ABSTRACT
In reviewing the state and needs of Crabtree studies, I came to the conclusion that much remained to be discovered about those crucial years in the seventeen-nineties after Crabtree had made that memorable decision to abandon Annette and their unborn child and to allow Wordsworth to pose as the childs’ father. Guided by some of my colleagues in the Department of French at King’s College, I read various autobiographies and memoirs covering the seventeen-nineties. I found that one of these works was worthy of particularly close scrutiny. It is Les Mémoires de la Comtesse de la Blague, published in a chastely illustrated edition by the Dockyard Press, Marseilles, in 1797. Some of the Comtesse’s most lively recollect ions concern an Englishman with whom she had an interesting encounter at Carcassone in the summer of 1792. This Englishman had little knowledge of French, a great liking for dogs, and a solemn, even disconsolate demeanour. The Comtesse vividly illustrates these characteristics in an anecdote which bears the marginal gloss, ‘Le fond du caractère anglais, c’est l’absence de Bonheur’. The Englishman, she tells us, had with him a greyhound, a female of the species, and was anxious to perpetuate the stock by finding a suitable mate for her. On being informed that the Comtesse possessed a male of the species, he decided to ask for the loan of this animal, and went to some pains to learn sufficient French to make his needs clear to her. After being presented to the Comtesse by a mutual friend, he blushingly asked her, ‘Vaudriez-vous Comtesse, me prêter votre chien pour-pour couvrir ma chienne?’ The Comtesse graciously assented; her dog was borrowed and duly returned. Shortly afterwards, on a particularly hot afternoon, the Englishman encountered her in the great square of Carcessone, and, removing his hat and sweating profusely, he thanked her in his halting French for the loan of her dog. Sorry to see him bareheaded and sweating so profusely on so hot a day, the Comtesse said, ‘Mais, monsieur, couvrez-vous !’ To the Englishman, however, ‘couvrez’ had only one meaning, and, a few seconds’ hesitation, he stammered out the words, ‘Oui, Comtesse, de temps en temps’ and then, with a deeply dejected air, stumbled across the square and out of sight, leaving the Comtesse, to use her own words, ‘très cusieuse et un peu
piquée’. The question at once presents itself, gentlemen: was this Englishman Crabtree? And have we here a vital illustration of his ambivalent state of mind after departing from Orléans and Annette; interested on the one hand in dog-breeding, exhibiting on the other hand every sign of a guilt-complex when obliged to use the vocabulary which that interest made necessary? There is certainly an impressive array of evidence to support this inference. We know that Crabtree was in France at this time: we know that his knowledge of French was almost non-existent: we know of the emotional crisis which caused him to surrender Annette to William Wordsworth; and we know, too, from Wordsworth’s cancelled lines in The Leechgatherer ms, which describe Crabtree ‘wrapt in glory and in joy, casting his fly along the riverside’, that Crabtree was addicted to fieldsports. To clinch the matter, only one more item of evidence seemed necessary: was Crabtree a dog-lover and interested in grey-hound-breeding during the early seventeen-nineties?
