Their boat left Calais for Dover at eleven o’clock at night. Though the south-easterly wind was light and the sky cloudless, Frédéric immediately took to his bunk, overcome by his usual seasickness. Lucie went up on deck and found a hatch cover to perch on, holding Charlotte on her knee. Seated next to her was a young man who offered her a shoulder to lean against: he turned out to be the son of the editor of the Edinburgh Review, whom she had known in Boston. They spent the night talking about America; Lucie told him that if it proved impossible to return to France before too long, her plan–her wish–was to go back to the farm in Troy. With the pale dawn of an English September came her first sight of the cliffs of Dover.
By 1797, the English had become accustomed to their many French visitors, few of whom had risked, as Lucie and Frédéric had, too quick a return to France after the Terror. Fugitives from the revolution had been reaching the shores of the south coast since the summer of 1789, in waves that increased in response to each new incident of violence and each new repressive law against the French Church and the nobility. One of the first to come had been the Prince de Condé, who brought with him 28 servants; later had come soldiers, fleeing anarchy in the army, ‘non-juror’ clerics who refused to sever their vows to the Pope, aristocrats on the list of ‘suspects’, and all the wig-makers, chefs, valets and coachmen who had once looked after them. Many were unclear as to whether they were betraying the King in abandoning him to his fate, or had been driven into exile by his weakness. ‘La patrie [the fatherland] becomes a meaningless term,’ noted the Comte d’Antraigues, ‘when it has lost its laws, its customs, its habits…France for me is nothing but a corpse, and all one loves of the dead is the memory of them.’
Singly or in groups, among them entire congregations of priests and convents of nuns, these soldiers and clerics and servants had arrived, some bringing money in bags and accompanied by retainers, others destitute, bedraggled and disguised as women or sailors. When a party of 37 religious sisters from a convent at Montargin put ashore on Shoreham beach, curious spectators gathered to peer at the ‘fugitive virgins’. For the most part, those arriving had been received kindly and with generosity. While they were unlikely to ‘much contribute to our amusement’, said Gibbon, these people were entitled to pity and esteem.
Though by 1797 France was again at war with England, for the third time in 40 years, the French and the English were inextricably entangled, importing each other’s fashions and craftsmen, reading each other’s Enlightenment philosophers, sharing notions of ‘bon ton’ and good taste. When, before the revolution, the English aristocracy had visited Paris, they had mixed naturally with the inhabitants of the Faubourg Saint-Germain. Lucie’s family was in no way exceptional either in its fluent command of English, or in its many close English relations, particularly among the Catholics. The sons of recusant families were still obliged to travel to the continent to get a Catholic education. The Duc de Lauzun had shared a string of racehorses at Newmarket with Fox; the Duchess of Devonshire brought French interior decorators to Chatsworth. For the Whig women in particular, the salons of Paris, with their scholarly and formidable hostesses, to whom the great men of the day paid homage, had considerable appeal.
When the Bastille fell, the initial reaction in England had therefore been to welcome the revolution, precisely because it was perceived to be supported by Condorcet, Lafayette, Frédéric de la Tour du Pin and his father, all people the English knew and admired. For the English religious dissenters, as for the opposition Whigs, the defeat of the despotic Bourbons was a blow against tyranny. Fox spoke of the fall of the Bastille as ‘the greatest event that ever happened in the world’.
All this changed abruptly in 1792. With the attack on the Tuileries, the massacre of the priests in the prisons, and the execution of the King and Marie Antoinette, came the realisation that the bloodless revolution they had fondly imagined was an illusion. The stories of bloodshed carried across the Channel by the émigrés had shocked the English, bringing out the best in them, particularly as many of the French refugees displayed admirable stoicism in the face of their disasters. Those arriving throughout 1792 and 1793, among whom there were several thousand Catholic priests, were taken in and helped. The violence and confusion in France had lent itself naturally to caricature and provided Gillray with savage flights of fantasy, with his frolicking sans-culottes and sharp-toothed poissardes, perfect illustrations for Burke’s vision of the madness and destruction sweeping Europe.
But the French Revolution had had its own effect on England. It had rekindled a radicalism largely dormant in British politics since the early 1780s, bringing to the fore questions about human rights and social justice, questions raised by Thomas Paine in The Rights of Man, and Mary Wollstonecraft in A Vindication of the Rights of Women. The ownership of land, popular education, the role of the press and the Church, had all rapidly become topics fit for debate among people who no longer saw themselves as trapped within prescribed social spheres, but free to learn, to advance themselves and to challenge the rights of others. At the same time, renewed war with France had brought in its wake inflation, press gangs and crippling taxes. With republican stirrings and whispers becoming more audible, Pitt had responded by introducing penalties for sedition, libel and treason. The passage of the Aliens Act, in January 1793–which had caught Talleyrand in its net–had been designed to control republican spies and Jacobins; but for the French émigrés trying to reach England, it had meant more documents and passports and more daunting bureaucracy.
Burke had lived just long enough to see his warnings about a ‘despotic democracy’ in France, a ‘strange, nameless, wild thing’ liable to threaten all Europe, at first greeted as slightly absurd, at last taken seriously. In March 1797, not long before Lucie’s arrival, The Times warned against those ‘Foreigners…whose dangerous opinions, suspicious conduct and violent speeches call for the utmost vigilance and severity’, and urged that steps be taken to curb the spread of Jacobin ideas. Reports of ‘stout-made’ men landing from fishing boats, uttering ‘improper expressions relative to government’, were despatched from customs officers along the coast to London.
The England reached by Frédéric and Lucie and their children, on a blowy September morning in 1797, was therefore not as welcoming as it had been earlier. Eight years of steady arrivals, bringing some 25,000 Frenchmen, Frenchwomen and their children to England, added to growing shortages and political repression, had not made people eager to face a fresh surge of émigrés, what a British politician described as ‘hordes of vagabond French…pouring in upon us’. On the docks of Dover, as the de la Tour du Pins climbed ashore, they were treated roughly by the English customs officers, considerably worse, as Lucie observed, than they had been treated in Spain. It was not until she pointed out that she was an English subject, and gave them the names of her three English uncles–Lord Dillon, Lord Kenmare and Sir William Jerningham–that the brusque tone of the officers changed.
Lucie’s first act was to send word to her aunt, Lady Jerningham, and by the time they reached London that night Edward, the young page at her wedding, was waiting to take them to the Jerningham house in Bolton Row off Piccadilly. There they found Sir William’s brother, the Chevalier Jerningham, a frequent visitor during Lucie’s childhood to the rue du Bac and Hautefontaine. Lady Jerningham was a forceful, good-hearted woman and much attached to Lucie, who noted with considerable pleasure how kind her aunt was to Frédéric and how genuinely taken she seemed to be with Humbert. ‘We established ourselves,’ wrote Lucie, ‘as if we had been the children of the house.’ Of all her relations, both French and English, Lucie felt fondest of her English aunt.
London, at the end of the 18th century, had seen vast changes. It was the age of the Georgian terrace house and the neo-classical architecture made fashionable by Robert Adam, James Gibbs and Sir John Soane. With just under a million people, London was the largest city in Europe, owning and building more ships than anywhere in the world. Like Paris, it was noisy, packed with wagons, carriages and markets, its streets full of itinerant vendors ringing their bells and singing out their wares: cigars and walking sticks, rat poison and shirt buttons, shellfish and sheep’s trotters. As Paris did for France, London represented the heart of the country. Sydney Smith, obliged to live in his parish in Yorkshire, remarked that for him it meant being ‘12 miles from the nearest lemon’.
But while France had suffered greatly from its political revolution, England had been growing rich from its inventions in industry and agriculture, from its new machinery for spinning, smelting and pumping, an explosion of technology that had brought with it extraordinary wealth, but also brutal and dangerous conditions. England was the country where the basic inventions that would create modern industry were made, perfected and introduced, but children as young as 5 were going to work cleaning chimneys.
To house London’s ever-growing population, the city had been moving west, past Mayfair and Piccadilly, and north, through Marylebone towards Islington and Highgate, where visitors were warned that the cold of the winter was so extreme that ‘many constitutions cannot endure it’. Though Hampstead was still a heath, menaced by highwaymen, and Kensington and Chelsea were villages, surrounded by countryside, London was soon to engulf them. To amuse and simplify the lives of Londoners, there were new gadgets: toothbrushes, roller skates, ball-cocks, dumb-waiters and fountain pens. The sandwich had just made its appearance, as had toast, though the young Swedish scientist, Peter Kalm, maintained that toast had been invented because it was the only way to spread butter on to bread in an English winter.
Almost every French visitor, having dutifully praised the spaciousness and cleanliness of the fine new Georgian squares and the excellence of the street lighting, remarked on the tangled lanes that lay behind them, with their hidden courtyards and dark alleyways, home to the poor, of whom there were a growing number, hit hard by spiralling grain prices and the enclosures of common land. The year of Lucie’s arrival, Irish rebels were sent off to Botany Bay, to join the English felons, men and women convicted for stealing sheep and poaching deer, in the harsh penal settlements of newly discovered Australia.
The French also remarked on the desolation of the London Sunday, the streets silent and deserted, the few passers-by ‘like walking shadows’. As the Comte de Montloisier put it, the English were a ‘semi-paralysed people’. And there were very few indeed who did not comment on the fog, the swirling greyish-white mists from the coal-burning stoves which obliterated the city for days at a stretch. It was the fog, remarked Montloisier, which was responsible for the lack of ‘animal vitality’ in Londoners, and for their permanent ‘état de spleen’, an affliction that combined boredom and melancholy and often led to madness and suicide. In his seven years in London, he noted gloomily, he saw the grapes growing on a wall opposite his house change colour only once. Just occasionally, this moroseness was described as having something of the much loved French ‘sensibilité’; more often it was seen as seriousness so profound that some French visitors wondered whether the English, enveloped in fog and puffed up like balloons on butter and beer, were in fact capable of laughter at all.
The ‘era of Jacobinism’ that had preceded Lucie to London had brought with it more austere fashions. Gone were the buckles, ruffles and powdered wigs* for men, the ‘plumpers’ designed to fatten the cheeks of sallow women, the 4-feet-tall ostrich feathers, the hoops and the false buttocks; except at court, where George III and his German-speaking Queen Charlotte had been on the throne for more than 30 years, presiding over a staid Windsor, where hoops remained de rigueur on formal occasions. George III’s first spell of madness had happened soon after the fall of the Bastille, in the summer of 1789. Compared to Versailles, the French courtiers found Windsor painfully cold and stupefyingly dull.
Shortly before Lucie’s arrival, the Princess Royal had married the hereditary Prince of Württemberg, a man so fat that Napoleon would later remark that God had created him merely to see how far the human skin could be stretched without bursting. Whether at court or in the drawing rooms of London society, Englishwomen remained, to the surprise and annoyance of their French guests, firmly in their segregated and inferior places, expected to withdraw after dinner to allow the men to talk literature and politics. In England, a visitor smugly remarked, women were ‘the momentary toy of passion’, while in France they were companions ‘in the hours of reason and conversation’. As Jane Austen put it, ‘Imbecility in females is a great enhancement of their personal charms’, something that Lucie, brought up to talk intelligently, would find extraordinary. The French were also disconcerted by the casual manners of their hosts, the way young people hummed, put their feet up and perched on tables.
With rich relations able to take the family in, Lucie’s position in London was considerably easier than that of all but a handful of the other French émigrés. But it was also strewn with emotional traps. Her stepmother, Countess Dillon, had reached England some time before, bringing with her Betsy and Alexandre, her two children by her first husband, and 13-year-old Fanny, her daughter by Arthur. Two other daughters by Arthur, whom Lucie had never seen, had died in infancy.
Lucie was fond of the gentle, good-natured Betsy, whom she had known when at a convent school in Paris, and who had just made what was turning into an unhappy marriage with the well-connected but wayward Edward de Fitz-James. Betsy was pregnant and clearly miserable. ‘She was a sweet girl,’ Lucie wrote later, ‘and deserved a better fate.’ Edward’s mother, the Duchesse de Fitz-James, ran what was described as the gayest of the French salons in London, the one where ‘la haute émigration’, the most noble émigrés, gathered. Lucie felt rather less affection for Alexandre who, though carefree and charming, had, she said, ‘little intelligence and even less learning’, lacked all talent and was interested only in fashion, horses and ‘small intrigues’. Like his mother, whom Lucie described grudgingly as a woman ‘not without a certain natural wit’, Alexandre had never been known to open a book.
Fearing to be greeted coldly by her stepmother, Lucie was relieved and pleased when Mme Dillon came to call, eager for an account of Arthur’s last winter in Paris. Though they had much to talk about, Lucie felt surprised that her clever and well-educated father had chosen to marry such a woman.
More problematic was how Lucie would be received by her grandmother, the ill-tempered Mme de Rothe, who had fled from Koblenz to London with Archbishop Dillon after the defeat of the émigré army. To Lucie’s enduring relief, they had not met since Lucie’s departure for Holland nine years earlier, and there had been virtually no contact between them in all that time. Persuaded by Lady Jerningham that it was her duty to show her grandmother some mark of respect, Lucie, taking the bright and easy-going Humbert with her, but leaving Frédéric behind, went to call. What Frédéric did not tell her until later was that Mme de Rothe had been spreading malicious stories about Arthur and about himself around London, and that she had stipulated that on no account would she receive him.
Mme de Rothe and the weak but not unkind Archbishop were living in a modest house in Thayer Street on a pension of £1,000 a year provided by Arthur’s eldest brother, Lord Dillon. One of the servants who had accompanied them into exile, Michel Esquerre, mistakenly believing it safe to return to France, had gone home and been guillotined in May 1794. The Archbishop was now 84; the authorities, who, through agents, kept a close eye on the émigrés settled in England, listed him as a ‘rebel to his country and his Church’.
When his manservant, who remembered Lucie from Hautefontaine and burst into tears on seeing her at the door, announced her, the Archbishop greeted her most affectionately. He hugged Humbert ‘again and again’ and soon began questioning him in French and English, evidently much charmed by the little boy. He pressed Lucie to return next day to dine with him and the six elderly bishops from the Languedoc who shared his meals and whom Lucie remembered from her travels to Narbonne.
Mme de Rothe was icy. Lucie kissed her hand; her grandmother addressed her as ‘Madame’. Learning that Lady Jerningham had invited the family to spend the winter at Cossey Hall, near Norwich in Norfolk, further displeased her and Lucie watched with mounting anxiety as Mme de Rothe began to mutter to herself under her breath, a sign Lucie remembered as heralding an outburst of ill-temper. After half an hour, trembling lest her grandmother embark on a long list of accusations against her father or against Frédéric, Lucie kissed her hand again and left.
Lucie never referred to her grandmother again, in anything she wrote, though she paid many visits to the Archbishop and cannot have failed to have met her. It was as if her profoundly unhappy childhood had simply never happened.
After this, came a visit to Lord Dillon, who greeted her with a ‘cool courtesy’, and offered her his box at the Opera; but nothing else. Then Lucie called on Lord Kenmare and his 18-year-old daughter Charlotte, who were both warm and affectionate.
There was one family visit left, and in some ways Lucie feared it the most. There was something in her relationship with Frédéric’s forceful aunt that had always troubled and unnerved her. The Princesse d’Hénin was living in Richmond, where many of the aristocratic émigrés had settled, sharing a small house with her faithful and cowed companion, Lally-Tollendal. This second exile had not softened her forceful nature and she made no effort to conceal her envy at Lucie’s invitation to Cossey, all the greater since Lally-Tollendal had spent many pleasant months there on his own as the guest of Lady Jerningham. But the Princesse d’Hénin was never cold and unjust in the manner of Mme de Rothe, and Lucie was grateful that she was now generous enough to see how important Lady Jerningham’s support would be to the family. It was with considerable relief that Lucie, her round of visits completed, prepared to leave for the country. What little she had seen of the émigrés in London, gossiping and intriguing, while fluttering shamelessly around the ‘pale constellation’ of rich and fashionable hostesses, had depressed her exceedingly.
The party, consisting of Lucie, Frédéric, the children and Marguerite, as well as Lucie’s stepmother and her children and various maids and grooms, travelled to Norfolk in a convoy of carriages, crawling slowly over terrible roads marked, for the first time since the Romans, by regular milestones. The mail coach service had recently been extended as far as Norwich, and couriers passed them on the road at the considerably faster speed of 9 miles an hour. Lucie, for whom new sights and new places never failed to raise her spirits and give her pleasure, greatly enjoyed a day they spent on the way at the races in Newmarket. They reached Cossey at the beginning of October; the weather was windy but mild.
Cossey Hall, not far from Great Yarmouth on the Norfolk coast, which had been in the Jerningham family since the middle of the 16th century, was a large, red-brick, partly medieval and partly Tudor house, with a single tower. It had projecting wings, angled buttresses and gables, topped by square pinnacles. More imposing and eccentric than beautiful, it was said to have been lived in for a while by Anne of Cleves, when banished from court by Henry VIII. But its setting, in the middle of a valley through which wound the river Wensum, surrounded by forests of oak, beech and chestnut, was delightful. The park was full of deer and, compared to the severe geometric parterres and gravelled paths of the great French gardens, seemed, with its grass, ponds and walks, very informal. The walled kitchen garden had glasshouses for tomatoes and peaches and a 60-foot run of cucumber pits. A hamlet of about 600 people, most of them living on an island of cottages contained in a loop of the river, provided staff for the estate. After the ruggedness of Albany, it was all very gentle. When the weather was good, Lucie, wearing a new riding habit given to her by her stepmother, went out on one of Edward de Fitz-James’s horses, on a side-saddle he had thoughtfully provided.
As Catholics, Sir William Jerningham and his brother the Chevalier, a Knight of Malta, had been educated in France, Sir William staying on to serve at court and in the army. With memories of the Gordon riots of 1780, and their virulent attacks on Catholics by a burning, looting mob, fresh in people’s minds, the Jerningham chapel at Cossey remained hidden away at the top of the house in the gables, though by the end of the 18th century restrictions against Catholics were beginning to ease. Sir William, who had returned from France to campaign on behalf of English Catholics, was planning a new chapel in the grounds, modelled on King’s College Chapel in Cambridge. Since the beginning of the revolution, Lady Jerningham had been taking in as guests French refugee priests as well as the sisters from the Blue Nuns in the Faubourg Saint-Antoine, where she had studied as a girl, and her salon for the French had earned her the affectionate name of ‘her Catholic Majesty’. Ever practical, she had written to her daughter that ‘I like to have several People in the House, and a multitude cannot be had cheaper than with the unfortunate French: no Servants, no Horses, no Drinkings’.
About the inside of the house, with its mullioned windows, wood panelling and flagstones, Lucie would write only that it was ‘old but comfortable’; she approved of the food, saying that it was ‘plentiful and not too elaborate’. Coming from a Parisian childhood, where the nobility, though less wealthy than the English aristocracy, lived on a far more lavish scale, what she seems to have most liked was Cossey’s unpretentiousness, though with £18,000 a year in income, the Jerninghams were one of England’s small elite of privileged landed families. Accustomed to the acute cold of a North American winter, she does not appear to have noticed the chilliness and draughts for which English country houses were already famous.
They were a large group in the house, 19, including a Catholic chaplain, most of them in some way related. Charlotte, Lady Jerningham’s only daughter, who had recently married Sir Richard Bedingfield, lived not far away in a moated 15th-century fortified manor house. Both Sir William and his brother spoke excellent French and Lady Jerningham took charge of Humbert’s education, leading him off to her room every morning after breakfast to read and write in both French and English. Sir William, a warm-hearted, affable man, was writing a paper on mangel-wurzels. There was an excellent library for Frédéric to read in and among the pictures that hung on the panelled walls was a portrait of Queen Mary Tudor by Holbein.
Lucie had fled from France without warm clothes for either herself or the children, but when cold weather set in at the end of October, and it began to snow, Lady Jerningham sent out for winter wardrobes for them all. Knowing that Lucie could sew, and wanting to provide her with some occupation, she ordered lengths of different materials, tactfully pretending it would also encourage Fanny to sew. To distinguish her from another Dillon cousin called Fanny, Lucie’s stepsister, who was turning into a pretty, somewhat forceful girl, with an oval face and determined brown eyes, was known as the ‘little tall Fanny’.
A local parson, the Rev. P. Woodforde, coming to dine with the family at Cossey, was shocked to find them eating pheasant, swan and ham on Fridays and fast days. Lady Jerningham, he noted, was a ‘fine woman, thou’ large and extremely sensible but much given to satire’. Part of her sensibleness was to insist that Humbert and Charlotte be vaccinated against smallpox, and she sent to Norwich for her own doctor to carry it out. When spring came and the Jerninghams prepared to return to London, they pressed Lucie and Frédéric to remain at Cossey, in a small cottage in the grounds. But Frédéric had business in London to attend to; and Lucie was once again pregnant–her seventh pregnancy in as many years–and feeling very ill. Fearing that she might again miscarry, she preferred to be near good doctors. The pleasant months in the country came to an end. They had suited Lucie well, just as her years in Troy had suited her. Among the many advantages of her equable nature was a genuine ability to make the most of wherever she found herself, and a refusal to spend time regretting or anticipating.
For all the generosity of their English hosts, the French émigrés were seldom very happy in their state of exile. Those who had not grown up speaking English–the great majority–found the language hard; they hated the cold; they considered the fruit ‘bad, sour and half ripe’ and the tarts watery under their crusts of ‘half-cooked dough’. When the Marchese de Caracciolo wrote to the King of Naples that in England he had discovered a country of ‘22 religions and two sauces’, these were not words of praise. Fretting about events at home, mourning those who had gone to the guillotine, many of the émigrés had become crabby and quarrelsome, feeding, as Lucie had remarked, on gossip and rumour. They were being devoured, observed Mallet du Pan, editor of one of London’s three French language papers, Le Mercure Britannique, and briefly a spy for the British government, ‘by an indomitable spirit of discord, malice and despotism’.
And many were extremely badly off, particularly the widows with young children, and the elderly clerics, living in damp dark lodgings in Southwark or Somerstown, mostly on a diet of potatoes, the staple food of the poor which the French much despised. Chateaubriand, who began his period of exile in a garret off Holborn and was capable of feeling aggrieved in almost any circumstance in which he found himself, wrote later that ‘I was eaten up with hunger…I sucked linen rags dipped in water, I chewed grass and paper. When I went past bakeries I was horribly tormented.’ Chateaubriand soon gravitated to smarter lodgings in Marylebone.
Some of the worst poverty was alleviated by a number of charit able ventures, both public and private. Jean-François de la Marche, Bishop of Saint-Pol de Léon, had fled to England from Brittany in the spring of 1791. Though he was over 60, his health was good and he set up a Committee for the Relief of the French Clergy and Laity in Golden Square, where he began distributing relief at the rate of 1 shilling a day for adult men, and half as much for women and servants. Reports to the committee, listing the worst cases, spoke of ‘Mme de D…dead of hunger…she has left a paralysed husband and three sons, all three sick’ and ‘Mme de B…left without anything and five children who are completely naked’. As needs increased, the administration of the fund was taken over by the government. In its editorials The Times urged Londoners to respond generously: ‘Should this country,’ the paper asked, ‘not afford some further protection to these unfortunate strangers, whither must they fly?’
But as the months and then the years passed, even those who had arrived with money began to run out of funds. Our fortunes, wrote the Marquis de Tremane to the Prince de Bouillon, a rich and philanthropic Frenchman who did a great deal to support those worst off, ‘are simply not lasting as long as our persecution’. Some of the émigrés fell ill, others lost their jobs. M. de Rodire, who taught French, ‘lost his scholars’. Mlle le Boucher went mad. The disastrous Quiberon expedition in 1795, after which many of those who were not killed in battle were guillotined under the émigré laws, had left many hundreds of widows and small children, reduced to selling off, one by one, all their possessions. For a single year, the committee estimated that it needed to raise at least £150,000 for the destitute émigrés, a quarter of it going to members of the nobility. Some of the money went on health, the Middlesex Hospital having agreed in 1793 to open two special wards for ‘sick French clergy’. Most of them were reported to suffer from bad eyesight and ‘grande faiblesse’, extreme feebleness, though there were official complaints about the number of leeches used in a single year–36,100–and the quantity of wine the French patients drank (49 dozen bottles). Could some of these French priests, asked The Times, not be persuaded to help get in the harvest?
But it was not all grim. Lucie was only one of many writers who later pointed out that wherever possible, even in the midst of misery, the French émigrés remained astonishingly cheerful and that when they got together, they laughed. The French, remarked Lucie, ‘are by nature gay, so that although we were desolate, ruined and furious, we nonetheless succeeded in preserving our good humour’. Though few could afford a carriage–the Abbé Baston, who found London ‘monstrously big’, complained that his long walks were ruined by impudent women who buffeted him off the pavements–and very few owned the changes of dress necessary to go out in society, most nonetheless took pleasure in brightly coloured, noisy, smelly, bustling Georgian London.
They went, when they had the money, to the vast new Drury Lane theatre, or to the Vauxhall and the Ranelagh pleasure gardens, where they sat under arbours of honeysuckle and roses and listened to music or danced late into the night. They strolled along Charing Cross, through Leicester Square and Piccadilly, and watched street shows of freaks, midgets, women gladiators and even mathematical pigs, and if they were lucky they saw the ‘amazing Learn’d Dog’ which could answer questions on Ovid’s Metamorphoses, knew the Greek alphabet and could tell the time. For the more robust, there was bear-baiting and cock-fighting.
The Abbé Tardy, who wrote a guide to help his compatriots navigate the hazards of this alien land, recommended excursions to Hackney, ‘the richest village in Europe’, and to the ‘mountain of Sydenham’ to admire the views over London. Those who wished to learn to swim he directed to the Peerless Pool, near Finsbury Square. Good coffee, he warned, was all but impossible to find; best to drink port wine, ‘which the climate of England demands’. On the subject of boiled vegetables in white sauces, and cold boiled meat, which his readers should expect to encounter if they stayed in a pension, the Abbé was very gloomy.
When not weakened by illness, the French émigrés, whatever their class and background, were extremely resourceful. In workshops up and down Marylebone, women who had grown up surrounded by servants, never doing anything that resembled work, now embroidered chiffon dresses and made straw hats, sending the men to the Cornhill to buy the straw, and giving the youngest women the unenviable task of selling the hats to milliners. Two hundred priests made carpets for the Marquis of Buckingham, while monks entertained Lord Bridgewater’s guests by strolling up and down the lawns of his country estate, reading their breviaries. Jean-Baptiste Cléry, Louis XVI’s valet, gave readings from his account of the King’s tearful parting from his family. Jean-Gabriel Peltier had a miniature guillotine built of walnut and, appealing to the macabre and ghoulish in Georgian England, announced: ‘Today we guillotine a goose, tomorrow a duck.’ Mlle Merelle gave harp lessons; M. de Gaumont bound books; the Marquis de Chavannes sold coal and the Comte de Belinaye wine. M. d’Albignac tossed salads at fashionable dinner parties. The Comtesse de Guery’s ice creams became popular with the Prince of Wales; and when the Abbé Delille, the ‘blind bard of emigration’, reciting Milton in French in the Duchess of Devonshire’s drawing room, reached the part about the King’s execution, his listeners wept. Pierre Danloux, bitter foe in Paris of David, spent ten years in England painting portraits–among them that of Betsy de Fitz-James–charging 15 guineas for a bust and 50 for a full-length picture. Dispossessed, sad and fearful for their future, they complained, as Lucie noted, remarkably little.
Soho, first populated by the French Protestant Huguenots fleeing persecution in the 1680s, became a gathering place for émigré writers and artists. They congregated in a bookshop run by a former Benedictine monk, who used his own library to start his business, or at the émigré school opened by the Abbé Carron in the Tottenham Court Road; and they met after Mass on Sundays in St Patrick’s Chapel in Sutton Street, consecrated in 1792 as the first Catholic chapel to be built that was not attached to an embassy. A few wrote novels, often heavily autobiographical in nature, full of English ‘mylords’ and examples of ‘délicatesse’, which fed the new appetite for romantic fiction on both sides of the Channel. The Comtesse de Flahaut, Talleyrand’s mistress and mother of his child, sick of making straw hats, wrote her immensely successful Adèle de Senange. Those who had money were expected to share it. When guests left the Duchesse de Fitz-James’s soirées, they were supposed to slip some money under their plates.
And some young women, who could find no way to make money, contracted hasty marriages, like that of the Comtesse d’Osmond’s daughter, Adèle, who at 17 accepted the hand of the 42-year-old General de Boigne, marrying him 12 days after their first meeting. The Comtesse d’Osmond was the Dillon relation who had come to Hautefontaine when Lucie was a child to beg the Archbishop’s help at court, and who had much disapproved of the lax morals of the house. Both Adèle and her mother made very little effort to conceal their distaste for the General, who was both rich and generous; soon, their criticisms and mockery were being repeated around London and General Boigne’s shortcomings became a topic for gossip throughout the European émigré world.
Lucie and Frédéric were beginning to experience money problems of their own. Forced to flee Paris at such short notice without returning to Le Bouilh, they had brought almost nothing out with them. They could have applied to the Bishop of Saint-Pol de Léon, but felt that this would embarrass their rich relations. Though Frédéric was considered a traitor by Mme de Rothe for his early enthusiasm for the revolution, the Archbishop offered to write to Lord Dillon on their behalf, pointing out that however badly her husband had behaved, this should not be used as a reason not to help Lucie. She was, after all, his niece. When he had been the head of the family, ‘in my days of glory and opulence’, he had felt an obligation to provide ‘for all my relations in trouble’. The letter yielded nothing. The single invitation to his box at the opera was Lord Dillon’s sole gesture towards his French niece.
On returning to London, however, Lucie and Frédéric learnt of a sad but very welcome legacy. A letter came from Martinique, informing them of the death of M. Combes, Lucie’s much-loved tutor at Hautefontaine, whom Arthur had appointed Registrar of Martinique. Living in Arthur’s house on the island, M. Combes had managed to save 60,000 francs. While the de la Tour du Pins had been in Albany, M. Combes had repeatedly tried to send them money, only to be thwarted at every turn by Lucie’s stepmother, who had borrowed the capital–against interest–and found constant excuses for not paying it back. Not long before his death, M. Combes had written to say that the grief of knowing Lucie to be in a foreign country, without money, was slowly killing him. With interest accrued over the years, M. Combes’s legacy amounted to slightly more than 71,000 francs.
The life of the French planters in exile was considerably more comfortable than that of the French mainland émigrés. Most had managed to bring out with them at least part of their considerable fortune and many continued to receive rents and revenues from their plantations in the West Indies. Since many had settled in Marylebone, in fashionable houses in and around Manchester Square, also home to the richer noble Parisians, the area was referred to as ‘le Faubourg Saint-Germain’. It was here that Lucie’s stepmother had found a house, and where she entertained on a lavish scale. Until news of M. Combes’s bequest reached London, she had treated Lucie with affection. Overnight, she became distant and increasingly hostile. Referring Frédéric to her Creole agent for the money, she pleaded that funds were not arriving and that the sugar harvest had been poor. Small sums were advanced, with extreme reluctance. ‘We were given as alms,’ noted Lucie bitterly, ‘what was really our own property.’
Not willing to be a constant burden on Lady Jerningham, and in any case well aware of Mme d’Hénin’s proprietary feelings towards Frédéric, they now accepted her invitation to share her house in Richmond. Lucie, worrying constantly about money, was also conscious of the need for clothes for the coming baby. She wished they had never left Cossey.
Richmond lay 9 miles west of central London, reached along the river, through countryside filled by market gardens and hamlets going down to the water’s edge. The Abbé de Blanc, an early visitor, described it as an immense garden offering the eye ‘a kind of image of earthly paradise’. A bridge had been built in 1777 to join Richmond to Twickenham, and Garrick’s theatre, just off the Green, was popular with both residents and visitors. Richmond itself remained a charming small country town, with views across the fields to spires and the white gables of farmhouses, and in the distance the grey towers of Windsor. Up and down the Thames, watermen waited to ferry travellers across. Rich merchants, wanting summer houses close to the city, had bought land on which to build imposing new mansions and villas; cottages had gone up in the lanes and alleys behind. The mail arrived at 9 in the morning, and there was a regular coach service all through the day to London from the courtyard of the Old Ship Inn.
Since 1789, some 40 French émigrés had settled in Richmond, most of them aristocrats and royalists. They found life cheaper and less crowded than in London. One of the first to arrive had been Amélie de Lauzun, wife of Arthur’s faithless friend, though by 1797 she was dead, having returned too soon to Paris and gone to the guillotine for treason not long after her husband. Horace Walpole, living nearby at Strawberry Hill, befriended many of the émigrés, playing lotto with them in the evenings, and referring to Richmond as ‘une véritable petty France’. Though frequently impatient at the endless gossip about their ‘absurd countrymen’, he had been horrified by the news of the September massacres, and repelled by the fact that so many of the ‘perpetrators or advocates for such universal devastation’ had been philosophers, geometricians and astronomers.
When the Princesse d’Hénin had first fled to England in September 1792, she and Lally-Tollendal had shared a house in a damp valley in Surrey at the foot of Box Hill, 20 miles from London, with Mme de Staël, her lover the Comte de Narbonne and Talleyrand. Juniper Hall, a red-brick former coaching inn, had acquired a reputation for intrigue and scandal, both Mme de Staël and the Princesse d’Hénin living openly with their lovers in what were described as the ‘elegantly disordered alcoves of Les Liaisons Dangereuses’. Though their view that despite the horrors and the excesses, the revolution had been both necessary and inevitable had made them suspect in the eyes of both Pitt’s government and most of the exiled royalists, Mme de Staël’s brilliance and fascination had drawn many visitors to Juniper Hall. But in the spring of 1793, Mme de Staël had tired of England, telling Gibbon that the Tories had crushed all serious argument and made London the most boring city on earth, and she returned to Switzerland and to her parents. The author Fanny Burney, who had recently left her position at court and lived nearby, met her future husband Alexandre d’Arblay at Juniper Hall. She described the weak but scholarly Lally-Tollendal as the Cicero of the French Revolution.
When Juniper Hall was given up, Princesse d’Hénin and Lally-Tollendal had moved to Richmond, to a small white gabled house in Osmond Row, and it was here that Lucie, Frédéric and the children were invited to occupy the ground floor. Though pretty, the house was extremely cramped. Lucie shared one small room with Charlotte, Frédéric a second with Humbert. It is not clear where Marguerite slept. There was nowhere for them to sit or to receive visitors, other than in the Princesse d’Hénin’s drawing room. Lucie admired Frédéric’s aunt; but she was not fond of her. She found her manners too autocratic and her tongue too sharp. The Princesse’s bad temper and outspoken views, which had grown sharper with time and misfortune, had already alienated much of the émigré community. Every day, Lucie would write, she was forced to suffer ‘showers of pinpricks’. Lally-Tollendal was scarcely better liked. In the royalist salons, he was referred to as ‘the people’s dregs’; Lucie, who appreciated his kindness, considered him the ‘most timorous of gentlemen’ and had little patience with the way that he never dared risk any amusing remark for fear that it offend the Princesse d’Hénin.
In the evenings in Osmond Row, they were joined by other disaffected émigrés, all of them at odds with the royalist Relief Committee. From time to time, Chateaubriand came to read aloud from his new novel, Atala. Lucie, at 28 considerably younger than the rest of the party, and describing herself later as ‘laughter-loving’, found these evenings very tedious. She was bored not only by the ceaseless political debate, but by Lally-Tollendal’s insistence on discussing his recent Défense des Emigrés, a long tirade, not so much against the revolution itself as the arbitrary injustice of the émigré laws, which condemned them all, regardless of their views and positions, as traitors and cowards. Adèle de Boigne, in her acerbic memoirs, noted that his contemporaries referred to Lally-Tollendal as ‘the fattest of sensitive men’, whereas they might have done better to add that he was ‘the flattest of humorous’ ones, always weeping and snivelling over the past.
But Richmond was not without its pleasures. That summer, the Princesse de Bouillon, the extremely ugly companion of the Prince de Salm, of whom Lucie had grown fond in Paris just before the revolution, arrived in Richmond to collect a legacy left her by the unfortunate Amélie de Lauzun. In the eight years since they had last met, Mme de Bouillon had grown even uglier, her back more humped, her ‘yellow, dried skin’ clinging to her bones, her mouth so full of black and broken teeth that she was terrifying to look at. But the Princess had lost neither her charm nor her wit, and soon introduced Lucie to the Duchess of Devonshire, who gave a lunch party for the French émigrés in the newly done-up Chiswick House. The once famously beautiful Duchess was now 40 and worried about losing her sight; her looks were going, and she had become, as a friend maliciously wrote, ‘corpulent…her complexion coarse, one eye gone and her neck immense’. The Devonshire House Circle, with its Whig aristocracy and its passion for the theatre and gambling, satirised by Sheridan in The School for Scandal, was winding down, and the Duchess spent more of her time at Chiswick House, calling it her ‘earthly paradise’. She had planted lilac, honeysuckle and roses near the house, to scent the air. Later, the Duchess’s sister, Lady Bessborough, invited Lucie and Frédéric to a dinner at her house in Roehampton. And there was a visit to Hampton Court, where Lucie again met Anne Wellesley, with whom she had played as a child. Lucie, though seven months pregnant, loved these outings.
The Princesse de Bouillon now offered to exchange her larger and more comfortable lodgings in Richmond for the two ground-floor rooms in Osmond Row, saying that she was lonely on her own. They had scarcely moved into their new home when Lucie gave birth to a son, a ‘strong and beautiful child’. She called him Edward, after his godfather, Lady Jerningham’s son and her former page at her wedding. There were now once again three children in the family: Humbert, who had turned 9, the plump Charlotte, almost 2, and the new baby. While Marguerite cooked, Lucie sewed and ironed; an English nurse was hired to help with Edward. Humbert’s English was so good that on his way to school he called at the local shop to place the daily order.
One of her first visitors after the birth was the Chevalier Jerningham, who wrote to tell his sister-in-law that he had not found Lucie in good health. Lady Jerningham’s response was to charge him with finding somewhere in Richmond for her niece’s growing family, sending £45 to put down on a charming small early Jacobean terrace house at number 3 The Green. It belonged to a famous Drury Lane actress who never used it, but who had furnished its very small rooms with perfect taste. It was, wrote Lucie, ‘beyond anything we could have wished’.
It is sometimes as if the lives of Frédéric and Lucie were marked with particular tragedy; they accept, they endure, they recover, only to be struck down again. They do not complain. Georgian London was a sickly, unhealthy place, even if vaccination was making huge strides against smallpox and the plague had disappeared. Fevers–typhus, dysentery, measles, influenza, tuberculosis–still struck out of the blue, rampaging unchecked in epidemic waves. At a time when far more people died young than old, parents could not expect to see all their children survive beyond infancy. But Lucie and Frédéric had already lost Séraphine, and Lucie had miscarried three babies and seen another die at birth. Even for the times, her losses were extreme.
The day that they were due to move into their new terrace house, Edward, just 3 months old, caught pleurisy. The autumn was damp and cold and Lucie blamed the English nurse for not taking better care of him. Within days, Edward was dead. Lucie, who had been breast-feeding him, fell ‘very ill, and was’ she would write, ‘myself near death’. ‘The grief’, she wrote many years later, was such that ‘it curdled my milk’. This time, she took many months to recover. In her memoirs, she made little of Edward’s death, preferring to remain silent. But the gaps in her narrative, at moments of tragedy like this, were telling. It was as if she retired into herself, and simply concentrated on surviving; and, after a period, she picked up the thread again.
Getting rid of the English nursemaid, she now had only Marguerite to help her. Humbert went to school every afternoon, before going on to spend an hour or so at the home of a French émigré called M. de Thuisy and his four young sons. Lucie and Frédéric grew fond of this family and M. de Thuisy made a point of calling every week on the day Lucie did the ironing, when he would sit by the fire as they talked, handing her the hot irons, which he had first cleaned on brick and sandpaper. England was a country, Lucie was discovering, where those not possessed of a great fortune could still live comfortably. She delighted in the daily visits of the butcher to the house and in the fact that there was never any haggling over price or weight.
They were once again very short of money. Lucie’s stepmother’s repayments had trickled almost to a halt. The kind M. de Thuisy, observing their anxiety, found ways of bringing her sewing, particularly linen to be marked, at which she excelled. One morning, when they were down to their last 600 francs, a despairing letter arrived from M. de Chambeau, still in Spain waiting to be allowed to return home and himself left with nothing. His rich uncle had recently died in France, leaving him his entire fortune; but as a proscribed émigré, liable to be arrested if he returned to France, he was not permitted to inherit. Frédéric, taking most of their remaining money, hastened to a banker and took out a bill of exchange, payable to M. de Chambeau in Madrid. They now had a single £5 note left. As if by instinct, one morning soon after, Edward Jerningham rode to Richmond to call on them. Lucie, who was very fond of him, regarded him somewhat as the younger brother she had never had. Edward had just turned 21 and come into a sizeable inheritance. As he left the house, Lucie saw him slip something into her work-basket, but he appeared so embarrassed that she said nothing. After he had ridden away, she found an envelope with the words: ‘Given to my dear cousin, by her friend Ned’. It contained a note for £100.
Bit by bit, Lucie started going out again. She was once again in touch with her childhood friend, Amédée de Duras, with whom she had often played music in the Faubourg Saint-Germain, and who had fled to London soon after the revolution. Amédée had recently married Claire de Kersaint, the rich only daughter of the naval hero in the American wars, who had gone to the guillotine at about the same time as Arthur, accused of spying for England. Kersaint had tried, but failed, to kill himself while in prison. He had sat briefly with Arthur in the Assembly.
The marriage, at which the Princesse d’Hénin stood in for Claire’s mother, who was ill, brought together the cream of the Faubourg Saint-Germain in exile. Like Mme de Staël, Claire was too manly to be beautiful, but her somewhat wary expression suggested both intelligence and great determination. She was small, just over 5 feet, with brown eyes, black hair and a small mouth. Writing later about those who had been young in the Terror, she would say that they ‘would carry to their graves the premature melancholy that filled their souls’. Lucie was devoted to Amédée but deplored his haughty manner. After the young couple moved nearby to Teddington, she spent many hours comforting Claire for his infidelities, calming her storms of fury and despair, while reprimanding Amédée for his waywardness. As Lucie noted, Claire, who was 22, wanted romance, while Amédée was the least romantic of men. Lucie counselled patience and forbearance: she told Claire to try to make their house more pleasant, so that Amédée would not wish so often to get away; but then Lucie’s own marriage remained an exceptionally happy one, and her feelings for Claire would always be ambivalent.
When Claire gave birth to a daughter, Félicie, Lucie was asked to be her godmother. Though increasingly accepting of her new friend, she remarked, in the clear and critical tone that she frequently adopted when describing behaviour that was in some way wanting, that beneath the younger woman’s apparent passion and intelligence, lay ‘arrogance and tyranny’. In Teddington, Claire became increasingly distraught; she wept incessantly, while Amédée grew ever more bored. Lucie told her that Amédée hated scenes, and pointed out that love could not be commanded. ‘Having lectured the husband,’ she wrote later, ‘I consoled the wife.’ Her troubled friendship with Claire, which was to last for many years, would cause her much unhappiness.
Shortly after the birth of a second daughter, called Clara, Amédée, a First Gentleman of the Bedchamber, was summoned to do his tour of duty at Mitau, in the Duchy of Courland where Louis XVIII maintained his court in exile. The children were to be left with Mme de Thuisy. But on reaching Mitau, Amédée was informed that the King had let it be known that he would receive no one who had sat in the Assembly in Paris at the time of his brother’s trial and execution. Admiral Kersaint had been present that day: Claire would not be welcome at court. In 1795, Louis XVIII had drawn up a list of names of those who had rallied to the new French government, according to the wickedness of their deeds and the punishment they would receive. Those who had voted for the death of the King had an ‘e’ by their name, for écartelé, drawn and quartered, then there were those with a ‘p’ for pendu, hanged, those with an ‘r’ for roué, to be put to the rack, and those he called ‘heedless, pusillanimous and stupid’, who had a ‘g’ for galères, the galleys. Lafayette and two of the de Lameth brothers had ‘r’s.
One of Lucie’s neighbours in Richmond was a Miss Lydia White, a well-known local bluestocking, who, together with her unmarried sister, held musical evenings. Enjoying Lucie’s stories of her life in Albany, they pressed her to borrow books from their well-stocked library. When the two sisters moved away from Richmond, Lucie, knowing that she could not afford one of the many costly circulating libraries, resigned herself to a bookless life. A little later, a box full of books arrived from Hookman’s Library in London, with a letter telling her that she was entitled to request any number of French and English volumes from the stock of 20,000 books, and that if she put in her order by the seven o’clock morning coach, she would receive them the same evening. She never learnt who was responsible for the gift, but assumed it was the Misses White.
Other acts of kindness touched her. An alderman lived in the next door house on the Green. Having befriended the talkative Humbert, and learnt from him details of the family’s misfortunes, he sent round a constant supply of fruit from his hothouses, with notes saying that they were for ‘the young gentleman’. He also had pots of sweet-smelling plants placed all along their shared railings, so that their scent floated into Lucie’s rooms. And there were occasional outings, to Teddington to practise music with Amédée, to London to visit Lady Jerningham or to hear Johann Baptist Cramer play at a private party in London, where Lucie, accustomed to the respect accorded music and musicians in France, was shocked that no one stopped talking to listen.
For a while, the émigré community was full of rumours of a possible invasion by the French, and it was said that Napoleon might land with his men on the Norfolk Broads. Lady Jerningham’s reaction was to declare that she would raise an army of ‘stout robust young female peasants, dairy maids, servants, field workers, the wives and daughters of rustics’ and arm them with pikes. They were to wear neat plain uniforms and their task would be to drive the cattle and horses inland, away from the coast where they might be seized by the invaders.
One week, Lucie and Frédéric accompanied their old friend M. de Poix on an expedition to Windsor, Oxford, Blenheim and Stowe, pausing along the way to inspect the country houses open to visitors in the absence of their owners. With her not always well-concealed disdain for the English, Lucie observed that it was only in their country settings that English gentlemen ‘really became “grands seigneurs”’. Enjoying herself, she also remarked on the improved weather: away from London it seemed to her no worse than that of Holland.
Though they had at last extracted some more money out of Lucie’s stepmother–with the result that they were now cut by that entire side of the family–Frédéric was thinking of arranging for Lucie to return briefly to Paris to see what could be salvaged of their property. There was again news from France that in order to recover confiscated property, owners had to apply for it in person. Lucie would, they both thought, be able to travel in safety under her English name, though the English did not look kindly on the French who chose to cross backwards and forwards between the two countries. ‘What loyalty can be expected from men, who on their arrival at Paris, proceed even to the length of taking the oath of hatred against Royalty,’ asked The Times, ‘while in this country they affect a strong attachment to Kingly government?’
Lucie herself was extremely reluctant to go; she feared not the dangers, but the parting from Frédéric and the children. It was on the day she was due to leave Richmond that news came of the fate of two émigrés, men who had partnered her at dances in Paris before the revolution, and who had recently returned secretly to Paris on the same mission. They had been caught, and shot. Lucie’s trip was abandoned. The days passed very slowly. Her health was poor and she felt permanently listless. ‘My life in Richmond,’ she wrote later, ‘was very monotonous.’ She was once again pregnant. She was 29: this was her eighth pregnancy.
Lady Jerningham need not have feared a French invasion: Napoleon’s eye was on Egypt, where the writ of the Ottoman Empire was weak and where the Beys who governed it were subjecting French merchants to constant vexations. Egypt also promised to be the route by which it would be possible to strike at England’s coveted possessions in India. Having led his ragged, exhausted troops to victory after victory in Italy, Napoleon had returned to Paris a conquering hero, who had changed the map of Europe in France’s favour and made the revolution seem respectable again. The Egyptian expedition, however, proved expensive in men, decimated by ferocious Mameluke warriors, eye diseases and the plague, while Admiral Nelson had laid waste to the French navy off Alexandria, effectively cutting off the French from their homeland. Napoleon, remarked General Kleber, was the kind of general who needed a monthly income of 10,000 men.
On 23 August 1799, leaving his army behind in Egypt and passing off his defeats as victories, Napoleon set sail for France. He landed in Fréjus on 9 October. The Austrians were driving the French out of Germany, the Russians harrying them in Italy; Paris was in a state of unease. Barras, the only one of the five original Directors still in power, was negotiating with the exiled Louis XVIII for a return of the Bourbon monarchy; the Abbé Sieyès, whose pamphlet about the Third Estate was widely regarded as one of the defining documents of the revolution, was plotting on the contrary for a stronger executive. (When asked where he had spent the revolution, Sieyès memorably replied: ‘I survived.’)
Napoleon, approached both by Barras and by Sieyès for his support, agreed to back Sieyès, on condition that a new Constitution be drafted. On 9 November–18 brumaire–an emergency was declared. Napoleon was given the command of the troops in the Paris region, the Directoire was overthrown, and Barras was removed, though not without some resistance from the assembled deputies, which evaporated when confronted by the bayonets of Napoleon’s grenadiers. The days of the corrupt, incompetent Directoire were over.
Ten years of constant war and political turmoil had made the French long for peace and order. Napoleon was a man untainted by the venality of the Directoire, someone who could put both the revolution and its chaotic aftermath to rest. In him, royalists chose to see someone capable of restoring the monarchy; the former Jacobins preferred to believe that he could prevent it. Napoleon deftly engineered that authority would be vested in three Consuls, elected for ten years. There would be a Council of State to draft bills, a Tribunate to discuss them, and a Legislative Assembly to vote on them. After a brief interim period, a moderate lawyer, Jean-Jacques de Cambacérès, and a disciple of Rousseau’s called Charles-François Lebrun, joined Napoleon as Consuls. ‘Bonaparte has his eye on a dictatorship,’ warned an English agent, reporting to his superiors in London. ‘He wants to play Cromwell…’
In London, the news of Napoleon’s return and the fall of the Directoire was greeted with cautious optimism. The last two years had disillusioned many of the émigrés, France appearing to be as oppressive in peace as it was in war. The revolution, argued the émigré journalists, had turned out to be synonymous not with liberty but with destruction. But there was also a sense of excitement that it might at last be possible to go home in safety.
At Cossey, where Frédéric, Lucie and the children had joined Lady Jerningham to spend another winter in the country, letters arrived from de Brouquens and Augustin de Lameth urging them to return. Since England and France were still at war, they were advised to travel via Holland on German passports. Lucie was seven months pregnant and Lady Jerningham suggested that she let Frédéric go alone. She unnerved her niece still further by saying that she would be happy to bring up the new baby as her own. Lucie rejected both ideas: she had no intention of being parted either from her baby or from Frédéric. And she feared that if he were obliged to flee again, he would make his way to Le Bouilh, and then to Spain, where it might take her many months to join him.
Unwilling at first to believe that there could be any serious difficulties in obtaining French passports, Frédéric went to call on the Bishop of Arras, the sole accredited minister of the court in exile with the power to grant them. The Bishop was unhelpful. He was not interested in assisting anyone, he told Frédéric, who did not have the patience to wait until the counter-revolution and the restoration of the Bourbons. In the event, Dutch passports were secured, and passages booked for the family and Marguerite on a Royal Navy packet travelling from Great Yarmouth to Cuxhaven. Because of terrible weather, gale winds blowing from the north-west, they spent a miserable month waiting in dreary lodgings in Great Yarmouth, unable even to visit nearby Cossey lest the captain suddenly decide to weigh anchor. The day Lucie’s baby was due was getting uncomfortably close, and she was terrified that she might give birth before reaching Paris. Eventually, at the very end of December, they woke to a fine morning and the captain summoned the passengers on board.
The sea was still very rough, and the 14 French, German and Russian passengers huddled in a single cabin. Lucie found a bunk, keeping Charlotte close to her, but the hatches had been battened down and there was no fresh air. Frédéric and Marguerite, overcome with sickness, ‘lay like dead things’. Only Humbert remained on his feet. The boat heaved and tossed for 48 hours, and those passengers who were not actually sick got drunk on brandy and punch. Lucie would later remember these two days as among the most unpleasant of her life. For a while, it seemed as if they might have to put back or, if the ice was very thick in the estuary, land on a small island nearby.
But the weather cleared, the ice proved less thick than had been feared, and the boat anchored at Cuxhaven. A kind gesture on the part of the captain, by providing her with a small boat to take her closer to the jetty with Charlotte, nearly proved fatal. With the boat rocking from side to side, Lucie slipped and was only prevented from falling into the sea by two sailors who, while hauling her up on shore, at the same time yanked her arms in such a way that she was in the most terrible pain. Clutching Charlotte in aching arms, she was barely able to reach Frédéric, waiting close by with a cart.
Every inn in Cuxhaven was full of émigrés trying to reach France. Only after some hours did a landlord, taking pity on Lucie’s condition, allow the family in, and provided straw mattresses and blankets for them to sleep on the floor. Lucie had by now developed a high fever. She became delirious, and Frédéric feared that she might miscarry. A doctor was found, and through an interpreter Lucie described her accident. He prescribed a strong sedative and applied a plaster made of barley boiled in red wine to her painful side. Twenty-four hours later, she woke, feeling perfectly well again. She was, as she frequently remarked, blessed with excellent health and a determined nature.