Footsteps

by Richard Holmes

  Throughout this I could see also that Mary was coming to have a much better understanding of her own nature than before: she refers to her tendency to quarrel, to be low-spirited, and the “whole torrent of emotions” that she was continually struggling to keep under control. People had thought of her as cold and intellectual, and perhaps she had sometimes thought of herself like that too: now she realised the truth was the contrary.

  But what of the baby, due in May 1794, a true child of the Revolution? Understandably, Mary was anxious to rejoin Imlay on some more permanent basis well before the birth, so she suggested that she might follow him to the port and settle in a house at Le Havre-Marat. His response seems to have amused and delighted her: “What a picture you sketched of our fire-side!” she wrote on 11 January. “Yes, my love, my fancy was instantly at work, and I found my head on your shoulder, whilst my eyes were fixed on the little creatures that were clinging about your knees. I did not absolutely determine that there should be six—if you have not set your heart on this round number.”

  So it was that Mary Wollstonecraft, five months pregnant and with half her “great book” written, finally passed through the barrier gates of Paris at the end of January 1794, heading for the coast. She had obtained her passport with unexpected ease, and once again she felt that she was “on the wing”. How much had happened to her in the last thirteen months! And how surprised was I, her following shadow, to find that in this final stage of her journey through the Revolution almost all my own thoughts of public affairs had been banished by this affair of the heart. The natural focusing effect of biography had, in a sense, reduced the entire outcome of the Revolution to the success or failure of a single relationship, and to what occurred within “one little room”.

  Mary herself now felt, and admitted openly, the transforming nature of her relationship with Imlay. She who had prided herself, for half a lifetime, on her independence, her vocation as a writer, her revolutionary duty to her fellow-women, was now committed to achieving and sharing domestic happiness of the most traditional kind. “You have, by your tenderness and worth,” she wrote to Imlay on the eve of her departure, “twisted yourself more artfully round my heart, than I supposed possible.—Let me indulge the thought, that I have thrown out some tendrils to cling to the elm by which I wish to be supported.—This is talking a new language for me!—But, knowing that I am not a parasitic-plant, I am willing to receive the proofs of affection, that every pulse replies to, when I think of being once more in the same house with you. God bless you! Yours truly, Mary.”

  6

  Mary Wollstonecraft was to remain in Le Havre-Marat for the next seven months, until the autumn of 1794. Imlay had found a delightful town house, “pleasantly situated” down by the harbour in the section des Sans-Culottes, rented from one of the flourishing English traders there, a Mr John Wheatcroft, purveyor of soap and alum. In this bustling provincial port, with a solid bourgeois tradition of Anglo-French commerce, the pressures of the Revolution seemed far away. Businessmen with American passports still moved easily across the Channel to Brighton and Newhaven (which almost had neutral status), and eastwards to the Dutch, German and Scandinavian ports. Correspondence became much easier, carried unofficially among commercial documents and not having to pass the strict customs and censorship formalities of the Parisian barrier. Imlay laughed at the idea that Mary might be able to have her books shipped down from Saint-Germain, but Ruth Barlow arranged for copies of the Journal des Débats and other Government decrees to be posted down from Paris on the diligence, so Mary could continue the documentation for her History of the Revolution.

  Indeed, the main censorship danger was now on the other side, from the British Postmaster, for as it afterwards emerged in the Treason Trials of Home Tooke, Tom Hardy and Stone’s brother, William, suspicious letters from France were being carefully intercepted and copied in London, and Mary’s and Helen Williams’s names frequently appeared in the transcripts of cross-examinations conducted at the Old Bailey in the autumn and winter of 1794.

  Mary’s sense of comparative safety was increased not only by Imlay’s constant presence but by the news that nearly all the English had now been released from the Luxembourg prison. Indeed most of her close friends had been freed by Christmas 1793—otherwise she might have stayed on in Paris despite everything. Tom Paine alone remained languishing in a condemned cell, slowly becoming alcoholic under the terrible tension of waiting for Robespierre’s final decision on his fate, and soon to be suffering from a jail fever that threatened to anticipate the work of the guillotine.

  I had to admit that I was disappointed, in a way, that Mary was no longer in the eye of the revolutionary storm. It was a cruelty, a hunger for dramatic action, that came easily to a biographer learning his métier; and formed one layer of that slight but complex sense of guilt which shadows the vicarious element in historical research into individual lives. Sometimes even I would imagine myself, like a character out of Baroness Orczy, committing Mary to some fatal escapade in the Luxembourg prison, then personally intervening to save her, with the elegant flourish of a Scarlet Pimpernel—“Your faithful biographer, Ma’am, come to extricate you in the next paragraph, which has a secret trapdoor …”

  Had she stayed in Paris, how I would have loved to have read her piercing comments on the female divinities Robespierre recruited, in his madness for revolutionary purity, to perform the vestal roles in his Festival of the Supreme Being, staged on the Champ-de-Mars on 8 June. But Mary’s letters from Le Havre-Marat, speaking their “new language” of emotional self-discovery, were now turned upon her private situation, and slowly, almost reluctantly at first, I obeyed the fundamental dictate of biography, and followed where the materials led, to that deeper revolution of the human heart which I had not even conceived—or done more than half-glimpsed—when I first set out in the euphoria of 1968.

  On 10 March, some six weeks after installing herself with Imlay, Mary wrote the first surviving letter to Evarina for over a year. Though she says nothing of the expected child—due in two months—she describes her companion with obvious affection and pride (is there even a hint that she had made something of a fine, wild catch?):

  If any, of the many letters that I have written, have come to your hands or Eliza’s, you know that I am safe, through the protection of an American. A most worthy man, who joins to uncommon tenderness of heart and quickness of feeling, a soundness of understanding, and reasonableness of temper, rarely to be met with.—Having also been brought up in the interior parts of America, he is a most natural, unaffected creature. I am with him now at Le Havre, and shall remain there, till circumstances point out what it is necessary for me to do.

  There is an odd note here too: is it faintly patronising—“a natural unaffected creature” (a noble savage)? Or is it just the old Wollstonecraft pride and self-sufficiency which makes her say, “what is necessary for me [not us] to do”? Or just a certain stiffness before her younger sister? A mixture of all these, perhaps—though it is surprising not to find a hint of what Imlay looked like: his lean dark features and the boyish smile which so enchanted her.

  The immunity from censorship encouraged Mary to give Evarina her first freely expressed thoughts on the political situation, and all she had been through in Paris. It is still phrased in generalities—it was perilous to mention any public figure by more than an initial—but it shows the weight of her experiences and strikes a new, elegiac note. She speaks indeed like someone who has come through fire; like a combat veteran returning from a war that cannot really be explained to those who have remained, safe in their beds at home. She no longer thinks of herself as an adventurer, but as a survivor:

  It is impossible for you to have any idea of the impressions the sad scenes I have been a witness to have left on my mind. The climate of France is uncommonly fine, the country pleasant, and there is a degree of ease, and even simplicity, in the manners of the common people, which attaches me to them.—Still death and misery, in
every shape of terror, haunts this devoted country.—I certainly am glad that I came to France, because I never could have had else a just opinion of the most extraordinary event that has ever been recorded.—And I have met with some uncommon instances of friendship, which my heart will ever grately store up, and call to mind when the remembrance is keen of the anguish it has endured for its fellow creatures, at large:—for the unfortunate beings cut off around me—and the still more unfortunate survivors.

  There is no mistaking the literal horror of that “cut off”; and no more airy talk of “meddling with edged tools”. Her voice has lost much of its matter-of-factness, it is sorrowful and more than a little bewildered.

  Throughout March and April Mary quietly laboured away at her book, went for walks by the sea and thought about her baby. News of the Terror filtered down from Paris, like a distant rumbling storm, in letters from Ruth Barlow and Helen Williams. On 5 April, Helen saw Danton and Desmoulins taken in a cart to the guillotine, but her account is curiously unfeeling: perhaps she was too stunned by it all: “I saw them pass—they seemed indifferent to their fate. I think I never saw such an assemblage of people. I was in a carriage going to the rue Saint-Honoré, but the coachman could not possibly pass the pont Neuf—I wonder criminals are not allowed to be executed in a more private manner.”

  What a wonderfully absurd remark—as if it were nothing more than a traffic hold-up. Unlike Mary’s letters, it is also inaccurate: we know from other witnesses that poor Desmoulins wept and raged till the last, begging to see his young wife. I imagined Helen sitting well back in her coach with her eyes shut.

  On 16 April all foreigners were finally ordered out of Paris by the Committee, on pain of death. Helen went to Marly, with Stone, then on to Switzerland; Ruth joined her husband Joel in Hamburg; Paine remained in his feverish cell. Mary was anxious whenever Imlay was away, and wrote more fondly than ever:

  I could not sleep.—I turned to your side of the bed, and tried to make the most of the comfort of the pillow, which you used to tell me I was churlish about; but all would not do.—I took nevertheless my walk before breakfast, though the weather was not very inviting—and here I am, wishing you a finer day, and seeing you peep over my shoulder, as I write, with one of your kindest looks—when your eyes glisten, and a suffusion creeps over your elaxing features.

  She took on a maid to help her in the house, and ordered white calico gowns for the baby and linen shirts for Imlay. Writing to Ruth, she began to talk of “us” and “we”, remarking in a deliberate parody of her own feminist manner: “You perceive that I am acquiring the matrimonial phraseology without having clogged my soul by promising obedience etc etc.”

  By the end of April the first volume of the History was finished, and the manuscript sent over to Johnson in London; a great relief to her. There is some evidence that she had become bored with it: reviewers were to say that it consisted largely in copying out official documents. It is certainly her dullest work, and Johnson himself must have been disappointed that it broke off with the trial of the King in 1792—thus leaving out everything that she had witnessed in Paris thereafter. I came to think that Mary simply could not face writing publicly about what she had seen; it is only in her Letters Written in Sweden that she begins to reflect openly on some of the experiences she had undergone—and then only in brief asides. Writing, for example, of the vaunted patriotism of the Norwegians, she remarks: “They love their country, but have not much public spirit. Their exertions are, generally speaking, only for their families; which I conceive will always be the case, till politics, becoming a subject of general discussion, enlarges the heart by opening the understanding. The French Revolution will have this effect.”

  But she also says, in another place, looking at the magnificent landscapes of fjords and mountains, that for the first time “I forgot the horrors I had witnessed in France, which had cast a gloom over all nature …”

  Mary Wollstonecraft’s baby, a little girl, was born at Le Havre-Marat on 14 May 1794; or, as the birth certificate stated, on the 25th day of Floreal in the Second Year of the Republic.

  The Register was witnessed by “citoyen Gilbert Imlay, négociant américain”; and the child christened Fanny Imlay—the forename standing as a touching memorial to Mary’s soul-sister, Fanny Blood. The French midwife observed proudly that Madame had treated the labour so lightly that she “ought to make children for the Republic”. Mary naturally broke the bourgeois convention and breast-fed Fanny herself; at which Imlay teased her—as she told Ruth: “My little Girl begins to suck so manfully that her father reckons saucily on her writing the second part of The Rights of Woman.” He showed her “constant tenderness” and affection—despite all the “continual hinderances” in his business affairs and the “whipping embargoes” on his ships—and she felt great pleasure at being a mother.

  Indeed the Revolution had brought her a happiness she had never expected. For the next three months there was almost complete domestic silence from the little household. In Paris the guillotine rose and fell with increasing regularity, moving ever closer to Robespierre himself, and a single cry of anguish escaped Mary, writing to Ruth on 8 July: “The French will carry all before them—but, my God, how many victims fall beneath the sword and the Guillotine! My blood runs cold, and I sicken at thoughts of a Revolution which costs so much blood and bitter tears.”

  But for the rest it was wordless tranquillity, their backs stubbornly turned against a world of horrors, their hopes concentrated in a little smiling face, oblivious to all but milk and love.

  This odd, slightly overwritten last phrase of mine stayed in my head for many months. It was only slowly that I came to realise its oddness was important, that it signified something I could not really express. It was not so much fulsome and sentimental as hollow and empty of sentiment. It covered, in fact, a biographical gap. It was the substitute for a kind of information to which, as a biographer, I simply could not get access. To begin with I thought of this material as something slightly abstruse and poetic. In Mary’s happiness as a mother, in her act of breast-feeding, I felt sure there was a way of drawing some contrast between the milk of her maternity and the blood of the Revolution. She had come out to France to witness the “blood of freedom”, as it were, but what she had actually discovered was something even more fundamental, “the milk of human kindness”. I saw that contrast between milk and blood strongly in her letters, and I wanted some way of showing that she had grown conscious of it. I wanted in fact to make her something that she wasn’t—a poet. Whereas what I really needed to show was something much simpler, but in the end more remarkable: that this extraordinary and exceptional woman had become a mother—just like any other.

  But that ordinariness, and that family intimacy, is the very thing that the biographer—as opposed to the novelist—cannot share or re-create. Tolstoy in the opening of Anna Karenina writes that all happy families are happy in the same way; he might have added, that they leave little record of that happiness, even though it is the stuff of life. The very closeness of husbands and wives precludes letters between them, and often the keeping of journals (unless one party is secretly unhappy). The private, domestic world closes in on itself, and the biographer is shut out. It is only when arguments occur, separations, confrontations, crises—or the sudden revelation in a letter to a friend, or a melancholy diary-entry—that the biographer’s trail warms up again.

  I found something sad and unbalanced in this, almost as if the biographer were doomed to feed upon other people’s struggles and miseries; like a doctor, he rarely seemed to see his patients in the bloom of health and contentment. I have since come to believe that the re-creation of the daily, ordinary texture of an individual life-full of the mundane, trivial, funny and humdrum goings-on of a single loving relationship—in a word, the re-creation of intimacy—is almost the hardest thing in biography; and, when achieved, the most triumphant.

  I seemed to have no hope of discovering this intimacy betw
een Mary and Imlay and their child at Le Havre-Marat; yet without it an important element in Mary’s story, and the nature of her experience in France, was missing. For the story itself was nearly over: in the autumn of 1794 Imlay was to leave for London, and in the spring of the following year Mary would follow him. A different and better-known chapter of her life would begin: quarrels, separations, suicide attempts, the journey to Scandinavia and the liaison with William Godwin, her second husband.

  Eventually I had one small stroke of luck which led me to a tiny fragment of material that no previous biographer seems to have considered. In the British Library there is a rare four-volume edition of Mary’s Posthumous Works, edited by Godwin and published by the ever-faithful Joseph Johnson in 1798, one year after her death. Volume Two contains her last, unfinished novel, The Wrongs of Women, or, Maria, and bound into the back—but not mentioned in the contents list—are a dozen fragmentary pages entitled “Lessons for Children”.

  Mary’s note from the manuscript says that it was the first part of a series, “which I intended to have written for my unfortunate girl”; while Godwin’s editorial preface adds that it was probably “written in a period of desperation in the month of October 1795”. But what was important to me was that in drafting these fourteen “Lessons”—teaching her child early vocabulary, simple guides to conduct and ways of learning to appreciate and understand the people and animals around her—Mary had drawn on her own secret memories of the time of family happiness that had existed in the first few months after Fanny’s birth. In other words, it gave me a small but precious glimpse into that lost world of intimacy.