The Making of Poetry. Adam Nicolson

loved

      As man, and, to the mean and the obscure,

      And all the homely in their homely works,

      Transferred a courtesy which had no air

      Of condescension; but did rather seem

      A passion and a gallantry, like that

      Which he, a soldier, in his idler day

      Had paid to woman: somewhat vain he was,

      Or seemed so – yet it was not vanity,

      But fondness, and a kind of radiant joy

      That covered him about when he was intent

      On works of love or freedom.

      Beaupuy looked like an oasis in a bitter world, a source of hope and goodness in a violent time, a demonstration that human nature was capable of fineness and grace. With him, walking along the road in Touraine, Wordsworth had a sudden, formative encounter, one of those spots of time that make us what we are, remembered for the rest of his life:

And when we chanced

      One day to meet a hunger-bitten girl,

      Who crept along fitting her languid self

      Unto a heifer’s motion – by a cord

      Tied to her arm, and picking thus from the lane

      Its sustenance, while the girl with her two hands

      Was busy knitting in a heartless mood

      Of solitude – and at the sight my friend

      In agitation said, ‘’Tis against that

      That we are fighting,’ I with him believed

      Devoutly that a spirit was abroad

      Which could not be withstood, that poverty,

      At least like this, would in a little time

      Be found no more, that we should see the earth

      Unthwarted in her wish to recompense

      The industrious, and the lowly child of toil,

      All institutes for ever blotted out

      That legalized exclusion, empty pomp

      Abolished, sensual state and cruel power

      Whether by edict of the one or few –

      And finally, as sum and crown of all,

      Should see the people having a strong hand

      In making their own laws; whence better days

      To all mankind.

It is difficult to judge how much The Prelude attributes later thoughts and ideas to earlier events – Wordsworth was imperious in his relationship to time – but that moment with Beaupuy, who in 1796 would be killed by a cannonball in battle against the Austrians, and the simplicity and passion of the remembered words, ‘’Tis against that/That we are fighting,’ seem now to stand as one of the sources of Wordsworth’s later life. Beaupuy’s name is among those cut into the stones of the Arc de Triomphe, but these lines, in which he is described in the beautiful, supple, easy blank verse of The Prelude, are a true memorial.

      At the same time, Wordsworth fell in love with a young French woman. Annette Vallon was four years older than him. Their story, which was only ever known within the family circle in Wordsworth’s lifetime, is exceptionally opaque. She was the daughter of a surgeon in Blois. Nearly nothing is known about her, except that during the years of the Revolutionary wars, in which her Catholic and Royalist family suffered at the hands of the Republic, she and her sisters behaved with extraordinary and resourceful courage, running messages for the Royalists, concealing enemies of the state, smuggling them to safety, evading the secret police, in turn, of the Terror, the Directoire and Napoleon, risking all. Wordsworth had fallen in love with a woman of mettle and fire. She had first encountered him late in 1791, at the house in Orléans of André-Augustin Dufour, a magistrate’s clerk, and may have begun by teaching him French, but soon they moved together to Blois. In the spring of 1792 she became pregnant with their child.

      Wordsworth scarcely communicated with anyone at home, only asking his brother Richard for some money, but saying nothing of Annette. In December 1792 their daughter, Anne-Caroline Vallon, was born and baptised in Orléans, the French clerk carefully recording the impossible name ‘Anne Caroline Wordswodsth, daughter of Williams Wordswodsth, Anglois, and of Marie Anne Vallon’. Wordsworth had made arrangements for Dufour to represent him at the baptism, by which time he himself had gone, leaving Annette unmarried and unsupported. Astonishingly, he did not return immediately to England, but spent six weeks in Paris witnessing the drama of revolution.

It is, at the least, chaotic behaviour. Although their politics were directly opposed, Annette certainly expected him to marry her. She called herself Annette Williams, and her distraught letters long for his return, for him to be present in her life and the life of their daughter. Only obliquely did Wordsworth ever write of her, as an interlude in The Prelude, in which there is no suggestion that the love affair he describes was anything more than a story told to him by Beaupuy. But it is filled with memories of the ‘delirious hour’, the ‘happy time of youthful lovers’ he had known with her, the promise of that Loire valley beginning:

      his present mind

      was under fascination; he beheld

      A vision, and he lov’d the thing he saw.

      Arabian fiction never fill’d the world

      With half the wonders that were wrought for him.

      Earth liv’d in one great presence of the spring …

      all paradise

      Could by the simple opening of a door

      Let itself in upon him, pathways, walks

      Swarm’d with enchantment, till his spirit sank

      Beneath the burthen, overbless’d for life.

      It may be that, at the height of the reign of Terror late in 1793, with Britain at war with France, Wordsworth quickly and secretly returned to see her – there are suggestions of that in The Prelude – but he was soon gone, and her piteous letters resumed:

Come, my friend, my husband, receive the tender kisses of your wife, of your daughter. She is so pretty, this poor little one, so pretty that the tenderness I feel for her would drive me mad if I didn’t always hold her in my arms. She looks like you more and more each day. I believe that I hold you in my arms. Her little heart beats against mine and I feel as if it is your heart beating against me. ‘Caroline, in a month, in a fortnight, in a week, you will see the most cherished of men, the tenderest of men’ … Always love your little daughter and your Annette, who kisses you a thousand times on the mouth, on the eyes … I will write to you on Sunday. Goodbye, I love you for life. Speak to me of the war, what you think of it, because it worries me so much.

      Wordsworth never received that particular letter, as it was impounded by the Committee of Surveillance, and was only discovered in the 1920s, with one other, hidden in the files of a sub-police station in the Loire valley. But others of the same kind, all now destroyed, crossed the Channel, filled with appeals to a desperate conscience.

      On his return to London, Wordsworth sank into the deepest depression of his life, besieged by guilt and ‘dead to deeper hope’, his soul dropping to its ‘last and lowest ebb’. He had lost all faith in human endeavour. His abandonment of Annette and Caroline was fused in his mind with the fate of the Revolution in France and the turn to repression in England, with his own lack of any future and the absence of much hope for the ideals Beaupuy had embraced and the happiness Annette may have represented.

      Wordsworth wandered lost through these years. After 1793