Romantic Outlaws: The Extraordinary Lives of Mary Wollstonecraft and Her Daughter Mary Shelley

by Charlotte Gordon

  Shelley, Mary, William, Elise, and Claire arrived back in England in the beginning of September, right after Mary’s nineteenth birthday. They could not return to Bishopsgate—despite his allowance from his grandfather’s estate, Shelley had neglected to pay their bills before they left England, and creditors were once again looking for him, having already confiscated the valuables they had left behind. London, too, was out of the question, as it was already obvious that Claire was pregnant and this would have placed them at the center of a new wave of gossip.

  After some debate, they decided to find a house in Bath; the season had ended there and the town would be empty of gossiping Londoners. Mary disliked this plan, as Shelley had to stay in London to see the lawyers about his finances and she did not want them to be separated. But she had little choice, and Shelley thought Mary should stay with Claire during her pregnancy. Mary, however, did not want to take care of the stepsister who had tried to sabotage her relationship with the man she loved. She was sure the unborn baby was not Shelley’s, but she also knew that the rest of the world would think it could be. She dreaded the months to come: the loneliness, the quarreling with her stepsister, the worry that Shelley might abandon her, the drabness and small-town feel of Bath. She missed the Alps, the lake, and above all the communal life where she had felt insulated from the judgmental eyes of the world and inspired to envision what was supposed to be unthinkable: a human being playing God. Now, without Byron, without the reassuring presence of Shelley, and without the exhilarating feeling of being far from stuffy England, she would have to go forward alone, rewriting and expanding her manuscript during the long, gray autumn that stretched miserably ahead.

  CHAPTER 16

  MARY WOLLSTONECRAFT: PARIS

  [ 1792–1793 ]

  Wollstonecraft could discern little that was beautiful as her coach rolled through the city gates into the French capital and onto the Boulevard Saint-Martin. It was mid-December 1792, and the horses splattered through the dirty streets, splashing mud on the hapless pedestrians who were trying to avoid the deep sinkholes between the paving stones. She had caught a cold on the long uncomfortable journey from London, and after so many days of traveling, she was looking forward to meeting her sisters’ friend Aline Filliettaz, the daughter of Mrs. Bregantz, the headmistress of a school in Putney where Eliza and Everina had both taught. She knew no one else in Paris, as Eliza had come home in 1788 before the Revolution gathered steam. Both of Mary’s sisters now had teaching positions, Eliza in Wales and Everina in Ireland, and both wrote frequently detailing their miseries and asking for money. They had no one else to complain to and blamed Mary for their unhappiness. To them, she seemed to be leading a glamorous life, while they were still essentially servants. These laments were difficult to hear, as it was clear that they thought Mary should be working harder to make their lives happier: she should find them new employment or send them enough money so that they did not have to work. Mary empathized with how degrading and unpleasant their jobs were. But she had already spent considerable time finding them employment, and she had already sent them much more money than she could afford. Now that she was in France, she had plans of her own that she wanted to fulfill.

  When she arrived at 22 Rue Meslée (now Meslay), a side street deep in the Marais, Mary discovered that Aline and her husband had been unexpectedly called away. She was left in the hands of servants who spoke a colloquial French that was very different from the scholarly language she had studied. Try as she might, she could not make herself understood. “You will easily imagine how awkwardly I behaved unable to utter a word,” Mary wrote Everina.

  A young maid led Mary through “one folding door opening after another,” leaving her marooned in a room far from the servants’ quarters. Aline’s house was a grand residence six stories high with wrought iron balconies and long windows that opened onto the street. The last time Mary had lived in such splendor was when she was a governess for the Kingsboroughs. The elegant red brick Place des Vosges, one of the most prestigious addresses in Paris, was a short walk away. Nearby was the Temple, a turreted medieval fortress where King Louis and Marie Antoinette were imprisoned.

  For the next week or so, Mary was forced to stay indoors and try to recover from her cold. But her isolation grew more difficult with each passing day. The silence of the house was suffocating. She wrote Johnson, “Not the distant sound of a footstep can I hear.…I wish I had even kept the cat with me!” Although the maids tried to help, Mary could not find the words to explain herself: “I apply so closely to the language, and labour so continually to understand what I hear that I never go to bed without a head ache—and my spirits are fatigued with endeavouring to form a just opinion of public affairs.”

  When at last she was able to explore, she was disappointed in what she found. The city looked scarred: statues of the French monarchs had been pulled down or defaced, leaving empty pedestals and piles of marble; iron railings had been ripped off windows to make pikes for the workers to carry as weapons. Signs were posted on the street corners warning people not to cheer for the king. The sansculottes, the revolutionary workers, wearing their trademark striped trousers and liberty cockades, shook their standards—“an old pair of breeches…on the top of a pike”—at anyone who looked too aristocratic; Mary had been told not to speak English on the streets, as people believed English visitors were either nobles in disguise or spies. Even the names of shops, streets, bridges, and towns had been changed to eradicate any royal allegiances. Although Mary approved of this attempt to start anew, there were few updated maps available, making it “very difficult,” according to one English traveler, “for a stranger to know anything about the geography of the kingdom.”

  Eventually, Mary learned to thread her way through the rabbit warren that was eighteenth-century Paris, the streets so narrow they were like passageways. Although she rejoiced in the architecture of the Marais, the buildings were taller than in London and set more closely together, shutting out the sky. A seventeen-foot stone wall surrounded the city. If you did not have the right paperwork, you were not permitted to leave, a precaution that allowed the authorities to block the fifty-four tollgates at will. Not that Mary wanted to escape, but the city was claustrophobic. Walking was unpleasant; she hated the dirty streets. Like Londoners, Parisians dumped waste out the windows, but in Paris, unlike London, there were no sidewalks and few parks. When traffic backed up and carriages crowded past, the only choice was to press against the buildings to avoid being trampled; pedestrians frequently lost their lives in traffic accidents. All in all, Mary was shocked by “the striking contrast of riches and poverty, elegance and slovenliness, urbanity and deceit.”

  If navigating the city was difficult, calculating the time and date was even more challenging. The revolutionary leaders had changed the clock and the calendar to reflect the new society they wanted to create. This meant the French names for the days of the week that Mary had learned (lundi, mardi, mercredi, etc.) were now meaningless. Instead, weeks were now ten days long, beginning with primidi and ending with décadi. There were still twelve months, but each month was divided into three revolutionary weeks. At the end of the year, which began on the first day of the autumnal equinox (Mary had arrived in the third month of Year I of the French Republic), extra days would be added to approximate the solar year. Even more confusing was the concept of decimal time. Days were no longer twelve hours; instead, they lasted ten very long hours. Each hour was 100 decimal minutes and each minute was 100 decimal seconds, which meant a revolutionary hour consisted of 144 conventional minutes. There were even new decimal clocks, which no one could read. Newspapers, pamphlets, official documents, even Mary’s passport followed this system, reinforcing France’s isolation from neighboring countries.

  To top all this off, Paris was a veritable nest of gossip. Confused and still struggling with her French, Mary found it hard to distinguish between the swirl of false reports and reality. The week before Christmas (in English time
), the city buzzed with stories: the king had escaped; the Austrians were invading the city; radical factions were planning a coup. Frustrated by her lack of information, Mary took a cab to the home of a literary Englishwoman, Helen Maria Williams, whose book she had reviewed favorably the previous spring. Williams had since moved to Paris, where she published glowing reports of the Revolution that enthralled British liberals like Mary. At Helen’s, Mary was able to hear the news in a language she could understand. The king had not escaped. He was going to face the National Convention on the day after Christmas. Helen and her circle of friends had mixed opinions on what Louis XVI’s fate should be: The guillotine? A constitutional monarchy? A republic? Mary was against execution. Although she abhorred the traditions of aristocracy and monarchy, she felt empathy for the king and hated the mounting bloodshed. Other liberals agreed. Thomas Paine argued that Louis should be exiled to America rather than beheaded.

  And so, when December 26 came, it was with divided feelings that Mary climbed the stairs to the attic of 22 Rue Meslée to watch Louis pass by on his way to the National Convention. Around nine in the morning, she heard “a few strokes on the drum” and then the wheels of the king’s cart. A throng of National Guards, dressed in their dark blue coats with red collars and white lapels, marched alongside Louis’s coach, keeping any would-be rescuers at bay. The air was still and Mary was struck by the silence that greeted the procession. She wrote Johnson:

  The inhabitants flocked to their windows, but the casements were all shut, not a voice was heard, nor did I see any thing like an insulting gesture.

  …I can scarcely tell you why, but an association of ideas made the tears flow insensibly from my eyes, when I saw Louis sitting, with more dignity than I expected from his character.

  That night Mary could not sleep. “I cannot dismiss the lively images that have filled my imagination all the day,” she confided in Johnson. “Nay, do not smile, but pity me; for once or twice, lifting my eyes from the paper, I have seen eyes glare through a glass-door opposite my chair, and bloody hands shook at me.…I want to see something alive; death in so many frightful shapes has taken hold of my fancy.—I am going to bed—and for the first time in my life, I cannot put out the candle.”

  Mary’s reference to “bloody hands” was an allusion to one of her favorite plays, Shakespeare’s Macbeth. To Mary, Louis’s doom now seemed as inevitable as the Scottish king’s, and she felt implicated in what was to come, unsure whether she should be protesting what she had just seen. Like Macbeth, she and the French people were soon going to be guilty of regicide and could soon find themselves haunted by the king’s death. All she was certain of was that she had just watched an extraordinary event—a king going to trial, as though he were an ordinary citizen. The world would never—could never—be the same. This was a solemn thought, but also an inspiring one. With renewed energy, Mary took notes, planning to use them for an eyewitness account of the Revolution.

  Unable to attend the trial proceedings herself, Mary had to rely on the newspapers’ detailed coverage of the trial. President Barère, the president of the Convention, spent the morning preaching to the 749 delegates: “Europe observes you; history records your thoughts and actions; incorruptible posterity will judge you with inflexible severity.…The dignity of your sitting ought to be responsible to the majesty of the French Nation; she is ready by your organ to give a great lesson to Kings, and to set an useful example for the emancipation of nations.”

  These words resonated with Mary. She, too, could feel “incorruptible posterity” judging her actions, and when, after several weeks of debate, the Convention voted for the death penalty, she steeled herself to record all that she observed. Disillusioned by the revolutionary government’s tyranny, she wrote, “I am grieved—sorely grieved—when I think of the blood that has stained the cause of freedom at Paris.” Earlier that year, the guillotine had been set up in the Place de la Révolution, today’s Place de la Concorde, near the Louvre. Mary had already gone to see it, and although the killing device was horrifying to behold, she knew it was meant to be more humane than the old-fashioned stake burnings and hangings of the ancien régime. Its inventors boasted of its efficiency, and it was widely praised as a symbol of the Revolution’s egalitarian philosophy, since in the past, commoners had had to endure long, excruciating deaths on the wheel, while aristocrats received a comparatively merciful sharp blade. Now everyone, including the king, would suffer the same death. But democratic though it might be, Mary was still disturbed by the guillotine’s prominence. The authorities had placed it in front of the Hôtel Crillon, where Marie Antoinette used to take piano lessons and sip tea in the afternoons, asserting the Convention’s triumph over the royal family. Mary did not miss this symbolism, noting that the new government had as much lust for power as the old. It was beginning to seem that the only true difference between the regimes was a change in name.

  On January 21, the day of the execution, the city was eerily silent. Citizens were ordered to keep their windows shut under pain of death. The sky was overcast and guards marched the streets ready to suppress any protests on behalf of the king. Mary stayed locked behind the tall shuttered doors and iron-grilled windows of 22 Rue Meslée. Fortunately, Aline had returned to Paris, and Mary was not alone as tensions were running high in the city. It was dangerous on the streets, particularly for an Englishwoman. No one knew what would happen next, whether the people would rise up and seize control after the king was killed, whether civil war might be on the horizon. Outside Paris, royalists staged violent protests.

  At 10:00 a.m., thirty-nine-year-old Citizen Louis Capet, as the revolutionaries called the deposed king, climbed the steps to the guillotine. Shut indoors as she was, Mary did not get to be an eyewitness to what followed, but when she heard the reports, she was moved once again to tears. Showing more strength in the final moments of his life than during the years of his indecisive reign, Louis proclaimed his innocence, publicly forgave his people, and urged them to put a stop to the killings. There was a respectful silence while everyone waited for the blade to fall, but afterward, when the executioner held up Louis’s head, people rushed forward to plunge their hands in his blood, shouting, “Vive la République!” It was the beginning of a new life, a new epoch, the newspapers crowed. Without the king, everyone would become rich and free. But Mary did not agree. She believed that Louis’s death marked the Revolution’s turn toward disaster.

  Mary’s assessment was shared by most English and European leaders. Enraged and saddened, George III, the English king, declared war on France, joining the Austrians and Prussians already fighting the revolutionary troops led by an ambitious young general named Napoléon Bonaparte. Even in France, the celebrations would soon die down and Mary’s Shakespearean premonition would come true: Louis’s death would come to haunt future generations. For Camus, the king’s execution marked the end of meaning, the disappearance of God from history. Another twentieth-century philosopher, Jean-François Lyotard, would maintain that modern France owed its birth to a murder and was therefore doomed to corruption.

  Sensing the darkened mood of the country that spring, many expatriates fled back to British shores. Mary herself was tempted to leave Paris, since there might come a time when it would no longer be possible for her to return home. But she resisted the impulse, deciding to brave it out for the sake of history, spending February and March practicing her French and recording more impressions of the city. As a celebrated author, she was invited to many of the most important salons and political gatherings. Although she reported that one gentleman teased her about her habit of saying “oui, oui” in response to everything because in actual conversations her “fine French phrases…fly away the Lord knows where,” she gradually was able to speak more fluently. People liked her in this new world and she liked them; it was refreshing to live in a society that valued women and their ideas. In London she had been a rarity, often the only woman at Johnson’s dinner parties, but in Paris, the socia
l climate was entirely different. The Revolution had played a positive role in women’s lives, granting them significant legal privileges. Divorce had been legalized the preceding August, and in April 1791 the government had decreed that daughters could inherit property. Now the marquis de Condorcet, one of Mary’s new friends and an influential deputy in the Convention, was arguing on behalf of women’s right to vote: “Women should have absolutely the same rights [as men],” he declared; “either no individual member of the human race has any real rights, or else all have the same.”

  Her friendship with Helen Maria Williams was also deepening that spring. Helen Maria’s Letters from France had won the pretty, idealistic author the attention of a young English poet, William Wordsworth, who traveled to France to meet her and witness the miracles she had described. In later years, he remembered this time as glorious, exclaiming:

  Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive,

  But to be young was very heaven!

  He also painted a picture of the sentimental Helen in a sonnet titled “Upon Seeing Miss Helen Maria Williams Weep at a Tale of Distress”: “She wept. Life’s purple tide began to flow / In languid streams through every thrilling vein / Dim were my swimming eyes.”

  Before long, Mary felt comfortable enough to confide in Helen about Fuseli, and she relied on “the simple goodness of [Helen’s] heart” to help her navigate Parisian social politics. Like the salon hostesses of the ancien régime—the handful of privileged women who had led the cultural life of the city by hosting receptions for the rich and powerful, the intellectuals and politicians—Helen Maria prided herself on knowing everything about everyone: who hated whom, who had a secret lover, who supported the moderates and who the radicals, who was to be trusted and who not. This was valuable knowledge in a time when everything was changing so rapidly. The plunge from power to prison could take place in a matter of hours.