The French Girl and The English Poet
Blois: View of the town from Royal Château
Why, one wonders, has no-one thought to make a film, better still a TV Series, of the astonishing love affair between the young French girl, Annette Vallon and the even younger English man, William Wordsworth, an embryonic Poet Laureate.
It has it all. Romance, passion, thwarted love, drama, pathos, honour, fidelity, heartbreak, fear, bravery, grief, sadness and frustration.
The main character, strutting Centre Stage, is The French Revolution which separated them. The star crossed lovers wrote to each other for almost thirty years.
In November 1791, an impoverished, wet behind the ears William, a recent graduate from Cambridge borrowed some money to enable him to pop over to France to see the Revolution, a bit like modern day ambulance chasers. This was Pre-Terror Paris. Delighted with all he saw, William became an instant Republican.
Wanting to see how the Revolution was embraced, or not, outside Paris he headed for Orléans where he rented cheap digs above a shop. This was December, just before Christmas.
He became friendly with Paul Vallon, a lawyer’s clerk from Blois whose father and brothers were surgeons in the main hospital there.
Paul introduced Will to his sister Annette who was spending Christmas with him. She was twenty-five. Will was twenty-one. She spoke fractured English. He spoke fractured French.
Annette was everything the buttoned up young Englishman wasn’t. Vivacious, spirited, energetic, dynamic and a fervent royalist, although that seems not to have caused a problem.
What they had in common was that they were virgins but not for much longer. Despite, or helped by the language barrier, they embarked on a mutually passionate love affair.
You do wonder what Paul felt. He must surely have known.
Annette became pregnant.
She went home to her family in Blois. Her ardent lover followed her there. This was the Spring of 1792. Blois, staunchly pro-monarchy, was the centre of the counter revolution.
The river Loire divided monarchists and revolutionaries. Ever since Charles VII settled there in 1422, the Loire Valley had been a retreat for royalty and the aristocracy.
Annette’s royalist parents strongly disapproved of young Will.
He had nothing going for him. He was a foreigner. England was the enemy. The only French he knew was pillow talk learned from Annette. He had no money, no job. He was he an idle good for nothing with dreams of becoming a poet. Plus he was a Protestant.
Worse, he attended local meetings of the The Society of the Friends of the Constitution, one of the political clubs that sprang up all over France to inform people of the benefits of the Revolution.
On 18 August 1792, the Society voted to destroy the royal effigy of Louis XII over the main entrance to the Chateau. William was in Blois the first week of September when imprisoned royalists were massacred. He was still there on the twenty-first, when the monarchy was abolished and the First Republic was declared. The beginnings of the Reign of Terror changed his mind about The Revolution,
When Annette was six months pregnant her parents whisked her off without telling William. He found out she was staying in a cottage just outside Orléans where his daughter, Caroline Wordsworth, was born 15 December 1792 when France was in a state of anarchy.
Her uncle, Paul Vallon, stood in for her father.
William was back in England. He was determined to marry Annette and provide for her and Caroline even if it meant entering the dreaded Holy Orders. At least a curate had a roof over his head and received a stipend.
It was not to be.
He would not see Annette or his daughter for nine years.
On the first of February 1793, France declared war against England.
Their love letters were intercepted. Those of Annette’s never left Blois.
So. Was William having the time of his life in London while Annette, a monarchist, was trying to survive in Revolutionary France?
No.
The years following his return were the worst years of his life. Unable to find a curacy, he was not qualified for any other job. Rootless, penniless and lovelorn it looks as if he sofa hopped between friends. No wonder he felt profound sympathy with the victims of war, abandoned mothers, children, beggars and vagrants.
Following the Peace of Amiens in 1802, William and his sister Dorothy visited Annette and Caroline in Calais. He wanted to tell Annette in person he was about to marry an old schoolfriend.
He wrote a sonnet ‘It is a beauteous evening, calm and free’ recalling a stroll along the beach with the nine-year-old Caroline. Said to resemble her father, she was very proud to be his daughter.
Two months later William got married.
Did Annette, who never fell out of love with him and who never married, weep and wail? No. She became an underground fighter for the Counter Revolution. She hid priests and the wounded and circulated information and supplies. An ardent royalist who despised and detested Napoleon Bonaparte she often risked her life.
Dove Cottage, Grasmere, UK
1816. Caroline Wordsworth, living in Paris, daughter of William Wordsworth, land-owner, residing at Grasmere, Kendal, in the county of Westmorland, England, who gives his consent in an affidavit dated the 17th of last October and Annette Vallon married Jean Baptiste Baudoin.
William, no longer poor, settled an allowance of £30 a year on his daughter (£2,500 in 2024).
1820. October. William, his wife Mary and Dorothy spent a month with Annette, Caroline and her husband in Paris.
William Wordsworth, though happily married, pined for Annette, Caroline and the Loire Valley to the end of his life. A lover of the countryside he remembered his walks from Blois to Chambord, Romorantin, Beauregard and Vendome.
No-one ever forgets their first love, especially if it was in France.
Post by Pamela (BA History of Art), Photography by Mark.
Pamela-Shields.com
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