It could have been a line straight from Fuseli’s mouth, but this man wasn’t like him at all. Where Henry was compact, intense, refined, and florid, Imlay was as open as a prairie field, the new country of America personified. Optimism with ambition, openness with raw desire, energy unbound. He was forthright in his flirtations, witty, but unaffected. I guessed him about forty, with thick hair swept back from his tanned forehead and wrinkles around his eyes when he smiled, which he did easily. His face was angular, his complexion ruddy. He had a natural dignity that comes from a love of forests and wide-open spaces. He looked like a man who’d slept on the ground under the stars, eaten fish from rivers, and liked it. He was brawny but graceful, in a simple white shirt, stiff collar, and brown jacket—some said he fashioned himself after Daniel Boone—but there was a softness in him too.

At first I resisted Imlay’s charms, put off by his self-possession, but soon warmed to his poetic descriptions of exotic Kentucky, its rolling fields and farms, an unimaginable expanse of wooded wilderness—an Arcadian dream where strong men and strong women were building new lives as equals in the effort. Freedom, he said, was enthroned in the heart of every citizen, and their only master. We were both friends of the Revolution in France, but feared where it was headed. We agreed the king’s death had done little to improve people’s lives. Bread was as dear as ever, and they were still poor.

I read Imlay’s novel (surreptitiously) over two nights, and found him arguing against the slave trade, the massacre of native tribes, inherited wealth, monarchy. He called marriage “a state of degradation and misery for women,” and apparently believed, as I did, that all impositions on freedom, including strict divorce laws, were anathema to the liberty of all. Even more, he’d written about a heroine—“a beauty in tears”—victimized by a despotic husband partial to drunken sex. I couldn’t help but think of my own father, my sister Eliza, or shake the feeling that I was looking at myself in a mirror. I had never wanted to be a man, but if I ever did, I would have been Imlay down to his boots.

Soon we were tête-à-tête as soon as we came together, only stopping when we parted, and then found it hard to part at all. As spring swelled, we took long walks around Paris, which I now saw like a fairy scene that touched my heart: charming boulevards, elegant gardens, the sweet smell of clustering flowers.

“That first night when I saw you,” he said. “I secretly made you my singular mission.”

“What, to conquer me?”

“We Americans don’t conquer so much as throw off our oppressors, and then make deals in our interests.”

“What about my interests?” I asked.