Fanny was numbed by the shock of her sister’s death. For the first few days she could not cry at all, only scream to give ‘some vent to the weighty oppression upon my soul’.1 The blow was ‘deadly – irreparable – it strikes at the root of happiness’; ‘[I] still sometimes think it is not – & that she will come – & I paint her by my side – by my Father’s’, she wrote miserably to Fredy Locke from Chelsea.2 Dr Burney had to hide in his room for more than twelve hours after the d’Arblays reached Chelsea, literally unable to face them. When he eventually appeared at the parlour door, he wore ‘a look of unutterable anguish’. His eyes were shut and he was muttering, ‘I dread to see you, Fanny! I dread to see you!’3
There was nothing sublime or transcendent about Susan’s death to mitigate the tragic waste, and the idea of ‘merciful release’ was little comfort, as the family had all been convinced of her imminent recovery. Though piety dictated that it had been the will of God, Fanny couldn’t accept the death ‘chearfully, nor […] regard it otherwise than as a Chastisement!’4 Dr Burney was so overcome that he couldn’t go into public for three months. His only consolation was that Phillips had agreed to let his son William go to Charles Burney’s school in Greenwich, and Fanny Phillips was coming to live at Chelsea College. Fanny hoped to ‘mentally adopt’ her beautiful young niece; Dr Burney, who said ‘he will never part with her’,5 was intent on some compensatory spoiling, the results of which caused a deal of trouble later.
Once back in West Humble, Fanny also shut herself indoors until d’Arblay took matters into his own hands and engineered a meeting with the Lockes in order to break the ‘hard spell which seemed to obstruct returning consolation’.6 The results were cathartic: ‘overpowered’ by the sight of William Locke, Fanny sank to her knees – ‘I was compelled to let my sorrow – my gratitude – & my anguish take their own way.’7 This must have been an intimidating sight. As Mrs Sheeles had noted all those years before at the death of her mother, Fanny grieved unlike anyone else.
Fanny felt unhinged by the force of her misery, to the extent that her faculties were impaired. ‘I have lost my power of retaining & retailing’, she wrote to Hetty in late March, ‘& my recollections & ideas all run – I know not how – incoherently against one another’.8 More significantly for her lifelong habit of journalising and letter-writing, she had lost her closest confidante and earliest reader. The ‘power of retaining & retailing’ gradually came back to her, but the motivation to practise it had for the most part gone.
Meanwhile, the production of Fanny’s comedy Love and Fashion was going ahead at Covent Garden. She had sent a copy of the play to her brother Charles in the spring of 1799, and heard in October that Thomas Harris wanted to put it on the following March. Harris expressed surprise that Madame d’Arblay hadn’t tried her hand at comedy before (clearly he knew nothing of The Witlings), as she had ‘a genius for it!’,9 and praised Hilaria as ‘the first female character on the English stage: – quite drawn from nature’.10 More to the point, he was offering £400 for the manuscript.
Fanny left the matter in Charles’s hands, and did not expect to have anything more to do with the production. She told Harris that she wanted the play to remain anonymous, but while the d’Arblays were still in London after Susan’s death, staying at Esther’s house in Beaumont Street,* a notice appeared in the Morning Chronicle stating that ‘Madame d’Arblay, ci-devant Miss Burney, has a Comedy forthcoming at Covent-Garden’.11 The leak was galling, not least because Fanny didn’t want the failure of Edwy and Elgiva to spoil her chances of a fresh start as a playwright. Worse than that, the article sent Dr Burney into a panic. He demanded not only that Fanny withdraw the play, but also that the newspaper print a ‘contradicting paragraph’.12 The Doctor’s extreme response is only partly explicable by a desire not to expose the family name to any sort of publicity during their mourning for Susan. Was this the first he’d heard of Fanny’s comedy? If so, she must have deliberately hidden it from him.
This seems very likely in the light of the letter Fanny wrote to her father following his outburst against any play being produced. She had moved swiftly to retrieve the manuscript from Harris, but clearly intended only to postpone rather than cancel the play’s appearance on the stage (Harris himself expected to use it the following season). Fanny knew the reasons underlying her father’s ‘most afflicting displeasure’, and had anticipated such a response. Since in her letter – the most assertive she ever wrote to her father – she doesn’t once mention Susan’s death it is clear that, in her opinion at least, family delicacy was not the point at issue. The issue was Dr Burney’s chronic lack of confidence in her abilities and judgement, and she had had enough of it:
Your goodness, your kindness, your regard for my fame, I know have caused both your trepidation, which doomed me to certain failure; & your displeasure that I ran, what you thought, a wanton risk. But it is not wanton, my dearest Father. My imagination is not at my own controll, or I would always have continued in the walk you approuved. The combinations for another long work did not occur to me. Incidents & effects for a Dramma did. I thought the field more than open – inviting to me. The chance held out golden dreams. The risk could be only our own for – permit me to say, appear when it will, you will find nothing in the principles, the moral or the language that will make you blush for me. A failure, upon these points only, can bring DISGRACE – upon mere control or want of dramatic powers, it can only cause disappointment.13
She pointed out, in a way guaranteed to flatter and cajole, that she had followed her father’s example by wanting to be an author in the first place, and then by ‘ranging’ from one kind of writing to another. It was not her career only, but ‘our career’ – both the credit and the blame could be shared. ‘Come on then, poor Fan’, she wrote to him, articulating his ideal response, ‘The World has acknowledged you my offspring – & I will disencourage you no more. Leap the pales of your paddock – let us pursue our career.’14
In truth, Fanny could no longer afford to be ‘disencouraged’ from writing and needed to leap into whatever ‘paddock’ promised some decent grazing. The loss of income from Love and Fashion was serious for the d’Arblays, and had important repercussions. With the overthrow of the Directory in November 1799 and Napoleon’s establishment as First Consul soon after, change was afoot once more in France. Though d’Arblay had resolved years before not to return home while France was still at war with England, nor to serve against his wife’s country, he was more impatient than ever to make a proper contribution to supporting his family. When he heard, late in 1800, that he had been removed from the proscribed list of émigrés in April and that there was a chance to salvage about £1000 from his French property, he was delighted and set out immediately for Holland to make out a procuration (Holland was the nearest country at peace with France from which he could do so). Unknown to d’Arblay, he was already too late to claim his property, but he returned to Camilla Cottage full of high hopes.
When hostilities ceased between England and France in October of the following year, Monsieur d’Arblay was overjoyed. By a strange twist of fate the French plenipotentiary who came to London to begin negotiations for the peace was an old army comrade of d’Arblay, Jacques-Alexandre-Bernard Lauriston, who was now a General and in high favour with Napoleon. Lauriston promised to put in a word with the First Consul over the matter of d’Arblay’s pension and status, and the erstwhile Chevalier (now referred to officially as ‘Citoyen d’Arblay’) began planning a return to France with his wife and child immediately. All through October he went up and down to London, arranging passports and tickets, while Fanny, ‘much hurried, & much perplexed’,15 tried to adjust to the idea of spending the winter in France. She understood that d’Arblay had to make the journey ‘as a thing of course’, but found it hard to share his excitement: ‘on my side, many are the drawbacks – but I ought not, & must not listen to them’.16 When Alex, now six years old, became ill with ‘worm-fever’ the same month, Fanny had a rock-solid reason to stay at home. Though she hated to be parted from her husband, there was no question of moving Alex during his illness, and d’Arblay made the journey to Paris alone in early November.
The return to France after almost ten years was exciting, surprising and stimulating to d’Arblay. In Joigny he was received with rejoicing as a long-lost son; there was ‘beaucoup de gaieté et surtout de bruit’ in his uncle’s household. The youngest generation of cousins were about the same age as Alex, and d’Arblay longed to bring his son ‘home’ and settle in the beautiful valley of the Yonne. In Paris he met many of his old friends, all of whom had spent a far more active and profitable decade than he: Lafayette, imprisoned for years in Olmütz, was now being sought after by First Consul Bonaparte, and another former army friend, Louis-Alexandre Berthier, later Prince de Wagram, had made a spectacular rise to Minister of War. Berthier, like Lauriston, was a General, while d’Arblay was a shelved Maréchal du Camp, scrabbling after old pension rights. Even to an unambitious man like the Citoyen, these examples of success among his peers were a spur to action.
Restoration of the Bourbons, it seemed, was a lost cause, and most of the old Constitutionalists had transferred allegiance to Bonaparte. Madame de Staël and Narbonne were both thriving under the new regime; less successful, but surviving, were Lally-Tolendal, Montmorency and the former Princesse d’Hénin, last seen driving round Mickleham in a clapped-out cabriolet, now living in a small but elegant hôtel on the rue Miroménil.
As Fanny read her husband’s excited letters from Paris, she realised that his visit was likely to make him discontented with their life of quiet retirement in England. She wrote him long replies full of advice, pointing out that there was no need to ‘change our system’, since the peace would make it easy to travel to and from France. She also insinuated that it would be difficult for her to earn money abroad from her writing (which was all too true), and that their immediate future depended on the success of the plans she had for the new comedy she had been writing during d’Arblay’s absence (she was also revising Camilla in the hope of a new edition and trying to revive Harris’s interest in Love and Fashion). Always more of a realist than her husband, she saw little chance of him regaining his ‘many lost rights’: ‘What business, in which Money has any part, is ever executed as speedily as hoped?’ she wrote to her father; ‘I am the less philosophic in this delay [to d’Arblay’s return], as I have myself, no expectations of ultimate success.’17
Her letters to her husband had a resigned tone, however. Fanny intuited that change was in the air, and sincerely wanted d’Arblay to do whatever he thought best: ‘the more I reflect, the more I feel I can know no happiness but yours! – misery I may taste in many shapes; but Happiness & you are linked, for me, inseparably.’18 His patience and selflessness through his long exile deserved reward, whatever her personal fears and misgivings about a ‘renewed public sort of life’:
Do as you JUDGE best, & FEEL happiest, & I shall be best content. Yes, my dearest best loved Friend, your long forbearance – your waiting my wishes for the PEACE, call for my liveliest gratitude, & shall ever meet it, by an entire concurrence with your own decision for our future life.19
The comedy Fanny had been writing in the winter of 1801 was A Busy Day, but The Woman-Hater also belongs to this period. Far from being ‘years of quiet’ during which ‘Mme d’Arblay [was] happily occupied with her maternal responsibilities and, when time permitted, with her literary career’, as the editor of the Journals and Letters describes the period 1793–1801,20 it was a time of almost non-stop literary composition: Brief Reflections, revisions to Edwy and Elgiva and the other Court dramas, Camilla, three comedies and the tentative beginnings of a new novel. The Woman-Hater, written between 1796 and 1802, incorporates some themes from The Witlings, updated to take in the contemporary debate on the role of women in society and embellished with elements of sentimental drama. Two characters from The Witlings reappear, Bob Sapling and Lady Smatter, misquoting and showing off her little learning as before, but in The Woman-Hater she is an isolated figure of fun. The focus of this satire is Sir Roderick, the sour old misogynist who, like Dr Marchmont in Camilla, is smarting from being jilted in the distant past (in Sir Roderick’s case, by Lady Smatter*. Sir Roderick will not suffer women on his property at all, but his desire to avoid them has become such an obsession that he talks of little else. He has a wildly exaggerated idea of female helplessness (and conversely of male power) – ‘if they fall into a ditch, they are drowned, – and if you don’t put the meat into their mouths, they are starved!’21 – and sees women as useless whether they are educated or not:
Either you [women] know nothing, and a poor fellow, when noosed, might as well have the charge of a baby, or you know something, and he must pay for it with the peace of his life: for if you once take to a Book, or a Pen – his House may go to rack and ruin; his children may have the rickets; his dinners won’t be half dressed, and his servants may dance rigadoons.22
Sir Roderick’s attitudes are infectious. Old Waverley, his obsequious friend, lives in such fear of any dealings with women that when by accident he meets the virtuous Sophia Wilmot and her mother Eleanora, wronged wife of Lady Smatter’s brother, he interprets their actions as soliciting for sex. He subsequently tries to ‘rescue’ Sophia from vice, which occasions some slightly risqué scenes and double entendres about prostitution and ‘paupau women’ (something of a departure for the prude playwright, who presumably intended this play, too, to be staged anonymously).
Young Waverley, Sir Roderick’s heir, is so desperate to break free from the woman-hating zone in which he has grown up that he plans to marry the only gentlewoman he has ever met, Lady Smatter, even though he doesn’t love her and is certain to be disinherited because of the match. Fortunately, he meets Sophia before he can carry out his elopement. She and her mother have come in search of Sophia’s father, Wilmot, who is about to depart for the West Indies. Wilmot is another jealous misogynist whose misinterpretation of his wife’s ‘feeling’ behaviour many years ago made him cast her off. But unknown to him, Eleanora took their daughter with her and substituted the nurse’s child, a raucous, sensual, unintelligent girl who has been brought up as ‘Miss Wilmot’. The untangling of this family romance, the reuniting of a chastened Wilmot with his noble wife and lovely daughter, and the capitulation of Sir Roderick to the charms of Lady Smatter (comically effected with very little difficulty in the closing minutes), make an undemanding, entertaining play that shows the author perfectly at ease ‘doing what I have all my life been urged to, & all my life intended, writing a Comedy’.23
A Busy Day, which Fanny was writing during her separation from d’Arblay in 1801, has the distinction of being the only one of Fanny Burney’s comedies to have been staged – albeit 192 years after composition. When the Show of Strength company put it on in a pub theatre in Bristol in 1993 (with a revival in London the year after), a reviewer in The Stage described the play as ‘at least as scathing as anything from Goldsmith – and considerably funnier’.24 The only surviving manuscript is in d’Arblay’s hand, so presumably Fanny did not finish the play until she was reunited with him in France. That she intended to present it to Harris is clear from the draft cast-list she drew up, all members of the Covent Garden company. But circumstances intervened again to thwart her career as a dramatist: A Busy Day must have been among the ‘unprinted works’ that she was forced to leave behind in Paris until their final removal in 1815, since the only manuscript she is known to have taken out of France in the period 1802–15 was that of her novel The Wanderer. By then, the play was dated and Harris was dead.
The action of this splendid comedy takes place in London on the day when both the hero, Cleveland, and heroine, Eliza Watts, are returning from the East Indies. Unknown to either of their families, they have already met, fallen in love and become engaged. Eliza, the daughter of a self-made City trader, comes from an uneducated low-class background (her father was originally an errand boy and her mother a housemaid), but she has been adopted and brought up in India by a wealthy and cultivated elderly gentleman, Mr Alderson (a distant bachelor-monitor, rather like Crisp), whose recent death is the cause of her return to England. Cleveland, an aristocrat, has been sent out to India to make his own fortune, though by rights he should inherit one from his selfish uncle Marmaduke, who has mortgaged the family estates due to bad management. The reason for Cleveland’s recall (which he only hears on arrival) is for him to be married off by the uncle (his guardian) to a skittish heiress, Miss Percival.
Since Sir Marmaduke and his wife Lady Wilhelmina Tylney are monumental snobs and the Watts family are vulgar ‘Cits’, it soon becomes clear that there is going to be a violent clash between the families. Anticipation of this moment keeps the hero and heroine in suspense until Act 5, when Miss Percival, piqued by Cleveland’s rejection of her, manoeuvres the disparate parties into the same room. ‘Bless me! what people are these?’ Lady Wilhelmina exclaims:
Sir Marmaduke. I can’t imagine: unless those – (pointing to Mr Watts and Mr Tibbs) are two new men out of livery.
Lady Wilhelmina. Impossible she can have chosen two such grotesque figures. Besides, what do they stand there for? And look at those strange Women! how extraordinary! I can’t turn my head round, but that odd body made me a courtsie!25
The Wattses retaliate by talking loudly of their showy new coach:
Miss Watts (aloud). I wonder if our Coach stops at the Door.
Mrs Watts. I hope never a Cart, nor nothing, will drive against it, for the paint’s but just new put on, and it cost sich a deal!
Miss Watts (whispering). La, Ma’, you’re always talking so saving! Can’t you speak about our servants? I dare say (aloud) Robert’s forgot to tell Thomas to order Richard to stop.
Mrs Watts. Yes, I dares to say Robert’s forgot to tell Thomas to order Richard to stop.26
The Wattses are lovingly satirised: Mr Watts in his scruffy scratch wig clings to recollections of how much more controllable his wife and daughter were when they were poor; his wife, on the other hand, is obsessed with maintaining the visible signs of wealth. Peggy, their daughter, has seen just enough of the grand world to intuit how vulgar her family appears, but unlike her sister she doesn’t have the taste or refinement to rise above it. Her adoption of pretentiously romantic names for herself and Eliza, ‘Margerella’ and ‘Eliziana’, is comically thwarted by her parents’ inability to remember them correctly; her embarrassment over this and her family’s many other shortcomings recalls the Miss Branghtons’ similar concern with impressing ‘the quality’ in Evelina, a work that has many echoes in the play.
‘The Quality’, as represented by the Tylneys, frivolous Miss Percival, Cleveland’s dissipated younger brother Frank and his goofy boon-companion, Lord John Dervis, are a hopeless, enervated set; the constant references in their conversation to debts, tenures and mortgages emphasise that they are members of a class living on borrowed time as well as borrowed money. Money, and only money, matters in this cynical world; Cleveland’s and Eliza’s virtues would count for nothing if Eliza did not happen to be heiress to Mr Alderson’s £80,000 and therefore, ultimately, acceptable to the Tylneys.
Only money can control the anarchic effects of class fluidity that the play depicts in a rather surprisingly radical way. The compact between the serving class and those who pay them is precariously maintained: when Mr Watts (who looks like a gentleman, but isn’t) fails to tip the porter in Act 1, the porter immediately drops his deferential manner. Only the intervention of good-natured Joel Tibbs, who has neither got ‘so high up in the World’ as his ‘Cit’ cousin nor come from ‘so low down’,27 prevents the disgruntled porter from becoming violent. The waiters at the gaming-house in Act 1 are insolent and unhelpful (their stage directions include ‘exit sneering’, ‘exit yawning’ and ‘exit loiteringly’), and the gentleman’s valet in Act 3 is so elegant that he is mistaken by the Wattses for his master; both have taken on the affectations of their employees. But none of their behaviour is seen as culpable insubordination because their ‘betters’ are so lax.
The servants of the late Mr Alderson are correspondingly loyal and devoted, particularly the Indian Mungo, a fascinating character who does not appear at all (probably because of the restrictions of the all-white Georgian stage). At the waiters’ incredulity that they should have to help him or even talk to him – ‘What, the Black?’ – Eliza resolves to ‘treble’ her care of him in future ‘for the little kindness you seem likely to meet with here’. Her (white) female servant Deborah, who has been in India many years, makes the depressing reply:
Why that’s very good of you, my dear young lady, to be so kind to him, being my late master’s wish: but, for all that, these gentlemen mean no harm, I dare say; for after all, a Black’s but a Black; and let him hurt himself never so much, it won’t shew. It in’t like hurting us whites, with our fine skins, all over alabaster.28
Deborah’s dismissal of Mungo’s sensitivity hides another interpretation: perhaps his hurts ‘won’t shew’ because he is already black with them, like an all-over bruise. The treatment of natives in the colonies and at home would have been a sensitive point to press with a contemporary audience just waking up to the horrors of the slave trade and the responsibilities of a would-be empire. Burney was brave to dwell on it at some length in A Busy Day and to return to it in The Wanderer.
A Busy Day looks like a typical eighteenth-century comedy in the tradition of Murphy or Sheridan, but its concern with social conscience as well as social consciousness marks it out as a much more modern play. Aristocratic Cleveland’s move downwards into the trading class has not just filled his purse but broadened his mind. He knows the value of money and understands the means of production and has picked up a set of unimpeachably humanitarian principles on the way. Nurture must perfect nature; Cleveland is both cultured and practical, Eliza refined, unaffected and sensitive, unlike her newly-wealthy family, who have the trappings of ‘class’ with none of its agrémens. Both hero and heroine are moving into an idealised ‘middle’ class from opposite directions. Burney’s premise, as expressed by Cleveland almost exactly halfway through the play, is a restatement of the Burney Principle that ‘Elegance, as well as talents and Virtue, may be grafted upon every stock, and can flourish from every soil!’29 There is no swapped-cradle dénouement (as in The Woman-Hater) that will expose Eliza’s superior birth and save us from having to include the Wattses in the imagined aftermath of the play: she is a Watts and Cleveland is (almost) a Tylney – a disturbing and very effective resolution to this clever satire on social mobility.
Back in Paris, d’Arblay was hoping that his influential friends would help him get a job in London as commissioner of French commercial relations in England, but first he needed to sort out his pension and retraite. When he wrote to the First Consul, however, he was told that he would have to serve on at least one campaign for the Republic before he could expect to be paid for ci-devant services, and Bonaparte suggested he join an expeditionary force setting out for the colony of Santo Domingo (Haiti) to put down the rebellion of the Negro slave leader Touissant-L’Ouverture. D’Arblay agreed, glad to have the chance of promotion to Brigade Commander and an honourable exit from the army. He came home to England in January 1802 to fit himself up for the campaign, spending a small fortune – 220 guineas – on his new uniform and equipment and securing the correct passports and papers for an absence of over a year. Fanny of course was terrified at the prospect of her husband risking his life in the ‘pestilential’ climate of the Caribbean, not to mention the fact that she had little sympathy with the French cause, and thought the rebellious slaves had very likely been ‘ill-used’.30 She felt strongly enough about the issue to include a footnote in the Memoirs exculpating her husband from any insensitivity to it: ‘The Culpability, or the Rights of the insurgents [in Santo Domingo], could make no part of the business of the soldier; whose services, when once he is enlisted, as unequivocally demand personal subordination as personal bravery’.31
The same argument about ‘personal subordination’ did not, however occur to the d’Arblays in relation to action against the British, from which they naively imagined Monsieur d’Arblay might be excused. Before setting out for France again, d’Arblay took the precaution of writing to the First Consul to make it clear that though he was happy to accept the Santo Domingo commission, he would never fight against England. Bonaparte was not impressed. When d’Arblay arrived in Paris, with his hundreds of guineas’-worth of equipment in tow, he found that his commission had been cancelled.
This was not only a blow to his pride and his expectations (he thought of it as ‘cette disgrace’), but forced a huge disruption on his wife and child. D’Arblay’s latest passport, issued in connection with his military service, prevented his return to England for another year. If the family was not to be separated all that time, there was nothing for it but for Fanny and Alex to join him in Paris.
Fanny faced the prospect of leaving her precious home in West Humble and moving abroad for up to eighteen months with stoical resignation, fortified by relief that d’Arblay was not going to Santo Domingo after all. She set about arranging for Camilla Cottage to be let and, on William Locke’s advice, spent quite a bit of money sprucing it up to attract the right sort of tenant (it must indeed have seemed quite Spartan to the Lord of Norbury Park). The Lockes asked Fanny to take with her back to Paris a protégée of theirs, six-year-old Adrienne de Chavagnac, who was going to be reunited with her émigré parents. Little did Fanny realise that she herself was about to become a sort of refugee, detained in France not for one year, but ten. It was as well that she didn’t know this when she bade the Lockes, her father and siblings goodbye on 14 April 1802, and caught the Paris diligence with Alex and little Adrienne from the White Bear Hotel on Piccadilly.
Though she was unassisted, unaccompanied, uncomfortable about the language and had two excited children to look after, Fanny’s first ever journey abroad passed off pretty well. Sea-sickness made the Channel crossing a misery, but as soon as they arrived at Calais, Fanny was absorbed by the novelty of the scene. She and the children wandered out into the streets of the town and felt perfectly safe – much to her surprise: Fanny admitted that she had ‘conceived an horrific idea of the populace of this Country, imagining them all transformed into bloody monsters’.32 On their two-day journey to Paris, she was further impressed by the kindness and good manners of the villagers she met at every relais, piously rejoicing at Bonaparte’s recent restoration of freedom of worship in the Concordat. By the time Madame d’Arblay fell into her husband’s arms at the coach stop on rue Nôtre Dame des Victoires she was already feeling less apprehensive about what life would be like in this alien land.
D’Arblay had found an apartment in the Hôtel Marengo, near the Champs Élysées, then a relatively retired spot ‘entirely out of the violent bustle & close air of Paris’, as Fanny described it to her father. Narbonne lived nearby, and visited frequently, though Fanny was less ready to encourage a renewal of friendship with Madame de Staël, or with the novelist Madame de Genlis, who was also re-established – very successfully – in the French capital. The d’Arblays’ near-neighbour Madame d’Hénin came to visit the Hôtel Marengo on Fanny’s first day there, bringing tea and a teapot. Fanny was to see a great deal of this friend in the coming months, who tirelessly showed her the sights of Paris and found her a reliable femme de chambre.
The new French fashions for light drapery, translucent muslins and minimal underwear were not quite as shocking as reports in England had led Fanny to expect, but all the same it was obvious that Madame d’Arblay, now aged fifty, was never going to wear them. Madame d’Hénin and the maid looked at Fanny’s wardrobe in horror, as Fanny reported back amusedly to Miss Planta in Windsor:
This won’t do! – That you can never wear! This you can never be seen in! That would make you stared at as a curiosity! THREE petticoats! No one wears more than one! STAYS? every body has left off even corsets! – Shift sleeves? not a soul now wears even a chemise! &c &c. – In short I found all that I possessed seemed so hideously old fashioned, or so comically rustic, that as soon as it was decreed I must make my appearance in the grande monde hopeless of success in exhibiting myself in the costume francais, I gave over the attempt, & ventured to come forth as a Gothic anglaise, who had never heard of, or never heeded, the reigning metamorphoses. 33
Fanny had no desire to enter Parisian society and hoped to ride out her visit to France in modest obscurity. The new meritocracy created by Napoleon was an intimidating group, flaunting money and titles for the first time in years. There was no way in which the d’Arblays could compete with those who had flourished under the Directory and who now, like General Hulin (who had served as a Captain under d’Arblay before the Revolution), appeared at parades and reviews decked out in astonishingly showy uniforms, while d’Arblay was in a scruffy old coat and ‘complete undress’.34 Although France was still nominally a republic, Napoleon’s elevation to Consul for life in 1802 – a stepping-stone on his way to becoming Emperor two years later – was ushering in a new epoch of national confidence and pride. Bonaparte’s face was on everything, from medallions to barley-sugar sticks, and his fame was awe-inspiring, as Fanny soon had the chance to witness and experience herself. Only a fortnight after her arrival in Paris, d’Arblay secured tickets for a review of troops in the Tuileries at which the First Consul was going to preside. The crowd was extremely large, and short-sighted Madame d’Arblay would have seen nothing at all if she hadn’t been identified as a foreigner and given one of the best places (an example of French good manners which impressed her deeply):
At length, the two human hedges were finally formed, the door of the Audience Chamber was thrown wide open with a commanding crash, a vivacious officer-Centinel – or I know not what, nimbly descended the three steps into our Apartment, &[…] called out, in a loud & authoritative voice, ‘Le Premier Consul!’ […] I had a view so near, though so brief, of his face, as to be very much struck by it: it is of a deeply impressive cast, pale even to sallowness, while not only in the Eye, but in every feature, Care, Thought, Melancholy, & Meditation are strongly marked, with so much of character, nay, Genius, & so penetrating a seriousness – or rather sadness, as powerfully to sink into an observer’s mind[.]35
The review in the Tuileries took place when the Peace of Amiens between England and France was scarcely two months old, and when Fanny could dwell on Bonaparte’s abstract virtues without worrying too much about his martial ambitions. She began to feel very differently about the First Consul as the prospect of war built up again the following year.
The small circle of ‘female worthies’ with whom Fanny associated were mostly middle-aged ci-devant aristocrats like Madame d’Hénin and Madame (formerly Vicomtesse) de Laval, who had little money with which to enjoy the sophisticated cultural life of Paris but who maintained a genteel, intelligent and mutually supportive society of their own. Madame de Tessé, sixty-five-year-old former lady-in-waiting to Marie-Antoinette, was of this company, a lady whom d’Arblay described as ‘one of the first Women of the best French society’;36 her niece, Adrienne de Noailles, was the resourceful and heroic wife of d’Arblay’s former commander Lafayette (to whose rural retreat, La Grange, the d’Arblays were invited in June 1802). The elderly abbess Catherine de Fay de Latour-Maubourg was also of this circle with her niece Madame de Maisonneuve, who became one of Fanny’s closest friends in France. Fanny was fortunate to have a member of her family living in Paris at this time too: Hetty’s daughter Maria had moved there recently with her husband Antoine Bourdois (affectionately known to little Alex as ‘Bood’), a well-off native of Joigny and old friend of the d’Arblay family. The match between him and dowerless Maria Burney had been engineered by Fanny and her husband several years before and had proved a great success. It was a relief to have this charming and familiar young couple living within easy reach on the rue de Choiseul.
As Fanny had predicted, d’Arblay was seriously considering a permanent ‘change of system’, and, perhaps encouraged by the ease with which Fanny had made friends, soon came up with a plan to spend six months of every year at Camilla Cottage, four months in Paris and two in Joigny. He didn’t realise (because she hid it as well as possible) how increasingly important retirement was to his wife. When they spent a fortnight with the Bazille clan in Joigny in late June, Fanny found the visit almost intolerable. She loved the Bazilles and appreciated the fuss they made of their nephew and his family, but the small-town life that d’Arblay thrived on destroyed her sense of well-being as much as had Court life, as she wrote in comic exasperation to Hetty:
M. D’arblay is related, though very distantly, to a quarter of the town, & the other 3 quarters are his friends or acquaintance: & all of them came first to see me; next to know how I did after the journey; next were all to be waited upon in return; next came to thank me for my visit; next to know how the air of Joigny agreed with me; next to make a little farther acquaintance; & finally to make a visit of congé.37
‘Interruption, & visiting’ were still Fanny’s idea of hell.
Just as they couldn’t decide where to live, the d’Arblays also had a continuing struggle over which language was going to predominate in their household, since neither of them was truly bilingual. D’Arblay’s letters to his wife are in French, hers mostly in English, but English was the language they spoke at home – at least, it was when they were in France. Fanny could understand and read French very well by now, but was frustrated at her lack of fluency in speech. ‘You have hardly an idea what a check it is to my declamatory powers that if I think of speaking, I cannot utter a word!’ she wrote to Fredy Locke. ‘All my eloquence hangs on being surprised into an harangue, before I consider in what language I am delivering it’.38 She found the effort of speaking French tiring and boring: ‘my voice is as wearied of pronouncing as my brain is wearied in searching words to pronounce’.39 The resulting tongue-tie was like a return to her silent, blushing youth.
It wasn’t only her ‘declamatory powers’ that were checked in this period; Fanny also felt that for some reason or other her ‘epistolary spirit’ had ‘flown’.40 ‘I never wrote so few letters in my life’, she said41 – nor, she might have added, got so few replies. Her father, now approaching his eightieth year, was no longer a good correspondent, and despite resolutions with Hetty, Charlotte and Fredy Locke to keep a letter always on the stocks, ready for any opportunity to get it transported across the Channel, there was something deadening about the delays involved.
Within a couple of months of Fanny’s arrival in Paris the d’Arblays moved from the Hôtel Marengo to the airy suburb of Monceau because of Alex’s persistent illnesses in the city; in October 1802 they moved again, to 54 rue Basse, a house built into a hill overlooking the Seine at Passy.* They bought this ‘queer, irregular, odd house’42 in order to have some property in France to substantiate d’Arblay’s citizenship, since his hopes of reclaiming his land in Joigny had failed.* ‘It is just the place for such odd folks,’ Fanny wrote to Mrs Locke, ‘for we descend to enter it.’43 The cottage was mostly unfurnished when they moved in, and they had to send the builders away due to lack of cash, but Fanny liked the privacy of owning her own home, which became another ‘hermitage’. Presumably uncle Bazille helped out with the purchase; it is hard to see how else the penniless d’Arblays could have afforded it, cut off from Fanny’s small Court pension and the even smaller amount of rent they were owed at Camilla Cottage, which had only attracted a three-month let. D’Arblay’s own hopes of a pension were eventually realised in April 1803, through the offices of Lauriston again, but amounted to a mere £62 10s a year, half what he was expecting.
Fanny had been planning to return to England in October 1803, but events overtook her. War between France and England was imminent. On 12 May, the day the British Ambassador Lord Whitworth left Paris, the dramatist Bertie Greatheed called on the d’Arblays in Passy for the first time and found Monsieur in ‘the greatest agitation’. Madame kept to her room, clearly in no state to entertain. ‘This approaching war seems quite to overset them,’ Greatheed wrote in his journal, ‘so linked are they to both countries that to separate from either is ruin and to hold both impossible.’44 His observation was perspicacious: the d’Arblays’ loyalties were painfully confused. ‘War […] seems inevitable,’ Fanny wrote the same day to Fredy Locke, ‘& my grief – I, who feel myself now of Two Countries – is far greater than I can wish to express.’45
With the declaration of war on 16 May 1803, there was no longer any question of choice in the matter of where the d’Arblays’ were going to live. Now it was Fanny’s turn to be an alien in an enemy country. Bonaparte decreed on 22 May that all Englishmen and women in France between the ages of eighteen and sixty were to be considered prisoners of war. Severe travel restrictions and coastal blockades cut off any chance of Fanny keeping in touch with her family in England except by getting letters smuggled through on the very rare occasions when they could place them with trustworthy travellers. In 1804 she wrote only one letter to England – to her elderly father – and in 1807 she mentioned two that were ‘antiques that had waited 3 or 4 years some opportunity’. There was little chance of knowing, under these circumstances, if letters got to their destination or not, or whether they passed through the censor’s office on the way. Dr Burney was completely dissuaded from writing to Fanny because of his fear of her vulnerability, and advised the rest of the family not to risk writing to Paris either. He imagined that Fanny, with her Court and social connections in England, could easily be suspected of spying.
The d’Arblays therefore lived in a strange news blackout that lasted nine years. Letters that did trickle through from family and friends in England kept off politics and the war; consequently the d’Arblays didn’t even hear of the British victory at Trafalgar until 1812 – seven years after the battle. Similarly, Fanny had no idea until long after the event that her half-brother Richard had died out in Calcutta, aged only forty; that Sarah and James had finished their experiment in cohabitation in 1803 (James went back to his family and Sarah went off to be a governess in Cheshire); that Ralph Broome had died in 1805, leaving Charlotte widowed for the second time; that in 1807 her favourite niece, Charlotte Francis, had married a man called Barrett thirty years her senior and her most beautiful niece, Fanny Phillips, had found a husband rich enough to pay her debts and satisfy her extravagant tastes. Queeney Thrale had married too, at the age of forty-three. Her husband was Baron (later Viscount) Keith, Admiral of the White, the distinguished Commander-in-Chief of the Channel Fleet in the later stages of the Napoleonic war. Queeney’s mother, Mrs Piozzi, had begun a correspondence and friendship with Marianne Francis, Charlotte’s second daughter, a pious, self-possessed young woman who never married but devoted herself to private study and philanthropy. Perhaps it is just as well that Fanny did not know how she had been replaced in Mrs Piozzi’s affections by her niece, nor of how often gossip about ‘Madame Dab’ was passed along to Streatham Park via this channel.
There was little for the d’Arblays to do after the outbreak of war but keep their heads down, but with no chance of money coming from England and no recourse to their most reliable source of income, Fanny’s pen, the family was in a worse financial position than ever. In March 1805 d’Arblay began work on a salary of about £150 a year as a humble rédacteur in the Ministry of the Interior, a post he kept right through to the Restoration. After the first few months of pen-pushing he was so restless that he was briefly tempted by Narbonne’s suggestion to join Napoleon’s Polish campaign, but his principles and his chivalrous respect for his wife’s feelings prevented him from doing so. Fanny’s implacable objection to militarism and her reluctance to let d’Arblay risk his life in battle clashed once again with the family tradition, instincts and training of her frustrated soldier husband.
The health and education of Alex was a constant preoccupation of both his parents, who fussed continually over their hyperactive, precocious sauvage. Fanny was a firm believer in preventive medicine (they had submitted Alex to the risky new smallpox vaccination in 1798), and had always been keen on dosing her child up. The treatments she mentions giving him in these years in Paris include her old favourites, James’s powders and bark, as well as saline draughts, asses’ milk, red port infused with garlic, rhubarb and senna (together), sulphur, cream of tartar with honey, and raw turnip juice. No wonder the child felt sick most of the time and looked as thin as a ‘live skeleton’.46 And while his mother hung over his bedside, administering turnip juice on a spoon, his father was anxiously monitoring the boy’s studies and trying to rectify bad habits such as his obsessive interest in mathematical problems, which kept the child awake at night. Alex’s absent-mindedness, asociability and general lack of connection with the outside world were already marked at the age of ten.
The d’Arblays devoted a great deal of energy to their son’s education, but the time came when he began to out-learn them. Fanny had been planning to send him to his uncle Charles’s school in Greenwich on their return to England, but their detention in France necessitated finding him a place locally. Being possessive, anxious parents, unwilling ‘to relinquish entirely Our home system’,47 they persuaded Monsieur Sencier, the head of the pension on the rue Basse, to take Alex for mornings only. After only ten months of this dual regime, the boy won four first prizes at the end-of-year examination, for Mythology, Version, Thème and Bonne Conduite, much to his parents’ delight and pride. Neither Fanny nor d’Arblay seemed to anticipate any problems that might arise from Alex always being odd-man-out at school – the only externe, a skinny anglais, a winner of prizes for Bonne Conduite. The degree of control his parents exerted over him was extraordinary. At the age when d’Arblay himself had joined the army, Alex was being treated to evenings of family reading, his father carefully censoring ‘all such passages as might tarnish the lovely purity of his innocence by any dangerous impressions’.48
When the d’Arblays had to move back into the centre of Paris in the winter of 1806 to alleviate the unpleasantness of commuting (d’Arblay had been walking to and from his office in the sixième arrondissement along the muddy lanes to save money), Alex of course had to move schools. Monsieur Hix’s big school of almost two hundred boys was primarily for boarders, but again the d’Arblays made an exception of their son and insisted on sending him as a day pupil, this time on grounds of his health. Alex performed even better here than at Passy, but at a cost. Not surprisingly, the boys in his class developed a strong dislike of the little swot, and his superflux of merit points was deeply resented. The disaffected pupils were soon petitioning that d’Arblay be moved up to the next class, as Fanny related with misplaced pride in a long account to her father:
one of them called out aloud ‘Au quatrieme, D’Arblay!’ M. Hue angrily demanded who spoke? upon which 12 hands were held up, & 12 voices ‘Au Quatrieme, d’Arblay! This was so near a mutiny, that M. Hue was going to inflict some severe punishments, when all in a body lifted up their hands, & joined in the Chorus ‘Au quatrieme, d’Arblay! il est trop fort pour nous!’49
The teacher backed down at such a show of force, and referred the matter to the headmaster, but when the class was told yet again that they only had to work hard to get the same success as ‘petit d’Arblay’, they took matters into their own hands and threatened to beat him up in the playground if he didn’t either volunteer for a transfer or stop swotting. Alex took the latter course and quickly turned himself into ‘the idlest & most wanton Boy of the Class!’50 to appease his persecutors. His parents only found this out just in time to force him back ‘to his good old way’ before the exams. At the school prizegiving Alex carried off six first prizes and was so laden with books and laurel crowns that he made the audience of 1200 people give ‘a burst of approbation such as was given to no one else’ – so his mother said. She and d’Arblay were swollen with pride at their child’s success: d’Arblay was ‘forced to cover his face with his handkerchief from a joy amounting almost to shame’, as Fanny put it, and she – who had previously feared her child ‘might disgrace himself’ – couldn’t see for tears. It was indeed a very poor look-out for Alexander, as Madame d’Arblay herself realised later, singling out ‘those 6 fatal prizes’ as having ‘turned his understanding into presumption, & his application into caprice’.51
During her forced sojourn in France, Fanny worked sporadically on her fourth novel, The Wanderer. In the dedication to the book she reveals that it had been ‘planned and begun […] before the end of the last century!’,52 put aside, taken to France in 1802 and composed in patches over the next decade. With no chance of publication in the foreseeable future, there was no necessity to finish the book, and perhaps no desire to finish it either. The long, flexible story seems to have acted as a form of entertainment for Fanny as well as an occupation, a substitute for all the letters, conversations and gossip she was missing with her English intimates. Unfortunately The Wanderer suffered from its leisurely, aimless, episodic composition; without the pressure of a deadline that had knocked all her preceding novels into shape, Fanny’s new story merely sprawled.
Fanny had all but stopped writing a diary or journal, replacing it with memoranda, jottings and lists of visits, correspondence and reading. In the past she had composed her journal from notes made on the day (this had become a habit during the Court years); now she made very few notes and never bothered to elaborate them. ‘Could I write more frequently, or with more security that I write not to the Winds & the Waves, I would characterise the whole set to you, & try to make us yet shake hands in the same party’, she wrote to her father in 1810 of her friends the ‘female worthies’.53 But there didn’t seem any point in even beginning such a task.
The silence was broken occasionally, most notably when Fanny had to undergo an appalling operation, without anaesthetic, in 1811. Since the abscess which developed in 1794, she had suffered recurrent ‘breast attacks’ – painful inflammation of the right breast – in 1804 and 1806 (and possibly at other times which she forbore to mention). A regimen of fasting and asses’ milk helped her get through these bouts of illness, but the problem did not go away and by 1810 she had a painful lump in her right breast which by the following year was the size of a fist. After much agonised consultation and protracted attempts at a medicinal cure, it was decided to consult a surgeon, whose alarming diagnosis was that ‘a small operation’ might be necessary. Fanny’s delicacy was as much affronted at the thought of the indignities and exposure ahead as of the pain, and there was a further delay while she hoped to cure herself by diet and quiet living. Unfortunately, nothing but bad news reached her during this period, of the deaths of William Locke and Princess Amelia and of King George’s final collapse into illness (leading to the establishment of the Regency in 1810). Her state of mind had always had a direct effect on her health, and at the next consultation, which was with Napoleon’s celebrated army-surgeon Dominique-Jean Larrey, the need for an operation was pronounced vital: the growth was cancerous.
In the medical culture of the day, exposure of a female patient’s body to examination was not insisted on, and it is highly likely, given Fanny’s temperament and her stated ‘dread & repugnance’ of medical intervention ‘from a thousand reasons besides the pain’,54 that Larrey had not actually seen the affected breast until he was just about to cut it off. The consultation and decision-making that went on between the doctors over Madame d’Arblay’s prone body on the day of the operation certainly suggest it was the first opportunity any of them had had to examine the tumour, and even then, they didn’t touch it. It has been suggested in recent years that the fact that the patient, then aged fifty-nine, survived for twenty-nine years after her mastectomy indicates that the lump was benign and that total amputation may not have been necessary.55 The mastectomy was itself of course a life-threatening operation, from the dangers of haemorrhaging and infection (not to mention the trauma of excruciating pain in this pre-anaesthetic age). Without Larrey’s expertise at suturing and his pioneering surgical techniques, perfected on dozens of battlefields in the Napoleonic era, Fanny would very likely not have survived this cure for a possibly benign tumour.
The events of the day itself – 30 September 1811 – were recorded by the patient in extraordinary detail in an account written between six and nine months later.56 It was addressed to her sister Hetty, but was intended to be circulated among her immediate family in England, and because she had both her husband and son fair-copy it for her – a task which d’Arblay found traumatic – it could be rightly thought of as primarily addressed to them. Step-by-step she re-enacts the ‘never-ending’ wait for the doctors to arrive, the preparation of the bed, bandages, sponges and two old mattresses to soak up the blood, the arrival of the cabriolets ‘one – two – three – four – succeeded rapidly to each other in stopping at the door’, then the sudden entrance of the seven doctors, all dressed in black, the weeping nurses, the doctor’s imperious commands to his assistants ‘en militaire’ and the horrible moment of having to undress in front of them.
[E]verything convinced me […] that this experiment alone could save me[.] I mounted, therefore, unbidden, the Bed stead – & M. Dubois placed upon me the mattress, & spread a cambric handkerchief upon my face. It was transparent, however, & I saw, through it, that the Bed stead was instantly surrounded by the 7 men & my nurse. I refused to be held; but when, Bright through the cambric, I saw the glitter of polished Steel – I closed my Eyes. I would not trust to convulsive fear the sight of the terrible incision.
The style is an odd mixture of reportage and melodrama, relating all the facts with forensic accuracy but underpinning them with a symbolic language of intrigue, mystery, sacrifice and assault. The elements of colouring – the sinister ‘7 men in black’ arriving like assailants and surrounding the bed as soon as the victim’s face is covered, the threat of restraint, the glinting steel – might be considered unnecessary in a piece of writing which, the author claimed, was only written in order to correct any false reports her sister Hetty might encounter (from whom she might hear ‘false reports’ on this subject is hard to imagine). In her instructions about how the account of the mastectomy could/should be circulated, Fanny was very concerned not to have her father, Fredy Locke or Miss Cambridge read or know anything of the matter. (This was easily effected, and none of them ever found out what she had endured.) Her real motive in telling all but her most vulnerable friends about this dreadful event was clearly something different – a desire to shock. She goes on:
a terror that surpasses all description, & the most torturing pain. Yet – when the dreadful steel was plunged into the breast – cutting through veins – arteries – flesh – nerves – I needed no injunctions not to restrain my cries. I began a scream that lasted unintermittingly during the whole time of the incision – & I almost marvel that it rings not in my Ears still! so excruciating was the agony. When the wound was made, & the instrument was withdrawn, the pain seemed undiminished, for the air that suddenly rushed into those delicate parts felt like a mass of minute but sharp & forked poinards, that were tearing the edges of the wound – but when again I felt the instrument – describing a curve – cutting against the grain, if I may so say, while the flesh resisted in a manner so forcible as to oppose & tire the hand of the operator, who was forced to change from the right to the left – then, indeed, I thought I must have expired. I attempted no more to open my Eyes, – they felt as if hermettically shut, & so firmly closed, that the Eyelids seemed indented into the Cheeks.
This blood-curdling description is surely one of the most extraordinary pieces of ‘reminiscence’ ever committed to paper. Like the operation, the account goes on for a long time, and Fanny spares nothing: ‘the Knife rackling against the breast bone – scraping it!’, the mutilated breast so excruciatingly sensitive that she could feel the doctor’s hand poised over it ‘though I saw nothing, & though he touched nothing’. ‘I have two total chasms in my memory of this transaction, that impede my tying together what passed’,57 Fanny notes with slight regret of her lapses into unconsciousness. She wants to share it all, recall everything with a tenacity of attention which reaches to the very edges of consciousness: ‘When all was done, & they lifted me up that I might be put to bed, my strength was so totally annihilated […] my hands & arms […] hung as if I had been lifeless.’
The question why Fanny Burney decided to write the operation up in retrospect and in such detail is answered in great part – but not completely – by her obsessive need to control other people’s interpretation of her life. Most diarists or self-biographers would have drawn the line, though, at such a subject. First, there are the artistic difficulties: how do you convey pain convincingly? How can you transcend what is so personal? Of what use is it? Bodily functions and bodily ailments have never made good subjects for art. Fanny made no attempt to record anything about the birth of Alexander, which up to this date was the most traumatic physical event of her life; childbirth has no moral, which is why writermothers have avoided it as an unrewarding subject. There is a moral, of a kind, in Fanny’s mastectomy narrative. It symbolises all the other occasions in her life when she had ‘submitted to the knife’ and bowed to fate or to the will of others. It demonstrates the persistence of her individual consciousness and independent thought even when duty and prudence dictate submissive or passive behaviour. The value of Fanny’s narrative as a rare patient’s-eye view of radical surgery has been acknowledged by medical practitioners and historians of medicine,58 but its greatest value is as a testimony to the inviolability of the ego.
* Charles Rousseau Burney and his family, struggling as hard as ever to make ends meet, had moved there from Titchfield Street in 1798.
* Burney specifies in the play that it is seventeen years since this incident, interestingly the same interval as that between the composition of The Witlings and the first draft of The Woman-Hater.
* Rue Basse, now called rue Raynouard, has housed many famous people, including Benjamin Franklin, Jean-Jacques Rousseau and, in the nineteenth century, Honoré de Balzac. The Maison Balzac, with its rustic garden and views over the river, stands in the plot adjacent to the d’Arblays’ former home.
* It had been purchased from the state during his exile and could only be bought back at a massively inflated price.