How to Create the Perfect Wife (26 page)

The correspondence at least brought some much-needed cheer to Seward, who was so taken with the wit of “Monsieur Le jour” that she copied long passages into letters to her friend Po. Anna’s fortunes had taken a tumble since the idyllic summer’s evening of the previous year when she had entertained her “dear Quartetto’” on the palace terrace. Having lost Day and Edgeworth to their French sojourn and Honora to her father’s home, she had been forced to give up her beloved Saville too. A furious Mrs. Saville, exasperated at Seward’s continuing intimacy with her husband, had banned Anna from her home in the Vicars’ Close in late 1771. When this did nothing to curtail the pair’s relationship, Mrs. Saville complained first to the Reverend and Mrs. Seward, and then to the dean of Lichfield, John Addenbrooke.

Anna’s protestations that she was innocent of any sexual misconduct were accepted by her parents—and were quite possibly true—but that did not quell the rumors. In a casual aside during a dinner party at the palace in March 1772, Darwin suggested that he believed there was more to the complaints than idle gossip. Seward would never forgive him. Horrified by these revelations, the Sewards banished Saville from the palace and threatened to disinherit Anna if she ever saw him again.

For the moment Seward had little alternative but to comply with her parents’ commands, although she complained bitterly about their “deaf and inexorable cruelty” and the social stigma they inflicted on her “by the prohibition so disgraceful to my character.” Putting his loyalty to Anna before his marriage vows, Saville refused to accept the dean’s offer of a new post on the same remuneration away from Lichfield in the knowledge, Anna later said, that “I cou’d not bear a total separation.” Nearly thirty yet still financially dependent on her parents and forced therefore
to bow to their commands, Anna confided her desperation to Day. While other friends urged her to forget Saville for the sake of social decency and parental obedience, she knew that Day could be relied upon to offer non-judgmental sympathy.

Meanwhile, Edgeworth, at least, seemed ready to mend the fractures in his difficult marriage. Confident now that he was beginning to attain mastery over the powerful Rhône, he invited Anna Maria to join him in Lyon in early 1772. She made the long journey reluctantly with one of her sisters, leaving little Maria and baby Emmeline with their great-aunts in London. It was not a happy holiday. Edgeworth was still preoccupied with his plans and his constructions for most of the time, and his wife disliked French society and customs. But at least she would be spared the society of Day.

After nearly a year of being groomed, coached and bullied by his despised French tutors, Day felt sufficiently confident to return to England and, in Edgeworth’s words, “to claim, as the reward of his labours, the hand of Miss Elizabeth Sneyd.” Packing his bags to leave Lyon, he was besieged by beggars and poor peasants who were mortified to find their chief source of charity was about to depart. A large crowd gathered outside his door. Some of them merely “lamented, very pathetically, the grievous losses both of him and his bounty” while others made the wily suggestion that Day should leave behind a large sum “as a prudent supply for their future wants.”

Rushing back to England in early 1772, he hurried around to present himself at the Sneyd residence in Lichfield. When she saw Day after nearly a year’s absence, Elizabeth Sneyd could hardly believe her eyes. The scruffy young poet who had intrigued her during the balmy days of the previous summer had changed beyond recognition. Dressed in the height of French fashion, in colorful silk breeches, flamboyantly embroidered waistcoat and shapely long jacket, his wild black hair shorn and covered by a neat gray wig and his feet shod in silver-buckled shoes, Day bowed low in the customary manner and addressed his fiancée in the mannered style of a town dandy.

The effect was ridiculous. For all his efforts and lessons, Day looked even more awkward than before. “The studied bow on entrance, the suddenly
recollected assumption of attitude, prompted a risible instead of the admiring sensation,” laughed Anna Seward. “The endeavour, made at intervals, and by visible effort, was more really ungraceful than the natural stoop, and unfashionable air.” Day’s “showy dress” was “not a jot more becoming,” she wrote. All in all, the sight of “Thomas Day, fine gentleman” was infinitely more unattractive than the plain, unkempt Thomas Day of old, Seward noted.

The ladies of Lichfield sniggered behind their handkerchiefs; Elizabeth Sneyd was aghast. Her efforts to fashion the ideal husband had proved no more successful than Day’s attempts to create his ideal wife. She had sent him away to become the perfect gentleman, and he had come back a perfect fool. Recoiling in horror at the strange creature that she had summoned to life, Elizabeth swiftly broke the engagement. A furious and tearful row ensued before Day stormed off in a rage. With relief, Elizabeth threw away her books on metaphysics, and by March she was dancing merrily at an assembly in Shrewsbury.

Rejected once again, Day fell into another deep gloom. For all his serious stances on politics and manners, he was now a laughingstock among friends and associates far and wide. Even Darwin’s son, also named Erasmus, who was only thirteen at the time, would capture Day’s humiliation in a mischievous poem written secretly to his younger brother Robert a few years later.

Mr Day too was there, who was reckon’d you know

A Man who had travel’d & rather a beau

The very first moment we enter’d the Town

Good Lord! I discovered he was but a Clown;

Though he powders his Hair, & strives to look gay

But I charge you don’t tell him a word that I say.

Casting aside his stylish new clothes and his curled wig, Thomas Day resumed his plain dress and let his hair grow long and tangled again. He would later write a bitter defense of his slovenly ways in the form of a mock court case entitled “The Trial of A. B. in the High Court of Fashion.” The charges read: “That he the said Defendant, A. B. had at sundry
times, been guilty of the highest, and most enormous, offence against the dignity and majesty of the Court then assembled.” The defendant’s “crimes” included “That in dress he went remarkably plain” and “That in the management of his house he was notoriously guilty, keeping no more servants than were just necessary, and arbitrarily forbidding, upon pain of dismission, the use of curling irons, powder, and pomatum.” But he recovered swiftly enough.

Retreating back to Paris, in March 1772 Day wrote to tell Seward that he had never been “much in Love” and did not believe he ever would be again. Commiserating with Anna over her painful separation from Saville, he assured her that he knew from experience that time healed all wounds. “In respect to my fair Lichfield Friend, I have forgotten the very feelings of Passion. It is in my mind as a thing which never has existed.” He did not doubt that Elizabeth would have made him happy if they had married, he wrote, but “that I am disengaged with honour to myself, & without prejudice to her Happiness, I rejoice.” Unlike Margaret Edgeworth, the “toad” whom he said he still regarded with “abhorrence,” he bore no hard feelings toward Elizabeth. And he wanted Seward to tell her so. “Tell her if you see her that I am not at all in love with her, but that I have an higher opinion of her, & more affection for her than ever.”

At age twenty-four, Day was now totally convinced of the fickle nature of women. He told Anna that he had befriended “some fair female Acquaintances at Paris, with whom I talk of nothing but Sensibility” and who “continually exhort me to marry because it is a great pity so much sensibility should be lost.” Yet his wealth of experience in love made him realize, he said, that “when a woman fancies herself in love with me, tells me she shall love me eternally” and “would suffer death or torture, or poverty for me” he was “seldom deceiv’d.” He ended the letter with a poem to “Celia”—plainly Elizabeth—which recounted his “despair” when “with weeping eyes, you bid your swain adieu.” The poem did not explain whether the tears were due to sorrow or laughter.

Nevertheless, for all his bad luck with women, he had still not given up his romantic ideals entirely. Mixing in Parisian intellectual circles, Day met Amélie Suard, the liberated and intelligent sister of the writer and publisher Charles-Joseph Panckoucke, at about this time. Mme Suard,
who was married to the French journalist Jean-Baptiste Suard, was perhaps one of the “fair Female acquaintances” so eager to talk about sensibility with Day while exhorting him to marry. Although Mme Suard, who was twenty-nine in 1772, was already married, Day apparently “paid his court to her”; one source would say that he was “in love” with her. Evidently Day had decided to adopt the contemporary French approach to marital fidelity. But however much Mme Suard was taken with Day’s sentimental ideas, she gave his advances short shrift.

Despite his brave words to Seward, Day was still smarting from his rejection by Elizabeth when he visited Sutton Coldfield at the end of July. He must have been paying one of his rare visits to check on the progress of Sabrina’s education at her boarding school. Now fifteen, she had spent the past eighteen months poring over her books and being excluded from singing and dancing lessons while her guardian pranced and bowed as he practiced the minuet in France. But Day paid her little attention.

Stopping at an inn in the town he scratched a poem on the window lamenting his rejection by Elizabeth Sneyd and signed it T. D., July 24, 1772. Regarded rather as a mark of romantic sensibility than as a mindless act of vandalism, scrawling odes on windows, walls and doors in public places was not an uncommon practice for aspiring writers. Rousseau, for one, had scribbled a proclamation condemning the conspiracy he believed was working against him on the bedroom door of an inn near Lyon in 1769. In his usual passionate and declamatory style, Day’s poem envisages fleeing the sorry scene of his recent humiliation for Italy and Switzerland. “On, on ye coursers! roll ye rapid wheels!” he begins, as he urges his horses to bear him speedily away from the “friendless grove” and “dull diminished spires” of Lichfield where he has been rebuffed by the “cold Nymph.” Anticipating visits to Etna and the Alps on his travels, he ends the ode: “Full many a Nymph the wandering swain shall find / In other realms, as faithless and as fair.” The quest continued.

Returning to France—Italy and Switzerland would have to wait—Day rejoined the Edgeworths in Lyon. For once, Mrs. Edgeworth was pleased to see him. Having found herself pregnant not long after the reunion with her husband, she was now thoroughly fed up with French society—and with her husband’s obsession with mastering the Rhône. Now that he had
succeeded in carving out a channel for the anticipated new route of the river, and the approach of winter threatened a surge of water, Edgeworth was busier than ever. Terrified of giving birth in a foreign country, Mrs. Edgeworth wanted to return home and Day gallantly volunteered to escort her back. A distracted Edgeworth waved them off.

Soon afterward, Edgeworth was warned by one of the boatmen he had befriended that a “tremendous flood” was on its way. Desperate not to lose all his hard-won labors, he begged the river company to employ more men to work day and night in order to complete the fortifications. The company refused. A few days later Edgeworth was woken at dawn by a deafening roar and the bustle of crowds rushing to the banks of the river. He got there in time to see all his ingenious engineering work, along with piles, barrows, tools and timber, “carried down the torrent, and thrown in broken pieces upon the banks.” To forget Honora, he had thrown himself into taming the Rhône, but the Rhône had beaten him. He consoled himself by designing experimental windmills to while away the winter months.

In the New Year Edgeworth made one last desperate effort to repair his battered marriage. In an earnest letter to his wife on January 12, 1773, he promised that she could choose where they would live in the coming summer and offered to renew their marriage vows.

Will you agree to be unmarried again?
—
I mean as to the contract made between ourselves
—
and shall we make a new one?
—
If you will give it under your hand I will seriously
—
You become more agreable to me every day
—
and I hope the reason is that you become more deserving
—
Your character really and truly is mended and is I think a very desirable one
—
let the past be past
—
And I will return to England with a real desire to be pleased and to please.

It was probably the last letter that Anna Maria received from him. In March she gave birth at her aunts’ house in London to a fourth child, a daughter named Anna, and then died ten days later. Maria, now five, would remember being led to her mother’s bed for a last kiss. Edgeworth received the news later that month and immediately abandoned his work, then wended his way, pensively, back through France with Dick to arrive
in London in May. Poor little Maria, bereft at the loss of her mother, had thrown tea in someone’s face, and as a punishment her great-aunts had shut her in a gap between two doors to consider her sins. From her dark prison she suddenly heard a voice that struck her as being “quite different” from any she had previously heard. When the doors opened she saw a man dressed in black whom she immediately decided was “sublimely superior to all she ever saw before.” It was her father.