While Lucie was recovering, Frédéric managed to buy a small barouche and a horse for 200 francs. On a fine morning, they set out for Paris, but the weather soon turned stormy, with squalls of driving rain; Frédéric and Humbert sat hunched at the front under a single umbrella, while Lucie, Charlotte and Marguerite cowered under the hood. At Bremen, they paused for two days in an inn to dry out by the warmth of one of Germany’s immense wood stoves. When they took to the road again, deep snow lay on the open heath; the barouche turned over in the snowdrifts, leaving them shaken but unhurt.
Late one evening, they reached the Hanoverian garrison town of Wildeshausen, where a regimental ball was to be held that night. Every room was already taken. They were huddling around the fire in the town’s only inn when an officer, saying that he expected to be dancing all night, offered them his room. Greatly relieved, they ordered supper to be sent up. It was now that Lucie realised that she was going into labour. Frédéric became distraught; Lucie tried to comfort him, saying that babies could, after all, be born anywhere; but, she wrote later, ‘it is impossible to describe his despair’.
With difficulty, for none of them spoke German, a French barber, who had deserted during the Seven Years War, was found to interpret; he in turn fetched the doctor, an elegant young officer who came straight from the ball. Since Lucie lay swaddled in her cloak, it took some minutes to explain the nature of the problem. Once he had grasped the situation, the doctor, helped by the barber, Denis, efficiently arranged for the family to move into two un-occupied rooms belonging to a rich farmer on the edge of the town, Lucie as always supervising every step. ‘As I was not yet in much pain,’ she wrote later, ‘I had time to attend to all our small arrangements.’ Increasingly, it was Lucie rather than the anxious and good-natured Frédéric who tended to take charge.
It was here, on the morning of 13 February 1800, that a small, frail girl was born, ‘so thin and delicate that I hardly dared hope she would live’. Lucie estimated that she was about six weeks premature. They called her Cécile, after Frédéric’s sister. She was baptised in the Catholic church in Wildeshausen; Denis and his wife, who spoke not a word of French, acted as godparents.
Within hours of the birth, the local magistrate summoned Frédéric and informed him that they would have to leave the town within 48 hours, the Electorate of Hanover having strict rules about French émigrés travelling on what were clearly false Danish passports. But when he learnt their real name, he recalled how kindly his nephew had been treated by Frédéric when Minister at The Hague, after which the whole town opened its doors to the travellers and their delicate new baby. When, two weeks later, they left the farmer’s house and set forth again, officers from the garrison, the elegant doctor among them, escorted them on the first lap of their journey towards Holland. Inside the barouche, Lucie clasped Cécile tightly to her, never once exposing her to the ‘icy air of those northern plains’.
At Utrecht, reached after many slow, jolting days on the road, they were surprised to encounter the Princesse d’Hénin, who was on her own way back to Paris. She had paused in Utrecht to visit Lafayette, who, having been freed from five years’ captivity, was living nearby at Vianen and now hoped to be allowed to return to France. During his years in prison he and the Princesse d’Hénin had kept up a secret correspondence, some of his letters written with a toothpick in vinegar and charcoal on scraps of paper.
With new passports from the French Ambassador to Holland, whom Frédéric knew from his time in the French Foreign Ministry–papers as false as all the rest, stating that the family had never been in England–they travelled on to Paris where Augustin de Lameth had secured lodgings for them in the rue de Miromesnil. The house belonged to a former mistress of the Duc de Bourbon; one of Lucie’s first acts was to drape muslin over the full-length mirrors that covered the walls, saying that it irritated her to keep seeing her reflection at every turn.
It was not just a new century. Though the country was at a low ebb, its factories in ruins, its schools without teachers, its churches closed and its Treasury empty, and though thousands of destitute people wandered the streets of Paris, there was a real feeling that France had at last been delivered from a long nightmare. The revolution was truly over. And it was calm, without the frenzy that had marked the Directoire. Under the three new Consuls, genuine order was gradually being established. The Vendée, where civil war had simmered on, was being pacified. Several of the most unpopular and harsh laws had already been rescinded. Daily newspapers had been reduced from a chaotic 73 to 13, and these were under police surveillance. A new inspector-general of the gendarmerie had been named to fight brigandage, escort prisoners and ‘ensure the safety of people and property’. It was becoming strict and orderly, but after ten years of uncertainty, most found it all extremely reassuring.
And the émigrés were finally coming home, even those who had not dared do so in 1797. Singly and in groups, many on false passports and under assumed names, some wearing the thread-bare fashions of the ancien régime, others in disguise, they were making their way back to the outskirts of the city, venturing into the centre only when they perceived others doing so in safety. By the end of the Terror there had been 146,000 names of émigrés on the proscribed list, men and women prohibited from returning to France. But the Directoire had removed 13,000 of them and the new Consulat looked set to remove many more. The émigrés longed to be home. Whatever their politics and their parties, they longed to find out what was left of former possessions, to learn who had survived and who gone to the guillotine, to discover the shape and mood of the new France. Some were hoping to be reunited with children left behind with servants, fearing that they might have abandoned the old courtesies and gone the way of the merveilleuses and muscadins. ‘It has become as fashionable to come home,’ noted the Comte de Neuilly drily, ‘as it once was to flee.’
It was not, however, as easy or as straightforward as it may have seemed. In positions of power were many people whose new fortunes rested on stolen émigré property, or who feared that they might lose their jobs to better candidates returning from abroad. Over a million people had bought property belonging to the Church or to the émigrés, who were said to have lost possessions valued at some 2 milliard francs. Fouché, the Minister for Police, who had helped himself to several large estates, intended to fight hard against all requests for ‘radiation’, the removal of names from the hated émigré list. Fouché was using spies to gather incriminating information about anti-revolutionary activities during the years of exile.
Lucie and Frédéric were not on the list of the proscribed, but Frédéric’s mother was, even though she had barely stepped outside her convent in the rue des Fossés Saint-Victor. Just the same, they needed certificates to prove that they had never left France. And though these documents were widely known to be fabrications, in due course Lucie was forced to present herself, with her ‘cloud of witnesses’, at her local municipal office. The mayor signed the papers, laughing as he whispered in her ear that he knew that every bit of clothing she was wearing came from England. Frédéric had written to Alexander Hamilton before leaving London asking him to sell their farm in Troy, and was hoping to be able to retrieve or buy back at least some of their former possessions with the money. Hautefontaine, condemned as a nest of aristocrats and ‘non-juror’ priests, had been sold in 1799 to a speculator, together with 1,709 separate pieces of furniture, glass, kitchenware and linen, and could not be got back. But its library of 3,000 books, including 112 volumes of Pancoucke’s Encyclopédie, was intact, carted off to the Château de Compiègne with libraries from other châteaux; and this he was hoping to recover.
In the spring and summer of 1800, the Place Vendôme became Paris’s most elegant social meeting place. It was here, in a building on the corner of the rue Saint-Honoré, that a Commission des Émigrés had been set up to hear cases and hand down verdicts, the favourable ones often the result of handsome bribes. Newly returned émigrés, from Koblenz, Lausanne, Madrid, St Petersburg or London, hastened to the Place Vendôme to greet friends, discuss strategies, talk over plans, enquire about jobs, and to seek, after many years of absence, lost friends and relations. Some had been away for ten years. Not all knew the fate of people they loved. By early autumn, 8,083 requests had been filed with the commission; Fouché managed to reject 1,747 of them. With his lank fair hair, long pale face, staccato voice and jerky movements, Fouché, who had sent some 2,000 Lyonnais to their deaths with the words ‘no mitigation, no delay, no postponement of punishment’, was turning into a man many Parisians feared.
When Chateaubriand returned to Paris in 1800, he expected to ‘descend into Hell’. Instead, in the Champs-Elysées, he was greeted by music, the sound of violins, horns, clarinets and drums sounding out cheerfully to a people intent on normality and reassurance. Given his morose nature, Chateaubriand chose to dwell on the belfries stripped of their bells during the Terror, and the headless statues of saints, but most other émigrés, reaching the city from their years of anxiety and exile, were delighted by the liveliness and sense of order of Paris. It was tranquil, and stable, in a way which might actually last.
The revolution had done away with the salons of the Faubourg Saint-Germain, but now, searching for the familiar in a world torn apart by a hatred that many still found impossible to comprehend, bold aristocratic women began opening their doors once again to those coming from abroad or creeping back into the open after years of terrified concealment. What they longed for was the ‘douceur de vivre’ that had once made their lives so pleasing. One of the first salons to reopen was that of Frédéric’s friend, Mme de Montesson. Now in her 60s, the widow of the Duc d’Orléans had kept her youthful complexion and striking violet eyes, though she moved a little stiffly, telling friends that her bones ached from the 18 months she had spent in prison.
Announcing that she intended to give a dinner at two o’clock every Wednesday, at which the harp would be played and perhaps a book read aloud, Mme de Montesson soon gathered around her a dozen of the surviving luminaries of the ancien régime. It was said that it was in her salon that men wore silk stockings and buckles for the first time since the revolution. The food was excellent, the footmen wore livery and the china came from Sèvres. Elegant and understated, invariably wearing white or becoming shades of cream, Mme de Montesson let it be known that she would rise to greet no one, except for Napoleon’s wife, Josephine, or in order to show to the door someone she did not wish to receive again, and that she would tolerate no politics in her salon. Guests quickly read into her ‘open’ or ‘shut’ expression whether they were in favour or not; just the barest lowering of her voice was enough to keep passions in check. According to her great-niece, Mme Bochsa, no one knew better how to freeze people out with ‘nuanced and knowing politeness’.
Just the same, most people found Mme de Montesson more intimate and welcoming that Mme de Genlis, who, though better educated, was prone to pedantry. In her new salon, Mme de Genlis was blaming Voltaire and the Encyclopédistes for having paved the way for murderers like Robespierre. In the rue de Cléry, Mme Vigée-Lebrun, allowed back from St Petersburg only after 254 artists signed a petition on her behalf, had opened her long gallery to a resident music society. Musical soirées were becoming fashionable once again, leading the Goncourt brothers later to observe that many in the audience, believing that it was bon ton to listen to music, were in fact ‘heroically bored’ at having to do so. It was in the rue de Cléry that The Marriage of Figaro and Don Giovanni were sung for the first time in the original Italian.
And in a house lent to Mme de Beauvau in the Faubourg Saint-Germain, the three surviving ‘princesses combinées’–d’Hénin, de Poix and de Beauvau–met again, receiving their visitors stretched out on chaises longues, drinking coffee from a gold coffee pot. Mme de Poix had gone completely blind. Mme de Beauvau was sharing her very small house with her sister-in-law, the former abbess of Saint-Antoine des Champs, as well as two former ladies-in-waiting to Marie Antoinette, and Ourika, the Senegalese girl given to her as a gift by the Chevalier de Boufflers. Lally-Tollendal, who was considered very greedy by the princesses, was often tearful when talking about the past.
In these salons, Lucie and Frédéric rediscovered a world and friends that they had almost forgotten. Mme de Staël, at work on a novel, was gathering around her political figures of every persuasion, artists, émigrés, old Jacobins and royalists, talking, arguing, reasoning far into the night as she had always done. Many of the old nobility, Lucie observed, were hastening to make their peace with Napoleon, though seldom taking the trouble to conceal their contempt for his rough ways when among friends.
It was not long before they encountered Talleyrand, enjoying his position as Minister for Foreign Affairs, who asked them whether there was anything they needed. Lucie, remarking wryly that Talleyrand had ‘steered his fortunes with much skill’, told him that their financial problems were such that they had no choice but to settle at Le Bouilh. ‘So much the worse for you,’ Talleyrand replied, ‘but it’s folly.’ There was always money, he added, when you needed it. Talleyrand, noted Lucie, was as ever ‘amiable, but not really helpful’. A young English visitor called Catherine Wilmot, finding herself next to him at a reception, left a memorable if somewhat fanciful description of the man now rising to be the most important statesman of the age. He was wearing, she noted, an embroidered scarlet velvet coat and ruffles. ‘At a distance, his Face is large, pale and soft, like a Cream Cheese, but on approaching nearer, cunning and rank hypocrisy supplant all other resemblances…Gobbling like a Duck in my ear about the vicissitudes of fortune and happiness…he presented me with his fat paw.’ Talleyrand himself had given a magnificent ball in the rue du Bac shortly before Lucie’s return. ‘All these parties,’ wrote a returning noblewoman, ‘were lovely; above all, they possessed the charm of things that you thought you had lost and now discovered were still there.’
What soon became clear, however, was that a quite separate and very different kind of salon life was developing in Paris. It was more frivolous and considerably more luxurious and it was taking place, not in the faded surroundings of the ancien régime, with their chipped plates and empty rooms, but in the magnificent newly decorated houses of the agioteurs–the speculators–and the bankers. Foremost among these were the receptions held by Lucie’s friend, Thérésia, who, though still married to the jealous Tallien, had spent the years of the Directoire as mistress to Barras, filling his apartments in the Luxembourg with works of art that had once belonged to Marie Antoinette. Thérésia, now 27, still charmed Paris with her yellow straw hats, crowns of flowers, white dresses à la Mameluk and scarves woven becomingly around her short curls. She had a rival in Mme Récamier, described as so beautiful that she had been made ‘by the Creator for the happiness of man’, a ‘coquette’ with all the ‘charm, the virtue, the inconstancy and the weakness of the perfect woman’, even if some considered her chest too flat, her arms rather thin and her hair, though silky, thin.
It was Mme Récamier who gave the first masked ball at the Opéra since the revolution. Her salon was described as being too small for the many émigrés, former Jacobins, liberals, artists and officers who flocked to see her perform her famous shawl dance, her face unpowdered, wearing white muslin and satin, her curly hair framed by a black ribbon placed low over her forehead. At Mme Récamier’s, the dancing was so animated and lasted for so long that ladies changed their fans, bouquets and shoes several times during the evening. After dinner, favoured guests were given tours of her bedroom, with its white-and-gold bed, with bronze candelabras and violet damask falling in pleats, a white marble statue of Silence on one side and a golden lamp in the shape of a genii holding an urn on the other. In the bathing cabinet, the bath could be turned into a sofa edged with gold. Mme de Récamier, though considerably younger, had been befriended by Mme de Staël, and was said to be acquiring a distinct taste for intellectual conversation.
These new salons, observed Sophie Gay, who would later write two volumes about society in France after the revolution, were turning into places where the ‘debris’ of the ancien régime could meet the new political leaders of the day, each needing the other, the ‘anciens’ because they longed to feel wanted, the parvenus because they liked to be admired. Republicans and royalists, attempting to reinvent themselves in this new Consular Paris, where everything changed every day and no one knew what would happen next, ‘played together without liking each other, but without fearing each other either, rather as poor toothless dogs might play with cats which had had their claws removed’.
In February, Napoleon, the Corsican artillery officer whose valour at the siege of Toulon had won him glory, had used a plebiscite to have himself made First Consul, equivalent to the title of Princeps given by the Roman Senate to Augustus. He and Josephine had moved out of the Luxembourg and into the Tuileries, Napoleon taking the first-floor rooms overlooking the gardens. Josephine chose Marie Antoinette’s apartments on the ground floor, where in just a few months the Queen’s hair had turned completely white. Bronzes and tapestries were brought from Versailles, and the fashionable Percier and Fontaine decorated a drawing room in yellow and lilac silk. The Consul’s apartments were widely praised as in surprisingly good taste. Napoleon was already talking of making Paris ‘not only the most beautiful city that ever existed, but that could ever exist’, and plans were being discussed to tackle the stench and murkiness of the city’s labyrinth of dark alley-ways and its contaminated supplies of water.
Napoleon was not the first man to dream of a grander, cleaner, better lit Paris, but the public works he envisaged, for the immediate glory of his army and later for his own, were on a scale not contemplated before. The Louvre, reduced to a blackened, crumbling ruin, its outer walls sprouting a warren of ramshackle hovels, was to be cleaned up and joined to the Tuileries; the gardens were to be enlarged, and, where potatoes had grown during the revolution, lawns were planted with avenues of trees and trellises covered in flowering creepers. At the Palais-Royal, 496 lime trees had already been placed in long straight lines. Napoleon preferred engineers to architects, sculptors to painters; he liked colonnades and the regular contours of classical buildings. The Paris he planned would be symmetrical and monumental, full of triumphal arches, and it would have a necropolis, like Cairo’s City of the Dead.
Lucie had not met either Napoleon or Josephine. But she had known and often danced with Josephine’s first husband, M. de Beauharnais, just before the revolution, when he was reputed to be the finest dancer in Paris. Instinctively admiring of Napoleon’s military victories, she felt ambivalent about Josephine’s social pretensions, remarking, in her most lofty manner, that Josephine, the daughter of a plantation owner from Martinique, had not possessed the necessary degrees of nobility to make her a fully accepted guest at Marie Antoinette’s court. However, Lucie and Josephine were distantly related through Mme Dillon, whose mother was Josephine’s aunt, and soon after reaching Paris Lucie received an invitation to call. Mindful of her own more elevated social standing, and sensing that it was just a move to win over a former lady-in-waiting to Marie Antoinette, Lucie decided to delay. ‘I determined,’ she wrote later, with the strong sense of herself that was becoming more marked, ‘to increase the value of my condescension by making her wait a little.’
When she did finally consent to call, she found herself captivated by Josephine’s open and friendly manner, and by her evident desire to help as many of the émigrés return to Paris as possible. In the Tuileries, Josephine had three small black boys-in-waiting and a Mameluke in Turkish dress at the door. ‘She bore herself like a Queen,’ wrote Lucie, ‘though not outstandingly intelligent, she well understood her husband’s plan: he was counting on her to win the allegiance of the upper ranks of society.’ It was not, she added, a difficult task: everyone was ‘hastening to gather around the rising star’. In 1800, Josephine was 37; she was not exactly pretty, but she had delicate features and all who knew her remarked on the kindness of her voice and expression, and her ‘perfect’ figure, even if some could not help adding that her complexion was suspiciously dark and her teeth extremely poor.
Napoleon had begun confiscating art in 1794 while campaigning in the Netherlands and the Rhineland, when four commissioners–a botanist, an architect, a librarian and a geologist–had been despatched to the conquered territories to select and send back furniture, books, maps and pictures. In 1798, in the wake of his military victories in Italy, had come priceless books from Pope Pius VI’s magnificent library. They had reached Paris in time to be paraded around the Champs de Mars on the anniversary of Robespierre’s fall, escorted by a procession of curators and archivists, and by a number of ostriches, gazelles and camels, which happened to have arrived at the same time from North Africa. The arrival of carts, groaning under trophies, Veroneses from Padua, Leonardo da Vincis from Milan, pearls and precious stones from Bologna, had become a familiar sight on the streets of the capital.
Never had there been a greater appetite for the new, to be fed by new foods–salami from Bologna, sweetmeats from Egypt–by new meals–le thé, and a déjeuner à la fourchette of kidneys and pickled onions which could be taken at any time of the day–and even by new smells. Consular Paris smelt delicious, at least for the rich, the fashion for all things Greek including strongly scented baths: Thérésia took hers in strawberries and raspberries. Even language was new. The exaggerations that had marked the conversations in the pre-revolutionary salons of the Faubourg Saint-Germain with their flowery expressions of loathing and passion, had been replaced by shorter, sharper phrases. It made women, said Mme de Genlis, sound less affected, but at the same time colder and less welcoming. No longer did men lower their voices when addressing women or refrain from paying them direct compliments. Gone was the chaperone doing embroidery in one corner when a man came to call, and gone were the two lackeys, with flares, accompanying women out at night. Before the revolution, remarked Mme de Genlis wistfully, aristocratic ladies had required ‘witnesses and light’.
In 1800 the very fabric of the city itself seemed to change day by day. Dresses worn white one day, were zigzagged in violet or blue the next; ribbons were first striped, then chequered. Carriages were higher off the ground, then lower. In the houses of the rich bankers and speculators in the Chaussée d’Antin–the Faubourg Saint-Germain had been abandoned as too shabby–Percier and Fontaine, drawing on the recent excavations at Pompeii, were producing interiors in violets and pale greens, pastoral scenes giving way to the geometrical, garlands to winged sphinxes, caryatids, Venuses, nymphs and Graces, painted, chiselled or sculpted, in marble, leather and bronze. Salons became atriums. The moribund silk industry in Lyons was undergoing a rapid transformation, as Napoleon insisted that Anglomania should be forsaken in order to revive French textiles. In the rue Mestrée, the Frères Jacob were charging exorbitant prices for furniture made from mahogany and maple, for ebony clocks with gold figures and Egyptian hieroglyphics, for imitation marble and porphyry.
Much of this new longing for luxury was being expressed in clothes, where wigs of every colour, from canary to orange, had suddenly come into fashion. Thérésia was said to own 30. The Chaussée d’Antin, said an English visitor disapprovingly, was full of men who looked like women and women who looked like prostitutes, even if, in the Tuileries, Napoleon let it be known that he was not in favour of so much nudity, and preferred to see his guests in decorous white silk and satin. Undergarments, abandoned during the Directoire, were reappearing. The men, on the other hand, he wished to see in uniform. One of the first decrees issued by the Consulate had been that Consuls, ministers, members of the Legislative and the Conseil d’Etat were all to have their own official uniforms, in varying shades and degrees of gold, lace, embroidery and plumes, outfits that would become gaudier and more theatrical as the years passed.
A special regiment of young volunteer hussars, in which the sons of the old noble families hastened to enrol, among them Frédéric’s 18-year-old nephew Alfred de Lameth, were decked out in yellow, to be nicknamed ‘canaries’ by the people of Paris. August von Kotzebue, a German writer who visited Paris at around this time, remarked on the extraordinary amount of jewellery that women wore at night, seldom leaving their houses without seven or eight rows of gold chain around their necks, rings on every finger, medallions studded with diamonds and gold pins in their hair. Mme Récamier wore pearls, claiming that diamonds did not suit her as well. For those who wished to keep abreast of these changing styles, Le Journal des Dames et des Modes had separate supplements for furniture and decoration and was available in the cabinets de lecture, where issues could be rented by the hour. When the news was good, the Journal had its models smile. But whether good or bad, the models were always elegant, reclining on beds, watering flowers or feeding birds, for the main occupation of women now was to be elegant.
While Napoleon was in Egypt, Josephine had bought Malmaison, a three-storey, 18th-century stone house just outside Paris, with 300 acres of parkland, vineyards and fields running down to the Seine. She furnished it with sphinxes and a great deal of malachite, ebony, marble and bronze and a ‘patriotic’ bed in the shape of a campaign tent with drums for stools. When Lucie was invited to Malmaison, Josephine insisted on taking her on a complete tour of the house, stopping by every picture and sculpture to explain how each had been the gift of some grateful foreign court. Lucie was not just bored, but cross. ‘The good woman,’ she wrote later, ‘was an inveterate liar. Even when the plain truth’–that they had all been looted at the point of a sword–‘would have been more striking than an invention, she preferred to invent.’
Formality and etiquette were already beginning to cast an oppressive hand over life in the Tuileries and at Malmaison, and Napoleon had turned to Mme de Montesson and Mme de Genlis for the bon ton he wished to see around him. At her new school in Saint-Germain, Mme Campan, Marie Antoinette’s lady-in-waiting, was teaching the daughters of the speculators and bankers the manners of the ancien régime.
On the anniversary of 14 July, Frédéric and Lucie accompanied M. de Poix to watch a formation of veterans of the recent French victories at Marengo, many of them wounded and in tattered uniforms, carrying the standards and flags captured from the Austrians. They were surprised to find the crowds quiet and apathetic. A longing for peace and order, an exhaustion with turmoil and military valour, seemed to have settled over the city. Already people were beginning to talk of Robespierre and the ‘reign of Terror’ as if it had all happened somewhere else and a long time ago.
In September, taking with them as a tutor for Humbert M. de Calonne, a ‘non-juror’ priest who had spent the years of revolution in exile in Italy, they set out for Le Bouilh. They had neither the money nor the inclination for life in the new Paris. While Frédéric travelled on his own to see his mother’s lands at Tesson on the way, Lucie hired a carriage large enough for herself, Marguerite, M. de Calonne, a maid and the three children. Humbert, who was 10, perched up beside the coachman. They made very slow progress, seldom covering more than 75 kilometres in 24 hours; the roads remained appalling, despite a new toll designed to raise money for repairs.
At Cholet, near Angers, they fell in with a woman on her way to Bordeaux to sell cloth. With brigands menacing many of the main highways, they were pleased to travel in convoy. It was from this woman, who had fought with the royalists, that they learnt the full story of the Vendée’s long battle against revolutionary France, and the brutality with which it had been crushed, Cholet itself having been virtually destroyed in the fighting. For Lucie, the story of the Vendéen uprising came as an almost complete surprise. In her five months in Paris, she had heard little mention of it.
They found Le Bouilh, which they had left in the care of a reliable housekeeper, almost untouched; the land, however, had been neglected, and with the price of wine much reduced by continuing hostilities with England, the estate was worth almost nothing. The conscientious and hard-working Frédéric was neither a manager nor a businessman. The house in the rue du Bac had been sold for very little, Tesson and the estates at Saintes were either in ruins or had been sold, Hautefontaine had been taken by the state. To try to build up some kind of security, for Humbert was growing up and would soon be in need of a career, Frédéric bought a distillery, hoping that the higher profits from eau-de-vie might bring in a decent income.
The ungainly château began to fill up. A cousin of Frédéric’s called Mme de Maurville arrived; she was the impoverished widow of an admiral and her only son had been a pupil at Burke’s school for émigrés in London. Before long, they were joined by the Princesse d’Hénin, from whom Lucie never seemed able to escape for long, accepting with remarkable forbearance the volatile and domineering older woman. The Princesse would stay at Le Bouilh on and off for almost two years. Though the household was constantly thrown into turmoil by her capriciousness, and no one dared oppose her for fear of provoking a tantrum, Lucie accepted and appreciated her evident love for Frédéric, even if she doubted that the Princesse felt much affection for herself.
The Princesse d’Hénin brought with her Elisa, Lally-Tollendal’s 14-year-old daughter, a docile, affectionate girl who had been learning the ways of the ancien régime at Mme Campan’s academy. Lally-Tollendal wanted Elisa to live at Le Bouilh and agreed to pay the de la Tour du Pins the same fees as he had been paying Mme Camban, an arrangement Lucie found embarrassing but necessary. She was fond of the biddable Elisa, saying that her mind had been ‘completely neglected’, and she taught her English, leaving Frédéric to take history and geography and M. de Calonne Italian. With her usual clear and sometimes chilly eye, Lucie observed that Mme de Maurville and Elisa were ‘both about equally lacking in intelligence’, and she suspected that their feelings towards herself were probably closer to respect and awe than to affection. She added: ‘Despite whatever may have been said of me, I am not a domineering woman.’ Perhaps not; but she was certainly forceful, and becoming more so.
In the evenings, reverting to a habit started in the first years of their marriage, Frédéric read aloud to the assembled household. The vast château, with its high-ceilinged rooms and echoing halls, was filled with noise and children. There were occasional visits to Bordeaux, where the city’s fortunes were gradually rising, as American ships were once again docking in the port, and ways were found to circumvent the British blockade. The wine harvest of 1798 had been one of the best of the entire 18th century. Under Napoleon’s drive to revitalise the country, an envoy had arrived from Paris to run the police; the streets had been cleaned and lit by the new oil lighting; a fire service had been set up, a literary circle established, lycées were opening. The weeks passed, peaceful and contented. ‘I was very happy,’ noted Lucie, many years later, ‘we were at last all united and in our own house.’ Humbert, Charlotte and Cécile were all healthy.
Another visitor was Claire de Duras and her two small daughters, Clara and Lucie’s goddaughter Félicie. Claire had returned alone to Paris, living with her mother-in-law while she tried to arrange for the names of Amédée and of her own mother to be removed from the list of proscribed émigrés. She was taking steps to reclaim the Kersaint lands and houses. Though it was some time before Amédée, First Gentleman of the Bedchamber to the exiled Louis XVIII, was allowed back, they were planning to buy the white, turreted medieval château of Ussé overlooking the Indre valley. Before leaving Paris, Claire had opened her own salon, gathering around her people who still dreamt of a Bourbon restoration and were irked by France’s increasing subservience to Napoleon. Lucie found Claire agreeably changed; she observed crisply that Claire, having accepted that she would never win people with her looks, had fallen back on her intelligence and her wit, of which she had a great deal, and was clearly using them to good effect. Until now, Lucie, always moving, always alert for trouble, had had neither the time nor the place to enjoy close friendships with other women. With the difficult and self-obsessed Claire, she began to explore the possibilities of intimacy.
It was from her visitors that Lucie followed Consular life in Paris. To celebrate the first anniversary of 18 brumaire the famous ballooning couple, M. and Mme Garnerin, rose above the city before sending down a small dog suspended from one of Garnerin’s fashionable new parachutes. Paris had lost none of its delight in spectacles. But soon after, as the First Consul was in his carriage on the way to hear the first performance of Haydn’s Creation, an ‘infernal machine’ had exploded in a water wagon along his route, killing 20 people and destroying several houses, though Napoleon and Josephine were both unhurt. There was also news of Talleyrand, whom Napoleon, in keeping with the stricter moral tone of Paris, had obliged to marry his mistress of many years, Catherine Grand, the former wife of a British civil servant in Calcutta, who had been very beautiful but was reputed to be getting fat. It was said that she had once entertained Édouard Dillon, ‘le beau Dillon’, naked, covered only by her immensely long hair. And the Consuls were finally allowing the return of all the émigrés, except those excluded on account of their open hostility to the new government, though those who accepted Napoleon’s amnesty for their past misdeeds were kept under surveillance and warned that they might be expelled again at any time. Lucie and Frédéric’s great friend M. de Chambeau was at last on his way home.
For some, it had all come too late. Of the 14 male members of a family called de Jallays, all were dead, killed off by prison, the guillotine, penury or the war. And there were many thousands of families made permanently destitute by the forced sale of their lands. At a hospice in Paris could be seen elderly noblewomen, sitting on a row of chairs outside the door. Whenever they caught sight of someone they believed to have taken any of their former possessions, they withdrew silently into the chapel to pray.
Mme de Staël, too, was running into difficulties. She had published her novel Delphine, to considerable acclaim. But her glittering salon, at which she entertained ardent royalists with her disquisitions on platonic love, Protestantism and the Enlightenment, talking rapidly, never at a loss for words, her eyes sparkling with vivacity and wit, and looking, as one visitor remarked, ‘more virile than feminine’, had attracted the attention of Fouché’s spies. After Napoleon abruptly dismissed 20 members of the Tribunat, among them her companion Benjamin Constant, Mme de Staël had taken to writing mordant epigrams about the ‘sultan’. The day came when Napoleon decided to tolerate her no longer. Mme de Staël was ordered to withdraw to no closer than 40 leagues from Paris. It would be ten years before she was able to return and exile was extremely painful for her. It was only in Paris, she said mournfully, that ‘French conversation could be found’.
Mme de Staël was not the only Frenchwoman who had turned to fiction. Claire de Duras and Mme de Genlis were both taking up their pens to produce novels about duty, devotion and unhappy love affairs, in a world suddenly devoted to luxury and ostentation, in which women were no longer the centre of their worlds but relegated to the edges. In many of these books–published, it was said, at the rate of four a day–it was sometimes as if only the classical myths could expiate a sense of guilt about the death of the King and the end of the monarchy.
Among the returning émigrés were many priests, ‘non-jurors’ who had escaped the guillotine and spent the revolution in the Catholic countries surrounding France. Over 24,000 priests had gone into exile, a far greater number than the nobility. Until the summer of 1801, the only religious cult tolerated in France remained that of the theophilanthropists, deists believing in God but not in a Church. But France had tired of civic and philosophical holidays, of the forced jollity of feast days celebrating the virtues of Marcus Aurelius or the heroism of William Tell. When Chateaubriand, a man tuned to nostalgia, published his Génie du Christianisme, he found willing listeners not only in the Chaussée d’Antin and the Faubourg Saint-Germain but in the Tuileries. Like Mme de Genlis, Chateaubriand blamed Voltaire for inciting atheism. Dechristianisation, he said, had ruined the prestige and power of France; religion was all about the soul, conjugal love, filial devotion and maternal tenderness, and without God, men turned to crimes that no temporal laws could check.
Napoleon, seeking order and stability, was sensitive to the idea of a revived Church, seeing in it a certain way to win approval from ordinary people. In July 1801, he signed a concordat with the Pope. ‘Go to Rome,’ Napoleon instructed one of his generals. ‘Tell the Holy Father that the First Consul wishes to make him a gift of 30 million French.’ On Easter Day 1802, in the newly restored cathedral of Notre Dame in Paris, a Te Deum was sung for the first time in almost ten years. Few of the congregation could quite remember what they were expected to do. But it was not a total capitulation. The government would retain the right to nominate the higher clergy, and would be responsible for salaries. It was to be a submissive Church, despoiled of much of its great wealth.
In Bordeaux, as in all French parishes, Mass by ‘non-juror’ priests had until now been celebrated in secret, in private houses. When the local archbishop finally came back to the city, Lucie and Frédéric gathered together all their local parish priests to greet him. Later they accompanied him on a triumphal procession back to his see.
There was more to celebrate than the official return of Catholicism to France. For the first time in 10 years Europe was at peace. France had fought various battles with the Austrians, not all as victorious as Napoleon maintained, but victorious enough to sign a peace treaty at Lunéville in February 1801. Piedmont was annexed to France; Genoa became a French puppet state. Over the next few years, with total disregard for Italian aspirations for unity and independence, which Napoleon had warmly supported, various parts of Italy would be turned into mere tributaries of France. With the Peace of Amiens, signed with the British in March 1802, over a century of Anglo-French struggles were laid to rest. Fourteen thousand British prisoners were released from French jails. Martinique and Guadeloupe were returned to the French. Napoleon, eager to see the plantations prosper again, reintroduced slavery: the French slave traders had been dormant, but not ruined, having spent the fallow years as corsairs harrying British ships. Tom Paine and The Rights of Man were conveniently forgotten.
With the peace came a surge of English visitors across the Channel. They found Paris chilly, dilapidated and overwhelmingly fascinating. They came to find friends, to recover lost property, to hunt in the French forests and simply to look. The artists, Turner among them, visited the Louvre, where Vivant Denon, who had accompanied Napoleon to Egypt, had been appointed director of the Musée Central de la République. They wanted to see Europe’s looted art and many spent their days at easels copying. Those with a taste for the macabre visited Mme Tussaud’s waxworks to see Robespierre’s death mask. Others went to inspect Victor, the Aveyron savage, a boy found in the woods near Toulouse, apparently deaf and dumb and living like an animal. In the college of surgery there was a wax head of the King of Poland’s dwarf, Bébé, and wax representations of venereal diseases, the ‘miserable objects of fatal libertinism’. Theatre lovers saw the beautiful Mlle Georges play in Tancrède, and Napoleon’s favourite actor, the great Talma, in Molière’s plays, though most complained that his style was too extravagant and declamatory, and said that his ‘strutting bloated pomp, bombast gesticulation…trembling body and quivering hands’ made them laugh.
For those with musical interests, there was Gossec, nearly 70 but still active in the new Conservatoire de Musique. The French ballet, visitors agreed, set to a mishmash of tunes taken from symphonies, sonatas and operas, was not what it had been in the days of Rameau. For the greedy, Paris had never offered more restaurants, clustered around the Palais-Royal, some serving food so elaborate and architectural that they felt repelled; there were truffles, they protested, in every dish. At Very’s, you could choose from 25 different hors d’oeuvres, from herb salad to hog’s pudding. And for the scientists, there was the chance to call on Mme Lavoisier, whose father had gone to the guillotine at the same time as her husband, the famous chemist, and who had filled her salon with his ‘magnificent chemical and physical apparatus’.
The women of Paris, remarked the visitors, were all very pale; rouge had been given up in favour of white paint, à la Psyche, after a painting by Gérard. Those who called on Thérésia found that she had divorced Tallien and was living in the rue de Babylone with her new lover, the immensely rich army contractor Ouvrard. If fortunate enough to be invited into her bedroom, they discovered it to be more severe in style than that of her rival Mme Récamier, but even so its bed was shaped like a round tent, held up by the beak of a golden pelican, shrouded in white-and-crimson satin curtains with golden fringes falling in pleats to the floor.
Paris had become a vast bazaar, its quays along the Seine still full of bargains from sequestered houses, its fashions drawn from all over the world: waistcoats from England, linen from Holland, boots from Russia. The German dramatist August von Kotzebue, strolling past the Palais-Royal late at night, observed that the prostitutes were not as bold as before the revolution, but that there were several black girls, brought back by soldiers from Saint-Domingue and known as ‘chats en poche’–pocket cats–their ‘black skins peeping from beneath their white dresses like flies in a milk pot’.
One day Kotzebue accompanied Mme Récamier to the ruined royal abbey of Saint-Denis, where the caretaker, ordered by Robespierre to burn the coffins of Louis XIV and Henri IV in the vaults along with other royal remains, had buried them instead, 42 kings, 32 queens and 63 princes and princesses piled one on top of the other. Most visitors at some point made a pilgrimage to the spot where Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette had died, and then went on to the Place du Carrousel, to see the bronze horses looted from San Marco in Venice. In the new botanical gardens, they watched keepers pouring buckets of cold water over ‘the white bear from the North’, in order to keep it in ‘tolerable patience’.
But what the foreign visitors all wanted to do was to meet the French of whom they had heard so much, even if some were squeamish about taking up introductions to men they considered tainted by violent revolution. There was Joseph Fouché, who had appropriated the Hôtel Mazarin on the Quai Voltaire, and hung it with Gobelin tapestries, though his boots were said to be muddy and his linen seldom clean. And there was Cambacérès, the second Consul, who gave dinners on Mondays and Wednesdays to 35 men–never any women: meals of exceptional grandeur served by 50 footmen in blue-and-gold livery. Foreigners flocked to pay their respects to Talleyrand, the ‘able and wily diplomat who dupes Europe’. Talleyrand’s chef Carême, to whom he had set the test of creating an entire year of menus without a single repetition, using only seasonal food, was the most famous cook in Paris, the ‘chef of kings and king of chefs’.
Above all, of course, the visitors wished to see Napoleon. There was much jostling for invitations to the Tuileries, from whose windows they could watch the First Consul–who had recently appointed himself Consul for life–review the troops, looking young and forbidding on his white horse, accompanied by his uniformed aides-de-camp and his guard of Mamelukes ‘richly habited in the Oriental style’. The more fortunate, invited to an actual audience, found the rooms of the Tuileries packed, the men in court dress, the women in décolleté, the footmen in their new green livery edged with gold. As Napoleon walked slowly round the room, an equerry at his elbow murmuring the names of the foreign guests, Josephine followed a few paces behind, her hair dressed with a diadem of precious stones. After the audience came a ‘sumptuous’ dinner. It was known that Napoleon had an excellent sense of smell and that his head was so sensitive that his valet had his master’s hats specially padded and broke them in himself.
Peace lasted just over 13 months. England, unwilling to accept France’s supremacy over Europe, alarmed by its naval activities and wishing to keep French troops out of Holland, was the first to declare war, on 18 May 1803. In France, Napoleon ordered the arrest of some 7,000 English travellers, students, artists and merchants. Most were able to hasten away to the ‘liberty, cleanliness and roast beef of old England’. For the next 11 years, all travel between France and England was suspended. Lucie was once again cut off from her much-loved aunt Lady Jerningham and the rest of her English family.
As the months and then the years passed, friends wrote from Paris to Le Bouilh urging Frédéric to consider applying for a post in the Consular administration. All the ancien régime, they said, was rallying to Napoleon. France was larger and more powerful than it had ever been. It had a new legal code, the Code Napoléon, that effectively put an end for ever to the feudal world and was bringing order to an administration that had varied chaotically from province to province; the roads were safer, the civil war in the Vendée was over, education was spreading, there were new programmes of public works and new measures to spur economic growth. Napoleon had even weathered–though with some difficulty–the brutal murder of the innocent young Duc d’Enghien, grandson of the Prince de Condé. Kidnapped from his house in Baden, he was executed by firing squad, in response to fears that royalists were again preparing a coup d’état to return the Bourbons to the throne. But Frédéric, always cautious, always unassuming, always weighing up all sides to every question, found the role of petitioner extremely distasteful. If the Emperor desired his services, he said, he knew where to find him. It was less a question of loyalty to the deposed Bourbons–for Frédéric, like Lucie, was impressed by what Napoleon had done for France–than of genuine lack of self-promotion.
France’s new Constitution, amended in 1802, had given Napoleon every attribute of royal power, except the actual crown. Deciding that Malmaison was too small and modest, he and Josephine had restored the royal palace of Saint-Cloud. Here, at Sunday Mass, with the Bishop of Versailles officiating, Napoleon took the place in the Long Gallery once taken by Louis XVI. The two junior Consuls, Cambacérès and Lebrun, sat behind him. When Napoleon stood, Josephine, by his side, knelt. At night, they dined in state. Formality and manners were gradually consuming every facet of Consular life. At the Tuileries it was said that ‘the château sweats etiquette’.
In the spring of 1804, a proclamation was posted on the walls of Saint-André-en-Cubzac, inviting people to say whether or not they would like to see their First Consul made Emperor. Frédéric, who had become President of the Canton, agonised over his vote, pacing up and down the garden at Le Bouilh, Lucie watching but saying nothing. For herself, she was clear: Napoleon had earned his crown. When Frédéric told her that he had signed with a ‘yes’, she was delighted. This referendum, like Napoleon’s others, went resoundingly in his favour. At the end of November, Frédéric, as one of Bordeaux’s leading citizens, was summoned to Paris for the coronation.
All through the autumn, by night as well as by day, 3,000 workmen had laboured to clean up and embellish the city. Around Notre Dame, the various buildings that had sprouted from its walls were torn down. Tiers of seats went up. Charlemagne’s imperial insignia were brought from Aix-en-Chapelle. With extreme reluctance, Pope Pius VII agreed to travel from Rome to officiate.
On 2 December, the date set for the coronation, the day opened with a hailstorm. Courtiers wore costumes designed by David and Jean-Baptiste Isabey, a compromise between antiquity and the reign of Henri III, men who not so long before had sported red bonnets and carmagnoles decked out in laced boots, silk stockings, puffed white satin sleeves, short cloaks and plumed fur hats. Napoleon, his golden imperial coach groaning under carved garlands, medallions, allegorical figures and four great eagles, wings outspread, holding a golden crown designed by Fontaine, was so covered in diamonds and gold that spectators spoke of a ‘walking mirror’.
It was reported that 500,000 people, almost the entire population of Paris, lined the streets. When Napoleon entered Notre Dame, he put on a crimson cape, sprinkled with gold stars and lined with ermine. Josephine’s train was borne by Napoleon’s sisters, who, ill-pleased by her preferment, wore somewhat sulky expressions in David’s celebrated picture of the event. (Napoleon’s mother, known as Madame Mère, who declined to attend, was painted in later.) That night, standing on the balcony in the Tuileries, the imperial family looked out across the snowy gardens at a brilliant display of fireworks. Napoleon had contemplated an elephant for his imperial symbol, but settled on a bee.
To oversee the splendour of court life, every detail of which Napoleon supervised, two prefects of the palace were appointed, chosen, it was said, because they were shorter than the new Emperor; but while they argued about what should be done, the ci-devant nobles tittered in the background. Gradually it was turning into Versailles, all over again. The royal army had never looked more splendid, in an array of bearskins and tigerskins, lace, towering plumes, helmets and breastplates. For courtiers, there was velvet in winter and taffeta in summer, the costumes designed by Isabey.
Ladies-in-waiting were being chosen for the Empress. A letter arrived at Le Bouilh inviting Lucie to come to Paris to take up the post. She did not hesitate: she declined, remarking later that of all the women approached, who, like her, had attended Marie Antoinette, she was the only one to refuse. No court could be more attractive to her than her life at Le Bouilh with Frédéric and the children.
While Frédéric was in Paris, he had talked to many of his old friends, now attached to the government and the court. Talleyrand, recently named Grand Chamberlain and Vice-Elector of the Empire, on learning that Frédéric was still reluctant to petition Napoleon for an appointment, said only, ‘You will come to it’ and shrugged his shoulders. Their friend from London, M. Malouet, had been appointed Préfet Maritime at Antwerp to administer the coastal area and set up a shipyard to build the great new ships of the line. When Frédéric returned to Le Bouilh, he brought with him an invitation from M. Malouet for Humbert to become his secretary once he reached 17. Lucie was both pleased and saddened. Strongly attached to her children, she could not envisage a day when they lived away from her.
Talleyrand, while urging restraint on further territorial acquisitions, had been forced to sit by and watch Napoleon absorb Piedmont into France, sacrifice Venice to Austria, and turn the rest of northern Italy into a republic. After Russia formed an alliance with Britain and Austria joined the coalition, Napoleon, waiting at Boulogne to cross the Channel and invade England, had turned to march east, taking the lame, protesting Talleyrand with him. Victory had followed victory. At the Battle of Austerlitz, the Austrian and Russian armies lost 26,000 men to Napoleon’s 9,000. With the Peace of Pressburg, Napoleon became the master of western Europe, even if the annihilation of the Franco-Spanish fleet by Nelson at Trafalgar left Britain master of the sea. The coalition against France had been broken up, Austria was crushed, the Holy Roman Empire ceased to exist. Through battles and treaties, amnesties and deals, many brokered by the reluctant Talleyrand, Europe had been partitioned, then repartitioned.
Rewarded by the Principality of Benevento, a small enclave in the Kingdom of Naples, Prince Talleyrand was as efficient and canny as he had ever been, making millions of francs through bribes and backhanders. He continued to receive ambassadors, political colleagues, secretaries and friends during his daily public levers, when, emerging into his grand cabinet de toilette in several layers of flannel and nightcaps, he would sip camomile tea, while his long grey hair was combed, pomaded and powdered. ‘For a credulous soul’, remarked Aimée de Coigny, who had spent seven months of the revolution in prison and who knew him well, Talleyrand ‘would be a satisfactory proof of the existence of the devil…a priest who denied his God, a prelate who ransacked his Church, a nobleman who betrayed his King…a diplomat and minister always intriguing and pushing back the boundaries of excess and treason’.
Early in 1806, Lucie realised that she was pregnant for the tenth time. She was now 35. She had miscarried the previous year–her sixth miscarriage–and she resolved to take more care of herself during this pregnancy. Women in the 18th and 19th centuries could expect to spend many months of their lives pregnant; but Lucie’s constant pregnancies and miscarriages would have taxed a frailer woman.
In the spring of 1806, the family was faced with a very sad loss. Marguerite, whom Lucie had ‘loved all her life as a daughter’, fell ill. She grew weaker, but remained conscious. They bade each other the ‘tenderest of farewells’. When she died, the entire household went into mourning. ‘My grief,’ wrote Lucie briefly, with the economy of phrase she reserved for her deepest emotions, ‘was deep.’
There had been other deaths, less mourned. Mme de Montesson, having thrown a ball of great splendour for the marriage of Josephine’s daughter Hortense and Napoleon’s brother Louis, with ices shaped like fruit hanging in baskets from orange trees in flower, had died at the age of 68. According to a malicious friend, she had not aged well, her face ‘crackled…like an old piece of pottery’. Napoleon, who had appreciated her advice on etiquette and her impeccable bon ton, ordered that her body lie in state for eight days in Saint-Roche.
From London came news of the death of Archbishop Dillon, at the age of 85, having been ill for two days with what Lady Jerningham described as ‘gout of the stomach’. His funeral was held in the French chapel in Little George Street and was attended by the French nobility and clergy still in exile in England. Mme de Rothe had died not long before, behaving at the last with a dignity and courage she had seldom shown in life. Of all the relationships in her ill-tempered, embittered life, her 35-year-old liaison with the Archbishop had been the most harmonious. Not wanting the elderly Archbishop to be distressed, she had said nothing to him when she realised that she was seriously ill and had only a few days left to live; when she died, he was relieved to imagine that she had not suffered. The Archbishop spent the day of her funeral eating a hearty lunch and discussing Voltaire. Neither death caused Lucie much grief. She did not even remark on that of her grandmother.
The new baby came early. On 18 October, Lucie was dressing when she caught sight of Dr Dupouy, the doctor who had delivered Séraphine and Charlotte and who happened to be staying at Le Bouilh for a few days, walking past her window. Asking what he was doing up so early, she learnt that he had been called out to sign the death certificate of a neighbour who had died in the night. Lucie, who knew the woman well and had spoken to her the previous day, was shocked and upset. She went into labour. A boy was born; they called him Aymar. There were now five children in the house: Humbert, 16 and soon to leave, 10-year-old Charlotte who was turning out to be clever and full of curiosity, 6-year-old Cécile, and the new baby, Aymar. Elisa, Lally-Tollendal’s daughter, was the fifth.
Lucie herself was ill again after Aymar’s birth, with ‘double tertian fever’, presumably malaria, the fever recurring every day. She recovered slowly, but by Christmas felt well enough to take the baby to Bordeaux to be vaccinated against smallpox. The city’s fortunes had revived, with a series of excellent years for wine, and a forest of masts stretched as far as the eye could see along the estuary. The whole family spent six weeks staying in M de Brouquens’s house, attending balls and furthering Elisa’s marriage prospects. Elisa was 18, small, with thick black hair, and, at a time when dancing was considered an art, was much admired as an exceptionally graceful dancer.
At Mass one day Elisa attracted the notice of one of Bordeaux’s most eligible young men, a M. Henri d’Aux. M. de Brouquens helped Lucie arrange a number of meetings between the young couple; in due course, the d’Aux family came to ask for Elisa’s hand. Lucie noted in her critical way that though indeed extremely rich and a gentleman of the old school, Henri’s father was ‘without a vestige of intelligence or learning’. Lally-Tollendal had promised Elisa a fine dowry if he were repaid a debt owed him by the state since the revolution. Napoleon, who wanted Lally-Tollendal in the government, secured the repayment and the bride’s father arrived from Paris bearing a hundred sacks of money, each containing 1,000 francs. It was more money than Lucie had ever seen in her life.
The wedding was celebrated at Le Bouilh on 1 April 1807. For the dinner Lucie, Charlotte and Mme de Maurville made a centre-piece of red and white daisies, the flowers spelling out the names of Elisa and Henri against a background of green moss.
Soon after the grape harvest of 1807, 17-year-old Humbert left to take up his post as M. Malouet’s secretary in Amiens. Lucie had been dreading this moment: when it came she was heartbroken. ‘The gaiety of our house went with him,’ she wrote. Charlotte, who was 11, and to whom he had been an affectionate brother and companion, felt his loss equally keenly.
Frédéric, who accompanied Humbert to Amiens, paused in Paris, where he was given a surprisingly warm welcome by Lucie’s stepmother. Lucie’s half-sister Fanny was now 23. Elegant rather than pretty, and somewhat capricious, Fanny had fallen in love with Prince Alphonse Pignatelli, and would have married him, had he not fallen ill. When Pignatelli realised that he did not have long to live, he had pressed Fanny to marry him, in order to leave her his considerable fortune. But Fanny had refused, and Pignatelli had died. Since then, General Henri Bertrand, one of Napoleon’s aides-de-camp, had fallen in love with her and Napoleon was urging her to accept. But Fanny remained stubbornly opposed. When Frédéric called on Mme Dillon, she begged him to see the Empress Josephine on her behalf, in order to convey Fanny’s final refusal.
In the Tuileries, Frédéric was received in Josephine’s bedroom, where a deep alcove had been curtained off. He delivered Fanny’s message, but the Empress detained him with questions about himself and Lucie, and about their future plans. Frédéric spoke out freely; it was not in his nature to be discreet. Later that evening, Frédéric called on Talleyrand who, he discovered, already knew all about the meeting from Napoleon. The Emperor had listened to every word, hidden behind the curtain in the alcove. ‘Fortunately for you,’ Talleyrand told Frédéric, ‘your aristocratic airs have saved you. They happen to be the fashion in the Tuileries just now.’
That October Lucie learnt that a number of officers were to pass through Saint-André-en-Cubzac, on their way to the French border. Intending to bring the Iberian peninsula under direct French control in order to dominate the entire Mediterranean, Napoleon was pouring French troops into Spain, ostensibly under the guise of offering Portugal to Spain, which he accused of refusing to enforce the blockade against England. At Mass one morning, she caught sight of a particularly handsome young officer, splendidly turned out in the white cloak, baggy purple trousers and sabre of an aide-de-camp to General Murat. It turned out to be Frédéric’s nephew, Alfred de Lameth, elated at the prospect of action in Spain. Lucie had always been fond of him. Before leaving, Alfred opened his writing case and presented her with a small knife with a mother-of-pearl handle, saying that he wished her to have something to remember him by.
While Frédéric was still away in Amiens, the Princesse d’Hénin wrote from Paris to say that the Emperor would be passing through Saint-André-en-Cubzac on his way to Bayonne. After the French had entered the Iberian peninsula, the Portuguese royal family had fled to Brazil. Napoleon, playing off various factions against each other, had sent 100,000 French troops to Spain and had taken the citadels of Pamplona and Barcelona. In March 1808, King Charles IV abdicated in favour of his son Ferdinand, but then revoked the abdication, and Napoleon had summoned a meeting of all concerned to Bayonne.
Lucie, Mme de Maurville and Charlotte joined the crowds thronging the banks of the river, where a brigantine waited to carry the Emperor across the Dordogne. The scene, wrote Lucie, was one of extraordinary excitement. ‘A madness, a kind of delirium’ seemed to descend on people for whom Napoleon had acquired an almost godlike heroic status. They waited all day, Lucie cursing that Frédéric would miss what might have been a chance to attract the Emperor’s notice. She and Frédéric were increasingly worried about money: the eau-de-vie venture had not proved profitable and the turnover barely covered their daily expenses. When Napoleon finally arrived, followed by a detachment of chasseurs, it was all rather disappointing. The Emperor appeared sullen and bored while the mayor delivered his speech of welcome, then hastened away as soon as he could. ‘We returned to Le Bouilh,’ wrote Lucie, ‘tired and very out of temper.’
It was therefore with some surprise that Lucie received a summons next day to attend on Josephine, who was following Napoleon to Bayonne. The court was in mourning for the King of Denmark, and she had no time to do more than add black ribbons to a grey satin dress before setting off for Bordeaux. ‘Hesitation,’ she wrote, ‘was unthinkable.’ Lucie had not lost all pleasure in her own appearance. She thought her improvised costume ‘admirably becoming to a woman of 38 who, I say it without vanity, looked less than 30’.
That night, Napoleon, no longer as sallow and emaciated as he had been at the time of her stay in Paris, his angular features softened and his appearance considerably neater, entered the great dining room of the palace in Bordeaux where crowds gathered to greet him. While waiting, Lucie had been one of those marshalled into groups in a ‘military manoeuvre’ that had all the ladies standing in perfect straight lines. Catching sight of her, Napoleon asked her, laughing, why she mourned the King of Denmark so little that she was not in black. Replying that she had no black gown, she said that she had decided to come anyway as she was not prepared to renounce the pleasure of meeting her Emperor. Josephine, who had Lucie called out of the receiving line into a small salon, greeted her with great friendliness.
Next day, Lucie was informed that Napoleon had ordered that she spend each evening of Josephine’s stay in Bordeaux in attendance on her. What struck Lucie was the fact that even while conducting a war with half of Europe, Napoleon found time to oversee every detail of his administration and his court, down to the clothes that Josephine should wear and the conversations she should hold; and that Josephine would not have dreamt of disobeying him. Lucie was ‘cruelly disappointed’ when she learnt that Napoleon himself had already left for Bayonne. Something about him had always charmed her. Each time she saw him, she wrote, ‘my heart beat fast with excitement’.
Frédéric had returned and was present at the evening receptions where he played backgammon with Josephine. While in Paris he had heard from Talleyrand that Napoleon, wishing for an heir to his throne, was beginning to talk of a divorce from Josephine, who had not borne him a child and was now 43. That he could father one himself was clear from the fact that one of his mistresses had given him a son in 1806. Frédéric felt very uneasy when Josephine, pleased to find someone not at court with whom to talk, wanted to confide in him her terror of being discarded. She felt particularly bitter towards Talleyrand, whom she suspected–rightly–of encouraging the divorce. Napoleon had gone on ahead to Bayonne and Josephine was waiting and longing to be summoned to join him. One evening, she asked Lucie to help her decipher a scribbled note from the Emperor, saying that he was having trouble in Bayonne, where both King Charles IV and his son Ferdinand were assembled.
When Josephine was finally called to Bayonne, Lucie was not sorry to return to Le Bouilh. Ten days of imperial life, in full court dress, missing her children, were enough. She was only sorry that Frédéric seemed no nearer to preferment, and that, living with no fortune so far from Paris, it was extremely unlikely that anything would ever come his way.
In 1807, the royal families of Europe, jockeying for power and prestige and territorially ambitious, had between them descended to levels of intrigue, profligacy and lack of dignity that made the excesses of Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette seem insignificant. Charles IV, who had been on the throne of Spain for almost 20 years, was a credulous, intellectually feeble man, who preferred hunting and his own poor playing of the violin to government, and who allowed himself to be led by his coarse and vicious wife, Queen Maria Luisa, by whom he had 14 children, several of them subjects of Goya’s finest portraits. For some years, real power had lain with her greedy and dissolute lover, the present Chief Minister, Manuel Godoy. Like some of the other enlightened despots of Europe, the Spanish royal family believed that reform, should any be necessary, must come from above, and not from the people. By the spring of 1808, however, Charles IV had signed away his claims to the Spanish throne in favour of Napoleon; in exchange he was to receive a pension and a comfortable exile.
In May word came from M. de Brouquens that the deposed royal family would be spending a few days in Bordeaux on their way to Fontainebleau, and that Napoleon had ordered that Lucie was to serve as lady-in-waiting to Queen Maria Luisa during her stay. Elisa had also been appointed to serve her. When a chamberlain accompanying the royal party showed Lucie into the Queen’s apartments, he whispered that she should try her best not to laugh. The doors opened: Lucie felt more inclined to cry. The Queen was dressing. Apart from a very short cambric skirt, all she was wearing was a muslin fichu across her bosom, ‘the driest, leanest and darkest bosom you can imagine’. She was short, stout, with a peeved expression and a loud, harsh voice, and her grey hair was piled high with red and yellow roses. Napoleon found her very ugly, as he told Talleyrand, and ‘with her yellow skin, just like a mummy’. Her expression, he went on, was ‘nasty and treacherous’, adding that what he particularly disliked was her deep décolleté and her bare arms. Having brought very little with her from Madrid, the Queen was putting on a totally unsuitable dress in yellow crêpe and satin lent to her by Josephine. Lucie found her pitiful.
Over the next few days, Lucie was constantly at the little court in exile. She presented Bordeaux’s dignitaries to the royal couple, took meals with them, and listened to Maria Luisa railing against her sons, denouncing them as monsters and the cause of all their misfortunes, and saying that no punishment would be too bad for them. ‘It made me shudder,’ she wrote. The two young men had been sent as prisoners, under house arrest, to Talleyrand’s château at Valençay. Lucie also took strongly against the dissolute Godoy, who had been made Prince de la Paix, and who was very rude to her. The court consisted of a number of attendants, both Spanish and French, who found Lucie’s agreeable nature extremely helpful, and kept repeating that they would like Napoleon to appoint her a permanent member of the Spanish court in exile. Lucie’s one fear was that the Emperor might be persuaded to agree. One evening, knowing that the unregal Charles IV regarded himself as a fine violinist, she arranged a musical soirée, discreetly employing a proper musician to take over his part in the quartet whenever he lost his place. She was very relieved when she finally ‘bade farewell to these unhappy foreigners’ on the banks of the Dordogne, where a brigantine was to carry them across the river on the next leg of their journey into exile.
The King had left turmoil behind him in Spain. In May 1808, the people of Madrid rose up against the occupying forces. Though Joseph Bonaparte, Napoleon’s brother, proclaimed King of Spain in June, had ruled decently in Naples and promised to do so again in Spain, the Spanish felt furious that a vast French army was in occupation. The profoundly conservative Spanish clergy and the great feudal landowners were united in their dislike of the Napoleonic Code, in their opposition to liberal reform and in their refusal to contemplate the loss of their feudal dues. Small local uprisings were fast turning into a full-scale popular insurrection, all sides acting with extreme brutality. With each ambush of French troops, brutal reprisals were visited on the Spanish people. News reached Le Bouilh one day that Alfred de Lameth, Frédéric’s handsome nephew, had been attacked and killed while crossing a village on his way to lunch at Maréchal Soult’s headquarters. The French immediately set fire to the village, killing as many of its inhabitants as they could find. Until her death, over 40 years later, Lucie kept Alfred’s little knife, with the mother-of-pearl handle.
Late one evening, when Frédéric was in Bordeaux on business, and Lucie alone with the children at Le Bouilh, a messenger arrived bearing a note from him. It contained a single sentence. ‘I am Prefect of Brussels…Brussels lies just ten leagues from Antwerp.’ Preferment had finally come.
They learnt later from Napoleon’s secretary, M. Malet, that the Emperor, in keeping with his practice of monitoring every appointment and decision even when on campaign, had been presented with a name for a possible new incumbent for the vacant post of Préfet de la Dyle, crossed it out, and written Frédéric’s name in its place. ‘Like Cincinnatus,’ Lucie would write, Frédéric ‘had been summoned from his plough and given the finest prefecture in France.’
Lucie’s first thought was not of the salary and prestige of the job, but that she would soon be reunited with Humbert. Then she set about preparing for the move. ‘In the important moments of life,’ wrote Lucie revealingly, in words that said much about her decisive and determined nature, ‘any thought which has not occurred in the first 24 hours is either pointless, or idle repetition.’
By the time Frédéric reappeared next day, Lucie had already mapped out their future. ‘I was ready to tell him the plans and arrangements which seemed to me necessary.’ Eleven-year-old Charlotte, evidently taking after her mother in energy and determination, had studied all available maps and gazetteers of the Dyle and was waiting to discuss them with her father. The eight years of peaceful domestic inactivity had come to an end. Lucie had been a happy and loving mother; but in her pleasure and eagerness, one senses a longing for something new.