Massacres, that wave of mob violence which began with the storming of the Tuileries Palace and culminated in the massacre of fourteen thousand people, including priests, political prisoners, women and children as young as eight. William Wordsworth would witness the aftermath as he passed through Paris soon afterwards. The unthinkable had happened: France abolished its monarchy and formally established the Republic.
The atrocities were reported in gruesome detail in the English press. The royal family were imprisoned and the London papers focused on the fate of the Queen’s friend, the Princess de Lamballe. On 3 September she was killed by the mob, decapitated, her innards and her head carried away on pikes. The head was taken to a barber who dressed the hair with its striking blonde curls so as to render it instantly recognizable to Marie Antoinette when it bobbed up and down outside the window where she was incarcerated. Caricatures of decapitated heads being carried along the streets of Paris on pikes filled the windows of the London print shops.
Eliza must have been terrified for Jean-François as the English press reported that even those said to sound like an aristocrat or resemble one in the slightest way would be ‘run through the body with a pike’. The Times reported that ‘A ring, a watch chain, a handsome pair of buckles, a new coat, or a good pair of boots in a word, every thing which marked the appearance of a gentleman, and which the mob fancied, was sure to cost the owner his life. EQUALITY was the pistol, and PLUNDER the object.’32
Eliza was comforted by the calm and practical Austens. They fussed over her, soothed her worries and, most importantly, paid attention to her little son, Hastings – ‘very fair’, ‘very fat’ and ‘very pretty’, according to Mrs Austen.33 Earlier, Eliza had worried that he had no teeth. And when he did begin teething, he started having convulsions. As he became a toddler and failed to start walking or talking properly it grew clear that something was wrong. Comparisons with little George Austen were inevitable. Cousin Phylly Walter wrote to her brother to tell him that Hastings had fits, was unable to walk or talk but made continuous ‘great noise’: ‘many people says he has the appearance of a weak head; that his eyes are particular is very certain; our fears are of his being like poor George Austen’.34 Later, she wrote, ‘I’m afraid he is already quite an idiot.’35
For a long time, Eliza refused to believe that anything was wrong with her beloved ‘son and Heir’. Her letters are full of references to him, as she took pleasure in his every tiny accomplishment: ‘he doubles his prodigious fists and boxes quite in the English style’. There is something very touching in her attempt to convince herself that her boy was completely normal, despite his bad epilepsy, his strange noises and his struggle with speech and movement. She insisted on keeping him at home with her. There was no question of sending him away to join his similarly disabled Austen cousin at Monk Sherborne. Eliza devoted herself to teaching him his letters and to gabble in French and English. From all accounts, ‘little Hastings’ was a sweet-tempered child, who would offer people his ‘half muncht apple or cakes’. When a doctor recommended sea-bathing, Eliza was happy to oblige and spent months at seaside resorts, insisting on their efficacious effect on his health. She ‘breeched’ him early (taking him out of ‘petticoats’ and into jacket and trousers) in order to ease his difficulties in walking. She fondly called him ‘as great a pickle as any who ever deserved that appellation’. She would have never described him as an idiot, as cousin Phylly Walter was wont to do. His Austen cousins adored him and he often spent time in Steventon. He was, in Eliza’s words, ‘the Play Thing of the whole Family’.36
Eliza’s adventurous and difficult life had a great impact on the vivid imagination of the teenage Jane Austen. This close familial connection to the reign of terror brought her much closer to the French Revolution than most of her English contemporaries. According to family tradition, Jane’s dislike of the French never left her from this moment.
Eliza stayed at Steventon probably until the spring of 1793. On 1 February, the new French Republic declared war on Britain and Holland. The French Revolutionary and Napoleonic wars would continue for another twenty years. There is an uncorroborated, probably apocryphal, family tradition that Eliza went back to France and then escaped, heavily pregnant once again, in company with a maidservant (perhaps the Madame Bigeon who would become her housekeeper in later years). She was certainly back in London by March 1794. At one o’clock on a very wet Saturday, Warren Hastings called on her, by request, and she read out to him a paragraph in the émigré newspaper giving the very worst possible news: ‘that on the 22nd February – Jean Capote Feuillide was condemned to death’.37
Jean was guillotined the day after he had been found guilty. Listed in the official record as ‘Prisoner No. 396’, he was bundled into a tumbrel and taken to the scaffold on the fifth day of the newly created month of ventôse in Year 2, according to the revolutionary calendar.38 The revolutionary tribunal had found him guilty of two charges. First, for complicity with Nicolas Mangin, who was executed the same day, in conspiring against the unity and indivisibility of the Republic and the sovereignty of the French people. And secondly, for being ‘the accomplice of the Marboeuf woman in trying to seduce, by means of a bribe, one of the secretaries of the Committee for Public Safety in an attempt to persuade this public official to steal or burn documents related to the said Marboeuf’.39 The family had no doubt that these were trumped-up charges. From Eliza’s point of view, her husband had nobly helped an elderly friend, the Marquise de Marbeouf, by trying to buy off her false accusers (she was executed a few weeks earlier for the crime of ‘desiring the arrival of the Prussians and the Austrians’,40 enemies of the Republic). He had been betrayed and guillotined. There was a family tradition that he tried to save himself by claiming to be a valet impersonating his master, though no evidence of this fruitless plot came out in his trial.
There are no surviving letters of Jane Austen until 1796, so there is no way of knowing how the execution of prisoner 396 affected her, but her closeness to her cousin and little Hastings must have brought home the full horror of the guillotine. Eliza noted in her letters that the Austen children were rather special, each of them endowed with ‘Uncommon abilities’. Jane, her clear favourite, returned Eliza’s interest by dedicating stories to her, and by using her as a model for her clever coquettes. The notion that Jane Austen was somehow oblivious to the violent events of her time is belied by the fact that Eliza was with her and her family at the Steventon rectory in September 1792, one of the bloodiest and most dramatic months of that bloody and dramatic age, and that they remained in close contact at the time of the guillotining of Eliza’s husband.
***
For Eliza: Austen’s affection for her cousin is apparent from her decision to dedicate the early novella ‘Love and Freindship’ to her
It was in the late summer of 1792, exactly at the time when Eliza arrived in Steventon with news from revolutionary France, that Jane Austen began the short novel, ‘Catharine, or the Bower’, which includes the story of Cecilia Wynne heading out on the fishing fleet to India. One of the other characters, Mr Stanley, ‘never cares about anything but Politics’,41 while another, Mrs Percival, has fashionable disdain for the horrors of the modern world:
After Supper, the Conversation turning on the State of Affairs in the political World, Mrs P, who was firmly of opinion that the whole race of Mankind were degenerating, said that for her part, Everything she beleived was going to rack and ruin, all order was destroyed over the face
