Even as the revolution was unfolding, most Frenchmen still believed that nothing drastic or fundamental would befall France. In the eerie but brief calm that immediately followed the fall of the Bastille, Frédéric obtained leave from his regiment to take Lucie to the waters at Forges-les-Eaux, in Normandy. She had never fully recovered from the birth of her stillborn second baby and the doctors, fearing that damage to her kidneys might mean that she would not be able to have more children–‘a possibility that reduced me to despair’–had recommended a month in the countryside. Later, Lucie would remember these days as some of the happiest of her life. Forges was surrounded by forests. They spent their days riding through sunlit clearings and along grassy tracks; in the evenings, while Lucie sewed, Frédéric read aloud, setting a pattern they would follow all their lives. She was always eager to learn; Frédéric, who was an ‘indefatigable reader’, was a good teacher.
Their tranquillity did not last long. In the countryside, a sense of panic was catching fire. It was prompted by anxiety about the forthcoming harvest, by the expectations raised by the Estates General, and by a spirit of simmering hostility against the nobility and the clergy that had found expression and legitimacy in the cahiers de doléances. Towards the end of July, these grievances burst out into what became known as the Great Fear. It was grounded not in facts but in rumours and fantasy–that the Austrians were attacking from the Netherlands, that Spaniards were marching on Bordeaux, that brigands had been recruited by the nobility to destroy the livelihoods of those calling for reform. But while it lasted it was unpredictable and terrifying. A sudden dust storm, an unfamiliar rider, a deranged beggar, all were enough to cause women and children to hide in cellars and attics, and men to arm themselves with pitchforks and sickles. At one village in Champagne, men mobilised to confront a reported gang of bandits: it turned out to be a herd of cows.
In Forges, Lucy and Frédéric had taken rooms on the first floor of a house on the main road between Dieppe and Neufchâtel. At seven o’clock on the morning of 28 July, precisely two weeks after the attack on the Bastille, Lucie was standing at the window waiting for Frédéric, who had gone to the waters, when a crowd burst into the square below, the women wailing, the men shouting and gesticulating. In their midst was a dishevelled rider, on a lathered, dappled horse. The man began to harangue the crowd, saying that the Austrians were advancing on the nearby town of Gaillefontaine, and would soon reach Forges; then he galloped away to spread the news.
By temperament not given to panic, Lucie hurried outside and tried to reason with the crowd, pointing out that France was not at war with Austria. At the church door, she encountered the local priest, about to ring the tocsin, and she was still there clutching his cassock, trying to prevent his getting to the bells, when Frédéric, alerted by Lucie’s English groom, arrived and took charge. Telling the assembled people that they would ride to Gaillefontaine themselves to find out what was happening, Frédéric, Lucie and the groom, who complained that the French had clearly gone mad, set off at a canter.
It took them an hour to reach Gaillefontaine. As they entered the town, they were challenged by a man with a rusty pistol who demanded to know whether the Austrians were at Forges. On being assured that they were not, he led them to the main square, where another agitated crowd awaited. At this moment, a prosperous-looking villager, pointing at Lucie, set up a cry: ‘It’s the Queen!’ Immediately, Lucie’s horse was surrounded by angry, menacing women. Fortunately, a young locksmith’s apprentice had recently been in Versailles and explained, as Lucie wrote later, that Marie Antoinette was at least ‘twice as old and twice as large’. Lucie and Frédéric were released and hastened back to Forges, where the worried inhabitants were still waiting for news of the Austrian advance.
They had escaped very lightly. Others were not as fortunate, though how true the stories of violence were no one could be sure. All over France, the politics of paranoia were feeding into the settling of old scores. Châteaux were set on fire and their contents looted; the symbols of the ancien régime had become targets, and none more so than the nobility and their possessions. It was rumoured that a 94-year-old marchioness was thrown on to a smoking stack and died watching her servants distributing her linen, furniture and porcelain. One countess was said to have been strangled; another to have had her teeth broken. A princess and her two young daughters were reported to have been tied naked to trees. When Mme de Montesu, held and tormented all day by men and women she had known all her life, and whom she believed liked her, begged for a drink of water, she was–so it was said–dragged across the courtyard and drowned in the pond. A collective frenzy gripped France. Even in normal times, the 4,000 men of the provincial constabulary, the maréchaussée, would have been totally inadequate. As it was, they did almost nothing.
At Versailles, M. de la Tour du Pin, Frédéric’s father, had been appointed Minister for War. Regarded by the liberal aristocrats as loyal and level-headed, he was pleased to be offered the position because he had long been a critic of corruption in government and genuinely believed that aspects of the ancien régime, if reformed, might yet prove the basis of a legimate, functioning monarchy. A portrait of him, painted around this time by Greuze, showed a genial-looking man, with an oval face, heavy dark eyebrows and a small, neat wig. Her father-in-law’s appointment was the beginning of Lucie’s own public life. Still only 19, but accustomed to the Archbishop’s large and sumptuous receptions, she was put in charge, together with her sister-in-law Cécile de Lameth, of the household in the ministry on the first floor of the south wing of the Court of Ministers. Every week, the two young women, seated at either end of a long table, played hostess to members of the rechristened Constituent Assembly, taking care to place the most important guests on either side of them. Wives were not invited.
Versailles was emptying. The first to go, encouraged by the King and Queen, who felt it prudent for the objects of public hatred to distance themselves from France, were the much-loathed Polignac family, who left for Switzerland. Soon after, to Koblenz, went the King’s brother, the Comte d’Artois, and his wife, and after them the Princes of the Blood, Conti and Condé, and their families. ‘Emigration,’ noted Lucie drily, ‘became all the vogue.’ Carriages were seen trundling out of the palace, full of retainers and servants, laden high with baggage. ‘The Queen’s entourage have dispersed and become fugitives,’ wrote a diplomat in a despatch. ‘Several of her women have abandoned her, in the cruellest manner.’ There would certainly be misery in the capital before long, he went on, with so many rich customers departed. ‘I do not believe that the winter will pass without bitter scenes.’ Paris, he added, looked deserted, with an air of having been ‘dismantled’. Terror ‘is painted on every face’.
Among the nobles who had, for the moment, no intention of emigrating, were many who, like Frédéric and his father, were genuinely liberal in their aspirations for France, and believed in the possibility of a constitutional monarchy, along English lines, in which the king would govern, rather than rule, under a new constitution respectful of all people’s rights. These ‘gentilhommes démocrates’ included not only the de Lameth brothers, but Lafayette and Mirabeau, and many of the young officers who had served in America with Arthur Dillon and Frédéric. ‘Never had the aristocracy,’ the historian Hippolyte Taine would write in his history of the revolution, ‘been more liberal, more humane, more in sympathy with useful reform.’
Lafayette, still only 32, a youthful figure on his white charger and with his large military epaulettes, had been the first, even before the fall of the Bastille, to propose a Declaration of Rights, on the American model. All through July and August 1789 the new Constituent Assembly haggled over the question of how you could invest a nation, rather than its ruler, with political sovereignty, and how dismantle the ancient privileged fabric of Bourbon polity and put in its place a set of laws based on liberty and equality.
But the nobles, too, were now carried away by the flood of their own rhetoric. On 4 August, in what the Comte de Ferrièrres would later describe as a ‘moment of patriotic drunkenness’, dukes, marquises, counts and bishops voted to give up tithes, dues, benefices and proprietary regiments. In the Assembly, Trophime-Gérard de Lally-Tollendal, the Princesse d’Hénin’s new lover, sent a note across to the President. ‘They are not in their right minds, adjourn the session.’ But there was no halting the drive to collective abnegation. The deputies would never forget the night on which they gave away their patrimony. By mid-August, France’s feudal ancien régime was in pieces. It had been manifestly unfair; but the speed with which it was dismantled was terrifying.
The frenzy of dispossession hit Lucie hard. ‘It was,’ she said later, ‘a veritable orgy of iniquity.’ Much of the considerable de la Tour du Pin fortune lay in its seigneurial dues. ‘Everything,’ Lucie would write, ‘was swept away’, though for the time being neither she nor Frédéric realised the extent of their loss, not least because they were both convinced that a fairer France would emerge. As Minister for War, M. de la Tour du Pin still received a handsome salary; Lucie’s receptions at Versailles continued, to which she added smaller dinner parties on two other nights each week. Despite her young age, Lucie was treated kindly by the wives and daughters of the other ministers.
Since the recall of Necker in response to public pressure, Mme Necker was again presiding over a political salon, at which her daughter Germaine de Staël was the rising star. Lucie found her a curious mixture of ‘virtue and vice’ and noted shrewdly that Mme de Staël, though genuinely intellectual in her interests, was far more pleased by attention to the ‘beauty of her embrace’ and would abandon herself, instantly and without a struggle, to passion. At their frequent meetings, Mme de Staël repeatedly asked Lucie why she did not take more pleasure in her excellent figure and her unblemished complexion, saying that had she possessed them she would ‘have wanted to rouse the world’. Lucie replied with characteristic directness that she could see no point in dwelling on them, since they would so soon disappear with age. What Mme de Staël found hardest to understand, she told Lucie, was the younger woman’s excessive love for Frédéric and her willingness to ‘act in accordance with the ideals of devotion, self-sacrifice, abnegation and courage’, in short, to sacrifice herself to his every wish. ‘It seems to me,’ she said to the younger girl, ‘that you love him as a lover.’ Even now, with the revolution turning upside down all ideas about society, the nuances of 18th-century fidelity hung on. To show such evident love for one’s husband was unusual, even a little absurd; but among her contemporaries Lucie was unusual, sometimes disconcertingly so.
Lucie was, to her immense pleasure, pregnant for the third time. Feeling well and healthy, refusing to dwell on her two lost babies, she pronounced herself confident that this one would survive. M. de la Tour du Pin had been given a stable of 12 horses, which he seldom took out himself, and she and Cécile spent the fine afternoons of late summer driving out in the forests of Versailles. It was sometimes as if the Bastille had never fallen. One day she was asked to take the collection at a ceremony for the blessing of the standards belonging to the newly formed Garde Nationale of Versailles. It was, she noted, a ‘very magnificent and solemn ceremony’ and it was attended by the entire military corps of Versailles, but it left her uneasy. Though she put on a ‘pretty toilette’ and was much complimented at the dinner she gave afterwards, she was deeply mistrustful of the Gardes, drawn from among the messengers and staff of the various ministries, now armed to the teeth and clearly averse to any kind of discipline. Even musicians were in uniform. One night a well-known singer came to perform a motet at court in the uniform of a captain. There was also a children’s battalion, nominally commanded by the Dauphin; they wore tiny grenadier bearskin caps and manoeuvred light 1-pound cannons around the park.
From Paris, while the Assembly in Versailles was struggling to fashion a constitution of rights ‘for all times and all nations’, there came daily news of small riots, sparked by hunger and the growing shortage of flour, and fanned by an outpouring of pamphlets, papers and journals. With the proclamation on 24 August of the Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen, and its assertion that men were born and remained ‘free and equal in rights’, the old system of censorship was breaking apart. The subculture of Enlightenment publishing, so long underground, was surfacing into the light of day from back alleys, prison cells and hidden attics, and from across foreign borders. Pamphlets and news-sheets, so ephemeral that many lasted no longer than a couple of issues, were produced by printers on hand-presses working all day and long into the night by candlelight. They were read, handed around and discussed, noisily and with passion, in the hundreds of cafés opening all over the city, visited, for the first time, by women as well as men. As Jacques-Pierre Brissot, editor of the Patriote Français, put it, ‘it was necessary to enlighten ceaselessly the minds of the people, not through voluminous and well-reasoned works, because people do not read them, but through little works…’. In 1789 alone, 184 new journals appeared. They would serve, said Brissot, to ‘teach the truth at the same moment to millions of men’, something that had never happened in such a way before, and they would lead men to discuss them ‘without tumult’ and to reach calm decisions. The lack of tumult would soon prove little more than an illusion.
Paris and Versailles remained calm, if on edge. Lafayette, on his white charger, and the National Guardsmen, in their new uniforms of blue coats, white facings, lapels, vests and leggings, with their red trim, patrolled and kept the peace. For a moment, it began to seem as if the threat of the collapse of organised authority could be contained. Two executive committees, designed to centralise policy on appointments and security, were set up, no one perceiving that this would effectively pave the way for a revolutionary police state and a network of spies and informers. The tricolour cockade, made of dimity cotton, was everywhere and the staunchly nationalistic Mercier greeted it as a fitting emblem for the new ‘citizen-warrior’. Hunger and suspicion were, so the thinking went, to be allayed by patriotism and a show of armed discipline.
Frédéric, recently appointed by his father as second-in-command to the Garde Nationale of Versailles, was soon called upon to act. Like his father and father-in-law, Frédéric was anxious for reform, but like them he feared it was coming too fast, too soon. When, one day in late August, two men, convicted of plotting to create a shortage of food, were due to be executed, the Commander-in-Chief of the Versailles Gardes refused to return from Paris to confront the mob gathered to free the plotters. It was Frédéric who had to rally the Gardes, threaten them with dismissal if they disobeyed his orders, and insist that the hangings proceed. Though the actual executions distressed him, he was convinced that firmness would help the fragile sense of order. Like Lucie, he believed in discipline and clarity. Very little trace of his wild youth remained.
There was a long-established custom at Versailles that at the end of the summer, on the feast day of St Louis, a deputation of market women came from Paris to pay homage to the Queen. Wearing neat white gowns, they brought bunches of flowers, and curtseyed. But the poissardes, the market women and fishwives of Les Halles, who descended on Versailles in October 1789, were in quite another mood.
On 2 October, a banquet was held in the great theatre of the château to welcome the Flanders regiment, summoned to Versailles as a precautionary measure to protect the royal family and the Assembly. Towards the end of dinner, Lucie and Cécile went to watch the scene. Unwisely, given the general sense of precariousness, the King and Queen decided to make an appearance, bringing with them the boisterous 5-year-old Dauphin; they were received with cries of ‘Vive le Roi’ and the little boy was paraded around the hall by one of the Swiss Guards. A young courtier, the 19-year-old Duchesse de Maillé, foolishly decided to distribute white ribbons, the colour of the Bourbon kings, to some of the soldiers. Frédéric, in a whisper, said to Lucie that he feared that inflammatory remarks were being made.
Next day, rumours duly spread round Paris that an ‘orgy’ of treason and gluttony had been held. Stories of the sumptuous feast seemed outrageous to those queuing outside empty bakeries. On Monday the 5th, however, Versailles woke to a calm, rainy day. The Assembly continued with its deliberations; the King went hunting in the forest of Verrières; the Queen visited Le Petit Trianon; and Lucie went driving with Pulchérie de Valance, who was about to give birth to her second child. As they crossed the main avenue of the park, a horseman galloped past them, shouting: ‘Paris is marching here with guns.’ They hastened to the château to find Frédéric frantically despatching riders to search for the King and bring back the Queen, while disposing his Garde Nationale in battle order before the iron gates leading into the Cour Royale. The gates were closed and locked, the doors and entrances to the château barricaded. The Swiss Guards and the Flanders regiment took up positions at various strategic points, all facing towards the Grande Avenue, up which the attackers were expected to come. There was a lull. It continued to rain.
Just before three o’clock, the King and his suite arrived at a gallop up the avenue. Saying nothing encouraging to the soldiers standing in the pouring rain, and whose mood was already uncertain, he shut himself away in his apartments. Lucie, standing at her windows above the courtyard, watched. ‘The Gardes,’ she noted, ‘were getting their first taste of war.’
Around four o’clock, the leading column of fishwives, exhausted, some of them drunk, could be seen advancing through the misty autumn early evening up the avenue. The neat white gowns they usually wore to Versailles were filthy and the women carried not flowers but muskets and pikes, ransacked earlier from the Hôtel de Ville, as well as broom handles and kitchen knives. Prevented from entering the château by Frédéric and his men, they pushed their way into the Assembly, where they harangued the deputies and demanded an audience with the King. At this stage, though somewhat inebriated, most of the women were still in a good humour. They had come to demand food from the King, and they were confident that they would get it. But from her window, where Lucie remained all day, she saw the Gardes stationed in the courtyard begin to grow restless; soon, in ones and twos, they drifted away to join the women, in spite of Frédéric’s attempts to maintain order. One Guardsman, suddenly losing his temper, aimed his musket at Frédéric: the shot missed him but hit another officer, breaking his elbow.
A small delegation of women, with a rather pretty and fairly clean 17-year-old at their head, was nonetheless admitted into the King’s apartments; he listened to their complaints and promised to release grain stocks and have them delivered to Paris. By six o’clock, Louis had also promised to sign the decrees voted by the Assembly, as well as the Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen. It looked as if the women would now withdraw. But there was a sudden commotion. A group of fishwives, steered that way, Lucie would later say, by an unknown treacherous insider, discovered a small door leading on to a staircase in the Cour Royale, rushed through it and up the stairs into the ministers’ apartments. Lucie, who was in her rooms above, found herself surrounded by angry, gesticulating women. She was rescued by Frédéric, who led her to the Great Gallery of the château, now thronged with agitated, anxious courtiers and their families. No one knew what would happen next.
The King had been hesitating about whether to take Frédéric’s advice and depart for the safety of the château at Rambouillet. When he finally decided to go, and the waiting carriages were brought round, it was too late: the poissardes, with furious cries of ‘The King is leaving’, unhitched the horses and led them away. ‘This good Prince,’ Lucie later wrote, ‘repeating over and over again “I do not want to compromise anyone” lost precious time.’ M. de la Tour du Pin now offered his own carriages; but the King refused. In the Great Gallery, the courtiers continued to pace up and down. Lucie, excited and restless, hoping to find Frédéric or her father-in-law, wandered from darkened room to room, past ladies sitting whispering on stools and perched on tables. ‘The waiting,’ she wrote, ‘seemed unbearable. I was so agitated that I could not remain still a moment.’
At about midnight, Frédéric came to the Gallery to say that the Garde Nationale of Paris, with Lafayette a ‘prisoner of his own troops’, had just arrived. They, too, were soaking. Lafayette had tried but failed to prevent them setting out; he was reluctant to accompany them, and only did so in the hopes that his presence might act as a brake to any violence. Admitted to the King’s presence, he brought with him a plea to allow the Paris Gardes to protect the royal family, rather than the Swiss Guards and the Flanders regiment. The King agreed. All now seemed calm.
The fishwives, having eaten everything they could lay their hands on in the château, stretched out to sleep in the stables, in the coach house, on the floors of the kitchens and on the benches of the Assembly. The King and Queen retired to their bedrooms, the candles were blown out in the Great Gallery, and Frédéric accompanied Lucie back to the Princesse d’Hénin’s apartment, since their own was full of wet, sleeping women. The sight of them, noted Lucie, was ‘most revolting’. Versailles was quiet. Frédéric begged his father to get some rest. Making a last tour of inspection of the courtyards and the passages, he found the Gardes at their posts.
The attack came as dawn was breaking. Frédéric, keeping a vigil at the windows of the Ministry of War, heard the sound of tramping feet. Through the dim, uncertain light he could just make out people advancing with axes and sabres, pushing their way through a gate which should have been locked. By the time he reached the courtyard, the guard on duty was dead and the mob was racing across the Cour Royale; a group of some 200 people broke away and stormed up the marble staircase towards the royal apartments. A troop of bodyguards, hearing the din, took refuge in the guardroom, leaving one of their men locked outside to be torn to pieces.
There was only one man on duty outside the Queen’s rooms. He just had time to call through the locked door to her bedroom that people were coming to kill her, when the women fell on him, shouting that they had come to tear out the heart of the ‘Austrian whore’ and to ‘fricasser’ her liver. His unconscious body, blocking the doorway, held them up long enough for the Queen to escape along a secret passageway to the King’s apartments. The poissardes, bursting into her bedroom, plunged their pikes into her mattress.
Lucie, deeply asleep in Princesse d’Hénin’s apartment, was woken by Cécile, who said that she could hear shouting. When the two girls leaned out of the window, then climbed on to the ledge for a better view, they could still see nothing, but cries of ‘Kill them! Kill them! Kill the bodyguards!’ were clearly audible. At this point Marguerite appeared, trembling and terrified, saying that she had just seen a man with a long beard hack off the head of one of the guards. She also said that she had seen the Duc d’Orléans, a man none of the liberals trusted and whom Lucie was convinced was behind the disturbances, among the rioters.
As it grew light, the King, at the urging of Lafayette, agreed to appear on the balcony overlooking the courtyard, where some 10,000 women, disaffected Guardsmen and men with pikes, were milling around and shouting. The Queen, who came to join him, made as if to bring out the Dauphin and his sister, but was prevented from doing so by cries from the crowd of ‘Not the children’. What the people wanted was for the royal family to go to Paris.
At 12.30 on 6 October a ragged, mournful cortège duly set off, through blustery winds and heavy rain. The carriages of the King, the Queen, the royal children, the King’s sister Mme Elisabeth, and his brother and sister-in-law the Comte and Comtesse de Provence were followed by several cannon, decorated by the fish-wives with laurel leaves, by wagons containing flour from the King’s stores, and by a large crowd of women, singing and shouting. The heads of two bodyguards danced before the royal carriage, impaled on the top of pikes Lucie missed the closing hours of the attack on Versailles. Frédéric had insisted that she leave for the safety of a house at the Orangerie, and there she waited, in mounting fear and anxiety, for news. She was alone, Cécile having gone in search of her children; Marguerite was at the Ministry of War packing up their belongings. ‘I do not think,’ Lucie wrote 30 years later, remembering the events of that day, ‘that I have ever in my life passed such cruelly anxious hours. The cries of people being murdered rang in my head. The slightest noise made me tremble.’
When Frédéric finally arrived, he told her that the King’s parting words to him had been: ‘You are completely in charge here. Try to save my poor Versailles for me.’ Lucie begged to be allowed to stay with him, but Frédéric was adamant that she should accompany the Princesse d’Hénin to the safety of the Château of Saint-Germain, where her lover Lally-Tollendal kept rooms. Lucie’s presence, Frédéric said, would only ‘paralyse the effort which it was his duty to make to justify the King’s trust in him’.
Before leaving, Lucie returned to the silent and deserted Ministry of War. The only sound to be heard in the vast palace of Versailles, that she had known only as a bustling, crowded village of colour and movement, was the banging of doors and shutters, many of which had not been closed in decades, and which were now being barricaded against looters. Chairs and tables lay on their sides, knocked over by the rushing crowd. Discarded clothing was scattered around the floor. Versailles, for the first time in almost a hundred years, was empty. The Comte d’Hézecques, who as a boy had been a royal page dressed in crimson velvet embroidered with gold, walked, much as Lucie had, through the empty and echoing rooms, discovering corridors and whole apartments he knew nothing of.
The 3-hour drive to Saint-Germain, in a poorly sprung carriage, was bumpy and painful. When Lucie reached Lally-Tollendal’s apartment she collapsed. For a while, it looked as if she would miscarry. But she rallied, and both she and the unborn baby survived a ferocious cupping.
By the time that Lucie, still very pale and alarming Frédéric by her lack of appetite, arrived back in Paris towards the end of October, M. de la Tour du Pin was preparing to move into the new Ministry for War in the Hôtel de Choiseul. A pleasant apartment was being done up for Lucie and Frédéric, with its own separate entrance and with windows that opened on to a garden. Frédéric was working closely with his father, and Lucie, with the help of the Princesse d’Hénin, again became hostess at their official dinners, though they were smaller and less grand than at Versailles. They dined at four in the afternoon, after which Lucie returned to her own apartment or went out visiting. On moving to Paris, Marie Antoinette had given up her boxes at the various theatres and Lucie, in the middle months of her pregnancy, was too fearful of the mood of the Parisian crowds to go without the safety of a guarded box. The Queen’s decision, she thought, had been a mistake, for it served only to isolate her still further from the already hostile people. Marie Antoinette, she wrote, ‘was gifted with very great courage, but little intelligence, absolutely no tact and, worst of all, a mistrust–always misplaced–of those most willing to serve her’.
Arthur had recently returned from the West Indies to represent Martinique at the Estates General, and was living not far away, at 9 Porte Saint-Honoré. He had left his new family behind, and was constantly short of money. When not at the Assembly, speaking on colonial and naval matters, he spent his days trying to collect dues and a settlement on the Dillon regiment, which, together with all other proprietory regiments, had been integrated into the French army. For almost the first time in her life, Lucie was able to spend time with her father. She had not seen him for nearly five years. They grew close.
Having been hauled back to Paris by the poissardes, the royal family had been installed in the Tuileries, the collection of buildings started by Catherine de’ Medici in the 16th century. Overlooking the Seine, and made up of several wings and pavilions and 368 separate rooms, the Tuileries were dark, decrepit and un-welcoming. None of the doors shut properly. With the precipitous arrival of the royal family, the buildings had been cleared hastily of their occupants, most of them actors, artists and the families of court servants. After a first night, with courtiers sleeping on floors and tables, apartments had been arranged for the King, the Queen, the Dauphin and his sister. The children had a new governess, Mme de Tourzel, the 41-year-old widow of a Grand Prévôt of France, a woman whose impeccable probity was intended to counter the reputation of the compromising and frivolous Duchesse de Polignac, now safely in Switzerland. Mme Elisabeth, the King’s sister, was allocated rooms on the ground floor of the south wing; she complained that the poissardes came to scowl at her through the windows.
Gradually, as the mirrors and Gobelin tapestries were brought from Versailles to decorate the royal apartments, the court reestablished itself. Rose Bertin appeared with swatches of material; Léonard came to dress the royal hair. Greater efforts were made to economise and live more simply, but otherwise the royal day passed curiously unchanged: the lever, attendance at Mass, lessons for the children, tapestry for the Queen, billiards with the King, the coucher. The Dauphin played in the Tuileries gardens. The King went hunting. Lucie, returning to court, found that full court dress with hoops was still required. When guests came, they often wore lilies and white ribbons, symbols of the Bourbons; but when they left, they exchanged them at the gates for a tricolour cockade, without which they were liable to be arrested. The King, no longer ‘above the law’, but subject to it, was now simply Roi des Français, King of the French, and not Roi de France et de Navarre, a linguistic distinction meant to highlight his dwindling powers.
The Assembly had sat for its last session among the Doric columns and royal portraits of the Menus Plaisirs in Versailles on 14 October. Three days later the deputies resumed their deliberations in Paris in a hall of the Archbishop’s Palace, considerably shaken by the violence they had witnessed, though no one had actually been injured in the tumult. A few took the opportunity to slip away. Their confidence was not increased when a baker was lynched, and his head impaled on the now customary pike. Paris, as Gouverneur Morris gloomily observed, ‘is perhaps as wicked a spot as exists. Incest, Murder, Bestiality, Fraud, Rapine, Oppression, Baseness, Cruelty…’
To the pleasure of many of the deputies, their formal dress had been abolished and they were arrayed in a bewildering variety of outfits. They looked, Morris complained, extremely shabby. In the first issue of the new Journal de la Mode et du Goût, the truly democratic man, dressed à la Révolution, was decreed to be one who wore, with his plain black cloth coat, a red waistcoat and yellow breeches. If he was very patriotic, he wore buckles à la Bastille, for fashion continued to mirror life. Clothes everywhere but at court were becoming simpler and more comfortable: for women, no hoop, no heels to their shoes and hair worn loose and long, falling in curls to the shoulder.
For a majority of the deputies, especially those from the Third Estate or the lower orders of the clergy, this was their first visit to Paris. They had come to Versailles from all over France expecting a stay of just a few months; they had already been away from home for six. As the winter grew colder, they sent for warm clothes, for supplies of wine and cheese, and even for their families. The Assembly met every day, from eight in the morning until after ten at night, with a couple of hours off to eat. With a thousand people packed into a space so small that not all of them could sit down at once, they were soon complaining of the bad air; many caught colds and wrote home to their wives that Paris was filthy, its streets deep in mud, rubbish and sewage.* On 9 November, they moved into the Salle du Manège, the indoor riding school of the Tuileries, where they complained of the heat.
The deputies were confronted with a daunting task: that of drafting a Constitution in which it was clearly laid down where power resided. Nothing was made easier by the extraordinary process of change going on around them. ‘Everything is new to us,’ said M. Clermont-Tonnerre, a moderate royalist who would for a while side with the Third Estate. ‘We are seeking to regenerate ourselves; we are having to invent words to express new ideas.’ The old and arbitrary privileges, the powers of ancient lineage, the patchwork of illogical and overlapping jurisdictions, all had to be swept away and replaced by rational, equalising institutions. The very word ‘revolution’ had acquired new meaning, that of the total transformation of all areas of life, opening on to a limitless future. Even death would be more equal. On 28 November, a deputy called M. Guillotin proposed that all executions, regardless of class or crime, be henceforth carried out by a single plunging blade.
When the Assembly settled in Paris, several of the deputies, fearful of the confusions of this enormous, volatile city, decided to look for a place where they could meet and talk, not too far from the Tuileries. For 400 francs a year, they rented one wing of the Convent of the Jacobins, in the rue Saint-Honoré. At first, they called themselves the Club Breton, after the 40 deputies from Brittany, and their early meetings were attended by some of the monks, who sat together at the back of the room in their white habits and black hoods. As their numbers grew, to include journalists and lawyers, the meetings became noisier and more passionate, and were soon overflowing into the library. To welcome their new friends, they renamed themselves the Société des Amis de la Constitution; but soon they were simply known as the Jacobins.
The meetings in the Salle du Manège were also passionate and so noisy that the delegates at the back had trouble in making themselves heard. They were dominated by a group of the most forceful members, most of them lawyers from Paris or other large cities and all but a few Jacobins. One of these was a rigid, fastidious lawyer from Arras called Maximilien Robespierre, who was repelled by all forms of vulgarity and disorder and who, with the mind of a grand inquisitor, searched for hidden meanings behind every word. Lucie, at her father-in-law’s dinner parties where Robespierre was an occasional guest, was impressed by his apple-green coat and his thick white hair, elegantly dressed. ‘Before starting out,’ Robespierre declared, ‘you must know where you want to end up.’ There was Georges-Jacques Danton, another lawyer, a previously rather unassuming man turned street agitator; Danton would later be called the ‘Mirabeau of the gutter’. There was Camille Desmoulins, the young journalist from Picardy who had called on the citizens of Paris to rise. The court and the clergy, Desmoulins announced, were ‘ne’er-do-wells…who, despite their great wealth…are merely vegetables’. And there was Jean-Paul Marat, at 46 one of the eldest, a broad-shouldered, muscular journalist with an inflammatory skin disease, barely 5 feet tall; in his paper L’Ami du Peuple, Marat was busy inventing the language of the Terror. For his persistent calls for blood, Marat would be branded the ‘street-corner Caligula’.
But it was rapidly becoming clear that political harmony in the Assembly was fracturing, even among men whose similar backgrounds might have suggested unity. The ‘anti-monarchicals’, described as of the ‘left’–the first such use of the term–split away from a new grouping, the Club de 1789. Two of the de Lameth brothers, Alexandre and Théodore, joined Robespierre, Marat and Danton in agreeing that the real threat to the revolution would come from a royalist conspiracy; they wanted the state subjugated to the citizen. Members of the Club de 1789, on the other hand, which included Talleyrand, Lafayette, Mirabeau and the Abbé Sieyès, were more frightened of anarchy, and hoped to retain a strong, powerful France with a reformed monarchy. Among their supporters were Frédéric, his father and Arthur.
What gave their debates an edge was the fact that Necker’s measures were not paying off. France was running out of wheat. The nobility were being forced to reduce their households and dismiss many of their servants; merchants complained that they had no customers. Eighty thousand families had already left Paris. Writing to George Washington, Gouverneur Morris, who had stayed on in Paris after Jefferson’s departure in October, said that though Necker ‘understands Man as a Covetous Creature, he does not understand Mankind, a Defect that is remedyless’. What was more, he was a poor financier, with ‘feeble and ineptious’ plans. This new Order of Things,’ he added, ‘cannot endure.’ That winter, Morris dined with Arthur Dillon, ‘whose wine is very good’. Even when insolvent, Lucie’s father drank well.
On 10 October, even before the Assembly moved to Paris, Talleyrand, who had defrocked himself in dress if not in title, had proposed that since financial disaster threatened, the Church’s vast wealth in lands, monasteries and foundations should be used as collateral for a new loan. Great dangers, he said, demanded ‘equally drastic remedies’. Since the Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen had expressly stated that property was inviolable, this prompted fury among the higher reaches of the clergy. Horace Walpole, hearing the news in London, observed that Talleyrand was a ‘viper that has cast its skin’. But Talleyrand pressed on, and the Assembly, by 564 votes to 346, decreed on 2 November that all property owned by the Church would be placed at the disposal of the nation–the palaces, the thousands of acres of forest and farming land, the riches in gold and silver and art. As Barnave, the young deputy from the Dauphiné put it, since the clergy only ‘existed by the virtue of the Nation, so the Nation…can destroy it’.
In February came a further assault on the Church: there were to be no more perpetual monastic vows or vocations, though a few of the teaching and nursing orders would for the time being be reprieved. The new citizen of France, a man of liberty, patriotism and happiness, would not be allowed to surrender his freedom, except for the public good. Even as commissioners arrived to begin the task of drawing up inventories and preparing for sales, monks from the great Cistercian abbeys of Clairvaux, Cluny and Cîteaux took off their cowls and prepared to rejoin the world. France’s 51,000 nuns proved rather less willing to abandon their cloisters but they, too, were soon driven out, to settle, forcibly deprived of their habits, with their families or in small groups. Lady Jerningham, Lucie’s aunt, whose house near Norfolk included a hidden Catholic chapel, offered shelter to a group of Blue Nuns from Paris. Over the next two years, the secularisation of the Church would go further than anyone had imagined, with churches demolished or turned into warehouses, church bells and plate melted down, religious orders made destitute, and priests turned into public servants.
On 19 May, Lucie gave birth to a healthy, but rather thin, son. He appeared to consist only of ‘skin and bones’, but a good wet-nurse was found and the baby soon put on weight. She called him Humbert-Frédéric, and had him christened in the Church of St Eustache by Les Halles, appointing as godparents the Princesse d’Hénin and her father-in-law. Humbert filled her with delight. There was talk of Lucie taking the Princesse d’Hénin’s place at the court in the Tuileries, but Marie Antoinette decided against it, as it looked as if Frédéric might be appointed Minister for Holland. ‘And who knows,’ she added, ‘if I might not expose her to further dangers?’
Paris itself, day by day, was changing. The imagination of the men shaping the revolution had been seized by a cult of antiquity, which owed little to Aeschylus or Herodotus, but much to Horace, Virgil and Cicero, writers living at a time when the greatest days of Rome were effectively past, and attributing to that earlier age all the virtues of the simple life. The revolution of 1789 was, as they saw it, a similar moment, a society in which self-made men, Cicero’s homines novi, new men, might, solely by virtue of their eloquence, rise to hold the very highest positions. Among the painters similarly enchanted by antiquity was David, whose martial and patriotic Oath of the Horatii had caused such an uproar at the Salon of 1784, and who now, in an equally famous but unfinished work on the Tennis Court Oath, used the same outstretched hand of the Horatii as the fitting gesture for revolutionary oaths. The Phrygian cap, the red woollen bonnet worn by the freed slaves of Greece and Rome, was beginning to be seen around the streets of Paris, as were haircuts à la Brutus. Men abandoned powder and wigs for short, severe cuts.
This obsession with the ancient republicans extended to the theatre, where Talma, the rising star of the Comédie-Française, turned to David for help in designing costumes. Talma, who looked remarkably like a Roman senator himself, took to the boards as Brutus in a toga. From the theatre, antiquity moved to the streets where, by early 1790, classical festivals of public games and displays of gymnastics, as recommended by Rousseau and described by Plutarch, were being staged. With them came catchy new tunes and a new revolutionary musical form, a ‘genre hymnique’, easy to sing, mixing antiquity with allegory, and sung by immense choirs, often in outdoor settings, all designed to unite the crowd in communal emotion. Paris resounded to ‘Ça ira’, with its ominous refrain ‘Les aristocrates, on les pendra! Le despotisme expirera! La Liberté triomphera!’*
Very early on, Robespierre had understood that revolutions need celebrations. But it was Talleyrand, by June 1790 the only bishop still sitting in the Assembly, of which he was now President, who would star in one of the first and most magnificent of the revolutionary festivals, the celebration, on 14 July 1790, of the fall of the Bastille. It was to be held on the Champs de Mars, the open field used by cadets of the École Militaire to drill, but because no one could quite decide where the King should sit, work did not begin until the end of June. There were just two weeks to transform a stony, uneven patch of open ground into an amphitheatre able to seat an expected 400,000 people. The Gardes Nationales from all over France were invited to send deputations. Frédéric had been given the task of organising their lodgings, food and entertainment, and Lucie often went to the Champs de Mars to watch the progress.
It was a formidable task. Two hundred thousand Parisians, drawn from every class and every occupation, were drafted in to carry earth, which was to form a semicircle round a central ‘altar of the fatherland’ and a triple, arched Arc de Triomphe. Lucie spotted Capuchin friars harnessed to little carts, Knights of Malta with wheelbarrows, nuns with baskets. The nobility lent their horses. Workshops across the capital stood idle. All round the rising amphitheatre, taverns set up tables, laden with free food and barrels of wine and ale. It rained. Sand and gravel were brought to stiffen the sifting mud. The indefatigable and sentimental Mercier lyrically described seeing citizens ‘making the most superb picture of concord, labour, movement and joy that has ever been witnessed…’. Even Lucie, normally cool on such matters, admitted that it was the most ‘extraordinary spectacle’ and one that would not be seen again.
On the night of the 13th, Lucie and her sister-in-law Cécile went to sleep in an apartment lent to them in the École Militaire, overlooking the Champs de Mars, from whose windows they could watch the crowds arriving. M. de la Tour sent food with them, so that they could offer lunch to the military officers during the festivities.
The 14th dawned with heavy rain. The Guardsmen in their red, white and blue uniforms, marched, squelching, to the sounds of military bands. The King and Queen, standing on a special platform, held up the Dauphin to the crowds. The child wore the uniform of a little Guardsman. Lucie reported later that Marie Antoinette had said to an officer, pointing to the child’s bare head: ‘He has not got the cap yet.’ No, the man replied, ‘but he has many at his service’. Lucie had become ‘accustomed to the Queen’s various expressions’, and thought that she looked displeased, and should have made more effort to conceal her ill-temper. The carefully chosen red, white and blue feathers and plumes in Marie Antoinette’s hat dripped. In driving rain and gusting winds, Talleyrand–‘the least estimable of all French priests’, as Lucie noted tartly–celebrated Mass in full episcopalian regalia at the high altar and blessed the banners of the assembled troops, before Lafayette, on his white charger, led the chorus of oaths to the constitution and to the new nation. All around the amphitheatre, spectators sheltered under brightly coloured umbrellas, a novelty introduced to Paris not long before.
The ceremony was interminably drawn out. Humbert was not yet 2 months old and Lucie did not feel strong enough to join the crowds, so she remained inside. No provisions had been brought from the Tuileries to feed the Dauphin and his sister, who became very hungry, and Lucie offered to let them share the food prepared for the officers.
Despite the reassuring presence of Talleyrand at the altar, and the King on his special platform, plans were proceeding at considerable pace to dechristianise and make equal France’s 26 million citizens. On 19 June 1790, late at night when few of the remaining nobles were present in the Assembly, all titles of hereditary nobility had been abolished, and with them went liveries, coats of arms, which were painted over, and any name that suggested a place rather than a family. The Duc d’Orléans opted for the name Philippe-Egalité. The Assembly pressed on with its destruction of the Church, despite the protests of the King. A Civil Constitution of the Clergy made priests subject to appointment by the state, like all other public officials. Soon, priests would be required to sign oaths of allegiance to the state: those who refused would be branded ‘refractory’ or ‘non-juror’ and lose their jobs.
Archbishop Dillon, who had refused to return to Narbonne since the previous winter, on the grounds that he was greatly in debt as a result of the loss of his revenues, retired quietly to Hautefontaine with Mme de Rothe, far from his creditors. The size of his debts–nearly 2 million francs–only became known later, when they were paid out of what remained of Lucie’s inheritance. For many people, the new law against the clergy marked a turning point. The primacy of the Pope on matters of faith and morality was a verity recognised since the beginning of time: to deny it was to cease to be Catholic. Out of 160 bishops, only 7 would agree to become ‘jurors’. Talleyrand was one of them. Archbishop Dillon was not. It was impossible, he wrote to the King, for him to ‘acquiesce in the degradation of the Church’. Retribution followed swiftly. ‘It is time,’ wrote the new administrator for Church affairs in Montpellier, ‘to rid ourselves of this overweening priest who so impudently dares slander the nation’s representatives.’ Dillon, the last Archbishop of Narbonne, had no further role to play. In the following months, Hautefontaine would become a refuge for refractory priests, men like him who refused to give up their allegiance to the Pope and the old Church. With his administrative skills no longer wanted, the Archbishop retreated to a quiet life of prayer and Mme de Rothe.
The Great Fear had driven many nobles to seek safety outside France, their numbers swelling after each new decree or violent incident. After the attacks on the Tuileries in October 1789, the Princesse d’Hénin, taking her lover, the obedient Lally-Tollendal, with her, departed for Switzerland. Towards the end of July, Lucie, leaving Humbert with his wet-nurse and Marguerite in the Hôtel de Choiseul, decided to join them. Paris was calm.
It was still just possible to believe, as Lucie and Frédéric did, that the great and bold transformation of France into a constitutional monarchy might be accomplished without further bloodshed.