The cause of Mrs. Wollstonecraft's protracted stay in France;--for she intended, prior to her departure from England, to have remained there only six weeks,--and the attachment which she formed while in Paris, are foreign to this memoir; besides, if they were not, it would be unnecessary now to detail them, as they have been long before the public from the able pen of him who afterwards became her husband.[41] After an absence of nearly two years and a half, Mrs. Wollstonecraft returned to London, (in April 1795,) and on her arrival called upon Fuseli: the reception which she met with, it is presumed, was not very grateful to her feelings, for she shortly after wrote him the following letter. "When I returned from France, I visited you, Sir, but finding myself after my late journey in a very different situation, I vainly imagined you would have called upon me. I simply tell you what I thought, yet I write not, at present, to comment on your conduct or expostulate. I have long ceased to expect kindness or affection from any human creature, and would fain tear from my heart its treacherous sympathies. I am alone. The injustice, without alluding to hopes blasted in the bud, which I have endured, wounding my bosom, have set my thoughts adrift into an ocean of painful conjectures. I ask impatiently what--and where is truth? I have been treated brutally; but I daily labour to remember that I still have the duty of a mother to fulfil. "I have written more than I intended,--for I only meant to request you to return my letters: I wish to have them, and it must be the same to you. Adieu!" "Mary." "Monday Morning,--To Mr. Fuseli." All communication ceased between the parties from this time until after Mrs. Wollstonecraft's marriage with Mr. Godwin. Fuseli noticed this occurrence in a letter to a friend, in the following terms: "You have not, perhaps, heard that the assertrix of female rights has given her hand to the _balancier_ of political justice." Fuseli saw Mrs. Godwin but seldom; he dined only once at her table. Indeed, this lady did not live long to enjoy the happiness which she had pictured to herself, in being the wife of a man of genius and talents; for she died on the 10th September 1797, after having given birth to a female child,[42] who has proved herself, by works of the imagination, to be worthy of her parents. Fuseli could not but feel much regret on the occasion; but as "grief does not give utterance to words," so he barely noticed the catastrophe in the postscript of a letter to Mr. Roscoe, in these terms,--"Poor Mary!" CHAPTER VIII.