Helen Maria, with her far better French, had quickly become a well-known salonnière in Paris. At Chez Williams, generals, diplomats, and politicians mingled with poets, philosophers, artists, and actors—old and new, French and foreign. It was a heady atmosphere, every conversation charged with a sense of personal danger, even if softened by fancy fabric and fine manners. She was fond of saying that her love for the French Revolution was born of her nature, and that her political creed was entirely an affair of the heart. To understand the general good, she said, one need not possess the wisdom of a philospher, only the sensibilité of a woman.

She had wide blue eyes that took up most of her face, a long, thin nose, a petite slip of a mouth, abundant curls, and dressed like a Greek goddess. It was all the fashion now not to be fashionable, to eschew the elaborate silks, satins, and pinched waists of the old regime in favor of light cottons, gauze, and sheer India muslin, high waists and slitted skirts that showed a woman’s true form and liberated even her stride. Helen Maria’s only jewelry was a double chain of pearls wrapped about her slender neck, a delicate armor. I could have loved her myself.

It was well known that she protected Girondists on the run. We’d all seen them lose ground to the more radical Jacobins, who seemed hungry for everyone’s head. Only a few months before, the people of Paris had butchered thousands of prisoners—priests, beggars, prostitutes, royalists, and ex-courtiers—anyone deemed an “enemy of the Revolution.” Women were raped and men tortured before jeering mobs. But the most indelible image in my mind was that of the Princesse de Lamballe, Marie Antoinette’s close friend, rumored to have been stripped naked, breasts and vulva cut off, and dragged through the streets when she refused to disavow the queen. It was at least true that they cut off her head and mounted it on a pike outside the queen’s prison window. The wild cruelty of it, so far beyond the meant-to-be-more-humane guillotine, haunted me. It was natural that English enthusiasts began to have doubts, some turning away from the Revolution in disgust. Eliza and Everina had begged me not to go to Paris, even Johnson had second thoughts, but I was determined to go, and stubborn, as I so often am.

But with our king now throwing in against France, all English were the enemy.

“I’m beginning to wonder whether we’re guests or prisoners, the brave ones or the fools,” I told Helen Maria, thankful to be sitting in a drawing room where the language, even the gestures, were ones I recognized, with someone who felt like a kindred soul.