SOURCE: Adams, M. Ray. “Helen Maria Williams and the French Revolution.” In Wordsworth and Coleridge: Studies in Honor of George McLean Harper, edited by Earl Leslie Griggs, pp. 87-117. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1939.

[In the following essay, Adams examines the manner in which Williams interpreted the events of the French Revolution for her reading public in England.]

“The most sensible women,” wrote George Dyer in 1792, “are more uniformly on the side of liberty than the other sex; witness a Macaulay, a Wollstonecraft, a Barbauld, a Jebb, a Williams, and a Smith.”¹ The establishment of such a generalization perhaps requires a greater range of observation of the sex than George Dyer could boast, but the list of women radicals who were writing with more or less distinction during the revolutionary era is very striking. We might add to those whom Dyer mentions Mary Hays, Maria Edgeworth, Mrs. Amelia Opie, Mrs. Mary Robinson, and Mrs. Inchbald. Of them all Mary Wollstonecraft was the sturdiest and most original intellect, but no one of them knew as much of the French Revolution first-hand, no one of them had such opportunities to observe the very soul of the machine, and no one of them left so complete a record of what she saw and heard and thought as Helen Maria Williams. No modern appraisal² has been made in English of this record in thirteen volumes³ of her more than thirty years' residence in France. The present study deals with her experiences only in so far as they affected or reflected the history of her opinions. It primary concern is not her recital of the great public events which shook France during the revolutionary period but the rôle which she played in interpreting France to England.

No Englishman, with the possible exception of Thomas Paine, knew intimately so many of the men and women who shaped the destinies of the French Revolution. In her apartment in the Rue Helvétius were instituted in the autumn of 1792 those political and literary reunions over the teacups on Sunday afternoons which attracted men of light and leading from various parts of the world, and her hospitality was kept up with comparatively little interruption as late as 1816. She had a decided taste for intellectual society and she indulged it on a very generous scale. Few Englishmen of importance came to Paris in the years after the beginning of the Revolution without calling on Helen Maria Williams. Her home was a sort of political and literary clearinghouse for her countrymen on the continent. When Wordsworth went to Orleans in 1791, he was armed with a letter of introduction to her from her friend, Mrs. Charlotte Smith; but he failed to see her, she having just left for Paris. One of her first English guests was Mary Wollstonecraft, who came to Paris in December 1792. Among her visitors in 1802, during the temporary suspension of hostilities between France and England, were Fox, Lord Holland, John Philip Kemble, Benjamin West, John Opie, and Thomas Poole.⁴ The Americans, Robert Livingston and Joel Barlow, were entertained. Barlow's letters to his wife tell of twelve visits made to Miss Williams's house between May and September of 1802 alone. At one time he writes of dining there with “the usual great circle of letter folk.” At another time he writes: “I was at Helen's last night; I believe she has a party almost every night—30 or 40 or 50, chiefly English.” In an unpublished letter to his wife of August 3, 1802, Barlow has left a vivid picture of the éclat received by one of Miss Williams's celebrities, Lady Mountcachell, a British noblewoman of democratic sympathies:

Here is a billet from Helen for this evening, with a promise that I shall have a seat next to Lady M———and gratis—for you must know there is so much of empressement to get these seats that I have sometimes raised a little insurrection to vindicate the equality of right in this case. At last I told them (Helen & my Lady) they had better make a speculation of these parties and let the seats next to them par abonnement.⁵

Mrs. Amelia Opie and Miss Anne Plumptre⁶ visited her in 1805. In 1816 Lady Morgan found at her salon a large and distinguished company of English visitors whom she had welcomed after the restoration. The Miss Hutchisons called upon her in 1817. In 1814 the Clarksons, who had known her in her youth, introduced Henry Crabb Robinson, and he in his turn brought the Wordsworths in 1820.⁷

The list of her close early personal friends in France is almost a roll call of the leaders of the Revolution. She knew well the principal Girondists as well as a number of the Jacobins in the days of their moderation, and she rode in the Bois de Boulogne with Napoleon Bonaparte. Revolutionists, republicans, Bonapartists, monarchists—the whole procession of French political leadership during those shifting and troublous times—she knew, if not in her own drawing room, in theirs. While the Girondists were in power the salons of Miss Williams and of Madame Roland were certainly among the leading places in Paris where responsible opinion was bred. “The deputies of the Gironde and Barère passed most of their evenings at our house,”⁸ she wrote in her account of the spring of 1793. Among those leaders of the revolutionary and post-revolutionary periods who are known to have sat at her table are the Rolands, Vergniaud, Grégoire, Barère, Dupin, André and Marie-Joseph Chénier, Ginguené, Échoucard Lebrun, Paul Rabaut, Rabaut Saint-Étienne, Isnard, L. N. M. Carnot, Champfort, Miranda, François Gérard, La Source, Jean Baptiste Say, and Bernardin de Saint-Pierre. Her house was the rendezvous of distinguished foreigners like Kosciusko, Bitaubé, and Alexander Humboldt. Beyond these, the list of her political and literary friends and acquaintances runs to an amazing length: Brissot, Madame de Villette, Madame Helvétius, Madame de Genlis, the Marquis de Sillery, Gensonné, Dupré, Louvet, Rouget de Lisle, Xavier de Maistre, Pétion, Dorat-Cubières, Servan, Esmenard, Fonfrede, Ducos, Marron, Ducis, Laffon-Ladébat, and Cambacières. Of those who were at one time or another her friends, Madame Roland, Brissot, Vergniaud, Gensonné, Rabaut Saint-Étienne, Sillery, Fonfrede, Ducos, La Source, Dupré, and André de Chénier were victims of the guillotine, and Roland and Pétion committed suicide to escape it. And no Englishman, except Thomas Paine, ran as great a risk of the guillotine as she. Helen Maria Williams was certainly in the center of the wild currents of revolutionary thought and events. Had her table talk been preserved, it would have been a fascinating record from the human point of view and at the same time an invaluable mine of material for the history of literary and political opinion.

That Miss Williams was a political romanticist is obvious enough. Truly for her France “took at once the attraction of a country in romance,” as Wordsworth was later to put it. “I sometimes think,” she exclaimed in 1792, “that the age of chivalry, instead of being passed forever, is just returned; not indeed in its erroneous notions of loyalty, honor, and gallantry, which are as little ‘à l'ordre du jour’ as its dwarfs, giants, and imprisoned damsels; but in its noble contempt of sordid cares, its spirit of unsullied generosity, and heroic zeal for the happiness of others.”⁹ In disposition she seems to have had as much in common with the French as with the English character. She liked the French “mixture of enthusiasm and nonchalance” and was always commending them for their easy mastery of the art of happiness.

But whatever French gayety she might have assimilated was compounded with a generous infusion of sentimentalism, derived mainly from Rousseau and Ossian. She was always nursing “that gentle and tender melancholy which it is luxury to indulge” and many were the times that she or her tragic characters were “bathed in floods of tears.” The youthful Wordsworth is supposed by some of his editors to have been moved by such an exhibition of her feelings to compose a sonnet entitled On Seeing Miss Helen Maria Williams Weep at a Tale of Distress.¹⁰ She wandered pensively about the haunts of Rousseau at Vevey, and one thing that attracted her to Bonaparte was his “sympathy for the elevated sentiments and pathetic sublimity of Ossian.”¹¹ In fact, she may even be called a political sentimentalist. With her it was not so much a matter of intellectual conviction as of emotional contagion. “My political creed,” she wrote in the summer of 1790, “is entirely an affair of the heart.”¹² And she followed the instincts of her heart unerringly:

When a proposition is addressed to my heart, I have some quickness of perception. I can then decide in one moment points upon which philosophers and legislators have differed in all ages.¹³

She probably wore her heart on her sleeve too much; and so she has frequently been charged with “affectation of sentiment and sensibility.” Mary Wollstonecraft spoke of her as affected but good-hearted.¹⁴ Her melancholy, however, had its roots too deep in tragic experience to be always merely sentimental.

Of course seeing life about her steadily and seeing it whole was almost precluded by her disposition, and was made impossible by her experiences, which, as she writes, “with all the detail of domestic sorrow, with the feelings of private sympathy, with the tears of mourning friendship … rise in sad succession like the ghosts of Banquo's line and pass along my shuddering recollection.”¹⁵ We may as well, then, not labor the point of her reliability as a historian. J. K. Laughton wrote that her impressions were “frequently formed on very imperfect, one-sided, and garbled information, travestied by the enthusiasm of a clever, badly educated woman and uttered with the cocksureness of ignorance.”¹⁶ It is vain to claim that she was impartial. She was not. She once referred with contempt to “the faction of the impartial.” A passionate interest in what is considered a struggle between good and evil hardly admits of rigorous exactness. Moreover, as Funck-Brentano remarks, she was “une femme et une femme passionnée.”¹⁷ But Laughton's charge of ignorance is too broadly drawn. She herself witnessed many of the scenes which she has described and knew personally most of the principal actors. It is true that, not being satisfied with merely describing what she saw, she allowed herself often—and sometimes tediously—to be drawn into moral dissertations on matters which were beyond her immediate knowledge. She laid no claim to philosophical depth, but she was undoubtedly a woman of cultivated tastes. Her historical unreliability, however, does not reflect upon her integrity; it is inherent in the very changeableness of the times and in the immediacy of the events about which she wrote. She wrote with honesty, though her “facts” came from interested parties. She was of course too near events to look at them with any perspective. After all, her books on the revolutionary period are probably as correct as any contemporary record by an actor in his own story can be.

Her sentimentalism was deeply rooted in a religious nature, and her sceptical political philosophy was blended with a comparatively positive theology. Her inherent piety revolted against both the spiritual irresponsibility and the scepticism of the French philosophers. She disapproved of “the ribaldry and licentiousness” of Voltaire, Rousseau, and Diderot in their attacks on “inherent prejudices,” and she pointed out to her English readers the more respectable manners of Milton, Locke, and Sidney in overthrowing political and ecclesiastical despotism. What recommended Louis XVI to her perhaps more than anything else was the fact that “amid the seduction of philosophical scepticism on the one hand and the licentiousness of a dissolute court on the other, he appears to have retained a deep sense of the importance of religion and was in his own person an example of unaffected piety.”¹⁸ Napoleon's indifference to religion was, on the other hand, an article in her final condemnation of him. She found a narrowness in free-thinking as well as in priest-ridden religion. While she accepted Brissot's nobility of purpose and his radical political ideas without question, she considered “his sceptical errors in religion” typical of the French men of letters, “whose ignorance in matters of religion is only equalled by their arrogance in rejecting what they have not examined.”¹⁹

Her attack upon the ecclesiastical system was from the Protestant rather than from the philosophical point of view. She had a horror for what she often referred to as “the spirit of the priesthood,”²⁰ though she paid her homage to the devout. In Christianity she found support for a modified equalitarianism:

Christianity … promotes that spirit of equality which suffers us to call no man master; not that leveling system, which under pretense of destroying distinctions degrades genius and debases virtue.²¹

Her Protestantism was inherited from ancestors who had fought under the flag of the Covenant. But she was a Calvinist in politics only. She renounced the Genevese democracy for shutting the doors against Catholics and wondered that Calvin “should have riveted the chains of religious despotism, while he became by his political institutions the father of civil liberty in Europe.”²² She herself reared two nephews in the freer Protestant tradition.²³ She frequently attended the spacious Protestant church of Monsieur Marron in Paris “with a mind touched and elevated by devotion” and rejoiced in the exercise under full toleration of the rite of the sacrament. Her connection with free-thinkers was habitual; yet she was in friendship with persons who, without renouncing philosophy, believed religion to be a better moral guide and who found in it a solid basis of future hope. Her reason helpless, she attained hope through that “almost intuitive sentiment by which the feelings of the heart overpower the sophistries of the head.”²⁴

We turn from generalizations to pertinent facts of Miss Williams's career and a more specific review of those of her writings which are relevant to our purpose.

As a whole, her early efforts at verse²⁵ are now mainly of interest because they show that her poetic bark, though frail, is launched upon the gradually swelling stream of romanticism. “To Sensibility” is dedicated to the benignant power the spirit of which she was never to violate:

No cold exemption from her pains
          I ever wished to know;
Cheered with her transport, I sustain
          Without complaint her woe.

Perhaps Bowles should share with Miss Williams some of the credit for the revival of the sonnet. Before the publication of his Fourteen Sonnets in 1789, she had employed both the Shakespearean and the Italian forms. Two of the five sonnets of the collected volumes of 1786 are tributes to Burns and Chatterton. Wordsworth commended the “Sonnet to Twilight” and the “Sonnet to the Moon.”²⁶ In the latter especially and in the “Sonnet to Hope” she achieves concentration, dignity, and grace of utterance. “An Epistle to Dr. Moore” is done with a happiness of expression that suggests the intimacy and the sincerity of her attachment to one who had ministered to both her physical and her intellectual health. Dr. John Moore's travels, which she here recalls her delight in reading, probably had much to do in the arousing of her interest in Europe. The earliest outright expression of her revolutionary sympathies is “The Bastille, A Vision,” a rather turgid poetic interlude in the novel Julia (1790), where also first appeared “Sonnet to the Moon.” But her passion for liberty had already found vent in 1788 in the poem, “The Slave Trade.” In a letter to her of August 1789 Burns, who often expressed his pleasure in her work, praised the poem very highly and criticized it in detail. He compared the portion describing a tempest to Thomson's Winter and declared that “the most beautiful passage in the poem … would do honor to the greatest names that ever graced our profession.”²⁷ But the modern reader will conclude that she might have better attained in prose the heights of indignant feeling which she failed to scale in her poetry. We must look to the prose of the years of her residence in France for the full flavor of her revolutionary writing.

Even before going to Paris the Williamses (Helen Maria resided with her mother and her sisters, Cecilia and Persis) were known for their literary entertainments in London. “They used to give very agreeable evening parties,” wrote the ubiquitous Samuel Rogers, “at which I have met many of the Scotch literati, Lord Monboddo, etc.”²⁸ Dr. Andrew Kippis, the nonconformist divine, who was Miss Williams's early literary sponsor and who often took the youthful Rogers with him to literary parties, had introduced him into her home in 1787, and Rogers became very intimate with her. During 1789 Godwin, according to Kegan Paul, was “a very constant visitor at the house of Miss Helen Maria Williams, where many literary people congregated almost every night at tea-time.”²⁹

There is, however, in Miss Williams's writings no mention of either Godwin or his wife by name. While she undoubtedly accepted most of the conclusions of Godwin's political philosophy, especially his faith in the progress of reason toward political justice, his abstractions were not romantic enough to appeal to her. She seems to have accepted in practice her friend Mary Wollstonecraft's ideas about the rights of women, but she rarely argued about them. She entered a brief against the refusal of educational opportunities to women:

She has no professor but her music-master, no academy but that of dancing. … She who exerts over man an empire which, being founded in nature, is as immutable as her laws and beyond the reach of his imperious institutions, is treated as a being merely passive in the important interests of the state.³⁰

She thought that the French republic had been just as remiss in awarding women their political as in awarding them their educational rights.

Miss Williams's one ambitious attempt at fiction was Julia, a novel in two volumes published in 1790. Julia belongs to the school of sensibility with which her friend Charlotte Smith and other pre-romantic novelists were associated at the time.³¹ Though in one place³² she satirizes the addiction of the public to novels of sensibility, its pangs afflict her on many a page. There is little or no hint of the revolutionary ferment in it. The emptiness of fashionable life is shown, but there is no protest against the economic status quo. She preaches no economic or social gospel. And yet she has been called a “political novelist.”³³ The only possible hint of her association with Godwin the year before its publication is the insistence upon passion's being reined by reason;³⁴ but reason with Miss Williams is a merely prudential concept rather than a broadly philosophical one.

It was not long before her destiny was shaped for France. In 1785 when she was seeking a French tutor for a young lady, a French woman was recommended to her. This lady, who lived under her maiden name, Mlle. Monique Coquerel, was the young wife of a Norman gentleman, son of a Baron du Fossé, but she herself was of humble parentage. The son had married against the wish of his despotic father, who had him confined for two years at Rouen through a lettre de cachet. Meantime the young wife with a child had taken refuge in England. Miss Williams at once became intensely interested in her fate as a victim of social tyranny and frequently befriended her. Undoubtedly much of her initial love for the French Revolution was excited by this instance of parental despotism under the sanction of law. After the Baron du Fossé had died in 1787 and after the son had finally succeeded with many difficulties to his chateau and his title in 1789, he invited Miss Williams and her sister Cecilia to come to France, as Funck-Brentano writes, “pour y contempler de près l'aurore de la liberté.” Naturally young Monsieur du Fossé (he renounced his title) was an enthusiastic supporter of the Revolution.

In the sketch of Miss Williams's life in the Dictionary of National Biography there is a confusion in both the date and the purpose of this first visit to France. “In 1788,” we read there, “she went over to France on a visit to her elder sister, Cecilia, who married Athanase Coquerel, a Protestant minister.”³⁵ The date of her arrival in Paris, as she tells us in the first sentence of her Letters written in France in the Summer of 1790, was July 13, 1790, the day before the first anniversary of the fall of the Bastille. Moreover, her sister, Cecilia, accompanied her and was not married until after the release of the Williamses from imprisonment in 1793.³⁶

Her first visit to France lasted from July to early September 1790. She seems to have lost no time in giving an account of it to her countrymen; for late in 1790 was issued the book above named, the first of those numerous volumes which, with those of her friend, Dr. John Moore,³⁷ are the most complete first-hand record by Englishmen of revolutionary France. These volumes make up the great bulk of her writings. In them all the author uses the epistolary form. It gives her an opportunity to vary her style in slipping freely from the grave to the gay; from the argumentative, the pathetic, or the sublime to the colloquial. And her content varies as well as her style: detached memoranda, occasional reflections, anecdotes, and luxuriant descriptions are all thrown together. She is often flighty; so embarrassed is she by the multitude of things to be put down that she sometimes cannot follow an exposition through.

Her style lacks simplicity and would be more elegant, if it were less ornamental. She revels in poetic periods. Crowded figures of speech, emotional ecstasies, and barbarous diction often rob her style of the gravity and decorum which the subject demands. In particular, she often shows an exasperating contempt of anglicism. Such words as “epocha,” “phasis,” “meridional,” “centrical,” and “epuration” are without excuse. Her use of un-English idioms leads one reviewer to observe that she has almost forgotten her own language. This handicap, which she never overcame, sometimes puts the English reader almost out of sympathy with her enthusiasm and generous sentiment. In general, as Saintsbury has remarked, her prose is “formal but not ungraceful, neither Johnsonian nor in any way slipshod.”³⁸

Miss Williams immediately immersed herself in the political swirl of Paris. Her first three letters give a rapturous account of the Festival of the Federation on July 14:

It was the triumph of human kind; it was man asserting the noblest privilege of his nature; and it required but the common feelings of humanity to become in that moment a citizen of the world.³⁹

Like most Frenchmen at the time, she believed that the violent part of the Revolution had ended with the taking of the Bastille. She assiduously attended the sessions of the Constituent Assembly and conceived a tremendous enthusiasm for Mirabeau, particularly because he proposed to the Assembly the abolition of the slave trade. She was invited by Pétion, the mayor of Paris, to dine with him at the Hôtel de Ville. Writes Funck-Brentano of this occasion:

Si grand était l'enthousiasme pour les réformes nouvelles que, à en croire Miss Williams, dans les salons du maire de Paris, les femmes ne cherchaient plus à plaire, ni les hommes à les aimer.⁴⁰

The palace at Versailles she could not much enjoy for fancying she saw “in the background of that magnificent abode of a despot the gloomy dungeons of the Bastille.”⁴¹

With a letter of introduction from Edward Jerningham, Miss Williams called upon Madame de Genlis at St. Leu, where she resided with the family of the Duke of Orleans, superintending the education of his children. This great admirer of the Revolution and pioneer of modern French education, entertained her with arguments against hereditary rank and in favor of democratic manners. These her guest considered well exemplified in the conduct of her educational charge, the young Prince of Chartres, later Louis Philippe, who rejoiced the young Englishwoman by his ready acquiescence in the abolition of primogeniture.

During the summer she visited Rouen and was fascinated by its antiquities, but she did not go to Caen, the burial place of William the Conqueror, since she would not “travel twelve leagues to see the tomb of a tyrant.”⁴² From Rouen she went to the chateau of Monsieur du Fossé in Normandy. Here on August 28 she took part in a dramatic piece, La Féderation, ou La Famille Patriotique.

In the last scene, I, being the representative of Liberty, appeared … guarding the consecrated banners of the nation, which were placed on an altar on which was inscribed in transparent letters: “À la Liberté, 14 Juillet, 1789.”⁴³

Upon her return to England the political self-complacency of her countrymen made her chafe with impatience, though the first volume of her Letters had been very well received.⁴⁴ Besides, she was amazed and pained by the persistent reports of French atrocities and by hearing “the charming societies in which I found all the elegant graces of the most polished manners, all the amiable urbanity of liberal and cultivated minds” spoken of as “the most rude, ferocious, and barbarous levellers that ever existed.”⁴⁵ This was about the time that Burke's Reflections had begun to leaven English opinion. She thought that the French aristocrats who had taken refuge in England were mainly responsible for the lack of English sympathy.

Her movements during the next two years have been followed very vaguely by those who have written about them. Funck-Brentano writes:

Pendant cette année 1791, elle fit encore paraître en Angleterre un volume de vers, puis détermina sa mère à revenir avec ses deux sœurs en France, où elle arriva peu de temps avant les événements du 10 août 1792.⁴⁶

He leaves her second visit to France, which is the subject of the second volume of the Letters, out of account entirely. Her failure to date her letters makes the chronology rather difficult. The first letter of this volume was written at the chateau of Monsieur du Fossé. Fortunately a letter of July 31, 1791, written by her friend, Mrs. Barbauld, to Samuel Rogers, sets the approximate date of their second departure from England:

Perhaps you know that Mrs. Williams and Cecilia are set out for France, and that Helen and the rest of the family are soon to follow. They pay a visit to their old friends [the family of Monsieur du Fossé] at Rouen before they settle at Orleans.⁴⁷

Miss Williams was in Rouen, she writes, “the day before the King accepted the Constitution.”⁴⁸ This undoubtedly refers to the renewal of the King's oath September 14, 1791. Soon afterwards she is writing from Orleans. Inspired by scenes of plenty and happiness about Orleans, she sends a rhyming letter to her friend, Dr. Moore, in which her French patriotism is loosed in a flood against those who

… hope their eloquence with taper ray
Can dim the blaze of philosophic day;
Those reasoners who pretend that each abuse,
Sanctioned by precedent, has some blest use.(49)

She is exasperated by the haughtiness and insolence of the aristocrats of the city, though she notes with pleasure that manners were becoming disburdened of contempt for commerce and of the “obsequious politeness” which the aristocrats had bred in the lower classes.

She left Orleans in December and passed the winter in Paris, doing the theaters with a truly Parisian taste for amusement, seeing the palaces about the city, attending the Legislative Assembly (which she thought inferior in talent to the Constituent Assembly), and visiting the Jacobin Club. She seems not yet to have sensed the extremes towards which some of the members of this famous revolutionary society were tending. Its main enemy then was the aristocratic faction. With the majority of French patriots at the time, she was “convinced that those watchful, vigilant, noisy Jacobins are the best guardians of French liberty.”⁵⁰ She exulted with them when the names of Milton, Locke, and Hampden rang through their hall.

Apparently it was at some time during this winter or spring that Miss Williams met Madame Roland through the Girondist Lanthenas. A group of spokesmen of the lower orders, including Robespierre, Brissot, Pétion, Buzot, and Vergniaud, all of whom were members of the Jacobin Club, were in the habit of meeting at the Roland's hotel four times a week between February and the early autumn of 1791. According to one writer, “probably one of her [Madame Roland's] guests at that time may have been Helen Maria Williams.”⁵¹ But this is impossible as Miss Williams did not arrive in Paris until December 1791 and evidently did not become well acquainted with her until afterwards.⁵² “Mme. Roland et Miss Williams allaient ensemble applaudir au club des Jacobins Brissot et Vergniaud,”⁵³ writes Funck-Brentano. This was probably in the days before the appointment of the Girondist ministry on March 23, 1792; for the breach began to widen rapidly between the moderates and Robespierre's faction soon afterwards. It was then, too, probably that Miss Williams became a frequenter of Madame Roland's evening salons, which were revived after the appointment of her husband to the ministry.

As a picture of French society and politics during this second visit, which ended April 20, 1792, the second volume of the Letters from France is quite superficial. As the Analytical Review put it,

Miss Williams does not venture into the depths of politics; but, sipping at the brink of the stream, she skims lightly over the subject, catching as she flies some of the shades of manners which the varying atmosphere presents.⁵⁴

Miss Williams was too restless with the desire of witnessing further triumphs of the Revolution to be longer satisfied in England. Upon her insistence, her mother and her two sisters accompanied her back to France, arriving just before the “suspension” of the King, August 10. They took up their residence in a hotel in the Rue de Lille. From this point, on August 10, she witnessed the attack on the Tuilleries and succoured a wounded Swiss, who died on her premises. The next day, while passing through the garden of the Tuilleries, she noticed two men, apparently sleeping on the grass, whom, to her consternation, she found to be dead. The account of this experience passed with gross exaggeration into England, and Boswell in his second edition of the Life of Johnson struck the word “amiable” out of his previous description of her because he had been repelled by the reported hardness of her nature.⁵⁵ But she stood proof against the insistence of her friends in England that she get out of France. Ann Seward wrote to her “dear Helen” to “fly that land of carnage” and was aghast that she should call “the fire which led the French into chaos the rising sun of Liberty.”⁵⁶ Thus the current of abuse and misrepresentation was soon set against her in England, and it had not subsided several decades afterwards.

After the massacres of September, the Williamses took an apartment in the Rue Helvétius⁵⁷ and here she settled down never, so far as is known, to return to England. Here, as has been said, was started at this time her famous salon, at which she was hostess every Sunday evening to the principal Girondists. She soon became well known, too, among the English in Paris. At the famous banquet of Englishmen in White's Hotel, Paris, on November 18, given to celebrate the French victories, a toast was drunk “To the Women of Great Britain, particularly those who have distinguished themselves by their writings in favor of the French Revolution, Mrs. Charlotte Smith and Miss H. M. Williams.”⁵⁸

The third and fourth volumes of the Letters from France were written during the first four months after the execution of the King in January 1793. Of the third volume, however, only the first letter is her own. Six of them are by her friend, John Hurford Stone, and deal with the campaign of 1792. The final letter is by Thomas Christie, Scotch revolutionary enthusiast. The fourth volume contains little of a personal nature and is concerned largely with the defection of Dumouriez and erroneous opinions of the Revolution in England. To the last topic we shall return in another connection. Her portion of the third volume is a spirited indictment of the Paris Commune, who were responsible for the September massacres, as a set of demagogues who “have committed more crimes than despotism would have achieved in ages” and whose errors, she fears, will lead surrounding nations to “sink back into the torpor of slavery.” From the beginning, her firm republicanism did not allow her to countenance the excesses of the Jacobins, whose club, now deserted by the republicans, was filled with intriguers. She laments that “great characters who began the Revolution, … Brissot, Condorcet, Sièyes, and Buzot,” are being reduced to silence or obscurity, while, as the spirit of faction grows, “all arts are absorbed in the single one of speaking or declaiming.” And she flays the faction of the Mountain, headed by Robespierre, Danton, and Marat, as the subverters of the Revolution who “endeavor to lead the people to the last degree of moral degradation by teaching that the love of order is the love of despotism, and that the most unequivocal proof of patriotism is to remain in permanent insurrection.”

She discusses the trial and execution of Louis XVI in a very judicial frame of mind. History will condemn the King, she thinks; but it will also condemn his judges, who deprived him, not only of his inviolability as King, but of his rights as a citizen. “Perhaps the irrevocable decree of posterity will reverse that of the National Convention.”⁵⁹ Yet she has respect for those Girondists who, without fear and in bitterness of heart, did what they considered their cruel duty in voting for his death.⁶⁰

Miss Williams's next publication was the account of her experiences during the Terror, issued in three volumes in 1795, which were the next year supplemented by a fourth volume bringing the account down to the establishment of the Directory in the fall of 1795.⁶¹ These volumes, forming the second series of the Letters from France, are replete with revealing details of her personal history and show her to have been something more than a mere observer of this tragic period.

Between May 31 and June 2, 1793, the Convention was invested by the Paris Commune and the Jacobins, and Miss Williams from her window overlooking the Tuilleries witnessed in part the accomplishment of the conspiracy of Robespierre. Upon the arrest of their friends, the Girondist deputies, on June 2, the Williamses “became a subject of discussion at the Committee of Public Safety.”⁶² The next day the notorious Barère came to her house hypocritically deploring the fate of the arrested deputies and execrating the faction of Robespierre whose lacquey he was immediately to become as one of the chiefs of the Committee of Public Safety and “the great inquisitor of the English in Paris.” He later called upon the army “to make no English prisoners … and to let no one return to the land of Great Britain nor one remain on the free soil of France.”⁶³ Miss Williams had plenty of reason for suspecting Barère of having betrayed the conversations of her drawing room. Knowing too, as he did, that she was the author of letters published in England attacking Robespierre, he had her life in his power. Besides, Barère had been personally offended by her refusal to receive some deputies of the Mountain whom he had wished to introduce. But nothing came at once of these bad omens.

Meanwhile she was faithful to her friends in adversity. General Miranda, while under the displeasure of the government for his alleged connection with the treachery of Dumouriez, enjoyed her hospitality. While the Convention on May 31 was drafting the decree of accusation against the famous Commission of Twelve appointed to investigate the conspiracies, Rabaut Saint-Étienne, its president, escaped from the hall and took refuge in Miss Williams's house until midnight. He later sought safety from arrest at the house of a M. and Mme. Payzac, both of whom were eventually guillotined with him for sheltering him. She twice visited Madame Roland in prison. Amid the horrors of Saint-Pélagie she found her indulging her life-long passion for Plutarch and prepared to meet death with an exalted firmness. After Madame Roland was removed to the Conciergerie she sent to Miss Williams manuscripts, which, along with some of Madame de Genlis and her own, Miss Williams was compelled to destroy when she was later threatened with a domiciliary visit. “Had they been found in my possession,” she wrote, “they would inevitably have involved me in her fate.”⁶⁴ While the Girondists were under arrest in their own houses, she visited Fonfrede, Vergniaud, and Ducos in their hotel. The day before his unexpected proscription Fonfrede had accompanied her to Montmorenci, where they wandered together in the midst of the enchanting scenery described by Rousseau.

On October 11, while she was entertaining Bernardin de Saint-Pierre at tea and he was in the midst of a description of a projected idyllic retreat, a friend rushed in to tell her that all the English not resident in France before 1789 were to be arrested by the Convention as hostages for Toulon. At 2 a.m. the family were hurried out of bed to the guardhouse by commissaries and their property was seized by the nation. The next evening, after a day spent in the committee room, they were sent to the Luxembourg.⁶⁵ Here the keeper, Benoit, was very kind to them, but the visits of the vulgar Henriot, commandant of the military guard of Paris, were frightful experiences. The two apartments adjoining theirs were occupied by their friends, Sillery and La Source, who had long been in close confinement and who were soon to be dragged to the scaffold. La Source actually eluded the guard to visit the Williamses in their room and upon a second visit was accompanied by Sillery. They all found comfort together in religious devotions and every night the deputies sang in Miss Williams's hearing a dirge which they had composed together. Upon their final parting each gave her a lock of his hair. Because of a scandal the sexes were separated on October 26, forty women being sent to the English Conceptionist Convent. Here they were allowed to exercise in the garden and to talk to their friends.

The Williamses regained their liberty during the last days of November⁶⁶ largely through the application of Athanase Coquerel, the nephew of their friend, Madame du Fossé, who was affianced at the time to Cecilia and who did not delay in marrying her after her release. He was aided in his efforts at obtaining their freedom by the poet Dorat-Cubières and Jean de Bry,⁶⁷ later a leader in reconstruction after the Terror.

As the Terror continued on its bloody way she does not seem to have sought retirement. On April 5, 1794, she saw Danton, Desmoulins, and thirteen other victims on their way to execution. But on April 16 Robespierre caused a law to be passed ordering all nobility and strangers to leave Paris in ten days under penalty of the law. The Williamses retired to a retreat one half mile from Marly near Versailles, passing on their way the Square of the Revolution, where they saw the guillotine surrounded by a crowd awaiting the execution of a company of victims just entering the place. It was not long, however, before “two benevolent commissaries” of the revolutionary committee of their section obtained permission for them to return to Paris with a status which was supposed to exclude them from suspicion and proscription. But in June, haunted more than ever by fear of further persecution for her writings against the Jacobins, she fled to Switzerland with her friend John Hurford Stone⁶⁸ and took up her residence at Basel.

She seems from the extent of her travels and from the statement that during the winter of 1794 they passed through Franche-Comté on their way to Paris, to have spent about six months in Switzerland. Her observations there were published under the title, A Tour in Switzerland, in two volumes in 1798. The book is a hodge-podge of natural description, history, political discussion, and social reflections. She did not have a high opinion of Swiss liberty before the French Revolution had affected the country, as “the original freedom of most of their institutions had degenerated into coteries of family domination and personal interest.”⁶⁹ And she defended the revolution in Switzerland, asserting that the French had destroyed only the liberty of the sovereign magistrates of the cantons not that of the people. But she did not uphold in general the principle of interference with the independence of a foreign country.

Even through the Terror she remained as staunch a friend as ever to the original principles of the Revolution. She thought that the carelessness of the Parisians as to whether Girondists or Jacobins ran the government, was responsible largely for the tyranny of Robespierre. But, in the end, she absolves the French people as a whole from responsibility for the crimes of the period:

I should be equally unjust to present the English as a barbarous nation because a Clive has starved the provinces of Asia or because upon the coasts of Africa the slave merchants traffic in human life.⁷⁰

Upon returning to Paris “when Liberty, bleeding with a thousand wounds, revived once more,” she took up her restless pen to write the second series of her Letters. In 1795 she brought out her translation of her friend Bernardin de Saint-Pierre's Paul et Virginie, a work which she had begun while in prison and the first of a series of translations.⁷¹ In the spring of this year she attended with satisfaction the trial of the notorious Fouquier-Tinville, who was guillotined by the Directory for his part in the Terror. Her life under the Directory and the Consulate is told in a series of letters in two volumes written between 1799 and 1801 and entitled Sketches of the State of Manners and Opinions in the French Republic towards the Close of the Eighteenth Century. The theme is of a very rambling nature, part of the volumes dealing with the revolution in Switzerland. Like most Frenchmen, she eventually became disgusted with the inefficiency of the Directory, condemning its persecution of the Catholics, the subjection of the judges to the will and caprice of the people, and the failure to submit cases of property to juries. On the memorable 9th of November, 1799, when she happened to be riding in the Park of St. Cloud, she witnessed in the Orangery the transfer of power from the Directory to the Consulate. Since she saw the best possible could not be soon attained, she contented herself with the best practicable under the new government.

Meantime she tried her powers at short fiction in Perourou, the Bellows-Mender (1801). This tale, marred by false taste and sentiment though it is, shows the leaven of the Revolution in its satire of rank and its association of honor and poverty. It was destined to attain a great posthumous fame through Bulwer Lytton's adaptation of it for the stage as The Lady of Lyons in 1838.

In 1803 she embarked on an ill-starred editorial venture, The Political and Confidential Correspondence of Louis the Sixteenth, with Observations on each Letter, in three volumes. The manuscripts of these letters, which were later shown not to have been genuine, were naïvely bought from a bookseller. A special reason for setting her hand to this task was that the French editors of the King's correspondence had praised him in such a way as to detract from the Revolution. The work was met by a storm of abusive criticism from English reviewers.⁷² But it was reserved for Bertrand de Moleville, a former minister of state under Louis XVI, to provide a climax for the chorus of disapproval with his A Refutation of the Libel on the Memory of the late King (translated by R. C. Dallas, 1804). He heaps scurrility and vulgar abuse on Miss Williams and attacks all her writings with a discourtesy and a demoniac frenzy that won him fewer unprejudiced readers in England than Miss Williams's book itself had won. It appears that she deserved blame only for her credulity. “On ne l'a jamais accusée,” writes Breton de la Martinière, “d'avoir en cette publication, joué le rôle de mystificateur.”⁷³ Only war hysteria against France, then threatening invasion of Ireland, can account for such a uniformly hostile reception of the work in England. For, after all, her judgment of the King and royal family accords well with the calm verdict of history.

Her feelings towards Napoleon were consistent with her earlier political sentiments. Of course a woman like her could not escape “that glow of admiration which the rare union of excellent qualities excites.” At first he appeared to her a champion of liberty, and he played the rôle well in Italy. Even when he dissolved the Directory, her faith was not shaken. But in spite of her personal liking for him, republican as she was, she could not pardon his self-aggrandizement. She was even to suffer personally for a while his displeasure. An ode, written by her in the early summer of 1802 on the Peace of Amiens, had irritated him by its reference to the “subject waves” of England. She and her whole family were arrested by the police, and she was detained a prisoner for twenty-four hours. From the time that Napoleon made himself consul for life, all her illusion was dispelled. She was soon renewing her intimate relations with the republicans, especially Carnot and Esmenard.

As the course of French empire took its way eastward over Europe, crushing popular liberty as well as crowns, her thoughts withdrew from the political scene, “marked by every turpitude, crime, tyranny, and disgrace that could afflict a country,”⁷⁴ into the reserve of her own soul. In explanation of her literary inactivity between 1803 and 1815, she wrote: “The iron hand of despotism has weighed upon my soul and subdued all intellectual energy.”⁷⁵ In the latter year there appeared A Narrative of Events which have taken place in France from the Landing of Napoleon Bonaparte on the First of March 1815 till the Restoration of Louis XVIII. Here for the first time the years seem to be stealing fire from her mind. She is beginning to look with an apologetic air upon her days of high hope for the Revolution when she was “not yet cured of enthusiasm.” In this book she is more conscious of the calamities of the Revolution than of its victories. The return from Elba, according to her, was made possible by the remains of the Jacobin party and the military. “The military ravagers of other countries,” she declared, “can never become the civic defenders of their own.”⁷⁶

The year after Waterloo she reopened her salon and resumed her Sunday afternoon teas. But her means were hardly sufficient to maintain such an establishment long. Her friend Stone, who had been a prosperous printer in Paris, had been ruined in business in 1813. Her last publication, issued in 1819, Letters on Events which have passed in France since the Restoration in 1815, was, it appears, hurriedly composed to bolster her income. Almost half the book is taken up by a recital of the persecution of the Protestants in southern France in 1815. The narrative is often completely lost in historical retrospects and moral dissertations. But she did not end, as one writer has said, “an enemy of the Revolution”⁷⁷ or “repudiate her revolutionary sympathies,”⁷⁸ as another has written. On the first page of this last book she could write:

The interest I once took in the French Revolution is not chilled, and the enthusiasm I once felt for the cause of liberty still warms my bosom.

She did arrive at a very sober realization of the limitations of human nature. Nor was she in any very positive or comprehensive way “a friend of the Bourbons,”⁷⁹ as she has been called. The Bourbons whom she really admired were of the more liberal branch—the Duke of Orleans, who was guillotined by the Mountain as a Girondist, and his son, the Duke of Chartres, afterwards Louis Philippe, who was sincerely devoted to the Revolution. She did commend Louis XVIII as the defender of constitutional government against the violent partisans of the oligarchic party. She was, then, a friend of the Bourbons, but not in reaction against the Revolution. She welcomed the accession of Louis XVIII, as she would have welcomed that of almost any other ruler, as a refuge from Napoleonic tyranny. Better a chastened Bourbon than a rampant Napoleon.

Like many of the political romanticists whom France had disappointed, she saw across the Atlantic the promise of the more abundant life which “the American dream” was then offering. In an unpublished letter of June 15, 1815, now preserved in the collection of Barlowana at St. Helena, Calif., she wrote to her friend Mrs. Barlow in America with characteristic sentiment:

If the American government would endow me and my nephews with a cottage on the bank of one of your majestic rivers, thither would I hasten, and pass my days in composing orisons in praise of liberty—but such happiness belongs to the dreams of fancy.

After Stone's death in 1818, her fortune was exhausted, and she and her surviving sister, Persis, were invited to live in Amsterdam with their nephew, A. L. C. Coquerel, pastor of a French Protestant church there. But, removed from her literary circle and personal friends, she was thrown into such depression of spirits by

The Hollander's phlegmatic ease,
Too cold to love, too dull to please,

that her nephew took her back to Paris and settled an annuity upon her. Here she died December 14, 1827, and was buried beside Stone in Père Lachaise.

Her memory has never been cleared of the obloquy which the enemies of the French Revolution heaped upon her and she still remains almost without honor in her native country. From the time she went to France, not only were her works denounced as fabricated, but her reputation as a woman was attacked. Her sex did not protect her. In that citadel of respectability, the Gentleman's Magazine, the reviewer of the second series of the Letters wrote:

She has debased her sex, her heart, her feelings, her talents in recording such a tissue of horror and villainy and daring to insult a regular government and a happy people with such details, whose result, we defy her to show has yet been productive of one single good.⁸⁰

And in its obituary notice it referred to her as “preeminent among the violent female devotees of the Revolution.” Horace Walpole, with his penchant for the biting phrase, called her “a scribbling trollop.” Undoubtedly the irregularity of her connection with Stone was responsible for much of the defamation piled upon her,⁸¹ as well as the fact that he had been under indictment in England for treason in connection with the projected French invasion.⁸² The Anti-Jacobin⁸³ impaled Miss Williams and Madame de Stael together on a bawdy rhyme. In The Vision of Liberty, a satirical imitation of Spenser appearing in its successor, the Anti-Jacobin Review and Magazine,⁸⁴ she is made to represent lechery in a procession of the Seven Deadly Sins. According to it, her works are characterized by “an inveterate hatred of all existing establishments, by an earnest desire to promote their destruction, and by a contempt of truth, decency, and decorum, which constitute the general characteristics of a female mind infected with the poison of democracy.” In the broadside attack of the Reverend Richard Polwhele against all women radicals, called The Unsexed Females (1798), Miss Williams is given one of the places of dishonor. In this astounding piece of literary barbarity, she is “an intemperate advocate of Gallic licentiousness … importing with her a blast more pestilential than Avernus.” A sufficient refutation of such calumnies is patent in what has been written above. The piously respectable duly lamented her fall from grace and the fame of her sentimental salad days. We read in the Ladies' Monthly Museum for January 1816:

She had a tenderness and delicacy of soul and was a sincere friend of all order—moral, civil, and religious. But how frail is the best nature when it is powerfully assailed and gradually and habitually corrupted by inhuman and impious and by licentious and profligate examples.

William Beloe, writing about her at the very time when she was the cynosure of English eyes in Paris, left this evidence of the asperities of old age:

She received before she went to France the respect and attention of many of the most considerable persons in this country, both for talent and rank. What is she now? If she lives—and whether she lives or not, few know and nobody cares—she is a wanderer—an exile, unnoticed and unknown.⁸⁵

In short, one cannot escape agreeing with Professor Harper, the only contemporary writer who has suggested a re-evaluation of Miss William's career towards a more sympathetic interpretation, when he says:

The authority of her works has been contemptuously denied, partly because of their bias, but even more, I think, through the partisan prejudice of her critics.⁸⁶

An examination of Miss Williams's writings discloses little or nothing to support the idea that her influence was dangerous to British institutions. Her relations to English political life were not close, and she expressed her ideas on English politics rarely, and generally in an incidental fashion. She charges general misrepresentation of the Revolution, either through ignorance or design, in English newspapers. She defends the originators of the Revolution against the charge of imperialism made by the English. But she does not seem actively interested in revolutionary propaganda in England. In fact, she thought that the genius of the English people would find more moderate means to the same end:

While France has been obliged to correct her government by holding in one hand her philosophic declaration of rights and grasping her unsheathed sword in the other—may England effect the same august purpose with no other arms than those of reason.⁸⁷

She probably hurt the English by her justifiable attack upon Nelson for his treatment of the patriots at Naples in 1799. But in her criticism of Burke there is little of the vehemence with which Paine and others assailed him. She is not of the opinion that kings can do no good; Burke himself, she thinks, delivers “a shocking satire on every humane and just prince”⁸⁸ when he calls the Bastille the King's castle. It appears from a note left by the United Irishman, Wolfe Tone, that she had no sympathy for the invasion of the British Isles by France. In July 1796, when he was in Paris to confer on the French invasion of Ireland, he met Stone walking with her in the garden of the Tuilleries, and dined with them. Stone “was very hearty, but H. M. Williams is Miss Jane Bull completely.”⁸⁹

On the whole, it is difficult to see any basis whatever for all this hue and cry against her for attempting to subvert the English government. She simply adopted another country. She does not seem to have been very thoroughly informed about what was going on in England, and what interest she had in a revolution there was very probably only the result of a sympathetic rather than an active enlistment in the schemes of Stone.

Miss Williams did not answer her detractors at all, much less in kind. Such papers as the Anti-Jacobin prints, written, as she said for tea-circles in London, did not touch her in Paris with their calumnies; besides “those who have lived amidst the scenes of the French Revolution have learned to parry or despise more formidable weapons.”⁹⁰ But in England, where the abuse of her grew with no one to scotch it, she was soon consigned to Limbo and she has been there ever since. It is hoped that she has been shown worthy at least of a upper seat in Purgatory.

Notes

1. Poems, p. 36 n.

2. The only extended notice, so far as I have been able to discover, that has been taken of Miss Williams during the last century, is F. Funck-Brentano's Hélène Maria Williams, a biographical sketch prefacing his Le Règne de Robespierre, a translation, published in 1909, of the four volumes of her Letters which deal with the period between Robespierre's rise to power and the establishment of the Directory. I have found it useful for information about her French associations, exclusive of what she herself gives. Funck-Brentano's book has recently appeared in English in the Sundial Illustrated Historical Series under the title, Memoirs of the Reign of Robespierre, London, 1929. The sketch in the Dictionary of National Biography is inaccurate, if not prejudiced. J. R. MacGillivray, in an unpublished Harvard thesis, Wordsworth and His Revolutionary Acquaintances, 1791-1797 (1930), has given the details of the relations between Miss Williams and Wordsworth. See pp. 23-5, 44, 70-1, 89.

3. They are Letters written from France in the Summer of 1790, 1790; Letters from France, 4 vols., 1792-1796 (the first volume is a reprint of the above; the second bears the title, Letters from France containing many New Anecdotes relative to the French Revolution and the present State of French Manners; the third and fourth bear the title, Letters from France containing a great variety of interesting and original Information concerning the most Important Events that have lately occurred in that Country and particularly respecting the Campaign of 1792); Letters from France, 4 vols., 1795-1796 (the first two were issued under the title, Letters containing a Sketch of the Politics of France from the Thirty-first of May, 1793 till the 10th of Thermidor, Twenty-eighth of July, 1794; the third volume bears the title, Letters containing a Sketch of the Scenes which passed in various Departments of France during the Tyranny of Robespierre and of the Events which took place in Paris on the Tenth of Thermidor; the fourth volume, taking the account from Robespierre to the Directory, was added to the second edition of the other three in 1796); Sketches of the State of Manners and Opinions in the French Republic towards the close of the Eighteenth Century, 2 vols., 1801; A Narrative of the Events which have taken place in France from the landing of Napoleon Bonaparte on the 1st of March 1815 to the Restoration of Louis XVIII, 1815; Letters on the Events which have passed in France since the Restoration in 1815, 1819; Souvenirs de la Revolution française, a translation by C. A. Coquerel of unpublished manuscripts. The list is exclusive of her observations in her A Tour of Switzerland, or a View of the present State of the Governments and Manners of those Cantons, with comparative Sketches of the present State of Paris, 1798, and in her edition of The Political and Confidential Correspondence of Louis XVI, 1803. For convenience I refer to the first four volumes as Letters from France, first series, and to the second four volumes as Letters from France, second series. Other titles are abbreviated also.

   In Four New Letters of Mary Wollstonecraft and Helen Maria Williams, edited by Benjamin P. Kurtz and Carrie C. Autrey, Berkeley, Calif., 1937, appears for the first time an important letter of Miss Williams to Mrs. Joel Barlow, conjecturally dated April 6-16, 1794. See the present author's review of this volume in American Literature, Vol. IX, pp. 386-8 (November 1937). Four unpublished letters to Mrs. Barlow and one to Joel Barlow, written between 1811 and 1815, are in the possession of Barlow heirs at St. Helena, Calif. Mrs. Sarah S. Van Mater, of St. Helena, has kindly provided me with transcriptions of these letters.

4. In a letter to Coleridge, July 20, 1802, Poole writes: “Kemble went with us last night to Miss Williams's house. We there met, first Miss Williams herself, who is a very obliging woman, but a little affected. Lord Holland was there. … Carnot, the ex-director, was there. … At this party were also Mr. Livingston (the American ambassador), Joel Barlow, Italian Princesses and German Princes, many of the literati of Paris, etc., etc.” (Mrs. Henry Sandford, Thomas Poole and his Friends, London, 1888, Vol. II, pp. 85-6.) In another letter to Coleridge of August 22, he writes that he has been “three times to Miss Helen Maria Williams's conversations.” (ibid., Vol. II, p. 90.)

5. The originals of these letters are in the Barlow Papers, a collection in the Harvard College Library. Portions of the letters have been published by C. B. Todd, Life and Letters of Joel Barlow, New York, 1886, pp. 184, 195, 197, 202. Her intimacy with the Barlows, as four extant unpublished letters of her own to them show, was renewed during the year they spent in Paris while Barlow was on his mission to Napoleon as minister plenipotentiary from the United States.

6. Miss Plumptre, a writer now forgotten, was a novelist of revolutionary sympathies and, according to William Beloe, one of those “female Machievels” who “with the most superficial knowledge presume to pass judgment on the political rights and conditions of nations” and who was deflected from a pious youth by her friendship for Miss Williams. (The Sexagenarian, London, 1818, Vol. I, p. 363.) From 1802 to 1805 she resided in France and in 1810 told of her experiences in A Narrative of Three Years' Residence in France. She was both a democrat and a worshipper of Napoleon.

7. On October 25 Miss Williams wrote to Robinson to thank him for introducing the Wordsworths: “I am much flattered that you thought me worthy of them, and am grateful to them for having devoted to me two or three quiet evenings. … I left politics, the laws of election, and the charter to take care of themselves, while I was led by Mr. Wordsworth's society to that world of poetical illusion, so full of charms, and from which I have so long been absent. Miss Wordsworth has a desire to see my last little volume [Letters on Events … since the Restoration], your protégé. Will you obtain a copy for her of the second edition?” (George McLean Harper, William Wordsworth, New York, 1923, Vol. II, pp. 319-20.) As late as 1843 Wordsworth spoke in appreciative reminiscence of Miss Williams. See ibid., Vol. I, p. 150.

8. Letters from France, second series, Vol. I, p. 181.

9. ibid., first series, Vol. II, p. 5. In this series I have used the fifth edition of Vol. I and the second edition of Vols. II, III, and IV.

10. See George McLean Harper, op. cit., Vol. I, pp. 148-9.

11. A Tour of Switzerland, Vol. II, p. 57. But she wrote later: “I did not then know that Bonaparte valued Ossian for his descriptions of battles, like the surgeon who praised Homer only for his skill in anatomy.” (Sketches … of Manners and Opinions, Vol. I, p. 6.) Esmenard once gave her a humorous account of how being forced to carry out a commission to revise certain offensive passages against tyranny in the tragic poets, he was several times closeted with Napoleon while committing this species of literary murder.

12. Letters from France, first series, Vol. I, p. 66.

13. ibid., Vol. I, p. 196.

14. “Her manners are affected, yet the simple goodness of her hearts continually breaks through the varnish, so that one would be more inclined to love than admire her. Authorship is a heavy weight for female shoulders, especially in the sunshine of prosperity.” (Letter from Paris, December 24, 1792, to Everina Wollstonecraft, C. Kegan Paul, William Godwin, His Friends and Contemporaries, London, 1876, Vol. I, pp. 208-9.)

15. Letters from France, second series, Vol. I, p. 7.

16. Sketch in the Dictionary of National Biography.

17. Hélène Maria Williams, p. 32.

18. Political and Confidential Correspondence of Louis XVI, Vol. II, p. 40.

19. Letters from France, second series, Vol. III, p. 62. See also ibid., first series, Vol. IV, p. 32; second series, Vol. I, p. 47; Vol. II, pp. 88, 107; Sketches … of Manners and Opinions, Vol. II, p. 202.

20. For her fanatical hostility to monasticism, see Sketches … of Manners and Opinions, Vol. I, p. 43, and A Tour of Switzerland, Vol. I, p. 22.

21. Sketches … of Manners and Opinions, Vol. II, p. 122.

22. A Tour in Switzerland, Vol. II, p. 175.

23. In 1798, her sister, Cecilia, wife of Athanase Coquerel, died, leaving two small sons, Athanase Laurent Charles and Charles Augustin. She became a second mother to the children and reared them in the traditions of the Protestant religion and the liberal ideas which she had espoused. Both became prominent French Protestant leaders. Athanase Coquerel fils, well known for his liberal views and his eloquence, published numerous works in Protestant theology and in 1848 became a member of the Assembly. C. A. Coquerel won an important place as the historian of French Protestantism. He wrote an appreciation of his aunt as the introduction to the Souvenirs de la Révolution française.

24. Sketches … of Manners and Opinions, Vol. II, p. 213. See also in this connection her account of her visit to Lavater, German poet and mystic, A Tour of Switzerland, Vol. I, p. 72.

25. Edwin and Eltruda (1782), An Ode on the Peace (1783), Peru (1784), Poems, 2 vols. (1786).

26. See letter of May 10, 1830, to Alexander Dyce, Letters of the Wordsworth Family, edited by William Knight, Boston, 1907, Vol. II, p. 428. But whatever knowledge Wordsworth had of her work was not reciprocated until rather late. It is surprising to learn that, when in 1814 Crabb Robinson repeated some of Wordsworth's sonnets to her, she did not remember having heard of the poet before. See George McLean Harper, op. cit., Vol. I, p. 149.

27. Letters of Robert Burns, edited by J. De Lancey Ferguson, Oxford, 1931, Vol. I, p. 355. See also ibid., Vol. I, pp. 76-7, 116.

28. Recollections of the Table Talk of Samuel Rogers, edited by Alexander Dyce, New York, 1856, p. 50. A full reproduction of an evening's talk at her house April 21, 1791, was left by Rogers in his diary. On this particular occasion Henry Mackenzie, Joanna Baillie, Jerningham, Merry, Dr. John Moore, and Dr. Kippis were among her guests. See P. W. Clayden, Early Life of Samuel Rogers, London, 1887, pp. 145-52.

29. William Godwin, London, 1876, Vol. I, p. 63. An entry in Godwin's diary for November 17, 1789, reads: “Tea with Holcroft at Miss Williams'.” (ibid., Vol. I, p. 64.)

30. Sketches … of Manners and Opinions, Vol. II, p. 54.

31. See James R. Foster, “Charlotte Smith, Pre-Romantic Novelist,” Publications of the Modern Language Association of America, Vol. XLIII, pp. 463-76. Like Mrs. Smith's landscapes, Miss Williams's are poetic; but, unlike hers, they are not exotic. They are done in water colors. But most of them are not organically parts of the scene; they are used for figurative purposes only. Some of her similes are exquisite. She often knits up the action or the impression into a long simile at the end which leaves a flashing wake in the path of the narrative. Julia has nothing of the paraphernalia of terror which most novels of sensibility had.

32. Vol. II, p. 48.

33. S. A. Allibone, Critical Dictionary of English Literature.

34. See Vol. I, pp. iii, 178.

35. The error is probably traceable to the obituary notice in the Gentleman's Magazine, Vol. XCVIII, i, p. 373.

36. See Letters from France, second series, Vol. I, p. 212. O. F. Emerson, though correcting the date of the arrival, has left the date of the marriage confused. Moreover, she had not “gone to reside in Paris in 1790.” (Italics mine.) See his “Notes on Gilbert Imlay,” PMLA [Publications of the Modern Language Association of America], Vol. XXXIX, p. 420 (June 1924).

37. A Journal during a Residence in France from the beginning of August to the middle of December 1792, 2 vols. (1793-1794); A View of the Causes and Progress of the French Revolution, 2 vols. (1795).

38. History of English Literature in the Nineteenth Century, London, 1896, p. 30.

39. Letters from France, first series, Vol. I, p. 14.

40. op. cit., p. 15.

41. Letters from France, first series, Vol. I, p. 83.

42. ibid., Vol. I, p. 121.

43. ibid., Vol. I, p. 204.

44. See Monthly Review, Vol. IX, pp. 93-8; Analytical Review, Vol. VII, pp. 431-5; European Magazine, Vol. XVIII, p. 472.

45. Letters from France, first series, Vol. I, p. 219.

46. op. cit., p. 16.

47. P. W. Clayden, Early Life of Samuel Rogers, p. 179.

48. Letters from France, first series, Vol. II, p. 2.

49. ibid., Vol. II, p. 12.

50. ibid., Vol. II, p. 110.

51. Winifred Stephens, Women of the French Revolution, New York, 1922, p. 114.

52. Miss Williams herself writes indefinitely: “I had been acquainted with her since I first came to France.” (Letters from France, second series, Vol. I, p. 204.) But this seems doubtful, since the Rolands were not residents of Paris at the time of her visit in 1790.

53. op. cit., p. 16.

54. Vol. XIII, p. 386.

55. “I was sorry to be obliged to strike it out; but I could not in justice suffer it to remain, after this young lady had not only written in favour of the savage Anarchy with which France has been visited, but had (as I have been informed by good authority) walked without horror over the ground at the Tuilleries, when it was strewed with the naked bodies of the faithful Swiss Guards, who were barbarously massacred for having bravely defended, against a crew of ruffians, the Monarch whom they had taken an oath to defend. From Dr. Johnson she could now expect not endearment but repulsion.” (Life of Johnson, Oxford edition, Vol. II, p. 542 n.) In their meeting in 1784 she had won the old man's heart. See ibid., Vol. II, pp. 542-3.

56. Letters of Anna Seward, London, 1811, Vol. III, p. 205.

57. Ten years later she moved to the Quai Malaquai. See letter of July 4, 1802, from Joel Barlow to Mrs. Barlow in the Barlow Papers.

58. J. G. Alger, Paris in 1789-1794, New York, 1892, p. 326.

59. Letters from France, first series, Vol. IV, p. 10.

60. Among the Girondists who came at this time to accept Miss Williams's hospitality and to be charmed by her vivacious manners, one young deputy, Bancal des Issarts, fell deeply in love with her. In the prosecution of his suit he was encouraged by Madame Roland, but Miss Williams did not fully reciprocate his feelings. One happy result of the attachment, however, was that she persuaded him to vote against the death of the King. See Lettres de Mme. Roland, edited by C. Perroud, Vol. II, pp. 466-9.

61. The bibliography of her political writings in the Dictionary of National Biography is incomplete at this point. Neither the third nor the fourth volume is listed.

62. Letters from France, second series, Vol. I, p. 187.

63. ibid., Vol. III, p. 149.

64. ibid., Vol. I, p. 207.

65. The Temple has been mistakenly given as the place of her confinement. See Gentleman's Magazine, Vol. XCVIII, i, p. 373; S. A. Allibone, Critical Dictionary of English Literature; and Thomas Sadler (editor), Diary, Reminiscences, and Correspondence of Henry Crabb Robinson, London, 1872, Vol. I, p. 367 n.

66. P. W. Clayden incorrectly states that she was “liberated after the fall of Robespierre.” Furthermore, he has exaggerated her danger in the statement that “but for an oversight she would have been carried to the guillotine,” as has also J. R. MacGillivray in the assertion that she “barely escaped the final rites of the guillotine.” (Early Life of Samuel Rogers, pp. 68-9; Wordsworth and His Revolutionary Acquaintances, 1791-1797, p. 23.) J. De Lancey Ferguson, too, is mistaken in writing that she “was imprisoned from the fall of the Gironde until the fall of Robespierre.” (Appendix to Life and Letters of Robert Burns, Vol. II, p. 375.)

67. Her friend, Marie-Joseph Chénier, who had been asked by these men, to help in the liberation of the English, excused himself. “He was always obsessed,” writes Miss Williams, “by the idea of the guillotine.” The fate of his brother later showed that he was not unwise.

68. From this point on, Stone played a very important rôle in the life of Miss Williams, though she writes little directly about him. He had been arrested on October 10, 1793, and confined in the Luxembourg at the same time as Miss Williams. He was released after seventeen days, but was arrested again in April 1794 because of his Girondist sympathies and released on condition that he should leave France. Stone and Helen Maria Williams were made to understand each other. Both were generous in their feelings and ardent for liberty. Why they kept the exact nature of their relationship secret, it is hard to say. It has been thought that Bishop Grégoire secretly married them after Stone announced his divorce from Rachel Coope in June 1794.

69. Sketches … of Manners and Opinions, Vol. I, p. 22.

70. F. Funck-Brentano, op. cit., p. 151.

71. She translated eight volumes of Humboldt's travels and Xavier de Maistre's Lépreux de la Cité d'Aoste. The Dictionary of National Biography incorrectly refers to the latter as “one of the tales of J. de Maistre.” In her turn she has been honored by the translation of twelve of her volumes on the revolutionary period into French. J. B. Say translated A Tour in Switzerland, and Boufflers and Esmenard, two members of the Academy, translated her poems.

72. See Monthly Review, Vol. XLIII, pp. 225-35; Critical Review, second series, Vol. XXXIX, pp. 36-44; Annual Review, Vol. II, pp. 275-9; Monthly Magazine, Vol. XVI, p. 616; Edinburgh Review, Vol. III, p. 213.

73. Quoted by F. Funck-Brentano, op. cit., p. 27.

74. A Narrative of Events, p. 3.

75. ibid., p. 6.

76. ibid., p. 32.

77. Charles Edmonds (Editor), Poetry of the Anti-Jacobin, London, 1890, p. 185 n.

78. J. De Lancey Ferguson, op. cit., Vol. II, p. 375.

79. S. A. Allibone, op. cit.

80. Vol. LXV, ii, p. 1030. It had earlier doubted her story of Monsieur du Fossé. See Vol. LXI, i, p. 63.

81. Yet their connection was recognized by the abolitionist Clarkson, who in writing to her after a visit in 1818 gave “compliments to Mr. Stone.” (J. G. Alger, op. cit., p. 357.) She was referred to as his wife among their friends. See note 82. Although she signed herself “M.S.” (Maria Stone) before Stone's divorce in June 1794, it is clear that she planned to marry him, once all obstacles were removed. See Four New Letters of Mary Wollstonecraft and Helen Maria Williams, pp. 46-7, 80-2. She is reputed with little authority, in the Dictionary of National Biography and elsewhere, to have had a liaison with Gilbert Imlay, first husband of Mary Wollstonecraft.

82. Stone could not go to England in 1794 for this reason. It appears, however, that she had planned to go there. In an unpublished letter of the Barlow Papers, Barlow's friend, Konrad Oelsner, writes to him from Bern on October 19, 1794: “I have had no news of Md. [sic] Stone for a long time. I fear that she has met with discomfort upon her arrival in England.” See also Miss Williams's letter of April 1794 to Mrs. Barlow, op. cit., p. 46. In this letter it also appears that she had thought for a time of taking refuge with the Barlows in America: “How I shall [should?] like to form a menage with you in America—I think that country would please & suit my Id[e]as exactly. If my affairs are settled as I hope they will be, I will certainly see you there, if nowhere else.” At this time it seems that she was uncertain about Stone's success in securing a divorce. It might also be conjectured from this that Stone was expected, if the divorce was arranged, to share her asylum in America.

83. No. XXVI, May 14, 1798. In a satire, “The New Morality,” in No. XXXVI, July 9, 1798, she is represented with Coleridge, Lamb, Lloyd, Southey, Priestley, Wakefield, Thelwall, Paine, Godwin, and Holcroft as a friend of the execrated theophilanthropist Lepaux. The followers of this man, a member of the Directory, called themselves “Friends of God and Man,” but were a very miscellaneous group. Feeling that neither materialism nor the worship of reason would fill the void left by the overthrow of religion, they set up as the center of their system the moral government of the world by a Supreme Being and the immortality of the soul. Miss Williams had given a qualified approval, “since the belief in immortality is the most powerful motive to virtue and he who is convinced of the existence of the Supreme Being … will be less inclined to sacrifice again at the altar of Moloch and dye his hands in human blood.” (A Tour of Switzerland, Vol. I, p. 83.)

84. Vol. I, pp. 146-7. In the index to this volume under “Wollstonecraft” is this reference: “See Helen Maria Williams, Godwin, Prostitution.”

85. op. cit., Vol. I, p. 356.

86. op. cit., Vol. I, p. 148.

87. Letters from France, first series, Vol. II, pp. 115-16.

88. ibid., Vol. IV, p. 269.

89. Quoted by J. G. Alger, Englishmen in the French Revolution, London, 1889, p. 73.

90. Sketches … of Manners and Opinions, p. 6.