When Fanny Burney left Court in the summer of 1791 with a pension of £100 a year, she was a mature and independent woman emerging, as it were for the first time, into a changed and changing society. In this year of the first publication of The Rights of Man, between the fall of the Bastille and the onset of the Terror, there was much more widespread tolerance of radical ideas among the English intelligentsia than Fanny could have imagined from within the walls of Windsor Castle. Some of the Burneys’ acquaintances had become out-and-out republicans, among them the poet William Mason, Mary Gwynn* and the scholar Catherine Macaulay. James Burney had shocked his father with his ‘Painism’, Charles Burney junior had become a close friend of William Windham and the Whig Lord Spencer, and now Susan seemed to be following their lead, and that of William and Fredy Locke, with an ardour for democracy that posed a great challenge to her conservative sister. Fanny had jokingly referred to ‘you Republicans of Norbury & Mickleham!’1 in a letter to Susan written while she was touring the West Country with Mrs Ord in August 1791, but Susan did not take the remark lightly, and it provoked a series of exchanges which show the sisters for the first time in profound disagreement. ‘France is doubtless at present in a state of confusion & anarchy wch is grievous’, Susan wrote, in uncharacteristically sombre vein:
– à tel pris I cd not have wished for any revolution – but since it has been effected, I wish its support & success from a persuasion that whatever disturbance or distress it May have occasioned a few living Individuals … Millions yet unborn, & Millions who still exist will be lastingly benefited – that abuses very intolerable & very shocking to humanity will no longer be tolerated – that the great Mass of the French nation (wch does not consist in Dukes & Counts) will be relieved from oppressions cruel towards the sufferers & disgraceful to the great Aristocrates by whom they have been inflicted.2
These surprisingly teleological sentiments were triggered by Fanny’s account of a group of French aristocrat refugees she and Mrs Ord had met at an inn in Winchester. The plight of the ‘Poor Wanderers’ horrified Fanny: ‘is THIS LIBERTY! – where one side alone predominates thus fiercely? […] alas – in France, it seems to me but a change of despotism’.3 ‘What Tyranny’, Susan answered, ‘does there appear in the new Code of Laws? – What Tyranny has the National Assembly sanctioned?’ though she had to concede misgivings over the new assembly, ‘wch seems to me to consist of a very VERY inferiour set of Men, who by their republican & insolent spirit will I fear endanger the new Constitution more than all the efforts of the aristocratic body’.4 It was disturbing for Fanny to hear these set and earnest opinions from the ‘sister of her soul’. As a believer in absolutes, she could not account for ‘wrong’ ideas taking root in ‘bosoms so pure as my Susan’s & Mr & Mrs Lock’s’: ‘My Mind revolts at differing essentially from the THREE MINDS I most revere’.5
The Revolution in France was ‘the only topic which those who had either hearts or heads could, at that time, discuss’,6 its increasing militancy observed and debated in obsessive detail by the English intellectual class. Fanny records long conversations on the subject with Windham and with Edmund Burke, the publication of whose Reflections on the Revolution in France the previous year had led to a renewal of their acquaintance. ‘Kings are necessary,’ he told her, in his pragmatic new spirit of reaction, ‘& if we would preserve peace & prosperity, we must preserve THEM.’7 The likelihood of the Bourbons adapting to constitutional monarchy was not great, however: when Louis XVI was forced to swear his continuing allegiance to the Constitution or don a red ‘liberty’ cap to please the crowd, it was as a gesture of humiliation, not a foretaste of reform.
When she was visiting Arthur Young and his wife in Suffolk in the autumn of 1792 Fanny met a distinguished refugee from France, the Duc de Liancourt, who impressed her with the story of his dramatic escape from France in an open boat. There had been a price on the Duc’s head since his attempt to rouse his regiment in support of Louis XVI following the massacre of royal guards and attendants in the Tuileries on 10 August 1792. At almost exactly the same time, another group of Constitutionalist refugees intimately bound up with the events of 10 August were arriving in Susan Phillips’s neighbourhood in Surrey: the Princesse d’Hénin and her lover the Comte de Lally-Tolendal took a house in Richmond, the Princesse de Broglie was staying in West Humble and a group including Madame de Châtre, Matthieu de Montmorency and the charismatic ex-Minister of War Louis de Narbonne (purportedly a natural son of Louis XV) had rented Juniper Hall, a large house in a damp valley at the foot of Box Hill, about three quarters of a mile out of Mickleham village.
Juniper Hall was a former coaching inn that had been extended and redesigned in the 1770s. It now had two new wings, a landscaped garden and an elegant drawing room in the Adam style designed by the amateur artist Lady Templetown, a friend of Fredy Locke. It was part of the Juniper Hill estate, owned in 1792 by a lottery-owner called Jenkinson, but the Hall was never used as a family home, despite the expensive improvements. In his far superior property about a mile and a half away, Norbury Park, William Locke heard the local gossip that the Hall had been leased to ‘French papishes’ who were thought unlikely to pay their way.8 As an anti-xenophobic gesture, Locke immediately offered to stand surety for the rent of Juniper Hall, and made a point of befriending the new colony of exiles. He also made a prudent appearance at a rally in Epsom that December of the gentlemen, yeomen and farmers of Surrey ‘for the purpose of expressing their Loyalty to the King, and their attachment to every Branch of the present happy Constitution in Church and State’.9 In days of suspended diplomatic relations with France and increasing official anxiety about Jacobinism and sedition, Locke didn’t want his friendliness towards the odd collection of destitute aristocrats in Mickleham to be taken amiss.
Among the refugees at Juniper Hall was Narbonne’s devoted friend Alexandre d’Arblay, a thirty-eight-year-old career soldier from Joigny in Burgundy who had served as Adjutant-General under Lafayette in the Army of the North campaign against Austria that year and who had made his way via Holland and Harwich to London after the capture of Lafayette at Longwy. Susan Phillips, delighted to meet a lieutenant of her hero, described d’Arblay to her sister thus:
a true militaire, franc et loyal – open as the day – warmly affectionate to his friends – intelligent, ready, and amusing in conversation, with a great share of gaieté de coeur.10
D’Arblay’s long career in the army had begun at the age of fourteen, but though hard-working and dedicated, he lacked the sort of drive that worldly success requires, and his ascent through the ranks had been slow.11 He was a cultivated man, a music-lover who liked to compose a little poetry, and seems to have been happier obeying orders than giving them. D’Arblay was honourable, courageous and intensely loyal but had an unlucky streak which a critical observer might interpret as a certain lack of competence. He was in charge of the guards at the Tuileries, for instance, the night in June 1791 when Louis XVI and his family made their ultimately unsuccessful escape to Varennes. If there was a plot among the officers to allow the King to escape, d’Arblay seems to have been kept in ignorance of it. It is impossible not to suspect that he was being set up as a stooge on this occasion. If the King had not been recaptured, d’Arblay’s life would almost certainly have been forfeit.
D’Arblay’s open manner, sensitivity and charm, however, endeared him to many people. He often visited the Phillipses’ cottage on the main street in Mickleham, and Susan sent long accounts of their conversations to her sister. D’Arblay seems to have given up the idea of being able to return home to France and saw, with prescience, the unlikelihood of a lasting peace within thirty or even forty years: ‘I see no hope of peace in my unhappy country during my lifetime’, he told Mrs Phillips sadly, ‘The People are so vitiated by the breakdown of law – by disorders of every kind – by the constant sight of blood’.12 Fanny, writing back to Susan, carefully interpreted the stranger’s words as fuel for her anti-liberal feelings, saying they should be read to ‘all English Imitators of French Reformers […] New Systems, I fear, in States, are always dangerous, if not wicked; Grievance by grievance, wrong by wrong, must only be assailed, & breathing time allowed to old prejudices, & old habits, between all that is done.’13 To Mrs Locke’s similarly enthusiastic letters about the Juniper Hall set, Fanny replied, ‘Your French Colonies are truly attractive – I am sure they must be so to have caught me, so substantially, fundamentally, the foe of all their proceedings while in power’. Again, this apparent concession to emotion was prelude to a form of reproach: ‘[W]hat of misery can equal the misery of such a Revolution! – I am daily more & more in charity with all fixed Governments.’14
Fanny went to stay at Norbury Park in mid to late January 1793 and it was there that she finally met the French exiles, whose cultivation and good manners impressed her very favourably. The timing of their meeting was fortuitous, for it meant that she had a chance to form an opinion of both d’Arblay and Narbonne before the awful news reached London on the morning of 24 January of the execution of Louis XVI three days earlier. The whole Juniper Hall community was in shock, complicated, on the part of the émigrés, by guilt, fear and the need to demonstrate their disapproval and distress. Fanny wrote to her father that her new acquaintances had been ‘almost annihilated – they are for-ever repining that they are French, &, though two of the most accomplished & elegant Men I ever saw, they break our Hearts with the humiliation they feel for their guiltless BIRTH in that guilty Country – “Is it possible” cries M. de Narbonne, “that you, Mr Lock, retain one jot of goodwill towards those who have the shame and misery of having been born French?”’15 Narbonne looked jaundiced with shock, and d’Arblay, ‘from a very fine figure & good face, was changed as if by Magic in one night’ to ‘meagre’ and ‘miserable’. Howevermuch the friendly Lockes and Phillipses might sympathise with their plight, none of the émigré party knew how the wider English community would treat them now, and in truth no objective person could have failed to connect the Constitutionalists with the regicides, albeit indirectly. With the expectation of war getting stronger every day, they holed up at Juniper Hall, waiting on events.
At this critical juncture in the progress of the Revolution, Fanny ceased to cavil at her friends’ liberalism. Possibly with a sense of relief at being again unanimous with Susan, she transferred her full support and sympathy to the ‘guiltless’ émigrés. She wrote to her father that, with the exception of George Ill’s illness, she had ‘never been so overcome with grief & dismay for any but personal & family calamities’,16 and requested her mourning clothes to be sent from Chelsea immediately, so that she could appear among the Juniperians without shame. She must have realised that in her father’s opinion no amount of mourning could obscure the treasonable nature of these dangerous French liberals, and that he would deeply disapprove any further fraternisation with them. Yet Fanny was suddenly quite ardent in their defence. In the light of the rapidly developing intimacy between herself and the Chevalier d’Arblay over the next month, it seems that she had probably fallen in love with him at first sight, and was already, in this first letter to her father mentioning d’Arblay, adopting the methods of special pleading that characterise her correspondence with him over the next few months as she tried (fruitlessly) to change Dr Burney’s mind about the ‘French sufferers’ at Mickleham.
The community at Juniper Hall was enlivened by the arrival towards the end of January of Anne-Louise-Germaine de Staël, twenty-six-year-old daughter of Jacques Necker, the French King’s former Minister of Finance. Madame de Staël had recently given birth to a son at her parents’ home in Switzerland, but the months in Paris preceding that confinement had been fraught with personal danger. As the author of an admired study of Rousseau (published in 1788) and wife of the Swedish Ambassador to Paris, Madame de Staël had enjoyed a prominent role in Parisian intellectual life; her salon was a meeting-place for Constitutionalists and she used her influence to aid the safe passage of many refugees out of France during the turbulent autumn of 1792. When she tried to leave Paris herself, however, she had to run the gauntlet of the mob and was taken before Robespierre, accused of betraying the Revolution. Only her diplomatic status (and considerable personal bravery in standing up to Robespierre) got her safely away.
She brought with her to Juniper Hall not only these dramatic histories but further news about ‘the saint like end of the martyred Louis’, as Fanny styled it; how the King’s last words were drowned out by drums on the orders of Santerre and how the eight-year-old Dauphin pleaded in vain to be allowed to beg mercy for his father before the Convention. These affecting tales, told by the charismatic young authoress, inspired a warm response from Fanny: ‘She is one of the first women I have ever met with for abilities & extraordinary intellects’, she wrote to her father,17 this despite the Duc de Liancourt’s warnings that Madame de Staël was ‘one of the most offensively presumptuous women in the world, though of distinguished talents’.18
It is not surprising that Fanny’s letters of this period are full of superlatives: the company at Juniper Hall, which also briefly included the former Bishop of Autun, Charles Maurice de Talleyrand Périgord, was the most brilliant and animated that she had known in her long experience of distinguished and famous people. Even unobtrusive Monsieur d’Arblay was described as ‘one of the most delightful Characters I have ever met, for openness, probity, intellectual knowledge, & unhackneyed manners’. If Fanny was already enamoured of the gentle chevalier, with his large dark eyes, dark eyebrows and greying hair, receding at the front but flowing down over his collar behind in the new informal style, it seems very likely that he had fallen for her as quickly. By the end of their second week of acquaintance, he had suggested – insisted – that he become her tutor in French, which she accepted gladly. She forbore to mention that she already read and wrote the language very well.* Clearly she hadn’t been speaking much French in front of the foreign grandees, constrained by her unconquerable shyness, or ‘folly of fear’, as she described it to Mrs Locke.20 Monsieur d’Arblay teased her gently about this: ‘Since as your friends are quite ignorant of your knoledges in the french language, the are been surely surprised of your unexpected improvement.’21 There was no question, however, of not going ahead with the lessons. Fanny was amply motivated, writing to her new ‘Master of the Language’, ‘I have never had a real desire to write, speak or hear French until now’.22 The lessons became two-way, and therefore, of course, more frequent, with each party composing short ‘themes’ or essays in the language of the other, and sending them for correction and improvement. ‘[O]ur lessonings are mutual’, Fanny wrote to Mrs Locke, ‘& more entertaining than can easily be conceived.’23
The thèmes that Fanny and Monsieur d’Arblay exchanged between February and April 1793 were never formal or particularly educational, but from the start a substitute for correspondence, often more intimate and immediate than their later actual correspondence. The two ‘students’ had agreed to write on whatever they liked (or could express), which in Monsieur d’Arblay’s case was often a simple commentary on what was going on around him in the drawing room at Juniper Hall. One of his thèmes, a note to Fanny (with her subsequent corrections added in square brackets) has a charming immediacy, and a strong French accent:
‘Why do’nt you get down? [come down] every body in the drawing room calls after you [asks for you]. Some thought you were gone to Darking. Some others, you had got a Sittkness; at last [others that you had got a sickness at least]. – Mr Narbonne was affraid to finding you [was afraid of finding you] low-spirited, and all the society schew [shewed] an uneasiness wich I have desired to put an end [uneasiness to which I desired to put an end].’24
Fanny’s replies were lively, confident, even playful. D’Arblay was soon calling her his ‘Master in gown’, but his English seems, if anything, to have got worse under her tutelage, and when he had anything important to convey he always did it in French, establishing early on the language they would speak most often together in their strange bilingual marriage. The significance of this ‘simple, yet curious’ first phase of their courtship was such to Fanny that the thèmes were especially carefully preserved among her papers, ‘to obviate their [the next generation] being Dupes of false accounts’.25
Fanny’s immediately strong feelings for Monsieur d’Arblay undoubtedly coloured her view of the whole Juniper community. Madame de Staël, who was delighted to find the famous authoress of Cecilia among her new English neighbours, reminded Fanny particularly of Hester Thrale, whom she resembled ‘exactly […] in the ardour & warmth of her temper & partialities […] but she has infinitely more depth, & seems an even profound politician & metaphysician’.26 Narbonne, Fanny wrote to her father, ‘bears the highest character for goodness, parts, sweetness of manners & ready wit’, and as for Narbonne’s devoted Monsieur d’Arblay, he was surely ‘one of the most singularly interesting Characters that can ever have been formed. He has a sincerity, a frankness, an ingenuous openness of nature that I had been injust enough to think could not belong to a French Man.’ To Mrs Locke, she admitted that something like Juniper-fever had taken hold of her: ‘I am always exposing myself to the wrath of John Bull when this coterie come in competition. It is inconceivable what a convert M. de Talleyrand has made of me; I think him now one of the first members, & one of the most charming, of this exquisite set. Susanna is as completely a prosilyte. His powers of entertainment are astonishing both in information & in raillery. We know nothing of how the rest of the World goes on.’27
Unfortunately, the rest of the world went on with a rather less admiring view of the émigrés at Mickleham, and back in Chelsea, Charles Burney read his daughter’s eulogies with growing alarm. France had declared war on Britain and Holland at the end of January 1793, and the new Aliens Bill required the registration (and surveillance) of all these suspect Frenchmen. Worse still, though Dr Burney did not doubt Madame de Staël’s intellectual status or ‘captivating powers’, he had heard rumours about her moral character from the Burkes and Mrs Ord, who, with her close connection to the Court, was someone to take particularly seriously. He did not, in his immediate reply to Fanny, dwell on the gossip, which was that Madame de Staël had a ‘partiality’ for Narbonne, but warned her that Necker’s former administration and those associated with it were currently ‘held in greater horror by aristocrats than even the members of the present Convention’.28 He advised both his daughters to have as little to do with Madame de Staël as possible and to make any excuse to avoid staying at Juniper Hall.
Fanny responded with a spirited, not to say gushing, defence of the Constitutionalists. In her opinion they had been horribly misrepresented by Jacobins (‘that fiend-like set’) and the corrupt noblesse alike. Anti-Constitutionalist propaganda made little impact on Fanny any more – she had heard it all discussed at Juniper Hall – but the scandalous possibility that Madame de Staël and Narbonne could be lovers had never crossed her mind. Her reasons for thinking it ‘a gross calumny’ show her prejudice and unworldliness at full stretch:
she [Madame de Staël] loves [Monsieur de Narbonne] even tenderly, but so openly, so simply, so unaffectedly, & with such utter freedom from all coquetry, that if they were two Men, or two women, their affection could not, I think, be more obviously undesigning. She is very plain; – he is very handsome; – her intellectual endowments must be with him her sole attraction.29
Fanny’s assumption that there are certain ‘rules’ about sexual attraction (not to mention her apparent ignorance of the existence of homosexuality, and what was and wasn’t ‘undesigning’ between people) seems extraordinarily naive in a woman brought up among demi-mondaines and bohemians, and must colour our view of all her stated opinions about other people’s sex lives. This is particularly relevant to the scandal over the elopement, four years later, of James Burney and his half-sister Sarah. On that occasion, Fanny’s first instinct that something awful must be going on was quashed by her disinclination to think ‘something awful’ possible. As an adolescent it was not so surprising that Fanny took people at face value (one remembers how little trouble the Italian soprano Lucrezia Agujari had convincing the Burney girls of her purity); as an adult she never really understood that denying the obvious about one’s sex life was the polite way of admitting to it.
Though she was a prude herself, Fanny naturally enough found other prudes rather dull; thus her horror of immorality was forever coming into conflict with her attraction to charming, affable, sexy people. Sometimes it took years for the penny to drop even halfway. The relationship between the Princesse d’Hénin and Lally-Tolendal (living together quite openly in Richmond in 1792) was still puzzling Fanny in 1815, when she began to suspect that they might have a ‘secret marriage’. Even when the case was notorious, such as that of Lady Elizabeth Foster, bosom friend of the Duchess of Devonshire and mistress of the Duke of Devonshire, charm was able to win over Fanny’s deep initial distaste, and she ended their first meeting in August 1791 ‘in fervent wishes that calumny, not truth, may have condemned her, & in something like a fascinated feel in her favour’.30 It was one of Fanny’s strengths that she was aware of this susceptibility and the confusedly ‘mixt sensations of pain & pleasure’ it caused: the stories she had heard about Lady Elizabeth and the Devonshires ‘made me shudder at their power of pleasing’, but ‘the excellence of the behaviour & manner I witnessed, contradicted them all & rendered these objects of defamation patterns of virtue!’31
Others were not quite so easily swayed. Charles Burney had received a letter from his old friend James Hutton32 expressing his extreme disquiet at learning of Fanny’s association with Madame de Staël, whom he heard had come to England ‘to intrigue here, and […] to follow Mr de Narbonne’.33 Fanny should avoid any connection with such ‘an Adulterous Demoniac’, who could only be intending to exploit her celebrity in a way ‘most horrible Prejudicial to Fanny’. Hutton’s letter, sent on by their father, caused Fanny and Susan great disturbance. While apparently holding to her opinion that Madame de Staël was being ‘cruelly calumniated, & truly worthy of every protection & support’,34 Fanny made no delay in arranging to return to London and sent her excuses to Juniper Hall, begging off the latest of Madame de Staël’s fervent invitations with the excuse of a sore throat. Mrs Locke, who was back in London with her family for the season, had also sent news about scandal being attached to Madame de Staël’s name. The sisters wrote to her in distress, not knowing what to believe of their charming and brilliant French friends. Fanny’s remark seems particularly melancholy, weighted, as it undoubtedly was, by anxieties about the grounds of her relationship with d’Arblay: ‘& we had been liking & loving these exquisite people more & more every day without suspicion or controul!’
Reports of Fanny’s ‘indisposition’ and imminent departure from Mickleham brought Monsieur d’Arblay to the Phillipses’ cottage in person, eager to see her once more and ascertain whether he could continue to send her thèmes. These tokens of his concern and the affecting farewell note he sent her the same day – ‘my feelings are too strong – farewell my dear Master!’35 – must have made the parting from Mickleham even more wrenching. Fanny went back to joyless Chelsea, to her disgruntled father, ailing stepmother and the shared room with Sarah, wondering if anything would come of this extraordinary ignition of feeling, or if the Surrey idyll was already over.
Fanny continued to plead the cause of Madame de Staël at home, and thought (unlikely though it was) that she was slowly converting her father and stepmother to her own point of view. At the same time, she moved quickly to limit any damage done to her reputation, getting an audience with the Queen within days and arranging to dine with Mrs Ord and spend an evening with Lady Hesketh. Feeling against Madame de Staël was strong in London, and Fanny had to endure the congratulations of people like Hutton who felt she had done well ‘to forsake those Devilisms’.36 She used the thèmes to sound out d’Arblay on the subject: ‘Opinion here’, she wrote, dramatising her own trouble coming to terms with the dilemma, ‘says she is neither an emigrée nor banished – – M. de N[arbonne] has seduced her away from her Husband and Children! – – in vain I point out the difference in customs; the reply is always “She is a Woman, she is a Mother!”’37 This was an implicit challenge to d’Arblay to declare his attitudes to marriage and adultery, whether or not he was going to reveal to Fanny his revered friend Narbonne’s secrets, which he undoubtedly knew. His answer was delicate and diplomatic, carefully shifting the ground of the argument to avoid what he knew would alienate Fanny, open discussion of Madame de Staël’s sexual morals. He reminded her instead of Madame de Staël’s outstanding personal qualities: ‘Nothing can match her charitableness, humanity and generosity and the need that she feels to exercise them.‘38 Madame de Staël’s marriage had not been happy, like many other marriages of convenience among the French aristocracy, but, he pointed out, it would not only be wrong but barbaric to blame her for that. Not everyone could aspire to the domestic happiness presented by the Lockes, although d’Arblay made it clear that he aspired to it. As for the question of the nature of the relations between Madame de Staël and Narbonne, he answered, doubly negative, that though he couldn’t swear that it had never been ‘the most intimate possible’, he could assure Fanny that at present it was nothing but ‘the most respectable friendship’. Presumably d’Arblay knew or suspected that two of Madame de Staël’s children were fathered by Narbonne, but of course he was never going to tell this to Fanny. It is also unlikely that he thought the affair was over (Madame de Staël’s letters of the period prove that it wasn’t). Perhaps he hoped that the phrase ‘the most respectable friendship’ could be stretched to describe their public behaviour, which was certainly decorous. D’Arblay was a man of fine conscience, and would not have relished telling this half-truth to the woman he wanted to marry, but neither would he have wanted to betray Narbonne’s trust or break up the friendship between Fanny and Madame de Staël, whose society, he vowed on his honour, he could recommend ‘to my wife, or my sister’.39
The problem over how to treat Madame de Staël acquired a new urgency when the whole Juniper Hall party arrived in town in the second week of March 1793. Madame de Staël called, naturally enough, at Chelsea College to see Fanny, who was at her recently widowed sister Charlotte’s house in Sloane Street, probably trying to dodge the meeting. Convention dictated (to conventional people, at any rate) that a visitor wait in her carriage until her compliments, or simply her name, had been acknowledged by the person she had come to visit. Madame de Staël overrode this formality and gained entrance to the College, where a stunned Mrs Burney (reputedly even more of an anti-liberal than her husband) had to make conversation with her for a quarter of an hour, the minimum that politeness demanded. Unfortunately, while Madame de Staël was still in the Burneys’ apartment, Mrs Ord called (but was not introduced). Going on to Sloane Street subsequently, Mrs Ord was horrified to find Madame de Staël’s carriage there ahead of her again, proof that Fanny was still on good terms with the scandalous Frenchwoman. She refused to go into the house, but sent her name in via the servant and waited outside, rather preposterously, for the duration of the ‘adulterous demoniac’s visit. Fanny was galled to think the whole story would quickly reach the Queen’s ears (undoing the benefit of her recent audience), but couldn’t help warming to Madame de Staël again as soon as they were together: ‘this poor ardent woman – who was so charming, so open, so delightful herself, that, while with me, I forgot all the mischiefs that might follow, & that threatened with a broad aspect’.
The chief mischief that might follow from Fanny falling out of favour with the Queen would have been the loss of her pension, her sole dependable income now that she was only making about £20 a year from the invested profits of Cecilia. This small independence, approximately reckoned (by Mr Locke) as what a curate could just about live on, had suddenly taken on a new importance to Fanny, and it is not surprising that she became extremely anxious to protect it. D’Arblay had no money at all. All his property (‘something immense, but I never remember the number of hundred thousand livres’, as Susan had reported40) had been seized by the Convention in 1792 and he had been living off his friends ever since, presumably with some small pocket-money from Narbonne, who dramatically swore he would share his last pound with his faithful companion. Narbonne had been offering his (and d’Arblay’s) services to all the people of influence they met, the latest being ‘the Royal highness the duck of glocester’, as d’Arblay informed Fanny in one of his thèmes. ‘We have not the foolish opinion – to be very interesting defensors of this happy country, but we want to pay our debt for the kind reception we receive’.41 They also, naturally enough, wanted some kind of financial security.
Without such security, d’Arblay was honour-bound not to press his suit with Fanny any further, and he did not make any attempt to call on her while he was in London with Madame de Staël’s party. His feelings seeped through in the thèmes he kept writing, however: ‘Pray you, my dear Master in all,’ he wrote on 23 March, ‘to be convinced that your exercises give me very much pleasure, and never any trouble. Let us be blessed with our friendship and never vexed by it.’ Relations between Fanny and d’Arblay looked in danger of stalling just at the point when d’Arblay might have been expected to declare himself. What she did next – which was to offer to lend him £100 without interest – brought events to a head rather rapidly. No doubt she intended the gesture to seem casual and truly without interest; it also implied that she had lots of money to spare (and could therefore support both of them in the future). D’Arblay, of course, could not accept her offer, nor the £10 banknote and coins sent with it, but if his pride was hurt (and it is hard to see how it could not have been) he did not allow any sense of that to taint his reply. Instead he wrote her an account of his latest effort at finding gainful employment, a proposal to set up a ‘Corps d’artillerie à Cheval’ to help defend the English coast, which he hoped the government would accept. Mr Locke had tried to indicate to d’Arblay the extreme unlikeliness of this happening, and that the best he could hope for would be an appointment as Agent for one of the French corps recruiting in England at the time. Locke understood far better than his artless friend that the position of the Juniper émigrés not only precluded any government-sponsored job, but presented an extremely risky prospect to any prospective employer or patron, with, at the very least, the possibility of the situation in France changing at any moment and the émigré aristocrats all decamping without ceremony to reclaim their property. The prospects for d’Arblay were truly unpromising. Unless by some miracle he found a job in England, his only means of survival would be to follow Narbonne around.
D’Arblay himself was the last person, figuratively and literally, to see his situation in these stark terms, and his letter to Fanny of 31 March about his prospects is unaffectedly optimistic. He thought that if the cavalry plan could be proposed to Pitt, and if Fanny exerted her influence at Court, his worries would be over. What, he asked, in hesitant phrases, did Fanny think of this proposal, on which his hopes of gaining independence in England rested? It was, as Fanny was in no doubt, d’Arblay’s roundabout way of proposing marriage.
‘O my dearest dear Susan!’ Fanny wrote in delighted turmoil to her sister, ‘what would I not give to have you with me at this moment! You to whom alone I could open my Heart – labouring at this instant with feelings that almost burst it.’ She had sent only a short friendly note to d’Arblay, playing for time. What she needed was to talk the whole situation over with her sister. The money problem was not, surprisingly, on her mind at all:
I will be quite – quite open – & tell you that Everything upon Earth I could covet for the peculiar happiness of my peculiar mind seems here united – were there not one scruple in the way which intimidates me from listening to the voice of my Heart – Can you not guess what it is? – I wish him a younger Partner. I do not wish myself richer – grander – more powerful, or higher born, – one of his first attractions with me is his superiority to all these considerations – no, I wish myself only to be younger: I should then, I believe, with difficulty start a single objection, thinking of him as I think – His nobleness of character – his sweetness of disposition – his Honour, Truth, integrity – with so much of softness, delicacy, & tender humanity – except my beloved Father & Mr Lock, I have never seen such a man in this world, though I have drawn such in my Imagination.42
Susan thought the age question of no real moment. She had gathered that d’Arblay was thirty-nine (actually he was still thirty-eight until May 1793), and anyway, ‘his appearance makes him judged much older’.43 Susan was delighted at the prospect of this romantic match, but foresaw that their father might oppose it: ‘But – but – but – You do not wish yourself richer you say! – Ah my Fanny! – but that wd be essentially requisite in such a union – your single £100. per ann – his – Alas! his NOTHING – How wd it be possible for you to live?’44 Fanny’s reply was ardent and immediate: the high romance of the sacrifice necessary was very appealing to her: ‘Were he secure of only Bread & Water, I am very sure I should gaily partake them with him. How the World would blame me at first, I well know; but his worth, in time, would make its own way, & be my vindication. This, however, is all Utopian now – & I must not let him divine it.’45
Throughout the early weeks of April, d’Arblay and Fanny kept missing each other at the Lockes’ and at Charlotte’s house in Sloane Street, but Fanny thought it just as well, as she anticipated the difficulties of behaving normally in company. Nothing between her and d’Arblay was properly agreed at this point, and she felt that ‘repressing all personal discussions’46 would allow him to back out without shame if he changed his mind. D’Arblay had no such scruples and was desperate to talk to Fanny, turning up uninvited at Chelsea College on a series of pretexts, which caused some raising of eyebrows among the family (especially Sarah, who was immediately intrigued by the French visitor). During one of these tête à têtes, in which Fanny had been trying unsuccessfully to stop him saying anything at all, d’Arblay asked as a special favour for her tablettes, the erasable notebook made of bound ivory sheets in which she jotted down drafts of letters and memoranda. He must have noticed these at Juniper Hall, for she had thought of it already, and bought him a brand-new set. But d’Arblay didn’t want the new one, he wanted the one she had used, which he received with delight. Like his gift to her soon afterwards of an old pen, it showed a certain sensuality. It also reflected his perception of Fanny as a writer, specifically as the author of Cecilia, which several of the Juniperians had read. He had heard her referred to as ‘Cecilia’ (probably by Madame de Staël) and wanted her to inscribe it on his tablets. ‘So that isn’t your real name?’ he said ‘drolly’ when she declined,47 reminding us that though he presumably knew Miss Burney’s Christian name, he had never yet had the opportunity to use it.
D’Arblay was keen to meet Dr Burney, and Fanny could not refuse, though she knew it would be extremely painful to see her father snub him. She got the Doctor’s grudging permission to be introduced that evening, after a dinner at the Lockes’ to which both she and d’Arblay were invited. A situation as nicely problematic as any in Fanny’s novels arose when d’Arblay asked to ride back to Chelsea in the carriage with Fanny alone. She agreed, very hesitantly, but alert to the impropriety of travelling alone with a man in a carriage, tried to get away without him. D’Arblay caught up with her, however, before she reached the carriage steps:
I had already taken hold of Oliver’s arm – &, the instant I was in, he began putting up the steps! [—]
‘Ah ha!,’ cried M. D’Arblay, – &, leaping over them, got into the Coach, seating himself opposite to me.
I believe Oliver’s surprise was equal to my queerness! [—]
‘Where is he to go, Ma’am?’ cried he.
‘To Chelsea,’ I answered. – And the door was shut – & off we drove.48
Monsieur d’Arblay was in a very emotional mood, and alarmed Fanny by saying how impossible he would find it not to speak his mind to her father. She had only just persuaded him of the folly of doing any such thing when he was off on the subject of the joys of a retired life in the country with une personne, to which Fanny was ‘obliged to make him no answer at all, but say something quite foreign’.
‘Mais! mais! he cried, a little impatiently, laissez moi parler! – laissez – permettez – –’
‘Non! non! non! non!’ I kept crying – but, for all that – he dropt on one knee – which I was fain to pretend not to observe – & held up his hands folded, & went on –
I begged him to say no more then quite fervently.49
Poor d’Arblay took this as evidence that Fanny had had a change of heart, and ‘flung’ himself back in the carriage’s furthest corner. However, he was not one to brood, and was soon ‘bending from his little Boudoir’, as Fanny comically described it in her journal, and laughing at an idea he had had to evade her strictures. She had forbidden him to speak to her intimately in French:
‘– ainsi – I will speak English! &, in this language – I may pray you – you can’t refuse me I pray you – that you be –’
‘O oui! oui! oui!’ cried I, laughing too, parlons d’autre chose! –’
‘Non! non! cried he, – be – be – My dear Friend! – My dear -EST! –’
Their mutual laughter, the acknowledgement that they were playing a game and the surreal detail of the lovers having reversed languages, give this scene in the carriage peculiar charm. Fanny had been waiting all her life for someone as open, earnest and romantic as this, but had never imagined such a gentle hero. Where another more worldly or ill-intentioned man might have taken advantage (almost on principle) of the absence of any chaperone, d’Arblay’s conduct was wildly innocent, ardent without being in the least threatening. The middle-aged sweethearts emerged from the carriage at Chelsea College causing just as much surprise to the Burneys’ servant as they had done to the Lockes’, but now this was a detail which Fanny could enjoy observing, rather than tremble at. She knew her behaviour was above reproach, and she had decided to marry d’Arblay.
While her father could hardly prevent her from marrying, the with-holding of his approval inevitably overshadowed the prospect for her. In the section of the Memoirs dealing with this period, Fanny lets slip that religion, politics and ‘the dread of pecuniary embarrassment’ were not her father’s only objections: he also nursed ‘a latent hope and belief in a far more advantageous connexion’.50 Whether he had any particular suitor in mind is not clear, but it is possible he harboured hopes of William Windham, whose admiration for Fanny was obvious and who had been corresponding with Dr Burney for some years.
When d’Arblay invited himself to tea at Chelsea College, Charles Burney did not hide his grudgingness: ‘[He] prepared himself, drily, & sans commentaire: my Mother was taciturn, but oddly smiling […] Sarah was flightily delighted’.51 No doubt Sarah, who was to introduce into her first novel, Clarentine, a character named the Chevalier de Valcour, clearly based on d’Arblay, was enjoying the occasion in her own way. D’Arblay was on top form, ‘light, gay & palpably in inward Spirits’, as Fanny reported to Susan, and either unaware of his hosts’ antagonism or too happy to be received into the bosom of Fanny’s family to care. But Charles Burney, who had been such a good-hearted and good-natured guest himself at so many dinner tables, had the grace to recognise d’Arblay’s efforts (and genuine pleasure). He melted a little as the evening went on and fetched out various treasures from his library to share with the enthusiastic foreigner. It is impossible not to feel sorry for Burney, faced with the loss of his most devoted daughter to a Roman Catholic liberal Frenchman, or for Fanny, given this glimpse of their compatibility: ‘Ah, my dearest Susanna! – with a Mind thus formed to meet mine – would my dearest Father listen ONLY TO HIMSELF, how blest would be my lot!’52
During the courtship, the atmosphere at Chelsea College was strained. Mrs Burney was at her most ‘capricious’ and seemed to Fanny to be trying to catch her out by ostentatiously leaving the room almost every time Monsieur d’Arblay called. Only by forcing Sarah to stay put could Fanny thwart ‘the confounding & detecting effect’ she assumed was ‘meant to be produced & pointed out by la Dama’. The implication that ‘la Dama’ was an old hand at intrigue and assignations herself would not have been lost on Susan, the recipient of this report, nor would the unpleasant observation that Sarah Burney’s interest in Monsieur d’Arblay’s visits seemed to be one of ‘watchful malice’.53 Charles Burney himself was infected with this spirit of ill-will, and drew up a list of the factions in France (including the Constitutionalists) for d’Arblay to define, with the enquiry if there were any more. The sarcasm of this did not reach d’Arblay, but was absorbed by Fanny, the go-between, who also had to invent thanks from her father to her lover for his earnest efforts.
Susan remained Fanny’s mainstay at this extraordinary time, reading both sides of the lovers’ correspondence (copied for her by Fanny) and entering fully into the spirit of conspiracy. It was an odd situation in which Susan was not just letter-bearer, letter-reader and general go-between but substitute fiancée too, having her hand kissed and listening to the outpourings of the frustrated Chevalier. ‘Is it possible my dearest Susan can talk of postage to me at such a time?’ Fanny wrote with true lover’s impatience, ‘when you have only time for one Line, send it me off, as you prize my peace.’54
D’Arblay’s duty to Narbonne meant that his fate was tied up with that of a very active, ambitious and influential man who might at any moment draw them both back into war or intrigue. The defection of General Dumouriez to the Austrians at the beginning of April had quashed Narbonne’s latest plan to join a proposed counter-revolutionary movement, but there were to be dozens of similar alarms. Exile in Surrey had made the émigrés look like people of leisure; Fanny was having to consider for the first time what it might be like to be married to a soldier, and one of the wrong nationality. D’Arblay’s remarks about how much cheaper life was in France raised the question also of where they might end up living.
D’Arblay was not, for all his charm, a practical or resourceful man. His enthusiasm for a succession of money-spinning schemes flared up and died down unpredictably. Probably his wildest dream, and one of the longest-cherished in the spring of 1793, was that the widowed French Queen Marie Antionette might – with a change of government! – be once again in a position to grant pensions to worthy candidates, amongst whom he counted himself, naturally. He came to speak of this money as if it were only a matter of time before it would be in his hands. Fanny did not seem to be worried about d’Arblay’s lack of realism, possibly because she was already inwardly confident of being able to support them both by her writing. What did give her cause for concern were the outbursts of emotionalism she witnessed in d’Arblay. On one occasion he became quite maudlin about the Locke girls’ measles, and warned Fanny that he was sometimes ‘moody […] throwing myself here, there and everywhere restlessly’.55 She became too agitated to remember later exactly what else he had said, writing, ‘I am frightened at the susceptibility that binds me – perhaps more than any other thing – to enter into all his feelings!’56 It is interesting not only that her phenomenal memory shut down at this point, but that she saw the danger of her own sensibilities being altered by sympathy with his.
With the departure of Madame de Staël at the end of May (called back to her husband and their property at Coppet, near Lausanne), the Juniper Hall party was breaking up. Having found no prominent position in England, Narbonne intended to leave as soon as was practical, but understanding that something was afoot, he made no demands on d’Arblay to accompany him. D’Arblay himself seemed to have all but given up job-hunting by the summer. His conversation was mostly about cottages and he seemed eager to embrace a life of retirement. Loyal lieutenancy had always been his strong suit; he had done it for Lafayette and Narbonne. Now he imagined a cosy domestic version of the same thing, perhaps undertaking a little light secretarial work for his famous wife (he had extraordinarily neat handwriting) or making a French translation of her next book – the one whose proceeds they would live on. What could be more romantic than love in a cottage with a writer of romances, or more satisfyingly philosophical in an age of revolution than simply sitting tight and cultivating one’s garden, à la Candide?
A rapid and successful return to authorship was clearly the only way ahead for Fanny, but she needed some peace in which to test out ideas for a new book. Mickleham was out of the question while Madame de Staël was still there, issuing invitations to the last. The best place to ensure privacy was the old ‘homely home’, Chesington, and Fanny went there at the end of May with some notes for a novel. The house was sadly run-down, but ‘my good little dumpty fat square short round Mrs Hamilton’ was just as kindly welcoming as ever, as of course was ‘her young niece, Miss Kitty, who is only 63’.57 James Burney was there too, trying to recover from the long illness and subsequent death in April of his eldest child, seven-year-old Catherine. To Fanny he looked ten years older and ‘grievously altered’ by the blow. There is no mention of his wife Sally or four-year-old son Martin, but James often went about on his own. Fanny remarked that he was so often at Chelsea College he ‘almost lives’ there,58 and since 1787 he had been making surprise visits to the Phillipses at Mickleham, apparently looking round the area for a house to rent. Much of his erratic behaviour and some of his remarks on those occasions indicated that all was not well with his marriage, even in those early days. Susan hoped that ‘all that might have made [James and his wife] mutually wretched’ had been overcome and that ‘every year will endear them to each other’,59 but there were worse disruptions to come.
The new book that Fanny felt pressured to write was doomed to be something of a compromise. She said later* that Camilla was based on jottings made during her time at Windsor – hardly her happiest or most productive period. The sense that she was using this book to ingratiate herself with the Royal Family is evident in the fulsome dedication to the Queen, an honour that Fanny solicited (unlike Jane Austen, who kicked against having to dedicate Emma to the Prince Regent twenty years later). The book thus had several burdens to bear before a page had been written.
Work was interrupted in May by a visit from d’Arblay, for which preparations began days in advance:
Mrs Hamilton ordered half a Ham to be boiled ready; – & Miss Kitty trimmed up her best Cap, – & tried it on, on Saturday, to get it in shape to her face. She made Chocolate also, – which we drank up on Monday & Tuesday, because it was spoiling: – ‘I have never seen none of the French Quality,’ she says, ‘and I have a purdigious Curosity [sic]; though as to Dukes and Dukes Sons, and these high top Captains, I know they’ll think me a mere country Bumpkin. Howsever, they can’t call me worse than Fat Kit Square, and that’s the worst name I ever got from any of our english polite Bears.’60
Despite the cap and the chocolate, Monsieur d’Arblay’s arrival still took them by surprise:
the French top Captain entered while poor Miss Kitty was in dishbill! [déshabille] & Mrs Hamilton finishing washing up her China from Breakfast! A Maid who was out at the Pump, first saw the arrival, ran in to give Miss Kitty time to escape – for she was in her round dress nightcap, & without her roll and curls – However, he followed too quick – & Mrs Hamilton was seen in her linen gown & mob, though she had put on a silk one in expectation, for every noon these 4 or 5 days past – & Miss Kitty was in such confusion she hurried out of the Room. She soon, however, returned with the roll and curls, & the Forehead & Throat fashionably lost, in a silk Gown.61
With roll and curls firmly in place, Kitty Cooke and Mrs Hamilton never left the room during the whole visit, much to d’Arblay’s chagrin. They were immensely impressed by the French ‘top Captain’ and his history of war, revolution and escape. Quizzing Fanny later about him, Mrs Hamilton was moved to tears. It was only now that she’d actually set eyes on one of the émigré gentry, she said, that she could really begin to believe there had been a Revolution after all! To which Miss Kitty agreed: ‘“I purtest I did not know before but it was all a Sham!”’62
Fanny harboured few illusions over d’Arblay’s chances of employment. She also realised that matters in France could take a whole generation to be sorted out, and that his property there should be discounted from their plans. But this hard-headed realism balked before the power of her desire to go ahead and marry the indigent Frenchman come what may. As a middle-aged spinster daughter Fanny was still prey to her family’s plans for her, the latest of which was that she should go and live as companion to Charlotte, who had been left with the care of three very young children at the death of her husband, Clement Francis, in 1792. Marriage would mean a final release from such threats of dependence, escape from Chelsea College and, at last, a share in Susan’s apparently charmed life at Mickleham. ‘You all MUST know’, she wrote to Susan and the Lockes with emotion, ‘that to ME a crust of Bread, with a little Roof for shelter, & a FIRE for warmth, NEAR YOU, would bring me to peace, to happiness – to all that my Heart holds dear, or ever, in any situation, could prize.’63
Once Madame de Staël had left Juniper Hall the place all but shut down, and Narbonne and d’Arblay took to dining every day at the Phillipses’ cottage, much to Captain Phillips’s annoyance. He had his own view of the relationship between his wife and the foreign gentlemen, and it was not charitable. The property he had inherited at Belcotton in County Louth, which was vulnerable to the maraudings of nationalist rebels, took him off to Ireland frequently, but every time he came back it must have seemed as if his wife had perversely strengthened the already unwelcome intimacy with the Juniperians. D’Arblay especially, with his almost constant visits, his petting of the children and relish for lachrymose tête-à-têtes with Susan, was obviously not to be trusted.
Discussion of the income problem exercised all Fanny’s and d’Arblay’s friends at Mickleham, but only Susan saw that the solution lay with Fanny: ‘print, print, print!’ she urged. ‘Here is a ressource – a certainty of removing present difficulties’. ‘Yes, I would’, Fanny replied, ‘– if my own Mistress – & either for myself, or by – even by subscription’.64 By ‘for myself’ she meant at her own expense, which would be out of the question if she married d’Arblay. To publish by subscription meant opening a list and soliciting funds in advance, as her father had done for his History of Music. Though Fanny did not relish such a method of publication, any chance to make cash quickly was not to be sneered at any longer. Narbonne had thoroughly alarmed d’Arblay by exclaiming that the life the couple envisaged together would kill Fanny. If she was so delicate that she could not defy public opinion over Madame de Staël, he noted – with a touch of resentment – what hope of her surviving the social and material deprivations of life ‘comme – des Paysans!’?65 And how would they support their children? It was the first time anyone had broached that problem. Fanny and d’Arblay had idealised the struggle with poverty as a lovers’ trial, but at forty-one, Fanny was still young enough to have quite a sizeable family. Had not La Dama surprised them all by giving birth to Dick at the age of forty-three and Sarah at forty-seven?
Fanny tried to heal the rift with her father by showing him the few pages of her new novel, whose heroine at this date laboured under the name ‘Betulia’. He was pleased, with the writing and with the gesture, but nothing was going to alter significantly his dim view of Monsieur d’Arblay. He withheld his consent when d’Arblay formally applied for it, citing the ‘precarious tenure’ of his daughter’s income, his own professed inability to help them financially, ‘the distracted state of your own country, and the almost hopeless state of your party & friends’. To Locke he replied at greater length and in sad agitation: ‘All the self-denying virtues of Epictetus will not keep off indigence in a state of society, without the assistance of patrimony, profession, or possessions of [sic] on one side or the other.’ No one was better qualified than Dr Burney to know what a struggle it could be to maintain ‘a family establishment’ from scratch, but perhaps he had been too good an example of the triumphantly self-made man to impress his daughter with anything other than her own ability to succeed likewise.
The way in which Fanny was writing to d’Arblay indicates that parental approval was not, by this stage, uppermost in her thoughts:
You desire to know if I have weighed well how I could support an entirely retired life, &c –
Here comes a great YES! I have considered it thoroughly – but it was not at Ches[ington] – No; I considered it upon receiving your first Letter [31 March]; & my thoughts have never since varied.
Situation, I well know, is wholly powerless to render me either happy or miserable. My peace of mind, my chearfulness of spirits, my every chance of felicity, rest totally & solely upon enjoying the society, the confidence, & the kindness of those I esteem & love. These, I am convinced, will at all times be successful; – every thing else has at all times failed.66
It is not surprising that d’Arblay found this letter ‘charmante’, showing as it does Fanny’s ardour, good humour and commitment. On 21 June she left London for Epsom, where she was going to meet the Lockes at Bracebridge’s Inn and be taken on to Norbury Park. It was presented to Dr and Mrs Burney as yet another visit, but this time Fanny had no intention of coming home.
A begging letter from Susan, the family’s darling, made Dr Burney submit to the inevitable and send a grudging consent (presumably an upsetting document – it was not kept), and at seven a.m. on 28 July 1793 Fanny and her ‘bien meilleur Ami’ were married at St Michael’s Church, Mickleham. It was a small party: Susan and Captain Phillips, the Lockes, ‘Narbonne and James Burney, who stood in for his father and gave away the bride. Two days later the couple went through a Roman Catholic ceremony at the Sardinian Chapel in Lincoln’s Inn Fields, a precaution against any future property disputes in France, then went back to Mickleham to start their married life in modest rented rooms in a farmhouse on Blagden Hill.
* Goldsmith’s ‘Jessamy Bride’, formerly Miss Horneck and wife to one of the equerries at Court.
* Joyce Hemlow suggests that Fanny had taught herself French as early as 1764,19 and it is clear – to take only one example – from her exchanges with the refugees in Winchester, as detailed in the diary of August 1791, that she understood French with great ease.
* She was answering a query by the King, quoted in a letter to Charles Burney of 5–6 July 1796, after the book was published.