Sturdy, with a broad beam and a single, tall mast, the 150-ton Diana was one of hundreds of boats built in dockyards dotted along America’s eastern seaboard to transport cargo between Europe and the New World in the 18th century. It was small and uncomfortable, with just four sailors under a young and in-experienced captain and an older mate, both from Nantucket. Lucie, Frédéric and the children shared one cramped cabin, M de Chambeau had another. But in the first relief and euphoria of escape, none of this mattered. They were in any case immediately distracted by being stopped, on three separate occasions, by guards doing sentinel duty along the Garonne, each time risking discovery and fearing for their lives. On the last inspection, Lucie was forced to hand over a lamb, secured at the last minute by M. de Chambeau as food for the crossing, to a covetous official.
It was when the Diana finally pulled out into the open sea that the full discomfort of their journey hit them. The Atlantic passage westward, particularly during the equinoctial spring gales, was renowned for its battering winds and immense seas. It was not unusual for a boat to lose its mainmast and to have its sails shredded. Soon after they left the estuary, one of the sailors slipped from the masthead to the deck below and though he survived, his injuries kept him confined to his hammock. Frédéric was an appalling sailor. With the first big waves, he took to his bunk and for the next 30 days seldom left it, able to keep down only weak tea and biscuits soaked in wine. Apart from Lucie’s 50 packing cases and the piano, the Diana carried no cargo, which made the rolling more pronounced.
What chiefly afflicted Lucie, however, was hunger. The captain had also had trouble finding food for the voyage and as the days went by and their rations grew smaller she worried that her milk was again drying up: Séraphine, who slept happily all day, soothed by the swaying of her bed, was beginning to look shrivelled and pinched. ‘I could see,’ wrote Lucie later, ‘my daughter shrinking visibly.’ At night, fearing that as the boat rolled she might squash her, Lucie fashioned a strap with which to tie herself firmly to the bed-frame. Having slept all day, Séraphine spent the nights awake.
The young captain, for his part, was terrified of Algerian pirates, of privateers, the semi-legal pirates encouraged in wartime to seize the ships of enemy nations, and of the French navy, known to be patrolling the seas off the French coast in search of royalists escaping revolutionary justice. Determined to avoid a life of slavery in Algeria, or summary justice in a French court, he insisted on heading due north to Ireland, into pitching seas.
One black, rolling day, what they most dreaded happened: the Atlante, a French man-of-war, drew alongside and only the rough seas prevented its sailors from boarding the Diana. Instead, the French captain ordered the Diana to follow him back to Brest, making his point by sending a couple of cannon shots across their bows. The Atlante, as Lucie knew, had recently escorted a party of escaping French back to Brest, where they had all been guillotined. But a dense fog came down, the captain of the Diana dawdled, and as soon as the Atlante was out of sight, he hoisted all sails, and they scuttled away towards the north-west. The Diana was now blown to the Azores, where Lucie and Frédéric begged the captain to put them ashore, thinking that they would pick up a boat for England. Though angry at his refusal, Lucie would later feel nothing but gratitude. Just at the time that they would have reached England, an expedition of French royalists set out for Quiberon Bay on the coast of Brittany, planning to confront the revolutionary army. Frédéric, she reasoned, would have felt bound to join the ill-fated raid and would certainly have died with the other aristocrats in the ensuing massacre.
For Lucie, life on board was taken up with looking after the seasick Frédéric, breast-feeding Séraphine and keeping Humbert from falling overboard, with the help of the obliging M. de Chambeau, and trying to learn something about life in America from the entertaining young cook, Boyd. Finding her long hair unmanageable, she took the kitchen scissors and, to Frédéric’s displeasure, chopped it off and threw it overboard, and with it ‘all the frivolous ideas which my pretty fair curls had encouraged’. She spent her days propped up in the galley, open to the winds but warmed by the stove, listening to Boyd’s descriptions of his Boston childhood, and trying to stretch out the ever-dwindling supplies of dried haricot beans and ship’s biscuit. She was disgusted to see weevils squirm out the moment it was mixed with water. Her gums began to bleed. Humbert, constantly in tears, begged her for food that had been eaten days before. ‘I could not rid myself of the fear,’ Lucie wrote later, ‘that I would see my children die of hunger.’ Day after day, strong westerly winds beat the Diana back so that often they seemed merely to be marking time. For ten days, an impenetrable fog blanketed out even the riggings.
The captain had a little terrier, Black, to which he was much attached. On 12 May, after 60 days at sea, on a morning of warm weather and calmer seas when Lucie and Frédéric had taken the children up on deck, Black was seen to behave very strangely, racing up and down, barking and licking their hands. Suddenly, out of the mist, a pilot boat came in sight. Unbeknownst to the captain, the Diana lay just outside Boston. Even better, the pilot had with him a large, recently caught fish, some fresh white bread and a jar of butter. As they devoured the food, the Diana was towed out of the choppy seas and into a passage of flat water, surrounded by green fields with dense, flowering vegetation. After so many days of blue and grey light, of salty air and the sucking sound of the waves, the colours and the smell of land from the pine, spruce and balsam that grew along the shores were overwhelming. ‘Like the changing decor on a theatre stage,’ Lucie wrote, ‘the friendly land appeared, waiting to welcome us.’ Four-year-old Humbert, who had suffered acutely from the terror of their escape and the loss of ‘the fine bread and the good milk of earlier days’, was beside himself ‘with transports of joy’.
Just outside the harbour, the captain dropped anchor and had himself rowed to shore, promising to find them lodgings. While they waited, supplies of fresh fruit and vegetables were brought out to the boat; these were soon followed by parties of Frenchmen, clamouring for news from home. Most were small tradesmen and artisans, ruined by the revolution, who had left France several years earlier in search of work, but whose sympathies remained firmly with the revolutionaries. Lucie’s first human encounters in the New World, after almost two months of solitude and pitching seas, were far from pleasant. She found herself harangued by belligerent Frenchmen, angry that she had so little news to give them, and angry too that another aristocratic family had escaped the guillotine. After a few heated exchanges, the Frenchmen pulled away for shore. Lucie and Frédéric were left to contemplate their new home. Boston’s fine port lay spread out before them, with its tidy rows of ships and its church spires rising behind tall buildings, and the hills beyond.
Long before dawn the next morning, Lucie was awake and dressed. As soon as the dinghy was ready, they had themselves rowed to shore, sad to leave the crew with whom they had spent so many close and anxious weeks. The long wharf in Boston, where passengers were landed from their boats, was a confused, noisy mass of people. There were porters heaving crates, stevedores pushing carts and loading bales, all speaking a dozen different languages as they jostled their way along the quays, between horses pulling drays, pigs and cows being herded on to boats, carriages carrying merchants, passers-by come to watch. Above screeched gulls. Behind were narrow, crooked roads, most of them unpaved, lined by brick or pine clapboard houses painted in different colours, two or three storeys high, with small roof terraces and gardens with apple and cherry trees in blossom. Between the low green hills, cows and sheep grazed. In the evenings, and on Sundays, people strolled up and down a public walk they called the mall, half a mile of turf and gravel, shaded by elm trees. It was very ordinary, and welcoming, in ways that Lucie had forgotten existed. Only someone who had been through the anguish she had lived through, she noted, would ever ‘be able to fully appreciate my joy when I set foot on that friendly shore’.
By 1794, America’s Atlantic seaboard had a population of 2 million people. The promise of the New World, and the conflicts of the old, had between them brought English, Scots, Welsh and Irish, Germans and Dutch, Swiss, Swedes, Jews from all over Europe and slaves from Africa. Driven from their homes by dispossession and penury, they had come to settle and to trade in ports and cities along a thousand miles of coastline, importing manufactured goods, olive oil, salt, wine and brandy from Europe, cloth, tea and spices from India, sugar, coffee, indigo and rum from the West Indies, trading them on to the different states, often by river or canal.
The first thing Lucie and Frédéric did on landing was to be taken by the young captain to the best inn in town, where he had ordered the sort of food of which they had been so long deprived. Lucie would later write of this meal that it gave her ‘a pleasure so vivid that it surpassed any pleasures I had known until then’. After this, he took them to a lodging house run by a Mrs Pierce, with the help of her mother and her daughter, where their drawing room looked out over Market Square, the liveliest part of town, and their bedroom across to the shipyards. The three Bostonian women took the family to their hearts, the grandmother taking charge of the precocious Humbert, who was already speaking some English, while the daughter looked after Séraphine. That first night the household was woken by scratching at the door. The captain’s small terrier Black was discovered shivering outside, having escaped from the Diana and swum to shore. Despite his fondness for his dog, the captain agreed to part with her.
Lucie and Frédéric were taken to meet Mr Geyer, one of Boston’s richest merchants; Mr Geyer spoke good French, but his wife and daughter did not, and they were delighted to find that Lucie’s English was excellent. Having followed the news from France closely–the French papers, brought over by packet boat and merchant vessels, arrived with a delay of about six weeks, when their contents were picked up and printed by papers across the country–they were extremely sympathetic towards their visitors, insisting on believing that Lucie’s cropped hair had been cut by the executioner in preparation for the guillotine. ‘By the evening of the first day,’ wrote Lucie, ‘we felt as settled there as if no grief or anxiety had ever troubled our lives.’
Though Lucie did not again encounter the unfriendly French who had rowed out to the Diana, Boston was full of French émigrés, come over in two waves, the first as voluntary exiles in 1789 after the fall of the Bastille, the second those escaping like Lucie and Frédéric from the revolutionary guillotine. More recently had come French colonial settlers from Saint-Domingue, fleeing the slave uprising of Toussaint L’Ouverture. By 1794, some 20,000 French men and women had reached America and were eking out precarious livings as dancing masters, chefs, teachers of French and music or on small farms. On his travels around America in 1791, Chateaubriand, who wrote lyrically about the primitive natural life, described coming across a former chef, M. Violet, teaching Indians to dance near Albany, half-naked men with rings in their noses and feathers in their hair, prancing while he fiddled, in full dress of apple-green coat, his hair powdered, taking his pay in beaver skins and bear ham.
Some of these French exiles, preceding Lucie and Frédéric and landing on shores they had imagined hospitable and full of possibilities for work and happiness, had quickly become disillusioned. In place of a libertarian arcadia, they had found a hard land, energetic and tolerant, but vulgar and materialistic in ways they had not expected. They felt alien, sick with longing for France and for the graceful, polished society they had known; they were poor, ill-adapted to hard work, and fearful of the moral and cultural dangers that might lie in all this rugged prosperity. As Gouverneur Morris noted, they had chosen to disregard Benjamin Franklin’s warning that the point about America was that it was neither rich nor poor, but ‘rather a general happy mediocrity’.
And some of the émigrés had been swindled. From 1788, American speculators had been sending their agents to Paris to sell frontier lands, spinning tales of ‘smiling farms’, rivers full of fish, forests teeming in game, and vegetables of unimaginable size growing wild. As the revolution took hold, the offers had begun to look more enticing. A month after the fall of the Bastille, a poet called Joel Barlow, working for the Scioto company and helped by a crooked Englishman called Playfair, had succeeded in selling title deeds to 100-acre plots for the planned new town of Gallipoli on the Ohio, a river known, they claimed, for its enormous fish and the way that the trees along its banks spewed sugar from their trunks. A thousand émigrés set sail, to find the company on the verge of bankruptcy and in any case without rights to the land it had promised. Though half of them did indeed spend the first winter crouched on the banks of the Ohio, they were ‘peruke’-makers, artists and shopkeepers, utterly unsuited to life in the wilderness. They found the Indians menacing and the cold appalling. A visitor to the colony wrote that the inhabitants had a ‘wild appearance and sallow complexions, thin visages and sickly looks’. Within six months the project collapsed, leaving them destitute and reviving all the Abbé Raynal’s fears that the New World was no place for civilised Europeans, and that America’s peculiar climate had caused its people to degenerate, morally, physically and intellectually. All through the terrifying Parisian winter of 1793 and spring of 1794 other Frenchmen, fleeing the Terror, had been duped by similar schemes, lured by similarly chimerical promises, most of them doomed to bankruptcy.
Mr Geyer had offered Frédéric and Lucie a farm that he owned 18 miles from Boston. But Frédéric, who spoke very little English, had dreamt of settling nearer to French-speaking Canada. Soon after reaching Boston, they received a letter from the Princesse d’Hénin, who had taken refuge outside London with a group of aristocratic émigrés, with letters of introduction to General Schuyler, one of the heroes of the American War of Independence. Schuyler lived on his estates in Albany in upper New York State. The general was married to Catherine van Rennsselaer, descendant of the Dutch ‘patroon’, a diamond merchant who had first colonised the area and owned over 700,000 acres of land; they were rich farmers known for their hospitality towards earlier French travellers. In reply to a letter, the Schuylers wrote back, pressing Frédéric and Lucie to visit Albany and saying that it would not be hard to find them a farm. Before leaving Boston, Lucie held a sale of some of the possessions Zamore had hastily crammed into crates and which she believed would find no place in their new lives. Elegant dresses, laces and fabrics went to fashionable Bostonian ladies, who still looked to Paris for new designs, as did Lucie’s piano, which had made the journey safely. The money raised was converted into bills of exchange. Having been so careful to bring all these things with her, Lucie now parted with them without regret, reflecting that the life that awaited her would involve ‘conditions com parable with those of peasants in Europe’. She appeared little bothered by their loss.
Early in June, with the weather good and the trees in flower, Frédéric, Lucie and the children, taking the devoted M. de Chambeau and the terrier with them, left for the 165-mile trip to Albany. They had decided to travel by road rather than by sloop up the Hudson, hoping to get a clearer picture of their new country. Much of their route lay through forest of oak and pine, the road little more than a cutting opened by felling trees and leaving them lying along the side to mark the way. They saw squirrels the size of small cats and ‘thickets of flowering rhododendrons, some of them purple, others pale lilac, and roses of every kind’. In the many creeks and rivers grew water-lilies in full flower. ‘This unspoilt nature enchanted me,’ wrote Lucie. From time to time they came across clearings where farmers had put up wooden frame houses and were growing crops of peas, beans, potatoes and turnips. One night, stopping in an inn, Lucie heard ‘a stream of French oaths’ coming from the adjoining room. M. de Chambeau, not having been warned about this local custom, had been woken by another traveller climbing into his bed.
It was only once they had left Boston that Frédéric told Lucie the news that had just arrived on a boat from France. He had waited, hoping that the journey might distract her.
On 13 April, not long after they had set sail from Bordeaux, Arthur had been brought before the Revolutionary Tribunal in Paris and accused of conspiring against the republic, of being in league with Pitt in trying to put Louis back on the throne and of having helped France’s enemies to escape. ‘It is Dillon,’ said Le Moniteur in its coverage of the trial, ‘who is the spirit behind all the counter-revolutionary plots.’ In court, Arthur had answered each absurd accusation clearly and with courage. Not long before, he had written to Robespierre: ‘I have always fled before even the shadow of any plot, and I have despised and detested plotters…An incorruptible patriot like yourself should love and respect the truth.’ Arthur was one of 27 people tried that day, most of them accused with him of the ‘Luxembourg conspiracy’, a fanciful and convoluted tale of intrigue and spying. Arthur and Desmoulins’s widow, the 23-year-old Lucile, were, so their accusers claimed, guilty of trying to raise money to finance a movement to assassinate true patriots. The jury had retired for three hours. They returned with 19 verdicts of death. Arthur’s and Lucile’s were among them.
At six o’clock that same day, their hands tied behind them, they had been put into tumbrils and taken to the Place de la République. The frail 77-year-old former Bishop of Paris went with them, even though he had loudly renounced his faith. When the carts arrived to take them on their last journey, Lucile asked Arthur to forgive her for being the cause of his death. ‘You were only the pretext,’ he replied. At the foot of the scaffold, her nerve gave way: she shrank back from the executioner’s grasp and asked Arthur to go first. Arthur climbed the steps, calmly removed his cravat and shouted ‘Vive le Roi’ before the blade fell. Lucie had been expecting his death; but it did not lessen the grief she felt.
This was not the only painful news to reach the travellers. On 28 April, Frédéric’s father, who had so enraged the Public Prosecutor by referring to Marie Antoinette as ‘Sa Majesté’, followed Arthur to the guillotine. He was executed on the same day as his first cousin, the distinguished Marquis de la Tour du Pin, who had been a member of the Assembly of Notables. With them went three carts of ‘nobles, foreigners, indolent men and hired orators of the combined powers’, as the French papers described them.
Paris, according to the newspapers reaching America, was running out of food, its prisons were overflowing, its inhabitants cowed by terror. ‘The very paving stones smell of blood,’ wrote one reporter, ‘and the river itself seems to run red.’ The city, once indescribably noisy, now lived in ‘the silence of the grave’. Lucie and Frédéric learnt that in Bordeaux, in order to make heads fall faster, a guillotine had been erected to sever seven heads at a single stroke. It was enough, now, to ‘slander patriotism’ to be found guilty. When the victims died before they reached the scaffold, as did some who had tried to commit suicide, their corpses were guillotined. The Duc de Châtelet was unfortunate: he had tried to pierce his heart with a broken bottle and arrived at the guillotine drenched in blood, but alive.
With her mother, father, father-in-law, sister-in-law all dead, her great-uncle and grandmother in England, Versailles deserted, the nobility murdered or scattered, the world in which Lucie had spent the first 19 years of her life had vanished.*
The busy trading port of Albany, known to the Indians as Muhattoes and to the early Dutch settlers as Oranienburgh, was a pleasant, small town of some 1,500 houses. It had 6,000 inhabitants, 2,000 of whom were slaves. One of the oldest settlements in North America, Albany lay on the banks of the Hudson, and many of its houses had gardens down to the water. There was a market place, a prison, a town hall, a new bathing establishment and a number of English and Dutch churches. Its streets were regular, straight and paved with cobblestones, and in front of their Dutch-style shingled and gabled houses, people had planted lime trees, often marking the birth of each new baby with a sapling. In summer, families sat out on their porches, the Dutch fathers smoking pipes, watching the cows returning from their communal pastures to be milked. On the sandy hills surrounding the town, and all along the banks of the Hudson, raspberries and blueberries grew in abundance among the willows and wild roses. The land here, wrote an early missionary, was very like Germany, and the wine made from local grapes was good; but there were rattlesnakes, ‘variegated like spotted dogs’, and they made a noise like crickets. The forests that lay all around, of maple, poplar, chestnut and oak, were full of skunks.
Albany had begun as a frontier town, a starting-off point for journeys into the uncharted interior, and a depot for the furs brought from the interior to be shipped down the Hudson. While the 1783 Treaty of Paris had ended hostilities between the British Crown and the American secessionist states, leaving Canada in British hands but accepting a new border through the Great Lakes, it had no direct bearing on the standing of the Indian tribes who had been placed on the American side of the border. Congress had quickly set about entering into treaties with the Mohawks, the Senecas, the Cayugas and the Onondagas.
In October 1784, anxious to protect their frontiers from the British in Canada, it negotiated with representatives of the Iroquois Six Nations Confederacy, the 10,000 or so Indians whose ancestral hunting grounds stretched from the Hudson Valley to Lake Erie, persuading them to relinquish lands on which military forts were built in return for guarantees that they could continue to occupy a portion of their homelands. But only in theory: in practice, revolutionary soldiers, returning from the north with tales of fertile alluvial soil and well-watered fields, abandoned their stony and debt-ridden New England farms and migrated up the Hudson, arriving in groups by river in summer and overland by sled in winter, to occupy lands ‘subleased’ in deals to last ‘while water runs and grass grows’, which effectively appropriated most of the native territory.
The Iroquois gathered, talked, complained; but to no avail. By the summer of 1794 the forests where Indians had once hunted plentiful elk, deer, bear, raccoon, porcupine and wild mink were largely in the hands of ever-growing numbers of settlers, who chopped down the trees and planted potatoes, peas and corn, let their pigs roam to eat the wild plants favoured by the Iroquois and dammed their streams for sawmills. The settlers, noted Jefferson’s friend, Elkanah Watson, a man interested in the development of the land, ‘are swarming into these fertile regions in shoals, like the ancient Israelites seeking the land of promise’. An early casualty had been the rare white beaver, which had totally disappeared. In the luggage of one group of settlers, migrating north through Albany, came a printing press, destined, noted The Albany Register, ‘to shed its light abroad over the western wilds’.
A key figure in the negotiations with the Iroquois was General Schuyler, who for almost 40 years had known and dealt with the Indians, and whose ancestor, Pieter Schuyler, had taken a Mohawk chief to Queen Anne’s court in London and brought him home wearing a light blue suit, trimmed with silver lace. Though loved and respected by the settlers for his generosity in restoring the town after a terrible fire in 1792, Schuyler was a controversial figure, having long taken the view that it was Albany, and not Congress, that should have the final say on all matters dealing with the Indian lands. Exploiting the trust the Iroquois had placed in him, Schuyler had flouted Congressional laws, dispossessing the Indians in favour of the farmers and merchants. His dream was to open a canal from the Hudson river to the Great Lakes, to make the flow of goods faster and cheaper. Like the van Rensselaers, to whom the Schuylers were closely related, the General was enormously rich, owning over 10,000 acres of land, along with sawmills, hemp and flax mills, and a stately Georgian mansion in the centre of the town. His daughter Elizabeth was married to Alexander Hamilton, currently Secretary of the Treasury in Philadelphia.
Both the Schuylers and the van Rensselaers welcomed Lucie and Frédéric warmly. The General, a tall, commanding, somewhat austere man, declared that he would regard her as his sixth daughter. Mrs Rensselaer, one of his own five daughters, was not much older than Lucie and spoke good French; she was an invalid, confined for months on end to an armchair, where, clever and well informed, she liked to sit talking to visitors. Like Lucie, she had been reared on the Enlightenment. She immediately impressed Lucie with her grasp of the intricacies of the French troubles, much of it learnt from a close reading of the newspapers. Her insights, remarked Lucie, into the ‘vices of the upper classes and the follies of the middle classes’ were far more interesting and acute than those of most of her French acquaintances. In the drawing room of the Schuyler mansion, with its hand-painted wallpapers and stucco garlands so beloved of French 18th-century decorators, its Brussels carpets, yellow damask coverings and silver and glasses brought back from Europe, where young girls did their embroidery and played the pianoforte, Lucie rediscovered some of the conversation and the music of her early childhood. After five years of uncertainty and fear, it all seemed very reassuring.
As they did not want to live in Albany itself, Lucie, Frédéric and the children went to stay with a farmer not far away, hoping to learn from him the rudiments of their new life. M. de Chambeau apprenticed himself to a carpenter in nearby Troy, returning each week to spend Sundays with them. He had just heard that his own father had been guillotined. While Frédéric searched for possible properties to buy with the money they had managed to bring from France, Lucie, determined to acquire all possible skills, rose before daylight each day to help the farmer’s wife, making clothes for the family as well as black mourning dresses for herself. Opposite the farmhouse, on the other side of the river, lay the road to Canada, and on it stood a large inn, where news, gazettes and sale notices were posted. In the early mornings, Lucie explored her surroundings, marvelling at the speed with which the local vegetation seemed to grow, riding on horseback through fields of Indian corn that stood taller than her horse, and forcing herself to cross the river over a floating bridge of logs tied together, which, until she mastered them, greatly unnerved her. Abhorring cowardice, ‘I was careful not to tell anyone my fears’, she practised making the crossing until she could do so without hesitation.
Albany had two weekly papers, The Gazette and The Register, both full of advertisements for Irish linens, women’s gloves, Malaga raisins, all the luxury items newly arrived from Europe, together with notices about escaped slaves and missing horses. Early in August, a ‘composition’ mounted by a travelling Italian artist reached Albany. It depicted Louis XVI taking leave of Marie Antoinette in the Temple, with, as The Register put it, ‘a countenance very expressive of his feelings’, and the actual guillotining of the King, his head falling, ‘the lips which are first red, turning blue’, the whole performance orchestrated by an invisible machine. Even so far from France, it was impossible to escape the revolution. It was in the local paper that Lucie read about the execution of the King’s sister, Mme Elisabeth. ‘Blood flowed everywhere,’ she wrote. ‘Nor could we see an end to it.’
In September, Frédéric found them a home. It was a newly built farmhouse, 4 miles outside Albany on the road between the new settlement of Troy and Schenectady, down which passed a constant stream of wagons loaded with pelts. The lands surrounding Troy were the former hunting grounds of the Mohawk Indians, and it was at Troy that the wide, sluggish Hudson met the greatest of its tributaries, the Mohawk. The farm was exactly what they wanted. It had 150 acres of crops, a quarter of an acre of vegetable garden, an orchard with 10-year-old apple trees producing excellent cider, and extensive woods and pastures. Since the owners did not wish to move until the first snows, Lucie and Frédéric rented a log cabin in Troy itself, only recently incorporated as a village but growing rapidly, with new potash works, paper mills and tanning yards. Lucie was in the courtyard, chopping the bone of a leg of mutton ready for the spit, when she heard a familiar deep voice behind her saying that he had never seen mutton so magnificently speared. It was Talleyrand. With him was the Chevalier de Beaumetz, jurist and reviser of the French penal code and a former deputy to the National Assembly, who after the attack on the Tuileries had escaped Paris disguised as a travelling merchant. Both men had exchanged their silk and ruffles for clothes more suited to the American outback, the elegant and fastidious Talleyrand barely recognisable in rugged hunting shirt and waistcoat. They had brought with them a present of Stilton cheese.
Talleyrand had initially left France for England with Danton’s help in September 1792 on the pretext that he would write a report on France’s relations with the European powers, intending to return if it seemed safe for him to do so. But when Louis XVI’s iron chest was discovered, it was found to include letters from Talleyrand to the King, assuring him of his loyalty: next day, in the Convention, Talleyrand was accused of treachery and his name added to the list of proscribed émigrés. His position in London, however, was precarious. Lord Grenville, Minister for Foreign Affairs, disliked his manner, saying that it was cold and arrogant. Shunned by both the court and the government, Talleyrand spent his time with Fox, Sheridan and other members of the opposition.
And after Parliament passed the Aliens Bill in 1793, putting the French émigrés under police surveillance, Talleyrand, perceived as an influential and dangerous intriguer, received orders to leave. His first thought had been to remain somewhere in Europe, but one by one Russia, Prussia, Tuscany and Denmark closed their doors to him; even his good friend Mme de Staël, agitating on his behalf with the Swiss cantons, was unable to persuade any one of them to take him in. That left America. In March 1794, just as Lucie and Frédéric were leaving Bordeaux, Talleyrand set sail from England in the Penn, bound for Philadelphia, taking with him his friend de Beaumetz and a valet. He told Mme de Staël that he was not sorry to leave a country where ‘life was so royally disagreeable’.
Though his first impressions of America were far from favourable–he wrote to Mme de Staël that ‘if I have to stay in this country a year I shall die’–and though George Washington, committed to a policy of neutrality towards the new French government, refused to receive him, Talleyrand found friends in Philadelphia. He was soon paying calls, risking the disapproval of the town when he was rumoured to have taken a mulatto mistress. With the heat of May, and fears of a possible epidemic of yellow fever, he had decided to make a journey through Maine and Upper New York state, in search of land to invest in and hoping to meet Lucie and Frédéric, having heard that they had escaped Bordeaux successfully. In February, one of General Schuyler’s other daughters, living in London, had written to her sister Elizabeth, introducing Talleyrand and de Beaumetz. ‘To your care, dear Elizabeth, I commit these interesting Strangers…who left their country when Anarchy and Cruelty prevailed.’
Though genuinely impressed by the vast empty landscape, Talleyrand was a man of cities. The long report he wrote of his travels was full of poetical descriptions of forests ‘as old as the world itself’. But the farmers he met along the way struck him as ‘lazy and grasping…without the slightest trace of delicacy’. Revealingly, as he rode along, his mind turned to building ‘cities, villages and hamlets…’. The Indians, he added, were smelly and useless.
The travellers had picked up news of Lucie as they passed through Boston, where they found that she had been much admired for her excellent English and unaffected manners and the fact that ‘she sleeps every night with her husband’. As Talleyrand told Mme de Staël ruefully, such devotion was necessary in America, where ‘illicitness’ did not find favour. Tracking her down to the wooden cabin in Troy, the travellers had brought with them an invitation to dinner from the Schuylers, and promised to return next day to taste her roast mutton.
Reaching Albany later that afternoon, they found the General waiting for them in the garden, brandishing a newspaper and calling out: ‘Come quickly, there is exciting news from France.’ The local paper, reporting events that now lay many weeks in the past, carried an account of the fall of Robespierre and the abrupt end of the Terror in Paris: how, in June, Tallien, ousted from power and desperate to save Thérésia, who had been arrested and was about to be tried, had mounted a challenge to Robespierre’s dictatorial powers over the Convention; how he had won sufficient backing to have Robespierre arrested, together with Saint-Just; how Robespierre had shot himself but survived, though half his jaw had been crushed; and how, on 10 thermidor, 11 July, Paris had woken to find the guillotine back in the Place de la Révolution–moved some time earlier after complaints about the blood from the headless corpses–and to witness Robespierre and 17 of his followers mount the scaffold. Soon after, the Public Prosecutor, Fouquier-Tinville, had followed him to the guillotine. In Bordeaux, the last to die had been the infamous Lacombe.
Around the Schuylers’ table, wrote Lucie, ‘we all rejoiced together’. The talk was of the end of the revolution and a quick return to France. Talleyrand was particularly pleased that his sister-in-law, the wife of his brother Archambauld, who had stayed in France in the hopes of saving the family fortune only to find herself arrested, would now be freed. It was only later that night, reading the papers more closely, that he discovered her name on the list of those who had died in the frenetic final killings of June and July. Among the last to be executed, they discovered, were the wife, daughter-in-law, granddaughter, brother and sister-in-law of the Duc de Noailles–all close friends to Lucie and Frédéric–three generations in a single day, their hands tied behind them, the Maréchale in a bonnet and black taffeta, borne to their deaths through a thunderstorm and heavy rain. Hidden in the crowd, but making his way alongside the tumbril and seen by the women, had walked the family priest, pronouncing absolution.
Lucie was struck by how very upset Talleyrand appeared at the news of his sister-in-law’s death, and how ‘amiable and graceful’ he was when he came to visit them the next day, with his intelligent conversation and old-world courtesy. He spoke to her with an ‘almost paternal kindliness which was delightful’, and took great pains, with an ‘exquisite sense of propriety’, not to say things that might shock her. Many years later, reflecting in her shrewd way on Talleyrand’s subtle and scheming nature, Lucie wrote: ‘One might, in one’s inmost mind, regret having so many reasons for not holding him in respect, but memories of his wrong-doing were always dispelled by an hour of his conversation. Worthless himself, he had, oddly enough, a horror of wrong-doing in others. Listening to him, and not knowing him, one thought him a virtuous man.’
For the days that Talleyrand and de Beaumetz stayed in Albany, where Alexander Hamilton had come to join them, there were long evenings at the Schuylers’ and much interesting talk about the need for a liberal constitution and at least an appearance of democracy in both America and France. Talleyrand and Hamilton shared the view that real power should always reside in the hands of ‘gentlemen of standing’. Hamilton, Talleyrand would later say, was one of the three great men of his age, along with Fox and Napoleon. Hamilton and Talleyrand were somewhat alike, being slender and not very tall, but while Talleyrand was pale and watchful, Hamilton had a ruddy complexion and reddish hair, and he was energetic and quick in his movements. What puzzled Talleyrand was Hamilton’s decision to give up his job in the Treasury in order to earn more as a lawyer and to spend time with his eight children, and he remarked how strange it was that anyone so talented would yield power so readily.
When soon afterwards he went to Troy to dine with Lucie and Frédéric, Talleyrand took with him a medicine chest and presents of a side-saddle and bridle for Lucie, a perfectly timed gift for she had just acquired a mare to ride. He was accompanied by a tall, fair-haired Englishman called Mr Law, a former colonial governor in India, recently widowed by a rich Brahmin who had left him a considerable fortune. Lucie enjoyed Law’s wit and his clever remarks, but found him highly nervous and eccentric, as all Englishmen were, ‘to a greater or lesser extent’. Since she had become skilled at milking her cow, she was able to give them cream for dinner. Before leaving, Talleyrand told her that Law had been so moved by the spectacle of such a well-bred woman milking her cow and doing her own washing that he had been unable to sleep, and now wished to make them a gift of some money to make their lives easier. Lucie and Frédéric, though much touched, refused: they would call on him, they said, if ever they found themselves in serious difficulties.
Lucie and Frédéric waited impatiently for the moment they could take over their farm. The snows arrived suddenly, with a force and abruptness that startled them. In the space of a few days, thick black clouds, driven by bitterly cold north-west winds, sent everyone hurrying to put under cover boats, outside furniture and tools. The winds were followed by the rapid freezing of the wide river, along which pine branches were hastily laid to mark out a path so that travellers would find their way, before heavy snow descended, reducing all visibility to just a few yards. The Hudson would now stay frozen for several months.
As soon as the snow stopped falling, Frédéric loaded their two working sledges and their one ‘pleasure’ sled, which was shaped like a large box and had room for six people, and harnessed them to the four horses they had bought during the autumn. Together with M. de Chambeau, who had become a competent carpenter, they set out for the farm. The settlers had left the house in a very bad state. Constructed as a single-storey house, with a dairy and cellar tucked underneath, its wooden frame was filled in with bricks dried in the sun which Frédéric finished with plaster and painted, while M. de Chambeau mended the beams and Lucie cleaned. Lucie was a ferocious worker, saying later that as long as they lived in Troy she never remained in bed beyond sunrise, and admitting that for M. de Chambeau and Frédéric a little idleness might have been preferable.
With 150 acres of crops and a large orchard, help was needed and slaves, their new friends told them, were the people to provide it. Though in his original draft of the Declaration of Independence Jefferson had included an attack on slavery, by the time the final document appeared slave-owners in the south had forced him to reconsider, and all that remained was an ambiguous reference to bondage. Even Jefferson, however, did not personally consider the blacks inherently equal, saying that though as brave and indeed more adventurous than whites, ‘in imagination they are dull, tasteless and anomalous’. But the fighting against the English in the north had seriously disrupted patterns of slavery, and many slaves had fled their owners–some 30,000 were said to have escaped from plantations in Virginia alone–finding sanctuary in the confusion of armies on the move. Several thousand had fought–and many had died–on both sides. With the peace, and the heady rhetoric of the new nation, many former slaves had protested that they too had a ‘natural and inalienable’ right to life, liberty and happiness. A number of Northern slave-owners had gone along with the spirit of the revolution, and freed their slaves; other, less fortunate slaves had found themselves abandoned by the departing English, to be rounded up and re-enslaved. After all, as the popular English physician Dr Charles White had pointed out, blacks occupied a different ‘station’ from whites, being an intermediary species somewhere between white men and apes.
Lucie and Frédéric were deeply uneasy about the idea of owning a human being, but when they learnt that a slave dissatisfied with his master could officially request to be sold, and heard of just such a young man, they climbed into their red and yellow sled and set off to find his Dutch owner, a Mr Henry Lansing. The slave was called Minck, and he was eager to escape not just the harshness of his employer, but the severity of his own parents, both of them slaves in the same household. A deal was quickly struck, Mr Lansing being much impressed when he learnt that Frédéric had represented the French government in Holland. Before night fell they were on their way home, Minck driving the sledge, bringing with him only the best suit which he was wearing, everything else, down to his moccasins, belonging to his former owner and remaining behind. Lucie felt appalled, as she recorded later, by the ease with which a man could be bought and sold. For all her father’s support of the slavers, her views had remained firmly with the abolitionists. In the Albany Gazette, where ‘very lively Negro wenches’ were advertised, the reward for finding an escaped slave was the same as that for a lost horse.
The next slave to arrive was Minck’s father, Prime, a man well known to the Schuylers and the van Rensselaers for his farming skills, though Minck himself was not pleased to find himself again under his father’s yoke. Lucie also wanted a woman to help her in the dairy, and heard of a slave called Judith, in her 30s and the mother of a small girl, who had been forcibly separated from her husband. Taking a bag of money with her, Lucie visited her owner, a Mr Wilbeck, and said to him that it was well known locally that Judith wished to leave and that he had treated her with great brutality. A truculent Mr Wilbeck took the money and handed over the woman and her young daughter; when Judith learnt that she was to be reunited with her husband, whom Lucie and Frédéric also bought, she fainted. She too was now carried back by sledge to the farm, where M. de Chambeau had prepared a room for them in the granary, something they had never had before.
Before long, Lucie and Judith were making cream and excellent yellow butter, on which they stamped the de La Tour du Pin crest and which Prime took to market to sell ‘arranged daintily in a very clean basket on a fine cloth’. Though unable to read or write, Prime kept meticulous accounts in his head. Lucie made herself popular locally by adopting the dress worn by farmers’ wives: a blue-and-black-striped woollen skirt, full but not too long, a dark calico bodice, with her hair parted and piled up in a coil, held in place with a comb. No one around Albany wore jewellery, fans, patches or ribbons. Only when visiting the Schuylers or van Rensselaers did she put on a gown and stays, or one of the riding habits brought over in the Diana.
Spring arrived with the same abruptness as the snow. Towards the end of February, the north-westerly wind suddenly dropped, and a southerly wind began to blow. The snow melted so quickly that for several days people were trapped indoors by raging torrents along the roads. The spectacle of the ice as it broke drew everyone to the river banks. As the water below the thick ice began to stir, swollen by the snow melt, a first crack appeared along the middle of the river, bursting with a roar like thunder as shoals of ice broke away and gigantic blocks of ice rose into the air, the light refracted into rainbows. In less than a week, the meadows around the farm were green and covered in wild flowers.
The savages, as Lucie called them, had not been seen all winter. With the better weather, the Iroquois began to reappear around Troy and Albany, bringing deerskin moccasins to sell, stuffed with buffalo hair or moss for warmth, along with carved wooden implements and long gaiter-like leggings, worn by the farmers to protect their calves and shins. Lucie had been startled when she had first encountered two naked Indians, walking slowly up the street, but she had become accustomed to their ways. They were, she said, as ‘sensitive to good manners and a friendly reception as any Court gentleman’.
For their part, the Indians around Albany seemed to like her, finding her different from the dour Dutch farmers’ wives, and referred to her as ‘Mrs Latour from the old country’. Before the snows had begun, an Indian man had asked her if he might cut branches from a particular kind of willow that grew on their property, promising to weave baskets for her during the winter. Being, as she said, rather doubtful as to whether savages kept their promises, she was agreeably surprised when, a week after the snows had melted, he reappeared, carrying a neat pile of six baskets, all fitting inside each other, so closely woven that they held water as well as any earthenware jug. Refusing to take money, he accepted a jar of buttermilk. Lucie had grown fond of a very ugly elderly Indian woman, who had matted grey hair and wore nothing but a tattered shawl and the remains of an apron, to whom she gave old remnants of feathers and ends of ribbons, once part of her fashionable wardrobe. What the old squaw, as Lucie called her, really liked was to be allowed to look at herself in Lucie’s mirror, after which she would cast benign spells over their chickens and cows.
In the autumn of 1794, the Jay Treaty had been signed with Britain, finally resolving the last of the border crises. The USA now had the right to build forts wherever it chose on the remaining Indian territories, and the Indians themselves no longer had much sway with either side. Knox, the Secretary of War, favoured presents along with diplomacy, but in the long run wanted to see all frontier lands transferred from natives to settlers, believing that in any case the Indians would probably die out, especially if they did not embrace Christianity. The skirmishes that had long marked life in the less charted north, with soldiers returning to describe warriors painted and tattooed, their earlobes weighed down with ornaments and uttering piercing screams, were few and far between. If around Albany the Iroquois men continued to hunt beaver and bear for meat, roasting the fatty bear on top of venison, turkey and mallard in order to baste them as they cooked, and to collect maple sap to turn into brown sugar by slashing the tree trunks with their tomahawks, it was as objects of curiosity rather than as intimidating strangers that they were increasingly regarded. Fear of intoxicated Indians causing trouble had led legislators to outlaw the trade in alcohol, but inebriated Indians, having bartered their furs for liquor, were occasionally to be seen wandering around the streets of Troy and Albany. It was a very long time since Columbus, arriving in America, had been impressed by the resourcefulness of the Indians.
An officer in Frédéric’s regiment, M. de Novion, arrived one day on a visit, hoping to buy a farm and learn from the La Tour du Pins the skills that he would need. As he spoke no English, had neither wife nor children, and had never been near a farm, Lucie had doubts as to his suitability. She took him out riding to show him the land. After a few miles, realising that she had forgotten her whip and had no knife with which to cut one, she caught sight of an Indian she knew. To M. de Novion’s evident disgust and horror, she called out to him and the man approached, wearing only a very thin strip of blue cloth between his legs, and went off to cut her a switch with his tomahawk. M. de Novion asked Lucie what she would have done had she been alone. Nothing, she replied, adding mischievously that had she asked her Indian friend to do so, he would willingly have felled the Frenchman with his tomahawk. That evening, M. de Novion told Frédéric that he had decided to live in New York, where, noted Lucie mockingly, ‘civilisation seemed slightly more further advanced’.
For all her reserve about many of the Dutch settlers, whom Lucie found overly keen on money, she was happy in Troy. In the spring, the flocks of geese, duck and passenger pigeons, flying low between the coastal swamps where they wintered and the Great Lakes where they bred, were so dense that they cast a shadow over the streets below. Towards May, sharp-nosed sturgeon, up to 8 feet long and weighing up to 200 pounds, known as ‘Albany beef’ to the locals, appeared in the river and were fished from canoes, to be dried and pickled, the oil used for bruises and cuts. The surrounding forests were full of edible mushrooms and nuts, and in the summer months the fields were red with strawberries. In 1796, the first genuinely American cookbook had been published, a pocket-sized treatise ‘adapted to this country and all grades of life’ by Amelia Simmons, who won much acclaim by calling herself ‘an orphan’, with recipes geared to settler life–Indian pudding, cranberry sauce and cornmeal cake. (For the perfect syllabub, Simmons recommended sweetening a quart of cider with ‘double refined sugar’, before ‘milking the cow into your liquor’.)
The farm was prospering, there were enough French émigrés in the area to provide company, and they spent many evenings with the Schuylers and van Rensselaers, people with whom Lucie could talk and play music. With the invalid Mrs Rensselaer, whose knowledge of French literature surpassed that of many of her Parisian friends, she passed agreeable hours of conversation. It was at the Rensselaer house that she met the wife of the Anglican minister, Mrs Ellison, a middle-aged woman whose great sorrow in life was to be childless. Mrs Ellison was much taken by Humbert, now 5, tall for his age and speaking English better than French, and she begged Lucie to let him spend the summer with her in Albany. Lucie worried about the dangers of the farm and the amount of time Humbert spent with the horses and the slaves, and also that he had developed a habit of wandering off to look for the Indians, who occasionally, she had been told, kidnapped children; so she agreed to let him go.
Early in the summer of 1795, they received a visit from the Duc de Rochefoucault de Liancourt, who had escaped from France and was travelling through upper New York state with a former naval officer called Aristide du Petit-Thouars. Talleyrand had given the travellers an introduction to the Schuylers and van Rensselaers, but before taking them into Albany Lucie insisted that de Liancourt change out of his filthy clothes into something more appropriate. Even then she complained that he looked more like a shipwrecked sailor than the former First Gentleman of the Bedchamber. For his part, de Liancourt appeared astonished to see Lucie emerge in an elegant dress and a fine hat.
The visit to Mrs Rensselaer was not a success. She declared afterwards that she found de Liancourt ‘a very mediocre man’, as did Lucie, who was profoundly irritated by his opinionated manners and his ignorant criticisms of America. Later, in his immensely long account of his travels in North America–which were indeed full of ‘sickly trees’, apathetic, covetous Dutchmen, and cowardly bears and wolves–de Liancourt was fulsome in his approval of Lucie. Of all stalwart Frenchwomen, he wrote, she was the most admirable and but for her devoted support, Frédéric might have ‘sunk under their misfortunes’. Reading his words, Lucie would feel guilty about not having liked him better, but cross when she read his verdict on the inhabitants of Albany, ‘a set of people remarkable neither for activity nor politeness…the most detestable beings I have hitherto met’. Only a rattlesnake emerged well: though awake, noted de Liancourt, ‘she showed no sort of malignity’.
M. du Petit-Thouars, on the other hand, charmed his hosts; he was, noted Lucie, exceptionally ‘witty and gay’. Even de Liancourt admitted that his travelling companion ‘conversed with exquisite sense’. He made Lucie and Frédéric laugh with stories about the colony of French émigrés at Asylum on the banks of the Susquehanna where he had just spent some months. Planned by the Vicomte de Noailles, Lafayette’s brother-in-law, and the Marquis de Talon, Asylum had included piazzas, summer houses and shutters of a kind never seen before in America, and a special house for Marie Antoinette, designed when it was still thought that she might escape. After her death there had been talk of the Dauphin finding refuge there. But the land had turned out too rugged and mountainous for the fruit trees, while the canon, archdeacon, two abbés and various countesses had proved inept farmers; and Asylum, like Gallipoli, was foundering, its inhabitants reduced to eating robins and boiled tadpoles. Du Petit-Thouars was sad to leave Troy, where he had found his hosts less prone to the general contempt for the Americans that seemed to afflict so many of the French émigrés; and Lucie, in particular, he was enchanted by, saying that she was not only very pretty, but graceful, cheerful, a model of elegance for the local ladies, and that she possessed ‘outstanding cool-headedness and endurance’. There was something about the wholesomeness of their life that did indeed suit Lucie perfectly.
But she had not been well. Ever since the spring, when she had almost had a serious accident in the river, crossing with her highly strung mare on a ferry carrying four enormous oxen, she had had recurrent bouts of fever, which annoyed her principally because they left her unable to work. She attributed them to the shock, and characterisically blamed herself for being weak. Though the existence of malaria–‘mal’aria’–and its connection to swamps and marshes had long been known in Europe, where it flared annually to epidemic proportions, no one had yet worked out that it was transmitted by mosquitoes. Believed to come from ‘poisonous miasmas’, exhalations rising from decomposing vegetation–and even, on occasion, from putrid cabbages, potatoes, onions, coffee, chocolate, old books, locusts, beached whales and the entrails of fish–these spring and autumn fevers were a constant menace along the Ohio, Mississippi, Hudson and their tributaries.*
Lucie’s attacks lasted five to six hours, bringing headaches, fever and exhaustion; she felt hot and sweated, then cold and shook. Even the quinqina from Peruvian bark, sent to her by Talleyrand from Philadelphia, and already known to act as a cure, did little to shake it off. (A remedy she seems not to have tried is one described in the Boston Gazette the previous September: ‘Just before going to bed, let the patient take off his or her clothes and stand under a sieve suspended by a line; let the person pour into the sieve a pail filled with water just drawn from the well. The shock will be considerable…but the effect will be pleasing.’)
Soon after de Liancourt’s visit, a letter arrived from Talleyrand saying that he had, by good fortune, learnt that the firm holding Lucie and Frédéric’s money in Philadelphia was on the verge of bankruptcy, and that he had been able to withdraw their Dutch bills of exchange just in time. However, the bank needed Frédéric to sign the release papers. As the harvest was still a month away, Humbert was happy with Mrs Ellison and a neighbour offered to care for Séraphine, who was now almost 2, they decided to accept Mr Law’s invitation to be his guests in New York, where Lucie could see a doctor before travelling on to Philadelphia.
Before they left, this time by boat, the Albany Register carried an article about the death in his dank prison in Paris of the 10-year-old Louis Charles, Louis XVII, a sad, forgotten child, on 8 June.
Steamships were yet to be invented, though steam was already in use to power factories, and Lucie herself had a steam spit for the mutton and turkey she roasted on Sundays. With Albany set to become the new state capital, and Troy growing rapidly into a centre for ironworks, the river did a considerable trade, schooners, brigs and sloops all competing for a place by the quays, along with ‘battoes’, the flat-bottomed pine boats designed by the French to carry furs and wheat. Nearly all the larger sailing boats were equipped to carry passengers. The 164-mile trip to New York took between three days and a week, depending on the wind, the currents, and the expertise of the pilot whose job it was to know exactly how far each tide, whether flood or ebb, would carry the craft through the Hudson’s many reaches.
Lucie was enchanted by their gradual journey, travelling so slowly on windless days that the boat seemed to glide. She sat on deck watching villages and farms slip by, tracing the smoke from the fires started by settlers to clear the land as it rose into the still air, looking out across dense forests of pine, oak, ash and elm, and at the clearings with their orderly rows of cherry and apple trees. She was particularly struck by the deep dark water of the gorges, and the mountains that climbed steeply behind them. Never, she wrote later, had she seen anything to compare with the stretch of river at West Point, its ancient trees seeming to hang far out over the water, and in later life she hoped that they had been spared the ‘soulless, frenzied clearing of land’.
In 1795, New York was a town of some 45,000 people, with 2,500 slaves; founded by the Dutch in 1614, it had a busy port, churches of all denominations, numbered houses in brick, and named and paved streets packed with stores and constantly blocked by hackneys, diligences and wagons. Broadway, its widest street, cut the city from north to south. Rents were considered exorbit ant, drinking water was sold in barrels–the local water being full of gnats and said to be undrinkable unless laced with brandy–and New York’s pickled oysters, regarded as the finest in America, were shipped as far afield as the West Indies, preserved in a mixture of allspice, vinegar and mace. Merchants and brokers met at Tontine’s coffee house, which kept the gazettes of both Paris and London. After Albany, Lucie was delighted by New York, though Talleyrand and de Chaumetz, meeting the sloop, were appalled by how pale she was and how much weight she seemed to have lost.
In the afternoons, Alexander Hamilton joined the party on the terrace of Law’s house on Broadway. From then until after midnight, under a starry sky and in great heat, they would sit talking. Law described his elephants and palanquins in Patna, while Frédéric and Talleyrand argued about the ‘absurd theories’ of the French Constituent Assembly, and how too great a love of money had a paralysing effect on intellectual and artistic endeavour. As Talleyrand said, the USA was a young nation, with all the arrogance of adolescence, and he was yet to meet a Frenchman who did not ‘feel a stranger’. When Hamilton described the beginnings of the war of independence Lucie remarked, with one of her occasional flashes of sharpness, that it was considerably more interesting than the ‘insipid memoirs of that simpleton Lafayette’. The talk never ceased; the party gathered night after night and continued their conversation. Mr Law, saddened to think that these evenings would ever end, said to his manservant about his guests: ‘If they leave me, I am a dead man.’
When the moment came to move on to Philadelphia, Lucie was not well enough to travel. So it was Frédéric who was introduced to George Washington and saw the city described by the Comte de Ségur as a ‘noble temple put up to liberty’. On reaching Philadelphia he quickly joined the group of liberal, royalist French émigrés, men who had known each other for many years, had fled to America in ones and twos and now gathered every evening in the bookshop started at 84 First Street by Moreau de Saint Méry. There was the Vicomte de Noailles, the historian and philosopher, with whom Frédéric had served in America, and the Comte de Volney, recently escaped from a Parisian prison, who would spend the next three years gloomily scouring America for minerals, rocks and geological specimens, harassed by gnats, complaining that the evergreens were ‘dwarfish’, and that Indians had mouths shaped like those of sharks. At night, when Moreau closed up shop, the friends, each of whom in his own way had helped to bring about the revolution that led to their exile, and each of whom saw his own future only back in France, moved upstairs to continue talking far into the night, until asked to leave by Moreau’s exhausted wife.
From France had just come news that the exiled Louis XVIII had issued a manifesto promising punishment for the regicides and a return to power of both nobles and clergy.* From Paris too came further accounts of Robespierre’s death, his body torn apart by delirious crowds, the bleeding limbs paraded triumphantly around the city. Week after week, the Courrier Français ran stories about those who had been tried and guillotined, and how each had conducted himself at the end. In Paris, 2,639 people had died under the guillotine, half of them in the 47 days leading up to Robespierre’s death; surprisingly few–485–had been members of the nobility. A further 14,000 had been guillotined in other parts of France. The revolution, claimed the reports reaching Philadelphia, had taken 35,000 to 40,000 lives, including those who had died in prison or been executed without trial.
At the Fête des Victoires in July, Thérésia Cabarrus, now married to Tallien, had been called ‘Notre Dame de Septembre’, because Tallien was blamed for the September massacres in the prisons; but that was before his triumphant defeat of Robespierre, after which she became ‘Notre Dame de Thermidor’, on account of all the lives she was said to have saved in Bordeaux.
Though George Washington had already chosen the site for the new national capital on the Potomac, and Major L’Enfant was at work designing streets, drives and avenues radiating out from Capitol Hill, Philadelphia in 1795 was still the centre of American political and cultural life. It was here that the greatest number of French émigrés had settled, earning meagre livings as teachers of French, music, dancing and fencing, as clock-menders, dress-and wig-makers and chefs. Brillat-Savarin, one of the most renowned chefs of his day, was teaching Americans how to cook wings of partridge ‘en papillotte’, scramble eggs with cheese, and stew squirrels in Madeira, reluctantly admitting that there was much flavour in a good turkey. Jefferson, who was extremely interested in food and had returned from Europe with a waffle iron from Holland and a spaghetti machine from Italy, had turned his vegetable garden at Monticello over to experiments with eggplants, Savoy cabbage, endives and tomatoes, hitherto regarded as too poisonous to eat. Jefferson was said to like his ice cream enveloped in a crust of warm pastry.
Philadelphia ate lavishly. In the markets, noted one French émigré approvingly, were to be found 52 different kinds of meat and game and dozens of varieties of fish, though lobsters, reported by early Dutch settlers to grow to 6 feet in length, were not just smaller but scarce, having apparently been frightened away by cannon fire during the revolution. The French, their Philadelphian hosts reluctantly admitted, had brought a transformation to the American kitchen, even if Amelia Simmons’s successor, Lucy Emerson, noted disdainfully in her popular New England cookbook that ‘Gar-lics, though much used by the French, are better adapted to medicine than cookery’. The querulous Volney admitted to enjoying ‘le pie de pumkine’ but marvelled at the way Americans washed down their meat and vegetables with coffee and milk. When Volney’s comments on America were published not long afterwards, Samuel Beck, a Bostonian, described their author as a ‘timid, peevish, sour-tempered man’.
The Philadelphians also drank well. In smart society, wine, especially the ‘sombre and somewhat heavy’ reds from Hermitage and Côtes du Rhone, were increasingly replacing cider and Madeira at meals. Jefferson, who called wine ‘a necessity of life’, said that it stimulated intelligent conversation, whereas spirits only led to drunkenness.
With the arrival of ships from France came jams, syrups, chocolates, wines, brandies, raisins, almonds, hats and the latest French dresses, advertised by merchants in the daily Courrier Français. But the news from Paris was mostly bleak, of outbreaks of violence between Jacobins and counter-revolutionaries, of the settling of old scores and growing disorder and scarcity in the capital. While the French Revolution had originally been greeted by the Americans with approval, the New York Daily Gazette observing that ‘the flame of liberty expands from city to city’, its turbulent course had soured the views of many. As Hamilton observed, it was hard to go on supporting a revolution that had plainly substituted ‘to the mild and beneficent religion of the Gospel a gloomy, persecuting and desolating atheism’. Pleas by the new French Consul in Philadelphia, Fauchet, that the revolution in France, as in America, had simply been an attempt to embody in fundamental laws safeguards for people’s political and social liberties, counted for less than the reports of bloodshed arriving on every vessel. Even Fauchet now admitted that the execution of the King and Marie Antoinette, and the fall of America’s idol Lafayette, had between them stamped out most feelings of warmth towards the French. Talleyrand, writing to his friend Lord Lansdowne shortly before Frédéric’s visit to Philadelphia, observed that in the long run, America’s ties to England were so deep and so natural that they were the obvious allies, and not the French, with whom relations never rose above the superficial and the sentimental.
Now that the Terror was over, the French were starting to think about going home; the Americans were beginning to long for them to do so. Increasingly, the émigrés detected an ‘epidemic of animosity’ directed against them.
After three weeks in New York, restored to health by Law’s housekeeper, who insisted that she rest and brought her endless small cups of broth, Lucie was ready to return to Albany and the children. Frédéric came back from Philadelphia, tantalising her with his descriptions of George Washington. The long evenings of talk under the stars on Law’s veranda resumed. Later, Lucie would remember these weeks in New York as ones of exceptional ‘contentment’.
Then a sudden rumour spread that yellow fever had broken out in a street close to Mr Law’s house on Broadway. Yellow fever, the ‘malignant’ or ‘putrid’ fever, thought to have been carried to the USA from Barbados in the 1690s, was one of the most feared of all infectious diseases; people were still haunted by the epidemic that had struck Philadelphia two summers before, which had killed a tenth of the population, despite the ministrations of the ‘miasmanists’ and the ‘contagionists’ and their various remedies of purging and bleeding. Health, many doctors still maintained, was restored by eliminating morbid matter: if the patient died, it had not been sufficiently eliminated. Smallpox, for which vaccination now existed, held fewer terrors; when yellow fever struck, however, people fled.
That night both Lucie and Frédéric woke feeling extremely ill. Not knowing whether they too had been infected, or whether they had simply overeaten on the bananas, pineapples and other exotic fruits recently arrived from the Caribbean, they decided to leave New York immediately, before being trapped in the city by quarantine restrictions. By daylight they had packed and were at the port, looking for a sloop to carry them back up the Hudson. They quickly recovered: their malaise had been fruit, not fever.
This time their boat went aground on a sandbank and rather than wait to be towed off, they had themselves rowed a little way up one of the Hudson’s smaller tributaries, between climbing plants and wild vines that met above their heads in garlands, where they had heard that some French émigrés were farming. The two young Frenchmen, who were delighted to see visitors, appeared to live in a mixture of penury and luxury. Having found that the farming methods brought with them from a sugar plantation in Saint-Domingue were utterly unsuited to the American climate and soil, they were fast running out of money; but they continued to eat off magnificent, if chipped and unmatching, porcelain, salvaged from earlier splendour in pre-revolutionary France.
Lucie and Frédéric reached Troy to find Séraphine well and the farm preparing for an exceptional crop of apples and grain. Lucie settled back with pleasure to the routine of her days. Neighbours dropped by to remark on the improvements they had made to the farm and to praise M. de Chambeau’s elegant new ‘noble hog sty’. She was, as she noted, very happy. But then she was dealt ‘the most unexpected and what seemed to me then the most cruel blow that any mortal could endure’.
One morning Séraphine, a bright, cheerful, affectionate child of 2, woke with what Lucie described as a ‘sudden paralysis of the stomach and intestines’. The Albany doctor, fetched by M. de Chambeau, told them there was nothing he could do. A few hours later Séraphine was dead. One of the small Schuyler boys, with whom she had been playing the previous day, died shortly after.
There was no Catholic priest in Albany. Frédéric and Lucie buried Séraphine in a small enclosure near the farm, Frédéric conducting the funeral service himself. ‘This cruel loss,’ Lucie would write many years later, ‘threw us all into the deepest sadness and despondency.’ She had always maintained that, surrounded as a child by the spectacle of corruption and scandal in the Church, she retained nothing but bad memories of religion; it was as if, she would say, ‘all concern with morality had been stifled out of my heart’. But now, kneeling by Séraphine’s grave, she felt herself change, drawn towards a God who would give her the courage to endure such terrible grief. ‘God bided His time to work a change of heart in me,’ she wrote. ‘The hour had come when I was forced to recognise the hand that had stricken me.’ And ever afterwards, she would write, divine will was to find her ‘submissive and resigned’, though there was something in her nature that was profoundly alien to submission.
To combat her sadness, Lucie set about her work with even greater frenzy. She collected 5½-year-old Humbert from Albany and brought him back to the farm. She decided to teach him herself, rather than send him to school; he was a clever and biddable pupil. At all other moments of the day, which for her started before dawn, she threw herself into the harvest and pressing of the apple crop, the cider squeezed out by an old mill driven by a horse, on which Humbert rode round and round, then put into brandy casks from Bordeaux. So delicious was the result that their cider fetched double the usual price in Albany. The maize crop was no less good, the final shucking of the ears of corn done, according to local custom, all through one night in a barn lit by candles, with the help of both their white and their black neighbours, working together over great pitchers of hot milk, laced with cider and flavoured with brown sugar, cinnamon and nutmeg. Then came the ploughing, the stacking of wood, the repairing and repainting of the sledges in preparation for the coming winter.
Lucie bought blue and white checked flannel to make shirts for their slaves and engaged a tailor to come and sew waistcoats and thick lined capes. No minute of her long day was left unfilled. Every week, she washed the family’s clothes, did all the ironing, remarking how well her childhood with the servants at Montfermeil had equipped her for these tasks, and made the butter and cream, taking pleasure in the fact that her dairy was considered to be not just the cleanest but the most elegant in the neighbourhood. Slowly, very slowly, the days passed.
Winter came early in 1795. By early November, the black clouds bringing snow began to gather in the west. Within a week, the Hudson and the Mohawk were frozen solid, and the surrounding country lay under deep banks of snow. The short dark days were broken only by occasional visits to the Schuylers and the van Rennselaers. One morning a parcel arrived from Talleyrand, containing a valuable cameo of Marie Antoinette, a gold watch and a casket, all of which Lucie had left behind in Brussels with her banker friend, and which had been appropriated by the diplomat meant to be bringing them out to her. Talleyrand, spotting the cameo in a friend’s house in Philadelphia, confronted the young man and retrieved her possessions.
Lucie was once again pregnant. This was her sixth pregnancy; but of all the children she might have had growing by her side, there was only Humbert. Towards the end of the winter, she came down with measles and was for a while very ill. But neither Humbert, who slept in her room, nor the others caught the disease, and by spring she had recovered.
With the end of the snows came an unexpected letter from France. Their sans-culottes friend Bonie wrote from Bordeaux with the news that the property sequestrated from the émigrés and the nobility during the revolution was to be restored to its rightful owners. Frédéric’s mother had already taken possession of her house and lands at Tesson and Saintes. The seal on Le Bouilh could now be lifted, but only, it seemed, if its owners returned within 12 months to sign the papers. At the farm in Troy it was as if, wrote Lucie, a firebrand had exploded, each seeing in the news a different story. Frédéric and M. de Chambeau were overjoyed, released at last from all pretence that they might wish to spend the rest of their lives in America.
Despite Séraphine’s death, Lucie felt differently. She had felt safe on the farm, and what she remembered most clearly about France was that it was the country where she had lost her youth, ‘crushed out of being by numberless, unforgettable terrors’. She dreaded going back; the idea filled her with foreboding. But she said nothing of this to Frédéric, beyond asking that she be allowed to give the four black slaves, to whom she had become much attached, their freedom. When she gathered them in the drawing room and gave them the news, they wept. Never in her life, she would write, had she felt such pleasure in an act of her own. At the ceremony of manumission, which took place in public, in the presence of the disapproving Justice of the Peace, who was not in favour of abolition, and all the assembled black slaves of Albany, Minck, Prime, Judith and her husband knelt in turn in front of Frédéric. One by one, he laid his hand on their heads in token of liberation, following the practice of ancient Rome.
The end of their American adventure came quickly. Having distributed the smaller pieces of porcelain and some of Lucie’s gowns as presents, and sold the horses, furniture and stock for good prices, Frédéric, Lucie, Humbert and the ever faithful M. de Chambeau boarded a sloop for New York. Mr Law was away, so they stayed with a French banker, M. Olive, his wife and eight children in their house on the banks of the Hudson. They found Talleyrand in residence, also preparing to leave for France, Mme de Staël having written to urge him to return as quickly as possible in order to serve the new government. For a while it looked as if they might travel together, but Lucie and Frédéric wanted to approach Bordeaux from Spain, so as to be sure that France was indeed at peace, while Talleyrand feared that Spain’s Most Catholic Majesty might take against a cleric who had not been a ‘sufficiently edifying bishop’.
All over America, the French were preparing to go home, selling up their properties and booking passages on all available ships, intensely relieved that they could now abandon their precarious lives as dancing teachers and pastry cooks. Though apprehensive about what awaited them in France, where they had lost relations, friends and possessions, they felt a sense of urgency to leave. Few of them had enjoyed their exile. They had found America too rugged, its food too peculiar, its women too virtuous and assertive. They had missed the culture, the subtlety and the many nuances of language and behaviour that were so familiar and pleasing to them. Lucie was among the very few who had felt herself to be genuinely content. As for the Americans, they had found their French visitors perplexing, if elegant.
On 6 May 1796, almost exactly two years after their terrifying escape from Bordeaux, Frédéric, Lucie, M. de Chambeau and Humbert embarked on the Maria Josepha, a 400-ton English vessel bound for Cadiz with a cargo of corn. The weather was fine. One of the other passengers, Mme Tisserandot, was also expecting a baby. Lucie spent the 40-day crossing sewing for the captain and the crew, as well as making over her own clothes. By the time Cape St Vincent was sighted, the entire wardrobe of the ship was in good order.