Vindication

by Lyndall Gordon

  ‘My friend,’ she told Imlay, ‘I feel my fate united to yours by the most sacred principles of my soul.’

  New emotions stirred desire, ‘sacred emotions’ she called them, ‘that are the sure harbingers of the delights I was formed to enjoy, for nothing can extinguish the heavenly spark’. Once, when a Frenchwoman boasted her lack of passion, Mary was heard to reply: ‘Tant pis pour vous, madame. C’est un défaut de la nature.’ (The worse for you, madame. That’s a defect of nature.)

  From now on, she called herself ‘Mary Imlay’–that is, when she chose to do so. Mary Imlay’s identity eludes the usual categorisations of women as virgin, wife, mother or mistress, for she never discarded her independent and celebrated character as ‘Mary Wollstonecraft’. The ambiguity comes from the peculiar situation of an Englishwoman who chose to stay in Paris during the Terror; at the same time, her needs for commitment as well as freedom rehearsed the conflicts of women in future generations.

  10

  RISKS IN LOVE

  Events soon bore out Imlay’s precaution in lending Mary his name and nationality. On 10 September 1793, it was announced that all foreigners ‘born within the territory of Powers with which the French republic is at war’ would be imprisoned.

  On the night of 9–10 October, in one relentlessly efficient swoop followed by mop-up operations over the next four days, some two hundred and fifty Britons in Paris were arrested as spies or counter-revolutionaries. They were taken to the Luxembourg, once a palace, now a prison. The prisoners included John Hurford Stone, his lover Helen Maria Williams, and her mother and sisters, who were eventually released through the intercession of a Frenchman attached to Helen’s sister Cecilia. General Miranda’s association with Brissot brought him before the Revolutionary Tribunal. Barlow defended him, and he was fortunate to be deported. Condorcet, condemned and in hiding, was hunted down eventually, and cheated the guillotine by taking poison. Marie Antoinette was executed on 16 October, and Brissot on the 31st together with twenty former deputies of the Convention. Brissot looked each of his colleagues in the eye before laying down his head. On the scaffold the efficient executioner Sanson took thirty-six minutes to cut off twenty-one heads. Imlay broke this news to Mary.

  ‘I guess you have not heard the sad news of to-day?’

  ‘What is it? Is Brissot guillotined?’

  ‘Not only Brissot, but les vingt et un.’

  As faces rushed towards her–Brissot, Vergniaud, Brûlart de Genlis (husband of Mme de Genlis)–Mary fainted.

  Robespierre’s party denounced women who meddled in politics, whether it be the behind-the-scenes influence of Mme Roland or Charlotte Corday, who stabbed the bloodthirsty Marat in his bath. Helen Maria Williams thought the Jacobins masculinised the Revolution, breaking up families and destroying domestic affections (persuading the dauphin, for instance, to turn on his mother Marie Antoinette, with accusations of sexual abuse). On 17 August 1792 a proposal at the Jacobin Club that women be given the vote had not found favour. The Jacobins followed Rousseau’s sentimental picture of women’s nature: only mothers and helpmates were to have a place in an ideal society. No more revolutionary-republican citoyennes, no more ‘Amazons’. At this time the Jacobins expelled women from the public arena when they closed their political clubs and banned them from forming political associations. On 10 November they executed Mme Roland. The Convention declared that ‘a woman’s honour…precludes her from a struggle with men’. She must be ‘confined’ to the home.

  Imlay was not a man to settle for domesticity–or not for long. While he sat at their fireside, schemes fired in his head. A bar of soap that had cost twelve sous in 1790 had risen to as much as twenty-eight by 1793. The hunger of the populace was barely relieved by fixing food prices, ‘le maximum’, as it was called. Parisians were crying out for du pain et du savon, and Imlay sent out ships to bring in cargoes of wheat and soap. Shipping took him to the port of Le Havre (renamed Havre-Marat), a hundred and twenty-six miles north-west of Paris. Although all goods from Britain and its colonies were barred in France, Imlay did do business with London, in league with an English soap trader, John Wheatcroft, a resident of Le Havre where he owned properties and remained in good standing with the Committee of Public Safety. Imlay traded with the respectable London firms of Turnbull, Forbes & Co. and Chalmers & Cowie, but these are unlikely to represent the full extent of his interests. Did he pursue a career as a spy with commerce as his cover, validated by the name of his shipping family? Such activities are difficult to prove, but unquestionably Le Havre, then London, became over the next year his centres of operations.

  As Mary’s pregnancy advanced, he was mostly away. ‘But, my love, to the old story–am I to see you this week, or this month?’ she writes to Imlay on 29 December, some six to eight weeks after his last visit. ‘I do not know what you are about–for you did not tell me.’

  Strange that so bright a woman had so dim a notion of what this was. Eventually, he told her it was trade in soap and alum–a reply she found disconcerting. Soap did not fit her idea of the New World thinker she had come to love. Nor did he tell her of his New Jersey origins and the commercial interests of the Imlays. She did not know of the Imlay Mansion in Allen’s Town tended by slaves brought back from the West Indies. As late as March 1794–having known Imlay a whole year–she still talks of his growing up in ‘the interior regions’ of America. It was as though he had come to her from some far region–some edge of existence like that of her secret self, far out and alone. Yet he was changing before her eyes: the backwoods simplicity was vanishing, and in its place was a hard-eyed man preoccupied with schemes he presented as wholly–and banally–commercial. When his talk turned on what seemed to her a gambler’s hope for riches, he appeared a stranger.

  ‘Recollection now makes my heart bound to thee,’ she told him, ‘but it is not to thy money-getting face.’

  Imlay, in his New World character, had presented an undivided figure. It puzzled her to come upon his ambiguities, the backwoodsman who required the comforts of the affluent classes; the patriot who stayed in France; the outsider who was in some part insider; the lover-evader, dreaming of their future fireside, who hardly came home. Possibly he had more than one identity, and this fits Mary’s sense of his duality. She was in love with one of these men, the gentle, philosophic frontiersman, who appeared to her blocked by the contrived identity of a piddling soap merchant, one of the ‘square-headed money-getters’ who are ‘stupidly useful to the stupid’. She knocked at this image–softly, then loudly–convinced the real man was there, ‘concealing’ himself and increasingly inaccessible to her.

  Her letters call up the passionate Imlay who had been her counterpart, using the sacred ‘thy’ she reserves for him alone. ‘I have thy honest countenance before me…relaxed by tenderness; a little–little wounded by my whims; and thy eyes glistening with sympathy.–Thy lips then feel softer than soft–and I rest my cheek on thine, forgetting all the world.–I have not left the hue of love out of the picture–the rosy glow; and fancy has spread it over my own cheeks, I believe, for I feel them burning…’ Her heart beats through her pen, directing her gratitude to ‘the Father of nature, who has made me thus alive to happiness’.

  As she approached the fifth month of pregnancy, maternal feeling woke to the first ‘gentle twitches’. She thought: I am nourishing a creature who will soon be sensible of my care. To preserve this creature she resolved to exercise her body and calm her mind. As she did so, she relived desires heightened by the coming and going at Neuilly, and now began to fret that this was not, as it had seemed, an anticipatory phase; it was a pattern, the way Imlay conducted a relationship. She learnt to know the crack of his whip in the air as his horse galloped off into the distance. And, with that, the ‘we’ on Mary’s lips withdraws to ‘I’. One thought in particular plagued her, and eventually she put it to Imlay.

  ‘These continual separations were necessary to warm your affection.–Of late, we are always separati
ng.–Crack!–crack!–and away you go.’

  This was a man with a purpose that seemed to her debased by commerce.

  ‘I hate commerce,’ she said.

  He could not agree. Commerce, he argued, tended ‘to civilize and embellish the human mind’.

  Many call him rascal, scoundrel or cad, as though he were unusual and Mary Wollstonecraft a sex-starved dupe. These have always been reductive myths. Imlay was no different from other men on the make in an age of smuggling, piracy and colonisation. Men like Clive of India wrested private fortunes from peoples on the far side of the globe; privateers raided the high seas; and navies took ‘prizes’ in the form of enemy vessels–piracy legalised in games of war. Nothing was more respectable than impecunious Captain Wentworth taking prizes at sea in Jane Austen’s Persuasion– as the youngest Austen brothers would have done as they rose through the ranks of the navy during the Napoleonic Wars. What is ugly in such acts takes place across the horizon, unseen by society. Captain Imlay was another gentleman who hoped to make his fortune far from home. A game called ‘Speculation’ entered British drawing-rooms in 1804: players in Mansfield Park are advised to sharpen their avarice and harden their hearts, while the master of the ‘turns’ in the game shows ‘impudence’ and ‘quick resources’. In Pride and Prejudice an early sign of Jane’s and Bingley’s decency is that they prefer a different game to one called ‘Commerce’.

  The Wollstonecrafts came from a class structure where to be ‘in trade’ was low. Money should not be new–not like that of the nabob of Upton Castle, whom Bess Wollstonecraft despised for his incivilities and dirty tablecloths. The Wollstonecraft sisters positioned themselves as thinking individuals, defined by serious books, as by their aspiration to know French, for them (as for the upper classes in Europe throughout the wars with France) a sign of cultivation. The Imlays, on the other hand, came from a society where making money was admired. The power attained by politics or arms is brief, Imlay believed; ‘wealth is the source of power; and the attainment of wealth can only be brought about by a wise and happy attention to commerce’. This was what a man did if he was manly. Mary questioned Imlay’s ‘struggles to be manly’, and welcomed the counter-struggle of sensibility, she told him, ‘striving to master your features’. Mary saw manliness as a construct that could be remade in the light of Rousseau’s proposition: ‘We know not what Nature allows us to be.’

  He wrote often, every two or three days. Mary found his letters ‘a cordial’: he was ‘sweet’, ‘cheerful’ and ‘considerate’, sustaining a kindness that invites return.

  ‘Write to me my best love, and bid me be patient–kindly–and the expressions of kindness will again beguile the time, as sweetly as they have done to-night,’ she wrote. ‘I am going to rest very happy, and you have made me so.–this is the kindest good-night I can utter.’ And again: ‘I have just received your kind and rational letter.’

  Imlay’s attentiveness encouraged Mary to express her desires. ‘The way to my senses is through my heart; but, forgive me! I think there is sometimes a shorter cut to yours,’ she said. ‘I shall not…be content with only a kiss of DUTY–you must be glad to see me–because you are glad–or I will make love to the shade of Mirabeau.’ Imlay was habituated to the ‘cunning’ or ‘piquante’ woman who plays male games, deflecting her own desires, Mary argued, to the detriment of her own sex. Mirabeau, she fancied, would have been more amenable. She thought the run of men should change habits based on ‘casual ebullitions of sympathy’, and adapt to a more imaginative form of desire ‘by fostering a passion in their hearts’. While Imlay was away, she found her own imagination ‘as lively, as if my senses had never been gratified by [your] presence–I was going to say caresses–and why should I not?’

  Absence intensified her sense of the man she felt him to be. In her thoughts and desires she lived with the Imlay who wrote to the woman she felt herself to be. She called him up in her imagination, making him in this way more her own. This was easier when she could not see his commercial face.

  ‘I do not know why,’ she confessed, ‘but I have more confidence in your affection when absent, than present; nay, I think that you must love me, for, in the sincerity of my heart let me say it, I believe I deserve your tenderness, because I am true, and have a degree of sensibility that you can see and relish.’

  She doesn’t talk of her physical attractions, though she had them; she doesn’t see her own face as she sees his, but exists (in her own terms) as a speaker of ‘truth’ who can enter into the life of feeling. Facelessness deepens her presence in her writings, where inward truth takes precedence over face and form. ‘Be not too anxious to get money!’ she counselled, ‘–for nothing worth having is to be purchased.’ The Rights of Woman had called for fidelity on the part of men, and for women to refuse maintenance where there is no love. Mary was determined to put this kind of union into practice, based on what Imlay called the soul’s sympathy.

  As December crept by there were moments when impatience could not be contained: ‘You seem to have taken up your abode at H[avre]. Pray sir! When do you think of coming home? Or, to write very considerately, when will business permit you?’ She tried to make light of it. ‘The creature!’ she would exclaim as she passed his tatty slippers at her door. If he did not return soon, she told him on New Year’s day 1794, ‘I will throw your slippers out at [the] window, and be off–nobody knows where.’

  Imlay justified his absence as provider for her and their unborn child. ‘Exertions are necessary,’ he reminded her. Why then was she cold to him? Why had she been ‘three days without writing’? Did she not know that he revered her?

  ‘I do not want to be loved like a goddess,’ she replied, ‘but I wish to be necessary to you.’

  The kinder his voice, the guiltier she felt for her mistrust. ‘Your own dear girl will try to keep under a quickness of feeling, that has sometimes given you pain,’ she apologised. ‘Yes, I will be good, that I may deserve to be happy.’ How badly she wished to retrieve trust–badly enough to take the blame. ‘Quickness,’ she said, was her flaw. Lonely for Imlay, and wanting reassurance, she begged: ‘bear with me a little longer.’

  Imlay did not as yet reveal to Mary his biggest commercial scheme, though eventually she was drawn into a venture that would uncover its character only by degrees. Fashionable society continued to look to France as the arbiter of taste; the cultivated spoke French, drank French wines, and filled their houses with French porcelain. Amongst Imlay’s exports were glassware and other portable objects from abandoned chateaux. No sooner did Robespierre come to power in 1793 than he passed a law (10 June) by which the contents of royal palaces, ‘the vast possessions which the last tyrants of France reserved for their pleasure’, were to be sold off to aid ‘the defence of liberty’. A series of public sales of undervalued items began on 25 August at Versailles, where a poster announced that objects ‘may be taken abroad free of all duty’. This was a time of ideological purity when despised luxuries were to be discarded; storehouses were piled high with unwanted treasure. Americans like Imlay were able to buy costly objects with devaluing paper money.

  One way to approach the elusive Imlay is through American associates like Richard Codman who made fortunes in France during this decade. Imlay and Barlow had failed in massive schemes without losing their incorrigible self-confidence. It was common in their milieu for fortunes to fluctuate and to have their shady aspect. The most prominent figure amongst them was James Swan, another who had speculated in Kentucky lands. Mired in debt in 1787, he had come to France to recuperate his fortunes. He was unprincipled (according to future President James Monroe), and was to spend his last twenty-two years in a debtors’ prison. But in 1793–4 he flourished as a shipper, banker and dealer in art objects. His Boston firm was the official dealer in French objets d’art and furniture confiscated from the royal palaces after the fall of the monarchy and exported to the United States. Dallarde & Swan, his Paris branch at 63 rue Montmorency, was Barlow
’s business address.

  Imlay, meanwhile, was developing trade with Hamburg, Gothenburg, and Denmark, particularly with the mighty Copenhagen firm of Niels Ryberg who traded with the US and France. His ships had to reckon with the British blockade of French ports on the one hand, and on the other, the arbitrariness of French embargoes. So was born a series of high-risk schemes requiring secrecy and vigilance.

  At the same time Imlay and Barlow did not give up on the capture of Louisiana. A member of the Paris conspiracy (formed in March 1793 with Barlow at its head) alerted Citizen Otto (in the French Foreign Office) on 22 May that Imlay was still game. Having failed in the Louisiana scheme, Genêt was denounced as an instrument of the late Brissot when Robespierre addressed the National Convention on 15 November. Only eight days later Barlow and Leavenworth (writing from their base at the Maison de Bretagne in the rue Jacob) put forward a renewed plan for a coup. Its selling point was the advantage Louisiana would bring to France in terms of needed goods, while costing France nothing (‘sans coûter rien’ , as it was headed). This longer, more closely argued plan, set out point for point, was designed to appeal to Robespierre with its blend of logic and moral loftiness: to take Louisiana would be ‘une action d’humanité’ for a people who ‘soupirent pour la liberté, et que leurs coeurs réclament l’identité politique avec leur mère patrie’ (‘yearn for freedom, and where hearts cry out for political identity with their mother country’). Together, Barlow and Leavenworth asked the Committee of Public Safety to authorise their raising a force of two thousand. The names of their officers were to be withheld. In other words, control of the expedition was to remain in private hands, and its leaders protected by secrecy. The French Foreign Office endorsed the Barlow–Leavenworth scheme on 7 December. Leavenworth may have acted for Imlay, whose association with the guillotined Brissot would have made it impolitic for his name to appear.