That Lucie would receive a good education was never in doubt. The Encyclopédistes and the salons of Mme du Deffand and Mme Geoffrin had made certain of that. Lucie was also extremely fortunate in the timing of her childhood. With the revolution would disappear much of the equality won for women by men such as Diderot–who taught his daughter Angélique to ‘raisonner juste’, think clearly, saying that knowledge would make the world a place in which ‘children, becoming better instructed than us, may at the same time become more virtuous and happy’. It was Diderot who pointed out that girls needed to accept their biological condition, but that their education could provide the way for making that prison as comfortable as possible.
The only question was what form Lucie’s schooling should take. By the 1770s, Saint-Cyr, the celebrated school started by Madame de Maintenon–where nobly born girls were urged never to forget that they descended from warriors, and that their appearance mattered, since beauty was a gift from God–had long since closed. But convent schools, many of them run by the Ursulines, survived and much of the nobility continued to send their daughters away at 7, seeing them only occasionally until they emerged to marry and even then only in a parlour and in the presence of a nun. One possibility was that Lucie might join her English cousin Charlotte, Lady Jerningham’s daughter, in a convent not far from the rue du Bac. From time to time, Lucie was taken to visit her, but Charlotte herself never left the convent or its grounds. But Mme de Rothe and Thérèse-Lucy, schooled by Diderot and the salons, had no sympathy for what they regarded as the meagre offerings of the fashionable Parisian convents, where girls studied little beyond literature, dancing and mathematics and where the emphasis was on learning to please, while mastering and understanding nuances of gesture and demeanour.
To Lucie’s great relief, Arthur and Thérèse-Lucy decided to educate their only child at home. Nothing could have pleased her more, for she continued to show signs of being hugely curious about the world, certain that some great adventure lay in store for her. She envied Marguerite her village life and, when the young woman returned from visits to her family, begged her to describe in detail every minute of her time away. She was already conscious, she wrote later, of longing for a world in which people were not forced, as she was, ‘to hide their tastes and ideas’.
M. Combes was asked to stay on and teach her French, mathematics, history, geography and the sciences, and a maid was brought from London with whom she could practise her English. At Hautefontaine, whenever she could escape this Englishwoman who was meant, to Lucie’s distress, to replace Marguerite as her daily companion, she would walk down to the village to watch the apothecary conducting experiments in his small laboratory. Learning was rapidly becoming not just a pleasure but a necessary distraction. With the shrewdness of a lonely child, she was discovering that the way to escape punishment and ridicule was to appear at all times impassive and obedient. ‘How careful,’ Lucie would write, almost 50 years later, ‘one should be when bringing children up not to wound their affections, nor to be deceived by the apparent shallowness of their natures.’ In old age, recalling the indignities to which Marguerite was subjected, she would still feel angry.
Like her mother, Lucie was musical. Round the corner from 91 rue du Bac, at 110 rue de Grenelle, lived Thérèse-Lucy’s closest friend, Mme de Rochechouart, whose daughter Rosalie-Sabine had been born just before Lucie. It was here, as she grew up, that Lucie went to play the violin with other members of the family. In 1770, Paris was full of music teachers and organists, many of them embroiled in the squabbles between those who followed Piccinni’s tender and intimate melodies, and those who supported the Bohemian Gluck and argued that music should take on all the grandeur and pathos of great theatre, with dignity rather than gallantry, and a minimum of unnecessary dances.
Up and down the Faubourg Saint-Germain, celebrated musicians and singers, come from Germany, Italy and England, performed at small private gatherings in special rooms painted with nymphs and Pans, clutching hautbois, lutes and tambourines. Paris, rather than Mannheim, was rapidly becoming the most important European musical centre, especially for symphonies. In 1778, when Lucie was 8, Mozart composed his Paris Symphony, the 31st. On the Quai Voltaire, the Marquise de Villette seated her guests on chairs carved in the shape of lyres. Thé à l’anglaise, a meal much in fashion in the 1770s, at which guests not only drank tea but consumed large quantities of food, was invariably taken to the sound of a harp or a violin. In the Rochechouarts’ house, Lucie learnt the art of graceful performance.
Lucie herself, with her quick ways, was growing up to be interesting-looking rather than conventionally pretty. She lacked the perfect 18th-century oval face with small straight nose and delicate features and her grey eyes were rather small. After an attack of smallpox at the age of 4–which had left her face remarkably unscarred–her eyelashes and eyebrows were somewhat sparse. Her nose, like her father’s, was long and a little heavy at the tip, but her mouth and her lips were full, her teeth excellent, and she had thick ash-blonde hair. She also had a charming smile.
There was another strand to Lucie’s life, and it came not from Paris and the world of the French nobility, but from America, where, after the colonies united against British rule and mobilised a militia, and Britain sent troops, fighting broke out in 1775. In 1776, 13 colonies voted to adopt a Declaration of Independence. As a soldier, the commander and proprietor of a regiment, Arthur had been following the rebellion closely. From her earliest childhood, Lucie had heard constant talk about this vast land, much of it of a wildly contradictory nature. The most damning picture came from a Dutchman who had never been there, Cornelius de Pauw. In his Recherches philosophiques sur les Américains, published in Paris in 1768, de Pauw reported that the New World was putrefying and swampy, covered in snakes, insects and lizards of monstrous size with odd numbers of toes. The men who inhabited this land of ‘noxious vapours’ were themselves very strange, more like orang-utans than humans, degenerate, sexless and absurdly small. The Indians, observed de Pauw, from a safe distance of 12,000 miles, were not only sexually frigid, but insensitive to pain, cowardly, indolent, and lacking in all curiosity; the same fate, he warned, would surely befall Europeans who ventured to settle in America. (Blacks who came to Europe, however, could hope to turn white.*)
Hector St John de Crèvecoeur, a Norman nobleman who had actually seen America for himself, described on the other hand an Arcadia of meadows and orchards, in which even the kingbirds guarding the cornfields were known for ‘their extreme vigilance, indefatigable perseverance, and their audacity’. Arthur and his military young friends warmed to this vision of a Utopian land of plenty, settled by wise farmers at peace with themselves and the world, which they seemed to be refashioning in the very mould the 18th-century rationalists aspired to. Arthur had read Voltaire, and with him admired William Penn and the Quakers in tolerant, contented Philadelphia. And when in 1767 and again in 1769, Benjamin Franklin had visited Paris, where he became very popular with the nobility and the court, Arthur and his friends were delighted to learn about life in this country of free trade and political radicalism. Arthur’s sympathies increasingly lay with the reformers and radicals whose unease about the profligacy of the French court was growing all the time.
Benjamin Franklin, for Arthur and his friends, was the perfect American emissary. Celebrated by Voltaire as a man of genius, discoverer of electricity, instrumental in bringing pavements and lighting to Philadelphia’s streets, he was courteous, sweet-tempered, prudent and wily; and he spoke passable French. He also looked the part. In a Paris of men in powdered wigs, ruffled lace and silk stockings, he wore a rebel’s plain brown coat when visiting Versailles, and wandered around Paris with a fur hat perched on his high domed forehead. Soon, a hairstyle à la Franklin was all the rage. The Comte de Ségur, contrasting the polish and magnificence of the French courtiers with the rustic simplicity and directness of Franklin, said that it made him think of sages of the time of Plato or Cato, introduced into ‘the midst of the effeminate and servile refinement of the 18th century’.
Franklin was also extremely shrewd. Perceiving the French fascination with the natural world, he played his homespun card to perfection. In the salons of Mme du Luxembourg and Mme du Deffand, where Arthur and the Duc de Lauzun met to debate metaphysics, he charmed his audience with his skill at mastering the rules of ‘bon ton’, his subtlety and understatement. He was ‘sensible’, sensitive, like the best of the salon habitués, and simple, and thus pleasing to the followers of Rousseau; but equally, he was scientific-minded and rational, which endeared him to Voltaire. The French philosophers, the liberal aristocratic soldiers, the worldly prelates and the essayists, all liked his energy and his versatility and they enjoyed listening to him talk about his glass-works and his tannery. And when, on 4 July 1776, word came that the 13 United States of America had declared independence from England, and, in Thomas Jefferson’s words, proclaimed the equality of all men and their ‘inalienable right’ to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, the young French officers, longing to see action, began to think that an American campaign, among people like Benjamin Franklin, was exactly what they wanted. The American rebels themselves were desperate for French aid: they needed money, weapons, gunpowder and material for uniforms.
Franklin himself, back in Paris in 1777 to promote the cause of American independence as ambassador to the court of Louis XVI, in his spectacles and tall beaver fur hat, encouraged them, making friends with the influential philosopher and mathematician Condorcet, and becoming a member of the Académie des Sciences and of a Parisian masonic lodge. One night, at a dinner attended by the Abbé Raynal, a convinced sceptic about the charms of the New World, at which the meagre size of the American people was brought up, Franklin asked first the Americans present, and then the French, in two separate groups, to stand up. As it happened, the Americans at the dinner were tall, vigorous men, and the French rather small; afterwards, Franklin referred to the Abbé as a ‘mere shrimp’.
In January 1777, the King, spurred on by visions of the economic and political rewards that might follow for France, granted the American rebels 2 million livres, without interest, to be repaid only when ‘the United States are settled in peace and prosperity’. The deal was to remain, for the moment, secret, the idea of insurgency terrifying to those Frenchmen who believed in absolute monarchy.
The risk was considerable. France, though politically at its most stable for some time, was financially faltering. There had been a series of bad harvests, and attacks on farmers and bakers. Turgot, the King’s Controller General, the man committed to humane reform and the sway of reason, who had spoken of ‘six years of despotism to establish liberty’, who had sought to unfetter trade from crippling restrictions, abolished forced labour for road-making and tried to curb expenditure, had been dismissed the previous year. ‘Monsieur Turgot wants to be me,’ the King had declared, ‘and I do not want him to be me.’ It was Jacques Necker, a rich Swiss banker, who had made his money from successful speculations, who would now, as Director General of finance, steer France’s fortunes through the costly coming American war, with a commitment to greater transparency in financial affairs, a leaner and more efficient tax policy and greater central control. Necker, a rather effeminate-looking man, with a severe expression and little interest in leisure, was humane and imaginative; he was also a master at floating loans.
A friend of Arthur Dillon’s, the Marquis de Lafayette was the first to slip away to Philadelphia where he offered his services as soldier to Washington. He was soon followed by other young aristocratic officers, longing for military glory. Expecting to be greeted as saviours, many were disappointed by their reception; they complained that the sheets in the inns were filthy and that the American soldiers lacked discipline. There were not enough commissions in the American army for all these aristocratic majors and colonels, few of whom spoke English, and no money with which to pay them. For their part, the Americans found their saviours arrogant. There was a humorous moment when a Bostonian grandee offered to give a banquet for the French. Informed that they lived on frogs and salad, he sent his servants to scour the surrounding swamps, and when the soup plates were handed round, each was found to contain a large green frog.
As Franklin’s popularity in Paris grew, and his likeness began to appear on medallions and snuffboxes, and the Comédie-Française staged two little-performed Molière plays because he expressed regret that he had never seen them, so his ceaseless lobbying began to pay off. A French expeditionary force of 8,000 men, under the Comte de Rochambeau, was despatched to fight alongside the rebels, now increasingly hungry, cold and ill-equipped.
In the spring of 1777 Arthur was 29. Quick-tempered and enthusiastic, he embarked on 5 April with the 1,400 men of his regiment, flying their distinctive white and green flag of harp and crown, in a squadron destined initially for the West Indies. Lucie was allowed to go with him as far as Amiens, but Thérèse-Lucy and Mme de la Rothe accompanied him to Brest, where the French fleet was assembling, and where the Archbishop blessed the ships as they sailed out of harbour. Among the officers on the Diadème and the Annibal were four Dillons; three others sailed with a regiment led by Lauzun.
On their way home from Brest, Mme de Rothe and the Archbishop purchased the entire cargo of a ship that had just put in from the Far East, and returned to Hautefontaine with porcelains from China and Japan, chintzes from Persia, hangings, silks, damasks of every colour. On wet afternoons, Lucie and Marguerite went and watched as the crates and bales were unpacked and sorted out in a warehouse. ‘I was often told,’ she wrote later, ‘how it would indeed one day all be mine…But some presentiment of which I said nothing kept me from dwelling too much on future splendours. My young imagination was more inclined to dwell on thoughts of ruin and poverty.’
With her father’s departure, Lucie had lost an ally. Her mother, who had taken up her appointment as Marie Antoinette’s lady-in-waiting, was often away at court. With Arthur in America and without companions of her own age, she became ever quieter and more reserved. Mme de Rothe’s moods remained tempestuous.
Arthur was a good soldier, brave and resourceful. His superior officers said of him that he was ‘intrepid and swashbuckling’. He fought at Grenada, leading a column storming British fortifications above the harbour; though he lost 106 men dead and wounded, he captured or killed 700 English, together with their flags and cannons, which earned him a Croix-de-Saint-Louis. By September 1779, he was at Savannah, part of a French force of 3,500 men, where he led a pre-dawn attack against the British lines through a swamp, fired on from both front and flank. Conditions at Savannah were appalling: there were almost no tents and the men sat out the three-month siege in deep mud. Fighting alongside his close friends, the Comte de Noailles and Théodore de Lameth, Arthur was decorated again, rising to the rank of brigadier, though not without complaints by his superior officers that he was too prone to get into quarrels. By 1781, Arthur was in Tobago, preparing for a surprise raid on Saint Eustatius.
The war was in its closing stages. In June 1781, the French troops marched through Connecticut to join Washington’s men and the two armies proceeded south to New Jersey, Philadelphia, Maryland and Yorktown, where the French were waiting with naval support. And it was here, after a three-week siege, that General Cornwallis and the English surrendered. When news of the American victory reached Paris, a confectioner created a model of the blockade in spun sugar.
By now, Arthur and most of the liberal aristocratic French officers had come to like and appreciate their American fellow officers, who took them fox-hunting when the hostilities permitted. When they returned to France, after two years’ campaigning, they brought with them praise for a society both virtuous and egalitarian, in which land was owned without restrictions, even if they considered the Americans somewhat insensitive to beauty. The essence of art in all its forms, promoted and nurtured through the court at Versailles and the salons of Paris, was not, they claimed, to be found in Boston or Philadelphia.
For the French, the American war had been expensive. By early 1782, France had lent or given outright to the rebel cause $28 million. Another $6 million would follow. It was money France could ill afford. The previous year, Necker, whose strategy of no new taxes, no state bankruptcy and money to be levied through loans on international money markets had failed, had resigned after his attempts to limit spending had been foiled by the irresponsible nobility. He had also made himself unpopular by his attacks on venality and lack of accountability. For all his professed transparency, his famous Compte Rendu du Roi, an overview of France’s financial position, suggested a totally erroneous surplus instead of showing the actual enormous deficit, and had been ridiculed as a conte bleu (a fairy story). Crucially, Necker had concealed not only the vast sums eaten by the American war, but the extremely parlous state of current finances. Interest on the loans was already proving almost impossible to meet.
News of the American victory at Yorktown reached Paris soon after Marie Antoinette, after 11½ years of marriage, at last gave birth to a son. A daughter, Marie-Thérèse, known as Madame Fille du Roi, had been born in December 1778 (after childless years caused, it seemed, by the sexual awkwardness of the King); but girls could not succeed to the throne of France. Louis XVI ordered Paris to be illuminated, so that for several weeks the normally darkened city was visible for miles around. Masses and celebratory concerts were held and delegations of artisans arrived at Versailles, tailors with tiny uniforms, shoemakers with minute boots, musicians with child-sized instruments. The baby had been welcomed into the world, as custom and etiquette demanded, in a room full of people: the King, the royal family, the Princesses of the Blood, and a number of noble women with ‘honneurs’, certain rights at court. This time, Marie Antoinette had not fainted, as she had at her daughter’s birth, from heat and the press of people. The Princesse de Guéménée, wife of Mme Dillon’s friend the Prince and governess to the royal children, had then paraded the newborn baby through clapping crowds. He was given the name Louis-Joseph-Xavier-François.
The Archbishop had excellent connections at Versailles. Madame Adélaïde, Louis XV’s favourite daughter, painted in her youth by Nattier as a reclining nymph in a woodland setting, found his company amusing. It was through this friendship that the Archbishop was able to obtain favours at court for some of his impecunious Dillon relations, a matter of great import at a time when preferment ruled the fortunes of much of France’s nobility.
Marie Antoinette had never made any effort to conceal her dislike for Archbishop Dillon, and an even greater distate for Mme de Rothe. It was a measure of the Queen’s real fondness for Lucie’s mother that she had nonetheless taken Thérèse-Lucy into service at the court, where she constantly urged her to stand up to her domineering mother. Lucie would later say that Marie Antoinette, who appreciated high spirits and charm, had been dazzled by her mother’s many admirers. And when a ball was held at Versailles, by the Gardes du Corps, the royal bodyguards, to celebrate the birth of the Dauphin, Lucie was allowed to accompany her mother to the palace. It was her first visit to Versailles. She was 11 and she was expected to wear a miniature version of her mother’s full court dress, including a hooped skirt and powdered wig. In the Grande Salle des Spectacles, she watched as Marie Antoinette opened the dancing in a blue dress dotted with sapphires and diamonds. It was a spectacle Lucie never forgot. The young Queen had been so ‘young, beautiful and adored by all’. Many years later, when writing her memoirs, Lucie was haunted by the thought of how short a time Marie Antoinette had left to her.
The court at Versailles was still extremely youthful. Marie Antoinette was 26, the King 28, his brothers 27 and 25. But Versailles had retained much of the formality of earlier reigns. The court itself consisted of some 5,000 people, their separate roles filling 156 pages of the Almanach de Versailles, and their routines, duties and prerogatives were minutely observed. Who carried what, sat where, ate how, followed or preceded whom, wore what on which occasion, was all listed and followed. Women were admitted to court only if they could prove titles of nobility dating back to 1400. The ritual of the lever and the coucher, semi-public events in a royal life that was conducted on a permanently public stage, continued, and the morning toilette de la reine, at which Thérèse-Lucy, the other ladies-in-waiting and princesses of the royal family assisted the Queen to dress, remained a fixed point of Marie Antoinette’s day.
Clothes, like meals, were elaborate–Louis XVI was famously greedy–costly, and subject to rigidly orchestrated rules and fashions. For the men, this meant special uniforms worn to accompany the King to particular residences–green at Compiègne, green and gold at Choisy–and to the hunt: blue, silver and red for deer, blue and crimson, with gold and silver lace, for boar. For the regular Sunday reception at court, the King put on the Order of the Holy Spirit, in diamonds. Wigs of all kinds, worn even by children at court, in all shades, natural, powdered or dyed, had been court uniform since the days of Louis XIII, who became bald when young. Arthur Young, the English agriculturist, complained during a visit to Paris, that once in silk breeches, stockings and powdered hair, it was impossible to ‘botanise in a watered meadow’. Young had a keen eye for what he called ‘trifles’, saying that ‘they mark the temper of a nation, better than objects of importance’.
For Lucie and her mother, as for all the women and girls who attended court, it was considerably more cumbersome. The enormous paniers, or hoops, named after a type of wicker frame under which hens were kept, and which were de rigueur for formal wear, meant that women had to enter rooms shuffling sideways, and sit like puppets, their feet sticking out. The wigs favoured by Marie Antoinette, elaborate pyramids stuffed with horsehair, sustained by gum arabic, tallow and hog’s grease and a forest of pins, sprinkled with flour and held in place at night by swathes of bandages, were often so tall that the women underneath them had to stick their heads out of carriage windows. They also itched unbearably and quickly smelt rancid. On top of this edifice was a pompon, named after Mme de Pompadour, composed of feathers, flowers and diamonds.
At court, guests were meant to glitter in jewels: diamonds, pearls, rubies, sapphires and emeralds fashioned into bouquets of flowers, worn in the hair, around the neck or sprinkled over dresses. There were ribbons, fans, gloves, muffs made of silk, feathers or fur. For walking, shoes were in leather; for an evening at court, in damask, trimmed with gold or silver braid, with narrow heels 3 inches high that made Lucie feel as if she was standing constantly on tiptoe. It made dancing, she wrote, ‘a form of torture’. The material used for the dresses changed with the seasons: flowered silk for spring and autumn, satin for summer, damask for winter, all of which, given the muddy state of the streets in Paris and Versailles, needed the constant attention of several maids. Since gold, silver and gauze could not be washed, a primitive form of dry cleaning with the vapour of sulphur was used. The heavy dusting of powder for wigs, delivered as a fine spray by an houppe de soie, left the room and everyone in it coated in white flour. Smell, ever a problem of 18th-century life, was countered by scented soaps, pellets, ‘odiferous balls’ and powders, the mouth washed out with rose water and a paste made of irises, though doctors warned that too strong odours could exhaust the psyche and cause anxiety.
By the time Lucie paid her first visit to Versailles in 1781, the court was enjoying Marie Antoinette’s new passion for flowers, which now decorated tables, filled sachets, perfumed gloves, fans and handkerchiefs, and were worn draped over the head or wound around bodices, kept alive in artfully concealed ‘bosom bottles’. Musk, once popular, had been abandoned in favour of honeysuckle, ranunculus and hyacinth, lily of the valley and convolvulus. And some of these flowers at least made their way into Versailles’s gardens, in which Lucie strolled with Thérèse-Lucy when court duties allowed her mother a few hours off.
It was under Louis XIV’s landscape gardener Le Nôtre that Versailles had been transformed from what the Duc de Saint-Simon, the celebrated memoir writer, called ‘that most dismal and thankless spot’ into the most extravagant and influential garden in European history. As it grew, so it reflected the Sun King himself, his power, his concept of monarchy, even his love affairs. Versailles evolved into a vast and ever-spreading geometry of intersected walks, landscaped circles and squares, paths, parterres, copses, lakes and fishponds. Louis XIV’s gardens became his court, with a theatre, a concert hall, a conservatory and pleasure grounds, and fabulous water displays, all designed to distract his jaded court and keep them loyal. As at Tivoli near Rome, where water obsessed Hadrian, so Louis XIV had been in thrall to his cascading waterfalls, bubbling artificial springs, jets that spurted far above basins and fountains. Versailles was designed to provide a model of tranquillity and order in the tradition of great Renaissance gardens, reflected in regular avenues, in contrasts between light and shade and in the tensions of sudden vistas. Like Louis XIV, Le Nôtre hated flowers.
Reduced in scope and splendour first by the bankruptcy of Louis XIV’s last years, then by the Regent’s dislike of formal gardens, Versailles, by the time of Lucie’s first visit, was once again in the process of changing. Under the influence of Rousseau’s appeal for a return to the natural, sharp angles were being replaced by winding walks, formal parterres abandoned in favour of softer new arrangements of plants, and lakes and rivers created, artificially, to convey the simple, artless life.
This taste for simplicity found favour with Marie Antoinette who, not long after becoming Queen, asked Louis XVI’s permission to let her take over Le Petit Trianon, Louis XV’s gift to his mistress Madame de Pompadour. There Marie Antoinette set about creating a garden, in what was then known as the English style, of canals, winding paths and curving lakes, with screens of trees and trellises to preserve an impression of intimacy, and the sound of caged singing birds and tinkling water. It was in Le Petit Trianon and its famous hamlet, with its fake Norman farm buildings, that she escaped the stuffiness of court; and there that she created a theatre, with blue and gold papier mâché boxes, for the amateur theatricals in which she took the parts of shepherdess and village maiden.
Though the Prince de Guéménée had often tried to warn Thérèse-Lucy about the scandals increasingly engulfing the court, urging her to take great care not to become embroiled, Lucie’s mother, like Lucie, had a trusting and almost innocent nature. While others of Marie Antoinette’s favourites were busy furthering their own fortunes, through graft and financial deals, she played no part in their intrigues. But it was not only a matter of temperament and honesty: Thérèse-Lucy’s health was failing. She had not in fact felt well since the birth of her first child, Georges, when she was 18. Now, approaching her 30th birthday, she had little appetite, something the doctors ascribed to a ‘lacteal humour’ that had settled on her liver, but which Lucie ascribed to Mme de Rothe’s nastiness. In spite of being told that her blood was thin and inflamed, Thérèse-Lucy made little effort to take better care of herself, preferring to sing with Piccinni and to ride and hunt with the Prince de Guéménée in the forests around Hautefontaine.
Early in 1782, while Arthur was still in Tobago, where his military exploits had earned him the post of governor, Thérèse-Lucy began to cough blood. Mme de Rothe, maintaining that this was just an excuse to prevent her going to Hautefontaine, refused to believe that there was anything very seriously wrong with her. ‘Her invincible hatred and her suspicious nature,’ Lucie wrote later, ‘led her to see in my poor mother’s every action a calculated attempt to free herself from her authority.’ It was not until a doctor, diagnosing in Thérèse-Lucy’s now repeated haemorrhages a stomach complaint, insisted that she take a cure, that Mme de Rothe reluctantly consented to a visit to Spa, a fashionable health resort in the Ardennes, between Aix-la-Chapelle and Liège. Here frail patients were thought to benefit both from the calm life and the combination of acids and gases in the waters. Even so, it was Marie Antoinette, and not Mme de Rothe, who gave Thérèse-Lucy the money to make the journey.
Despite the efforts of the Enlightenment philosophers to clarify and categorise disease, it remained common in 18th-century France to attribute most illness to bad air, stemming from decomposing organic matter or ‘putrid exhalations’ rising out of the earth, or even to sorrow. Smallpox, measles and mumps were all known diseases, but ‘fevers’ could be bilious, autumnal, ephemeral or malignant, and whether ‘terminal diarrhoea’ meant gastric upset, dysentery, parasites or food poisoning, no one was sure. Equally, how disease was transmitted from one person to another remained a mystery. For the poor, and particularly the city poor, weakened by malnutrition, living in damp, dark rooms with bedding infested with vermin and using copper pots to cook with, illness was a long and baffling sequence of coughs, fevers, rashes, scabs and infected sores, most often ending in death. Water was polluted and alive with germs. Delicate children were doomed. Even the rich could not be cured of tuberculosis. As Thérèse-Lucy grew weaker, two of Lucie’s aunts were also coughing blood.
On the way to Spa, Thérèse-Lucy and Lucie stopped in Brussels, where Charles Dillon, Arthur’s brother, lived, not daring to return to London on account of vast debts at the gaming tables. Lucie liked his beautiful young wife, who had visited Paris the previous year to attend a ball at Versailles, and she enjoyed the company of her two small cousins. Thérèse-Lucy was very fond of her sister-in-law and in her letters addressed her as ‘ma chère soeur’, my dear sister. The Low Countries belonged to Austria, and Lucie and her mother called on the reigning Archduchess, Marie-Christine, Marie Antoinette’s sister. At Spa, a place much frequented by European royalty, Thérèse-Lucy took her small daughter dancing and soon the town was talking about the precocious French child who could dance the gavotte and the minuet with such grace. It was there, wrote Lucie that ‘I tasted for the first time the heady poison of praise and success’. It was also one of the rare moments in her childhood when she had her mother to herself, and Lucie, who was reading a romantic novel by the Abbé Prévost, extolling the virtues of devotion, longed to bestow her own loving feelings on her mother. But Thérèse-Lucy, evidently alarmed by her sickness and fearful that her daughter might catch it, kept her at a distance. ‘I often wept bitter tears,’ wrote Lucie, ‘because she would not allow me to nurse her, and I had no inkling of the cause of this strange aversion.’
Spa did not improve her mother’s health; rather, the haemorrhages increased. Thérèse-Lucy was very reluctant to return to Hautefontaine and to her mother’s tantrums and dreamt instead of travelling down to Naples, where the warmth and change of air might do her good. The spring and summer of 1782 were exceptionally cold in northern Europe and it rained ceaselessly. But when Thérèse-Lucy and Lucie reached Paris, it was clear that she was too ill to travel further.
Only now did Mme de Rothe realise that her only daughter was dying. Her manner underwent a profound transformation: from spiteful and tyrannical, she became tender and solicitous, insisting on giving up her own better rooms to the patient and personally seeing that she lacked for nothing. All this was witnessed by the 12-year-old Lucie with disbelief, and it was only many years later, looking back on the events of that terrible summer, that she understood that Mme de Rothe was a woman of passion and extremes and that her generosity now was simply another facet of her domineering character. For her own part, she continued to mind not being allowed to nurse her mother. One day, Marie Antoinette came to the rue du Bac to visit her former lady-in-waiting; and as Thérèse-Lucy grew weaker, so she sent pages from Versailles every day to enquire about her health. Arthur did not return to Paris.
Early on the morning of 8 September 1782, Lucie was woken by Mme Nagle, a friend of her mother’s, and told that Mme Dillon had died in the night, in Marguerite’s arms. Mme Nagle had come to counsel her. Lucie was to go, immediately, to her grandmother, throw herself at her feet, and beg for her protection and care, without which, with her father away and in any case not in favour, she might well find herself banished to a convent, like her cousin Charlotte, and also very likely disinherited.
Though Lucie was repelled by the need to fawn and deceive, finding it ‘utterly repugnant’, she did as she was told. Dry-eyed and frozen with grief in the face of Mme de Rothe’s hysterical tears, she was accused of being cold and hardhearted. Later, she would wonder why, in this clerical household, there had been no chaplain on hand to give her mother the last rites. At the time she was conscious only of glimpsing, with a sudden adult understanding, a vision of the ‘long years of deceit into which I was being forced’.