https://fromtheheartofeurope.eu/william-wordsworth-annette-vallon-and-their-daug...

The story is very simple. In early 1792, William Wordsworth, about to turn 22 and fascinated by revolutionary France, fell in love with Marie Anne Vallon, known as Annette – not in Paris, as Alison Bechdel would have it, but in Orleans, 110 km to the south. She was four years older; her family were strongly Royalist and Catholic, and the political pendulum was swinging against them.

Legouis points out that for the upper middle classes in France and England, having children out of wedlock was really not as big a deal in the late eighteenth century as it would be in the mid nineteenth century (or indeed the early twentieth century when he and Harper were writing). For Wordsworth as a foreigner, it would anyway have been difficult to stay in France.

On 15 December 1792 the state registry office in Orleans registered the baptism of Anne-Caroline, daughter of Marie Anne Vallon and William Wordsworth. He and his sister Dorothy stayed in touch with Annette and, when she was old enough, with Caroline too, as far as possible through the wars. They met only twice. During a brief period of international peace in 1802, Dorothy and William spent a whole month with Annette and Caroline in Calais. Wordsworth wrote this sonnet about the nine-year-old daughter who he was seeing for the first time:

It is a beauteous evening, calm and free,
The holy time is quiet as a Nun
Breathless with adoration; the broad sun
Is sinking down in its tranquillity;
The gentleness of heaven broods o’er the Sea:
Listen! the mighty Being is awake,
And doth with his eternal motion make
A sound like thunder—everlastingly.
Dear Child! dear Girl! that walkest with me here,
If thou appear untouched by solemn thought,
Thy nature is not therefore less divine:
Thou liest in Abraham’s bosom all the year;
And worship’st at the Temple’s inner shrine,
God being with thee when we know it not.

Wordsworth married his childhood friend Mary Hutchinson a few weeks later, having come into an inheritance which enabled him both to marry and to make arrangements for his first daughter. He and Mary had five children, two of whom died young; Annette did not marry again and had no more children.

In 1816 Anne-Caroline, now 23, married in her turn, Wordsworth giving his formal consent (and Anne-Caroline signing her surname as Wordsworth). The wedding had originally been planned for April 1815, and Dorothy was all set to attend it with Sara Hutchinson, Mary Wordsworth’s sister, but the Hundred Days intervened.

The whole lot of them finally got together in Paris in October 1820, William, Mary and Dorothy spending a week with Annette, Caroline, Caroline’s husband Jean Baptiste Martin Baudouin and their first two daughters, the older nearly four and the younger ten months old, Wordsworth’s first grandchildren. They never met again, though Annette lived until 1841 and Wordsworth until 1850.

The older daughter in due course married the painter Theodore Vauchelet. Legouis has a great compare and contrast between Vauchelet’s portrait of his mother-in-law, Wordsworth’s daughter Caroline, and the classic portrait of Wordsworth himself: There’s something pretty unmistakable about the nose.

Legouis has much more to say about Annette’s life. He has a fascinating account of how her monarchist family twisted and turned to stay alive during the First Republic and the Empire. Annette’s brother Paul was imprisoned several times and could easily have been executed; Annette herself was a firm opponent of the new regime (Wordsworth’s feelings were more ambivalent).

The whole story only came to light just over a hundred years ago, seventy years after Wordsworth’s death. Wordsworth’s literary executor was his nephew Christopher Wordsworth, an Anglican clergyman and future bishop, and apparently he destroyed all the records he could find relating to Annette and Caroline in the family correspondence; Harper and Legouis have done their best from incidental notes in Dorothy’s diary and also the rich store of French official records.

Just one of Annette’s letters to William and Dorothy survives, written in 1793 when Caroline was still a baby. It survives because the police seized it and it remained unseen in the Blois city archives for 125 years. Strictly there are two letters, one to William and one to Dorothy folded up together. Legouis transcribes them both in an appendix, and it’s riveting to get her voice so clearly, still at that stage desperately hoping that she and William (and indeed Dorothy, who she cannot have met) would someday soon get together. It’s always good to hear a voice speaking as clearly as this from the past, reminding us that there’s more to history than names and dates. ( )