At length Mrs. Wollstonecraft appears to have grown desperate, for she had the temerity to go to Mrs. Fuseli, and to tell her, that she wished to become an inmate in her family; and she added, as I am above deceit, it is right to say that this proposal "arises from the sincere affection which I have for your husband, for I find that I cannot live without the satisfaction of seeing and conversing with him daily." This frank avowal immediately opened the eyes of Mrs. Fuseli, who being alarmed by the declaration, not only refused her solicitation, but she instantly forbade her the house. No resource was now left for Mrs. Wollstonecraft, but to fly from the object which she regarded: her determination was instantly fixed; she wrote a letter to Fuseli, in which she begged pardon "for having disturbed the quiet tenour of his life," and on the 8th of December, 1792, left London for France.
Shortly after her arrival in Paris, she again wrote to Fuseli, gave him her opinion of the state of public feeling at that important period of the revolution, and implored him to write to her occasionally. As this letter was not answered, all communication on her part during her residence abroad ceased.
The cause of Mrs. Wollstonecraft's protracted stay in France;—for she intended, prior to her departure from England, to have remained there only six weeks,—and the attachment which she formed while in Paris, are foreign to this memoir; besides, if they were not, it would be unnecessary now to detail them, as they have been long before the public from the able pen of him who afterwards became her husband.[41]
After an absence of nearly two years and a half, Mrs. Wollstonecraft returned to London, (in April 1795,) and on her arrival called upon Fuseli: the reception which she met with, it is presumed, was not very grateful to her feelings, for she shortly after wrote him the following letter.
"When I returned from France, I visited you, Sir, but finding myself after my late journey in a very different situation, I vainly imagined you would have called upon me. I simply tell you what I thought, yet I write not, at present, to comment on your conduct or expostulate. I have long ceased to expect kindness or affection from any human creature, and would fain tear from my heart its treacherous sympathies. I am alone. The injustice, without alluding to hopes blasted in the bud, which I have endured, wounding my bosom, have set my thoughts adrift into an ocean of painful conjectures. I ask impatiently what—and where is truth? I have been treated brutally; but I daily labour to remember that I still have the duty of a mother to fulfil.
"I have written more than I intended,—for I only meant to request you to return my letters: I wish to have them, and it must be the same to you. Adieu!"
"Mary."
"Monday Morning,—To Mr. Fuseli."
All communication ceased between the parties from this time until after Mrs. Wollstonecraft's marriage with Mr. Godwin. Fuseli noticed this occurrence in a letter to a friend, in the following terms: "You have not, perhaps, heard that the assertrix of female rights has given her hand to the balancier of political justice."
Fuseli saw Mrs. Godwin but seldom; he dined only once at her table. Indeed, this lady did not live long to enjoy the happiness which she had pictured to herself, in being the wife of a man of genius and talents; for she died on the 10th September 1797, after having given birth to a female child,[42] who has proved herself, by works of the imagination, to be worthy of her parents. Fuseli could not but feel much regret on the occasion; but as "grief does not give utterance to words," so he barely noticed the catastrophe in the postscript of a letter to Mr. Roscoe, in these terms,—"Poor Mary!"