WILLIAM made two trips to France within the space of about a year. The first one, during that last vacation from Cambridge, was fascinating in its own way. The second one, not long after he’d come down, was sensational. That’s the only word for it, considering the character of the young man we have got to know so far. It is still one of the least explicable events in his whole life.
The first trip can be explained in several ways. It was a defiance of Cambridge, an open slight to the system. Secondly, he had always loved travelling and wandering, right from the earliest days. And thirdly the whole civilized world was agog with the news and excitement of the Revolution. It never struck him for one moment as being dangerous, to venture across a foreign land at such a time. He never thought of personal danger anyway, even when lost all night on a Lakeland fell. In those first heady days, the Revolution seemed so welcoming, a breath of fresh air; the horrors came later. There’s a fourth, minor reason. Mrs Tyson had shut up shop. She had become too old to take in boarders any more. For the first time, William had nowhere else to go for his summer holidays. No-one else, after all, would have him.
All the same, it was a strange adventure, one which his relations thought was crazy, which was why he didn’t tell them beforehand. It was common enough in those days for young gentlemen to go on a Continental tour, though sensible ones waited till after university. Rich ones went in their own coaches. Less rich ones went in someone else’s coach, getting a job as a companion. William Wordsworth went on foot—a pedestrian tour right across Europe.
His companion was another student from St John’s, Robert Jones, a jolly, roly-poly Welshman. He made a good counterfoil to William, who, by his own confession, tended to be irritable when travelling, William was tall and spare and already looked older than his years, in manner and in his awkward gait. His face was long and his expression was usually rather serious. Most people found him reserved on first acquaintance, but there were strong feelings and passionate enthusiasms bubbling away just below the surface. The two young men had a common background: both were sons of country lawyers, both had gone to local country grammar schools and both had grown up in mountainous regions.
They must have made a funny-looking pair, as they set off from London to walk across Europe on the morning of 11 July 1790, each man’s belongings tied up in a pocket handkerchief. Between them, they only had £20 to keep them going for the three months ahead. Those friends at Cambridge, who knew about their plans, said they’d never make it. But a long letter to Dorothy, written after they’d been on the road for two months and had reached Switzerland, shows that William was obviously thrilled with himself:
Our appearance is singular and we have often observed that in passing thro a village, we have excited a general smile. Our coats which we had made light on purpose for our journey are of the same piece; and our manner of bearing our bundles which is upon our heads, with each an oak stick in our hands, contributes not a little to that general curiosity which we seemed to excite. I expect great pleasure on my return to Cambridge in exulting over those of my friends who threatened us with such an accumulation of difficulties as must undoubtedly render it impossible for us to perform the tour. Everything however has succeeded with us far beyond my most sanguined expectations.
They’d been greeted with affectionate amusement on their journey through France. Each village was in the throes of revolutionary celebrations and they were invited to join in the festivities, the dancing and the singing. As Englishmen, from the land of liberty, or so the French believed, they were welcomed as brothers. ‘During the time which was near a month which we were in France, we had not once to complain of the smallest incivility of any person, much less of any positive rudeness. But I must remind you that we crossed it at a time when the whole nation was mad with joy in consequence of the revolution.’
They had many adventures and encounters, several of which Wordsworth relates in The Prelude and in a long poem about the tour, Descriptive Sketches. None was particularly dramatic. They got lost a few times, slept out in the open when they couldn’t find an inn, met pedlars and horsemen. Crossing the Alps by themselves turned out to be an anti-climax. They lost their way going over the Simplon Pass only to find that when they thought the top was yet to come, they’d got over the summit of the pass and were now going downhill. The discovery at first made Wordsworth dejected and deflated, as if he’d been cheated.
Switzerland was a disappointment on the whole, which surprised William, as Switzerland was then a fashionable country for English travellers, who normally rhapsodized about its natural beauty, the sturdiness of its inhabitants, the idealism of its political system. Mont Blanc had just been climbed, in 1787, and Thomas Gray was one of the many English writers who had recently visited the country and written about it. Wordsworth had probably read some of the current travel books about Switzerland, as his school library had contained several. Perhaps he had expected too much.
Had we been able to speak the language, which is German, and had time to insinuate ourselves into their cottages, we should probably have had as much occasion to admire the simplicity of their lives as the beauty of their country. My partiality to Swisserland excited by its natural charms induces me to hope that the manners of its inhabitants are amiable, but at the same time I cannot help frequently contrasting them with those of the French and as far as I have had the opportunity to observe they lose by the comparison.
William gave Dorothy a blow-by-blow account of their route so far, boasting how they’d walked twenty miles a day, and how several times they had managed twice that, which seemed a slight exaggeration; but they were strong chaps, with very little to carry. On their way back, they were very enterprising and bought a little boat which they sailed down the Rhine, from Basel to Cologne. When they’d finished with it, they sold it. They came back through Belgium, where they ran into more stirring events, as the Belgians had risen against the Emperor Joseph II.
The scenery throughout had captivated William, and he spent a long time trying to describe it, and trying to describe the problems of trying to describe it—a difficulty which all travellers face:
Ten thousand times in the course of this tour have I regretted the inability of my memory to retain a more strong impression of the beautiful forms before me, and again and again in quitting a fortunate station have I returned to it with the most eager avidity, with the hope of bearing away a more lively picture. At this moment, when many of these landscapes are floating before my mind, I feel a high enjoyment in reflecting that perhaps scarce a day of my life will pass in which I shall not derive some happiness from these images
But it was the passions of the Revolution that had the most immediate effect on him. The natural rebel in him, the lover of freedom and liberty, rejoiced in what was happening, and for the next few years this dominated a great deal of his mind and energies. As with the natural beauty, he got an extra pleasure by realizing at the time that he was witnessing something momentous. So often in life, it is only when we look back that we realize what was happening, that we recognize later we were happy then. Wordsworth knew.
Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive,
But to be young was very Heaven!
William returned to Cambridge, took his poor degree and then spent the next four months in London, bumming around. No details are known of how he lived or where he lived. Presumably he sponged off old Cambridge friends, perhaps those with some sort of job and some sort of accommodation. He idled the days away, watching the passing show, going to the law courts and watching the trials, which he described as ‘brawls’, and to churches, where he heard sermons which were ‘light follies’. It all sounds so contemporary, except that now an unemployed graduate can at least claim social security. William, however, had no income, though it looked as if soon the Lowther case might come to court.
‘My times passed in a strange manner,’ he wrote to a friend. ‘Sometimes whirled about by the vortex, and sometimes thrown by the eddy into a corner of the stream where I lay in almost motionless indolence. Think not, however, that I had not many pleasant hours; a man must be fortunate indeed who resides four months in Town without some of his time being disposed of in such a manner, as he would forget with reluctance.’
He managed to muster enough energy to move out of London when the weather got better and he spent the four summer months, from about May to September 1791, staying in North Wales with his pedestrian friend Robert Jones. They did some walking round Wales together, climbed Snowdon in the dark, and Wordsworth got into an argument with a Welsh priest who pulled a carving knife on him. (It’s not clear what the row was about: possibly William started on his anticlerical theories.)
But one of the big attractions of staying with Jones was the fact that three of Jones’s sisters were all at home. There’s a nice nudging reference in a letter from Dorothy to her friend Jane in Halifax. It’s the only reference I can find, in almost four thousand pages of published Wordsworth letters, in which William is teased about girls, though, as teases go, it’s a very harmless one.
‘William is now in Wales where I think he seems so happy that it is probable that he will remain there all summer,’ wrote Dorothy in June 1791. ‘Who would not be happy enjoying the company of three young ladies in the Vale of Clewwyd without a rival? His friend Jones is a charming young man and has five sisters, three of whom are at home at present; then there are mountains, rivers, woods and rocks, whose charms without any other inducement would be sufficient to tempt William to continue amongst them as long as possible.’ Is there perhaps just a little hint of jealousy on Dorothy’s part… ?
During this summer, the big Lowther trial was at last heard at the Carlisle Assizes. The Wordsworth family had been trying for seven years, since the death of John Wordsworth, to get the Earl of Lonsdale to pay up the money owing. It was estimated to be about £5,000. Divided amongst five of them, it would give them £1,000 each and would solve all William’s problems. There had been endless litigation and stays of proceedings and other nonsense, while Lowther kept them at bay, but at last the case was tried before a full court. Lowther had engaged forty counsel, brought forward a hundred witnesses and produced a mass of evidence. The Wordsworths could only afford four counsel, the leading one being Mr Christian, the new Professor of Law at Cambridge. ‘We have got a very clever man on our side,’ wrote Dorothy, ‘but he is young and he will not have much authority. I hope that what he wants in experience will be made up in zeal for our interests.’
The Wordsworths won—but Lord Lonsdale refused to pay. The case went to an arbitrator in London. Proceedings dragged on all winter, with more witnesses being called, and the case eventually slid to a halt, the Wordsworths having to take out mortgages to get them started again.
It is not hard to see why William had such a violent hatred of the aristocracy. They had blighted his whole life, ruined his present and clouded his future. He hated their power and their corruption, their friends and their influence. It would be unfair to say that his passionate support for the French Revolution, and for the toppling of the French aristocracy, owed everything to his personal prejudice, but this certainly played a part.
During the summer he had idly contemplated becoming a tramp, taking to the road for the rest of his life. All he would need would be £100 a year, and he’d be a free man. But the Lowther disaster meant he had to think again, and when his distant cousin, an MP, said he was still holding a curacy in Harwich for him, William went to London to see him face to face, no doubt pushed into such courtesies by Uncle William and his guardians, who may have advised him at least to look a gift horse in the eye. William half promised that he would take the curacy, when he turned twenty-three and could be ordained. In the meantime, said his cousin, get some useful experience, instead of just wandering the countryside. So poor William trudged back to Cambridge, where he enrolled to attend a series of lectures on Hebrew and Oriental languages, a preparation for a clerical life.
In a letter to a friend, dated 23 November 1791, William privately ridiculed this plan, saying that he hardly knew any Latin and scarcely any Greek, so what was the point of him starting a new language, like Hebrew?
A pretty confession for a young gentleman whose whole life ought to have been devoted to study. And thus the world wags. I am doomed to be an idler throughout my whole life. I have read nothing this age, nor indeed did I ever. Yet, with all this I am tolerable happy. But away with this outrageous Egotism. Tell me what you are doing, and what you read. What authors are your favourites and what number of that venerable body you wish in the red sea? I shall be happy to hear from you. My address, Mon, Mons? W. Wordsworth, Les Trois Empereurs, Orleans.…
This rather sprightly letter was not written from Cambridge, as his uncles would have expected. The address was Brighton. After only a few weeks of Hebrew in Cambridge, William had thrown up his course, though he’d promised himself that he would do what his relations wanted, after he returned. In the meantime, he was bound once more for sunny France.
William’s reason for going to France again, so he told his long-suffering relations, was to improve his French so that he could get a job as a tutor. Then he would come back and, at twenty-three, get himself ordained, settle down and do the right thing for a change. He was now twenty-one, and, as far as they were concerned, he had loafed around for long enough. For the last four years, since he was seventeen and had first gone up to Cambridge, he had completely disobeyed them, ruining all his chances, making a mess of his life, letting down the family and himself. He did want to improve his French, but wanting to return to France was basically part of his wanderlust. He’d loved France best of all on his previous year’s pedestrian tour to the Alps and wanted to go back. He decided to do it in rather more style this time, so he got his brother Richard, the London solicitor, to extract £40 from his guardians to finance the trip. This was a large sum, when you consider that William and Jones had survived for three months on half as much. He did well to get it out of his guardians, as the Lowther money still seemed to be stuck. If and when his £1,000 or so did materialize, there would be £300 in Cambridge expenses to pay back, plus all the other bits he’d had over the years.
He was going alone this time, using coaches, and he made plans beforehand to get himself introduced into the local society at Orleans when he got there. It is not clear why he should have chosen to go to Orleans. Had he already met somebody from there he wanted to see again? For some years it had been a popular centre for English people abroad, so perhaps he had been told he would enjoy himself there.
In Brighton, while waiting four days for favourable winds, William went to see a local literary lady who gave him an introduction to a Miss Helen Maria Williams, a well-known writer of the day who was living in Orleans. William had for a long time been a fan of hers. While in his last year at school at Hawkshead, he’d written a sonnet about her (‘On seeing Miss Helen Maria Williams weep at a Tale of Distress’) which he’d had published anonymously in a London magazine in 1787—his first published work. She was a poet and journalist and had just published a book on France, which showed her in favour of the Revolution. It was probably this introduction to Miss Williams which made William finally decide on Orleans.
He spent only a few days in Paris on the way there, just enough time to visit the National Assembly, wander round the arcades and gape at the taverns, brothels and gaming houses, and go and look at the Bastille and pocket a piece of stone as a relic, just like any other rubbernecking tourist. In Paris he changed £20 into French money, receiving 643 livres in exchange. Then he headed straight for Orleans and found himself some lodgings there.
On 19 December 1791, two weeks after he had reached Orleans, he wrote to his brother Richard in London, telling him he’d arrived safely but that he’d missed Miss Williams after all. She’d already left Orleans. However, he had found some nice lodgings which he was sharing with some cavalry officers. He didn’t know anybody else in Orleans so far, except a family nearby whom he found very agreeable and had spent several evenings with. He idled away the first few weeks in Orleans, living a ‘loose and disjointed’ life, so he says in The Prelude—a very tranquil existence, considering what was going on around him: ‘… careless as a flower / Glassed in a green-house, … When every bush and tree, the country through / Is shaking to the roots.’
William’s first enthusiasm for the Revolution had been a fairly adolescent response, an emotional reaction to a joyful uprising. He hadn’t so far been actively interested in politics. It was one of the cavalry officers who really made him appreciate intellectually what was going on. This officer, Captain Beaupuy, was from a noble family, but had left the army for a while and had been involved in Revolutionary politics. He’d then come back to his regiment, much to the disgust of his fellow-officers, who were mostly royalists and considered him a traitor. Beaupuy was fifteen years older than Wordsworth, a much experienced and well travelled man, something of a womanizer in his youth but now a great idealist with an interest in politics and philosophy. He became a firm friend of William’s, spending several months in his company, teaching and talking to him about France and about the world in general. According to William, he was the biggest single influence in his life up till that time. It was mainly thanks to Beaupuy that William, so he said, moved on from a love of nature to a love of man.
In The Prelude he recalls walking with Beaupuy in the country one day, when they came across a poor, half-starved girl with a cow, both bowed down and defeated-looking. ‘’Tis against that which we are fighting,’ declaims Beaupuy. William became passionately involved in the Revolution, fired by the ideals of equality, the need to abolish cruel laws and to make the people free. He felt himself suddenly to be a patriot—which was something of an exaggeration, considering he was an English tourist, but his heart was certainly in the right place.
He’d also fallen passionately in love, a fact which he doesn’t mention in The Prelude, for all that it is supposed to be an autobiographical poem. Her name was Annette Vallon and he first met her in Orleans, where she was staying at the time with her brother. They were probably the nearby ‘family’ William had been visiting. She gave him French lessons—free, it would appear—and the lessons led on to love-making. She was very soon pregnant.
It must have been a most dramatic and exciting courtship, a sudden and intense physical passion, each of them swept off their feet, carried away blindly, ignoring all the dangers and problems surrounding such a relationship. It is hard to fit it in with the character of Wordsworth as the world at large later knew him. It is almost as difficult to reconcile it with the facts of his life recounted so far. We know he had been a rebel—wayward, headstrong and disobedient to his guardians, refusing to conform, a drifter and a procrastinator, irresponsible even—but he was supposedly a dedicated spirit, one who had so far avoided the sins of the flesh, as far as we know. What came over him?
Annette was from a respectable, middle-class family and came from Blois, not far from Orleans. Her father, now dead, had been a surgeon in Blois, as had his father and grandfather before him. Surgeons in those days didn’t have quite the esteem they enjoy today, having not so long before been little more than clever barbers; but they were of some social standing nonetheless. Annette’s mother had remarried, so perhaps Annette had rather moved away and was no longer completely under parental control. However, like the rest of her family, she was a devout Catholic and a strong royalist. She was twenty-five, four years older than William, so there’s a temptation—though absolutely no evidence—to suppose she might have been the dominant partner, the woman of the world who was amused by this young, serious but passionate young foreigner who chanced to walk into her life. He also happened to be a penniless foreigner, with no job, no training or prospects, a non-Catholic, an anti-royalist and a strong republican. What, then, was she doing? It could only have been passion.
Annette moved back to her home in Blois, and William followed her. It’s not known what her family thought, but there’s a hint of secret meetings, so no doubt they were not best pleased.
On 19 May 1792, when Annette must have been pregnant for about a couple of months, William wrote from Blois to a friend in England, saying he still intended to come home in the winter and take holy orders. He wished he could defer it, but it wasn’t in his power, as he’d made a promise to his uncle. In September, still at Blois, with Annette now heavily pregnant, he wrote to his brother Richard in London, asking for a further £20 to be sent out to him urgently. In the same letter, he repeats his intention to return in the winter, saying he’ll probably stay with Richard for a few weeks in London while he sees about the publication of his Descriptive Sketches, which he’d been completing while in France. He expected to be back in October. In neither letter is his connection with Annette mentioned, nor the slightest hint of it given.
Not long afterwards, William and Annette both returned to Orleans. Perhaps Annette’s family had refused to shelter her any more, now the birth was imminent. William, as he’d planned, left Orleans in October. This would seem a callous thing to do, leaving the mother-to-be on her own, but it was now dangerous to be an Englishman in France and he needed to go home to England and get some money, so he said. But he promised to return to Annette and the baby. He had no intention of abandoning them. He left someone with legal powers to register the birth, and his name was entered on the baptismal certificate as father. Annette’s child—a girl, Caroline—was born on 15 December 1792.
But William did not go straight home. For about a month, at least, he was lingering in Paris, and was possibly still there at the time of the birth, despite having no money and being in danger. It was obviously a most exciting time to be in Paris, and no doubt it proved hard for a young idealist to drag himself away, even with personal commitments and responsibilities elsewhere. The King had been deposed after the mob had stormed the Tuileries in August and he was now locked up, for his own safety. Some allied forces were marching into France threatening to put down the Revolution. In reply, the Commune, led by Danton, Marat and Robespierre, had encouraged the September Massacre. Over three thousand royalist sympathizers had been taker out of prison and publicly murdered. William arrived just a few weeks after the massacre, and could feel and smell the blood and the bodies still in the street. He was horrified and frightened, but still he didn’t leave. He watched and heard the reaction against Robespierre, in the streets and in the newspapers, as some sections blamed him and the Jacobins for the excesses. William, like many of the idealists, felt more sympathy with the Girondists: the more moderate, more peaceful of the Revolutionary groups. But in November, Robespierre routed his critics, denied responsibility for the September Massacre, and went on to take charge of the Revolution—until his own head rolled off the guillotine. It was, indeed, a dramatic time. No student of the human race would want to have missed it.
William eventually arrived back in England by late December 1792, and immediately confessed all to his sister Dorothy. He did intend to return to Annette, but very soon war between England and France officially broke out and it was then not possible for him to go back to Orleans. He definitely planned to marry Annette, judging by a series of very touching love-letters, as well as many letters to Dorothy, which Annette wrote, and which were discovered earlier this century. Dorothy, the perfect sister, immediately understood what had happened, blamed no-one, and from then on addressed Annette as her own sister. William, never a great letter-writer, let Dorothy do most of the corresponding, even though, in theory, he could now speak French, whereas Dorothy, who’d never been abroad or been educated, had to teach herself.
In Wordsworth’s lifetime, the public never knew about the Annette affair and his French daughter, though he told his immediate family and closest friends. After his death, the official biography, written by his nephew, made no reference to the affair and it was all hushed up. (The nephew, who knew the truth, simply says he was ‘young, impetuous, encompassed with strong temptations’). The story only emerged in the 1920s after an American scholar (Harper) and a French one (Legouis) had done some brilliant detective work and tracked down letters from Annette, still lying unread, 130 years later, in local departmental archives in the Loire district. At the time the letters were written, England had been an alien power, at war with France, and so they had never been delivered. Imagine the scandal! Imagine the shock to Wordsworth scholars, as they all rushed to read the love-letters and to reassess their theories about who or what had been the great influences in the poet’s life.
The letters are utterly charming. Annette never threatens or blackmails William, morally or financially. Whatever else William was at the time, he prided himself on being a young man of principles. If Annette had been wicked and scheming in the first place—as some people believed when the news first came out, unable to reconcile the facts with the later, Victorian image of Wordsworth as the stern man of God—then surely she would have tried to force him to marry her before the birth of the child. She might well have managed it, if that had been her wish. It is interesting to wonder why he didn’t marry her in Orleans, before the war had started. What held him back, in that first mad passion, when nothing else in his life seemed to matter? His staying on in Paris, while she was about to give birth, is also mysterious, since he was supposed to be going home for money. However, when he left her, Annette was convinced that they would soon be together again, as man and wife. After he’d arrived in London, she wrote to him:
My distress would be lessened were we married. Yet I regard it as almost impossible that you should risk yourself. You might be taken prisoner. But where do my wishes lead me?
I speak as though the instant of my happiness were at hand. Write and tell me what you think and do your very utmost to hasten your daughter’s happiness and mine, but only if there is not the slightest risk to be run. I think the war will not last long … but find some way by which we can write to each other in case the correspondence between the two kingdoms were stopped.
In a letter to Dorothy, Annette sympathized with the problems of telling the uncles and said she did not want William to be unhappy. But her biggest concern was for Caroline’s happiness. She even considered it would be enough if only William could come across to France for a short while, marry her and make Caroline legitimate, thereby taking away the shame which she and her family feared Caroline would have to bear for ever.
William was in great distress, contorted with guilt and worry, confused by his emotions, caught up in events which were now out of his control. The following summer he spent about a month on the Isle of Wight, for no apparent reason, just sitting around, watching the English fleet preparing to fight the French. Did he half hope or half try to get on a boat bound for France? Annette’s letters had certainly become very emotional:
Often when I am alone in my room with his [William’s] letters I dream he is going to walk in. I stand ready to throw myself into his arms and say to him: ‘Come my love, come and dry these tears which have long been flowing for you, let us fly and see Caroline, your child and your likeness; behold your wife, sorrow has altered her much; do you know her? Yes! by the emotion which your heart must share with hers. If her features are altered, if her pallor makes it impossible for you to know her, her heart is unchanged’ Ah, my dear sister, such is my habitual state of mind. But waking from my delusion as from a dream, I do not see him, my child’s father; he is very far from me. These transports occur again and again and throw me into a state of dejection.…
But the war went on, and William could do nothing; he learnt to live with the situation and waited for the war to end. Although he put no reference to Annette in The Prelude, in the middle of the French section there is a long and extremely tedious story about a blighted love affair between a nobly born French boy and a humble local girl. It appears to be a rather pointless, sudden interlude, though Wordsworth has inserted a few similarly sudden interludes elsewhere in The Prelude, dragging in stories and incidents, out of context, from other periods of his life.
Until the Annette story was revealed, the Wordsworth scholars, while admitting that this was a boring interlude, decided it was meant to be a political metaphor, illustrating one of the iniquities of the ancien regime in France, since it showed a noble family being oppressive and dogmatic. But once they knew about Annette, they suddenly decided it was obviously meant to be a metaphor for William’s own love affair! It makes one wary of all deductions based on a handful of letters or facts, when we never know what has not survived. It also shows how easy it can be to find things, once you’ve decided what it is you’re trying to find. However, and nonetheless and notwithstanding, the saga in The Prelude of Vaudracour and Julia, as told in Wordsworth’s words, does bear some striking relationships with the poet’s love affair such as it was eventually revealed to have been. The differences between the two lovers, the obstacles put in the way of their marriage, and then the birth of Julia’s baby, are very similar to the facts of William’s and Annette’s affair. The most revealing lines are the early ones about their passion:
He beheld
A vision, and he loved the thing he saw.
Arabian Fiction never filled the world
With half the wonders that were wrought for him.
We know, because Wordsworth has told us earlier in the poem, that as a boy he adored reading The Arabian Nights: the first book to stir his imagination. So, that could be a clue. He later describes the girl’s fears in words which have echoes of Annette’s own letters, though, admittedly, you would never think of the connection, unless you’d just read Annette’s letters:
A thousand thousand fears and hopes Stirred in her mind; thoughts waking, thoughts of sleep Entangled in each other.
The end of the story is all highly dramatic. The nobleman locks up his son—and no doubt Wordsworth felt he too was in a prison, being locked in England—but then the son kills a servant while trying to escape. He has to agree to give up all thoughts of marriage, to appease his father, and is then allowed out. He sees Julia briefly again, but she goes into a convent and he goes off with the child, living on his own in a forest, talking to no-one, wasting his days, becoming an imbecile.
We will probably never know how serious William was about marrying Annette, though she certainly wrote like a woman who knew that her lover planned to marry her. It had been a moment of ecstasy and grand passion, but it all ended in sadness, a harrowing experience for both of them, one that clouded his thoughts and life for many, many years.
The bare facts can make him appear rather callous, but doubtless Annette urged him to leave her, agreeing that he should go back to England to get some money, wait for the Lowther case to be settled, and then return when it was safe.
It was a sudden thing, done in the heat of passion. William hadn’t been completely unaware of girls till then, as Dorothy’s barbed remark about the three Jones sisters indicates, but it doesn’t look as if he had had any sexual experience. He’d been appalled by the sight of prostitutes and by the dissolute life of the wild bucks at Cambridge. There were no real ladies at Cambridge for the young men: it was either women of the street or nothing. William surely wouldn’t have fallen in that way. But in France—a headstrong, rebellious young man, passionate and excited about everything that was happening to him, fresh from Cambridge, where morals had been extremely lax—he was a long way from home and far from normal conventions and restraints. And he did love Annette. There’s no doubt about that. But, oh, the remorse and moral turpitude he must now have experienced. Until then, he had been sinned against rather than sinning. The Lowthers, his hateful Penrith relations, the corrupt and distasteful Cambridge system—with them all, he felt he was in the right. Now, in his darker moments, he felt he had done wrong.
From The Prelude, Book 10, the end of his residence in France.
In this frame of mind,
Reluctantly to England I return’d,
Compelled by nothing less than absolute want
Of funds for my support, else, well assured
That I both was and must be of small worth,
No better than an alien in the Land,
I doubtless should have made a common cause
With some who perish’d, haply perish’d, too,
A poor mistaken and bewilder’d offering,
Should to the breast of Nature have gone back
With all my resolutions, all my hopes,
A Poet only to myself, to Men
Useless, and even, beloved Friend! a soul
To thee unknown.