ON HIS FIRST VISIT TO ST ANDREWS IN 1793 WHEN HE WAS IN HIS EARLY twenties, Walter Scott carved a woman's name in runic characters into the turf beside the castle gate.(1) Her name was Williamina Belsches, and her rejection of him made him, as he put it much later, Brokenhearted for two years--My heart again--but the crack will remain till my dying day (Journal [18 Dec. 1825]: 51). The woman who handsomely pieced Scott's heart was Charlotte Charpentier, whose surname had been Englished to Carpenter, and whom Scott married in 1797. A year older than her husband, she was the daughter of Jean Francois Charpentier, who had been controller of the household to the Embassy at Constantinople for twenty years, and was now Master of the Military Academy at Lyons. Perhaps because Charlotte's mother, who died in 1788 and who was also named Charlotte, had had an affair, the girl had been brought to England along with her brother around 1784, becoming a ward of the Marquis of Downshire. Though Charlotte continued to speak with a accent, she became a British subject and was baptized into the Church of England in 1787.(2) Scott's family was uneasy about his relationship with Charlotte on various counts. The Revolution had not only shaken Europe; more immediately, it had led to war between Britain and France in the early 1790s. During that time Robert Burns in Dumfries had been accused of Jacobinism, and had penned Scots, wha hae, ostensibly a paean to Bruce, Wallace, and Scottish nationalism, but also surely a poem alert to more contemporary continental rebellion against Tyrants.(3) In the two years before Scott and Charlotte Carpenter fell in love, Britain had feared a invasion, and Burns in 1795 had published in the Glasgow Magazine a now famous poem which presents in its last verse what Marilyn Butler calls probably the closest rendering in English of the notorious Jacobin `Ca ira': Then let us pray that come it may, As come it will for a' that, That Sense and Worth, o'er a' the earth Shall bear the gree, and a' that. For a' that, and a' that, Its comin yet for a' that, That Man to Man the warld o'er Shall brothers be for a' that.--(4) (Poems and Songs 603) Walter Scott's politics were different from those of Burns. Eight months before Burns wrote these lines, during the conflict between Britain and France, Scott and some other young advocates were involved in a wartime brawl in the pit of the Edinburgh Theatre when, armed with cudgels, they laid into Francophile and pro-Republican Irish medical students from Edinburgh University who were trying to disrupt the singing of God Save the King (Johnson 1: 102). The Tory royalist Scott, who would have liked to be a soldier and whose elder son became a British army officer, was no revolutionary. Yet he knew how dangerous French ideas and people could seem in some sections of Scottish society in the 1790s, and how they continued to appear throughout Britain during and after the Napoleonic wars which were the defining European events of Scott's maturity. In the Scott family stories grew up about how Charlotte Charpentier had been a royalist refugee at the time of the Revolutionary Terror, her father a close friend of the English nobility; none of this was true, but it was the sort of domestic propaganda which stopped Charlotte, with her sometimes broken English, from ever being thought of as some kind of enemy alien. Scott's own very happy marriage was a European union, and one which external political events and potential conflicting loyalties might have threatened with a crack. That crack never opened, yet all through the years when the British and fleets met at Trafalgar, or the European armies clashed at Waterloo, Charlotte Scott kept by her bedside a miniature portrait of the Master of the Lyons Military Academy. Initially, at least, Scott had paid comparatively little attention to the Revolution. …