Vindication

  Despite these reservations, Mary was gripped. In 1788, at the age of forty-seven, Fuseli had married an artist’s model from Bath, Sophia Rawlins. His many sketches of her show off a stylish temptress, but she’s no mere type. She’s there, alive, disseminating sexual aplomb. Though she was never part of the company at Johnson’s, she and Mary were friends and remained so. Late in 1792 Mary asked if she might move in with the Fuselis. No scandal touched Hannah More when she lived with David Garrick and his wife, but Mary’s wish roused suspicion. Was she in love with Fuseli, as most assume? Or was she needy like a child who has lacked paternal protection and will seek out alternative fathers? Johnson was ready to oblige; his friend Fuseli was not. Or was Mary simply a kind of disciple? It’s reported that she told Sophia that her idea arose ‘from the sincere affection which I have for your husband, for I find that I cannot live without the satisfaction of seeing and conversing with him daily’. The statement is wooden–unlike Wollstonecraft’s voice–and unreliable, transmitted through one source only, Fuseli’s biographer, writing forty years after the event.

  Even if she did speak in this peculiar way, she denied sexual feeling. ‘[I] hope to unite [myself] with your mind…[I] was designed to rise superior to [my] earthly habitation…[I] always thought, with some degree of horror, of falling a sacrifice to a passion which may have a mixture of dross in it…If I thought my passion criminal, I would conquer it, or die in the attempt. For immodesty, in my eyes, is ugliness.’ These sole surviving snips taken out of context from Mary’s letters to Fuseli are too insubstantial not to be, as William St Clair put it, ‘biographically misleading’. Whatever it was that she had in mind, it was a plan easy for a man of Fuseli’s vanity to misrepresent. He fancied that she had acquired elegant furniture and better clothes to impress him. One of his boasts was that he’d leave the letters of this attractive woman unopened in his pocket for several days. The sexual fantasies in his own letters show him as a master of innuendo channelled through a third party, suggesting, say, the complicity of the newly married Mrs Schweizer. This, then, was the man who turned on Mary as a temptress threatening his marriage with a ménage à trois, even though there is ample evidence that she opposed any form of promiscuity. In fact, violence at home had made her unusually self-protective. The presence of so eroticised a wife might have seemed to offer the security that Mary would not be a candidate for sex. Her daughterly attachment to the Blood family, her missing the caresses of her pupil, her bungled attempt to replace Margaret with a convenient orphan, her recent homemaking in Store Street, followed by this misguided impulse to attach herself to the Fuselis, add up to a frustrated craving to reconstitute a family.

  In her own terms, Mary’s proposal was innocent; the leer came from Fuseli. It should not be forgotten that 1792 is the year Wollstonecraft’s fame surpassed that of Fuseli, a man who could not bear to be outdone and thought no woman could do lasting work. Conceivably, his rejection of Mary’s proposal was not to protect his wife, but to score in the simplest way: to take the moral high ground and cast this woman in the banal role of sexual intruder. For Mary what hurt was the rejection, repeating the rejections of her early life. Whatever the truth, this is a complex relationship, but there’s enough to question Fuseli’s insinuations.

  When Mary found she had been intrusive, she backed off and apologised. To Johnson, who could not console her (given his loyalty to Fuseli), she said with a winterly smile: ‘We must each of us wear a fool’s cap; but mine, alas! has lost its bells, and is grown so heavy, I find it intolerably troublesome.’ She wondered if she had ‘intruded’ on Johnson too. Crying and laughing at once, she acknowledged ‘that life is but a jest–and often a frightful dream–yet I catch myself every day searching for something serious–and feel misery from the disappointment’.

  A remaining puzzle is whether Fuseli’s rejection preceded, succeeded or coincided with Mary’s decision to move to Paris–in effect, to press on with a story of her own. Ahead lay a risky move carried forward with jokes: ‘I am still a Spinster on the wing,’ she told Roscoe. ‘At Paris, indeed, I might take a husband for the time being, and get divorced when my truant heart longed again to nestle with its old friends; but this speculation has not yet entered into my plan.’

  Fuseli’s biographer, John Knowles, propagated the myth that Mary Wollstonecraft was loose: ‘Having a face and person which had some pretensions to beauty and comeliness’, she ‘fancied’ possibilities with Fuseli, and had ‘the temerity to go to Mrs. Fuseli’ with a ‘frank avowal’ that ‘opened the eyes of Mrs. Fuseli, who…not only refused her solicitation, but she instantly forbade her the house’. Knowles goes on in the same melodramatic vein: Wollstonecraft had ‘to fly from the object which she regarded’, and wrote a letter to Fuseli begging pardon ‘for having disturbed the quiet tenour of his life’. Only the last rings true. The legend was sealed when Knowles let it be known that Mary’s letters were too ‘amatory’ for public consumption. This claim is impossible to prove or disprove, for the letters have vanished.

  Many have believed that Mary ran away to Paris because of Fuseli. Knowles stated: ‘the attachment on her part…would be the cause of her leaving this country’. Adherents of this version are convinced that when Mary declared on 12 November 1792, ‘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’, she was referring to Fuseli as the object of desire. Yet the word ‘desire’ in the eighteenth century merely meant ‘wish’. Mary’s ‘desire’ could just as well refer to a wish to witness the Revolution at first hand, a continuation of the June–August plan–a ‘rational’ plan formulated before Fuseli’s rejection. Revolutionary leaders had talked of restoring ‘natural’ rights to women: property rights and an equal voice in family matters. In September 1792 a humane divorce law had been passed, the kind of legislation that Mary Wollstonecraft wished to see in England. She said later that to go to Paris was the only way to form ‘a just opinion of the most extraordinary event that has ever been recorded’. Given a commission from Johnson to write a series of ‘Letters from the Revolution’, she resolved, as winter approached, to brave the guillotine and go on her own–‘neck or nothing’, she joked as she set out.

  9

  INTO THE TERROR

  In Calais, words flew past her straining ears. She caught ‘a violent cold’ as she sat three days in the winter diligence, a young woman travelling, as always, alone. She had intent, rather dreamy eyes (the ‘most meaning eyes I ever saw’, said the poet Southey) with a hint of vulnerability in her air of ‘the princess’. As the vehicle, carrying eight to twelve passengers, rolled heavily over the wide flintstone road towards the capital, she wondered how she was to report on a revolution without the language to unlock it.

  So it was that Mary arrived ‘awkward’ and coughing at her destination in the third arrondissement, 22 rue Meslée, a six-storey house opening straight on to the narrow street. She had arranged to stay with a married daughter of the Putney headmistress Mrs Bregantz, but it turned out that Aline and her husband, M. Fillietaz, were away. Here, knocking at the door and mounting the stair, is this venturesome woman we’ve come some way to know. She moves through deserted rooms, folding doors opening one beyond another, till the servant leaves the stranger–‘almost stunned by the flying sounds’ of the spoken language and ‘unable to utter a word’–in a remote room at the back of the house.

  Mary holed up here, alone, for the two weeks before Christmas, shrinking from dirty streets (she excused herself to Everina), but as yet unready ‘to form a just opinion of public affairs’. At home in Store Street, in the company of her cat and breathing the clean, damp air of market gardens, Mary had said tartly, ‘children who meddle with edged tools are bound to cut themselves’. So she’d remarked after the September Massacre of fourteen hundred prisoners whose screams were heard with indifference by fellow-Parisians until the mob bashed the Queen’s friend the Princesse de Lamballe, disembowelle
d her, and waved her dressed head on a pike. Blood had seemed to Mary an aberration from the rational progress of the Revolution. Now, on 26 December, she witnessed the renewal of the King’s trial: the emptied streets, the eyes behind the shutters, and Louis himself, upright in the close-guarded coach, rolling along the boulevard Saint-Martin on his way from the Temple prison to his tribunal. A spatter of drumbeats seemed to deepen the silence surrounding the King. As Mary relived the scene some hours later, writing in the shadows of her room, eyes glared through a glass door. Then hands approached, dark with blood. ‘For the first time in my life,’ she wrote, ‘I cannot put out my candle.’ That night, she came face to face with the oncoming Terror.

  Until this night, she had delayed her letter to Johnson, in the hope of being able to say that more blood would not flow. Tom Paine, as honorary French citizen, member of the National Convention (replacing the Assembly), and the first (as in America) to propose a republic, argued for the King’s life. All he achieved was to cast doubt on his own loyalty to the Revolution. On 21 January 1793, the King was guillotined before a crowd of eighty thousand. Ruth Barlow reported from London that the friends of the regime, as well as its enemies, condemned it. ‘The National Convention have most certainly disgraced themselves…they have shewed themselves too cruel & blood thirsty…. their friends are ashamed of them.’ The English, Ruth said, were venting their outrage on the French Ambassador with a view to provoking a declaration of war: ‘M Chauvelin is infamously treated.’ On 1 February he was ordered to leave the country, the English Ambassador left Paris, and English residents there, fearing to be trapped in the walled city, rushed homewards in a second wave of panic. The first, in December, had carried the young Wordsworth away from Annette Vallon, his French teacher, who had given birth to his child. Wordworth’s desertion is said to be sensible under these circumstances. For Paris, he saw, had become a ‘place of fear/ Unfit for repose of night/ Defenceless as a wood where tigers roam’.

  Thinkers, not tigers, had initiated the Revolution, from philosophes Voltaire and Rousseau to Mary’s hero Mirabeau, an orator whose resolution had been born during forty-one months in a dungeon when he was twenty-eight. He had come into his own when the Estates-General were summoned to consider the failing economy in the fateful year of 1789. This body consisted of the three ‘estates’: the first was the nobility; the second, the higher clergy; and the third, men of property, professionals and the middle-class intelligentsia. Six months before, at the time Joel Barlow had arrived in Paris, Jefferson, the American Ambassador, and Lafayette had introduced Barlow to prospective leaders of the Third Estate. At a Lafayette dinner, he was impressed by a conviction that the whole of France was so united behind the idea of regime change, and the old regime so susceptible to public opinion–even ‘soft’–that the leaders expected to bring off a bloodless revolution. All the same, Barlow picked up what sounded for him a warning note: a feeling in Paris that the Americans had thrown liberty away, with their recent acceptance of a federal constitution with controls on every side. ‘They say we [Americans] have given up all that we contended for.’ Why did these Frenchmen speak as though liberty were inconsistent with control? To Barlow such criticism showed the bravado of novices: ‘they are as intemperate in their idea of liberty as we were in the year seventy-five–’.

  The first real threat to the monarchy had come on 5–6 October 1789, when six thousand market women marched on Versailles. Two of them rode astride their cannon. The others walked the twelve miles in the rain, bearing pikes and muskets, armed for the first time. They were protesting about the shortage of bread and the price of it. The King agreed to help and to accept the August Declaration of the Rights of Man, yet the crowd at the gates of Versailles remained unsatisfied. Next morning at dawn they broke into the palace and swept through the Hall of Mirrors towards the royal apartments. Narrowly escaping death, the royal family was brought to the Tuileries in Paris. Here the King would be more accessible to the pressure of the street. The ‘Austrian’ Queen, Marie Antoinette, was particularly unpopular. In 1792 when the Austrians and Prussians declared war on revolutionary France, initial French defeats and a climate of threat and fear began to foment suspicions of internal traitors. On 10 August that year the mob–joined by the National Guard–slaughtered the King’s Swiss Guard. This marked the fall of the monarchy (that anarchic moment when Mary Wollstonecraft, Fuseli and Johnson had to abandon their journey to France). From now on France became a police state. About a thousand arbitrary arrests followed a systematic massacre of helpless prisoners, including nuns and priests who had not sworn allegiance to the Revolution. The Princesse de Lamballe was prepared to offer allegiance to the Revolution, but was doomed when she refused to swear an oath of hatred against the Queen.

  This atrocity was the turning-point for public opinion in England. Up till then the Revolution had stirred the freedom to rethink every aspect of life anew. What, for instance, does it mean to be a human being? Wordsworth famously wrote, ‘Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive.’ But after the bloodshed of 2–3 September, England, including Wordsworth, turned its back on the Revolution.

  Some Englishmen who remained in Paris were refugees, amongst them Paine and John Hurford Stone, an abruptly enthusiastic man of thirty who had been a member of Dr Price’s congregation in Newington Green. In November 1792 they and other foreigners gathered at White’s Hotel at no. 7 passage des Petits Pères, not far from the clash of factions, moderates (Girondins) versus radicals (Jacobins), in the geometric arcades of the Palais d’Orléans (where Barlow had once lain low). The company at White’s was celebrating the anniversary of the revolutionary sermon Dr Price had delivered in November 1789. Back in England, this event was reported as treason, and the same month Barlow was accused of sedition. Instead of sailing for America, as Ruth wished, he fled to Paris where he was made an honorary citizen of the new French republic. At the time Mary arrived he was away, taking immediate advantage of his citizenship to stand for election in Savoy.

  Mary did not share the plight of the refugees, and as war broke out her obvious course was to go home. Soon, France would be out of bounds to English travellers. The mockery of the King’s trial and the look on faces under red woollen caps decorated with the tricolour did not inspire confidence in the will of the people. Vehicles leaving Paris were filled to capacity when an Englishman offered Mary a place in his carriage.

  Should she go or stay?

  It was typical of her rationality that, at this moment of decision, she set herself to examine the French character. An uneasy article, dated 15 February, questions the amiability of French manners in the lull after the King’s execution. It did prove a deceptive lull. The Revolution was moving too fast, she thought, wishing it would release its energies through a slower, more durable process of education. Withdrawing her foot from the carriage bound for England, she turned to formulating ‘a plan of education’ for the Committee for Public Instruction. It’s not known if this contribution was an initiative of her own or invited by a member of the committee: Paine or perhaps Condorcet, a deputy who concerned himself with the position of women. To Mary Wollstonecraft a new system of education presented an irresistible opportunity to act on the platform of history. So she joined a dwindling circle of foreigners who continued to trust in the ultimate benefit of the Revolution.

  Amongst the first of her contacts was another Englishwoman, Helen Maria Williams, whose Letters From France had done much to win support for the Revolution in its hopeful phase. Richard Price had been her political mentor, as he’d been for Mary Wollstonecraft: all three warned that it would be useless to level differences of birth, only to make way for that of wealth. Expatriates at White’s sang a song by Helen Maria Williams, and toasted the ‘Women of Great Britain…who have distinguished themselves by writing of the French Revolution’. Bluestockings Mrs Montagu and Anna Seward praised her sensibilities, and one of Wordsworth’s first poems was a ‘Sonnet on seeing Miss Helen Maria Williams weep at a tale of
Distress’. It starts: ‘She wept.–Life’s purple tide began to flow/ In languid streams through every thrilling vein/ Dim were my swimming eyes…’ Mary Wollstonecraft was less charmed. ‘Authorship is a heavy weight for female shoulders,’ she thought, ‘especially in the sunshine of prosperity.’

  And yet she did ‘rather like’ Helen Maria Williams. A genuine civility and ‘simple goodness’ broke through ‘the varnish’, drawing Mary to her Sunday evening salon, over English cups of tea. The French company was refreshingly intellectual: leading Girondins like Brissot de Warville and Vergniaud might be heard; Mme Roland (influential wife of the Minister of the Interior) and Mme de Genlis (whose tales Mary had read at Mitchelstown Castle) aired ideas without self-consciousness as women. Tall, dignified Mme Roland was an idealist who saw the Revolution as the purification of the soul of France, and was known to have drafted her husband’s petition to the King to accept the people’s decrees. She spoke energetically with grace and eloquence. Mme de Genlis had once been governess to the children of the pro-revolutionary duc d’Orléans, who called himself Philippe Égalité. Frenchwomen, Mary saw, had ‘acquired a portion of taste and knowledge rarely to be found in the women of other countries’. It delighted her to meet women whose ‘affectionate urbanity’ seemed to demonstrate ‘the true art of living’. These were ‘the rational few’, she mused. They were less romantic than Englishwomen, less prey to unsatisfied desires, and married couples seemed ‘the civilest of friends’. Her Rights of Woman, translated as Une Défense des Droits des Femmes, suivie de quelques Considérations sur des Sujets Politiques et Moraux, was her entrée to some of the Revolution’s leading figures, including Roland himself and Jérôme Pétion, the complaisant mayor of Paris, as they became its victims.