The Real Jane Austen: A Life in Small Things. Paula Byrne
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.
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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 of the World … Depravity never was so general before.42
Catherine,43 the heroine, is a clever girl who is interested in politics and is shocked when her feather-brained friend, Camilla, professes, ‘I know nothing of Politics, and cannot bear to hear them mentioned.’
Catherine finds succour in a garden bower that she has built. When Edward Stanley, recently returned from France, kisses Catherine’s hand in the arbour, her aunt, Mrs Percival, is horrified: ‘Profligate as I knew you to be, I was not prepared for such a sight … I plainly see that every thing is going to sixes and sevens and all order will soon be at an end throughout the Kingdom.’ Catherine is dismayed by her aunt’s rebuke: ‘Not however Ma’am the sooner, I hope, from any conduct of mine … for upon my honour I have done nothing this evening that can contribute to overthrow the establishment of the kingdom.’ ‘You are mistaken Child,’ replies the older woman, ‘the welfare of every Nation depends upon the virtue of it’s individuals, and any one who offends in so gross a manner against decorum and propriety, is certainly hastening it’s ruin.’44
This is one of Austen’s most explicit references to the French Revolution. There is no mistaking what Mrs Percival means by the overthrow of the establishment of the kingdom. She sees no distinction between radical politics and dangerous sexual impropriety: in her view Edward Stanley has picked up both vices on his French travels. The stability of the state, she suggests, depends on proper behaviour between the sexes. She is horrified that Catherine has been neglecting the improving sermons and catechisms she has foisted upon her.45 French influence, inappropriate reading and sexual licence mean only one thing: revolution. The fact that Jane Austen is clearly mocking Aunt Percival’s political paranoia shows that she has no sympathy for mindless conservatism. But, at the same time, the presence of Eliza and her French news in the household at Steventon alerted the young Austen to the high stakes in the current ‘State of Affairs in the political World’.
Later in the turbulent 1790s Jane Austen wrote the first draft of the novel that was eventually published after her death under the title Northanger Abbey. It includes a scene not dissimilar to Catherine’s debate with Mrs Percival. The exchange takes place on Beechen Cliff, the hill above the city of Bath. Henry Tilney has been lecturing another Catherine, Miss Morland, on the picturesque, and then moves on to politics and the ‘state of the nation’:
Delighted with her progress, and fearful of wearying her with too much wisdom at once, Henry suffered the subject to decline, and by an easy transition from a piece of rocky fragment and the withered oak which he had placed near its summit, to oaks in general, to forests, the inclosure of them, waste lands, crown lands and government, he shortly found himself arrived at politics; and from politics, it was an easy step to silence.46
Strikingly, it is Catherine who puts an end to the silence: ‘I have heard that something very shocking indeed, will soon come out in London.’ Catherine is in fact talking about a new Gothic novel that is about to be published, but she is misunderstood by Henry’s sister, Eleanor, to mean mob riots in London: ‘Good Heaven! – Where could you hear of such a thing?’
‘A particular friend of mine had an account of it in a letter from London yesterday’ [replies Catherine]. ‘It is to be uncommonly dreadful. I shall expect murder and every thing of the kind.’
‘You speak with astonishing composure! But I hope your friend’s accounts have been exaggerated; – and if such a design is known beforehand, proper measures will undoubtedly be taken by the government to prevent its coming to effect.’
‘Government,’ said Henry, endeavouring not to smile, ‘neither desires nor dares to interfere in such matters. There must be murder; and government cares not how much.’ …
‘Miss Morland, do not mind what he says; – but have the goodness to satisfy me as to this dreadful riot.’
‘Riot! – what riot?’
The reference to reading