‘My prefects, my priests, my rectors,’ replied Napoleon, when asked how he planned to administer his Empire. In 1790, as part of the reorganisation of the country, France had been split up into 83 departments, their names chosen from local rivers and mountains; as conquered countries were brought into the fold, so the numbers of the departments grew. When he let it be known that he would appoint prefects from all political sides, ambassadors, soldiers and ministers hastened to offer themselves. Few shared Frédéric’s reticence about seeking preferment. However, from his earliest days as Consul, Napoleon had also been much taken with the idea of nobility. He was appreciative of those of the ancien régime who rallied to him, and constantly sought ways to bring more back into the fold. Increasingly, he wished to see fewer former Jacobins and more aristocrats among his prefects. Frédéric, ‘ci-devant Comte, Colonel, Ministre Plénipotentiare du roi en Hollande’, was a natural choice. Hiding behind the curtain in the alcove in Josephine’s room, Napoleon had been impressed by Frédéric’s ‘aristocratic airs’, his evident honesty and his obvious attachment to his family. Lucie, with her training at the court of Marie Antoinette, her excellent English and her pleasing ways, would serve France no less well than her husband.
Formally appointed on 12 May 1808, by Napoleon, Conquéreur des Français, Roi d’Italie et Protecteur de la Confédération du Rhin, Frédéric listed his fortune as ‘none’. He explained that his revenues before the revolution had indeed come to 44,000 francs a year, but said that all he had left were a few worthless vines in Bordeaux. ‘I have often been told,’ he added, ‘that one should not allow oneself to become poor. But I do not believe in such things. I offer myself simply as I am.’ Frédéric’s poverty and his rectitude both promised that the new prefect would prove hard-working and biddable. One of his first acts as prefect was in fact to send out his signature, so that it would be recognised as authentic on official documents; he signed it Latourdupin, as a single word, in a rounded, firm, legible hand. With the post came pomp, splendour and considerable power, for, in keeping with his ideas about authoritarian rule, Napoleon placed local administration in the hands of a single man, assisted by two councillors. He called his prefects ‘des empereurs au petit pied’, emperors in miniature, and gave them uniforms in blue, red and white, their blue coats embroidered with silver, their red sashes trimmed with a silver fringe. The wheel had turned full circle: the prefects were almost indistinguishable from the intendants of the ancien régime.
Frédéric’s job, however, would not be easy. Over his prefects as over all other aspects of his Empire, Napoleon liked to retain control. He personally vetted and selected every prefect, as well as many sous-préfets and mayors, and paid them according to the size and strategic importance of their departments; he sent inspectors to check up on them, scrutinised their reports, criticised their personal lives and sacked them at will. From his prefects he expected absolute submission and blind zeal. If they were seen to assume excessive power, they were called to order; if they abused it, they were removed. When the Prefect of Montenotte was reported to have taken his mistress on a trip rather than his wife, he was informed that the Emperor insisted on ‘la plus grande décence’, total respectability. Their job, Napoleon told them, was to rally hearts to a common love of the motherland, no easy task in an empire that stretched from the Baltic sea to European Turkey and the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies, and which included, among its vassals, 32 German kings, princes and dukes. And Frédéric was not quite the loyal, unquestioning servant Napoleon appeared to take him for. There was a streak of independence in his character, and more than a little yearning for the lost monarchy; and he could, when pressed, be very stubborn.
Frédéric had gone on ahead. Lucie, Aymar, the two girls and Mme de Maurville reached Brussels in the summer of 1808. They found waiting for them a palatial mansion with extensive gardens, filled with servants, and a handsome, cultured, prosperous city, the streets paved and well lit, the buildings in good repair, the theatres playing to full houses. In the upper town, the ville haute, behind its 14th-century walls, were the houses of the aristocracy, the royal palaces and the guild houses, some identified not by numbers but by the names of flowers and animals, others painted pale green or yellow, with Ionic columns. In the ville haute, French was spoken.
Below, in the ville basse in the valley, along the banks of the canal and the river, life centred around the markets for wheat, flax, tobacco, linen, lace and beer, conveyed to customers throughout Europe by canal or road. In the new greenhouses grew grapes and pineapples. In the streets of Brussels could be seen dogs harnessed to wheelbarrows, and on fine evenings, people strolled along L’Allée Verte by the Palais Royale. Brussels was a city of pigeon fanciers, of public fountains with excellent water and of horse-racing; Lucie’s uncle Lord Dillon was still remembered as one of three English lords who had brought their horses to race in Belgium long before the revolution. When Voltaire had visited the city in 1742, he observed that while Brussels had very few interesting people, it had exceptionally interesting books.
Belgium had been an early victim of the passion for conquest that gripped France during the revolution. A part of the Spanish Netherlands at the end of the 17th century, it had been French, Austrian, briefly independent, then Austrian again. With Dumouriez’s victory at Jemappes in 1792, it became French; a year later, it fell again to the Austrians. But in 1794, General Pichegru, advancing over frozen water in an exceptionally cold winter, had brought Jacobism to Brussels, along with the cockade, a Tree of Liberty planted in the fine Gothic and baroque Grand’ Place, and the loss of cart-loads of art plundered from the city’s richly endowed churches and monasteries.
On 1 October 1795, the Austrian Netherlands, Flanders and Liège were all annexed to France and split into nine departments. Brussels, the seat of the prefecture of the department of the Dyle, was the most important. Napoleon had since done much to restore Belgian prosperity, ordering dozens of Brussels’s famously comfortable carriages, with their glass windows, and instructing Josephine and her ladies-in-waiting to buy Belgian lace.
By 1808, Brussels had been French for 13 years. The first prefect, Louis-Gustave de Pontécoulant, was a Norman aristocrat and a cartographer who had worked hard to provide an efficient economy, based on Paris. He had welcomed as visitors to their native home the two composers Gossec and Grétry, restored churches and encouraged the production of lace. After five years, Napoleon had recalled him to Paris and made him a senator, sending in his place M. de Chabon, an even better administrator, who had set about restoring to their rightful owners property that had been confiscated. De Chabon earned a reputation for justice. He was, Lucie conceded, ‘worthy, enlightened and firm’, all virtues to which she was much attached.
She felt, however, that neither of these two men had done much to woo the affronted Belgian nobility, a tight-knit circle of some 300 families, most of them related in some way to one another, living in haughty and faded seclusion in and around the Grand’ Place. Lucie, who immediately identified her role as ambassadress to these people, reflected that de Pontécoulant had failed on account of his wife, a former mistress of Mirabeau’s, whose origins, she concluded, ‘held little attraction’ for the Bruxellois, and de Chabon on account of his own, an ailing, obscure woman ‘from a very modest level of society’. Lucie herself, she noted with pleasure, was already known to the beau monde of Brussels through the Abbé Delille’s popular poem, La Pitié, published in 1802, which talked of a young lady-in-waiting to Marie Antoinette, who had milked cows in the forests of the New World. In the haute ville, Lucie was received ‘with the greatest kindness’. It was made clear to her that the Belgians were delighted that their salons were again to be ‘presided over by an aristocrat’. Only Lucie’s extreme directness excuses a tone that sometimes sounded extremely snobbish.
Along with her impeccable breeding, Lucie held another important card. Before the revolution, in the salons of the Faubourg Saint-Germain, Lucie had often met the Duchesse d’Arenberg, the last descendant of a famous Belgian 15th-century warrior baron. Mme d’Arenberg was known in Brussels as the Dowager, and regarded as the Queen Mother. She had perfect 18th-century manners, rode out in all weathers in an open carriage, was devoted to her grown-up children and particularly to her blind son, and received every evening between seven and nine. The Dowager was the arbiter of Brussels society. Letters of introduction had been sent ahead by the Princesse de Poix and Mme de Beauvau; the day after she reached Brussels, Lucie went to call. She was invited to dinner, whereupon ‘the whole town signed our book’.
Lucie was an assiduous worker. Whether milking cows, sewing linen or making butter, she had always risen at dawn. Her job in Brussels, as she saw it, was to understand the nobility and charm them. ‘To overcome their aloofness’, she decided, needed influence, and influence would come from her salon. As people came to call on her, she began to put together a list of their names, their relations, their occupations and their interests. She borrowed books on the peerage from the Bibliothèque de Bourgogne, and she called on the services of a former Commander of the Knights of Malta, who came to the house every evening to answer a list of questions she had drawn up during the day. By the end of the month, she felt that she knew Brussels well, down to its ‘different liaisons’, its ‘animosities’ and its ‘bickerings’.
Refusing to pay or receive visits in the mornings, which she spent with Cécile and Charlotte, she gave up the rest of the day to making friends with the ville haute. For the first time since the ministry in The Hague, she had a large staff to help her: a butler-valet, two liveried footmen, an office boy, a porter, an office footman, two stable boys and any number of cooks, maids and kitchen servants. Unimpressed by grandeur, largely indifferent to comfort, she took great pleasure in her own competence at organisation.
Just the same, it was not always smooth. Brussels was a city of intrigues, in an age of uncertain power and precarious fortunes. Though she and Frédéric made friends readily, there were people who were envious of a position apparently won without effort. In Brussels were two Frenchwomen, senior to Lucie in that their husbands held higher-ranking positions. One was Mme de Chambarlhac, the wife of the General commanding the division garrisoned in Brussels. She was a handsome woman in her 40s from a noble family, but she was rumoured to have been plucked out of a convent by her husband during the Italian campaign and to have followed him around, dressed in a hussar’s uniform. Living rough among soldiers, Lucie decided, had ruined Mme de Chambarlhac’s manners beyond repair. The second was Mme Betz, the wife of the First President. Mme Betz was in her 50s and wore, Lucie thought, unsuitably deep décolleté. Neither of these two ladies was ever invited to dine with the Dowager. Lucie, who was, did not care to receive them either. ‘Naturally,’ she wrote, ‘I could not consider any connection’ with such people, while the General she considered ‘a fool’. The jealousy and animosity of these two women, along with that of their husbands’, simmered.
Soon after reaching Brussels, Frédéric received a visit from the Comte de Liederkerke, who had been a junior officer in his regiment many years before. The count, who came from a very wealthy old Belgian family, asked whether his only son, Auguste, a probationer in the Council of State, might work for him as a secretary. Frédéric agreed. Humbert had left Antwerp and now arrived to join them, in order to study for the Council of State himself, and the prefecture, to Lucie’s intense pleasure, was soon full of children and young people. Brussels, with its good food, its wines from Flanders and the Rhine, its games of whist and lotto at the Dowager’s suppers, was turning out to be a pleasant posting.
General Henri Bertrand, Napoleon’s favourite aide-de-camp, had not stopped yearning for Lucie’s half-sister Fanny. He was a military engineer by training, a good-looking man with curly dark hair and regular features, sturdy, reserved and somewhat stubborn. Fanny held out against him for two years, displeasing Napoleon greatly one day by exclaiming, when he yet again asked her to consider the match, ‘What, sire!…Why not the Pope’s monkey?’ But one day the Emperor sent her 30,000 francs with which to buy a wardrobe so that she could accompany Josephine to Fontainebleau. Josephine was very fond of Fanny, though Lucie herself found her ‘extremely frivolous’. It was while at Fontainebleau that Fanny relented and agreed to marry Bertrand. Napoleon, remarked Lucie, was someone to whom one could refuse nothing, ‘so gracefully and so winningly did he set about obtaining what he wanted’. He was not as graceful with everyone.
Fanny’s elder half-sister, the unhappy Betsy de Fitz-James, had died recently, leaving four young children. But Napoleon would not hear of Fanny’s marriage being delayed; he allowed her eight days, as he wished to be present, after which he was leaving to rejoin his army. Early in September, Lucie was suddenly ordered to Paris: the Emperor had announced that she alone would be able to arrange the ceremony in time. She hastened to obey. ‘Although the letter was a very friendly one,’ she wrote, ‘it was clearly a command.’
Leaving Brussels at once and travelling all night–the new four-horse vélocitères travelled faster than the old turgotines–Lucie reached the Princesse d’Hénin’s house in the rue de Miromesnil at dawn. She paused only long enough to change her dress and send for a carriage to take her to her stepmother’s house in the rue Joubert. There she found that Mme Dillon and Fanny had left for Beauregard, Mme de Boigne’s house not far from Saint-Cloud. Lucie had not met her cousins, Adèle de Boigne, wife of the unfortunate General, or her mother, Mme d’Osmond, since her childhood at Hautefontaine. Hurrying on, she was at Beauregard by 11.30. ‘Ah,’ exclaimed Fanny, on seeing her, ‘we’re saved. Here is my sister!’ Mme Dillon was still in bed, and very reluctant to be rushed. Lucie urged her to dress quickly and to accompany her back to Paris, so that they could begin making plans. While waiting, she strolled around the park with Bertrand, whom she found initially shy and awkward, but soon won over. By lunchtime they had come ‘to understand one another well’. Lunch was taken with Mme de Boigne and Mme d’Osmond, neither of whom, remarked Lucie briskly, ‘could abide me’. She ate heartily, having had nothing all day.
There was much to arrange. A judge had to be found to concoct a new birth certificate for Fanny, her own having disappeared somewhere in Flanders. Napoleon himself signed the marriage contracts of his favourite courtiers, and as her stepmother kept neither paper nor pens in her house, confirming Lucie’s opinion of her as an uneducated and foolish woman, she had to send out to d’Expilly, Paris’s finest stationer, for supplies. Napoleon had said that he would attend the wedding, so every detail had to be perfect. Lucie was informed that she personally was to be presented to the Emperor at Saint-Cloud next morning, and that she was to wear ‘court dress and plumes’.
Lucie’s intrepid life in the wastes of North America was well known to Napoleon, who clearly admired her boldness and was appreciative of her aristocratic origins. For her part, Lucie was surprised at how little frightened she was of a man of whom most of his courtiers were terrified. At Saint-Cloud, he greeted her, she reported later, ‘graciously’, and asked her about Brussels and its ‘high society’ as if to suggest that it was the only kind that might interest her. He teased both her and Mme de Bassano–wife of Napoleon’s recently ennobled secretary M. Maret–about having made them rise so early; Mme de Bassano pouted, later telling Lucie that Napoleon had become ‘most attentive to her’. Lucie was not the only intelligent woman to be dazzled when singled out by the Emperor.
The Emperor had given orders that Fanny and General Bertrand were to be married in the chapel of the Château de Saint-Leu, which belonged to his stepdaughter Hortense, Queen of Holland. At 3.30 in the afternoon of 17 September, Lucie followed a long procession of plumed, beribboned, decorated and gaudily dressed grandees from the château to the chapel, where the nuptial blessing was given by the Bishop of Nancy. Talleyrand and Maret, respectively Prince de Bénévent and Duc de Bassano, stood as witnesses for Fanny; Maréchal Berthier and Grand Maréchal Duroc for Bertrand. ‘I am happy for you,’ wrote Josephine in a little book for Fanny, which was also signed by Hortense and Napoleon’s sister Pauline. Afterwards came a dinner and dancing; Hortense, who normally loved dancing, sulked because Napoleon had ordered her to give up her own set of emeralds and diamonds as an additional wedding present to Fanny. Though the Emperor himself did not attend, his presents were lavish: three properties, one in Poland, a second in Westphalia, a third in Hanover. Lucie found the whole event somewhat ‘insipid’. Without the lustre of Napoleon’s presence, the artifice of the imperial court held little attraction for her.
The year 1808 was the one in which Napoleon’s rule reached its most glorious phase. The continent of Europe lay at his feet, with Austria and Prussia his allies, Russia, who was at war with the Ottoman Empire, neutral, and only Britain, Sicily and Sweden holding out against him. Three of his brothers were on thrones: Joseph in Spain, Louis in Holland, Jerome in Westphalia. Since French was now the language of Europe’s courts, there was no need for Frenchmen to learn another language. Though France had indeed lost most of its colonies to the British, and the French merchant fleet was either paralysed or destroyed, the economy was healthy, with manufacturers finding outlets throughout the French-dominated continent, while agrarian reforms and the abolition of internal trade barriers, both legacies of the revolution, were beginning to show results.
At home, the Senate and the Corps Législatif were subdued and impotent; the Tribunat had been closed down. Almost all traces of republican liberty had vanished. It was no longer possible to gather, to talk or to write freely. The press was censored, and newspapers had been reduced to theatre reviews and paeans of praise for Napoleon. Though Le Journal des Dames et des Modes had illustrations showing women driving coaches and flying balloons, in practice the Code Napoléon had returned them to their hearths, forbidding them to travel, inherit or hold a bank account without their husbands’ permission. Art in all its forms, from literature and poetry to painting and the theatre, colluded in glorifying the Emperor, artists having learnt that only lofty moral subjects would keep them out of prison. Secret police infiltrated every corner of private and public life. Troublemakers like Mme de Staël had been banished to internal exile; in eight state prisons languished those suspected of conspiracy. Even from his entourage, Napoleon would tolerate no contradiction. Many of the worst repressions of the ancien régime were being surpassed.
But the city of Paris itself had never looked more imposing. Like the Pharaohs, Napoleon intended to leave great monuments–paid for out of the heavy contributions levied on conquered enemies–by which his deeds would be remembered. Three thousand metres of new quays stretched along the banks of the Seine. There were new bridges–du Louvre, des Arts and d’Austerlitz–new museums and new schools. On top of the Colonne d’Austerlitz, cast after 1,200 cannons captured at the battle were melted down, the bronze statue of the Emperor was seen leaning on a sword, holding in one hand a globe, surmounted by the figure of Victory. The old palaces of the ancien régime were being restored, to house ministers and the imperial nobility. The Canal de l’Ourcq was at last bringing fresh water to Paris from three separate rivers, while the Louvre overflowed with most of the masterpieces of European art.
It was after the Battle of Austerlitz in 1805 that Napoleon’s court had grown truly sumptuous. Having seduced the nobles of the ancien régime with honours and positions, bestowed on them his new Légion d’Honneur, and elevated his family and generals with imperial titles and fortunes pillaged across conquered Europe, the Emperor had imposed a military dictatorship on social life at court. Courtiers wore so many decorations that these looked not like orders and medals but ‘a new style of dressing’. ‘What I want is grandeur,’ he announced. ‘Whatever is grand is always beautiful.’ It was indeed grand; but it was also stultifyingly formal and often extremely boring, a pale and exquisitely orchestrated shadow of pre-revolutionary spontaneity and gaiety. ‘Fear assumed the mask of respect,’ wrote the Vicomtesse de Noailles. ‘It was not a court, but a power: but what a power!’
With the Comte de Ségur as Grand Master of Ceremonies–later described by Stendhal as a ‘dwarf…one of the Emperor’s weaknesses’–presiding over a court of several thousand people, many of whom moved with the Emperor from the Tuileries to Saint-Cloud, Fontainebleau and Compiègne, had come other ci-devant nobles to coach his clumsy generals and their ignorant young wives in the delicate subtleties and nuances of Marie Antoinette’s court. The women learned faster. ‘Adopt neither the posture of a fawning slave, not that of an insolent tribune,’ the Comtesse de Bradi instructed them. ‘Both roles make one look silly and ridiculous.’ In what Claire de Rémusat, who became lady-in-waiting to Josephine when she was 22, called ‘a daily growing despotism’, the parvenus were taught how to walk, stand, sit and bow by Despréaux, former dancing master to Marie Antoinette. They were told how to address each other–princes rated an ‘altesse royale’, grand marshals an ‘altesse sérénissime’–and how many plumes to wear. Rules and etiquette became a form of protection, against malicious remarks and embarrassing blunders. ‘These debutantes in the career of manners,’ observed Mme de Staël, still in exile and pining for Paris, ‘would make a mistake if they confused the outer appearance of things with good taste.’ Court balls had become cold and stiff. Napoleon, who did not care for dancing, had tried, and failed, to learn to waltz. ‘I am sorry for you,’ Talleyrand said to M. de Rémusat, Superintendant des Spectacles, ‘for you are in charge of amusing the unamusable.’
There were, however, compensations, as Fanny Dillon had discovered. Fortunes were lavished on favourite generals to be spent on furs, carriages, silver, liveries, all the trappings of splendour. Josephine’s increasing acquisitiveness–for diamonds, dresses, jewellery–found a ready following in her ladies-in-waiting, and in the separate establishments run by Napoleon’s sisters, Elisa, Pauline and Caroline, and his stepdaughter, Hortense. Josephine herself changed her costume three times a day, never wore a pair of stockings twice and owned some 400 cashmere shawls, having them made into cushions for her dogs as she tired of them. A dress covered in thousands of fresh rose petals was designed to be worn only once. ‘No language,’ wrote the Duchesse d’Abrantès, whose husband General Junot had been made a duke, ‘can convey a clear idea of the magnificence, the magical luxury…of this plumed and glittering circle’, even if imperial receptions sometimes seemed more like ‘reviews at which there happened to be women’. Napoleon’s review of his guards in front of the Tuileries, held every Sunday when he was not away at the wars, was widely regarded as the finest military spectacle in Europe.
Mme de Rémusat, who like many of the old nobility–and like Lucie herself–continued to regard her own culture, manners and education as greatly superior to that of the newcomers, left a description of Napoleon at this time. He was a man, she wrote, ‘ill-made, the upper part of his body…too long in proportion to his legs’, with thin chestnut hair, greyish blue eyes, very white skin, and a thin-lipped mouth, who in repose looked melancholy and meditative and when angry menacing. Napoleon was awkward, ‘deficient in education and manners’, but his ‘intellectual capacity’ was ‘vast’, and his long monologues, which took the place of ordinary conversation, were a pleasure to listen to. Napoleon, said Mme de Rémusat, was selfish, but possessed ‘fleeting tenderness’; and, just occasionally, he would appear in Josephine’s rooms in the evening and tell ghost stories.
Mme de Rémusat was as clear, and as chilling, when contemplating Josephine, a woman ‘easy to move and easy to appease, incapable of lasting feeling, of sustained attention, of serious reflection’. It was Napoleon, she maintained, who had taught Josephine to despise morality and also ‘the art of lying, which they both practised with skill and effect’. By 1808, as Lucie quickly discovered, there were few details of the imperial couple’s intimate lives that were not observed, picked over, criticised and recorded, from Napoleon’s taste for fricasseed chicken, called Marengo, after the battle, to Josephine’s careful smile, deliberately restrained in order to avoid revealing her bad teeth. At Saint-Cloud, as in the Tuileries, all life hung on Napoleon’s pleasure.
More celebrations followed Fanny’s wedding, each of the four witnesses holding a dinner in honour of the new couple in their mansions in Paris, where the mood these days was all for action rather than reflection, mirroring Napoleon’s military exploits. Lucie stayed on in Paris for some time. At the Salon des Expositions that summer, David, Gérard, Girodet, Gros and Guérin all exhibited pictures, most with heroic martial themes, cast in antiquity, the parallels with Napoleon’s feats clear to see. In the absence of new thoughts, and anxious not to dwell too heavily on the pleasures of the ancien régime, people were returning to the classics. Italian opera buffa, full of ‘improbabilities and follies’, had become very popular. Children were being christened Ossian, Porphrye and Zaphlora. Grimod de la Reynière was at work on his Manuel des Amphitryons, daringly taking menus from pre-revolutionary chefs. To sample the dishes which he invited readers to send in, Grimod had set up a Jury Dégustateur, which was attended by his large white angora cat; the jury, which spent five hours at table, sampled the dishes à la Russe, one by one, rather than having them all on the table at once, which was still the custom in France. Tasting a ragout of thrush, he declared that ‘one would eat one’s own father in this sauce’. The feet of a turkey, he added, were good for insomnia.
Mme de Staël, whose romantic novel Corinne, published the previous year, had made Italy fashionable in France, was at Coppet, at work on her study of German culture, De l’Allemagne. She continued to long to return to Paris, telling Mme Récamier, herself out of favour with Napoleon on account of their friendship, that ‘one is dead when one is exiled. It is merely a tomb where the post arrives.’ But she remained extremely indiscreet about her opinion of the Emperor, referring to him as ‘Robespierre on horseback’.
Before returning to Brussels Lucie again met Claire de Duras, who wrote to a cousin that her friendship with the ‘beautiful and affectionate’ Lucie was one of the most ‘delightful things’ in her life. After Mme de Montesson’s death, Napoleon had turned to Claire to advise him over matters of etiquette at court. The two women now became close again and when Lucie returned home, relieved to have escaped the ‘tedium’ of Paris, they wrote to each other frequently, Lucie sending presents of lace from Brussels, Claire red and blue bonnets from Paris. Amédée’s name had remained on the proscribed list until 1807, and he still preferred to spend most of his time at Ussé. Claire remained Lucie’s closest friend, perhaps the nearest she had ever come to intimacy with another woman. But their friendship was about to be tested in ways that revealed more of Lucie’s nature than of Claire’s frailties.
Not long after Lucie returned to Brussels, she heard from Claire that she had at last been introduced to Chateaubriand, whom she had been angling to meet for some time. Appointed Minister to the Valais in Switzerland by Napoleon in recognition of his support for the restored Catholic Church, Chateaubriand had resigned his post after the murder of the Duc d’Enghien. He had since given serious offence to the Emperor with an article comparing him to Nero. Like Mme de Staël and Mme Récamier, he spent much of his time banished from Paris.
An ‘amitié profonde’, a deep friendship, quickly sprang up between him and Claire; within days, as she wrote to Lucie, they were addressing each other as ‘dear brother, dear sister’. The trouble was that Claire’s feelings for Chateaubriand were far from sisterly, and she was soon complaining bitterly that it was clear that ‘he cares only for qualities of the mind’. With Amédée at Ussé, and the self-effacing Mme de Chateaubriand seldom in Paris, they went for long walks around the city. In the Plaine de Grenelle, where Chateaubriand’s cousin had been executed by revolutionary guards, Claire knelt on the edge of the ditch where the ‘blood of martyrs’ had flowed, prayed, and picked a primrose. To Lucie, she wrote that had it not been for ‘other commitments’, she would simply have devoted her life to ‘trying to please him’. She sent Lucie Chateaubriand’s letters to read.
Lucie was appalled. ‘Good God!’ she wrote quickly and anxiously back. ‘My dear Claire, how long must go by before you learn to be reasonable!’ What shocked her was her friend’s tone of self-abasement. Chateaubriand was not Socrates; if he sought adulation, that was because of his pride, and Claire would think more of herself if she kept company with good and serious people who recognised her true worth. ‘I am devoted to you, my dear,’ she wrote, ‘devoted enough to be able to tell you the truth, even when you doubt my motives…’ Such frankness was perilous.
When, soon afterwards, she learnt that after their third meeting, Claire had written a love letter to Chateaubriand, Lucie, who like many of their mutual friends considered Claire excitable and impetuous, returned to the attack. Letters went back and forth between Paris and Brussels, Lucie adopting an ever more disapproving tone. But Claire, by now fully embarked on a romantic passion, was unwilling to be deflected. It was not simply that the moral, faithful, sometimes prudish Lucie found her friend’s excesses distasteful: it was about the responsibilities of friendship, the necessary compromises in love, as in life, the importance of holding steady in a world buffeted by vanity and fashion, of keeping faith with some inner certainty. Even the women who ran the 18th-century salons and believed in the ultimate power of language had seldom sounded so blunt. The effect was to give Lucie a vulnerability that she otherwise seldom permitted herself. So straight herself, she found moral confusion in others both disturbing and distasteful.
In reply to Claire’s exaggerated outpourings about her devotion to Chateaubriand, Lucie urged restraint, caution, seemliness. ‘Why do you say I detest him? I hate him only in that he is dangerous for you. Until you tell me that I am wrong or reassure me, I shall go on disliking him.’ Lucie did not, in fact, much care for the brooding Chateaubriand, from whose vanity and self-indulgence she instinctively recoiled. She warned her friend that she was ‘making a spectacle of herself before the whole of Paris’. She told her that it was a fantasy, that she should ‘flee to Ussé…Calm your heart…Stop dwelling on this man who torments you…You must not think, my dear, that love at 40 is the same as that at 20…Stop reading this eternal Génie du Christianisme, which you know by heart…’ Urging Claire to take exercise, to study, but not poetry or metaphysics, ‘a dangerous topic for women’, she wrote: ‘To look inside your heart, see what needs destroying and then not have the strength to do it: that is more dangerous than useful; one grows accustomed to one’s enemy, and by making it familiar one loses the desire to get rid of it…I want to persuade you that there are a number of things in life that one must pass by without looking at.’
There were several occasions every day, admitted Lucie, when even she had to stop and say sharply to herself: ‘No, don’t think this way.’ She begged her friend not to agonise over a man for whom she was not the most important person. ‘M. de Chateaubriand seems to me like a flirtatious woman who wants many different men to pay attention to her; he has a little harem in which he seeks to bestow his favours equally in order to reign as Emperor.’ Recommending patience and greater efforts not to neglect her young daughters, she wrote, as she had once written in Richmond, many years before, urging the then just married Claire to make fewer scenes about the faithless Amédée: ‘You must not brood, nor look dissatisfied.’ These were manners of the heart that for Lucie could never be neglected.
Though she made little progress with Chateaubriand, who remained firmly committed to their ‘amitié profonde’ and nothing more, and was in any case pursuing other women, Claire eventually tired of Lucie’s scolding. Her replies became distant, formal. Lucie’s final words were bleak.
Your last letter was so dry, so glacial that it crushed my heart. I saw in it something that has been threatening me for a long time: it is that M. de Chateaubriand will get what he wants, and that you will no longer love me. I am convinced that this is exactly what he wants; and he is right. He doesn’t like me and he knows why. It doesn’t matter to him that you are in fact fond of me: we are fighting over your heart. He is more skilled than I am…and you have begun to listen to him; if once you give way to him, then I am lost. When he tries to persuade you that you no longer love me, dear friend, do not believe him…But what is certain is that if I lose your love (your real love, for I want nothing else), then I do not know what will be left for me.
Lucie was right to fear Chateaubriand’s influence: Claire did not reply. The correspondence ceased. It had, while it lasted, been intimate and loving, and it had exposed Lucie’s own feelings in ways not apparent before. The woman glimpsed from behind the daily round of efficiency and self-abnegation was both softer and more self-reflective than the picture she would later draw of herself.
In Brussels, even if she complained about the rain and the grey skies, and the ignorance of the Bruxellois who were perfectly capable of ‘thinking that Racine’s Hector was slain in the Seven Years War’, Lucie was in fact content. In the mornings, she taught Cécile history and Charlotte physics. She was devoted to her daughters. At 12, Charlotte was a modest, pious girl, ‘level-headed, mature and confident’; there was nothing she could not talk to her about. Cécile, nearly 9, had a good singing voice. ‘I take care to please my daughters,’ Lucie wrote to a friend. ‘I want them to think that theirs is the company I prefer to all other, and that I am never as happy as I am when I am with them.’ Humbert was a studious 18-year-old, reading nothing but Italian and Latin. Aymar, not yet 3, was seldom mentioned. While the girls studied, Lucie painted miniature scenes of castles and landscapes on to plates and sugar bowls, or did her tapestry.
The side of her life in Brussels she least enjoyed were the receptions and balls she was obliged, as the prefect’s wife, to give. The people who came to them, she wrote to a friend, ‘bore me to death, but I try not to let it show…the human beings who pass before my eyes are like a magic lantern which I have forgotten as soon as I see it’. Meeting so many different people made her feel ‘disgusted’ with the human race. ‘Every day I draw a little more into myself and I shall finish my days in a Trappist convent.’ Sometimes, her own detachment from all but her immediate family worried her. When her friend Pauline de Bérenger gave birth to a first child at the age of 36, and Lucie found herself unexpectedly anxious about her, she wrote: ‘I never realised that I was so interested in her, but it goes to show that I really do care. This makes me relieved: I worry that, like Mme du Deffant, I am not capable of loving anyone.’ Since her love for Frédéric and the children was so deep, it is hard to believe that she meant the words in any but the lightest sense; but it revealed a concern that the incessant public life was taking a toll on her nature that she did not much care for. Even so, it did not stop her adding that she found Mme de Bérenger’s refusal to read any novel she deemed ‘inferior’ lest it corrupt her own perfect taste ‘totally absurd’. Even when meek, Lucie remained sharp.
In the spring of 1809, Austria, defeated three times in 12 years by Napoleon, rose up against the French; it took Napoleon a month to fight his way to Vienna, with heavy casualties on both sides. Austria was obliged to pay vast indemnities; it also lost 3 million subjects in lands ceded to the French. But Napoleon needed an heir, to carry on his empire, and the boy he had designated, his stepdaughter Hortense’s son Louis, had died in 1807, at the age of 4. After months of rumours and uncertainty, the Emperor finally announced that he would divorce Josephine and marry the blue-eyed, blonde-haired, somewhat stolid 19-year-old daughter of Emperor Francis of Austria, Marie-Louise, whose aunt happened to have been Marie Antoinette.
The French court was fond of Josephine, who, while frivolous and spendthrift was also good-natured and very generous; she had put on weight and her face was more round than oval, but her voice remained warm and pleasing. With regret, they saw her retire to Malmaison, to cultivate the peonies, roses and dahlias that grew in profusion in the hothouses that had been built behind the house, to enjoy her collection of mostly looted Titians and Raphaels, and to sleep in her red tent bed, under the squatting gold eagle. As Louis-Antoine Bourrienne, Napoleon’s secretary, remarked, for Josephine it was acquisition and not possession that gave her the most pleasure. She was sad, but not lonely. Her agreeable nature continued to attract many visitors, and the handsome settlement after the divorce enabled her to acquire ever more shrubs and flowers. Josephine, as Claire de Rémusat had noted, was not much of a reader; but she was passionate about horticulture, and about the scents and colours of her plants. Many years later at St Helena, Napoleon would say that Josephine had been ‘une vraie femme’, a real woman.
The proxy marriage ceremony with Marie-Louise was held in Vienna. Napoleon awaited his bride at Compiègne, where 10 pages of instructions for the ceremonial of her reception had been circulated. It was from Fanny and Bertrand, who, together with the entire court, had been ordered to Compiègne, that Lucie heard the details of Marie-Louise’s arrival. In the castle courtyard, a barouche stood ready, the horses already harnessed, waiting for word of the approaching convoy of carriages from Vienna. When it came, Napoleon set out to meet his bride. Not giving her time to alight, he jumped into Marie-Louise’s coach, pushed his sister Caroline, Queen of Naples, who had been sent to greet her new sister-in-law, into the front and rode back by Marie-Louise’s side to Compiègne. Flares and an orchestra of wind instruments awaited them. By the time the many formal presentations had been made, it was dark. Napoleon led his bride to her apartments.
The first impressions had been good: Marie-Louise, though not exactly beautiful, and standing half a head taller than Napoleon, was judged to have a ‘fresh face’. The courtiers waited, longing for dinner, expecting at any minute to see her reappear in a new gown. Finally came a message to say that Their Majesties had retired for the night. Later, Bertrand discovered that the Archbishop of Vienna had given Marie-Louise a document stating that the proxy marriage was valid in the eyes of the Church: Napoleon had taken his new Empress straight to bed.
For the civil marriage at Saint-Cloud on 1 April, the early heavy rain had cleared and the spectacle of so many kings and queens, in full robes and uniforms and jewellery, was dazzling, even if Napoleon’s sisters and Hortense made a fuss about having to carry Marie-Louise’s train and dropped it to show their displeasure. But the start of the marriage was marred by a terrible fire in the Austrian Embassy, where Prince Schwartzenberg was holding a ball in honour of the Emperor and his new Empress, attended by the whole court. Two temporary tented rooms had been put up to house the 1,200 guests; a fire broke out and tore like lightning across the canvas; struggling to escape through one door, many people were trampled to death. The women’s ball dresses went up in flames, which spread from one dress to the next. The ambassador’s sister, who was 22 and pregnant, was killed when a chandelier fell on her head; the Russian Ambassador, the frail and corpulent Prince Kourakin, was severely injured. The finest jewels in Paris had been worn for the ball. Some of the women who managed to reach the streets were attacked by thieves. Prince Kourakin, who was wearing diamonds to the value of many millions of francs, lost them in the fray. ‘I never saw such a blaze,’ wrote an American visitor to Paris who happened to be nearby. ‘It seemed as if half the city was on fire’, the flames casting light on an incredible scene of half-dressed frantic people running around looking for friends and relations, while passers-by, pretending to help, snatched diamonds from their fingers, ears and hair.
In Brussels, the old nobility was not proving altogether easy to court, in spite of the best aristocratic efforts of Lucie and Frédéric; but they were growing slightly warmer towards the French. And when Napoleon, less than a month after his marriage, decided to bring his new bride to what had been the capital of her father’s Belgian possessions, many of the remaining reservations disappeared. Brussels went into a frenzy of preparations: houses were painted and redecorated, a new staircase was built up the side of the Hôtel de Ville, with a grand new entrance, and, along the roads the imperial party would take, sand was spread, and even carpets were laid. The walls of Marie-Louise’s apartments in the Château de Laeken were hung with pleated pale pink satin, looped with garlands of roses in carved silver. For days before the great event, musicians could be heard rehearsing in different parts of the city.
On 28 April, Frédéric and General Chambarlhac went to receive the Emperor and Empress at Tubize. On a fine spring day, Napoleon and Marie-Louise rode into Brussels in an open carriage, accompanied by a special guard of honour in green and maroon, raised by Frédéric from Brussels’s leading families, Humbert and Auguste de Liederkerke among them. With them came the kings and queens of Westphalia and Naples, Prince Metternich and Prince Schwartzenberg of Austria, and all their suites of ministers, officers and attendants. The cannons roared, the muskets fired salvoes, and bells were rung in every church. Behind came the musicians, playing and singing in harmony. There were shouts of ‘Vive l’Impératrice’, who, it was generally agreed, had a dignified carriage and a sweet expression.
Next day, Lucie was ordered to present the ladies of Brussels to the Empress. Marie-Louise was pleasant, but said nothing. She had, wrote Lucie later, no trace of haughtiness but was, on the contrary, ‘gentle, good, obliging’ and extremely shy, ‘which is proper for her age’. She was also ‘remarkably naive’. At court, Marie-Louise had already earned a reputation for prudishness, making clear that she would tolerate no doubles entendres or risqué remarks.
The city of Brussels had organised a ball in honour of the Emperor and Empress and, to her immense pleasure, Lucie was invited first to a small private dinner at the Château de Laeken. It would mean a rapid change of dress, but the prospect of spending two hours with Napoleon charmed her, and she liked this kind of challenge. She positioned a maid with her ball dress at the Hôtel de Ville and pressed the mayor, the Duc d’Ursel, into service to act as her escort. At dinner there were just eight people; Lucie was on Napoleon’s left. He spent most of the meal questioning her in great detail about the people of Brussels, about the lace-makers and the convents of the Béguines, women living in communities but not bound to perpetual vows.
It was all over in 45 minutes, as Napoleon never liked to waste much time on food; but in the drawing room afterwards he continued to talk to Lucie, while teasing his brother Jerome about all the ‘rascally’ men he had taken into his service in Westphalia. To Lucie, seeing that she was well versed in history, he talked about the French kings and the style of their reigns, saying that he thought that Louis XIV had only proved ‘truly great’ towards the end of his life. When he reached Louis XVI, he paused, then said, ‘sadly and with respect, “an unfortunate Prince!”’.
Then came the dash to the Hôtel de Ville with the Duc d’Ursel. Lucie was standing in her allotted place, in full ball dress and jewellery, when Napoleon and Marie-Louise, holding a bouquet of flowers made of precious stones, arrived. The Emperor, complimenting Lucie on the speed with which she had changed, asked her whether she would be dancing. He laughed when she replied that, being a woman of 40, she no longer danced. The fact that the Empress did not dance either was seen as a hopeful sign that she might already be pregnant. Next day, the imperial suite left for Antwerp, Frédéric accompanying them by boat on the canal. News did indeed soon come that the Empress was expecting a child.
The visit had passed off very well. At least in part due to Frédéric’s diplomatic skills and instincts, the right people had been noticed, the right honours bestowed. When, not long afterwards, Humbert went to Paris for his examinations for the Council of State, Napoleon, who was present–no detail of his administration being too small–took over the questioning. Discovering that Humbert was fluent in Italian as well as English, he gave him the sub-prefecture of Florence.
Life in Brussels continued, in its pleasant, social way, broken only by a painful operation to remove a tumour from below Frédéric’s ankle, for which the Princesse d’Hénin sent a trusted Paris surgeon. It was just as well, for the wound had become inflamed after a Belgian doctor applied caustic in error, and there had been talk of amputation.
Frédéric was not yet able to walk when news arrived that a British fleet of 40 ships of the line and 30 frigates had entered the mouth of the river Escaut, and laid siege to Flushing. As a first step to challenge Napoleon’s domination of continental Europe, the British plan was to move on to take Antwerp. Napoleon was away from Paris. Arch-Chancellor Cambacérès, alerted by telegraph, began marshalling troops from nearby garrisons and turned out the Garde Nationale. In Brussels, Frédéric gathered together the Guardsmen from the Dyle. Every day, leaving Brussels at five in the morning, he and Lucie went by carriage to Antwerp, changing horses along the way, to inspect the defences. After a late breakfast with Malouet, they returned to Brussels, a round trip of some six hours on the road. It was taken for granted that Lucie would accompany Frédéric: their marriage had become a partnership in every aspect of their lives.
The British campaign started well, but soon faltered; the plan to take Antwerp was abandoned. By now the French, who had been caught off guard, had regrouped, though it was widely agreed in Brussels that had the British adopted a different strategy they could indeed have entered Belgium unopposed. As it was, both armies were struck down with Flushing fever, the surrounding dikes being full of mosquitoes, which, arriving on top of dysentery and typhoid, put four in every ten of the 40,000 British soldiers out of action. The French gardes, bivouacked on the island of Walcheren, came down with the same fevers, and all the surrounding hospitals were soon overflowing with sick young men and boys. The prefecture in Brussels became a depot, where families handed in spare mattresses and linen. Lucie was working harder than ever.
But trouble was brewing for Frédéric. Napoleon was looking for culprits for France’s slow response to the British invasion. M. Malouet, recently appointed conseiller d’état, warned that people were beginning to intrigue against him. The very qualities that made Frédéric so remarkable–his directness and incorruptibility–were ill-suited to the slippery world of Empire politics. In Brussels, people came forward to accuse him of having failed to summon the Guardsmen with sufficient haste. Only the courageous intervention of a young officer, who named the true culprits, deflected Napoleon’s wrath. Frédéric had also made a dangerous enemy of Anne-Jean Savary, newly elevated Duc de Rovigo and appointed Minister of Police, by refusing to further the ambitions of one of his relations.
Early in 1811, Lucie and Frédéric went to Paris to see Humbert off to Florence. ‘This departure,’ wrote Lucie later, ‘was the beginning of a long separation and was exceedingly painful to me.’ Fanny had been staying in Brussels and now, like everyone else connected to the court, was hastening home to be present at the birth of Marie-Louise’s baby. Hers was turning out to be a very happy marriage and Lucie felt closer to her. Fanny was already the mother of two children, Napoleon and Hortense, born without mishap despite her insistence on accompanying Bertrand all over Germany, when their carriage turned over several times on the bad roads.
In Paris, Lucie was cautiously reunited with Claire, who, to her alarm, was still pursuing Chateaubriand, with as little success as before. She had two serious rivals and Lucie found the petty jealousies and adulation of these three ‘priestesses’ ‘ludicrous’, each plotting behind the others’ backs to ingratiate herself further in the eyes of their complacent god. Subterfuge and malice remained foreign to Lucie’s nature. One evening, she was delighted to discover that she had been invited to attend a play at the Tuileries, where luxury shone ever more brightly, with much silver and lapis lazuli, and all lines straight and regular, everything that was ‘capricious and irregular’ out of fashion.
There was a small and select audience of just 50 lavishly dressed courtiers, who expressed surprise when Napoleon and Marie-Louise greeted the more simply dressed Lucie so warmly. To boost the French lace and silk industries, men without an office at court were required to wear the old habit habillé, the heavily embroidered silk coat of the ancien régime: rugged old soldiers, veterans of the republican wars, were to be seen in shimmering pinks, greens and pale greys.
Once Humbert had left for Florence, Lucie longed to return to Aymar and her daughters. Frédéric, evidently uneasy about his enemies, decided that they should remain in Paris to await the delivery of the Empress’s baby. On the evening of 19 March, news came that Marie-Louise had gone into labour. The ladies-in-waiting hovered, were sent home, recalled, then sent home again. In the late morning of the 20th, a first cannon shot, fired from the Invalides, was heard. Paris froze: carriages stopped, people hurried to their windows, the streets filled. There were to be 20 shots for a girl, 25 for a boy. By the 19th, an expectant hush silenced the whole city. When the 21st boomed out, there was an explosion of cheering.
That evening, at nine o’clock, the court was summoned to the Tuileries to attend the provisional baptism of François-Charles-Joseph-Napoleon, King of Rome. Lucie, Fanny and Mme Dillon joined the throng jostling for positions close to the aisle where Napoleon and the baby would pass. They found an excellent spot at the top of the staircase, just by the row of the much decorated veterans of the Vieille Garde. When the baby appeared, carried by the royal governess on a satin and lace white cushion, Lucie was able to observe him very closely. Lucie had seen many newborn babies, not least her own six. This baby, she was certain, was not newborn. But whose it was, and whether he had been switched with another child, was a mystery she discussed only with Frédéric.
Towards the end of summer, though Marie-Louise had still not recovered her health after the birth of the baby, Napoleon returned with her to Belgium. While he went on a tour of inspection of his northern defences, the Empress stayed at the Château de Laeken. Lucie was expected to spend every evening with her, playing lotto. This time, she found Marie-Louise excruciatingly dull. Every day the Empress, holding out her wrist to have her pulse taken, asked whether Lucie thought she had a temperature; every day, Lucie replied that not being a doctor, she could not tell. When the Duc d’Ursel tried to interest her in an outing to the Fôret des Soignes, she said that she did not care for forests; offered a portrait of her illustrious grandmother, Maria-Theresa, to hang on the walls of her apartments, she pronounced the frame too old-fashioned. ‘In short,’ concluded Lucie briskly, ‘this insignificant woman’ was utterly unworthy of ‘the man whose destiny she shared’. Lucie did not meet Marie-Louise again until after Napoleon had fallen: and then ‘she was still just as stupid’.
On St Helena Napoleon would say that he had wanted to ‘make Paris the true capital of Europe’. By 1811, Rome had been annexed to the French Empire as a free imperial city; the lands lying on the north and east coasts of the Adriatic had become the Illyrian provinces; the Hanse cities of the North Sea had been absorbed; and when Louis abdicated, Holland had been incorporated into France by imperial decree. All that stood in the way of French hegemony were Britain and Russia, and victory in Spain, where French forces were stalled. Napoleon needed soldiers, to replace the tens of thousands who had died, and those now struggling wounded and crippled back from Spain. For yet more recruits he turned to his prefects to carry out levies in their departments.
Some of the attacks on Frédéric at the time of the British invasion had been justified: though he had indeed tried to raise men for the Garde Nationale, he had noticeably failed to enthuse the Belgians for Napoleon’s wars. Nor had he done much since his arrival to chase up the growing number of deserters. Ordered by Paris to seize the parents who could not pay the fines of young men who had deserted or were in hiding, he refused, replying that it was not only illegal but pointless to send parents to jail for their sons. While mobile units scoured the countryside for fugitive soldiers, Frédéric kept repeating that fines, threats, forfeits and the taking of liens on entire communes seemed to him morally and legally wrong. Together with his transparent honesty, Frédéric was a stickler for doing things according to the law, and he was never afraid of quarrelling with anyone over matters of principle.
None of this made him popular with the Ministry of the Interior. Nor did his extreme reluctance to force Belgian families to send their sons to lycées and military academies in France, a suggestion greeted by the ville haute with horror. Frédéric had also been less than helpful when instructed by Rovigo to draw up a list of well-born, unmarried, rich Belgian girls over the age of 14, together with descriptions of their appearance, any deformities, talents and religious views, as possible wives for Napoleon’s senior officers. As Frédéric saw it, these were simply forms of hostage-taking.
M. Réal was the member of the French Council of State in charge of the ‘surveillance’ of the nine Belgian departments; Lucie referred to him as a ‘superior kind of spy’. In 1811, Réal arrived in Brussels on a tour of inspection, telling Lucie as soon as he set foot in the prefecture that to his mind Belgium was nothing but a ‘country of fanatics and fools’. A number of Belgian priests had taken the lead in opposing Napoleon’s stand against the Pope and Belgium was full of priests forced into hiding by their refusal to recognise the concordat. The Archbishop of Malines, M. de Pradt, however, far from protecting his recalcitrant priests, was in league with the Commissioner of Police, and when asked to give them up had been reported as saying: ‘You want eight? Well, I will give you 45.’ Neither the Commissioner nor the Archbishop approved of Frédéric, whom they suspected–rightly–of doing nothing when asked to track down the leader of the rebels. Nor did the Archbishop care for Lucie, whom he considered responsible for reporting back to Paris some injudicious remarks he had made to her. She had indeed repeated them to the Princesse d’Hénin, hoping to amuse her, but the letter had been intercepted and its contents shown to Talleyrand who used them in jest with the Archbishop. Lucie herself was not always tactful, and it had been foolish to take such risks.
While M. Réal was in Brussels, he stayed at the prefecture. One night Lucie gave a dinner in his honour, to which she invited all the people known to be particularly well disposed towards Frédéric. After dinner, there was a glittering reception for the ville haute. When the guests left, M. Réal expressed his disgust at so many useless elegant and illustrious people. Frédéric replied that he was sorry that he felt that way, but that he was certain that Napoleon saw things differently.
Réal returned to Paris to file a highly critical report. Not only was the Prefect weak and ineffective, but he was under the sway of his domineering and wilful wife, who had created a ‘court’ for herself in Brussels. ‘If called upon to act in difficult circumstances, he would probably lack the necessary resourcefulness and severity…Married to a woman of considerable spirit, who has the greatest influence over him…’ Frédéric was, the report went on, too liberal, too lacking in administrative firmness and too directionless.
There was some reluctance now among Belgian guests to attend Lucie’s receptions in the prefecture, lest they be perceived as too closely associated with Frédéric’s stubbornness in his dealings with Paris. The Comte de Mérode, whom Frédéric had helped avoid being sucked into Napoleon’s net by overlooking false details in his residency papers, described Lucie’s soirées as ‘splendid’ but added that ‘one went to them with apprehension, so frightened were we of being seen and conscripted’. When Talleyrand came to Brussels to preside over the election of a senator and two deputies, Lucie found him refreshingly charming and entertaining, and noted that in comparison M. de Pradt looked like Scapin, Molière’s comic buffoon, noted for his cowardice, in a purple cassock. Talleyrand was himself increasingly at odds with Napoleon over their very different views on the future of Europe, and by now Napoleon had already made his much repeated remark about his Foreign Minister being nothing but ‘shit in yellow silk stockings’.
Most of the prefects had their protectors at court. Whether Talleyrand was a protector to Frédéric is not clear, but he was noticeably present at most of the crucial moments of Frédéric’s life. He would, however, have been able to do nothing to shelter Frédéric from the spies, agents and secret police who were active in every corner of the Empire, often spying not only on their neighbours but on each other. ‘Spy on everyone except for me,’ Napoleon had ordered his police; and gendarmerie, guards, aides-de-camp, prefects, generals and mayors all duly sent constant reports back to him from wherever they were.
What they had to say in the winter of 1811 was not encouraging, either about events in Belgium or in the rest of the Empire. Despite constant rises in taxation, the deficit in the Treasury was such that Napoleon had cancelled the arrears of pay owed to soldiers killed in action. Led by the Banque de France, banks had been drawn into a cycle of competitive discounting: businesses were failing on all sides. There were several bankruptcies in the Dyle. A terrible summer, with storms in some places and scorching heat in others, had combined with the British blockade to produce acute shortages of flour, and the potato so hated by the French was again back in evidence. From the provinces came reports of increased brigandage and ever more beggars. Posters were seen with the words ‘bread, work or death’.
In Paris, censorship was so extreme that the Gazette de France was reduced to talking about religion and the Journal de Paris about entertainments. The press, Réal informed the Conseil d’Etat with satisfaction, ‘is in a state of absolute servitude’. Though Mme de Staël agreed to remove 11 passages considered anti-French from De l’Allemagne, her long awaited book on German culture, Rovigo commanded that the entire edition of 10,000 copies be seized and burnt, and ordered her to leave France once again. Mme de Récamier, threatened with exile herself should she pay her friend a visit, said to Rovigo: ‘One can forgive a great man the weakness of loving women, but not that of fearing them.’
In June 1812, troops of French soldiers began passing through Brussels on their way east across the river Niemen. It was the start of the Russian campaign. Soon groups of officers, with just a few hours in which to rest and eat, appeared at the prefecture, where Lucie gave them dinner before they disappeared into the night. Orders arrived to requisition farm wagons and horses, with forage, sometimes as many as 80 or 100 carts a day.
The Grande Armée–some 600,000 men and 200,000 horses, the largest army ever assembled in Europe, with Italian, Austrian, Polish and German soldiers fighting alongside the French–was soon advancing against a retreating Russian enemy, whose scorched earth policy drew them ever deeper into Russia. At the Battle of Borodino, at the end of August, the French lost 30,000 men, dead or wounded; among them were 43 generals. Napoleon continued to advance on Moscow. How the fire that destroyed four fifths of the largely wooden city started no one discovered. By the time the French were forced to retreat, the Russian winter was on them. Less than a sixth of the Grande Armée came home.
It was some time before the full scale of the disaster became known. In Brussels the autumn passed uneventfully, broken only by Auguste de Liederkerke’s attentions to Charlotte, now 16, a tall, accomplished girl, not pretty, as Lucie noted in her straightforward way, but quick, cheerful and always helpful. ‘Her qualities of heart,’ wrote Lucie, ‘surpassed even those of her mind.’ Such was Charlotte’s love of books that her mother removed her light each night before going to bed, to prevent her daughter from reading and writing until dawn. ‘You will laugh at me,’ Lucie wrote to a friend, ‘but at the moment I am in love with a young man of 22…whom I hope to make my son-in-law.’
On New Year’s Day 1813, Auguste’s mother called at the prefecture to ask formally for Charlotte’s hand for her son. Cécile was away in a convent, preparing for her First Communion, but Lucie promised that she could return in time for the wedding. Better still, Humbert, whose ‘aptitude for business matters, zeal and love for work’ had greatly endeared him to his superiors in Florence, was to be transferred as Sub-Prefect to nearby Sens, but not before Lucie had irritated Fanny and Bertrand by her blatant attempts to advance her son’s career. Where Frédéric and the children were concerned, Lucie had very little shame. To add further to their happiness, their dear friend M. de Chambeau was not only back in France but had been posted to Antwerp, and so was able to visit them in Brussels.
It was now that a blow fell. Frédéric’s enemies had proved too powerful. One morning, when Lucie was in the prefecture and Frédéric away trying to raise more soldiers for Napoleon, a courier arrived from Paris with the news that Frédéric had been dismissed. He had, in the euphemism of the Ministry of the Interior, been ‘called to other duties’; Rovigo was thought to be behind the sacking. Lucie’s first thought was that the Liederkerke family might break off the engagement, but as soon as he heard the news Auguste insisted that nothing would cause him to change his mind. Lucie’s next step was, given her nature, predictable. M. Réal had been right to mistrust her forcefulness. Without even waiting for Frédéric to return, she left for Paris, travelling by coach through the night. ‘I decided,’ she wrote later, ‘not to give in without a struggle.’ That Paris might be consumed by the news from Russia does not seem to have occurred to her. Nor, apparently, what Frédéric would feel about her journey. It was almost always Lucie, now, who was the more forceful and resolute of the two.
Reaching the Faubourg Saint-Germain at ten o’clock next evening she went straight to Claire de Duras’s house, to find 14-year-old Félicie and 13-year-old Clara in bed and their mother out. A servant was sent to fetch her. Soon Lucie, who had developed a fever during her journey, was put to bed in a nearby apartment; a doctor arrived to give her a ‘calming potion’.
She slept all next day, rose at five, dressed in her most elegant clothes and ordered a livery carriage. Taking Claire with her, she set out for Versailles where she believed she would find Napoleon, who had hastened home ahead of his straggling small army of survivors when he learnt of a coup d’état being planned against him. The Emperor was in fact in the Trianon, recently restored for his use. Lucie took rooms in an inn and wrote out, in her careful, neat hand, a copy of a draft letter that she had brought with her, and addressed it to Napoleon. She and Claire got back into their carriage and had themselves driven to the Trianon, where the chamberlain on duty happened to be an old friend, Adrien de Mun. He promised to deliver her letter in person. That evening, a palace servant in lace and gold brought word that the Emperor would see her next day. Lucie slept soundly, rose, fortified herself with a large cup of coffee, and set out for the Trianon.
The interview with Napoleon lasted, she calculated later, exactly 59 minutes. From Napoleon’s opening words–‘Madame, I fear that you are very displeased with me’–it went extremely well. Later, Lucie would describe this encounter as one of the most important occasions of her life. Having listened carefully to her account of Frédéric’s difficulties in Brussels, including his brushes with M. Réal and General Chambarlhac and his wife, the former nun, he said: ‘I was wrong. But what can be done about it?’ As they talked, Napoleon walked briskly up and down the room, Lucie trying to keep pace with him. On his desk were papers relating to vacant prefectures. He paused, looked down the list, then asked: ‘There is Amiens. Would that suit you?’ It suited Lucie perfectly: Humbert, at Sens, would be very near. Before she left, bearing with her instructions to tell the various officials of his decision, Napoleon asked Lucie whether she had forgiven him; she, in turn, asked him to forgive her for her outspokenness. ‘You were right to do so,’ he replied. She curtsied and he walked to the door to see her out. This, too, was an honour.
A few days later, at a drawing room reception at court, she met the Emperor again. Catching sight of her standing behind a row of ladies, he came over and smiled: ‘Are you pleased with me, Madame?’ The ladies parted to let Lucie come forward. It was the last time, she wrote, ‘I was to see the great man’. Later, she would describe the charm and sweetness of his smile, all the more remarkable because of the contrast with his normally severe expression.
Frédéric’s appointment to Amiens was posted in Le Moniteur. Lucie was warmly congratulated by friends who had heard of his disgrace and feared that nothing could be done to save him. Napoleon was not known to change his mind, and colleagues were amazed by Lucie’s success. She returned to Brussels to pack up the prefecture and restore the rooms to precisely the way they had been before her arrival five years earlier. Charlotte and Auguste’s wedding had been set for the end of May, and to Lucie’s delight Auguste had been appointed Sub-Prefect of Amiens, so she would not lose her daughter. Not wishing to offend the incoming Prefect by too great a show of popularity, Frédéric asked the mayor, their old friend the Duc d’Ursel, to conduct the civil ceremony at ten o’clock at night, when the streets were usually empty. Just the same, the family emerged to crowds of well-wishers, and when they returned to the house that had been lent to them by friends, they found that all the musicians of Brussels had gathered to serenade them.