He laughed and pulled a pink blossom off a tree and smelled it, almost unconsciously, before flicking it into the wind. “It seems clear you stand for yourself, Miss Wollstonecraft, and value your freedom as much as any man values his.”

“I am not in pursuit of a marriage ‘deal,’ as you can imagine, Imlay, but I do believe that mutual affection might be the principal solace of human life. The thing that makes everything else tolerable.”

“Do you speak from experience?” he said.

“Do you?”

He stopped and looked away from me, down the arcade of leafing trees that lined our way, with his hands on his hips. I could see the answer on his face. Gilbert Imlay was blushing.

“Let me just say that I’ve dabbled in affection, probably exceeding what I should have, but not the mutual sort. Mostly I find there’s one person more in love with the other, whose ‘affection’ grinds down all gratification into guilt.”

“I’m guessing that person is not you,” I said.

“And I’m guessing it’s not you, either.”

My ideas about sex, I knew, were still mostly theoretical. Here was a man who was the furthest thing from it. He was flesh and feeling, and inviting me, directly and without pretense, to share mine with him, as his equal. I was thirty-three years old, on the verge of thirty-four. I felt the pull of Imlay strongly, wanted to believe in him, yet still resisted, maybe because Helen Maria whispered in my ear, “Be careful of that one, you know, he’s got a woman in every port.” And though everyone seemed to adore him, without exception, I took gingerly steps.

Then Tom Paine invited me for dinner at a hotel in the elegant Faubourg Saint-Denis to meet a woman younger than I was—Anne-Josèphe Théroigne de Méricourt—a failed singer-turned-courtesan, turned-militant-and-legend. She had a Jeanne d’Arc sort of beauty, wild-cropped dark hair framing her heart-shaped face, a great crown of white ribbons, and a rose at her breast.

“I’ve heard that in the march on Versailles,” I said, “you led the charge in a red riding coat on a black horse, sword in hand and pistols ready.”

“Oh, I’d heard a white riding habit and round-brimmed hat,” she said, with a flashing smile. “In fact I spent most of the night in bed, depressed, though I did go to the palace next day to watch the royal family removed and marched to Paris. A sobering sight.”

“But Théroigne has a plan to form a legion of Amazons to fight for Paris and the Revolution,” said Paine. “Don’t doubt she’ll do it.”

“Women must bear arms, same as men,” she said. “That’s what will make us citizens.”

“I wish men would turn their bayonets into pruning hooks, and give up war altogether,” I said.