Lucie would remember her year in Holland as the last heedless moment of her life. Later, she would wonder at her own frivolity and insouciance; but in the autumn of 1791, a determined young woman with a small healthy son and a husband she loved, accompanied by Marguerite and Zamore and her former tutor M. Combes, who had returned from America and was now secretary to Frédéric, she set out to enjoy life as the wife of a French ambassador. She was 21; she had a large wardrobe of Parisian dresses and good jewellery; and wherever she went, she was looked on with admiration.
Frédéric, for his part, was turning into a highly competent administrator, though somewhat outspoken. When doubts had been raised in the Assembly about appointing known monarchists to the diplomatic service, M. de Montmorin, the Foreign Minister, had pointed out that, given the royalist feelings at the courts of Europe, this was not the moment to send ‘people who have declared themselves in favour of revolution’. Frédéric’s political credentials, liberal yet aristocratic, were precisely what were needed. Even so, Mme de Staël, who, estranged from her husband was now mistress to the Comte de Narbonne and working hard behind the scenes for her friends, advised Frédéric to ‘study closely the men you meet and try rather to fascinate them with their own ideas rather than with yours’. He would do well, she said, to lie low, for the word around Paris was that he was ‘not very Constitutional’, and too close to the King. Try to write despatches ‘that sound very patriotic’, she added: to do otherwise had become foolish.
Frédéric’s position at The Hague was not an easy one. He had never been a diplomat and France’s relations with Holland were tense. After years of struggle between the French and the English for supremacy in Holland, with fortunes spent on spies and secret diplomacy, William V, Prince of Orange, a cautious, irresolute man with protruding eyes and bulging cheeks, had only recently agreed to recognise the new United States. At heart, he remained firmly in favour of the English. There were two main parties, the ruling House of Orange, of which William was ‘stadtholder’–the chief executive and military commander–and the Patriots party, younger, more liberal and more open to France. Dutch citizens who supported William wore orange ribbons, whether as cockades in their hats or their buttonholes, or pinned to their dresses, a custom followed by Frédéric’s predecessor, a timorous diplomat called M. Caillard. Caillard, noted Lucie scornfully, was ‘prudent to the point of timidity’ and had kept his post ‘only by sending despatches exaggerating the difficulties’.
Frédéric, on the other hand, was already showing signs of the diplomatic stubbornness which would later mark many of his decisions. Though titles and liveries had been abolished in France, French diplomats abroad were allowed to use the King’s livery. Frédéric ordered his household to leave off both orange ribbon and tricolour cockade; Lucie supported him, remarking tartly that it would be unseemly to clutter the Bourbon livery with the insignia of someone who was nothing other than the senior officer of a republic, even if he was of excellent family and had married a Royal Highness.
Their stand earned them a few clashes with angry crowds, but the Dutch people were soon more interested in Zamore and his elegant wardrobe. Frédéric now settled down to negotiate his way between the cross-currents of revolutionary fervour drifting across Europe, while Lucie became, as she wryly wrote later, ‘the acknowledged leader of all society gatherings’. Unlike Sir James Harris, former English Minister at The Hague, who had found the city unremittingly dull, its inhabitants interested only in cards and food, Lucie was in a mood for parties. ‘I was dazzled,’ she would say, ‘by my own success’, and, she added, ‘little realising how short a time it would endure’. She was also pregnant again.
By the spring of 1792, what had started as a trickle of frightened people trying to escape the uncertain temper of Paris was turning into a river even if Talleyrand, when consulted, would advise his friends to hide somewhere, stay quietly in their châteaux, rather than leave the country. The word ‘émigré’ was a creation of the French Revolution, Edward Gibbon, in 1791, remarking on the large numbers of ‘emigrants of both sexes…escaping…the public ruin’. What had become known as ‘l’émigration élégante’, the elegant émigrés, had crossed the Channel to England; ‘l’émigration pauvre’, the least well-off, had gone to Soleure and Fribourg in Switzerland. There were French dukes, marquises, counts and their retinues, as well as royalist soldiers and ‘non-juror’ clerics, in every state and country bordering on France, their numbers growing with each violent incident. More or less tolerated by their hosts, they led lives as similar as they could make them to their former existence at Versailles. Horses with which to leave Paris were, at times of particular turbulence, in such short supply that oxen were harnessed to carriages instead, to be seen creaking at little more than a crawl out of the city gates. Until March 1792, there was no need for a passport to leave.
Koblenz, meanwhile, standing on the confluence of the Rhine and the Moselle, had become the capital of the military emigration. It was here that the King’s brothers, the Comte d’Artois and the Comte de Provence, had set up their headquarters and were assembling an army, l’Armée des Princes, the Army of the Princes out of disillusioned, royalist soldiers. Six thousand men, half the French officer corps, had gone into exile after the royal family’s disastrous attempt at escape. The 24-year-old René de Chateaubriand, recently returned from America, observed that they were a motley bunch of ‘grown men, old men, children just out of their cots, speaking the jargon of Normandy, Brittany, Picardy, the Auvergne, Gascony, Provence, the Languedoc’, sometimes several generations of the same family.
Viewed with extreme misgivings in France, and the cause of constant rumours of imminent invasion and counter-revolution, these soldiers, when not engaged in military tasks, spent their days intriguing. Swinging between optimism and pessimism, their mood was constantly jostled by inflammatory pamphlets smuggled over the border from France, and by the comings and goings of spies, Jacobins, recruiters and people carrying letters. Their families, mourning the douceur de vivre they had left behind, were already beginning to appal their hosts with their arrogance and frivolity. ‘We dance and we enjoy ourselves,’ wrote the Duchesse de Saulx-Tavannes about the émigrés in Brussels. But Lucie, nearby in The Hague, heard stories from her friends that the Belgian noble families, known for their modesty and simplicity, were terrified lest they become contaminated by the profligacy of their visitors.
Among the recent arrivals in Koblenz were Mme de Rothe and Archbishop Dillon, who had fled from Hautefontaine as more and more ‘refractory’ priests were rounded up, and there were fears that he might be taken with them and imprisoned. Though never overly concerned with piety, the Archbishop had a stubborn and courageous streak. He did not intend, at any price, to renounce what he believed to be the true vows of the Catholic Church.
At The Hague, Frédéric, closely following local events, listening to the gossip and reading the papers, both clandestine and those published openly, was soon aware that the French émigré army in Koblenz was looking for horses and weapons. His reports to Paris, either written in his own hand, or dictated to M. Combes, some of them in a code of neat numbers, gave precise accounts of the success of these ventures. Frédéric’s tone was careful, but already he was filling his despatches with his own opinions, which reflected his thoughtful nature. ‘The Dutch,’ he wrote, having not greatly taken to them, ‘are not people to give away cheaply what is theirs.’ In December, hearing of 15,000 guns and ammunition for sale, he asked the Foreign Ministry in Paris whether he should make an offer for them, to keep them out of the hands of the émigré officers. ‘I am as yet to find a single educated man,’ he wrote, with that sense of false security in which he and his colleagues continued to live, ‘who believes in the success of the French Revolution.’
In March 1792, as France’s revolution was heading into a new phase, Frédéric was abruptly informed that he had been dismissed. The weak but amiable M. de Montmorin had been replaced as Minister for Foreign Affairs by General Charles-François Dumouriez, an energetic, canny, ambitious soldier who had been a close friend of Mirabeau’s. Dumouriez, whose proposed reforms of the army were opposed to those of Frédéric’s father, bore a grudge against M. de la Tour du Pin: he repaid it by getting rid of Frédéric.
Moving out of the splendid French Embassy in The Hague into a smaller, rented house, Lucie gave proof of her spirit and sense of humour. To embarrass Frédéric’s replacement, she held a very public open-air sale of all the furniture and possessions for which they no longer had room, holding it on the promenade immediately in front of the embassy. Profiting from the lessons learnt about housekeeping and money during her childhood at Hautefontaine, she made a handsome sum, which she prudently entrusted to a Dutch banker in whom she had confidence. But she kept her lavish wardrobe and, having taught Zamore to dress her hair, continued to go to court, to dance and to pay visits. It was becoming impossible, however, even for the still carefree Lucie, to ignore the fact that the news from France, brought by visitors or carried back by Frédéric from his frequent trips to Paris, was becoming more alarming with every week that went by.
The acceptance by the King of the revised Constitution in September 1791 had been greeted with pleasure and relief. A Te Deum was sung in Notre Dame and a balloon, trailing tricolour ribbons, was sent up to hover above the Champs-Elysées. In the new Legislative Assembly that replaced the old Constituent Assembly–for which no former deputy was permitted to stand–the clergy and nobility had virtually disappeared. Apart from one or two revolutionary aristocrats, the Assembly was dominated by lawyers, with a sprinkling of mathematicians and historians, all well versed in revolutionary discourse, as well as journalists and editors such as Camille Desmoulins.
A new political grouping, the Feuillants, which included the two more militant de Lameth brothers, had split off from the Jacobins and was preaching a constitutional monarchy of the centre, with a stronger sense of public order to quell the frequent outbreaks of popular insurrection, and discipline imposed on the press, the political clubs and the army. But the Jacobins, though numerically smaller in the Assembly, had Marat, Danton and Robespierre, whose cold, moral earnestness and invective against royalists and aristocrats was remarked on by all visitors to Paris. Robespierre had about him ‘something sardonic and demoniac’, and, with his tawny-coloured eyes, looked like a brooding bird of prey. His political voice formed by the Oratorians and by his devotion to the teachings of Rousseau, Robespierre shared with his mentor a vision of an austere, virtuous and authoritarian republic, obedient to a controlling social order, views that would soon become the guiding spirit behind revolutionary absolutism.
The steady stream of émigrés leaving France to join the Army of the Princes in Koblenz had fed a growing sense of paranoia and mistrust in Paris. By the spring of 1792, the Assembly was in a fever of war rhetoric, speaker after speaker rising to denounce the legions of fanatical émigrés apparently massing on the border to attack France. Their passions were further enflamed when, on 7 February, Austria and Prussia signed a formal treaty of alliance. The Emperor Leopold, while concerned for the safety of his sister, Marie Antoinette, had been extremely reluctant to go to war, but his death had brought his more war-minded son Francis to the throne. On both sides, the mood was turning to war.
In the second week of April, 50,000 Austrian troops were moved to the Belgian frontier. On the 20th, Louis XVI, believing that a successful war might also restore him to his proper place, went to the Assembly and proposed that France should begin hostilities, though much of his family and his court were by now in exile and on the opposing side. War–which would last, on and off, for almost 23 years–was declared. In the garrison at Strasbourg, a young army engineer called Rouget de Lisle came up with a catchy, rousing song that would remain famous long after the revolutionary music of Gossec and Grétry was forgotten. Soon, men all over France were marching to war to the Marseillaise, with its heady appeal to valour and patriotism and its images of the tainted blood of tyrants.
For the French, the war did not start well. Despite the presence of able and seasoned military veterans in all three major theatres of war–Lafayette, Rochambeau and Luckner–the army was disorganised and still plagued by memories of the troubles at Nancy in which Frédéric had played a role. Many soldiers remained suspicious of their aristocratic officers. One of the first to fall foul of his men was Théobald Dillon, Arthur’s first cousin, who had served with him in the American war. Théobald had been commanding a force sent to attack the Austrians at Tournai. Retreating after encountering unexpectedly heavy opposition, he had been mistaken for a spy, lynched and hanged from a lamp-post in Lille, before his leg was hacked off and paraded around the town. Other officers, learning of his fate, hastened to resign and crossed the border to join the Army of the Princes.
France itself, like its army, was in a troubled and volatile mood. As the value of the paper money, the assignats, kept falling, and news of grain shortages in the south and the southwest was reported, so there were increasing attacks on the barges and wagons carrying food. A ‘famine plot’ was talked about, apparently planned by scheming ‘counter-revolutionary forces’. Uprisings in the French West Indies, where tens of thousands of slaves in Saint-Domingue, under the free, highly intelligent Toussaint L’Ouverture, had destroyed a large number of plantations and made coffee and sugar, two commodities which had become staples in French life, prohibitively expensive. Into this mood of paranoia about food and anger towards those responsible for the shortages was emerging a new band of revolutionaries, the sans-culottes, artisans, shopkeepers and functionaries of the more militant Paris sections, who saw in the silk stockings and breeches of the old court everything they most deplored. The enemy was perceived to be not just the émigré army and the Austrians, gathering against France, but the ‘false patriots’ and fifth columnists at home. ‘To your pikes, good sans-culottes,’ urged Jacques-René Hébert, whose acerbic Père Duchesne was becoming the most popular of the revolutionary papers, ‘sharpen them up to exterminate aristocrats.’ The true patriot now was a man who wore, along with his tricolour cockade and red bonnet, pantaloons, suspenders, clogs and a short jacket, the carmagnole. Writing to Jefferson, Gouverneur Morris, the last American diplomat left in Paris, remarked: ‘On the whole, Sir, we stand on a vast Volcano, we feel it tremble and we hear it roar…’
At the end of May, as Frédéric kept a close and anxious eye on events in France from The Hague, and Lucie nursed her increasingly sick sister-in-law Cécile, the King in Paris was forced to agree to the disbanding of his own personal guard. Using his veto in the Assembly, he refused, however, to accept a decree to deport all ‘refractory’ priests. It was a stormy, wet summer. The Paris crowd was not in a mood to tolerate royal vetoes. On 20 June, a mob forced its way into the Tuileries, brandishing a gibbet with a doll dangling on a rope labelled ‘Marie Antoinette à la lanterne’, dragged a cannon up the staircase and battered down the doors to the royal apartments. The King was cornered, forced to place a red bonnet on his head and to swear allegiance to the Constitution.
Events were moving very fast. The insults against Louis and Marie Antoinette had become such that they no longer dared to walk in the gardens. While 20,000 Guardsmen were converging on Paris for the 14 July celebrations, singing the Marseillaise and reducing the city to new levels of lawlessness, the Duke of Brunswick, commander-in-chief of the combined Austrian and Prussian forces, issued a memorandum promising an ‘exemplary and unforgettable act of vengeance’ against anyone who harmed the French royal family.
In the Assembly, where Robespierre called for unity and emergency powers, ‘la patrie’, the nation, was proclaimed to be ‘in danger’. An ‘insurrectionary commune’, made up of people from the more militant sections, and including Robespierre and Danton, was set up. The travelling soldier Desbassayns remarked that though the markets were full of peas there were very few apricots, and noted: ‘We have reached a moment of crisis.’
All through the night of 9 August, the tocsin rang continuously. On the morning of the 10th, the royal family was taken for safety to the Assembly, where they were forced into a caged space usually reserved for reporters. A crowd, swollen by many Gardes armed with pistols, sabres, scythes, swords, pikes and knives, surrounded the Tuileries, which was lightly guarded by 900 Swiss soldiers together with a number of mounted gendarmes and about 300 aristocrats. The Swiss fired; the crowd retaliated. In the hours that followed, those defending the palace were stabbed, stoned, clubbed, bludgeoned to death. People poured into the Tuileries, killing everyone they caught, dragging them out of hiding places in the chapel, the attics or the cellars, looting and drinking as they went. The naked bodies of Swiss Guards, stripped of their distinctive red, blue and gold uniforms, were mutilated. When an English visitor to Paris, Mr Twiss, ventured out at three o’clock, he found the bridges, gardens and quays surrounding the Tuileries covered with bodies, dead, dying or drunk; sans-culottes and poissardes running about covered in blood; and bodies being loaded on to carts to be taken for burial in common lime pits. Looters, rummaging in the wardrobes of Marie Antoinette and her servants, emerged decked in feathers and pink petticoats. Marie Grosholz, later famous as Madame Tussaud, described seeing the gravel stained red, with flies buzzing around clotted pools of blood. Some of the women wore ears and noses pinned to their caps.
The violence abated; but the monarchy had fallen. That night, the royal family slept in the Convent of the Feuillants. On the 13th, they were taken to the medieval tower of the old monastery of the Templars in the Marais. They were now prisoners. In L’Ami du Peuple, Marat spoke of 10 August as a ‘glorious day’. There would be, he added, no ‘false pity’ for tyrants. The Princesse de Lamballe and the children’s governess were separated from the royal family and taken to the prison of La Force. Inside the Temple, life resumed some kind of normal course. The King read in the excellent library of the Knights of Malta; Mme Eloffe was allowed to deliver clean linen; there were prayers, lessons, needlework. The meals remained relatively luxurious, soups, entrées, roasts and desserts, served on silver. What would happen to the royal family had not been decided.
But the sudden outbreaks of frenzied violence were not over. Santerre, a brewer known for his revolutionary fervour, was made head of the Gardes. The events of 10 August were quickly recast by those now in power as a royal plot, courageously foiled. The newly formed Insurrectionary Commune called for the establishment of a military tribunal to try those accused of plotting against the republic. It had powers to arrest, question and punish, with no right of appeal. The task of tracking down the guilty was put into the hands of a new Comité de Surveillance; ‘domiciliary visits’ began, late at night or at dawn, to search for fugitives and incriminating documents. A revolutionary police state had effectively come into being. The Terror had begun.
Over a thousand people, many of them ‘refractory’ priests, bishops, almoners and vicars, hiding in seminaries and churches, along with aristocrats and their servants, were rounded up; editors and printers deemed ‘counter-revolutionary’ were seized and their publications closed down. Among those sought were former ministers. Frédéric’s father, M. de la Tour du Pin, managed to make his way to Boulogne and crossed the Channel to Dover. Mme d’Hénin’s lover Lally-Tollendal was caught in the net and sent to the prison of L’Abbaye, from where he wrote to a friend asking for clean shirts and a few bottles of wine.
The war was still going well for L’Armée des Princes and its allies, who had crossed the French border on 14 August, scored a victory at Longwy and were advancing on Verdun. Goethe, attached to the Prussian army, found time to pin down the noise made by the cannons. They sounded, he wrote, like ‘the humming of tops, the gurgling of water, and the whistling of birds’.
In the Assembly, Danton rose to describe fifth columnists, traitors to the patrie, lying low in Paris waiting to exact revenge should the royal family be threatened. The Orateur du Peuple printed a rousing article about the enemies at home. ‘The prisons,’ it said, ‘are full of conspirators…’ Marat spelt it out. ‘Good citizens’, he declared, on posters that went up on walls all over Paris, should go to the prisons, seize the priests and conspirators held there and ‘run a sword through them’. The city was sealed, its gates barricaded shut; drums were beaten; the tocsin was rung.
Among the first to be dragged from their cells were 24 priests, hacked to death in the gardens of the prison of L’Abbaye. Over a hundred others were slaughtered in the Convent of the Carmelites, following a brief parody of a trial. Bishops were shot as they prayed. Vicars, abbots, parish priests, canons, almoners, seminarians, men known for their piety and learning, were murdered. The massacres, which had started on 2 September, continued into the 3rd. Nothing was done to stop the violence. The prisons of Bicêtre, La Force and La Salpêtrière housed not only the newly arrested clergy and nobility, but beggars, prostitutes, old women and the insane; they, too, were hauled out and killed, the youngest being a vagrant boy of 12. By the time the killing had played itself out, 1,400 people were dead, most of them hacked and battered to pieces. One of these was M. de Montmorin, Frédéric’s former employer at the Ministry for Foreign Affairs. Another was the Princesse de Lamballe, the blue-eyed, fair-haired friend of Marie Antoinette who, refusing to denounce the monarchy, had her head chopped off; it was impaled on a pike and borne off to the Temple, to be danced about under Marie Antoinette’s windows, before being carried to the Palais-Royal to be shown to her lover, the Duc d’Orléans. Lally-Tollendal miraculously survived by escaping through a window.
Though the Duke of Brunswick was continuing to advance, the fortunes of the émigré army and its allies were in fact turning. The magnificent squadrons of mounted cavalry, noted by the Comte d’Espinchal in his diary of the campaign as being ‘almost entirely composed of the cream of the French nobility’ and filled with ‘indescribable enthusiasm and zeal’, were being routed. The initial force of 30,000 men, eroded to little more than 10,000 by incessant heavy rain and inadequate supplies, was halted at Valmy on 20 September. On the 30th, the Prussians sounded the retreat. It soon looked more like a stampede. Dragging carts piled high with sick or wounded men, the émigré force fell back through torrential rain and deep mud, losing men to marauding bands of French attackers, or abandoning them to die of dysentery in the ditches. The magnificent horses described by d’Espinchal were soaked and bedraggled. Returning to Koblenz, the Army of the Princes fell apart; its members began to disperse, carrying the French diaspora still further afield.
Lucie’s father Arthur, to the fury of the Archbishop his uncle, who accused him of treachery, had remained in France. Many aristocratic families were now divided, their members at war with each other, the royalists outside France, plotting to bring down the revolution, the liberals inside the country, still hoping to be able to save a reformed constitutional monarchy. Promoted to lieutenant-general, Arthur had initially hoped to be sent to Martinique as colonial governor, to join his wife. But in the spring of 1792, shortly before the declaration of war, Arthur had been drafted to serve in the army. He was on the border with Flanders when he heard of the massacres in Paris. Always rash and outspoken, at heart a convinced monarchist, Arthur immediately declared that he would indeed renew his oath of allegiance: but it would be an oath to the King as well as to the Constitution, and he asked that his men do the same. His position, as a former aristocrat, with three Dillon relations serving on the other side with the Army of the Princes, was made more precarious when his friend Lafayette, judging that civil war was looming, deserted and crossed the lines to the Austrians. Arthur could, like Lafayette, have remained abroad in safety. Lucie begged him to join them in The Hague; but her father insisted on returning to Paris.
For a while, Arthur, who was an excellent and brave soldier, was protected by Dumouriez, who had been promoted to supreme control of the French armed forces. He was sent to command the Army of the Ardennes, at one point holding out against 80,000 Prussians with only 10,000 men. At Verdun, however, he made a fatal mistake. Hoping to confuse the enemy with a series of phoney letters that he was confident would be intercepted, he was himself accused of treachery and recalled to Paris to defend himself before the Assembly. There, Arthur managed to persuade the deputies of his innocence, and was even able to secure compensation for the widow of his murdered cousin, Théobald, despite Marat’s accusation that Théobald was nothing but a royalist intriguer. But Arthur’s manner was brusque, and he had never been diplomatic. He was relieved of his command. Offered lowly alternative positions, he refused to take them, announcing that he would remain in Paris and keep requesting military reinstatement until offered a worthy command. As a friend observed, Arthur had defended himself ‘with zeal, too much zeal’.
For the revolutionary French forces, victory followed victory. In Paris, every revolutionary triumph was greeted with jubilation, the heroic deeds of the victors celebrated on posters, in paintings and on the stage. ‘We cannot be calm until Europe, all Europe,’ declared Jacques-Pierre Brissot, emerging as one of the leaders of the revolution, ‘is in flames.’ Battalions of volunteers, some as young as 14, had responded when invasion threatened. All over France every man with two pairs of shoes gave up one for the defenders of the frontiers; women made bandages and scraped the walls of cellars to extract saltpetre for explosives. By the end of October, General Custine, M. de la Tour du Pin’s whiskery, red-faced friend, had occupied the Rhineland; in the south, Savoy and Nice fell to the French. The 6th November saw the winning Battle of Jemappes, after which Dumouriez and his men marched on Brussels, mercilessly requisitioning all they set eyes on as they went, and demanding vast indemnities, thereby setting a pattern for French conquest for the next 20 years.
In Brussels, the thousand or so émigrés, settled in lodgings and hotels around the Grand Place, had believed themselves safe. But one evening, just as Lucie was preparing to leave for a reception at court in The Hague–at which she was a frequent and popular guest, despite Frédéric’s dismissal as ambassador–the Austrian Minister, the Prince de Starhemberg, arrived, looking ‘distraught’. ‘Everything is lost,’ he told her. ‘The French have defeated us completely. They are occupying Brussels.’
For the Dutch, and for the French émigrés who filled their cities, Dumouriez’s advance was indeed disastrous. A friend arriving at The Hague from Brussels described to Lucie the flight from the city of the thousand or so émigrés who had taken refuge there. He told her of scenes of chaos, as frantic people, piling their belongings on to every waggon, dray and carriage they could get their hands on, fled the city. For many it had been their second, or even third, sudden flight. The wisest and those ‘most plentifully provided with funds’, made their way to England. Somewhat sternly, with the self-righteousness of youth mixed with her own tendency to take a firm moral line, Lucie noted how appallingly some of the richer émigrés behaved towards those without money. ‘Many of them,’ she observed, ‘presented a sorry spectacle of the most shocking heartlessness towards their companions of misfortune.’ Vowing that she herself would certainly never help them should they fall on hard times themselves, ‘I hastened,’ she wrote later, ‘to offer my services to the most heavily stricken and paid very little attention to the richer.’ Lucie herself had just miscarried again, at around five months into her pregnancy. She was not very well, but she did not complain.
The French émigrés, perched precariously in towns and villages over the borders in Switzerland, Italy, the German States, Belgium and the Austrian Netherlands, were indeed in an increasingly impossible position. In their absence, ever more punishing edicts had been issued against them: one by one, their rights had been curtailed, their relations threatened, their lives menaced, their houses and lands marked for sequestration and sale as biens nationaux, national properties. Already dispossessed of their feudal dues, desperate not to lose everything they owned, but fearing imprisonment and execution if they returned home, they were also running out of what little money they had taken with them into an exile that all assumed would only be brief. Their hosts in the border towns were, for their part, growing increasingly impatient with guests who seemed incapable of understanding that the ancien régime was over, and who continued to gossip, gamble and hold salons, while borrowing vast sums of money. In several places, these unwanted exiles were now being ordered to move on, and parties of desolate French counts and marquises, sinking ever deeper into debt and penury, could be encountered trailing along the roads of Europe, spending their nights in their carriages and selling their last pieces of jewellery. Outside villages could now be seen signs: ‘émigrés not wanted here’. ‘Our fate,’ noted one mournful count, briefly finding refuge in Spa, ‘is to be ceaselessly victims of events.’
Lucie and Frédéric, who had been sent to The Hague on official business, were in a somewhat different category, and Frédéric, since his dismissal by Dumouriez, had spent a considerable amount of time back in France. When, in the late autumn of 1792, fresh penalties against émigrés were voted through the Assembly, banishing them from France in perpetuity and arranging for the immediate sale of their properties, Frédéric decided that it would be sensible for Lucie to return, to try to ensure that the house in the rue du Bac would not be seized. From Paris, he wrote to tell her that too much was at stake for her to delay any longer. Frédéric’s father had also decided to leave London and come back to Paris, saying that he refused to do anything that would jeopardise the remaining inheritance of his children. The full meaning of the dispossession of the Church and the nobility was at last clear to Lucie. Up until this moment, she wrote, ‘I was still no campaigner, but as delicate, as much a fine lady and as spoiled as it was possible to be…I still thought that I had accepted the greatest sacrifice that anyone could require of me when I agreed to do without the services of my elegant maid and my footman-hairdresser.’
It was an extremely cold winter; snow lay across northern France. Taking with her Humbert, now aged 2½, Zamore, Marguerite and one other manservant, Lucie left The Hague in a carriage on 1 December 1792. Buried under a pile of pelisses and bearskins, she clutched Humbert to her, wrapped up tightly like a small Eskimo. They had taken the painful decision to leave Frédéric’s sister behind, with her two young sons. Cécile, very weak and coughing blood, was too ill to travel. Many years later, Lucie would regard this journey as the defining moment in her life, the one at which she finally recognised that nothing would ever be the same again, that the pampered years of balls, dazzling clothes and jewellery, times she described as ‘weakness and illusions’, were over.
What she did not know, when she left The Hague, was just how far the French had already advanced. Reaching the border with the Austrian Netherlands, she learnt that Antwerp had fallen and though a room was at last found for them, the town was crammed with rowdy soldiers, celebrating their recent victory. Standing at the window, Lucie watched as a vast bonfire was lit in the main square, the flames soon ‘leaping high as the rooftops’. Drunken French soldiers, reeling and swaying, fed the flames with furniture, books, clothes and portraits dragged out of the surrounding houses. Meanwhile ‘dreadful-looking women, their hair loose and their dress in disorder, mingling with this gang of madmen’, plied them with vintage wine looted from the cellars of rich Antwerp merchants, singing obscene songs and dancing around the flames. All night, appalled, Lucie watched from her window, ‘fascinated and terrified, unable to tear myself away despite my horror’.
Leaving Antwerp next morning, accompanied by a friend of Arthur’s, they drove through the French encampment, and Lucie noted how few of the men had proper uniforms. ‘These conquerors,’ she observed, ‘who were already making the fine armies of Austria and Prussia quake in their shoes, had all the appearance of a horde of bandits.’ Their cloaks, hastily made up in every conceivable colour out of material requisitioned from stores along the way, reminded her of a vast human rainbow, or a gigantic flower-bed, brilliant against the white of the thick snow. It was their red bonnets that lent them an air of menace.
Lucie’s heavily laden carriage moved very slowly along roads cluttered with wagons and ammunition carts, occasionally halted by officious commanders wanting to see their papers. In Mons, drunken men tried to break into the room in which the women had barricaded themselves with Humbert, but they fell back just as Lucie was preparing to hit them with a flaming log pulled from the fire. Nearing Hénencourt, where she was hoping to find Frédéric, they came across a squadron of well-mounted black soldiers, led by the Duc d’Orléans’s manservant, Edward, going to join the fighting in the north. Many of these black former footmen had been in service with the nobility and, their employers having fled, were joining the army as volunteers. Lucie feared that she would lose Zamore to them, but after spending a day with his friends, riding part of the way with them, he returned that night to her side. As they crawled their way over frozen, muddy tracks, past châteaux that had been looted and set fire to, Lucie reflected on her life. At that moment, she wrote later, she felt overwhelmingly sad; her ‘carefree youth’ struck her as sickeningly frivolous. Doing what she had so often done in the past, imagining situations and events that might lie in the future, she started to sketch out the dangers that awaited her, so that she might be better prepared. From that day onward, she would write, ‘my life was different, my moral outlook transformed’.
Frédéric was not, as she had hoped, at Hénencourt with Augustin de Lameth. Travel around France had become extremely difficult, with detailed passports and permits–specifying age, height, length of nose, shape of mouth and face, type of chin, and colour of hair and eyebrows–needed for the shortest journeys, and he had been unable to leave Paris. Augustin was alone, very gloomy and anxious about his wife Cécile and the children and about the encircling violence. Lucie, entrusting Humbert to Marguerite’s care, set out to look for Frédéric, taking with her Zamore for the 160-kilometre journey to Paris and carrying false papers, provided by a friendly official in Hénencourt, to say that she had been resident there since the spring.
After an interrupted and uneasy journey, constantly stopped at roadblocks by suspicious Gardes, she found Frédéric at Passy on the outskirts of Paris, living secretly in a house belonging to the Princesse de Poix. They were its only occupants and decided to keep to the back rooms, leaving the front of the house shuttered to give the impression that it was empty. Humbert would be left in safety at Hénencourt. Frédéric’s father was in hiding not far away in a house belonging to his cousin at Auteuil. It could be reached from Passy by little-frequented footpaths and every day, slipping out of the house through a concealed side door, Lucie and Frédéric made their way through the wintry countryside to see him. They had discovered a ramshackle cabriolet and a very old horse, and planned to make forays into Paris to find out what could be done about salvaging the house in the rue du Bac.
Paris was much altered. In the 15 months that Lucie had been away everything that had once made the city the envy of the civilised world was either destroyed or under attack: libraries and priceless antiques chopped up for firewood, churches and convents desecrated, crowns, coats of arms, fleurs de lys all defaced or chipped away, the statues of the French kings in the places Vendôme, des Victoires and Royale toppled from their pedestals, volumes of heraldry and registers of nobility publicly burnt. In the Faubourg Saint-Germain, Lucie and Frédéric, venturing cautiously past the Église des Théatins, now a grain store, and the Convent of the Récolettes, now the Théatre des Victoires Nationales, found the once exotic and sweet-smelling gardens abandoned and overgrown. The Hôtel de Bourbon, confiscated from the Prince de Condé, had been transformed into a prison, where the few Swiss Guards who had survived the massacre in the Tuileries were locked up. Lucie and Frédéric learnt that the liberal monarchist Stanislas de Clermont-Tonnerre had been murdered outside his house in the rue du Cherche Midi, and the Duc de la Rochefoucault dragged from his carriage and lynched in front of his wife and daughter. ‘In Holland,’ Lucie wrote later, ‘I had been spoiled, admired and flattered…The revolution was now all about me, dark, menacing, laden with danger.’
The signs of revolution, as Lucie and Frédéric moved around Paris, were indeed everywhere; it was the speed with which it had happened that was so striking. Many of the street names had already changed–there would be 4,000 new names by 1793–losing their ecclesiastical and noble connotations: the rue de Condé had become rue de l’Égalité, the rue Comtesse d’Artois was now the rue Montorgueil. Citizens addressed each other as ‘tu’, and signed their letters ‘ton-Concitoyen’. And just as Notre Dame was now the Temple of Reason, so playing cards had shed their kings and queens, to become ‘Génie’, talent, and ‘Liberté ’.
In this new world, time itself was to be thought anew. A special commission had been appointed to give the old Gregorian calendar a revolutionary twist, and the model they had come up with, disdaining the superstitions and tyrannies of the past, looked to the seasons and changing weather of the agricultural world. ‘We can no longer count the years,’ said Fabre d’Églantin, ‘during which kings oppressed us as a time in which we lived.’ The first moment of the declared Republic, 9.18 plus 30 seconds on the morning of 22 September, 1792, had been the time of the vendange, the grape harvest, and so became vendémiaire; brumaire was the month of mists; frimaire, that of cold. Each of the twelve months was divided into 10-day periods, the décades, periods in which people were encouraged to contemplate the fruit, flowers and produce of the moment. For fructidor, on the cusp between summer and autumn, the calendar prescribed eglantine, roses, crayfish, chestnuts, hops and sorghum. Since each month was to be an equal 30 days, the five days left over in the year were declared to be sans-culottides, to be devoted to festivals of industry, heroism and patriotic games. Fructidor was becoming a popular name for new babies.
And, for all the shortages, the almost total lack of coffee and soap–which meant that skin diseases were multiplying–for all the bread queues and bread rationing, there was something hopeful and bracing in the air, remarked on by the few foreign visitors left in the city. The English traveller, Mr Twiss, walking around the streets, observed how much better dressed ordinary women seemed, even wearing earrings as they served behind their stalls, and how few children were to be seen barefoot. He approved of the simpler dresses, the way lace, silk and velvet had been replaced by cotton and linen, and the new short haircuts for men, shorn like David’s heroes of antiquity. David had designed a new uniform for men, with a short tunic, held together at the waist by a wide scarf, tight breeches and a three-quarter-length cape, inspired by the Romans and the Renaissance; but it was generally found to be too fanciful to be worn.
Most of the fashionable modistes had followed the émigrés into exile, Rose Bertin taking with her four of her famous dolls, like the one given to Lucie by de Lauzun, splendid in the full panoply of the ancien régime. It was no longer either right or appropriate, noted the editor of the Journal de la Mode et du Goût, for women to have an air of meekness or submission; on the contrary, given the new laws promising them freedom from parental and marital control, and providing for divorce on equal terms, their manner should be ‘decisive’, their head ‘held high’, their step ‘resolute’. Citoyens and citoyennes were encouraged to abandon the flowery talk of the aristocrats and use coarse and vulgar oaths. Some of these bold citoyennes could be found at Meot’s, in the Palais-Royal, where a former chef served 22 white and 27 red wines, some of them looted from the cellars of émigrés, or eating ices in the boxes at the back of the Assembly, as they heckled the speakers.
Since the revolution, the Palais-Royal had become ‘un grand marché de chair’, a market place for flesh, with girls as young as 12 soliciting for custom, no longer harried by the police, who were more intent on catching refractory priests and suspicious nobles. Mr Twiss, strolling in the arcades, noted that there were canaries, white mice and linnets for sale, and what he called ‘lion cats’ from Syria, with ruffs and tails spread over their backs like squirrels, as well as a lively commerce in libellous books. A two-volume Private Life of the Queen, complete with obscene drawings, was selling well. Prevented from exploring further by the ‘disturbances’, he was disappointed to hear that ‘aristocratic plants’ had been banned, though just what those were he did not say. At Versailles, he discovered that most of the famous stable of horses had gone off to the army, and that the magnificent furniture, tapestries and pictures that had once made Versailles one of the most beautiful courts of Europe, were soon to be auctioned in 17,182 lots in the Cour des Princes. Lucie, taking stock of the extraordinary changes brought about in the 15 months of her absence from Paris, reproached herself for the ‘futility’ of her past life. ‘A bitter sadness filled my heart,’ she wrote later, adding that it made her determined to face the future with ‘very great courage’.
On 1 January, Mme de Staël, who in November had given birth to a second boy, Matthias Albert, arrived in Passy to stay with Lucie and Frédéric. Nicknamed by her enemies as the ‘Bacchante de la Révolution’, having ‘Girondins for dinner, Jacobins for supper, and at night everyone’, and ‘derided and lampooned by every journal in the capital’, she had left her children with her parents in Switzerland. She was frantic with anxiety about the Comte de Narbonne, her son’s father, whom she had earlier helped to escape to London, but who was now proposing to return to Paris rather than risk permanent exile and the forfeiture of all his property under the new laws.
Lucie had not seen her father since her departure for The Hague. Returning into Paris early in January 1793, she found him living in a furnished house in the Chaussée d’Antin. He was running up further debts in wine, trying to avoid creditors pressing with unpaid bills for lace, porcelain, carpets and shoes, and unable to leave the city until a trusted messenger he had despatched to Martinique returned with money from his wife. While waiting, he continued to drink, and to gamble, particularly at cards. Arthur was now 42, but appeared considerably younger. ‘I looked on him more as a brother than a father,’ wrote Lucie. ‘No one was ever more noble in manner or more aristocratic in bearing.’ They often dined together, when she and Frédéric came into Paris from Passy, and she was delighted by how attached to each other her husband and her father seemed to be.
Arthur, always heedless of his own safety, was taking enormous risks, and spent his days lobbying the Assembly on behalf of the King. He was trying to convince the deputies that it was in their own political interests to remove the royal family to somewhere that they could be protected, where they would then be unable to communicate either with foreign or hidden royalists. But Arthur had enemies, particularly Dumouriez, who had turned against him just as he had once turned against Frédéric.
Just how possible it was to try Louis XVI was a question that had divided the National Convention for some months. In theory, under the Constitution of 1791, he could not be tried at all, for no court had jurisdiction over a king. But the endless debates had brought to the fore a young protégé of Robespierre, Louis-Antoine Saint-Just, who wore a single gold earring and let his black hair fall loose down to his shoulders. ‘One cannot reign innocently,’ Saint-Just told the Convention. His case was greatly strengthened by the discovery of an iron chest hidden in the Tuileries, containing damning evidence of royal duplicity. This was the chest in which Frédéric’s incriminating memorandum had been put. For a few alarming days, Frédéric and Lucie feared arrest. But the initials on the document–M. de G–were believed to be those of a M. de Gouvion, who had since conveniently died.
On 11 December, the man now known to the French as ‘Louis Capet’–the name of an earlier French dynasty–was taken before the Convention and indicted for ‘shedding French blood’. Louis had been tubercular in his youth, but his years of passionate hunting had made him physically robust. Locked up in the Temple, he spent his days reading, later saying that he had read 250 books, most of them history or geography, in four months of captivity; he also translated Horace Walpole’s Richard III into French. The royal family lived quietly and simply, both the King and the Queen giving the children lessons and playing skittles with them. The once plump Marie Antoinette had grown thin and haggard, and her hair had turned completely white; her sumptuous wardrobe had gone, to be replaced by a brown linen gown and lawn cap.
On 26 December 1792, the trial of the King opened before the National Convention. An account of the trial of another king, the English Charles I, was being read all around the hall. Saint-Just rose to argue that Louis should die, not for what he did, but for who he was; Robespierre declared that he had condemned himself by his actions; Danton observed that revolutions could not be made with rosewater. In his diary, Marat noted: ‘I shall never believe in the Republic, until the head of Louis Capet is no longer on his shoulders.’ Since the trial itself was a violation of France’s new criminal code, Louis could, perhaps, have emerged innocent. In fact his guilt had already been decided.
On 4 January, voting began. There were three questions. Was the King guilty or innocent? If guilty, what should the sentence be? And should there be a popular referendum?
There were 749 deputies present when, on 15 January, the first and third questions were settled: a verdict of guilty was passed by 693 of them, the few others abstaining, or being absent, and the decision was taken not to hold a referendum. In the corridors, Arthur, going from friend to friend, still believed that the King could be saved. At nine o’clock on the evening of 16 January, one by one, the deputies went up to the tribune to decide on the King’s fate. The hall was full of a whispering, almost festive, crowd. Tom Paine, who had been made a deputy despite his poor French, suggested through an interpreter that Louis should be deported to America; it was wrong, he said, that the ‘man who helped my much loved America to burst her fetters’ should die on a scaffold. Condorcet voted that the King should be sent to the galleys. Twelve hours later, at nine on the morning of the 17th, there was a majority of 70 for execution. Among those voting for death were the King’s cousin, Philippe-Egalité, the former Duc d’Orléans, who looked miserable and distracted. Lucie and Frédéric had spent the night in the Chaussée d’Antin with Arthur, ‘suffering,’ as she wrote later, ‘an anxiety it is quite impossible to convey’. When the news of the verdict came, they began to discuss ways in which the King might still be rescued. Arthur was convinced that some kind of ‘revolt’ or popular uprising would take place.
The execution had been set for the morning of 21 January. The King was allowed a brief, miserable farewell from his family. Early that morning, Lucie and Frédéric, back in their house in Passy, stood at the open window, hoping to hear the ‘rattle of musketry’ that would tell them that ‘so great a crime’ had not gone un-challenged. They heard nothing. ‘The deepest silence,’ wrote Lucie later, ‘lay like a pall over the regicide city.’ The gates to Paris had been barricaded shut. It was a bitterly cold, damp, foggy morning. The King, escorted by 1,200 guards, was brought from the Temple to the Place de la Révolution in a closed carriage along streets lined four-deep with soldiers. The procession lasted two hours. People had been ordered to keep their shutters and doors closed. ‘One might have thought that the freezing atmosphere of the day had benumbed every tongue,’ observed J. G. Millingen, one of the very few foreigners left in Paris. The drums beat. Louis, composed and dignified, spent a few minutes in prayer before climbing the steps to the scaffold and raising his arm: ‘Peuple, je meurs innocent.’ He was 38. Later, Mercier, who had abstained from voting in the Convention, recorded that the executioner gathered up little parcels of hair and fragments of the King’s clothing to sell.
At 10.30, still standing shocked and silent at their open window, Lucie and Frédéric heard the familiar noises of Paris resume. Trying to appear calm and composed, they set out on foot for the city. Avoiding the Place de la Révolution, they went in search first of Arthur, then of their elderly friends, Mme de Montesson and Mme de Poix. ‘People scarcely spoke,’ noted Lucie, ‘so terrified were they.’ It was as if, she thought, each one of them felt a measure of personal responsibility for the King’s death. Frédéric blamed himself bitterly for not having believed that the execution would actually go ahead.
Returning that night to Passy, they found two monarchist friends, Mathieu de Montmorency and the Abbé de Damas, waiting for them. Both men had witnessed the execution, and both now feared that their angry exclamations might have been overheard, which could bring instant arrest. Lucie and Frédéric agreed to hide them until they could get away. In Paris the mayor had decreed that the city would be illuminated for the next few days, despite a full moon, saying that these ‘unsettled times’ were not the moment to practise economies.
An English visitor, who had attended the execution, was later said to have dipped his handkerchief in the King’s blood and sent it to London, where it was prominently displayed. The English reacted with horror and disbelief to the news of Louis’s death. The theatres closed and at a memorial service the King’s last written words were read aloud to a weeping congregation. ‘I leave my soul to my creator…’ Louis had written. ‘I advise my son, should he have the misfortune to become king, to give himself up entirely to his subjects…’ Until now determinedly neutral, Pitt, calling the execution the ‘foulest and most atrocious’ act the world had ever seen, ordered Chauvelin, the French Ambassador, to leave England.
The war was spreading, both against enemies coming from across the borders, and within France itself, where counter-revolutionary groups were joining forces. In the Vendée, an isolated, rural area in the south-west, an eruption of popular anger, triggered by the arrival of recruiting agents, and fanned by energetic, popular, ‘non-juring’ priests, burst out into rebellion against Paris.
Towards the middle of March, as the Convention announced that it intended to hunt down enemies of the state and try them before special revolutionary courts, M. de la Tour du Pin was arrested, together with a cousin, the Marquis de Gouvernet, mistaken by the police for Frédéric. Taken before the Paris Commune, they were repeatedly questioned about the events at Nancy in which Frédéric had played a part and blamed for the death of so many ‘good patriots’. Though they were soon released, M. de la Tour du Pin begged Lucie and Frédéric to leave Paris for Bordeaux. He thought that they should hide on his estate at Le Bouilh before crossing the border into Spain or even joining up with the rebels in the Vendée.
Lucie was extremely reluctant to leave her father, whose careless ways and outspoken views terrified her. ‘It grieved me profoundly,’ she wrote. ‘His originality of mind and evenness of temper made him a most agreeable companion. He was my friend, and a comrade also to my husband.’ Arthur had been offered and refused the Army of the Rhine as second-in-command under General Custine. He had since been struck off the list of general officers and been warned that he was under suspicion for ‘anti-civic activities’. France was at war on all fronts: against possible invasion, against angry Vendéens, against counter-revolutionaries. It was an anxious and sad small party that now set off south, for news had just come that Cécile, alone with her two children in The Hague, had died. And Lucie was once again pregnant, though she was still weak from her miscarriage in Holland.
Taking with them Humbert, Marguerite and Zamore, she and Frédéric set out by carriage through countryside plagued by brigands and hungry and sick deserters from the army. They left behind them a city increasingly short of food and riven by rumours of conspiracy, black marketeering and treachery, with the sans-culottes and the new extreme left-wing enragés closing in on anyone suspected of uncertain loyalty, and a new tribunal to judge all those said to violate the security of the state; and the Jacobins, day by day, acquiring ever greater power.