cleared and he wrote a letter to Therese. It was both truthful, in what it included, disingenuous in what it omitted. He said nothing of Lux, nothing of his fears, nothing of his doubts. He wrote of his heart-broken yearning to see his children and begged her to come and live with him in Paris. He said nothing of his conviction that Huber was too lily-livered to consider living in Paris. In one masterly letter, he had demonstrated to the censors his loyalty to the Revolution (for who but a true revolutionary would beg his wife to come to Paris in July ’93 – or rather, Thermidor in Year One?) In the marital war, he was now on record as being reasonable, generous even, reconciliatory. As a father he genuinely yearned to see the children.

  For a few weeks after this, he spent most of his time with the British exiles: with Miss Wollstonecraft, and the Christies. To escape the stultifying heat of Paris, he stayed near Lucienne, near the Comtesse de Barry’s Pavilion. The Christies had befriended a rich banker called Lecoulteux: he had offered two million livres to the Government to spare the King’s life. It was a refreshing time. They took walks over to Versailles. The royal palace had been taken over by sans-culottes. Some appeared to be living there. Others were simply mooching about. On one of their walks they watched a woman casually smashing a window and bursting into laughter. Not long after this the Christies left for England, repeating their offer to find work for George, as a writer and publisher, if he were able to escape.

  On their last night in Paris, the Christies took George and Miss Wollstonecraft to Iphigénie en Tauride by Gluck. They had dinner and drank a lot of wine. Upon his return to the Dutch Patriots, he found a letter from Therese. She told him she was in Switzerland (Neuchâtel) with Huber and the children. It was not clear whether she had received his last, carefully worded letter, or not.

  She had written to George to tell him that she was writing a novel, but she did not confess its subject. It was in fact the first novel ever written with an Australian background, and by the time she admitted its existence to George, its first episode was serialized in the women’s magazine Flora. It was an epistolary novel, in which George, renamed Rudolph, was on a ship bound for Australia, writing back to his two ‘friends’, Berthold and Reinette: a thinly disguised Huber and Therese. It included his visit to Norfolk Island, which Therese had planted with coconut palms – which would not be found there – and Rousseau-esque ‘noble savages’. George’s essays on the penal colonies were infused with an ‘enlightened’ belief that they would turn their vices into virtues and be redeemed by the practice of enlightened activism. She replaced all this with a crude ‘primitivism’ with ‘honest Hottentots’ and a blind old Arab happily playing with his grandsons in the shade of a camel. She did not admit to George that some phrases in the letters of ‘Rudolph’, for instance speaking of India as ‘the cradle of mankind’, had simply been lifted from the letters he had written to her from Paris. She described George’s interview with the Emperor Joseph.

  —And what will you do when you are finally tired of roving?

  —Then I shall go home and grow cabbages.

  Joseph put his hand on his shoulder and asked earnestly,

  —Why don’t you start doing that today?

  As ‘Rudolph’ wrote to ‘Berthold and Reinette’, he was by nature a wanderer . . . —There is another kind of happiness and another philosophy, which is perhaps not generally useful but is most bracing for anyone who is driven by Fate to adopt it . . .

  Reinhold was shocked by her acts of fiction, when his wife read them in Flora. George, had he ever read them, would have been more indulgent. While his family considered Therese turning him into a character in fiction to be the ultimate act of gratuitous exploitation, he would have seen that Therese, who had always been an addict of sentimental fiction, was actually unable to respond to George in any other way. As soon as she had parted from him, she had been liberated to become what she had always been in her heart: a novelist. George would have remembered their quarrel about Werther. In part he could not speak to her fully about it, because its story of a man who commits suicide having been driven mad by love too painfully recalled Nally. But another reason for their acrimonious difference was that he had been genuinely unable to inhabit Werther, which revealed far more than a simple difference in literary taste. It showed they were looking at the same world and seeing two quite different things. They were a pair of misplaced library books. She was more capable than he was of seeing that both of them, for as long as they had tried to be married, were on the wrong shelf. He had wanted her catalogued as Travel with himself. She belonged with Fiction. He was with Pausanias and Hakluyt, while she was moving from Richardson’s Clarissa to Rous
seau’s Emile. Linnaeus and Reinhold thought that you had told the truth about the world by making it into a series of life forms listed in categories: she felt such life forms – animal, plant or human – made no sense until they had been interpreted and shaped. George’s Voyage was as much a work of interpretation as a novel. Did anyone suppose that Mr Hodges’s demurely picturesque depictions of aboriginal life, or his South Sea islands, as brightly decorated as flats in the Imperial Theatre at Mainz, provided a neutral or accurate picture of the seas and landscapes explored by Captain Cook? And were not George’s letters a projection, a version of himself, which was halfway to being a novel?

  With the still, considered creativity of a mind soused in a bottle of red Burgundy, George wrote to his wife one of his finest letters. He urged her to bring Huber and the children to Paris. He continued to regard Huber as a friend – they could continue with their translating work. He did not reproach Therese. Some form of living together could be found. It must. His heart was broken by not seeing Rosechen. As for where they all were – surely this made no difference?

  I have no homeland, no fatherland. I no longer really have friendships, not really. Everything which seemed certain has become contingent. Everything to which I clung has forsaken me. I have found a new life, independent, liberated . . .

  He was not sure quite what it meant, as he powdered the wet ink of the words and sealed the wax on the back of the letter with his ring. One of her letters crossed with this profession. It was quite short, and asked him for a divorce, to allow her to marry Huber.

  It was not long after he received this letter, when he was sitting at the dining table of the Dutch Patriots, and spreading a newspaper over the crumbs and wine-stains of the greying linen cloth, when the lugubrious Guénot again appeared.

  —I came here rather than summoning you to the Préfecture, citizen.

  —I shall ring for wine—

  —Thank you, coffee is all I require.

  —It is some weeks since we were served coffee, citizen, and even that was made of acorns.

  Clothilde brought out a jug of coarse red wine and two glasses.

  —Walls have ears, said Guénot in a low gravelly voice when she was gone. It is from Citizen Robespierre himself that I have come. The English in the north have taken many prisoners. We in turn have some three or four hundred of theirs. We believe, Citizen Robespierre believes, we could negotiate an exchange.

  —You want me to negotiate?

  —You have perfect English, haven’t you? Besides, in Citizen Robespierre’s home town . . .

  —Arras . . .

  — . . . but of course . . .

  Guénot was impatient. The birthplace of the Saviour of France was surely such common knowledge as to be unworthy of remark.

  —Arras, he continued, is in an . . . interesting situation. There are . . . enemies of the Revolution.

  By now Guénot was murmuring so low that his words were scarcely audible. Something about an inn: something about an English officer, Major Manson, who would be the man with whom the negotiations would begin. That evening, George did some packing – put notebooks into a portmanteau. He wanted to continue with his translations of the Indian tales. He was also at work on an Essay on the Relationship between Happiness and Politics. The money offered for his mission was rather good, twice the eighteen livres a day which he claimed as a Deputé. After a breakfast of very watery chocolate and some slices of yesterday’s loaf, George climbed into the diligence, bound for Arras.

  PART SEVEN

  Sailing Home

  Oh! dream of joy! is this indeed

  The light-house top I see?

  Is this the hill? is this the kirk?

  Is this mine own countree?

  I

  1775

  —AND IT SEEMS I HAVE A NICKNAME AMONG THE YOUNG midshipmen, said Reinhold.

  He and George were climbing a hill together on the island of St Helena. They stood for a while and looked back at the Governor’s house (where they were being entertained) at the avenue of banyan trees (Ficus religiosa Linn), at the zigzagging road which led out of the town, at the ships and boats in the harbour, and, inland, beyond barren, rocky terrain, well-cultivated orchards and plantations, at wooded slopes, down which rivulets cascaded, shaded by the snowy blossoms of Calla Æthiopica. It was a fine clear May day, excellent for botanizing.

  —It would be better, probably, if you did not know the nickname, said Reinhold. It is disrespectful. I should prefer, however, that you heard it from me, than that you picked it up – for example, from one of the midshipmen – and that you were hurt by it. I must say, I find it is a hurtful name.

  Hearing George address his father, as many Germans do, as Vati, the midshipmen, followed by the crew, had instantly labelled Reinhold the all-but homophonous Farty. George had noticed it, probably, back in July ’72, before they had even left Plymouth. Now, very nearly three years later, it had reached his father’s attention.

  —I am considering, went on Reinhold, writing a short letter to Kapitän Cook about the matter. It is very bad for the discipline of a ship if the midshipmen are allowed to be disrespectful to their elders.

  —They did not use the name to your face, Vati.

  Reinhold paused.

  —Of course not. That would have been a court martial matter, I should guess.

  —All the English go in for nicknames, Vati – especially on a ship or in a school. Think of the Academy at Warrington. All the boys revered Mr Priestley but they called him ‘Loony P’.

  —I took this to be a reference to the Lunar Society, said Reinhold. The learned society to which Mr Wedgwood also belonged. It met at full moon and so was named Lunar. From this you get the play on words, Lunar – Loony.

  —They called Dr Marat ‘Dr Tintacks’ – for no reason at all.

  —That I took to be a reference to the celebrated character, Dr Syntax . . .

  —I got the reference, Vati. It’s just there was no particular meaning behind the name. It is just a play on words.

  —My name – they copy you, you see, and call me Vati. At first this seemed affectionate, for I am like a father to them, perhaps. Then I saw they meant to call me Farty. I am sorry to tell you this.

  —It’s a joke. It’s their facetiousness. He spoke the word in English, though they were conversing in German. You see, we are so not facetious that we do not even have an equivalent word in our language – frech? No. Witzig? No. For the English facetiousness is a whole habit of mind. A Weltanschauung.

  —It may be so. But to accuse me of flatulence . . . in the course of three years, I suppose there must have been occasions, for example when we lived too much on Sauer Kraut, that some digestive dysfunction could be discerned; bowel gases could have built up, but no more I find in me than among the average. Yet it is me they call Farty. This I find very difficult to understand.

  —I should not worry about it.

  —Perhaps if you called me Father in future, and not Vati, it would be Step One in the elimination of this unfortunate development. Meanwhile I shall, I think, have a word in Kapitän Cook’s ear.

  They had a good morning of botanizing, noting how the imported European furze (Ulex europaeus) over-ran the native plants in any less fertile spot. Among the trees they especially admired a large American willow beard live oak. When they came down the hill, hot from their walk, they approached a spot on the harbour-edge, outside the fort, where the midshipmen were displaying themselves on the greensward. The half-dozen boys, nearly all two or three years George’s junior, made an impressive sight in their royal blue frock coats, with white lining and cuffs, velvet collars, brass buttons, highly polished black buckled shoes, and, on their heads, three-cornered hats trimmed with gold. In all three years of the voyage, George, who got along, in a superficial way, with these near contemporaries, had made friends with none of them. In all the long journey to find the never-known southern land, the Terra Australis Nondum Cognita, he had been aware of that other
mystery-land, which spoke a cousin-language, which had adopted German kings, but which remained on some profound level untranslatable. George, on this occasion, could hear, and then see, the midshipmen before the young men spotted him and his father: and they were now young men – even Loggie and Maxwell who had been girlish-faced little boys who, during the first gale in the Bay of Biscay back in ’72, had cried for their mothers, and curled into Elliott’s hammock to be hugged. Yet seeing them all there, with their high colour and blond fluff gathered about lip and ear, George felt less than them, he felt put down by their sense of superiority to the rest of the world, a sense so ingrained that it did not need to be expressed. George, whose ear had immediately cocked itself to what they were saying, thought it was quite possible that his father would not even know, if he were sitting at their feet, who they were ‘being’.

  —I vil tell de Kingk of you.

  —Tha shall do nah such thing, lad – becoss – and ah’ll tell thee wha – becoss . . .

  The guffaws of the group drowned out the end of the sentence. By now their versions of Reinhold and of the Captain did not even attempt accuracy, but it was always immediately obvious, when they moved into these conversational routines, that their own voices and personalities had been discarded and those of the naturalist and the navigator assumed, like fancy dress.