Vindication

  Imlay also confronts rape in marriage. The fictional Lord B—‘considered women merely as a domestic machine, necessary only as they are an embellishment to their house, and the only means by which their family can be perpetuated’. His wife resolves ‘never to enter the bed of my Lord B—again; for his conduct to her that morning, after coming to her two hours after midnight in a state of intoxication, was too gross for a woman of spirit and delicacy to forget…[To comply again would be,] after the treatment she had received, a most ignominious prostitution.’ Lady B’s ‘prostitution’ dramatises the case for divorce reform. The ‘man of honor’ doesn’t just talk of morals; he puts them into practice. Whether Imlay himself followed his principles remains to be seen, but as principles go, he was sure to please.

  When Genêt reached America, he set about enlisting enthusiastic frontiersmen for an assault on Spanish Florida. But he did it so flagrantly that Washington was forced, on 19 April, to put an end to his activities with a reassertion of American neutrality. Jefferson, as Secretary of State, concluded (or, for diplomatic reasons, pretended to conclude) that Genêt was not representing the policy of his government, and asked for his recall. Since Genêt was seen to be an appointment of Brissot, this weakened Brissot’s position. Robespierre was to use the Genêt Affair to justify Brissot’s execution. It could be argued that Genêt and Brissot were puppets of Imlay and Barlow, whose names do not appear in the diplomatic crossfire that cut off their Louisiana scheme.

  Washington soothed relations with Spain when he spoke publicly of prosecuting American participants in this plot. Vice-President Adams sent his wife Abigail a rhyme about the unidentified secret agents behind it all:

  At home dissensions seem to rend

  Or threat, our Infant State

  ’Bout Treaties made; yet unexplain’d

  With Citizen Genêt.

  The conspirators in Paris were undismayed, since they were already on to their next scheme. Colonel Benjamin Hichborn of Massachusetts had proposed they use American neutrality in order to ship goods between warring countries. Scores of ships were doing this. The American Minister in London, Mr Pinckney, protested repeatedly over the British navy’s retaliation against American shipping. So these were risky ventures–useful, though, for spying.

  Barlow continued to use Mary Wollstonecraft as a draw for his wife. ‘Mary writes to have you come here & take lodgings with her at Meudon 5 miles from town. She really loves you very much. Her sweetheart affair goes on well. Don’t say a word of it to any creature.’ Mary herself wrote four letters to Ruth in quick succession, the last on 7 May (none has survived). Barlow sent his final letter to Ruth on 10 June: ‘Mary is much disappointed & grieved at your not having come…I think she loves [you above] all other creatures.’ Ruth then crossed the Channel.

  Despite her husband’s assurance that Paris was safe and quiet, Ruth arrived just as the Terror took over. On 2 June the moderates had been detained in their lodgings; on 13 June they were imprisoned; and on 28 July declared traitors. Brissot was amongst them, as was leading feminist Olympe de Gouges, who had set out her Rights of Woman to match, point for point, the French Declaration of the Rights of Man. ‘Men!’ she exclaims. ‘Are you capable of justice? It is a woman who asks the question.’ She wished to be ‘a man of state’ and demanded women’s suffrage as well as the abolition of the slave trade, workshops for the unemployed and a national theatre for women. The immediate cause of her arrest was disseminating anti-Jacobin pamphlets, which she continued to manage from prison until her execution.

  During this time, the names of enemy aliens had to be chalked on the doors where they lived. Mary could not endanger the Fillietaz family by her continued presence. In May she had found a post for Bess in Geneva, and applied for a pass in order to join her. A pass was not forthcoming, and Bess decided against Switzerland as too expensive, but significant here is Mary’s willingness to leave France. It seems that her romance was at this point no more than romance. There is no sign of Imlay’s intervention. If they were sleeping together, Imlay would have made a plan to keep her safe–he was a great instigator of plans. In any case, for Mary to leap into bed with an admirer without a serious understanding would have been out of character, inconsistent with the modesty and sexual caution she expressed in the Rights of Woman. It had expanded on her earlier warning against women’s susceptibility to flirts and rakes, the residue of her own encounters with Joshua Waterhouse and Neptune Blood. If her first plan had worked, she would have left the country that May, and possibly not seen Imlay again.

  As it was, her alternative was to find lodgings outside Paris. Plan number two, to live with Ruth at Meudon, was once again not designed to promote an affair with Imlay. Meudon is likely to have been the subject of her four urgent letters to Ruth in London. It was only when Ruth’s intentions remained too uncertain that Mary accepted a third solution, offered by her hosts: she took refuge in a cottage at Neuilly-sur-Seine, north of the Bois de Boulogne beyond the city wall. It was a cottage belonging to or tended by an elderly gardener who worked for the Fillietaz family. He plied Mary with home-grown fruit and warned against her taste for solitary walks in the wooded lanes leading to the river.

  Here, Mary lived quietly and happily from June to August. She had begun to write a ‘great book’ on the French Revolution, ‘great’ because she resolved ‘to trace the hidden springs and secret mechanism, which have put in motion a revolution, the most important that has ever been recorded in the annals of man’. That summer of 1793 she explored the deserted Versailles, with its fading phantoms. Nothing testifies more hauntingly to the evanescence of the past in the present context of the Terror:

  How silent is now Versailles!…The train of the Louises, like the posterity of the Banquos, pass in solemn sadness, pointing at the nothingness of grandeur, fading away on the cold canvas, which covers the nakedness of the spacious wall–whilst the gloominess of the atmosphere gives a deeper shade to the gigantic figures, that seem to be sinking into the embraces of death.

  So Mary’s days were filled with the history of the present, enlivened by visits from Imlay, his face flushed with expectation as he came to meet her through the barrière at Longchamps (one of the guarded exits from the walled Paris). Long afterwards, she would remember the approach of his ‘barrier face’ as she waited on the far side, holding up a basket of grapes. ‘Dear girl,’ he called her, with lips ‘softer than soft’.

  ‘I am confident my heart has found peace in your bosom,’ she said. ‘Cherish me with that dignified tenderness, which I have only found in you.’ So she recalls him by night in the light of her candle; seals him in the folds of her paper; repeats his parting phrase, ‘God bless you.’ She was often alone, even ‘quite lonely’. Imlay’s visits may have been fewer than we have come to imagine. Business came first.

  The first shipping ventures were disastrous. Cargo that Barlow sent to New York on a ship called the Hannah turned out to be illegal. A court case ensued, and judgement went against the captain, a man called Parrot. Sixteen years later Parrot finally tracked down Barlow, who had to arrange a reimbursement of $20,000. It’s hard to fit Barlow’s humorous intimacy, his warmth towards Mary, his love for Ruth, with this irresponsible distance from the small man who’s caught and tried and pays the price. Yet it fits the irresponsibility of the Scioto scam.

  Barlow and Hichborn chartered an English ship called the Cumberland, and loaded it with flour and rice to relieve the food shortage in France. Their associates were Mark Leavenworth who often acted as Imlay’s agent; Colonel Blackden, another speculator in Kentucky land, whose wife had welcomed Ruth to London; and a banker called Daniel Parker who had involved himself in the Scioto scheme when Barlow arrived in Paris, then had the prudence to withdraw. Since the British Parliament had just then passed a bill prohibiting trade between Americans and France passing through England, the cargo was said to be bound for Spain. When this ship came to land at Bordeaux, suspicious Frenchmen embargoed a vessel whose pap
ers indicated traffic with the enemy. The Cumberland was one of a hundred foreign ships, most of them American, trapped at Bordeaux during the second half of 1793. The American Minister, upholding Washington’s policy of neutrality, ignored their pleas for rescue. The balance of power between England and France was being fought out at the French coastal ports, and for the Americans to engage in shipping was to enter this war zone.

  Meanwhile, Mary worked away at her ‘great book’ in the woods of Neuilly. On 13 July she received £20 from Joseph Johnson, probably an advance for her proposal to attempt a history at a time when her status as enemy alien put an end to earning a living as a foreign correspondent. ‘I am now hard at work,’ she reported to Bess, ‘for I could not return to England without proofs that I have not been idle.’

  To write a history of the Revolution during the Terror was ‘almost impossible’ from so close a perspective. Her proximity to events must be coloured by the ‘prejudice’ of current political sentiments (evident in her virulence towards Marie Antoinette as a type of Lady Kingsborough). Yet, for all her disclaimers, the closeness of her perspective grants her a unique advantage. When she approached the barrier to meet Imlay, she observed through its towering, stately frame the prison that Paris had become. Its expansive approaches, its people lounging ‘with an easy gaity peculiar to the nation’, and the beauty of its buildings were all, she saw, locked and confined as in a cage. The barriers, she wrote, ‘have fatally assisted to render anarchy more violent by concentration, cutting off the possibility of innocent victims escaping from the fury, or the mistake of the moment’. Her eye takes in the Terror not as a number of heads to be counted, but as architecture, the design of a city conceived in exquisite taste by ‘miscreants’ of the past–a continuum of powerbrokers, uninterrupted by revolution. ‘Thus miscreants have had sufficient influence to guard these barriers, and caging the objects of their fear or vengeance, have slaughtered them.’ She bears witness to ‘the effect of the enclosure of Paris’ on her own observant eye, ‘disenchanting the senses’ so that ‘the elegant structures, which served as gates to this great prison, no longer appear magnificent porticoes’.

  A tear starts to her eye, blocking the ‘inlets of joy’ to her heart as Imlay approaches. For that eye looks beyond private excitement, towards the anguish of the city where a ‘cavalcade of death moves along, shedding mildew over all the beauties of the scene, and blasting every joy! The elegance of the palaces and buildings is revolting, when they are viewed as prisons, and the sprightliness of the people disgusting, when they are hastening to view the operations of the guillotine, or carelessly passing over the earth stained with blood.’ Only education ‘will prevent those baneful excesses of passion which poison the heart’.

  She writes from where she stands, and the tense is the present–this is her strength: she feels as well as sees through her welling tear beauty dissolve in terror. Another advantage is her use of her outsider-insider position to make a balanced statement designed to outlive its time:

  …The french had undertaken to support a cause, which they had neither sufficient purity of heart, nor maturity of judgement, to conduct with moderation and prudence…Malevolence has been gratified by the errours they have committed, attributing that imperfection to the theory they adopted, which was applicable only to the folly of their practice.

  However, frenchmen have reason to rejoice, and posterity will be grateful, for what was done by the assembly.

  John Adams, as second President of the United States, would read the book twice and, though he often disagreed, think her ‘a Lady of a masculine masterly Understanding’ with a ‘clear often elegant’ style. He was struck by her critique of revolutionary France in favour of the American Revolution: ‘She seems to have half a mind to be an English woman; yet more inclined to be an American,’ he remarked.

  Critical judgements would have been dangerous for anyone to make at the height of the Terror, but especially for an Englishwoman whose country was at war with France. Mary Wollstonecraft therefore took the precaution of confining her history to the run-up and first three months of the Revolution, the hopeful period before it turned on its leaders. Her chief hero, Mirabeau, had died in 1791. His passionate speeches had denounced inherited wealth, required the rich to pay the national debt, demanded equal rights for Jews and Protestants, and proposed the abolition of the slave trade. More recent events, the turn to bloodshed, were reserved for a sequel Wollstonecraft meant to write when it was safer.

  So she lay low at Neuilly while the Terror took hold, and Imlay came and went in that city where the guillotine was in motion, the Committee of Public Safety tightened its grip on the populace, its Law of Suspects spun around pointing its arbitrary talon, and thousands eventually lost their heads. Imlay was a man of secrets who worked through others. The only way to reach him is through the activities of his associates, who were careful what they put on paper. In this, Mary was his opposite: she made no secret of her feelings.

  ‘I obey an emotion of my heart, which made me think of wishing thee, my love, goodnight! Before I go to rest,’ she writes at midnight to Imlay from Neuilly. ‘You can scarcely imagine with what pleasure I anticipate the day, when we are to begin almost to live together.’

  The Revolution was not only an event that had happened outside Mary Wollstonecraft; it was active in her own blood. She had been in revolt all her life–against tyranny, against the prostitution of women by law and custom, against misshapen femininity. The storming of the Bastille on 14 July 1789 had been the potent image of release: what was locked up in women’s minds, feelings, desires. Imlay’s frontiering freedom encouraged her interior revolution. Then, too, he had a tenderness missing in Fuseli, in her violent father, and in her sister’s obtuse husband. The question–one only time could answer–was whether this was going to add up to a new genus of manhood with whom to invent a new kind of union. Wollstonecraft had written that the marriage tie should not bind a couple if love should die. Yet once she fell in love with Imlay, she craved permanence.

  ‘I like the word affection,’ she told him, ‘because it signifies something habitual.’ She saw a test ahead: ‘We are soon to meet, to try whether we have mind enough to keep our hearts warm.’

  Imlay was no sexual innocent. In Kentucky there had been a ‘girl’ whom he sent away; more recently, a mistress whom Mary called a ‘cunning’ woman. * This past was not an issue at Neuilly: in a period of coming and going, the present drama was at the barrier: partings, meetings, and a flush on Imlay’s face as he drew near.

  She did occasionally pass through the barrier herself. ‘Why cannot we meet and breakfast together quite alone, as in days of yore?’ she wrote to Ruth from Neuilly, recalling their breakfasts in Titchfield or Store Streets when they had lived close by in London. ‘I will tell you how–will you meet me at the Bath about 8 o’clock…I will come on Monday unless it should rain…We may then breakfast in your favourite place and chat as long as we please.’

  Ruth’s favourite place was the new Chinese Baths–so called because of the twin pagodas of its design. Its aromatic water, warmed robes and restaurant would remain popular with Americans in Paris for the next sixty years. The Baths were in the boulevard des Italiens, not far from the guillotine. One day Mary entered Paris on foot through the Place de Louis Quinze soon after an execution. Her foot slipped, and looking down, she saw that she had stepped on blood left by the last batch of victims. Shocked, she burst into protest, when a passer-by warned her in low tones not to put her own life at risk.

  After some four or five months she and Imlay still lived apart. We don’t know when, exactly, they became lovers, but it’s worth noting that Barlow, the only witness to leave a record, saw Mary in ‘sweetheart’ mode. We know, while Imlay was absent, she longed to kiss him, ‘glowing with gratitude to Heaven’; we know the ‘barrier’ roused their desires; but nothing more until Mary left Neuilly to live with Imlay on the Left Bank in the Faubourg Saint-Germain. A likely place could be t
he Barlows’ lodgings in the Maison de Bretagne, 22 rue Jacob, small, only two storeys with an attic, along the same street as the statelier York Hotel where Benjamin Franklin, John Adams and John Jay had signed the peace treaty with Britain in 1783.

  By August, Imlay realised that the French defeat when the British captured Toulon meant new danger for the dwindling number of British citizens in Paris. That month Thomas Christie, another honorary citizen of France, was arrested, and when he and his wife were released they fled to Switzerland. To protect Mary, Imlay gave her the cover of his name and nationality by certifying her as his wife with the American Ambassador. As such, she carried a certificate of her status as an American. It was vital at that time, for Americans continued to have standing in France under Robespierre. This move was to keep Mary Wollstonecraft safe when the time came for fresh threats against enemy aliens.

  Imlay may have saved Mary’s life. It was certainly a generous act, for to declare this woman his wife meant taking on responsibility for her support. All the evidence suggests that he undertook this obligation. Other aspects are less certain. How did Imlay convince his ambassador, Gouverneur Morris, to certify a marriage? Was there some kind of republican ceremony? Certainly, whatever they signed was a document of doubtful legality.

  Imlay’s action impressed Mary as a commitment. This was a novel solution to the problem of marriage: she would not bind herself in a legal contract unjust to women. Imlay concurred. He called the laws of matrimony ‘barbarous’, laws set up for the ‘aggrandizement of families’. Mary meant to pursue a purer union with a ‘worthy’ man, consistent with the promise of perfectibility that radical intellectuals of her generation read into revolution. Once she had the certificate, it was safe to leave Neuilly and move into the city. It was a major move–she hired a carriage for her books alone. ‘I have so many books, that I immediately want,’ she said. So Mary returned to Paris, lived with Imlay, and soon was pregnant. To make love was, for her, a sacred as well as passionate act.