The Real Jane Austen: A Life in Small Things. Paula Byrne
with the King’s brother and other royalist émigrés. Eliza wrote from London to the Austen family at Steventon telling them the news and also giving bulletins of her mother’s declining health. She comforted herself with gossip about her Steventon cousins, especially Jane and Cassandra: ‘I hear they are perfect beauties and of course gain hearts by dozens.’26
After a long battle with breast cancer, Phila Hancock died in 1792. Eliza’s husband managed, via a circuitous route, to join her in England to provide some comfort in her bereavement. They went to Bath for a period of recuperation and she became pregnant. The Count decided, however, to return to France for fear of having his land confiscated. As Eliza reported,
M. de F proposed remaining here some time, but he soon received Accounts from France which informed him that having already exceeded his Leave of Absence, if he still continued in England he would be considered as one of the Emigrants, and consequently his whole property forfeited to the Nation. Such Advices were not to be neglected and M. de F was obliged to depart for Paris.27
Within days of his departure, Eliza’s nerves, already frayed, were shattered when she was caught up in serious riots in London. On 4 June 1792, the King’s birthday, a group of forty servants had been invited to a dance and dinner at a pub, the Pitts Head. There was no disturbance until the High Constable of Westminster along with his watchmen entered the pub, made trouble and arrested all the servants, taking them to the Watchhouse in Mount Street. The next morning a mob arrived at the Watchhouse and soldiers were called to read the Riot Act. Eliza’s coach was attacked and her driver was injured, terrifying her out of her wits and causing her to miscarry the baby she had conceived on her husband’s visit to England. She wrote a graphic account of the events:
The noise of the populace, the drawn swords and pointed bayonets of the guards, the fragments of bricks and mortar thrown on every side, one of which had nearly killed my Coachman, the firing at one end of the street which was already begun, altogether in short alarmed me so much, that I really have never been well since. The Confusion continued all that day and Night and the following Day, and for these eight and forty Hours, I have seen nothing but large parties of Soldiers parading up and down in this Street, to which Mount Street is very near, there being only Grosvenor Square between. My apprehensions have been that they would have set fire to the houses they were so bent on demolishing, and think if that was to be the case how soon in such a City as this a Fire very trifling in the beginning might be productive of the most serious Consequences.28
Parallels were instantly drawn with recent history in France. A caricature of the Mount Street riots, published two days later, showed a French manservant arguing with a violent watchman and saying ‘Ah, Sacre Dieu! I did tink it vas all Dance in de land of Liberté!’ On the back wall is a print of the Storming of the Bastille, with cannons and decapitated heads on pikes. The implication is clear: like Paris, London was in danger of being swept into revolution.29
Eliza immediately made plans to escape to Steventon. But as a result of her miscarriage and then a severe case of chickenpox, she didn’t get there until August. So it was that she arrived at the Austen rectory with her head full of English riots and anxieties about her husband back in Paris. Weakened by miscarriage and illness, she cried when she saw the uncle whose features so resembled those of the beloved mother whom she had recently lost.
She noted how tall her cousin Jane had grown and assured Phylly Walter, who disliked Jane, that she ‘was greatly improved in manners as in person’. Eliza also expressed her own sense of loyalty to the younger sister: ‘My Heart gives the preference to Jane, whose kind partiality to me, indeed requires a return of the same nature.’30
She may have felt safe in rural Hampshire, sharing stories and books with her cousins, but news from France reached her in private letters from Jean-François and also via the English press: ‘My private Letters confirm the Intelligence afforded by the public Prints,’ she wrote to Phylly Walter, ‘and assure me that nothing we read there is exaggerated.’31 She was referring to the September 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