Le Bouilh was to have been the finest château of the Bordeaux nobility, a mansion fit for the King, as M. de la Tour du Pin had assured Louis XVI when he complained that there was nowhere of sufficient grandeur in the region for a royal visit. Making the most of the celebrated Victor Louis’s presence in Bordeaux to design the city’s new theatre in the late 1780s, M. de la Tour du Pin had asked the architect to build him a château consisting of two wings, joined by an arcaded gallery and a cupola, with rows of Doric columns and a terrace above. It was to be vast, and extremely grand. But when, in 1790, he was summoned to Paris to take up the post of Minister for War, all work on Le Bouilh stopped, leaving only one wing finished, the columns unadorned and just 90 of the planned 180 rooms completed. The property had been left with an awkward, somewhat top-heavy air, not so much unfinished as oddly proportioned.
Even so, the building that had risen on the ruins of an earlier fortified medieval mansion was extremely imposing, with high ceilings, drawing rooms decorated with stuccoed garlands, shells and musical instruments, great marble fireplaces and chandeliers. The rooms were filled with tapestries and there was a renowned collection of maps and globes which M. de la Tour du Pin planned to spend his old age studying. Approached along an avenue of poplars, through a curved courtyard with stables and a forge, Le Bouilh also had a neo-classical ‘château d’eau’ or pump house. There was a magnificent walled kitchen garden, with pools fed by the hydraulic water system. The French windows in the drawing room opened on to a formal garden and lawns with views over vineyards to the Garonne beyond. It was a tranquil place.
By 1793, the journey from Paris to Bordeaux by the rapid new turgotine had come down to five and a half days, but Lucie’s carriage moved very slowly, on account of the atrocious roads and her anxiety not to lose her baby. It was mid-April by the time the party reached Le Bouilh, to find the great house shuttered. There were wheelbarrows and scaffolding, abandoned from the day work had ceased. Lucie was nonetheless delighted with the house. There was an excellent library and while Frédéric read aloud to her from books of history and French literature, she spent the evenings sewing clothes for the coming child. She had done well, she reflected, to pay such close attention to her sewing lessons at Hautefontaine. Below, in a semi-basement, were the vaulted kitchens, with rows of copper pots and a flagstone floor, soon taken over by Marguerite and Zamore. Later, Lucie would remember the four months they stayed at Le Bouilh as a time of perfect love for Frédéric, when the feelings they had for each other seemed to shelter them from the surrounding troubles. ‘There was,’ she would write, ‘no flaw in our domestic happiness. None of the disasters that threatened had the power to alarm us as long as we could bear them together.’
Every day, however, it was becoming harder to keep these dangers at bay. The news from Paris was increasingly grim. On 1 July, Arthur was arrested and sent to the Luxembourg, one of some 50 different schools, convents, barracks and former hospitals that had been turned into prisons. Charged with being a ringleader in a counter-revolutionary plot, Arthur was questioned about how he spent his days. He replied that, since his dismissal from the army, he had led a retired life, with no intimate friends; that he ate at home, sometimes in the company of Condorcet or Camille Desmoulins, and that he occasionally went to a club to play billiards. Among his few possessions seized by the police were maps and atlases, several volumes of travel and history, and a file of letters from General Dumouriez, who, not long before, had deserted and crossed over behind enemy lines.
In the national archives in Paris, written on crumbling paper in faint ink, are the accounts of Arthur’s expenditure on food while a prisoner, in orderly columns giving date, item and cost. They make poignant reading. On 15 August, he ordered in soup, a dish of braised cabbage, a roast, a bowl of apricots, coffee, bread, three bottles of wine and four of beer. On the 16th, he asked for soup, roast pork, a ‘fresh egg’, some more apricots, salad, a dessert, coffee and bread, as well as two bottles of wine and three of beer. Most days, there was wine, beer and brandy; occasionally an omelette, artichokes or spinach. In among the accounts are letters from Arthur’s wife in Martinique, begging him to come home, and to stop gambling, as well as his own petition to the Ministry of War for a pension, in recompense for 38 years of service, including a ‘harsh’ tour of duty in the colonies.
Soon after hearing of Arthur’s arrest, Frédéric and Lucie learnt that M. de la Tour du Pin had also been detained, and that orders had been issued to sequestrate his property in Saintes and his château at Tesson. Papers relating to his case gave his height at 5 feet 2 inches, his nose as aquiline, his eyes as blue and his face as ‘full’; they stated that he wore a wig. Since a ‘rascally’ local lawyer in nearby Saint-André-en-Cubzac had spread a rumour that Le Bouilh itself was subject to a lien, Frédéric feared that the château would also be impounded. Anxious about the coming baby, they accepted an invitation from their friend M. de Brouquens, provisioner of the army in the south, to move into a small isolated house he owned called Canoles, set in the middle of the Haut Brion vineyards on the edge of Bordeaux, with useful tracks leading off in every direction, and no village nearby. They moved in September, taking with them Zamore and Marguerite.
It was not an altogether prudent move: the Terror was coming closer, and Bordeaux was in the eye of a new storm. All during the spring and summer of 1793, a battle had raged in the Convention in Paris between the Montagnards, the fanatical men of the Mountain, and the milder Girondins sitting below them, their disagreements fuelled by accusations of corruption and speculation, by plots and counter-plots, the protagonists tearing each other apart in furious speeches that lasted long into the nights. By late July, the Girondins were on the run, many in hiding in and around Paris. A new nine-man Committee of Public Safety under Robespierre and Saint-Just was turning itself into the most concentrated and powerful state machine France had ever known, with a programme of economic regulation, military mobilisation and an official ideology to replace the haphazard and anarchical politics of the street. ‘Let us be terrible,’ declared Danton, ‘so that the people will not have to be.’ Networks of spies and informers fanned out to provide information about ‘non-juror’ priests, hidden nobles and hoarders of food, while revolutionary mobs of sans-culottes ransacked the countryside for concealed sacks of grain.
With the murder of the Jacobin Marat in his bath by the young Charlotte Corday, and the sense of panic created by the news that Toulon had opened its harbour to the British fleet, the Jacobins were able to rouse French citizens to war against the ‘enemies of the people’, both within France and across its borders. It was enough, now, simply to be a priest, a nobleman, a royalist, a would-be émigré or even a ‘false republican’ to become a ‘suspect’. ‘Those who want to do good in this world,’ Saint-Just told the Convention, ‘must sleep only in the tomb.’ The levée in March had brought 300,000 men under arms; metallurgical factories were turned over to producing cannons, rifles, balls and shot; church bells were melted down; the Tuileries gardens were dug up and planted with potatoes. Under the Tree of Liberty in Paris, the Committee of Public Safety made a bonfire of newspapers and ‘counter-revolutionary speeches’ before debating a proposal to burn all libraries.
Reading the Paris papers, when they were able to get them at Saint-André-en-Cubzac, and questioning travellers arriving from the north, Frédéric and Lucie learnt that the guillotine in the Place de la République, placed by the side of the statue of Liberty, cap on head, spear in hand, shield by her side, was working at such speed that the tricoteuses were splattered with blood as they knitted, and came away with their feet wet. During a 47-day period, citizens lost their heads at the rate of 30 a day, sped on their way by the implacable Public Prosecutor, Fouquier-Tinville, borne to the guillotine in carts through crowds of jeering onlookers. On 13 September 1793, there were, according to Le Moniteur, 1,877 people awaiting trial. There was very little mercy. To process the guilty faster, Robespierre longed for a blade which could cut several heads at a single go.
For the first time in the history of France, the prisons contained not petty thieves and murderers but counts, seamstresses, lawyers, tanners, maids, priests, wig-makers, marquises, schoolteachers, all held together in a way they had never been before. Once the daily list of names for the guillotine had appeared, and people knew that they were not on that day’s, they then threw themselves into a frenzy of games, cards, madrigals and charades. There had been an expectation that the women would cry and collapse: for the most part they remained stoical and calm. Frédéric’s father was reported to be insisting on keeping his wig and dressing every day as for his former life.
In August, while Lucie and Frédéric were still at Le Bouilh, Marie Antoinette, ‘veuve de Louis Capet, ci-devant roi des Français’, gaunt and white-haired, had been moved to the Conciergerie, the ‘anti-chamber of the revolutionary tribunal’ from which few people emerged alive. She was held in a small damp cell, whose only light at night came from a lantern hanging outside her barred window. She spent the days crocheting and reading. The case against the ‘Austrian she-wolf’ was that she was immoral, corrupt, greedy, lustful and treacherous; she had, said her accusers, squandered France’s fortune and held orgies at Versailles and committed incest with her son. Her trial opened on 14 August.
The following day, the 15th, M. de la Tour du Pin was called as a witness. Asked if he knew the Queen, he bowed low before her, and said that he had indeed had the honour of knowing her for many years; but, he added, he knew no ill of her. Challenged to admit that it was on Marie Antoinette’s orders that he had sent his son to massacre the ‘brave soldiers’ of Nancy, he denied it. Accused of running down the army on her orders, he replied that he was not aware that he had run it down at all. Frédéric’s father was questioned for several hours; his manner remained calm and dignified. Not everyone called to give evidence was as loyal.
Right up until the moment of the verdict, Marie Antoinette herself seemed to believe that she would still be ransomed and sent to her nephew in Austria. When informed that she was to go to the guillotine, she was asked whether she wanted to say anything. She shook her head. At eleven o’clock next day, her hands bound, wearing a white piqué dress, white bonnet and black stockings, she was taken to the Place de la République in an open cart, staring straight ahead of her, silent and calm. On Marie Antoinette’s feet were a pair of kid shoes, carefully preserved through 76 days of captivity. She stumbled as she mounted the steps to the scaffold, but remained composed.
After the execution, Hébert, in the Père Duchesne, wrote of his joy at having seen with his own eyes, ‘the head…separated from the fucking tart’s neck’. In his memoirs, the Comte de Saint-Priest would say that though the Queen had been weak and not very bright, ‘she was never evil or cruel…she never betrayed France and…at moments of great danger she showed a kind of magnanimity’.
In Bordeaux, lists of those who had gone to the guillotine were passed from hand to hand. Every day that Frédéric ventured into the city he returned with the names of friends and relations who were either already dead or in prison, awaiting their trials. There was Mme du Barry, Louis XV’s last mistress, betrayed by her black servant, who had so often accompanied her to balls dressed as a hussar with a plumed cap. In the cart carrying her to her death, Mme du Barry was reported to have wept and called for help. There was M. de Genlis, husband of the royal tutor, father of Lucie’s friend Pulchérie, who was now in prison herself; the Prince d’Hénin, Frédéric’s aunt’s wayward husband; and Philippe-Egalité, whose betrayal of his cousin the King had not been enough to save him. Philippe-Egalité’s servant, Edward, whom Lucie had encountered leading his troop of black volunteers near Hénencourt, followed his master to the guillotine.
Titled soldiers, many of them men with whom Frédéric had served in America, were being rounded up and sentenced for treachery and incompetence. General Custine, M. de la Tour du Pin’s good friend, went to his death with the words ‘I die calm and innocent’; the Duc de Lauzun, who had given Lucie her court doll, insisted on finishing a bottle of Burgundy and a plate of oysters in the tumbril. ‘I am dying at a moment when the people have lost their senses,’ Larousse, one of 21 leading Girondins sentenced to death, told his judges, ‘you will die the day that they recover them.’ In prison, Condorcet, the celebrated author of Mathématique Sociale, took poison. On hearing her sentence of death, Olympe de Gouges, who had dreamt of a female Convention and a world in which women would be equal, cried out: ‘I wanted so much to be someone.’ For her own troublesome political fervour, the strong and articulate Mme Roland followed her soon after; her husband, hearing that she had been guillotined, slashed his own throat with a dagger. It was becoming harder every day for Lucie and Frédéric to believe that they would ever escape alive.
When the Terror had begun, Bordeaux, of all French cities, was perhaps the most open to reform. Grown rich on wine, slaves and commerce, its ships had carried eau-de-vie, lard, beef, linen and the famed red wines of Haut Brion and Lafite to America, bringing back coffee from Martinique, indigo from Saint-Domingue, and sugar, to be refined in warehouses around the city. Its real fortune, however, lay in wine. Foreign merchants most often came to collect their cargos themselves, the English taking the reds, the Dutch some of the whites, and the Bordelais keeping the best Graves and Sauternes for themselves. At Le Bouilh, M. de la Tour du Pin had planned extensive vineyards.
Drawn by legislation that was both liberal and protectionist, hundreds of foreigners had settled in the city, bankers, shipbuilders and merchants, who spent lavishly on handsome, unadorned buildings in the creamy local stone along the quays. From their balconies, they looked out across the city to the surrounding hills, where many had also built châteaux or country mansions to escape the summer heat. The skies were blue, the river was majestic, and on fine evenings the Bordelais strolled along avenues planted with limes and poplars. It was in his Château de La Brède near Bordeaux that Montesquieu wrote Les Lettres Persanes and De l’Esprit des lois, and where, inspired by him, belles-lettres and scientific and artistic academies flourished throughout the 18th century. In Bordeaux, ‘as in Paris’, noted one visitor, ‘it was le bon ton which counted’. Because of the lively overseas trade, most Bordelais knew a great deal about what was going on in other parts of the world.
In Bordeaux, after the fall of the Bastille, a revolt, inspired by and paid for by the Girondin municipality, had flared up against over-zealous local Jacobins, and a federalist army was mobilised to defy the dictatorship of Paris. Young men drilled on the slopes of the Château-Trompette, where jugglers, cock fights and exotic animals had once entertained the crowds. But the federalists were weak and there were too few of them, and Bordeaux soon set up its own Garde Nationale. But it took a milder form than in Paris. Ruled in an orderly and fair way by a kind of spontaneous council and a moderate city administration, it had at first remained largely impervious to the revolutionary violence stirring the north. By the end of 1791, the old noblesse de robe, which had dominated Bordeaux for the previous three centuries, had for the most part retired to their properties in the surrounding hills, where, like M. de Brouquens, they hoped to sit out the troubles. Their places had been taken by rich merchants who kept up the tradition of orderliness and dealt calmly with the overthrow of guilds and corporations. On the tracts of land confiscated from the Church, they built new roads and planned imposing new buildings. Right up until the end of 1792, a cult of revolution, efficient and even somewhat aristocratic, seemed to have taken over smoothly from that of religion.
But the tranquillity could not last. Bit by bit, a city driven for centuries by work, by trade, by its vineyards and intellectual circles, began to alter. Merchants, their fortunes hit by the revolt of the slaves of Saint-Domingue, by the war with England and by the closure of the Chamber of Commerce, ceased to trade. Victor Louis’s colonnaded theatre was turned over to plays of a patriotic, exhortatory nature, in which kings were portrayed as rapacious and tyrannical, nobles as frivolous, priests as artful and hypocritical. And a rival authority, incoherent and domineering, began to emerge in opposition to the municipality through Jacobin clubs and popular societies. The day came when two refractory abbots, seized in a nearby town, were brought to Bordeaux and had their throats cut in the courtyard of the old archbishop’s palace. The statue of Louis XV was pulled off its pedestal in the Place Royale. In January 1793, not long before Lucie and Frédéric fled Paris, battles raged between the Jacobins, raised from among the discontented and the disoccupied, and the more moderate Girondins, who were forging links with the federalists across the south, resolving, like the rebels in the Vendée, to defy the dictatorial rule of Paris.
Bordeaux would not experience the same atrocities as federalist Lyon, where the ex-Oratorian Joseph Fouché and Jean-Marie Collot d’Herbois sent 1,700 men, women and children to their deaths, many of them mown down by cannon and shovelled into mass graves. But the temerity of the Bordelais would not be allowed to go unpunished. As Fouché remarked, ‘Terror, salutary terror, is the order of the day.’
The first agents of the terror, the représentants en mission, sent from Paris to quell the rebels, bring orthodoxy to disaffected areas, and complete the violent dechristianisation of France by smashing altars, images of saints and crucifixes, arrived soon after Lucie and Frédéric moved to Canoles. These agents were heckled, threatened and forced to retire to the safety of a nearby town.
But on 16 October 1793, the day of Marie Antoinette’s execution, a revolutionary army of 2,000 sans-culottes, with 200 cavalry, under the command of General Brume, escorting three men from the Convention, marched into the city. Not one of the three was vicious in the way of Fouché or Collot d’Herbois: Claude Ysabeau, a former vicar, was ponderous but could be generous; Marc-Antoine Baudot, a doctor, though an ardent republican, was optimistic by nature; while Jean-Lambert Tallien, volatile and given to violence, was also capable of clemency. What made them lethal, however, was their choice of men to carry out their orders: a clock-maker called Bertrand, better known for his thieving than for his clocks, was appointed mayor, and Jean-Baptiste Lacombe, a crafty and corrupt teacher and militant Jacobin with a long thin face, was named President of the Revolutionary Tribunal. It would later be said that between them, and the scores of spies, fanatics and criminals they recruited, justice in Bordeaux would be turned into a ‘tribunal of rapine and blood’. It would also be remarked that neither Bertrand nor Lacombe was actually a native of Bordeaux, and that the Bordelais had needed such men to sully their hands, so that their own might stay clean. From Canoles on the outskirts of the city, Lucie heard of ‘this army of butchers, dragging a guillotine behind them’, getting greedier every day.
On 23 October Bordeaux woke to the sounds of the guillotine going up in the former Place Dauphine, recently renamed the Place Nationale, and to the shouts of town criers beating their drums and calling out that the time had come to cut off the heads of traitors. What surprised everyone was the ease, the lack of all opposition, with which the Terror had arrived. It was as if, by being submissive, many Bordelais believed they might yet escape retribution. Lucie, observing the speed with which they capitulated, remarked with scorn that a little courage might well have been enough to keep the ‘fanatics’ at bay. When an order went out for all citizens to surrender their weapons, and people hastened to obey, she noted that it did not ‘seem to have occurred to anyone that it would have been far braver to use them in self-defence’.
Lucie and Frédéric discussed leaving for Spain, but Lucie was now in the ninth month of her pregnancy, and to reach Spain they would have had to pass through the French lines. Once the baby was born, they decided, Frédéric would seek shelter somewhere else.
Late one night, just at the moment that Lucie realised that she was going into labour, news reached Canoles that people in nearby country houses–‘bad citizens’–were being rounded up and taken to one of the makeshift detention centres in former seminaries, convents and public buildings, to await hearings before Lacombe. Dr Dupouy, come to attend the birth, was said to be on the list of wanted men. Their host de Brouquens sent a trusted servant to stand on the road leading to Canoles, in order to be able to warn of approaching danger so that Frédéric could escape from the house and slip away by another path through the vineyards. The birth was fortunately both quick and easy. No sooner was the baby born, a girl, and given the name Séraphine, than Frédéric left for Le Bouilh, where he intended to stay secretly while they worked out what to do. Dr Dupouy, not daring to go home, was found a hiding place in an alcove in the baby’s room. ‘I suffered more from fear,’ wrote Lucie later, ‘than from the actual pain of my daughter’s birth.’ Not knowing what ‘fate held in store’ or when she would see Frédéric again, all she could think about was recovering her strength ‘so that I might deal with whatever might arise’.
Three days later, de Brouquens returned to Bordeaux, where the revolutionary committee was already at work rounding up suspects in the middle of the night to send before Lacombe, whose phrase ‘we are fascinated by your case’ had already become synonymous with execution. The Terror had taken its first victims, borne away to the Place Nationale by tumbril at ten each morning, the mounted guards of the escort, the ‘cavaliers de la mort’ clattering over the cobblestones. The terrified Bordelais kept their windows shuttered. One of the first to die was a good friend of de Brouquens’s, the much-loved and respected former mayor, François-Armand de Saige, accused of having incited the Girondins to rise against the Jacobins. Four other prominent Girondins, who had come to take refuge in the city, were hunted down; two managed to commit suicide before they were caught, but one, Barbaroux, succeeded only in wounding himself and was dragged dying to the guillotine.
Bordeaux, like Paris and the other cities in which the executioners were at work, had its own tricoteuses, knitting and singing at the foot of the guillotine. Actors, accused of being subversive, merchants suspected of hoarding, priests caught hiding in attics or cellars, or behind altars, were dragged before the tribunal. De Brouquens himself was arrested on his return from Canoles, but managed to convince Lacombe that it was not in anyone’s interests to do away with the official provisioner of food for the army in the south.
Three nights later, just as de Brouquens was going to bed in his house in Bordeaux, guards arrived with orders to escort him immediately to Canoles, insisting that they needed to examine any papers and documents held there. In vain, he protested that he seldom used the house. Lucie was asleep when a terrified servant shook her awake to say that soldiers were on the way, a friendly guard, loyal to de Brouquens, having found a way to send word ahead. Before disappearing into the night, the servant slipped a packet under Lucie’s pillow, containing money that de Brouquens had put on one side for emergencies such as this. Taking care to conceal the packet from Séraphine’s nurse, a girl Lucie deeply mistrusted, she pushed Humbert’s bed across the alcove in which the doctor crouched, and got back into her own bed, taking the baby with her. In the drawing room, Zamore hastily laid out a meal of pâté, wine and liqueurs. And then, Lucie wrote, ‘we all waited resolutely for the arrival of the enemy’.
Half an hour later, she heard the clatter of clogs on the flagstone floors. She lay stiff with fear, clasping Séraphine to her, listening as the men combed the house for incriminating documents. At last, she heard a voice ask: ‘Who is in the bedroom?’ And then there was silence. For the next two hours, the men searched the house, pausing only to eat and drink; but they did not open Lucie’s door and nor did they discover Dr Dupouy. When they left, de Brouquens told her that he had said that he was looking after the sick and delicate daughter of an old friend, who had just given birth to a baby.
Once Dr Dupouy had recovered from the fright of the nocturnal visit, he was happy to spend his days instructing Lucie in the rudiments of surgery and midwifery. In return, she taught him embroidery, dressmaking and knitting, accomplishments learnt from the servants with whom she had spent so much of her lonely childhood. Many years later Dr Dupouy told her that his new skills had saved him from acute boredom when he had been forced to hide for many months with a peasant family in the Landes, whose kindness he was able to repay by making them shirts and stockings. In the evenings in Canoles, while Lucie sewed, the doctor read aloud from the newspapers, though what they contained often terrified and appalled them.
It was in the local paper that one evening Lucie and Dr Dupouy came across a full account of Marie Antoinette’s trial. It brought home to them the true extent of their danger. The callous nature of the proceedings dismayed them–when a juror called Antonelle had heard the sentence, he had ordered a celebration dinner of foie gras, thrushes, quails au gratin, sweetbreads, a pullet, Sancerre and Champagne–but they were more alarmed when they read further. The Public Prosecutor, according to the report, had asked M. de la Tour du Pin where his son was living. Frédéric’s father, for whom lying was repugnant, replied that he was staying on his estates near Bordeaux. A warrant for Frédéric’s arrest had apparently already been despatched to Saint-André-en-Cubzac.
Frédéric had taken the precaution of keeping a strong horse stabled and ready at Le Bouilh. As soon as he learnt of his father’s indiscretion, he set out, in thunder and driving rain, disguised as a merchant in search of supplies of grain, planning to make his way to his father’s other estate at Tesson. There a trustworthy servant called Grégoire and his wife were still living in the house, though it had been sequestrated after orders that the ‘nation be put in possession of the property of traitors’. Shortly before dawn, as he rode past a posting stage not far from Tesson, he was offered shelter by a villager. Sitting by the fire, he found an elderly man: this turned out to be the local mayor. They discussed the high price of grain and cattle. Frédéric was then asked to produce his passport. Finding no visa on it for any forward journey, the mayor ordered Frédéric to remain where he was until morning, when the local Municipal Council could be informed. Frédéric kept his head. Very calmly, he walked to the door, as if to check on the weather. Surreptitiously stretching out his hand, he silently unhooked his horse’s bridle from the door-post, leapt into the saddle and galloped off before the mayor had time to get to his feet.
It was clearly too dangerous for him to go to Tesson. At nearby Mirabeau, he went in search of a former groom of his father’s, a man called Tétard well known to the family. Tétard now kept an inn. But he also had a wife and small children, and feared for their lives should Frédéric be discovered in their house. However, he had a brother-in-law, a locksmith called Potier who, though married, had no children, and was willing to hide Frédéric in a small windowless room, little bigger than a cupboard, in return for a generous sum of money. All day, while men worked in the adjacent forge, separated from Frédéric’s room only by a plank of wood, he had to stay absolutely still and in the dark. Only once the men had gone home was he able to join Potier and his wife for dinner. From time to time, Tétard came with the local gazette and news of Lucie and the children. Frédéric thought of making his way to join the rebels in the Vendée, but such was the strength of their royalist fervour that he doubted they would welcome a man who had remained for so long working for the Constituent Assembly. In any case, once it became known that Frédéric was in the Vendée, all chances of either his wife or his father surviving the rage of the revolutionaries would be lost.
The months passed very slowly. Bit by bit, Lucie regained her strength and with it her determination. On her walks around Canoles, she occasionally came across traces of hiding places, clearly occupied by others like her, on the run from the guards scouring the countryside for suspects. She would leave out food, to find it gone next day. By late winter she began to worry that her continuing presence at Canoles might endanger de Brouquens, who had been placed under permanent house arrest in the city. One of the few people who was occasionally able to visit her was a young relation of de Brouquens’s, a M. de Chambeau, who was also in hiding, having found refuge in the house of a man called Bonie in the centre of Bordeaux. Bonie was, to all appearances, the perfect Jacobin, an ardent member of a political ‘section’ and never to be seen without his sans-culotte jacket, clogs and sabre. But he was also a good-hearted and generous man, and when de Chambeau told him of Lucie’s predicament, with her father and father-in-law both in prison in Paris, her husband in hiding, and two small children to care for, he offered her rooms in an empty, dilapidated apartment overlooking a small garden and hidden away behind a wood store in the heart of the old city.
As a hiding place, the rooms in the Place Puy-Paulin were excellent. Lucie moved in, taking with her Marguerite, constantly ill with malaria, Zamore, who as a free slave ostensibly waiting to join the army could come and go as he wished in Bordeaux’s large community of blacks, Humbert and Séraphine and their nurse. She also took with her the cook, who was able to get a job with the représentants en mission and bring back not only news but food to cook for the household. Restless and energetic, it was not long before Lucie was looking for ways to keep occupied. Hearing that an Italian singer called Ferrari was in Bordeaux and that he was a fervent royalist, she invited him to give her singing lessons, which had been interrupted by the years of revolution. It served to pass the long hours of idleness and fear. Even in the shadow of the guillotine, some semblance of normal everyday life went on. And it was indeed in its shadow: from her room behind the wood store, Lucie could hear the clatter of hooves from the horses pulling the tumbril to the Place Nationale, the rattle and crash of the plunging blade, the shouts and songs of the crowd, as heads and trunks were thrown into baskets ready to be taken for burial in communal pits in the cemetery of Saint-Seurin.
Much of her time was spent trying to find food to feed her household. A tough new form of rationing had been introduced, with taxes imposed on all goods and punishment by death for all who sought to evade them. Since farmers now received less money for their grain, meat and vegetables than they could produce them for, many preferred not to sell them at all. Famine and malnutrition spread around the city. Ration cards were issued for bread that was black and glutinous, and lists were posted on every house giving the names of all their inhabitants and what they were entitled to. They were written on paper with tricolour edges under the words ‘Liberty, Equality, Fraternity or Death’. Lucie wrote their own names as faintly and illegibly as possible, to be washed away by rain, and was able to boost Zamore’s meagre ration by obtaining double for herself as a wet-nurse since she was still breast-feeding Séraphine.
In the streets, carefully dressed as a peasant woman wearing a waistcoat, with kerchiefs on her head and round her throat, a disguise she rather enjoyed, she marvelled at the docility of the Bordelais, standing in endless queues for inferior food, doing nothing to protest when the cooks of those in power pushed their way to the front to collect freshly baked white rolls and choice cuts of meat for their masters’ tables. There was something about the perilousness of their situation that seemed to galvanise her, and she would later speak of these months in hiding as times when it was still possible to laugh. Lucie herself was in a fortunate position. A local farmer’s wife from Le Bouilh, devoted to the family, brought provisions in the baskets strapped on to her donkey when she came twice a week to sell potatoes and cabbages in the nearby market. Frédéric kept in touch by sending letters concealed in a loaf of bread, brought to Bordeaux each week by a young boy. Le Bouilh had been sequestered but before it had been sealed shut, the caretaker had managed to remove all the best linen and small objects, and these she sent, a few at a time, by trusted courier to Bordeaux, along with a supply of logs for firewood.
Jeanne-Marie-Ignace-Thérésia Cabarrus was regarded by many as the most beautiful woman of the revolution. She was small, not much over 5 feet, but she had silky black hair, very white skin, a slightly turned-up nose, perfect teeth and a ravishing smile. Even Gouverneur Morris, never lavish with his praise, remarked approvingly on her sprightliness. Born in July 1773 to a French merchant father and a Spanish mother, she had arrived in France at the age of 5 to be educated by the nuns. Added to her many other charms was that of her voice, which retained a barely perceptible foreign lilt. When only 14 she made a good marriage to the Marquis de Fontenay, a councillor at the Paris parliament; the following year, not yet 16, she gave birth to a son, Théodore. Lucie, who was three years older than Thérésia, had been introduced to her when they were both girls. ‘Nothing,’ she wrote later ‘could dim the radiance of her wonderfully fair skin.’
It was in the studio of the fashionable portrait painter Mme Vigée-Lebrun that Thérésia met Jean-Lambert Tallien, the son of a modest maître d’hôtel in an aristocratic household. Tallien was tall, with curly fair hair and regular, pleasant features, and he was then working for the printer Pancoucke. By their second meeting, not long afterwards, he had become secretary to Alexandre de Lameth and was moving rapidly up the political ladder. By then Thérésia too was causing a stir, both for her looks and for her salon, frequented by Lafayette and La Rochefoucault. With the revolution, Tallien found his true vocation. Though not as brutal as Danton, nor as outrageous as Marat, nor as cold as Robespierre, he shared most of their ideals. By the summer of 1792, he was clerk of the court to the Paris Commune, with the job of signing warrants for arrest.
At 25 one of the youngest deputies elected to the Convention, sitting on the Mountain with Robespierre, Tallien was sent, in the spring of 1793, to Tours to speed up recruitment for the army and to set up committees of security and surveillance. The city was in chaos: Tallien proved competent and not overly cruel. When représentants en mission were needed for rebellious Bordeaux, he seemed an obvious choice. In the special représentant uniform of long, tight-fitting blue redingote, tricolour sash, plumed hat, cross-belt and sabre, he cut a glamorous figure as he rode into the city behind General Brume.
The summer of 1793 was extremely hot, and Tallien took a few days’ holiday in the Pyrenees. Here he again met Thérésia, on vacation with her brothers and uncle from their house in Bordeaux, where she had taken refuge from the violence in Paris. She was divorced–she had been one of the first to take advantage of the new laws–and after falling out with her uncle she moved into a large apartment in the Cour Franklin where she filled her study with musical instruments, books, an easel and paints, and planted her terrace with orange trees. At the end of November, Thérésia was arrested and taken to the Fort du Hâ, a grim, humid 15th-century fortress; Tallien was able to have her freed. After this, the two were inseparable, and though Thérésia kept her rooms, in which lived Théodore and her maid Frenelle, she spent much of her time in the sumptuous apartments of the représentants en mission in the former Grand Séminaire, enjoying their unrationed food and the excellent wine confiscated from unhappy Bordeaux merchants. Though by the middle of the winter of 1793 Bordeaux was a ghost city, many of its inhabitants reduced to penury and malnutrition, those in power lived well.
And there were also occasions of jollity, even if of a forced nature. Virtue and terror, Robespierre maintained, were both aspects of the self-improvement and moral regeneration he believed should govern every part of life, both private and public. The festivals marking the revolutionary calendar were growing ever more theatrically absurd and opulent, with specially commissioned revolutionary oratorios, regiments of choristers, triumphal arches and the releasing of hundreds of white doves. For the Fête de la Raison on 10 December, a cortège of Bordeaux dignitaries, followed by 40 women feeding their babies, 100 girls dressed in white, soldiers, schoolchildren and the members of Jacobin clubs, processed slowly through the centre of the city. Behind followed mummers, grotesque figures parodying the Church and the nobility, a dwarf sitting on a donkey and shouting benedictions, criminals and prostitutes decked out in church vestments, later burnt, along with books of ‘chicanery and superstition’ in a gigantic auto-da-fe in the Place de la Comédie. Soon after, encouraged by Tallien, Thérésia gave a rousing speech on education, for which she wore an ‘amazon’s’ dress of bright blue cashmere, with yellow buttons and red velvet facings, her hair cut à la Titus under a fur-edged scarlet bonnet. Thérésia did not always take the revolution very seriously. From her hiding place, Lucie followed her exploits.
Whether because of the great prosperity of Bordeaux, or because Lacombe and Bertrand were exceptionally venal, Bordeaux’s Terror had been from the start as much about money as about survival. The revolutionary committees were more than happy to cut deals, accepting fortunes in exchange for acquittals. The Hôtel de Ville was already filled with works of art plundered from Bordelais churches and the nobility. ‘Tallien,’ the historian Michelet would write later, ‘sold lives, while his mistress served behind the counter.’ Tallien and Thérésia were soon tainted by charges of extortion and greed, and stories would later circulate about Thérésia’s great fondness for certain kinds of jewellery. On returning to Paris after the revolution, the Marquise de Lage de Volude would recount a particularly damning incident.
Mme de Lage de Volude had been a lady-in-waiting to Marie Antoinette. She was in Bordeaux, nursing her dying mother, when she heard of the September massacres. Rather than return to Paris, she had gone into hiding in Bordeaux. One day, a friend of hers who had been to call on Thérésia returned saying that she had spotted a pile of unsigned passports on Thérésia’s desk. Learning that Thérésia had a particular fondness for antique cameos, Mme de Lage de Volude bought an exceptionally fine piece and had it mounted with some diamonds that she still had left. She secured an introduction to Thérésia and told her that she desperately wanted to join her husband, who had managed to escape to America. Before leaving, she presented her cameo. A few days later, a passport arrived; Mme de Lage de Volude was able to leave France.
But there was another side to Thérésia. She had a generous heart and she was determined to save as many people as she could from the guillotine, whether they paid her or not. The Comte de Paroy, whom she counselled and protected, was only one of many who later stated that they had remained alive only through her help. By early 1794, it was widely reported that she was having a softening influence on her lover Tallien; and that she was not afraid.
The Terror, early in 1794, was reaching a peak in Bordeaux, ci-devant nobles, priests, peasants, merchants following one another rapidly to the guillotine in the Place Nationale, where people were beginning to complain of the persistent smell of blood, despite constant washing of the scaffold. On the lists of the accused in the Gironde were some of the charges that sent them to their deaths: ‘suspicious opinions’, ‘nostalgia for the ancien régime’, ‘weak nature, concerned only with the abolition of the monasteries’, or simply ‘consorting with the nobility’. As in Paris, a few young women won reprieves by stating that they were pregnant, but once they had given birth they went to the scaffold. From her hidden room, Lucie listened in terror to the roll of drums before each beheading, and the crash of the blade that followed. ‘I could count,’ she wrote later, ‘the victims before seeing their names in the evening papers.’ When arrests of English and American merchants and their staff began, Lucie, light-skinned and fair-haired, feared for her own life each time she left the house.
Frédéric’s own position was also becoming ever more precarious. When Potier, in whose house he was still hiding, came one day to Bordeaux to buy iron for his foundry, he happened to pass through the Place Nationale as a woman mounted the scaffold. Enquiring as to her crime, Potier learnt that she was a ‘ci-devant noble’; and this he found reasonable. But when the next to climb the steps was a peasant, whose crime was that of sheltering a nobleman, the full horror of his own position hit him. ‘In that poor man’s fate,’ wrote Lucie, ‘he saw his own.’ He hastened back to Mirabeau and told Frédéric that he was to leave instantly.
For a while, Frédéric was able to hide in his father’s house, Tesson, with the faithful Grégoire and his wife, but this came to an end when the local municipality sent men to draw up an inventory of the house’s valuable contents. Grégoire found him temporary shelter with the sister of another trusted groom. When her nerve went, Frédéric returned to Tesson, where, each day, there were rumours that the municipality would soon be taking over the château for its own use. Though barely recognisable in his rough peasant clothes, Frédéric was too well known locally to believe that he could survive for very long without hiding.
Lucie, listening to the talk around Bordeaux, was well aware of Thérésia’s relationship with Tallien. Sensing that the time was fast running out for her family, she decided to take a bold and terrifying step. She sent a letter to Thérésia. Without giving her name, she wrote: ‘A woman, who met Mme de Fontenay in Paris and knows that she is as good as she is beautiful, asks her to accord a moment’s interview.’ A friendly reply came back, with an invitation to call. ‘In a state of agitation difficult to convey’, Lucie went to Thérésia’s apartment, where she was greeted with great affection. Lucie told her that she wished to have the order of sequestration on Le Bouilh lifted, in order that she and her family could live there quietly. The only way to achieve this, said Thérésia, was for her to ask Tallien in person.
That evening, accompanied by the equally nervous de Chambeau, Lucie went to see Tallien, listening in terror to his approaching carriage, unmistakable in the silence of Bordeaux’s dark and shuttered streets. When Thérésia announced that Tallien was ready to receive her, Lucie was unable to move her feet forwards until Thérésia gave her a little push. Tallien, she was sure, would be her ‘executioner’. The meeting did not go well. As soon as Tallien realised that Lucie was the daughter of General Dillon and the daughter-in-law of the man who had addressed the ‘widow Capet’ as ‘Your Majesty’, he made a gesture with his hand indicating beheading, saying: ‘All the enemies of the Republic will have to go.’ Even in extreme adversity, Lucie was never undignified. ‘I have not come here, citizen,’ she replied, ‘to hear the death warrant of my relatives…I will not importune you further.’ Walking home, she reflected that if Tallien would not protect them, then ‘death seemed inevitable’.
The net, bit by bit, was drawing tighter. Sweeps, sudden descents by the revolutionary soldiers on houses at unexpected times, were gathering in people ever closer to Lucie. She now left the house only under the cover of darkness. M. de Chambeau, picked up while dining with friends, was taken off to the Fort du Hâ, where he spent a terrible 28 days, believing that each day was his last, before finding himself mysteriously released, the tribunal apparently ignorant of his aristocratic connections. Opposite the Fort du Hâ lived a teacher called Saint-Sernon and his daughter, who wrote the names of those arrested and sent to the guillotine on a blackboard and held it up for the prisoners to read from their barred windows. There was a community of men and women in hiding all over the city, seizing moments of gaiety, meeting fleetingly to talk, play cards and exchange food and news, but it was shrinking all the time. Every day now, there would be friends among those going to the guillotine, people who had been certain that they would never be touched. A young royalist, M. de Morin, to whom Lucie had fed omelettes made from eggs smuggled to her from Le Bouilh and truffles stolen by her cook from the stores of the représentants en mission, and who changed his hiding place every night, was picked up along with others in the small monarchist association they had formed and taken straight to the guillotine.
Then, one day, Lucie herself was recognised. She had discovered that unless she had a certificate to prove ownership of her house in Paris and her state bonds, she would lose them all. Taking Bonie, her Jacobin protector, with her, she went to the municipality, in which sat a dozen clerks, all wearing, to her ‘extreme distaste’, red bonnets. Bonie urged them to hurry, saying that his young friend was nursing a baby and could not be kept waiting. To Lucie’s horror, when her case was heard, the officer in charge insisted on reading out loud every line of the certificate. When he came to the word Dillon, one of the clerks looked up and asked her whether she was by any chance a sister or niece of ‘all those émigrés of that name who are on our list’? She was about to confess that she was, when a man who happened to be in the room interrupted, insisting loudly that she belonged to quite another family. As she left with her certificate, he whispered in her ear that he had known her great-uncle, the Archbishop.
Ever more desperately, Lucie was trying to think up ways to escape. For a while, she wondered whether she might not pass herself off as her Italian singing master’s daughter, taking her children back to Italy, with Frédéric disguised as her servant. As her agitation and fears for Frédéric and the children grew, so Lucie’s milk began to dry up.
M. de Brouquens was still under house arrest, but from time to time Lucie was able to pay him a visit. One day, she happened to be standing by his table when her eye fell on an item in the morning paper. A ship, the Diana of Boston, was to leave Bordeaux in eight days’ time. It was indeed news. For the whole of the past year, 80 American ships had been anchored in the Garonne, trapped there by France’s state of war with its neighbours. As Lucie hurried from the room, M. de Brouquens asked where she was going. ‘I am going to America,’ she replied.
Now that she had a plan in mind, Lucie’s sense of anguish and uncertainty seemed to leave her. She was still only 24, but it was she rather than Frédéric who was emerging as the more resolute and forceful of the two. Rarely buffeted by self-doubt or tormented, as he was, by the greyer shades of meaning, it was as if her solitary and loveless childhood had equipped her for such a challenge. She now had just eight days in which to have Frédéric fetched back from Tesson and kept hidden and safe, and to obtain passports and visas for them all, while keeping everything secret from the spying nurse. Marguerite, unable to shake off the malaria which had kept her shivering and feverish for many months, would stay behind, Lucie fearing that the long sea journey might prove fatal to her. Nor would Zamore accompany them. The question as to who could be trusted to go for Frédéric was solved by Bonie, who insisted that he would go himself. Thérésia, whom Lucie asked for help in securing the passports, pressed her to hurry, for Tallien had been denounced for ‘excessive moderation’ towards the Bordelais, and was likely to be recalled to Paris at any moment. He was to be replaced by an austere and pitiless 18-year-old called Marc-Antoine Jullien, who was known as the ‘shadow of Robespierre’.
All seemed to be going well when Lucie, accompanying de Brouquens–who had unexpectedly been released from house arrest–to Canoles, encountered Tallien on his way to visit the Swedish Consul on the outskirts of the city. With all the grace and courtesy of a noble of the ancien régime, Tallien accepted her story that she and her family needed to visit Martinique, where she had financial matters to attend to, and promised to have papers prepared for her. ‘I can today,’ he told her, ‘make amends for the wrongs I have done you.’ Two hours later, his secretary Alexander brought her the documents requesting the municipality of Bordeaux to issue passports in the name of Citizen Latour and his family. (Thérésia told her that she had threatened never to see Tallien again unless he produced them.)
The first hurdle had been crossed. Next day Bonie set off to find Frédéric, taking with him a spare set of identity papers, borrowed from an unsuspecting friend, telling everyone that he was going in search of grain, more plentiful in the Charente-Inférieure than in the Gironde. The journey was uneventful but, dressed in his full sans-culotte costume, Bonie had difficulty in convincing the terrified Grégoire and his wife of his loyalty until he thought to show them a slip of paper, written in Lucie’s hand, which he had fortunately stitched into his jacket. The return journey was slow, for Frédéric was not strong, and the months of anxiety and concealment had taken their toll. Lucie, having calculated the hour and the exact time she expected to see him, went down to the quay where the travellers were to arrive. But Frédéric did not appear.
The river grew dark, the curfew was sounded and she could think only of her stupidity at having entrusted the life of the person she loved most in the world to a revolutionary she barely knew. Desolate, she spent a sleepless night listening for sounds that he might have arrived by some other means, imagining Frédéric arrested, recognised and dragged to the scaffold. The house had never seemed to her so still. ‘If I had an enemy,’ Lucie wrote later, ‘I could not wish for him any worse punishment than the mortal agony I endured.’
When, early next morning, the sly nurse arrived to dress Séraphine, she brought with her a message. Bonie was at home and wished to see her. Very casually, keeping her excitement under control, Lucie finished dressing and then, saying that she was going out, flew along the corridors to another part of the house, where Bonie had a secret room. Bonie, it turned out, had hired a fishing boat, and brought Frédéric to Bordeaux by a different route. Though they had exchanged letters, Lucie had not seen Frédéric for six months. ‘In every lifetime,’ she wrote later, ‘there are a few luminous memories that shine like stars in the darkness of night…We were happy, and death, which we felt so very close to us, no longer frightened us, for it was possible again to hope that if it struck it would strike us down together.’
Time, however, was pressing and there was still much to do. A friend of Lucie’s father, a ship-broker, agreed to arrange with the captain of the Diana for their passages. Surreptitiously, so as not to alert the nurse, Zamore was given the task of packing the linen and silver, brought from Le Bouilh and hidden locked in cupboards, into crates, ready for removal to the Diana. With them went 50 bottles of Burgundy, a few jars of potted goose, a small case of bottled jam and some potatoes, the only food they had managed to gather for the journey. A piano went too, no one imagining that Lucie could survive in the New World without one, or indeed that she might find one there.
Then one morning, to their great alarm, the whole family had to present themselves to the clerk at the municipality for their permits to be exchanged for passports. Dressed in elegant but well-used clothes–for Lucie was to pass herself off as an English-woman fallen on hard times–they shrank back into the dimly lit corner of the busy passport office, relying on Bonie, who accompanied them, to smooth over all awkwardness. There was a terrible moment later that evening when Lucie took the passports for their final visas to Thérésia, who was to give them to Tallien, only to find her in tears, Tallien having already departed in disgrace for Paris, and her own immediate future far from safe. It was now up to his colleague, the cold-blooded Ysabeau to provide the indispensable visas; and these were only obtained because Tallien’s secretary Alexander was a kind man and was able adroitly to hurry the process through by presenting the passports late at night, when Ysabeau was about to dine and did not bother to scrutinise what he was signing.
Lucie, Frédéric and the two children were now free to depart. The timing could not have been more fortunate. The next morning the harsh young Jullien, little more than a boy, reached Bordeaux. Announcing that Ysabeau and Tallien had both been far too lenient, too lacking in true revolutionary ardour, he set about hunting down the remaining Girondins and nobles, hidden away in attics, in concealed vaults behind wine vats, in cellars, in cupboards and on their country estates. In the coming weeks, he would send 71 people to the guillotine.
In Paris, where Arthur and Frédéric’s father remained in prison, the Terror was approaching its most murderous phase. Robespierre and Fouqier-Tinville, dreaming of a commonwealth of virtue, were despatching 30 to 40 people to the guillotine each day. Many of them were taken away in groups: magistrates one day, tax inspectors the next, or even several generations of one family. ‘Heads,’ remarked Fouquier-Tinville, ‘are falling like tiles.’ One by one, the men who had shaped the revolution and sent others to the guillotine were becoming victims themselves of stronger and cannier political forces.
There was Hébert, who went to the scaffold with 19 of his friends. After Hébert came Danton, fighting to the bitter end with great booming tirades of rhetoric, who left behind him a 16-year-old wife; and Camille Desmoulins who, when asked his age by the Tribunal, replied: ‘The same age as the sans-culotte Jesus when he died, the critical age for patriots.’ Accused of spending his time with aristocrats and of praising his friend Arthur Dillon with the words that the General was ‘neither Royalist, nor Republican, nor Jacobin, nor Aristocrat, nor Democrat: he was simply a Soldier’, Desmoulins could have gone back on his words. Instead, he spoke out. ‘I am proud,’ he declared, ‘even if I am alone to oppose the injustice of Rome for the services of Coriolanus.’ There are, observed Robespierre, ‘only a few serpents left for us to crush’.
Paris’s places of detention were filled to overflowing, some 7,000 people crammed into humid and unhealthy barracks, convents and former palaces, prey to typhus, dysentery and influenza. The surviving ci-devant nobles continued to keep fear at bay by charades, cards and rhyming couplets, and by singing, even on the way to the scaffold, faithful to bon ton until the end. As the historian Taine would later observe, the nobility went to their deaths with dignity, ease and serenity, all the savoir-faire that was second nature to them.
By March, M. de la Tour du Pin was imprisoned in the Conciergerie, on the Quai de l’Horloge, next to the Palais de Justice, where he continued to receive visitors in formal dress, wearing his wig. Arthur had also been moved to the Conciergerie, accused, in the wake of his friend Camille Desmoulins’s death, of a conspiracy involving Lucile, Desmoulins’s 23-year-old wife. Dillon, said his accusers, had never ‘ceased to conspire against the republic’. Arthur knew himself to be guiltless. ‘If,’ he had written to Desmoulins earlier, having handed over all his papers willingly to the authorities, ‘a single suspect line is found, then I will accept the harshest treatment.’ Later, an anonymous writer would describe Lucie’s father during his weeks in prison as drinking heavily ‘and when he was not drunk, he played backgammon’. Lucile Desmoulins, arrested soon after her husband’s death and charged with the same conspiracy, had been to plead with Robespierre for Desmoulins’s life; Robespierre had been witness at their wedding and was the godfather of her 18-month-old son, Horace.
In Bordeaux, there was one last gathering with the friends who had saved Lucie and Frédéric’s lives: M. de Brouquens, described by the Comte de Paroy as ‘the best man who ever lived’, M. Meyer, the Dutch Consul in whose house Frédéric had been hidden, and Thérésia, who wept as they left. Lucie found the parting from Marguerite particularly hard, and both she and Frédéric dreaded the thought of what might befall their fathers, shut up in Paris’s revolutionary prisons. And then the moment came when, feigning an afternoon stroll with the children in the public gardens, they climbed into the dinghy sent by the captain of the Diana to collect them at the end of the Quai des Chartrons. At the very last minute, M. de Chambeau, who had just learnt that his father had been denounced by a servant who had worked for him for 30 years and had been arrested with papers revealing that his son was in hiding in Bordeaux, was able to get a passport as their legal representative and went with them. ‘There is no doubt,’ wrote Lucie, ‘that the heave of the oar with which the sailor pushed us off from the shore was the happiest moment in my life.’