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12 1 “Quite Alone in a Crowd” Armed with a letter of credit for thirty pounds from her publisher, Mary Wollstonecraft traveled from London to Paris in December 1792 determined to experiment with the possibilities of life at the epicenter of revolution. She was thirty-three years old and the acclaimed author of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman. In many ways, the journey was an affirmation of her hardwon status as an independent professional woman. Wollstonecraft had at long last found her voice within imperial London’s radical literary circles, supporting herself by writing reviews, essays, and books. As important, she had honed an acute sense of what was wrong with her world and how it might be improved through the cultivation of a culture of mixed-gender sociability. Why not try Paris? It was on the cutting edge of revolution, only three and a half years from the fall of the Bastille and a couple of months from the replacement of a monarchy with a republic. The National Assembly had even made divorce a legal option for women on September 20, 1792. Perhaps, she joked, the “Spinster on the wing . . . might take a husband for the time being, and get divorced when [her] truant heart” missed her friends in London.1 In fact, Wollstonecraft had just experienced a kind of emotional divorce. Disappointment drove her from London as much as hope brought her to Paris. She was still trying to let go of her “rational desire” for the married painter Henry Fuseli, who had recently refused her proposal that she live 1. Mary Wollstonecraft (MW) to Everina Wollstonecraft, [circa early December 1792], in Janet Todd, ed., The Collected Letters of Mary Wollstonecraft (New York, 2003), 212–213, to William Roscoe, Nov. 12, [17]92, 208. “QUITE ALONE IN A CROWD” / 13 with him and his wife. The pain was intense. She missed him. She missed their intimacy. Above all, she missed them. Wollstonecraft had “always [caught] something from the rich torrent of [his] conversation, worth treasuring up in [her] memory, to exercise [her] understanding.” As she absorbed Fuseli’s decision, she recoiled from her own behavior. To her “horror ,” she realized she had become “a sacrifice to a passion which may have a mixture of dross in it.” Perhaps she was confronting her sexuality, something she had yet to indulge with another person. Perhaps she was just hurt and embarrassed. Whatever it was, she had thought she could “conquer” such a passion or “die in the attempt.” Why had she failed—again—to sustain a relationship that had moved from friendship to love? Fuseli was not the first person with whom she had found intimacy that proved fleeting. Why? Was she “a mere animal” in whom “instinctive emotions too often silence the suggestions of reason”?2 Paris provided no answer, no refuge, and no satisfaction. Wollstonecraft entered a dark, dirty, chilly city very much alone. Arriving just before Christmas Day, she stayed at a friend’s house, barren of all but servants. Unable to shake a cold, she fought a lingering cough and struggled to improve her French. Beyond the house, Paris was consumed with the fate of one man. On the morning of December 26, Wollstonecraft watched from her window as guards escorted the former king of France to his trial. There were no insults, no jeers, no rude gestures, just an eerie silence broken only by the regular beating of a drum. Impressed with the behavior of the crowd, she was equally impressed with Louis’s dignified demeanor, a composure he would sustain until his execution in the Place de la Révolution on January 21. Trying to write after the tumult of the procession had faded into the distance,Wollstonecraft was haunted by images of “bloody hands.” Unnerved, she missed her cat. “I want to see something alive,” she wrote, “death in so many frightful shapes has taken hold of my fancy.” That night she went to bed “for the first time in [her] life” with a candle still burning.3 In February, intent on adjusting to the rhythms of her new home, making friends, and learning French, she still could not shake a “lowness of Spirits” so persistent that one of her sisters speculated that she must have suffered “some great disappointment.” Life in the republican capital, she confessed, was more diverting than satisfying. “Those who wish to live for themselves without close friendship, or wa[rm] affection ought to live in Paris...

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