SOURCE: Favret, Mary A. “Spectatrice as Spectacle: Helen Maria Williams at Home in the Revolution.” Studies in Romanticism 32, no. 2 (summer 1993): 273-95.

In the following essay, Favret discusses Williams' Paris salon, frequented by an international group of artists and intellectuals in the early days of the French Revolution as a place that blurred the boundary between the domestic and the political realms.

It was a rendezvous for the most famous orators, the best-known men of letters, the most celebrated painters, the most popular actors and actresses, the most fashionable dancers, the most illustrious foreigners, the lords of the Court, and the ambassadors of Europe; the old France had come there to end, the new had come there to begin.

—Chateaubriand, Mémoires d'Outre Tombe¹

The Paris home of the English writer Helen Maria Williams was just the sort of rendezvous Chateaubriand recalled from the early days of the French...