The momentous times of Seventeen Hundred Ninety-two were on in Paris. That mob of women, ragged and draggled, had tramped out to Versailles, and Marie Antoinette, a foolish girl who rattled around in a place that should have been occupied by a Queen, had looked out of the window and propounded her immortal question, "What do they want?"
"Bread!" was the answer.
"Why don't they eat cake?" asked Her Chatterbox.
Mary Wollstonecraft was a revolutionary by nature. Looking about her she saw London seething with swarms of humanity just one day's rations removed from starvation. A few miles away she saw acres upon acres—thousands of acres—kept and guarded for private parks and game-preserves. Then it was that she supplied Henry George that fine phrase, "Man is a land animal." And she fully comprehended that the question of human rights will never be ended until we settle the land question. She said: "Man is a land animal, and to deprive the many of the right to till the soil is like depriving fishes of the right to swim in the sea. You force fish into a net, and they cease to thrive; you entrap men, through economic necessity, in cities, and allow a few to control the land, and you perpetuate ignorance and crime. And eventually you breed a race of beings who take no joy in Nature, never having gotten acquainted with her. The problem is not one of religion, but of commonsense in economics. Back to the land!" Of course a writing woman who could think like this was deeply interested in the unrest across the Channel.
And so Mary packed up and went over to Paris, lured by three things: a curiosity concerning the great social experiment being there worked out; an ambition to perfect herself in the French language by speaking only French; a writer's natural thirst for good copy.
In all these things the sojourn of Mary Wollstonecraft in Paris was an eminent success, but tragedy was lurking and lying in wait for her. And it came to her as it has come for women ever since time began—through that awful handicap, her nature's crying need for affection.
In Paris martial law reigned supreme; in the streets the death-tumbrel rattled, and through a crack in the closed casement Mary Wollstonecraft peered cautiously out and saw Louis the Sixteenth riding calmly to his death. The fact that she was an Englishwoman brought Mary Wollstonecraft under suspicion, for the English sympathized with royalty. When men with bloody hands come to your door, and question you concerning your business and motives, the mind is not ripe for literature!
The letters Mary Wollstonecraft had written for English journals she now destroyed, since she could not mail them, and to keep them was to run the risk of having them misinterpreted. The air was full of fear and fever.
No one was allowed to leave the city unless positively necessary, and to ask permission to go was to place one's self under surveillance.