Lucie spent the first ten days of their return to Europe in quarantine in the harbour of Cadiz, a condition imposed by the Spanish to control the spread of epidemics. She was in her sixth month of pregnancy; Mme Tisserandot, also bound for France, was in her eighth. The two women, delighted after so many days at sea to see fresh fruit, pulled up baskets of figs, oranges and strawberries from fruit sellers who rowed out to the Maria Josepha. When finally permitted ashore, the Frenchwomen found themselves the objects of considerable curiosity, a large crowd gathering to stare at their coloured gowns and straw hats as if they were two exotic beasts. To escape the ceaseless scrutiny, they bought black skirts and mantillas. Lucie, who had dysentery, felt very ill. Accustomed to the ‘exquisite cleanliness’ of America, she found their Spanish inn ‘disgustingly’ dirty.
All her life, Lucie would be captivated by new sights and places; she was naturally curious, observant about small details, and for the most part easy-going, though she was capable of being both prim and censorious. Direct herself, she disliked evasiveness in others. She could be firm, but not unkind; she appreciated kindness in others and often remarked on acts of generosity and thoughtfulness. The French Consul General in Cadiz, M. de Roquesante, a ci-devant noble turned ardent republican, to whom Frédéric had to apply for their visas, struck her as extremely unpleasant, particularly after he and Frédéric had a sharp exchange over the recent death of a hero of the Vendée. Frédéric’s unwillingness to compromise or feign was becoming more marked. But an English merchant in Cadiz, Mr Langton, married to the sister of Théobald Dillon, the officer murdered by his men in Lille, charmed her by his solicitousness.
In the evenings, when the temperature at last dropped to below 35° C, they strolled up and down the Boulevard de l’Alameda, looking out across the sea and enjoying the spectacle of small Spanish grandee children in their full finery of brocade and powdered wigs. One afternoon, on the Feast of St John, they went to watch the leading matador of Cadiz fighting bulls so magnificent that Lucie thought that each would have made the fortune of any American farmer. The moment of the bull’s death, with the matador poised gracefully for the kill, left a lasting impression on her, as did the Spanish method of keeping the bull-ring cool by spraying cold water over the awning shading the spectators.
Since Spain had concluded a peace treaty with France, most of its previously considerable army had been disbanded. Without pay or work, destitute soldiers had taken to the mountains from where they attacked travellers labouring their way up and down the steep passes. For safety, people now journeyed in convoys of 15 to 20 covered wagons, pulled by mules, the men of the party heavily armed. Though Lucie was still not very well, she was anxious to reach Le Bouilh before the birth of her baby, due in early November; she noted, with her customary robustness, that it was not in her nature to be defeated by small obstacles. Hiring their own wagon, with a wicker and tarpaulin hood, in which a mattress for her to lie on had been laid over their baggage and packed in with straw, they duly set out for Madrid. Frédéric, Humbert and M. de Chambeau perched at the front, their frisky mule trotting rapidly over good roads. Whenever they could, they did a leg of the journey by water, rejoining the convoy at a later spot. At Xeres, they spent the night in the wagon, repelled by the dirty beds of the inn.
The convoy was approaching Córdoba, crossing a long, empty plain, when Mme Tisserandot went into labour. A halt was called and Lucie helped deliver a baby girl. Since all the clothes for the baby were packed in her wagon, and the convoy was reluctant to pause for long in such a desolate spot, Lucie and the muleteer, having washed the baby in wine, wrapped her in shawls and then hastened to catch up with the rest of the party. It was night when they finally reached Córdoba. The servants at the inn, seeing what they took to be an injured woman in the wagon, apparently the victim of an attack by bandits, fled, not wishing to be called later as witnesses. In total darkness, Lucie unpacked the bags to find clothes for Mme Tisserandot and her child.
Next morning, the convoy waited an hour for the baby to be baptised in Córdoba cathedral. The convoy travelled slowly on across Spain, through groves of lemon trees, across parched plains and up into the Sierra Morena, Lucie loving the flowering pomegranate trees around the wells and the green valleys full of weeping willows, deliciously shady after the bleaching sun of the plains. It took them almost three weeks to reach Madrid.
Once again, they had letters of introduction and soon found themselves well looked after; they were received cordially by the French Ambassador, who had once served under Lucie’s father. Lucie was anxious to press on, but it was not until six weeks later that letters at last arrived from Bonie and de Brouquens, reassuring them that it was safe for them to return to France. The last stage of their slow journey, in an enormous ancient carriage pulled by six mules, with a seventh, known as the generala, out in front to guide the way, took them past the Escorial, where Lucie reflected severely that to collect so much splendour in a place of such solitude could serve no other purpose than to ‘make us aware of the futility and vanity of the works of man’. They were all much saddened by their recent parting from M. de Chambeau who, his name not yet removed from the list of proscribed French émigrés, could not go home.
‘I felt no pleasure,’ wrote Lucie, many years later, ‘returning to France.’ She was haunted by the horror of her last six months in Bordeaux, and dreaded seeing Le Bouilh, which they knew to have been taken over by the municipality. Frédéric’s mother, back in control of most of her own properties, she remembered as suspicious and obstinate. Archbishop Dillon’s house at Hautefontaine had been sequestrated. The status of her own house in the rue du Bac was unknown. And, now that the lands of the former nobility and clergy had been split up and sold, the revenues on which the family had once lived had disappeared. It was to vast debts, rather than to a comfortable income, that she and Frédéric were returning. When, stopping in Bayonne for yet more papers, Frédéric was summoned before the President of the Department to answer questions, even the presence of the reassuring Bonie could not calm her fears. Though Frédéric’s name had definitively been removed from all lists of émigrés, as had that of his dead sister Cécile, which meant that in theory their property might legitimately be returned to them, there were many hurdles still to cross.
Their first sight of Le Bouilh, on an autumn day when mists and rains traditionally cast the Languedoc in soft grey light, was grim. When they had last seen the château, in the autumn of 1793, it was a well-furnished, comfortable home, with an excellent library, fine pictures, silver and crystal chandeliers, a well-equipped kitchen and a vast amount of the finest linen. Now Le Bouilh appeared vast, gaunt, unwelcoming. The garden was overgrown, the outbuildings derelict; the immense high-ceilinged drawing rooms with their tile and stone floors echoed at every step. Not long after their escape to America, they learnt, men from the local municipality had arrived to conduct a sale of the château’s entire contents, moving from room to room like locusts until it was stripped bare, a screen, commode and secrétaire, together with three walnut chairs covered in black leather, going one day, bed-hangings, napkins, sheets, aprons, tablecloths, cushions, covers, the next. No item, however small, remained, though pouring rain and cold winds during the sales had apparently kept many buyers away. All copper, iron and lead items had gone to the mint to be melted down for the army. The last object to go, lot 359, had been an orange tree in a pot. Surveying the desolate scene, Lucie and Frédéric set about unpacking the crates that had been sent on ahead by boat from their farm.
Much of the furniture of Le Bouilh had, it soon turned out, been bought by neighbours, either, as Lucie noted crossly, out of envy, or out of greed. By the next day, shamefaced people began appearing at the door carrying tables, chairs and mirrors, offering to sell them back at the prices they had paid for them. The priceless copper kitchen utensils, taken away to be melted down, had been overlooked at the mint and were now returned, as was Frédéric’s father’s excellent library, which was discovered unharmed in a nearby storehouse. Bit by bit, the unfinished, ungainly château began to take on something of its former appearance.
And there was an enormous, unexpected pleasure when Marguerite, having heard of their return, appeared from Paris. She had been living with Lucie’s friend Pulchérie de Valance, who had survived and been released from prison after Robespierre’s fall. Marguerite herself had been saved when a stranger in the street had pulled her into an alley-way and warned her to remove the starched white apron she always wore, saying that it was bound to inflame revolutionary tempers; she had spent the Terror looking after two small children whose parents had been arrested. Marguerite reached Le Bouilh in time to help Dr Dupouy, the timorous doctor who had looked after Lucie during Séraphine’s birth, deliver her new baby on 1 November. It was a girl and they named her Charlotte, after their dear friend Charles de Chambeau. There was once again a second child in the family.
The de la Tour du Pins were not alone in their misfortune, nor indeed among the hardest hit. The Gironde was one of the areas of France where the losses of the nobility had been the heaviest, and where the revolutionary committees had been most zealous in dividing and selling off vineyards. Some 16,400 members of the French aristocracy had emigrated during the revolution, 624 of them from Bordeaux alone. Though relatively few had perished under the guillotine–79 nobles out of the 301 condemned to death in Bordeaux, along with 24 nuns, 30 priests, 28 seam-stresses, washerwomen and cooks executed for harbouring refratory priests, 2 miniature painters and 6 scribes–those who now came home found their properties stripped down to the locks and wooden window-frames. Bordeaux itself, where the population had shrunk by almost a quarter, was silent and deserted after dark, the lamps no longer lit. The once long alleys of poplars leading up to handsome mansions of yellow stone, with white shutters and slate roofs, had been chopped down for firewood. It was clear to none of those returning how they would survive.
Nor was anywhere very safe. With the end of the Terror had come a surge in brigandage and lawlessness, as former Jacobins and revolutionaries found themselves without employment and those they had persecuted sought revenge. The counter-revolutionary White Terror had seen the Trees of Liberty chopped down, while royalist ‘companies of Jesus’ scoured the countryside for ‘terrorist Jacobins’. One of the first acts of the new government in Paris had been to add a seventh ministry, that of the Police, to the six agreed under the Constitution of Year III; but the new police were ineffective, not least because there was no money with which to pay them, and judges were in any case too afraid to pass sentences and witnesses too afraid to speak. The assault on France’s magnificent forests for firewood, begun during the hard winters of 1793, 1794 and 1795, had opened great tracts of land. Up and down the country, along roads that had got much worse during seven years of neglect, diligences were regularly stopped by brigands, their bands swollen by deserters from the army.
What terrified Lucie most were the gangs of so-called ‘chauffeurs’, ‘heaters’. These outlaws broke into houses where they suspected they might find money and burnt the feet of those inside over the open fire until they revealed their hiding places. Not far from Le Bouilh, chauffeurs had crippled a shopkeeper. When, in December, Frédéric set off to inspect the family properties at Tesson, Ambleville and La Roche Chalais, leaving her and the children with Marguerite, two maids and a drunken manservant, Lucie spent the nights sitting up in bed trembling with fear, listening to the creaks in the vast, echoing house, worrying that the few dilapidated planks securing the ground-floor windows would be too flimsy to protect them against intruders. ‘I longed,’ wrote Lucie later, ‘for my farm, my good negroes and the peace of those months.’ She feared for Frédéric, travelling the countryside alone. She had started having nightmares, in which he was being hunted, and from which she woke up covered in sweat, her heart ‘beating heavily and painfully’.
When Frédéric arrived back, he brought more bad news: the château of Tesson, which his father had filled with valuable pictures and furniture, had been stripped bare, its contents sold, the wallpapers torn from the walls, its shutters ripped off. The house at Saintes had been reduced to a worthless ruin. Lucie felt saddened not just for her family but for France. ‘No one,’ she wrote later, ‘would see again the room in which he had been born, or the bed in which his father had died.’
In July 1797, when Charlotte was 8 months old, Frédéric decided that he needed to go to Paris to try to put the family affairs in better order. Humbert was now 7, and both children were thriving. Frédéric’s brother-in-law Augustin de Lameth, who had spent some months in prison after Cécile’s death, had become mayor of Hénencourt, but he had lost almost all of his property in the revolution. All four de Lameth brothers had survived; the family was trying to mend the political differences that had divided them during the Terror. Mme de Montesson, Frédéric’s elderly friend, released from her own time in prison, wrote proposing that they should stay in her house. Mme de Staël was back in Paris, working hard on Talleyrand’s behalf to find him a position in the new government, as was the Princesse d’Hénin, who was staying with Mme de Poix.
Taking Marguerite and the two children, and planning to be away no longer than six weeks and to return in time for the grape harvest, Lucie and Frédéric took very little luggage with them. Lucie was still breast-feeding Charlotte. They travelled via Tesson, where Lucie saw for herself the complete destruction of the house, and where she was able to thank the elderly Grégoire and his wife for having saved Frédéric’s life during the Terror. Though as many as half a million previously landless people had become individual proprietors as a result of the revolution, having bought land at a hundredth of its true value, the countryside they saw as their hired coach rumbled its way slowly north was extremely poor, the villages filthy, the children barefoot, the inns without linen or cutlery.
Paris was very altered. The city had been overtaken by a heedless longing for happiness. No longer subdued or diminished by fear, people wanted to forget, to celebrate the fact that they were alive. Though the streets were filthy, full of wild dogs and pigs and the carcasses of dead animals, though the city had lost almost a fifth of its inhabitants to the wars, emigration and the revolution, though there had never been so many abandoned babies left on the streets, people arriving in Paris in 1797 were amazed by its air of gaiety. At least 14 of the 23 theatres had a play every night, often a tale of tyranny defeated by valiant men. A new language had been invented for the stage, a debased ‘langue poissarde’, a fishwife’s language, enriched by the vocabulary of the revolution, with new words like ‘terrorism’ and ‘decadi’ heard in the popular plays about a character called Madame Argot, ‘Madam Jargon’. In the streets were puppet shows, ventriloquists, conjurors; balloons of every colour and size floated above the city.
And people were dancing, as they had never danced before, to forget, to pretend that nothing had happened, in cabarets, in cellars, in halls and in empty former mansions, the women dressed as nymphs and Greek goddesses, scented and floating like Venuses under the chipped gold cornices. ‘There is dancing in Les Carmes, where throats were cut,’ wrote Mercier, once again chronicling the everyday life of the city, ‘in the Jesuites, in the seminary of Saint Sulpice, in the Daughters of Sainte Marie, in three or four churches, in the Hôtel Maubert and the Hôtel Richelieu…’ In the Tivoli pleasure gardens, 8 acres of flowers, artificial mountains and lakes, once the property of Boutin, treasurer to the navy and executed early in the revolution, they danced the waltz, newly arrived from central Europe. It was, observed one disapproving traveller, ‘an intimate dance, requiring the two dancers to join closely together, and to glide, like oil across polished marble’. To add buoyancy to their steps, men sometimes wore lead soles by day so that their evening pumps seemed weightless.
At a subscription dance for the ‘victims of the Terror’ at which all the guests had lost someone to the guillotine, dancers wore red ribbons tied around their necks to suggest a severed head, a ‘depravation’ noted Helen Maria Williams who passed through Paris that winter, ‘not merely of manners, but of the heart’. At balls, lit by a profusion of candles and smelling strongly of flowers, ladies’ maids hovered, waiting to replace gloves, soiled shoes and ribbons of guests who danced all night. Parisians now not only looked different, and behaved differently: they also had different tastes.
When they were not dancing, they were gambling, in spite of frequent attempts at prohibition, at lotto, trente et un, faro, backgammon, picquet, whist and all forms of cards and dice, people who had lost their fortunes risking what little they had left. The new game of roulette had become so popular that wheels were set up in public squares and in the foyers of theatres. After the claustrophobia of the revolution, Parisians longed to be outside, to walk in the gardens of the Tuileries, to ride in the Bois de Boulogne, to play ‘diable’, a form of badminton with racket and balls, among the orange trees on the Terrasse des Feuillants. After years of military bands and the beat of drums, they wanted concerts, romantic songs, comic operas. The quarrels between melodic Piccinnistes and stern Gluckistes had resumed. For a while, the harp became the preferred instrument, favoured by women after a doctor claimed its reverberations through the chest were a protection against heart problems. ‘I want Italian singers to settle in Paris,’ announced the composer Grétry, ‘Italian music is the antidote to the evil we must put behind us.’
In the absence of religion, magnificent displays celebrating patriotism, with mythical gods and goddesses, chariots and statues of Apollo, brought crowds onto the streets. In the underground Café du Sauvage, a man dressed up as an Indian, said to be Robespierre’s coachman, played the timbals and made terrible faces and noises. In the Jardin des Plantes, Baba the elephant fired a pistol with his trunk. Along the Promenade des Tilleuls, two dromedaries grazed. Parisians were reading, too, in ways that they had not read before, particularly novels, sitting in cabarets de lecture, special reading rooms, or taking books out of the new lending libraries. Three poets had gone to the guillotine–Fabre d’Églantine, Jean-Antoine Roucher and André Chénier–but others were taking their place in an explosion of works in verse. Never had there been a time more dedicated to public pleasure.
Lucie and Frédéric had last seen Paris in March 1793, as the Terror was taking hold. Following the death of Robespierre and his followers, a five-member executive committee, the Directoire, had been established on 1 November 1795, elected by a new Council of Five Hundred and a second Council of Elders. Along with the monarchy and arbitrary and despotic rule, the three Estates had vanished. Having inherited an empty treasury, unpaid taxes, public institutions without funds and a near worthless paper currency, the assignats, the Directoire had nonetheless succeeded in bringing some measure of confidence and calm, introducing compulsory and free public education–though there were no teachers to teach it–and a more coherent system of taxation. France was still at war with Britain and Austria, but peace treaties had been signed with Prussia, Holland and Spain.
Every day, at one o’clock, one of the five Directors, in their ceremonial costumes of red, white, blue and gold, held public audiences in the Luxembourg. Not one of these men, as Lucie soon remarked, could be described as very impressive. There was the seductive and cynical Barras, a close-shaven, sinister-looking man both lazy and venal, whose dinner parties were the most sought after in Paris; the heavy-drinking Reubell, with legs too small for his body, reported by an English agent in Paris to his superiors in London to be of a ‘rapaciousness without equal’; the feeble, doctrinaire La Revéllière, head of the new sect of theophilanthropists; Carnot, a military engineer known for his organisational skills; and a harmless naval officer called Le Tourneur. Of these, Barras was the man of the moment. ‘He is playing the Prince,’ reported an English agent to his masters in London. Lucie would later say that they had all been ‘drawn from the dregs of the gutter’.
Mme de Montesson and Pulchérie de Valance greeted Lucie and Frédéric warmly. Lucie, noting that the French liked nothing better than someone new and different, found herself the centre of attraction. ‘The strangeness of the life I had led in America and my wish to return there,’ she noted wryly, ‘made me quite the rage for at least a month.’ One by one, the nobles who had survived the violence by living quietly on their estates, and the émigrés, returning from Holland, Spain, Italy, the German States and England, were making their way cautiously back into the city. Most were now very poor. As in Bordeaux, they found their former mansions boarded up, with signs that they were for sale; when they could, they moved back in, perching disconsolately in magnificent rooms, stripped of their mirrors, curtains and furniture. Six thousand private houses stood empty. In the Boulevard des Italiens, soon known as ‘le petit Koblenz’ on account of all the émigrés who gathered there, friends met again and cried in each others’ arms. Because no one wanted to be thought wealthy, people professed total penury. ‘The supreme bon ton was to have been ruined,’ wrote the Baron de Frémilly, ‘to have been a “suspect”, persecuted, above all in prison…’
Many returning from exile spent their days searching for their ransacked possessions along the banks of the Seine, where stalls had been set up selling porcelain, glass, furniture, tapestries, all stolen or confiscated from the houses of the çi-devant nobility. The former convent of Les Petits Augustins had been renamed the Museum of French Monuments and was now a depository for church treasures, statues of the saints, sarcophagi, obelisks, bronze casts of kings and martyrs and stained-glass windows all piled on top of each other. As Marat had remarked early in the revolution, praising those who were setting fire to the fine mansions of the Faubourg Saint-Germain, liberty could only be built on equality, and how could mansions be shared other than by demolishing them? There were melancholy outings to the cemetery of the Madeleine, where the heads and bodies brought in baskets from the scaffold had been tossed into a ‘ditch of the guillotined’.
Those who ventured as far as Versailles found more scenes of destruction, the avenues of trees cut down, the porphyry and alabaster busts cracked and chipped, grass growing in the courtyards, the magnificent furniture, pictures and tapestries sold off. In the park, the setting for so many elegant and magical receptions, the fountains stood silent, the statues mutilated, the lake a dark grey swamp. Only the Orangerie had survived, with its 1,200 orange trees, some dating to the 17th century. And the frescoed temple of Flora seemed strangely untouched, as if Marie Antoinette was about to arrive to dine beneath the painted garlands and arabesques, though the eight sphinxes crouching on the staircase had had their noses and ears chopped off. Frédéric Meyer, strolling through the Queen’s apartments in Versailles, heard the sound of flutes and a harp, playing first an andante and then an adagio. He followed the music to what had been Marie Antoinette’s bedroom, where a solitary clock was sounding the hour.
Lucie and Frédéric soon discovered that no quarter of Paris had been more profoundly altered by the revolution than the Faubourg Saint-Germain and the streets running from the rue de Varennes to the end of the rue de Grenelle. It was as if ‘an army of Huns or Vandals’ had passed that way. The Hôtel Biron, where Lucie had paid visits as a child, was now a dance hall; the Hôtel Vaudreuil, once renowned for its collection of paintings by David, Boucher, Greuze and Poussin, lay in ruins; the Hôtel de Conti was a horse market. Though Lucie’s house in the rue du Bac was relatively unscathed, still owned by Mme de Staël’s husband, the nearby convent of the Récollettes had been turned into a theatre, its saints defaced, its cloisters overgrown and full of rubbish. Of Lucie’s former neighbours, the Maréchal de Mailly, at number 1 rue du Bac, had survived the attack on the Tuileries in August 1792, only to be arrested, to escape, to be caught again and finally beheaded, at the age of 86. The Duc de Clermont-Tonnerre and his son, who had once lived between Lucie’s house and the missionary order in whose orchards and gardens she had walked as a child, had been among the last to die.
Soon after reaching Paris, Lucie went to call on Thérésia Cabarrus, married for the past three years to Tallien, by whom she had a child. She was living on the edge of the Champs-Elysées, in a charming small thatched house hidden by poplars and lime trees called La Chaumière, which looked like a country cottage from the outside but was extremely luxurious inside, with frescoes in the Roman and Etruscan style. The two women greeted each other affectionately. Recounting to Lucie the story of her ordeal in prison and her last-minute rescue by Tallien as she was about to appear before the revolutionary tribunal, Thérésia told of his subsequent furious jealousy, and how she sometimes now feared for her life. Tallien had much to be jealous about. Thérésia, whose tale of deliverance and whose exploits in Bordeaux had made her the toast of Paris, had become one of the most fashionable women in a city longing for extravagance and beauty. ‘This woman,’ observed Pitt on a visit to Paris, ‘would be capable of closing the gates of hell.’
Thérésia was to be seen at public dances, dressed à la sauvage, in flesh-coloured clinging culottes, with diamond rings on her toes, or à la Cleopatra, or à la Diane, or à la Psyche, any dress with a Greek or Roman theme. Her high-waisted, white muslin dresses, simple straw hats, shawls, preferably from Kashmir, were admired and copied throughout Paris. When she dressed as Diana, said Barras, who was widely known to be her lover, she was the ‘female dictator of beauty’. In 1795, Mlle Bertin had returned to reopen her shop in the rue de la Loi, but it was the new Journal des Dames et des Modes, started by a former abbé and professor of philosophy called La Mesangère, which was setting the tone not only for Paris but for much of Europe.
The Journal de Lyon of 21 February 1793 had been the first to use the word ‘muscadin’ to denote the opponents of the revolution, the word taken from the apprentice grocers of Lyon who smelt strongly of nutmeg. Distinguished by their exotic appearance–long, powdered hair, cravats worn right up to their bottom lip, grey or brown redingotes borrowed from the English, tight breeches and white stockings–the muscadins were parading around Paris in the summer of 1797, staves in their hands, occasionally brawling with the remaining pockets of Jacobins. At their more fanciful, they were known as ‘incroyables’ or rather ‘incoyables’ because they lisped their ‘r’s. Mercier particularly disliked the fashion for enormous cravats, saying that the ‘head reposes on a cravat as on a cushion in the form of a wash-basin; with others it serves as a grave for their chins’.
Their women companions, known as ‘merveilleuses’, carried fans on which were painted portraits of Marie Antoinette; they left the feeding of their babies to goats, of which there were many, wandering around the streets, because wet-nurses were hard to find. Both men and women had fleurs de lys sewn on to their clothes. As in the years leading up to the revolution, people were once again wearing the signs of their political allegiances: royalists blond wigs and black collars, Jacobins red collars and pantaloons. In the Journal des Dames et des Modes, La Mesangère suggested that nuns, released from their convents, should dress like Roman vestal virgins.
Very little of all this touched Lucie, who was in any case too serious and too poor to indulge in fashions. She laughed when she was offered 200 francs for her long fair hair, a hairdresser telling her that fair wigs were much in demand. ‘I naturally refused,’ she wrote later, ‘but from then on held my hair in great respect.’ Like the other ci-devant nobles, meeting once again in salons to revive the art of conversation, she was witnessing a new Paris rising on the ashes of the old; power had shifted from the nobility and the Church to the new rich, the bankers, the suppliers of goods to the army and the speculators, many of them using their fortunes to buy up the châteaux and mansions lying empty. Many of these people, now, held receptions more sumptuous than those under Louis XVI. Chez Mme de Staël, so it was said, ‘one sorts things out’, chez Talleyrand ‘one mocks’, and chez Mme Tallien ‘one negotiates’.
Speculation, born in the famine and misery of 1795, when the assignats lost their value as they multiplied to meet the expenses of the state, had made fortunes for those canny or ruthless enough to take risks. By 1797, Paris was in a fever of speculation, over food and soap, furniture and matches, even houses, sometimes bought and sold within days, without ever being seen, many of the deals concluded under the arcades of what was now known as Maison-Egalité, the old Palais-Royal. Here agents promised huge returns on fabulous scientific discoveries, like horses that did not need feeding, or mechanical carriages that ran on wheels. The Directoire was turning into one of the most corrupt periods in French history. Good living, complained Mercier, was making the Parisians ‘insolent, lazy, amoral and greedy’. In the house of one of the richest speculators, the cook produced a dinner of exotic birds, pies and pâtés of Indian curlews, Java pheasants and ostriches.
It was at dinner with Pulchérie de Valance that Lucie met Talleyrand again, as enigmatic and wily as ever, who casually let slip that he had just been appointed Foreign Minister. Nothing about Talleyrand would surprise her, noted Lucie, ‘unless, perhaps, it should be something lacking in taste’. Even serving an exceedingly corrupt government, she felt sure, Talleyrand would remain a very great gentleman. Talleyrand owed his appointment, so it was said, to Mme de Staël and Benjamin Constant, the pale-faced, carrot-haired romantic writer and ardent republican who was now her constant companion, and it was rumoured in Paris that Talleyrand had threatened to blow his brains out unless he was given a ministry. Talleyrand had needed help in securing power, Mme de Staël later observed, but once there ‘he had no need of anyone to keep it’.
Talleyrand now provided Lucie with a most enjoyable event, one that reminded her pleasurably of the elegance of her earlier years. His new post had coincided with the arrival in Paris of Ali Effendi, an emissary from the Sublime Porte, with an entourage of 50 attendant Turks. Since London, Berlin, Vienna and St Petersburg all had Turkish ambassadors, Paris was keen to follow suit. Ali Effendi arrived in Marseilles from Constantinople after a stormy 55-day journey and was taken aback to discover that he was expected to spend a further month in quarantine; his hosts placated him with a constant supply of fresh olives, truffles, anchovies, newspapers and yoghurt. After a royal procession across France, he reached Paris in July where the mansion of the ci-devant Princesse de Monaco had been put at his disposal. He was an instant, enormous, public success.
Within days, Turcomania had replaced Anglomania. Parisians did what they had always done when faced by an exciting event: they turned it into a fashion. Soon, women were wearing turbans and dresses à la Odalisque. The Journal de Paris, describing Ali Effendi as somewhat above medium height and livelier than his appearance suggested, remarked on his superb two-tiered turban, the top half green, the bottom white muslin, with a gold button perched on top. The Turkish emissary, they noted, wore ermine, which was apparently a summer fur, and the sleeves of his outer garment fell to well below his hands.
Ali Effendi’s visit lasted four weeks and began with a presentation of gifts to the Directors: a silk tent, ten magnificent Arab horses, precious stones, scents and essences. Night after night, balls and displays of fireworks were laid on for his benefit. Talleyrand invited Lucie to attend a lunch party in the ambassador’s honour, having arranged the room with sofas and low tables, with a sumptuous buffet, rising in tiers halfway up the wall and laden with every kind of delicious and exotic food. Leading his august Turkish guest to a divan, Talleyrand asked, through an interpreter, which lady Ali Effendi would care to have seated next to him. The Turk did not hesitate, as Lucie recorded later, adding that she was not really surprised, ‘for of all the ladies present, none could stand the brilliant light of a mid-August noon, whereas my own complexion and fair hair had nothing to fear from it’. Her gleaming skin never ceased to give her pleasure. Seated by his side, Lucie found the ambassador to be a handsome man in his 50s, who asked innumerable questions through his Greek interpreter, ‘and paid me a thousand amiable compliments’. On discovering that she particularly liked aromatic pastilles, he filled a handkerchief with a selection from his own pockets. Next day arrived a flask of attar of roses and a valuable length of green and gold cloth. To add to Lucie’s triumph–which created something of a stir–Thérésia Tallien had not been invited to the lunch.
It was very soon after her arrival in Paris that Lucie became uncomfortably aware that royalist sentiments, quite out of tune with the mood of the Directoire, were being expressed by people other than the foppish muscadins. In the salon of Mme de Montesson, deputies favourably disposed to the royalist cause talked openly about the prospects of a shift to the right and the eventual return to France of Louis XVIII, still in exile in England. Many of these people wore badges and ribbons by which to recognise each other, knotting their handkerchiefs in particular ways or wearing black velvet collars. At dinners given by their friend M. de Brouquens, who had survived the revolution in Bordeaux and returned to Paris, or in the drawing room of Mme de Staël, where Lucie spent part of every day, royalist deputies in the Assembly spoke freely of their hopes, despite the presence of the servants.
Lucie was treated as ‘ridiculous and pedantic’ when she pointed out that every word was making its way back to Talleyrand and to Fouché, the former Oratorian and arch republican recently appointed by Barras to run an unofficial secret police for the surveillance of the former nobility. The royalists had been greatly heartened by the elections in April, which had brought in a majority of avowed constitutional monarchists as new deputies, many of them men who had been imprisoned during the Terror. In May, after a plot by the left to overthrow the Directoire was uncovered and put down before it could do harm, the government swung further to the right.
At daybreak on 4 September 1797–18 fructidor, as it was known under the revolutionary calendar–Lucie was sitting on her bed feeding Charlotte when she heard loud noises coming from the street. Marguerite went to see what was happening and returned to say that soldiers and gun-carriages were pouring onto the nearby boulevard. Frédéric went off to find news. When he failed to return, Lucie and Pulchérie de Valance, modestly dressed so as not to attract attention, set out for Mme de Staël’s house, making their way through streets crowded with anxious, silent people. Several of the roads had been barricaded. Pushing their way to the front, they were in time to see a number of heavily guarded carriages pass by, in which sat several of the royalist deputies Lucie had met with M. de Brouquens. Seeing Lucie, the men waved, immediately provoking shouts of ‘Down with the royalists’ from, as Lucie wrote later, ‘a number of those horrible women who appear only during revolutions or disorders’.
They reached Mme de Staël’s apartments to learn that the Director Barras, fearing a monarchist takeover, had turned for help to Napoleon Bonaparte, the young general of the army in Italy whose military exploits had become the talk of Paris. Napoleon had despatched one of his subordinates to Paris, and the monarchists had quickly been crushed. The leaders of the conspiracy were all under arrest. Carnot, one of the two Directors involved, had fled; the other, the moderate royalist Barthélemy, who had replaced Le Tourneur, was in prison.
Within hours, 60 right-wing deputies, including many of the men who had spoken out so freely in the salons in the Faubourg Saint-Germain, were on their way to the ‘dry guillotine’: this meant imprisonment in Guyana, the prisoners being sent across France in iron cages to the coast. Many would eventually die in Guyana. The results of the April elections were declared void and 177 of the new deputies banished. Members of the Bourbon royal family, such as the Prince de Conti and the Duchesse d’Orléans, had been rounded up and were to be deported to Spain. Over the next few weeks a military commission set up in the Hôtel de Ville passed death sentences on a number of plotters, several of them recently returned émigrés. In the name of suppressing a counter-revolutionary conspiracy, the remaining three members of the Directoire, Barras, Reubell and La Revéllière, with the support of the army, took over the administration of the state and outlawed all opposition. The first steps towards dictatorship had effectively been taken.
For the recently returned émigrés, just beginning to find their feet and retrieve what was left of their pre-revolutionary fortunes, the attempted right-wing coup spelt disaster. France’s new leaders were not prepared to see a return to power of monarchists. Under threat of arrest and trial before a military tribunal, some 150,000 people were ordered to leave Paris within 24 hours and France within a week.
Lucie’s first thought was how to warn the Princesse d’Hénin, who was staying just outside the city at Saint-Ouen with the Princess de Poix. The barricades were up all around Paris. No one was being permitted to leave without a passport. Since she was still feeding Charlotte, she was forced to take the baby with her. Passing herself off as a nurse to a friend with a valid passport to travel, she reached Saint-Ouen on foot, exhausted by the long trudge with her plump daughter. The émigrés sheltering there together, some of them under false names–the Princesse d’Hénin had a false passport in the name of a Swiss dressmaker–were appalled by Lucie’s news: many were in the middle of delicate negotiations for the return of their properties from the state.
For a while, Lucie and Frédéric, whose names had never been on any list of émigrés, hoped that they would not be affected by the new decree. They called on Talleyrand for advice, but found him too preoccupied with his own future to offer much reassurance. Even Tallien was unable to help, though he did provide them with passports. When it became clear that they, too, as ci-devant nobles at the court of Louis XVI, would have to leave France once again, they briefly considered going to Spain, and from there returning to America; but the Princesse d’Hénin, who intended to return to London, persuaded Frédéric that England would be better. The Faubourg Saint-Germain was in a state of turmoil, the streets full of unhappy and undecided people, wondering where to go and how to get there. No one could contemplate a return to the poverty and precariousness of exile without dread. Frédéric, who had been discussing the buying back of Hautefontaine, was forced to abandon all talks.
In a mood of profound gloom and uncertainty, with just two small trunks of clothes, everything else they possessed still at Le Bouilh, Lucie, Frédéric, the two children and Marguerite set out in a coach for Calais. This second emigration would prove more ruinous than the first.