Three fraught years earlier, in the summer of 1816, a summer that would change their destinies, Alexandre Corréard and Théodore Géricault appeared very different from the agitated, injured beings who would meet in that grisly studio during the winter of 1819. Both seemed, uncannily, so much younger. Géricault, in contrast to his later self, was very much the young man about town, handsome, well dressed, with an attractive head of reddish, light brown hair. Corréard was lithe and sinewy, excitable and alert. These two men, who would become important figures in each other’s lives, had urgent reasons to leave France. Love would drive Géricault away; loathing for what was happening to his country would send Corréard, as a pioneer, to Senegal.
Despite the costly failures during the final months of his reign, Napoleon had boosted the self-esteem of a great many Frenchmen. In 1814, the twenty-six-year-old Corréard was by no means alone in feeling dismay at his emperor’s defeat. Although a conciliatory constitutional monarchy was swiftly created, Louis XVIII was obliged to reward survivors from the ancien régime, counterrevolutionaries, and those who had been supportive to the crown in exile. Though the king was to preserve many of the improvements made in French administration since his elder brother, Louis XVI, had been forced from the throne and guillotined, the year 1814 saw ennoblement on an unprecedented scale and witnessed the restoration of that emblem of an all-powerful monarchy, the palace of Versailles.1 Such conflicting signals were alarming to a country suffering from defeat and a formidable sense of collective loss.
During their childhood and youth, Alexandre Corréard and Théodore Géricault had known only the turmoils of revolution and the authoritarianism of the empire. Alexandre had been born into a class that had prospered since the French Revolution and grew up in one of the grandest houses in the precariously hill-hugging town of Serres in the mountainous region of southwestern France. On his father’s side the family had been merchants since the Middle Ages and his mother’s family were middle-class professionals. Elizabeth, the mother often children, of whom Alexandre was the sixth, was fervently religious. She kept to her faith throughout the revolution, which had, by turns, been unsympathetic or ambivalent toward the church. Just as Alexandre’s flair for enterprise suggests some measure of paternal influence, so Elizabeth’s tenacity was reflected in the ardor of her son’s subsequent struggles against the injustices of the state. He attended a military school in the imperial city of Compiègne, coming to maturity when Napoleon was at the height of his power. In 1812, as the tide turned against the emperor, with food and anticonscription riots at home, defeat in Spain, and retreat from Russia, Corréard joined the Imperial Guard, in which he served until 1814.2
During those two years, the military and domestic situation in France deteriorated rapidly. With so many men conscripted, wounded, or dead, the women and children were to be found hard at work in the fields. Abroad, the unenthusiastic remnants of the French army in Spain were defeated at Vitoria-Gasteiz in June 1813, allowing the victorious Wellington to enter southern France. Napoleon was likewise defeated at Leipzig in October 1813, allowing the Prussians to push on toward the French frontier. By the early months of 1814, peasants had inundated Paris with their carts and cattle, seeking refuge from the invading armies. The mentally disturbed were turned out of asylums in order to provide quarters for the retreating troops; hospital patients were driven from their beds to make way for the wounded. In March, famine and pillage threatened the capital, presaging complete social breakdown.3 Dead bodies were heaped up on the banks of the Seine and floated eerily in the river, a situation that the authorities duplicitously assured inhabitants would have no deleterious effect on drinking water. Mounds of the military dead were piled into mass graves and Paris took on the air of a sacrificial altar to a lost cause.
Then, at the end of March and the beginning of April 1814, it all changed. Throughout the city, Allied troops paraded. In the Tuileries, along the Champs-Elysées, and in the Palais Royal droves of curiously attired English tourists, along with a multitude of occupying troops, gave Paris the splendor of a fabulous extravaganza; a stroll through the capital would present the visitor with a
savage Cossack horseman, his belt stuck full of pistols, and watches and hatchets … the Russian Imperial guardsman, pinched in at the waist like a wasp, striding along like a giant, with an air of victory that made every Frenchman curse within his teeth as he passed him … the heavy Austrian, the natty Prussian, and now and then a Bashkir Tartar, in the ancient Phrygian cap, with bow and arrows and chain armour, gazing about from his horse.
The cosmopolitan mayhem of the occupation flashed visions of “hopeless confusion … Russians, Poles, Germans, Italians, Jews, Turks and Christians, all hot, hurried and in a fidget.”4
To secure peace and stability in Europe the Senate, at the behest of the provisional government and acting on the wishes of the Allied victors, summoned the Bourbon Louis Stanislas Xavier, king of France, to return home after his interminable exile and accept his rightful place on the throne. The event was heralded in a fast-selling pamphlet in which the royalist author vicomte de Chateaubriand celebrated the Allies as liberators, denounced Napoleon as having had “the sword of Atilla and the maxims of Nero,” and hailed the royal family as healers.5
Returning to France in 1814, the Bourbons may have been thoroughbred French, with their line stretching back to the Middle Ages, but they were also an unprepossessing group who were coming to restore regal authority and order to a country that had run wild with blood-thirsty political experiment. Louis XVIII claimed that he had been de facto king since the death of his young nephew Louis XVII, in 1795. By 1814 he was aging, childless, and deteriorating with gout, yet his uncompromisingly absolute attitude, a reaction to the execution of his brother Louis XVI, had mellowed during his long exile. Not so, however, that of his younger brother, the dangerous and provocative duc d’Artois, who would succeed Louis as Charles X. Artois surrounded himself with extremists, “ultra-royalists” who had no intention of letting renegade republicans and Bonapartists have their say in restoration France. These ultras were to prove the most problematic of all the political factions, launching intimidating affronts to Louis’s rule.6
The Senate called Louis XVIII to the throne as a constitutional monarch on April 7, 1814. The king arrived with a strong desire to heal his kingdom’s wounds and to effect, as he put it, a “fusion of two peoples.”7 France was a nation in a state of shock and, as Louis’s remark suggests, divided against itself. If a good number of people in many parts of the country welcomed the return of a king, the army remained loyal to Napoleon. Paris was split along political lines. Dangerously, factions were testy and likely to clash.
Remembering Napoleon’s rule as a period of opportunity, Alexandre Corréard noted that, at the time of his fall, “I wanted to distance myself as far as possible from France and so I engaged as an engineer in the military expedition that was going to retake possession of the French establishments on the African coast.”8 As a geographical engineer, Corréard was appointed to identify a suitable location on Cap Vert, or its environs, for the establishment of a colony.9 An expedition was set up in the late autumn of 1814 and participants began to assemble at Brest for a departure planned for the spring of 1815. The scheme for which Corréard enlisted was directed by the Philanthropic Society of Cap Vert and attracted a large number of republican, or Napoleonic, sympathizers who were seeking to start afresh in a French colony.10 In order to gain official support, the Philanthropic Society presented itself as an organization that had been created to prevent disaffected people from taking their capabilities and capital off to other countries. With a schedule for reimbursing the crown for its initial support, the society was a properly structured commercial venture with shareholders, annual general meetings, a committee of directors, and projected profits.
As Corréard prepared to ship out, something unforeseen happened. On March 1, 1815, Bonaparte, who had been smoldering away on the island of Elba, landed in Golfe Juan on the south coast of France with the four hundred soldiers that he had illegally kept with him in exile. His reckless gamble seemed to be paying off when he entered Grenoble six days later, escorted by the very troops sent to check his advance. On March 10 in Lyon, Napoleon was greeted by crowds yelling, “To the scaffold with the Bourbons! Death to the royalists.”11 Events followed swiftly. On March 14, the Crown Jewels were sent to England for safekeeping. Louis addressed the chamber of deputies, claiming that he stood for peace and liberty, whereas Napoleon brought war. However, on March 19 the king prepared to travel north into exile.
During the evening of the twentieth, Napoleon arrived in the capital, at the head of yet more troops who had been sent to oppose him.12 Unwisely, Louis had replaced the ever popular tricolor, that rallying point for liberté, égalité, fraternité, with the white flag of the Bourbons. Upon Napoleon’s return, the tricolor was unfurled with alacrity and shopkeepers exchanged their royal emblems for Napoleonic insignia, much as they had replaced Napoleonic eagles with fleur-de-lis only nine months before. It was as if Louis had never happened; the reconceived monarchy had been stillborn.
On June 12, Napoleon marched his army north to engage the Allied troops massed under Wellington and the Prussian field marshal Blücher. There were scores to settle and his new position to consolidate; although vast portions of the French population were loyal to the king, Louis now found himself in virtually unprotected exile. The future of the monarchy was, once again, in doubt until Napoleon’s daring bid was, within the week, crushed by his defeat at Waterloo. By June 21 Napoleon was back in Paris, where, on the following day, he abdicated in favor of his son.13 The period known as the Hundred Days was at an end. To prevent himself from being captured by his enemies, Napoleon made haste for Rochefort where two frigates would be waiting to enable his escape to America.
Forgetting earlier triumphs under Louis XIV against a united Holland and England, the French tended to undervalue their navy. In a pitiful state when Napoleon first came to power, its history during the previous forty years had been checkered, although the loss of most of France’s first colonial empire at the end of the Seven Years’ War in 1763 provoked a great period of naval reorganization, shipbuilding, and peaceful exploration, particularly in the Pacific. Louis XVI zealously sought a fleet that could wrest control of the high seas from the English and recover the French colonies lost under his grandfather Louis XV. By 1780 France possessed seventy-nine warships, eighty-six frigates, and about a hundred smaller ships. It was thus able to play a decisive but costly role in the American War of Independence. The French blockade of Chesapeake Bay in September 1781 prevented the Royal Navy from coming to the aid of Cornwallis, who was thus forced to surrender at Yorktown in mid-October. The Peace of Versailles in 1783 gave France minimal overseas territory, including Tobago and Senegal, yet the cost of helping the Americans free themselves from the yoke of unjust English taxation had been punishing. The deficit in the navy budget anticipated the ruin of the ancien régime itself.14
After the revolution, there had been a massive emigration and, by 1792, half of France’s naval officers had disappeared. In 1793, when war broke out with England, the British sank the French fleet at Toulon. During the two following years France lost many vessels through bad seamanship as well as in combat, a sequence of disasters culminating, in 1798, with Nelson’s crushing defeat of the French at Aboukir. Despite some reorganization under Napoleon, the navy was again beaten at Trafalgar on October 21, 1805, where the smaller but remarkably well trained English fleet beat the demoralized and badly equipped Franco-Spanish adversaries. The victors gained incontestable supremacy on the high seas and the subsequent blockade kept what was left of the French navy starved of materials and largely portbound.15 After the restoration, that blockade ceased to exist but, toward the end of the Hundred Days, the English navy was again on hand to frustrate any attempt at escape.
The plan, in June 1815, was for Napoleon to set out for America on board the Saale while a frigate called the Medusa was to act as a decoy. This ship was the work of the acclaimed designer Jacques Noël Sané and construction began at Paimboeuf in April of 1807. She was to carry forty-four cannon, each capable of discharging a four-pound shot. The hull was reinforced to her waterline, with copper to protect it against mollusks and barnacles, and when ready for launch in July 1810 the Medusa was utterly up to date. Her maiden voyage in December of that year was the command of a small Franco-Dutch expeditionary force to Batavia.16 It was an adventurous voyage out; the frigate was battered by high seas, lost her convoy, and was given chase by an English squadron. Shortly after her arrival in the Dutch East Indies, the islands were surrounded by British warships and Batavia surrendered. Julien Schmaltz, the quixotic adventurer who would later play such a shameful part in the Medusa scandals, was captured by the English. Meanwhile, the Medusa and her sister ship, the Nymphe, gave the enemy the slip, sailed off, and arrived safely back in Brest almost a year after they had left France.
The captain of the Medusa recorded that after various adventures during the voyage, he was in no doubt about the excellence of his ship. During 1812 and 1813 she put to sea a considerable number of times, given the blockade. Among her duties was the hunting of English merchant ships returning from the Far East. Her career was distinguished; by February 1814, along with the Nymphe, she had engaged and destroyed a dozen enemy ships. Under the restoration she serviced as a patrol vessel in the Caribbean, arriving back in Rochefort for a refit in February 1815. When the Hundred Days ended ignominiously for Napoleon, the Medusa was nominated to draw the fire of the English squadron moored off Rochefort, while the emperor fled on board the Saale. The captain of the frigate, le Chevalier Ponée, believed that he would be able to distract and deceive the English for about three hours. After that, his frigate would be finished, but by then the emperor would have put a little distance between himself and his pursuers. In the event, however, Napoleon gave himself up to the British captain Maitland on board HMS Bellerophon on July 14, 1815. Ponée, understandably, lost his command with the coming of the second restoration and, only months after its refit, the Medusa returned to Rochefort to be disarmed.17
With the unforeseen episode of the Hundred Days, Alexandre Corréard’s departure for Senegal had been called off when the Philanthropic Society “momentarily suspended its activity.” Feeling that there were grounds, once again, for hope at home, he was, in fact, left in France merely to witness the swift and final failure of his emperor and the subsequent eclipse of liberal prospects. After such an unexpected affront to European security, the occupation of France was more stringent than it had been in 1814, and the pressure on Louis to root out subversives even greater. With peace, however, the efforts of the Philanthropic Society recommenced, helping “peaceful men who were tired of exhausting their resources in conditions of social paralysis, and who, without ceasing to be French, wished to create a new country on land that is still untouched.”18 For Corréard, the expedition, a chance to escape to a land uncomplicated by conflicting ideologies, seemed overdue.
In the summer of 1816, the date of Alexandre Corréard’s eventual departure for Senegal, Théodore Géricault also wished to leave France. He signaled no immediate dissatisfaction with the restoration; indeed, he played an active and positive part in the new regime. Born into a comfortable family in September 1791, Théodore spent his earliest years in Rouen, in a pro-royalist household that was threatened during that revolutionary period. In those early years the boy quite probably absorbed something of the violence that characterized the Reign of Terror under the Jacobins, and it is likely that the Géricaults left for Paris in order to escape from local revolutionary unrest. In the capital, Théodore’s father, Georges-Nicolas Géricault, joined his brother-in-law Jean-Baptiste Caruel in his tobacco enterprise, while his son attended a nearby boarding school. Let out on Thursdays, the boy was much indulged by his grandmother, who lived with them in the faubourg Saint-Germain, and he threw tantrums when it was time to return to school. In 1806 Théodore entered the Lycée Impériale, where it soon became evident that he had more enthusiasm for horses than for schoolwork; his eyes glazed over as he wrestled with Latin grammars while his “spirit was captivated by visions of imaginary cavalcades.” However, early on, he did display artistic talent; a friend and fellow pupil, Théodore Lebrun, recorded Géricault’s natural aptitude for drawing, commenting that he was already an artist without being conscious of the fact. Much of Géricault’s recreation and study time was consumed by drawing, and as a result he appeared somewhat of a dunce and was frequently thrown out of class.19
In May 1807 a family event occurred that would have immense repercussions on Géricault’s life and art. In a union not unusual for the period, Théodore’s fifty-year-old uncle Jean-Baptiste Caruel married a young lady of twenty-two. His chosen, Alexandrine-Modeste de Saint-Martin, possessed a lively interest in the arts, and, within the confines of her new family with its narrow focus on business, it was inevitable that the artistic leanings of her personable young nephew would attract her. An animated friendship grew up between them, which benefited from the blessing of Alexandrine’s busy husband. When she met with her nephew, she was keen to see his sketches and chat about art. He, at sixteen, was flattered, perhaps even a little embarrassed, by the attentions of an attractive young lady.
Within a year of Alexandrine’s marriage, a death occurred that drew the young aunt and youthful nephew even closer together. In March 1808, Théodore’s mother, a strong woman whom he had loved and by whom he had been much loved, died. While his father entertained practical and predictably safe ambitions for the boy, his mother had supported her son’s budding artistic talent. After her death Théodore had even greater need of his aunt’s understanding.
The boy and his father moved to the Right Bank, to a house only a stone’s throw from the rich and luxurious establishment in the rue de la Grange-Batelière where the Caruels were installed. Alexandrine was particularly sensitive to the boy’s grief, having lost her own immediate family during her childhood. She became a consoling presence who began to fill the emotional vacuum left by the death of Théodore’s mother. He rejoiced in her sympathetic and vivacious spirit and she delighted in the vitality of someone close to her own age who was still sufficiently young enough to become a kind of protégé. Easily distracted by his eagerness to become a man about town, Théodore responded warmly to the relaxed atmosphere generated by Alexandrine in the Caruel home. The extent to which he had become an important part of her world is indicated by the fact that in December 1809, Géricault was named godfather of the Caruels’ second son, Paul.
As the bond grew between Alexandrine and her elegant, tall, well-formed nephew, she became the most important woman in his life. They became so close that they started to hatch secret plots and deception became a part of their alliance. Géricault’s father had continued misgivings about his son’s desire to paint, so Alexandrine entreated her husband to provide a respectable cover for their nephew’s artistic studies, persuading him to take the young man into his tobacco firm as a trainee accountant and to turn a blind eye to the boy’s absences. During these escapades, Géricault went either to a riding school or to class at the studio of the anglophile and royalist Carle Vernet, an accomplished painter of history and horses. It was there that Théodore befriended Carle’s son Horace, whose own studio would, by contrast, and within the first few years of the restoration, become a rendezvous for subversive Napoleonic and republican liberals.20
On the brink of maturity, and made financially independent by a substantial legacy from his mother, Géricault was much admired by women. Carle Vernet “asserted that he had never seen such a good-looking man,” going on to remark that “his legs were, above all, superb.” Géricault was fashionable and becoming careful in his dress to the point of affectation.21 Yet any vain posturing was “tempered by a marked expression of gentleness.” His eyes twinkled, and such a dashing and accomplished young man, exhilarated by the thrill of horsemanship and beginning to take himself more seriously as an artist, proved a compelling companion for the youthful Alexandrine Caruel.22
One highly attractive place where he was welcome to stay and work was the magnificent property near Versailles that had been purchased by his uncle Jean-Baptiste Caruel in 1802. Adjoining the Parc de Trianon, the Château of Grand-Chesnay had once belonged to officers at the court of Versailles and was a typical purchase for a member of the bourgeoisie who had become rich after the revolution. The château’s park and its dependent agricultural holdings were sizable and the house boasted a library of fourteen hundred classical texts and a collection of fifty pictures and engravings, mainly by minor Dutch and French artists.23 Though these indifferent images had little to offer the young visitor, the large house and extensive grounds gave Géricault the opportunity to enjoy privileged moments with his young aunt. She was becoming more than a strong ally against paternal caution and the young man’s attraction to her was developing into something more complicated than a mere replacement for maternal love and encouragement.
While at Grand-Chesnay, Géricault visited the nearby imperial stables to make paintings of three of the emperor’s studs. He also frequented the Trianon Gallery where he would study the works of art, and it was there that he would meet and flirt with a certain Mademoiselle Montgolfier, who mistook the dalliance for a serious advance, a misunderstanding that Géricault was, as the months went by, more than happy to encourage. To be seen in the company of Mademoiselle Montgolfier and to be talked about would provide a useful camouflage for the serious, dangerous, and illicit adventure upon which he was embarking.24
Not wishing to become a victim of the disintegrating Napoleonic military machine, Géricault bought himself a replacement for his military service. This was perfectly legal and aboveboard and it meant that he could set out on a course of study that would prepare him for the competition for that year’s prestigious Prix de Rome, a four-year scholarship to study at the French Academy in a city rich in classical statuary and artistic heritage. Whether or not Géricault entered the competition in 1812 has been argued by historians and biographers; what remains important is that, despite his youthful exuberance and dandyism, a new strain of seriousness appeared in his approach to his work. This, however, by no means suppressed his zest or volatility; in May he was banned from the Louvre after abusing and hitting a young student in the Grand Gallery. While the incident reveals his passionate nature, it also vouches for the fact that he was in the Louvre studying or copying. What is more, it was not the first time he had fallen foul of the museum authorities; Vivant Denon, director of a museum richly swelling with Napoleonic booty, had occasion to ban Géricault temporarily after he brutally resisted officials when they attempted to repossess his membership card. Perhaps the loss of his grandmother, in April 1812, and the stress of the developing triangle between himself, his kindly uncle, and his attractive aunt help to explain such outbursts.
Left even wealthier by the death of his grandmother, Géricault rented an empty shop on the boulevard Montmartre, and there he began work on the first of his few great projects, The Officer of the Chasseurs. Painted between September and October of 1812, at a time when Napoleon had rashly driven his army deep into Russia with its infamous winter coming on, the tensions in the painting reflect the moment at which and for which it was painted. It questioned imperial military hubris by pitting the officer’s splendid uniform, so out of place and yet worn with such bravura, against the inferno of the battlefield. Resonating with fear, the painting registered the degenerating military situation and its insight was prized. Géricault won a gold medal worth 500 francs in the Salon of 1812 with what was, in fact, his first submission. By the time the Salon shut its doors on February 13, 1813, Napoleon had overreached his imperium and three hundred thousand of Géricault’s compatriots lay dead in the Russian snow.
The Officer of the Chasseurs hinted at failure on a national scale, revealing that Géricault was already becoming sensitive to the political tensions that would transform him from the careless man about town into a shaven recluse, working with fanatical zeal, on The Raft of the Medusa. Eschewing Napoleonic mythmaking and contrasting what attracted him to the military—the fine horses, opulent saddle cloths, shimmering uniforms—with the reality of battle, Géricault began to engage with the truth.
During 1813, his uncle Jean-Baptiste Caruel became the mayor of the village of Chesnay and, with his young wife, began to spend more time at their château. As he added mayoral duties to his already demanding business schedule, relations between aunt and nephew developed into a full-blown love affair. The Château of Grand-Chesnay provided an ideal setting for secret meetings and intimate encounters. Yet despite their rapture the affair was understandably fraught. The underlying tension of deceits and stolen moments, along with the complication of Alexandrine’s children and generous husband, the very man who had proved to be such an accommodating uncle, placed enormous pressure on the lovers. For every moment of elation, for every afternoon of delight, they suffered acute pangs of conscience. Nonetheless, their affair seemed unstoppable, their love uncontainable.
Perhaps in an attempt to distract himself from this complicated relationship Géricault decided to become a soldier. No sooner had Louis XVIII returned to France than the young artist joined the First Company of the Musketeers. By comparison with the dangers of Napoleonic conscription, the life of a soldier who was unlikely to be forced into battle pleased Géricault. The blade in him adored the red uniform and he was happy to be riding the fine gray chargers of the Musketeers.25
Embodying Louis XVIII’s desire for unification and forgiveness, 41 out of the 176 Gray Musketeers had served in Napoleon’s army, including Géricault’s captain, the Comte de Nansouty. Others, such as Géricault himself, or the poets Lamartine and Alfred de Vigny, were veterans of no cause, but simply rich, idling young men who were attracted by the prospect of playing soldier. Their function was, however, taken very seriously by Louis XVIII, who believed that had his older brother surrounded himself with what was effectively a private army, he would not have fallen victim to the revolution.26
When the Hundred Days sent Louis into exile, Géricault, the toy-soldier musketeer, with his impulsive compassion for the underdog, followed the fleeing king through a dreary northern French landscape made even more depressing by an unrelenting downpour. Troops and wagons became bogged in the mud of Picardy and many followers took the opportunity to desert. Even well-mounted horsemen could advance only with great difficulty as the paths were reduced to muddy rivulets.27 Ordered to disperse at Béthune, the Musketeers were free to return to their families or to follow the king into exile at Ghent.
There are several theories about where Géricault passed the remaining weeks of the short-lived insurrection. If he made for the Château of Grand-Chesnay, which would have been a likely destination, he would have been in contravention of the imperial decree of March 13, 1815, banning all the members of the royal household from residing in Paris, its outskirts, or near the imperial palaces at Saint-Cloud and Malmaison. However, Géricault needed Alexandrine and Napoleon had his mind on other things.
The Hundred Days substantially altered the political direction of the restoration. During his first year in power, Louis had proved a good strategist and, in attempting to rule over a radically divided country, he was prudent. He willingly submitted to Allied demands for a charter that would provide the basis for the country’s constitution. Devised by the king himself, the document aimed to guarantee political liberties. But the charter was, in effect, a vague document that offered with one hand and took away with the other. Article Eight was just such a piece of chicanery and one that would create great problems for Alexandre Corréard and his fellow liberals: “Frenchmen have the right to publish and print their opinions, as long as they conform to the laws for repressing abuses of this liberty.” Declaring that the charter was granted “by the free exercise of our Royal authority” in the “nineteenth year of our reign” was a gauntlet thrown down to the left as it effectively negated the political experiments that had changed the face of France over the previous twenty-five years.28 Above all, however, the liberal tenor of the document and its intentions were detested by the extreme right.
After the final fall of Napoleon, the elections of August 1815 yielded a surprising result. Perhaps shaken by the swiftness and sureness of Napoleon’s invasion, and manifesting their desire for stability, voters swung to the right, returning a chamber that was predominantly ultra-royalist. Louis retaliated by pointedly inviting the moderate duc de Richelieu to lead his ministers as president of the council. Nevertheless, the government included a strongly ultra military axis typified by the elderly vicomte DuBouchage, who had served as a minister under Louis XVI and who now became the minister of the Navy. By contrast Elie Decazes was a bright young politician who had so attracted Louis’s admiration as the Parisian chief of police that the king appointed him minister of police. Decazes was an ambitious man of action who proved to be a strong moderate presence in the government, rapidly declaring his opposition to the extreme right.29 This did not, however, prevent him from introducing rigorous legislation that safeguarded the survival of the king. During the autumn of 1815, a series of laws was introduced that suspended habeas corpus for those plotting against the royal family and the state, suppressed inflammatory acts against the crown, and set up temporary criminal courts without juries and any right of appeal.30
Although such menaces can only have provided confirmation for Alexandre Corréard about the desirability, if not the absolute necessity, of leaving France, the true political situation was even uglier than the election result and subsequent legislation indicated. Having received slight comfort from the first restoration, the nobility was full of bitterness and out for blood. Only two days after the abdication of Napoleon in favor of his son, the first major reprisal occurred in Marseille, where Napoleon’s supporter General Verdier was removed from power. During the ensuing forty-eight hours, two hundred and fifty sympathizers were killed in an orgy of retribution. There was violence in Avignon and about one hundred Protestants were slaughtered in Nîmes as the new White Terror began. There were mass purgings of the public sector; between fifty thousand and eighty thousand members of the civil service, about a third of its total workforce, lost their jobs. Above all, untold numbers of people were murdered or tortured, particularly in the south where the ultra-royalists entertained dreams of southern secession. As the contemporary observer John Scott of Gala put it, “Ultra-royalism … has raised its monstrous head, professing to see in the last disturbance the necessity for giving a stronger hand to authority.”
Politics descended into mob violence and looting as the White Terror weakened the Bourbons and their standing with the nation forever. The “demoralized state of the public character,” wrote John Scott, rendered “it impossible for the King, whose inclinations and principles are decidedly moderate, to reckon on a substantial support.”31
The relaunching of the French monarchy promised a turbulent passage fraught with conflict, and it was against such an unpropitious background of stormy division and strife that the newly repainted Medusa, with thirty cannon removed to make way for extra troops and stores, was about to set sail on her final voyage.
As a dangerous reminder of how things had turned against the liberal and republican cause at home, the crew, troops, colonists, and officers on board the flagship Medusa were to be under the command of a political appointee, the haughty Hugues Duroy de Chaumareys, a rusty relic from the ancien régime who had not put to sea for about a quarter of a century. Such ill-judged appointments were a hazardous fact of the restoration as the outmoded, old aristocrats, who had remained loyal to the crown, solicited just recompense. The absurdity of their appeals is amusingly underscored by a celebrated story of a petition brought to the government by an officer of the Royal Navy who had not served since 1789. At that time, the man had been a midshipman but now demanded the rank of rear admiral, arguing that this would have been his present position had his career evolved normally. “Tell him,” said the secretary of state, “that we acknowledge the logic of his reasoning, but that he forgot a key fact—he was killed at the battle of Trafalgar.”32
While the restoration government was forced to suspend more than six hundred officers and numerous enlisted men on half pay, or, worse still, make them redundant, the crown was obliged to reward loyal naval officers. Some of these had gone so far in their fidelity to the Bourbons as to fight against their own country; manpower shortages in England’s Royal Navy had led to the recruitment of French royalists who had fought against republican and imperial France. Obviously, the readmission of such men would rankle as the restoration simultaneously checked the natural advancement of many of the officers who had distinguished themselves for the republic and empire. The situation was not only combustible, it was absurd. Veterans of great wars “are vegetating on half-pay in ports, while brilliant commissions are given to those whose only merit has been to remain faithful to the Bourbons,” sniped Gicquel des Touches, one of the captains appointed to the Senegal convoy. Des Touches justly insists that fidelity “can be rewarded by pensions, court appointments, and not by commands of ships on which depend both the lives of men and the honour of the flag.” Even the minister of the navy himself, the vicomte DuBouchage, the man who was organizing the expedition to Senegal, had been retired from public life for a quarter of a century when he was appointed.33
As for Chaumareys, the man who was made commander of the convoy, his credentials were acceptable, but twenty-five years out of date. On his mother’s side, Hugues Duroy de Chaumareys was related to one of Louis XVI’s great maritime strategists, Admiral d’Orvilliers, whose example determined the young man’s choice of career and greatly facilitated his advancement in the service. Hugues Duroy embarked as a midshipman under d’Orvilliers in 1779 and on April 17 of the following year saw action in the American War of Independence. Wounded in the head but remaining at his post, he was subsequently promoted to ensign on the warship Pegasus, and then rose swiftly to the rank of captain of a transport ship. If it had not been for the revolution, it seems that Chaumareys, with that kick-start of a family connection and a demonstrable gift for advancement, would have made a tolerable career in the navy. However, in December 1790 he became an émigré, a royalist who fled the country. It was during this period as a refugee from the revolution that he fabricated the tale that he would use to obtain his captaincy of the Medusa.34
What is established fact is that Chaumareys participated in the royalist landing on the peninsula of Quiberon on June 27, 1795. The aim of the invasion was to rally support throughout Brittany and then march on Paris. It is likewise true that the insurgents were captured and transported to Vannes where Chaumareys, unlike so many of his fellow royalists, escaped being put to death. He avoided execution by lying. He swore that he was not a monarchist, that he had not taken up arms against the republic, and that he had had no military function at Quiberon. He was subsequently imprisoned in a tower at Vannes, from which he absconded, aided by sympathetic guards and by a local woman named Sophie de Kerdu. Chaumareys hid in the town for over two weeks before escaping to the English fleet and thence to England, where he was treated as a hero and given the Royal and Military Order of Saint-Louis on February 21, 1796.35
Lavish praise and recompense were prompted by a self-aggrandizing narrative that Chaumareys published while in London. Selling in both French and English bookshops, the story made assertions that would be guaranteed to serve its author admirably in any future restoration. Addressing those dead comrades who had, in fact, acquitted themselves more honorably than Chaumareys himself, he declares: “There are still tyrants in my country …. And you, touching victims of honour and fidelity, I saw your sublime devotion …. You’re no longer here; but you spilt your generous blood for your King.”36 With sentiments worthy of a swashbuckling adventurer in the heat of escape, Chaumareys praises the courage of the young Sophie de Kerdu and, describing his leave-taking, swears that “I will do nothing but devote my life to you.”37 In the event, Chaumareys did not return to marry his brave, Breton peasant and live happily ever after; within two years he married another Sophie, a Prussian baroness named Sophie de Azentrampf. Obviously such a match was socially and politically more serviceable.
Making his bid for celebrity with a self-serving rewriting of the failed uprising, Chaumareys’s distorted version of events, which ran into three editions, propagated the myths on which he would rebuild the wreckage of his career. Returning to France in 1804, he sat out the empire at his eighteenth-century family residence, the Château de Lachenaud in Limousin. During the first restoration, using his relation to Admiral d’Orvilliers, his service record, his inflated account of his participation in the Quiberon fiasco, and slightly adjusting his age, Chaumareys solicited a commission. In a torrent of letters to the minister of the navy, the story of his escape from Vannes was further distorted to his advantage. The part played by Sophie de Kerdu is excised from his new account, which simply foregrounded Chaumareys’s own incontestable presence of mind. In light of such bravery and composure, the minister deemed him worthy of the command of a frigate and Chaumareys was expeditiously awarded the Légion d’Honneur in order to make amends for a ministerial gaffe in attempting to award him the Military Order of Saint-Louis for a second time.38
When, with testimonials from his noble friends that were mistaken in matters of character and not always accurate in matters of fact, Chaumareys eventually secured his command of the Senegal expedition on April 22, 1816, he was to face understandable suspicion and opposition from the other officers appointed to the convoy, most of whom had served France during the previous decades. Gicquel des Touches found him, on first meeting, to be snobbish and ill-informed.39
In the aborted 1815 expedition to Senegal under Captain Bouvet, Chaumareys was to have commanded a corvette.40 Although this appointment would have given him ample time to familiarize himself with the potential hazards of the route, the minister of the navy urged Chaumareys to arrive in Rochefort well in advance of the June 1816 departure, in order to profit from the experience of sailors who had navigated the coasts of Senegal. It was a region badly charted and notoriously treacherous, but there was an account published in 1789 that documented some of the dangers. Sailing in the violent currents off the West African coast, the author observed that the water around the ship was becoming steadily clearer. He urged the captain of the St. Catherine to take a sounding but was rebuffed—“Why are you afraid, we’re 80 leagues from the coast?” That very night they were beached and their tragedy was merely a prologue to attack and capture; when survivors from the frequent shipwrecks in the area managed to make it to shore, they found themselves on the edge of the interminable white sand plain of the Sahara Desert and prey to hostile Moors.41
Apart from the strong currents, there was an ill-defined and hazardous sandbank to contend with, but Chaumareys appears to have been too high-handed to take the opportunity to learn from those with knowledge of the region. Gicquel des Touches, in order to assert his superiority over this man who, on first meeting, had treated him so contemptuously, offered to give Chaumareys written instructions on how to circumnavigate the dangerous Arguin Bank. Upon receiving this offer of a helping hand, Chaumareys immediately altered his attitude toward des Touches, who observed that the commander of the expedition appeared much intimidated by the challenge of the perilous shoal.42
A legitimate source of Chaumareys’s anxiety was the inadequacy of the available maps. Hydrography was in its infancy and charts were notoriously incomplete; many shoals, rocks, and reefs remained unrecorded because cartographers had an imperfect knowledge of the seas. This lack, coupled with a navigators’s incapacity to correctly determine longitude, resulted in numerous shipwrecks.43 In the case of the dreaded Arguin Bank, Bellin’s map, which was supplied by the ministry, was known to be defective in its tracing of the western perimeter of the extensive shoal, a fact indicated in the Nautical Description of the African Coast, which was sent to Chaumareys before the convoy set sail. This text, printed in 1814, was a ninety-eight-page document written by Admiral de Rosily, director of the Navy Depot Hydrographic Service. It confessed that the French navy had minimal and imperfect knowledge of the West African coast, and a good deal of whatever information they did possess was the result of hearsay rather than serious study. It categorically stated that the “maps of the western coast in Bellin’s French Hydrography are flawed and it would be dangerous to trust them.” Above all, it claimed that “For the greatest safety, you must take soundings as often as you can and proceed according to the depth and the type of sea bed that you discover.”44 Such warnings would surely alert an insecure commander—if only his insecurity was not hedged by blinding arrogance.
A further source of concern for the leaders of the expedition was that Geoffroy de Villeneuve, in his authoritative history of West Africa, published in 1814, urged that all Europeans “who want to visit the African coast must aim to get there during November in order to acclimatize themselves before the onset of the rainy season which commences at the end of June and lasts until October.”45 With an unpropitious date set for the Medusas departure, the avowed fallibility of his navigational aids, his lack of recent experience, and the political hostility of his officers and men, Chaumareys was, from the first, a captain under stress.
When Charlotte-Adelaide Picard, one of the eldest daughters in a family of nine colonists bound for Senegal, approached Rochefort at the end of May 1816, she found it bustling with activity. There was the clatter of the workmen in the shipyards and the clanking of the enormous chains that yoked convict dock laborers together as they dragged the heaviest loads along the wharves.46 There were soldiers, stevedores, port officials, sailors, and officers like Chaumareys, strutting self-importantly about, attracting sneers and snide remarks from those condemned to drink away their enforced retirement in cafés, dreaming of glorious, old imperial days. There were blacks from Africa, mulattoes from the West Indies, and the buzz and hubbub of a recently revivified naval port.
Charlotte Picard had left Paris on the morning of May 23, and even the earliest stages of her journey had proved to be not without misadventure. On the first evening, the innkeeper almost burned down his establishment while preparing an omelette for the travelers. On the following night their driver got completely drunk, and between Niort and Rochefort the road was so bad that they got stuck in the mud. These incidents must have given her pause; if such misfortunes could happen on home ground, then what lay in store for her in a wild and distant land? The spirited young lady, wondering if she would ever see her own country again, gazed with deep affection at the lush, fertile green of France’s beloved Loire valley as her coach sped on toward her port of embarkation.47
Arriving in Poitiers on June I near the end of his journey to Rochefort, Charles-Marie Brédif, a mining engineer who kept the only surviving notes of the Medusas voyage written during the journey, checked to see if the Fortin barometer that he had entrusted to his friend Dechatelus was intact after the bumpy journey. To his great chagrin, he found it broken, and registering a rare note of pessimism he remarked that “our voyage has really begun badly.” To his further dismay, he found his chronometer was not working and hoped to be able to have both instruments repaired at Rochefort, where he arrived on June 4, the same day as Colonel Julien Schmaltz, the future governor of Senegal. Brédif lodged, like Schmaltz, his wife, and his daughter, at the Coquille d’Or and found Rochefort, which stood near the mouth of the Charente River, attractive and astir. Brédif and Dechatelus set about having their instruments repaired and had the pleasure to meet up with several old friends from their student days at their respected engineering college.48
Alexandre Corréard, in his second determined attempt to escape from France, along with the other colonists supported by the Philanthropic Society, were arriving in Rochefort, eager to depart, all seeking the fresh air of a new start. The climate in Senegal may have been oppressive, but the chance to get away from the stifling constraints of restoration France filled them with optimism.
On a showery and windy June 9, Brédif boarded a boat to carry him downriver to the Medusa, which was in the roads, a sheltered area offshore where ships could safely anchor. After a while, the rain became steady and the passengers were forced to take refuge in the sailors’ quarters or in the hold. Despite a high tide, the incompetent pilot managed to beach them near some chalky rocks ominously known as the House of the Devil. It took an hour to free the boat, by which time the tide had gone out and they touched bottom again. This second time, the crew were unable to dislodge the boat from the mud and so the passengers spent the night stranded on board.
Enduring a dirty bunk and devoured by fleas, it was with some relish that Brédif, a stranger to the sea who was having second thoughts about voyaging into a dangerous unknown, lovingly recorded the details of the meals that he took when they disembarked the following day at Verjou, only half a league from Rochefort. Lunch consisted of a milk soup, an omelette, and a soft cheese, his supper of “peas and excellent little fresh fried sardines.”
At Verjou they took on more passengers bound for Senegal, including the Picard family, and then went sailing out of the Charente in a good wind that sped them along toward the ships at safe anchorage off the Ile d’Aix. Among these, they discerned the newly repainted black and white hull of the flagship Medusa. By nine a.m., Brédif and the Picards had boarded the frigate where they found everything in complete disorder. Bad weather had prevented the ship from being notified as to their arrival and matters were further complicated by the recent embarkation of 161 unruly soldiers from the Africa Battalion.49
Three days later, on June 13, everything was shipshape and the officers, in full dress uniform, welcomed Governor Schmaltz, his wife, Reine, his daughter Eliza, and their maids on board. Reine was of a nervous disposition and a patient of the celebrated and revolutionary mental specialist Dr. Esquirol. She was immediately alarmed to find out that one of her great doctor’s disciples, Falret, who was to have sailed on the Medusa, had canceled his passage at the last minute.50
It was a motley collection of vessels assembled for the voyage out. There was the corvette Echo, detailed for a hydrographic and reconnaissance mission along the Senegalese coast. There was the supply vessel Loire, a flute built in India and, according to the director of construction in Rochefort, too slow and unwieldy to participate in such an expedition. There was the brig Argus, the former HMS Plumper, which had been captured from the English. The Argus was a type of ship normally employed for short coastal trading voyages, a function she was intended to fulfill upon arrival in Senegal. The Echo was weatherly and fast, but both the Loire and the Argus would soon find it impossible to keep up with the convoy’s flagship. Originally, another ship, the Elephant, had been designated to lead the expedition, but instead she was appointed to other duties, a fate that did not allow her to escape from the incompetent appointments of the vicomte DuBouchage.
After delays caused by strong headwinds on the fifteenth and sixteenth, as the convoy finally got under way Brédif noted that the Medusa did not hoist all of her sails so as not to leave the Argus and the Loire behind. By three o’clock on that first afternoon, the Loire sent signals that she was drifting badly and Chaumareys gave the order to drop anchor. It was hardly a promising start for a convoy urged by the minister to make all possible haste for Saint-Louis in Senegal. The colony was to be repossessed as rapidly as possible as there was this year’s valuable gum harvest at stake.51
Toward the end of the eighteenth century, West Africa had been considered simply a loading stage for the slaves captured, largely by Moors, from the interior; the continent was seen as little other than “a mine of men to exploit.” Restoration France, trailing behind England in its abolitionist thinking and suspicious that the moral stance of its recent enemy masked commercial intentions, vacillated over the legality and acceptability of the trade. Nonetheless, the avowed intention of Louis’s government was to reestablish a legitimate colony in Senegal and the crown thus offered grants of African land to the colonists who were going—or escaping—to start a new life. There were projects for the growing of cotton, cocoa, and sugarcane and plans to profit from the lucrative gum trade. With its laxative and antihemorrhaging properties, gum was valuable in medical applications. It was also an ingredient in the manufacture of inks and dyes and a substance much used by confectioners.52
The commanders and crew of the various vessels were as heterogeneous as the ships themselves. A man of identical rank and sharing Chaumareys’s loyalty to the crown was the captain of the Echo, François-Marie Cornette de Vénancourt, who, descended from American plantation colonists, had been born in Martinique in 1778. A monarchist like Chaumareys, during the Hundred Days his crew on board the Actéon mutinied in favor of Napoleon while anchored in the roads of Fort Royale, Martinique. Vénancourt was wounded trying to restore order and became a prisoner on board his own ship. Nevertheless, he dissuaded the sailors from hoisting the Napoleonic tricolor, which would have put them at risk from the English ships patrolling those waters. When they eventually sighted an English brig, the mutineers pressed their prisoner to take command of an attack. Pretending to acquiesce, Vénancourt merely signaled his difficulty to the English, who promptly escorted the Actéon to Martinique. Safely arrived, Vénancourt began a campaign to rid the island of Napoleonic supporters and further the royalist cause in the West Indies. If sympathetic to Commander Chaumareys’s politics, Vénancourt clearly resented the superior appointment held by an inferior mariner.53 Not only was Vénancourt a more experienced sailor but he had been recently and demonstrably brave in his loyalty to the crown.
Gicquel des Touches, captain of the unwieldy Loire, was of the opposite political persuasion. He had also revealed an exemplary courage unknown to Chaumareys. Aged ten, he had been on board a ship sailing for Guadeloupe when she was given chase by the English. The captain beached the ship in order to give the enemy the slip, but the young boy was denied a place in the lifeboats. Left on board the wreck with a handful of unruly sailors who started to drink themselves to death, the young Gicquel discharged a cannon in the direction of the enemy, which achieved the desired effect. The English approached and boarded the French wreck and took the plucky young Gicquel and his mates prisoner. He was, at length, transported back to England in the stifling ’tween decks of an old frigate, in conditions resembling those of the slave ships where air was in short supply, the odor rank, and the insects legion. After a year in prison in England, he returned to France to fight for the republican cause. Gicquel des Touches served at Trafalgar, after which, once again, he was taken to an English prison. Having persistently revealed his audacity and his presence of mind, and with two of his brothers dead in the service of the republic, it is hardly surprising that des Touches took exception to the airs put on by an undeserving monarchist such as Chaumareys.54
The captain of the Argus, Léon Henry de Parnajon, was, like Vénancourt, of colonial origin and, like des Touches, had fought at Trafalgar. Later captured by the enemy, he had languished in an English prison from April 1809 until August 1811. Apart from that brief interruption he had been sailing since 1799, so he too was more seasoned than the expedition’s commander.55
On board the Medusa herself, the official second in command was the republican Lieutenant Joseph Reynaud. His career against the English had been lively. In 1804 he had been shipwrecked on the French coast after an engagement with two enemy frigates. During a mission to Santa Cruz in 1805–6, he had captured the HMS Calcutta after a two-hour battle. Latterly, however, his duties had involved protecting coastal shipping, and so in his present rank of lieutenant he had little experience of long voyages. What is more, his politics made relations with his captain awkward.
The second lieutenant on board the Medusa, the “very knowledgeable and zealous” Jean-Baptiste Espiaux, had been wounded twice in the wars with England and was captured by the English in the Bay of Cádiz in June 1808. He had escaped while being transported to England, courageously diving off an English ship and returning to the siege of Cádiz. Later, aboard the Medusa, participating in Napoleon’s escape bid to America, Espiaux witnessed the humiliation of his emperor’s ultimate surrender to the English.56 Such an officer can have had but a slight regard for his obsolete, out-of-touch captain, a man sustained by the discredited idea that he was capable simply because he was of noble birth.
Ensigns Chaudière, Lapeyrère, and Maudet had all fought against Britain and all spent long periods in English prisons. They made no secret of their contempt for their captain, a disdain generously reciprocated as these officers had all sprung from the bourgeoisie.
Only the most forceful and knowledgeable commander would have been able to harness officers and men so dangerously at odds with him. The clamor of contradictory voices on board the Medusa echoed the discord that resounded throughout France, where divisiveness, selfishness, and suspicion were the upshot of thirty years of ideological struggle. If passions ran high at home, emotions intensified in the creaking confines of an overloaded frigate, only 154 feet long from prow to stern, 39 in its beam, and sailing into the tropical heat at the height of summer.57
At seven p.m. on June 17, the convoy weighed anchor once again, cleared the Straits of Antioche, and finally set sail. But only hours after this second start, the wind dropped and the Medusa became ungovernable and lay stranded in the lull before the storm. Slowly, the sky darkened, the sea swelled, and strong gusts of wind squalled about the ship. Suddenly and quite violently, the frigate tacked in order to avoid drifting onto a reef, an accident that would have ensured her destruction. For those on board who were aware of what had happened, such a brush with calamity can hardly have added to what little faith they had in their dubious captain.58
The departure roll call on board the Medusa listed 166 officers and crew, 61 passengers, 10 members of the frigate’s artillery, 161 soldiers in two cosmopolitan and volatile companies of the Africa Battalion, and the wives of a couple of these soldiers—a neat total of four hundred souls. The passengers on board the Medusa included explorers and geographical engineers, such as Corréard and Dechatelus, the naturalists Lachenault and Kummer, the mining engineer Brédif, and clerks, administrators, and settlers such as Picard with his prodigious family. There were the professionals and tradesmen needed to build and maintain a colony: pilots, gardeners, scouts, schoolteachers, bakers, hospital directors, and surgeons. There were twenty-three colonists sailing under the auspices of the Philanthropic Society: carpenters, cabinet makers, locksmiths, and two women with three young children.59 Among the passengers, there was also Gaspar Mollien, a man who later made a name for himself as an outstanding geographer and who, usefully, prefaced an account of his travels into the interior of Africa with a narrative of his eventful voyage to Senegal. Besides Mollien, there were several people on board who, for a variety of motives, would provide records of their adventures. Brédif kept his diary regularly. Charlotte Picard published, under her married name Dard, a narrative of the voyage and its aftermath. The most exhaustive version of events was the result of a collaboration between the ship’s second surgeon, Henri Savigny, and Alexandre Corréard. Their observations were subsequently challenged in print by Lieutenant Anglas de Praviel of the Africa Battalion. The cargo on board the frigate included munitions, supplies, state papers, statute books, travel writings about Africa, a bust of Louis XVIII intended to preside over the governor’s residence, and, in the hold, three casks containing 90,000 francs in coin.
During the following days, passengers who had never been to sea such as Corréard, Brédif, and Charlotte Picard variously adapted to the pitching and rolling and heaving and groaning. They marveled at the optimism and thunderous splendor of sails unfurling. They found the sharp, salt sea breezes bracing, the speed and the spin drift exhilarating. They were awed by the lateral tilting of their tall ship in a squall. They learned the hard way that they had to stoop, supporting themselves against unexpected jolts as they moved around the dimly lit and encumbered spaces between decks. They adjusted to the smells of those confined spaces as the frigate moved south. They became attuned to the creaking of her joints, to the noise and flurry of the changes of the watch when sailors scurried up and down vertiginous ratlines as if they were doing it in their sleep. When the winds changed, they observed a great buzz of activity. Charlotte Picard noted that “the crew was busy everywhere, climbing the rigging, perching on the extremities of the yards, climbing the highest masts, bellowing as they rhythmically and forcefully pulled on certain ropes, swearing and whistling” as “the yards were turned on their pivots, the sails were stretched and the ropes fastened.” The sailors seemed to be in control of what appeared to be giant bundles of laundry fastened by myriad stays strung about every which way from deck to mast and mast to mast in seeming confusion. The passengers experienced in the abrupt reports—“Sail ahoy” and “Two points off the starboard bow”—and the sudden order—“Lower away on the main”—strange and novel incantations that promised, in their mystery, that this vessel would indeed deliver them safely to their exotic destination.
When the wind dropped on June 18 Brédif, struck by the fact that he could see nothing but water encircling him as far as the great disc of the horizon, recorded that the sea was “extremely calm and of an indigo blue.” But by one o’clock the weather was changing and that evening, when he dined with the commander at a table meticulously laid and amply provided, he wasn’t sure that he would be able to hold his meal down: “The movement of the boat is more pronounced in his quarters and it made me feel unstable. After dinner, the walk which we took with the ladies on the quarter-deck made me feel better and I went to bed feeling fine.”60
Many passengers were, indeed, seasick and Charlotte Picard was, at times, terrified by the new sensations surrounding her. During the night she went up onto the quarterdeck and “watched with horror as the frigate flew across the water.” There were “sounds of cracking from every corner as this large mass of wood seemed ready to smash under each wave that thwacked us in the side.”
The commander’s indecisiveness was made dramatically apparent in his slowness to react when, at sunset on June 23, a fifteen-year-old sailor slipped off the breechblock of a cannon and through a forward porthole. When the cry “Man overboard!” was heard, many of the crew and passengers were on the poop and at the bulwarks, entertained by the antics of a school of porpoises. A bosun’s mate managed to grab the boy by the neck of his jacket but had to let him go lest he too be pulled into the sea. Buffeted in the waves, the boy grabbed at a dangling rope, but the rapid motion of the frigate ripped it from his hands. Sailors attached themselves to ropes and plunged into the sea—but in vain. When an attempt was made to signal the Echo it proved to be too far off, and so it was decided to fire a cannon as a substitute but none of the fourteen on board was loaded.
At length, a life buoy was thrown, the frigate hove to, her sails were shortened and trimmed, and a skiff was let into the water from which three sailors began to search the heavy sea. They pulled toward the life buoy, disappearing under billows, reappearing on the crests of each wave until they were forced to give up. Brédif remarked on the considerable “disorder in the manoeuvre,” with excited passengers impeding the efforts of the sailors. In the narrative of the voyage to Senegal that Corréard and Savigny felt compelled to bring before an astonished public, they commented that the “manoeuvre was long” and that “we should have come to the wind as soon as they cried ‘man overboard.’” The failing light, which slowly obliterated all hope of rescue, darkened the spirits of the helpless onlookers as the youth who should—and perhaps could—have been rescued was left to drown.61
Already the expedition was beginning to fall apart. The recently modified Echo was a match for the Medusa, but the Argus and the Loire were starting to lag behind. Chaumareys was torn between his duty to keep a convoy together and the wishes of DuBouchage and Governor Schmaltz to reach Senegal as swiftly as possible. By the time the captain of the Loire lost sight of the command ship, des Touches had received no indication regarding the route. Maintaining his course for several hours in the hope of sighting the Medusa, des Touches then decided to set his own. Vénancourt, the captain of the Echo, who kept close enough to Chaumareys to receive communications, noted a discrepancy between the prescribed course and the actual navigation of the Medusa. He thought it wise, at that stage, to follow what Chaumareys did rather than what he signaled. When, on June 24, Vénancourt and Chaumareys compared their respective estimates of their position, they were out by eight minutes of longitude, or nearly six nautical miles, and forty-six minutes of latitude, a measurement equivalent to the identical number of nautical miles.62
The disorderly manner in which the captain had reacted to the fatal accident set passengers and officers whispering. The rougher soldiers and humbler sailors began to mutter their superstitions and Chaumareys would find small groups falling silent as he approached. Increasingly, he found himself isolated and excluded. The pull between innate and excessive arrogance and his desire to hide his inadequacy from those whom he had been appointed to lead meant that the commander was acting erratically from the start.63 Among the passengers at his table, however, was a member of the Philanthropic Society, a man by the name of Antoine Richefort. An ex-mariner and a braggart with a clouded history, Richefort claimed great knowledge of the West Coast of Africa. Finding himself an outsider on his own ship, Chaumareys turned increasingly to this man, ignoring the advice of his unsympathetic officers. With seeming relief, Chaumareys placed his unqualified trust in this blusterer.
Once the gloom over the lost sailor boy had begun to lift, the usually optimistic Brédif records many agreeable moments of life on board: how he delighted in climbing onto the bowsprit while the Medusa was plowing through the foaming sea at ten knots, white spray showering about him; how the crew and passengers took great pleasure in catching tuna with fishing lines that the sailors dangled from various parts of the ship; how there was great excitement as a stowaway was found on board, Marie-Antoine Rabaroust, an infantry surgeon’s junior assistant who had resigned after the Hundred Days and who wished to escape France to start afresh in Senegal; and how, once discovered, he was swiftly assimilated into the governor’s retinue as a domestic.64 People marveled, as they sailed south, at the stars that hung above them, stars of a different world, another hemisphere. A splendid adventure, the chance of a lifetime.
Chaumareys had predicted that they would sight Madeira by the morning of June 26. As it was not until sunset that land was eventually spotted, his margin of navigational error had increased; his calculations—or perhaps those of his sidekick Richefort—were now off by a whole degree, or sixty nautical miles.65 That night the Medusa tacked so as not to draw in too close to the islands, and on the following morning she sailed along the southern coast, past Ponta do Sol toward Funchal. Disparaging the advice of his officers with whom he was politically at loggerheads and placing his complete trust in the boastful Richefort, Chaumareys allowed the Medusa to be directed too close to the coast. In lee of the land, there was a sudden calm and the frigate was at risk of being swept ashore by the strong current.66 After a lively exchange of views, Lieutenants Espiaux and Reynaud prevailed and the Medusa made for open sea and a fresh wind. As a result of such a perilous, inept, and time-wasting maneuver in the bay of Funchal, Chaumareys decided against sending a boat ashore for provisions. The crew and passengers were left with a passing impression of an island whose fertile slopes were covered with vineyards, orange and lemon groves, and fields bordered with banyan trees. The fiery color of the volcanic earth and the fragrance of citrus fruits blowing out to sea made a powerful appeal to those inexperienced voyagers who hankered for land and who had never before glimpsed such extravagant vegetation.67
By the evening of June 28, the highest point on Tenerife came into view, the peak aflame with sunset. As they approached the island the following morning, the fiery crown had given way to a misty veil through which the Medusa sailed into the bay of Santa Cruz. At seven a.m. a boat was lowered, and a party, including Lieutenant Reynaud, Ensign Lapeyrère, and midshipman Sander Rang, was chosen to go ashore. They suffered as they sat in their boat awaiting the completion of landing formalities; loud, incessant bells tolled for the Feast of St. Peter, and, as the morning mists cleared, a fierce sun beat down upon them. At length, the French sailors were allowed to disembark and were introduced to the governor, don Pedro de Rodriguez, a Francophile and royalist who was curious about the political situation in Europe. After this meeting, the shore party set about making purchases and were aided in this by some French inhabitants. The Spanish wife of one of these urged the sailors to stay and make some amorous conquests on the promenade that evening. They were tempted but they declined. Their captain and Governor Schmaltz were eager to make haste for Senegal and so they were back on board the Medusa by late afternoon.68
Toward midday, while the party was ashore, the Echo rejoined the Medusa and Vénancourt came aboard. His log somewhat reproachfully makes it clear that he considered it injudicious to have put a boat ashore in such a strong breeze.69 While on board the flagship, he was an appalled witness to the dangerous trust Chaumareys had placed in the loudmouthed Richefort. In what seemed to be a repeat of his vainglorious performance along the coast of Madeira, Richefort decided that it was unsafe to stay at anchorage off Santa Cruz and, again, Chaumareys took his advice. Charlotte Picard accused Richefort of changing route
for no other reason than to show that he knew how to make the necessary manoeuvres to tack. Every moment … we came, we went, we came back again, we drew near to reefs in order to defy them. … All this went on so long that after a while the sailors refused to obey the scheming pilot, saying loudly that he was nothing but a vile impostor.
Indeed, several officers “complained to the Captain that it was shameful to place his confidence in someone unknown,” adding that “they would not obey a man who didn’t have the temperament to command.” Chaumareys scorned this intimation of mutiny and, according to Charlotte Picard, “was, without doubt, relieved to have someone else doing his job.” To that end, he ordered the crew and pilots to obey his self-appointed surrogate. Adrift, among officers more competent than himself, Chaumareys was now dangerously out of his depth.
Even before reaching Tenerife, Brédif had started complaining about the “insupportable sun”; now the weather had become heavy, giving him a headache and making him feel sick. Nonetheless, he claimed to be in good health generally, possessed of a hearty appetite, and, despite the continual creaking and straining and heaving of the boat, he slept well.70 The heaviness and the headaches were signs that the Medusa was sailing into the tropics at the very hottest time of the year. Charlotte Picard recalled how, as they neared the Tropic of Cancer, the sun seemed suspended directly above their heads and “the burning wind blowing off the Sahara” offered its parched welcome to a strange land.71
From the maintop a ringing was heard, and a raucous hunting horn broke in, followed by a shower of pulses and dried peas, which hailed down onto the deck. These announced the “Lord of the Tropic” who would preside over the ritual festivities that accompanied the crossing of the Tropic of Cancer. When the hard rain halted, a booted courier, whip in hand, arrived on the quarterdeck and delivered a dispatch to Captain Chaumareys, who seemed mildly flattered to be the center of such attention. At last, a sailor disguised as the despotic lord, covered in skins like a Lapp yet shivering in the sweltering heat, arrived, interrogated the captain, and said that he would visit him at ten the following morning. At this point Chaumareys, happy to have any release from the disquieting concerns of navigation, granted a day of festivities on the morrow.72
Waking at 2 a.m. on July 1, Brédif was astonished by the thousands of points of reflected light that surrounded him. Slowly he understood that his little cabin was covered in two inches of water, which, he later discovered, had flooded from the gutters of the ship. Going up on deck, he marveled at the lucent wake and the brilliance of the sails, seeming as if they had been lit by torches from beneath. Moonlight on the foam and billows had ignited the sea into a thousand flames, and with myriad stars milking the sky it seemed the most sublime privilege to be aboard that ship that night.73
By morning the baptismal vat was ready. Into it would be plunged any passenger refusing to pay tribute to the lord while crossing his tropic for the first time. Sailors dressed as priests heralded the ancient lord in his twelve sheepskins and hempen wig, accompanied by a sailor disguised as his wife with scandalous protuberances and scaly hands. The couple was dragged on an old gun carriage by two sailors disguised as bears. At each side, to the front and back of their chariot, processed sailors representing the four corners of the world: Europe with plumed hat and epaulettes, Asia, Africa, and America variously blacked or bronzed by a mixture of soot and tar. Sailors who were crossing the line for the first time were embraced by both their majesties, after which the passengers were rushed through a friendly baptism. But just as they thought they had escaped the worst, a signal sounded and thirty bucketloads of water held in reserve on high rained down on the quarterdeck. Everybody was soaked—passengers, sailors, officers. The four corners of the world were blanched as water splashed and gushed in every direction. In this uproar, the defrocking of the Lord of the Tropic began. His beard, his diadem, his scepter were all torn from him; even the excessive breasts of his travesty of a wife were ripped from her body and tossed about from sailor to sailor.
While Chaumareys played his part as the captain of a ship participating in a time-honored ritual, Richefort was strutting on the forward deck, casting his untutored eye on a treacherous coast not half a cannon shot off the port side. This charlatan was pumping himself up with his own rhetoric, bragging that he had already saved the Medusa from certain shipwreck, boasting of his experience of this coast, and vaunting his knowledge of the perilous Arguin Bank.
Within the previous twenty-five years, at least thirty ships of differing nations had been wrecked on the stretch of the African coast between Cap Bojador and Cap Blanc, along which the Medusa was now sailing. Not eleven months earlier, the American brig Commerce had been wrecked near Cap Blanc and the crew taken into captivity by hostile Moors.74 While Chaumareys was so enjoying his carnivalesque diversion, a humble echo of the court burlesques of the ancien régime, a maritime disaster that would shake the fledgling restoration was in the making. Given the conflicts on board, the mutterings of discontent, it seems most appropriate that the shadow-play subversion of the masque should act as a prologue to tragedy.
The officer of the watch, Lapeyrère, knowing that the Medusa was sailing too close to the coast and was much at risk from the strong onshore drift, put an end to the celebrations and changed course without consulting the captain. This unauthorized initiative resulted in a brisk exchange with Chaumareys but saved the frigate from running onto a reef that stretched half a league out to sea. The commander of the expedition, having mistakenly identified Cap Barbas earlier that morning when the Medusa was still to the north of that cape, had already set in motion the miscalculations that would result in the loss of his ship. Even a landlubber like Brédif correctly recognized the cape as they doubled it at midday.75
Throughout that afternoon the Medusa sailed at a safe distance from the coast as the Echo followed off the stern on the port side. Toward evening, the weather became hazy, and anxious passengers watched as the shore melted into the mist and darkness.
The Echo spent the early part of the night of July 1–2 signaling to the Medusa. Until eleven p.m. she remained off the port stern but then she overtook the frigate. Vénancourt, wanting to maintain contact in these dangerous waters, lit extra lights and sent up a flare. He also took soundings, finding a depth of forty fathoms at eleven p.m. and forty-five fathoms at midnight. Losing sight of the Medusa shortly afterward, he sent up a second flare but, getting no response, he continued, wisely, to steer west-southwest.
It was Ensign Chaudière’s watch from eight to midnight. At ten, he took a sounding of thirty-five fathoms and at twelve he registered a depth of forty-five. Chaudière did not inform Captain Chaumareys when the Echo disappeared from sight. This was irregular but perhaps, by that time, Chaudière questioned the utility of communicating anything of importance to his captain. Henri Savigny was on deck when Reynaud took over the watch at midnight and was surprised that the lieutenant failed to reply when a signal from the Echo was, at last, sighted. The Medusa once again lost touch with the Echo at three a.m. and this fact, along with the information that the Echo had overtaken the Medusa and was now off the starboard, or offshore bow, was communicated neither to Espiaux, who relieved Reynaud, nor to Captain Chaumareys.76
By now mistrust was running so high that a group of officers attempted to dupe Chaumareys in order to secure a wider margin of safety. The accepted wisdom was that to reach Senegal, avoiding the dreaded Arguin Bank, which extends out into the ocean from the bay to the south of Cap Blanc, a ship simply sights that cape and continues sixty-six miles south-southwest before changing to a course south-southeast. Officers anxious about the competence of their commander could thus indemnify themselves against any errors that he might make simply by “moving” Cap Blanc farther south. Several of these conspirators went to rouse the captain at five a.m. on the morning of July 2 and persuaded him that a huge white cloud in the distance was, in fact, Cap Blanc itself. Although Chaumareys had already claimed to have identified it during the previous afternoon, a perfectly logical consequence of having “identified” Cap Barbas well in advance, they succeeded in their deception without the least difficulty. But they had not counted on the arrogance of Richefort, who thought it necessary to sail only thirty miles after sighting Cap Blanc before setting a southerly or southeasterly course. The cunning group had taken the trouble to dupe a captain who was no longer in command.
People’s nerves were frayed; an officer who dared challenge the competence of Richefort was arrested. Ensigns Lapeyrère and Maudet calculated that they were heading straight for the dangerous shoal and when they challenged Richefort they received the blithe rebuff: “Never mind, we’re in eighty fathoms.” The colonist Picard, who had made two previous trips to Senegal, sought out the captain to alert him that the ship was making straight for the ill-defined sandbank. As with the protestations of the officers, Picard’s opinion was ignored. Richefort patronizingly asserted, “We know our job, get on with yours and rest calm.” Seeing that he would not prevail, and hopeful that providence would keep them from danger, Picard went down to his cabin and tried to bury his fears in sleep.77 When, at half past seven, a sounding gave a depth of a hundred and twenty fathoms, a course was set south-southeast.
During the morning, even those passengers with no previous experience of the sea noticed a steady change in the color of the water. Corréard noticed that deep blue had given way to green. Shoals of fish flashed just beneath the surface. Then they detected sand scrolling in the little waves agitated by the gentle breeze blowing from the north. The sailors set about catching large numbers of fish, delighting in a sport that distracted them from the other telltale signs of shallow waters: the kelp, appearing in great quantities, floating on the surface; a sea becoming clear.
At midday Ensign Maudet and midshipman Rang took over the watch in little doubt that they were on the fringes of the Arguin Bank. Brédif had measured the temperature of the sea at eight o’clock that morning; taking a reading after lunch, he found that the temperature of the water had, alarmingly, risen by over four degrees centigrade in as many hours. A sounding was taken that gave only eighteen fathoms. Chaumareys was informed. He hastened up on deck and gave the order to steer a quarter to starboard. Everyone became silent. Another sounding was taken. Ten fathoms. Brédif watched as Rang turned pale. Two quarters to starboard. Six fathoms. The frigate’s sails swelled with a sudden gust of wind. There was a shudder. A scrape. A jolt. A roar from the keel rasping against some undesired obstruction. The Medusa lurched to a halt. An absolute silence was broken only when a sudden panicked clamor resounded throughout the stranded vessel. On the quarterdeck officers were shouting orders. The captain alone was unable to speak.78
Whether Louis XVIII was a liberal at heart or merely appeared to be one because that is what the situation dictated is unclear; certainly, in 1815–16, he seemed happy to uphold sentences that condemned his subjects to the guillotine for political crimes. In July 1816, the month in which the Medusa came to grief, three men accused of participation in a Bonapartist conspiracy had their right hands severed prior to being guillotined before a huge crowd in front of the Hôtel de Ville in Paris. And still the ultra-dominated chamber criticized the government for not rooting out sedition.
Throughout the early stages of the second restoration, the person whom Louis XVIII increasingly came to treasure was Elie Decazes, the minister of police. To gain such favor, Decazes had played the part of devoted young man, eager to learn the ways of government from a master. The ruse worked and Louis began to consider Decazes a disciple, a spiritual son—even perhaps the offspring he never had. Decazes, a political animal who won favor by telling Louis what he wanted to hear, was also a clearheaded tactician who believed that he knew what was good for the crown and, hence, for the country.
Anxiety had been mounting among the liberal ministers that the reactionary policies of the ultras would lead to the downfall of the monarchy. During the cold and rainy summer of 1816, which gave rise to a serious famine in many parts of France, Decazes set out to turn the king against the hostile and reckless policies of the extreme right. A threat to the charter, to national security and sovereignty itself, the ultras, Decazes suggested, would push as far as civil war in order to realize their reactionary aims. Carefully selecting what he brought before the king and Richelieu, the leader of the government, Decazes presented the picture of a country suffering at the hands of a right-wing chamber. During the summer recess, with support from Pozzo di Borgo, the ambassador to Russia, and even from Czar Alexander I himself, Decazes persuaded Louis XVIII that the chamber must be dissolved to make way for autumn elections that could reduce the parliamentary influence of the ultras.79
Théodore Géricault’s shift from dandy and man about town to serious and dedicated artist took place against this ministerial struggle for the safety of the realm. Géricault’s political attitudes were beginning to mature and his decision to leave the Musketeers at the end of 1815 had been influenced by his realization that there was a good deal of arrogance and vanity in his devotion to the royal family.80 He had settled in the rue des Martyrs, in that part of Paris that was too bourgeois to be called bohemian but was nonetheless a quarter occupied by the painters, writers, politicians, and wits who were agitating against the status quo. The young painter’s change was also part and parcel of a pervasive shift in the attitude of middle-class youth that was beginning to occur in France. In the chamber of deputies, citing young men born between the early 1790s and the early 1800s, Benjamin Constant spoke of a generation “Less frivolous than that of the ancien régime, less passionate than that of the Revolution” and “distinguished by its thirst for knowledge … and its devotion to truth.”81 The young painter’s decision to leave the king’s service was prompted by his desire to do more serious work in preparation for the 1816 Prix de Rome while, at the same time, juggling the logistically difficult affair with his aunt.82
On March 18, 1816, along with twenty-nine painters and fourteen sculptors, Géricault sat for the first round of the competition. Along with seventeen others, he made it through to the next round but on March 30, Géricault was informed that he had failed to make the list often finalists and the contest was eventually won by an artist who, as is so often the case when it comes to these prizes, fell into obscurity.83 Apart from the kudos of an award, the independently wealthy painter had no need of financial assistance in order to go to Italy and, as this was considered to be an important part of an artist’s education, it is what Géricault decided to do.
An incident that took place not long before his departure testifies to Géricault’s growing embarrassment with his image as a bright young thing. Théodore Lebrun, who was to have accompanied Géricault on the two-year Italian trip, came to see him and found Géricault making elaborate preparations for a ball, with his hair in paper curlers, intended to give it added bounce. When Lebrun was forced, for reasons beyond his control, to cancel his journey, Géricault assumed that he had done so merely to avoid traveling with so vain and frivolous a companion.84
The role of winsome man about town had, to a degree, become a mere facade for the intense affair that embroiled Théodore and his pretty aunt. Yet Géricault had become a divisive presence in Alexandrine’s comfortable life and he was rattled, distracted, unable to fix and maintain a course of work. A substantial motivation for his Italian trip was the belief that he must distance himself, physically and emotionally, from the turmoil of his relationship.85
On August 15, 1816, the chief commissioner of police issued Géricault with a passport for Switzerland and Italy. The young painter obtained a highly laudatory letter of recommendation from his teacher Guérin, who claimed that he “is one of the pupils on whom must rest our greatest hopes.”86 And so Géricault was off to Italy in search of inspiration. He was fleeing the wreckage of his emotional life and leaving France at a time when the Medusa scandal was breaking. Obviously he had his mind on other things, but for Elie Decazes, eager to change the government and set a new course for France, the news of the shipwreck fell like manna from heaven.