Footsteps by Richard Holmes
That she might one day say yes, without thinking: the joke has a faint but distinct sexual suggestion. Mary later said she was disarmed by Imlay’s sudden, tender smile: it had the vulnerable look of a child who had somehow got into mischief.
It is not clear exactly how their liaison now developed (what of Imlay’s supposed faiblesse for Helen Williams?) but it is evident that the helter-skelter pace of political events contributed a good deal. In May the first Maximum Law was passed, controlling food prices with ferocious punishments for black marketeers, and making daily life difficult and unpleasant—long queues outside the shops, shortages, curfews, sudden scares and casual violence in the streets. All householders had to post the names of their occupants on their front doors, and the whereabouts of foreigners was known and marked. The Fillietaz family began to think of leaving permanently for the country; Mary’s position became awkward. She applied for a travel document to get her through the barrier, but it was not immediately granted. Then, at the end of May, Robespierre unleashed his attack on the Girondists in the Convention. Within two weeks the Rolands, Pétion, Brissot—all had been arrested, while Condorcet had escaped and was in hiding, later to commit suicide. Quite apart from the terrible shock this gave to the international group, it meant the collapse of both Mary’s involvement with the Committee for Public Instruction and Imlay’s Louisiana scheme with Brissot. They were effectively isolated, though Imlay, like Paine and Barlow, was protected by his American citizenship, as the national of a friendly power. Mary was not.
In the midst of this maelstrom Mary suddenly sent a rapturously happy letter to Eliza, dated 13 June, from outside Paris, but without further address or postmark. (It was almost certainly carried in the private baggage of one of Barlow’s American business contacts who still moved freely between Paris and London.) Of political affairs she says precisely, and very carefully, nothing: “I write with reserve because all letters are opened.” But of her own situation she is radiantly yet mysteriously optimistic:
I will venture to promise that brighter days are in store for you. I cannot explain myself excepting just to tell you that I have a plan in my head, it may prove abortive, in which you and Evarina are included, if you find it good, that I contemplate with pleasure as a mode of bringing us all together again. I have been endeavouring to obtain a passport a long time and did not get it till after I had determined to take a lodging in the country—for I could not think of staying any longer at Madame F’s. I am now at the house of an old Gardener writing a great book; and in better health and spirits than I ever enjoyed since I came to France …
Mary’s secret, what she could not explain, was that she and Imlay had become lovers. They were already planning—after the Revolution, should they survive it—to go to America together and seek the Golden Age there, perhaps on a farm in some far western territory. Meanwhile Mary had contrived, with the help of the Fillietaz family, to cross the barrier at Longchamp (between the present place Charles de Gaulle and the place du Trocadéro), and take rooms in an idyllic little country house at Neuilly, hidden in its own grounds, and looked after by the Fillietaz’s faithful old gardener. She had brought her books and papers with her, and was embarking on her History of the Revolution—her “great book”.
The gardener kept house for her, and brought her fruit and vegetables, especially a particular kind of grape which she adored. The old man, she later told Godwin, grew wonderfully fond and protective, “contending for the honour” of making her bed, warning her against walking alone in the woods by the Seine, and making solemn difficulties about the grapes “when she had any person with her as a visitor”. Her most frequent visitor was of course Imlay, whom she would go to meet at the barrier in the summer evenings. Long after she would recall with delight the smiling, expectant look of his “barrier face”.
Mary remained in her retreat at Neuilly for four months, until September 1793. It was a magical time—perhaps the happiest of her whole life. Within the turmoil of the Revolution she had unexpectedly discovered what came to seem like her own private Garden of Eden. She was writing hard, and at the same time successfully sharing her life with someone she deeply loved. Intellectually Imlay was a stimulating companion, and constantly brought her the latest news of events in Paris, which they would discuss long into the night. Physically the relationship—which had begun, like so many others, in a small hotel in Saint-Germain—was an immense success on both sides. Indeed, from what Mary later told Godwin, it was a completely transforming experience: a revolution within her own being. “She entered into that species of connection for which her heart secretly panted … Now, for the first time in her life, she gave a loose to all the sensibilities of her nature.” In his Memoir, Godwin described her sense of well-being, her excitement, her radiant glow of sheer animal exhilaration, in beautiful pre-Freudian imagery, and without a trace of jealousy:
She was like a serpent on a rock, that casts its slough and appears again with the brilliancy, the sleekness, and the elastic activity of its happiest age. She was playful, full of confidence, kindness and sympathy. Her eyes assumed new lustre, and her cheeks new colour and smoothness. Her voice became cheerful; her temper overflowing with universal kindness; and that smile of bewitching tenderness from day to day illuminated her countenance, which all who knew her will so well recollect and which won, both heart and soul, the affection of almost everyone that beheld it.
Or, in the expressive French phrase, Mlle Wollstonecraft était bien dans sa peau.
No trace now remains of Mary’s magic house and garden, though I long searched for it. In those days Neuilly was a country village, surrounded by woods, allotments and a network of little lanes leading down to the Seine. Now, on one side, lie the elegant parklands and shaded rides of the Bois de Boulogne; on the other, the bleak windy skyscrapers of La Défense. The sole remaining evidence of the place lies in two of her little love-notes scrawled to Imlay; the one regretting a “snug dinner” she had missed with him, but leaving the key in the door; the other begging him to cherish her, “and your own dear girl will try to keep under a quickness of feeling, that has sometimes given you pain”. Though Imlay’s side of the correspondence has not survived it is impossible to doubt that they were both very much in love, and constantly anxious to be with each other. One of the notes, written at two in the morning in late July, ends:
But good-night!—God bless you! Sterne says, that is equal to a kiss—yet I would rather give you the kiss into the bargain, glowing with gratitude to heaven, and affection to you. I like the word affection, because it signifies something habitual; and we are soon to meet, to try whether we have mind enough to keep our hearts warm.—Mary. I will be at the barrier a little after ten o’clock tomorrow.
5
Mary’s love affair with Imlay was to dominate her remaining year and a half in France. Public events, and even her “great book”, took second place to it; indeed, I came to feel that her deepest understanding of what the Revolution meant was produced by the emotional changes in the “little kingdom” of her own heart. She gave an entirely new importance to instinctive feeling, and sincerity of emotions.
In fact I found her to be exemplary in a more profound, indeed spiritual way than I had supposed when I first set out looking for a simple witness to events. The Revolution was, in a sense, internalised in her own biography: from the clever rational feminist to the suffering and loving woman writer with a deep understanding of her fellow-beings she had passed through a revolution of sensibility. It was only towards the end of the affair, in her Letters Written in Sweden—her least-known book—that she was able to write about human relationships with the tenderness and insight of the following passage:
Friendship and domestic happiness are continually praised; yet how little is there of either in the world, because it requires more cultivation of mind to awake affection, even in our own hearts, than the common run of people suppose. Besides, few like to be seen as they really are; and a degree of simplicity, an
It was perhaps that ability to be touched, never to be the “uninterested observer”, that Mary learned from her time with Imlay.
Poor Gilbert Imlay! Subsequent biographers of Mary, mostly feminist writers, have torn him limb from limb. Taking their cue from Virginia Woolf, who irresistibly described his courtship of Mary as “tickling minnows” and hooking “a dolphin”, they have condemned him for shallowness, bad faith, bad manners. But it never seemed like that to me.
In the first place, there is the evident and extraordinary change that he produced in Mary as a writer. In the second, there is the biographical fact—or rather lack of fact—that his side of the correspondence, and therefore his side of the story, has not survived; Imlay therefore stands undefended before the bar of history. In the third place, there is what Godwin himself described in his Memoir, with pointed emphasis, as Mary’s own attitude long after the affair was over. “Be it observed, by the way, and I may be supposed best to have known the real state of the case, she never spoke of Mr Imlay with acrimony, and was displeased when any person, in her hearing, expressed contempt of him.” Fourthly there is Mary’s own noticeably difficult personality, independent and powerful and assertive, and her compensating need for demanding and equally difficult men—as her pursuit of Fuseli had shown. Finally, there was the simple truth that Imlay, in the autumn of 1793, certainly saved Mary from arrest, and possibly from execution on the grounds of her being in possession of incriminating papers—those pertaining to the Girondists, and to her History of the Revolution. She later said that Helen Williams had strongly advised her to burn the whole manuscript, “and to tell you the truth—my life would not have been worth much, had it been found”.
To understand the critical nature of Mary’s position one has to look outside the little garden at Neuilly and return to events within the barrier of Paris. The Committee of Public Safety, waging a fierce war on the eastern borders of France, had become obsessed with its own security at home. On 10 July Danton was removed from the Committee after an internal power struggle with Robespierre, and three days later Marat was assassinated in his bath by Charlotte Corday (an act which, incidentally, completely undermined the position of the remaining French feminists—Olympe de Gouges was at once arrested). Throughout September the Committee tightened its hold on the Parisian population, adopting a series of emergency powers—the Law of Suspects, the Law of 40 Sous (restricting section or neighbourhood meetings), the Law of General Maximum and finally, on 10 October, suspending the entire Constitution in favour of what was in effect a military dictatorship directed by Robespierre and Saint-Just.
The revolutionary Terror was now absolute, and guillotinings took place daily. Almost the first act of the Committee within its new powers was to order the arrest of all British citizens, and on the night of 9-10 October, with ruthless efficiency, some four hundred people (the bulk of these being nuns and clergymen who had stayed in the English convents and communities in Paris) were picked up in closed carriages and taken to a special prison established at the Luxembourg. No one seems to have escaped the police sweep, organised by the notorious Fouquier-Tinville. Helen Williams, together with her sister and mother, was arrested shortly after midnight; Tom Paine—with the proofs of The Age of Reason in his pocket—was brought in by dawn; even Joel Barlow, vigorously protesting American citizenship (with more success than Paine), was temporarily arrested as a precautionary measure. But Mary Wollstonecraft escaped, and this was thanks to Imlay.
For in French law she was now his wife. Mary had discovered in early autumn that she was pregnant, and had insisted on leaving the safety of Neuilly to come to live with Imlay at his hotel in Saint-Germain. Seeing the inevitable course of the Committee, Imlay had taken her to the American Embassy and overriding her protests (for she still in theory regarded matrimony as bondage) he registered her as his wife and obtained for her papers of American citizenship. So when the terrible blow fell in October Mary was immune, and indeed with characteristic courage she used her papers to visit Helen and other friends in the Luxembourg. Once again, no record of this appears in her letters—the reminiscences of Godwin and Helen Williams were my source—for political censorship made it more than ever perilous to make the least reference to public affairs. What does appear in the letters is Mary’s anxiety about her new responsibility, and the strain now imposed on a relationship that had begun in such freedom and high hope. How were they to domesticate a free union within the heart of a Revolution run mad, apparently intent on consuming even its most passionate supporters?
Imlay’s position must have been very difficult. In saving Mary he had of course taken on responsibility for a family. Since the collapse of the Louisiana scheme he had been trying to work out with Barlow the basis of a trading company, to bring much needed imports of raw materials into France—running the blockade—from the free port of Hamburg, and through Scandinavian contacts. It was now more than ever vital that this business succeed financially, and that terrifying brushes with the Committee of Public Safety (like Barlow’s temporary incarceration) be avoided. Imlay had chosen brave and gifted people to work with, all of them natural survivors. Barlow would eventually be appointed, in 1811, Special American Envoy to Napoleon; while their Scandinavian contact, Elias Backman, was to become in 1799 the first American Consul in Sweden. But it was hectic and uncertain work, involving sudden trips out of Paris—notably to his base port at Le Havre-Marat (recently renamed). Inevitably Mary was left frequently alone. How he must have wished that she had remained in the relative safety of Neuilly! Moreover, Mary now revealed a growing distaste for his commercial projects, and far from sharing his interests began to mock him for his “business-face”, openly wondering if “these continual separations” were necessary to warm his affection for her. “Of late,” she wrote in October, “we are always separating.—Crack!—crack!—and away you go. This joke wears the sallow cast of thought.” Imlay cannot have appreciated the sexual allusion here; or even the mocking quotation from Hamlet.
By the end of the year—and it was indeed a terrible one, for all the Girondists had now been executed, including Madame Roland, and the whole of Europe was now at war with France—Mary had fallen back into her old state of depression, doubting everything, from the historical outcome of the Revolution to their personal future together. Imlay must have been shaken by her bitterness.
“I hate commerce,” she wrote to him in Le Havre-Marat, “how differently must [Ruth Barlow’s] head and heart be organised from mine! You will tell me, that exertions are necessary: I am weary of them! The face of things, public and private, vexes me. The ‘peace’ and clemency which seemed to be dawning a few days ago, disappear again. ‘I am fallen,’ as Milton says, ‘on evil days’; for I really believe that Europe will be in a state of convulsion, during half a century at least. Life is but a labour of patience: it is always rolling a great stone up a hill …”
If he did not come back soon, she threatened, she would throw his slippers out of the window, “and be off—nobody knows where.”
But nor indeed did she. There is no indication that Mary ever seriously considered abandoning France, even at this low point. There was something tenacious and irrepressible in her spirit, stronger even than her depressions, and she seems to have got over her physical fears of the Parisian streets. One particular story about her became famous in expatriate circles at this time: crossing the place de la Révolution one morning, she slipped on a patch of wet earth, and looking down saw that the wetness was blood from the previous day’s victims. She exclaimed out loud at the horror—the injustice—of it all, and started to create a scene (I could by now vividly imagine a Wollstonecraft scene). It was only when a friendl
Besides, reading the mass of little notes she fired off to the absent Imlay in December and January, it became clear to me that the relationship, though stormy, was still very passionate. Mary’s depressions were matched only by her sudden bursts of renewed high spirits. “A man is a tyrant!”—she would exclaim at one moment; and then at the next, “I do not want to be loved like a goddess; but I wish to be necessary to you. God bless you!” She would mock his “money-getting face”, then suddenly picture his “honest countenance” relaxed by tenderness: “a little—little wounded by my whims; and thy eyes glistening with sympathy.—Thy lips feel softer than soft—and I rest my cheek on thine, forgetting all the world.”
Whenever he came back to Paris all was well; and even his letters could have a transforming effect on her. She wrote on the night of 6 January:
I have just received your kind and rational letter, and would fain hide my face, glowing with shame for my folly.—I would hide it in your bosom, if you would again open it to me, and nestle closely till you bade my fluttering heart be still, by saying you forgave me … Do not turn from me, for indeed I love you fondly, and have been very wretched, since the night I was so cruelly hurt by thinking that you had no confidence in me … You perceive that I am already smiling through my tears—You have lightened my heart, and my frozen spirits are melting into playfulness.