SECRET FOR 100 YEARS

Evening Post, Volume CVI, Issue 126, 24 November 1923, Page 16

SECRET FOR 100 YEARS

WORDSWORTH'S LOVE STORY.

Some interesting particulars of WordsWorth's love affairs were given in a. lecture delivered in Paris under the .auspices of the Murren. Lecture Society by Mrs. M. L. Woods on the poet's youth, reports Eeuter in the "Daily Telegraph." Ii was; she said, a remarkable, fact that although his attachment to Mavie Anno Vallon, whom he first met at Orleans^ was known to many of his friends, these all, in deference to the poet's v4sb.es, kept theiv knowledge to themselves, and the secret was.kept for over a hundred years, until an American professor found some letters of Dorothy Wordsworth in the British Museum in which reference was made to the facts.

Marie Anne Vallon, the lecturer said, belonged to a Royalist and Catholic family, at Blois, and when Wordsworth met her she was living at Orleans, where her favourite brother was in a notary's office. It was impossible to say now why Wordsworth did not marry her. We can only suppose it was his poverty or his political and Teligious views, to which her family would naturally have objected. Wordsworth was just 22, and Annette (as he'always called her) was 26. He was a plain, shy youth, who, on his arrival in Orleans, could not have spoken French at all fluently. Yet it cannot have been very long before she became his mistress, and, without being grossly uncharitable to Marie Anne Vallon ; it may be assumed that her responsibility for this state of affairs was not less than the young William Wordsworth's, the more so as her later history points to her having been a woman of a strong; bold character, witha taste for plot and intrigue. Their child, a girl, was born in the December of the following year, and the poet returned to London shortly afterwards. The mother was evidently living in comfortable circumstances; Wordsworth had not left her to starve. France's declaration of war against England came as a shattering blow to him— both for public and personal reasons. It erected a hopeless barrier ■ between the lovers, and.we can sympathise with him in his dejections and agony as described in ''The . Prelude.'.' Precarious communications were maintained with Annette during the next two or three years. Two letters from her, one to William and one to Dorothy, have survived in the archives of Blois. The former is harrowingiy emotional, and one seeß a passionate woman to whom already the lover is less important that the child on whom for the rest of her life she was to lavish, her maternal devotion. The next we hear: of her is that she is living with her sisters at Blois as the widow of an Englishman named Williams. ■ She was \ evidently a leading spirit ■ among the Boyalists, watched by the police and always able to baffle them. Did. Wordsworth ever find his "way over to France in reply to some appeal from Annette? We do not know.

. In 1795 Wordsworth and Dorothy settled at Racedown, on the £900 left to the poet by his friend, Raisley Calvert. _ Annette fades into the distance,haunting him only as a memory, a sadness, a theme for pity, perhaps for remorse. Seven years later, after the Peace of Amiens, the former lovers met once more. Wordsworth and Dorothy met Annette^ and the little Caroline at Calais. Wordsworth was by this time a prophet and a poet; we do not know whether Annette' realised this, or whether she had read his verses. The American professor who wonders why Wordsworth did not then marry Annette would appear to possess more morality than common sense. Imagine" this Frenchwoman, this townswonian of 36, an ardent Catholic her interests in Prance;, transported to a tiny cottage in the damp and extremely Protestant Lake 'District, living the simple life with Wordsworth and Dorothy and probably all-the Coleridge family. They spent a month together at Calais (one hopes that Wordsworth, now better off, provided- for. his daughter). Then the Wordsworths returned to England, and shortly after Wordsworth married May Hutchinson, with whom for many years he lived, in peace and happiness.