“What do you say to this threat?—why, entre nous, I like to give way to a sprightly vein when writing to you. ‘The devil,’ you know, is proverbially said to ‘be in a good humor when he is pleased.’”
Many of her old friends in the capital had been numbered among the children devoured by the insatiable monster. A few, however, were still left, and she seems to have made new ones and to have again gone into Parisian society. The condition of affairs was more conducive to social pleasures than it had been the year before. Robespierre was dead. There were others besides Mary who feared “the last flap of the tail of the beast;” but, as a rule, the people, now the reaction had come, were over-confident, and the season was one of merry-making. There were fêtes and balls. Even mourning for the dead became the signal for rejoicing; and gay Parisians, their arms tied with crape, danced to the memory of the victims of the late national delirium. The Reign of Terror was over, but so was Mary’s happiness. Public order was partly restored, but her own short-lived peace was rudely interrupted. Imlay in London became more absorbed in his immediate affairs, a fact which he could not conceal in his letters; and Mary realized that compared to business she was of little or no importance to him. She expostulated earnestly with him on the folly of allowing money cares and ambitions to preoccupy him. She sincerely sympathized with him in his disappointments, but she could not understand his willingness to sacrifice sentiment and affection to sordid cares. “It appears to me absurd,” she told him, “to waste life in preparing to live.” Not one of the least of her trials was that she was at this time often forced to see a man who was Imlay’s friend or partner in Paris, and who seems to have aided and abetted him in his speculations. He tormented her with accounts of new enterprises, and she complained very bitterly of him. “——, I know, urges you to stay,” she wrote in one of her first letters of expostulation, “and is continually branching out into new projects because he has the idle desire to amass a large fortune, rather, an immense one, merely to have the credit of having made it. But we who are governed by other motives ought not to be led on by him; when we meet we will discuss this subject.” For a little while she tried to believe that her doubts had no substantial basis, but were the result of her solitude. In the same letter she said:—
“... I will only tell you that I long to see you, and, being at peace with you, I shall be hurt, rather than made angry, by delays. Having suffered so much in life, do not be surprised if I sometimes, when left to myself, grow gloomy and suppose that it was all a dream, and that my happiness is not to last. I say happiness, because remembrance retrenches all the dark shades of the picture.”
But by degrees the dark shades increased until they had completely blotted out the light made by the past. Imlay’s letters were fewer and shorter, more taken up with business, and less concerned with her. Ought she to endure his indifference, or ought she to separate from him forever? was the question which now tortured her. She had tasted the higher pleasures, and the present pain was intense in proportion. Her letters became mournful as dirges.
On the 30th of December she wrote:—
“Should you receive three or four of the letters at once which I have written lately, do not think of Sir John Brute, for I do not mean to wife you, I only take advantage of every occasion, that one out of three of my epistles may reach your hands, and inform you that I am not of ——’s opinion, who talks till he makes me angry of the necessity of your staying two or three months longer. I do not like this life of continual inquietude, and, entre nous, I am determined to try to earn some money here myself, in order to convince you that, if you choose to run about the world to get a fortune, it is for yourself; for the little girl and I will live without your assistance unless you are with us. I may be termed proud; be it so, but I will never abandon certain principles of action.
“The common run of men have such an ignoble way of thinking that if they debauch their hearts and prostitute their persons, following perhaps a gust of inebriation, the wife, slave rather, whom they maintain has no right to complain, and ought to receive the sultan whenever he deigns to return with open arms, though his have been polluted by half an hundred promiscuous amours during his absence.
“I consider fidelity and constancy as two distinct things, yet the former is necessary to give life to the other; and such a degree of respect do I think due to myself, that if only probity, which is a good thing in its place, brings you back, never return! for if a wandering of the heart or even a caprice of the imagination detains you, there is an end of all my hopes of happiness. I could not forgive it if I would.
“I have gotten into a melancholy mood, you perceive. You know my opinion of men in general; you know that I think them systematic tyrants, and that it is the rarest thing in the world to meet with a man with sufficient delicacy of feeling to govern desire. When I am thus sad, I lament that my little darling, fondly as I dote on her, is a girl. I am sorry to have a tie to a world that for me is ever sown with thorns.
“You will call this an ill-humored letter, when, in fact, it is the strongest proof of affection I can give to dread to lose you. —— has taken such pains to convince me that you must and ought to stay, that it has inconceivably depressed my spirits. You have always known my opinion. I have ever declared that two people who mean to live together ought not to be long separated. If certain things are more necessary to you than me,—search for them. Say but one word, and you shall never hear of me more. If not, for God’s sake let us struggle with poverty—with any evil but these continual inquietudes of business, which I have been told were to last but a few months, though every day the end appears more distant! This is the first letter in this strain that I have determined to forward to you; the rest lie by because I was unwilling to give you pain, and I should not now write if I did not think that there would be no conclusion to the schemes which demand, as I am told, your presence.”