Lucie, Frédéric, Cécile and Aymar, taking with them the newly married Charlotte and Auguste, arrived in Amiens towards the end of March 1813. A prosperous wool-manufacturing town, Amiens was set in the flat, somewhat marshy, malarial plains of Picardy, 150 kilometres north of Paris. Frédéric’s brother-in-law, Augustin, whose home at Hénencourt lay not far away, was waiting to introduce them to the town’s leading families. The prefecture was a charming two-storey, grey-stone, 18th-century mansion, set back from the road and reached through an imposing stone gateway; behind were pretty, landscaped gardens stretching away to fields and forests.
Lucie was delighted with the house and its grounds, saying that they made her feel that she was living in the country; but she felt rather less warmly towards the officials who governed Amiens. For the most part, she noted, the men were ‘utterly vulgar’, while their wives were remarkable chiefly for their ‘grotesque appearance and ridiculous behaviour’. They also had an absurd habit of addressing their husbands as ‘ma poule’–my chicken–or ‘mon rat’. The years of poverty and turmoil had done nothing to diminish Lucie’s taste for bon ton. Nor had they altered her belief in the innate superiority of the aristocracy, views that sometimes sat oddly with her instinct for fairness or her genuinely kind heart; or, indeed, her very real support for the liberties proclaimed by the revolution. She and Charlotte briskly resolved to mix with none but Amiens’s older families and long-established merchants.
Angélique de Maussion, whose husband had been in prison with Augustin de Lameth during the revolution, met Lucie and Frédéric soon after their arrival. Frédéric, she wrote later, was likeable, clever and warm-hearted, while Lucie was ‘belle, like the whole of her family, but also blessed with a strong character and a good mind’. Having been through so much, ‘she had become what by birth she was destined to be: a great and noble woman’. What most people remarked on now, when they were introduced to Lucie, was how formidable she could be.
One of Frédéric’s first and most unpleasant jobs was to recruit yet more soldiers for Napoleon’s struggling armies, no easy task in a country openly longing for peace. Commissioners, sent to all parts of France by the Senate not long before to help with recruitment, had returned with reports of apathy, exhaustion and resentment. Over 2 million men had been called up since 1805, and nearly a million were dead, in Spain, in Russia, in Italy, killed in campaigns fought backwards and forwards across Europe. It would later be said that half of all French boys born between 1790 and 1795 had either been killed or wounded in Napoleon’s wars. As Prefect of the Somme, Frédéric had orders to call up all remaining healthy, well-built men under the age of 35, both single and married, regardless of whether they had already served in the army, providing that they were of good moral character and stood at least 1 metre 65 centimetres in their bare feet. So acute was the shortage of young men that nearly all the guests at balls were women. The ‘sun of Austerlitz’, remarked Aimée de Coigny, had turned into a ‘ball of fire devouring France’.
When not away reluctantly seeking men for the army, Frédéric spent much of his time finding pallets, blankets and linen for the troops, and also money, through the compulsory sale of lands. The former nobility, he noted, often seemed more willing to yield up their sons than their money. As in Brussels, Frédéric did not hurry to send off ever younger boys to the front, which was once again earning him a reputation for royalist, anti-Napoleonic leanings.
But Frédéric, for all his patrician airs, remained, like Lucie, convinced that the roots of the revolution had lain in the errors and profligacy of the court and the ancien régime. Both of them regarded all talk about a possible return of the exiled Bourbons with profound misgivings. ‘All the errors and vices which had been at the root of the first revolution were still too vivid,’ wrote Lucie. ‘Their weakness would bring in its train abuses of every kind.’ Even if many of their friends–Amédée de Duras, Mathieu de Montmorency–were known to be organising a secret royalist network in central France, meeting at Ussé, Frédéric would have no part in it. The most he was prepared to do to defy Napoleon was to hold back, as he had in Brussels, on the levies of young men for Napoleon’s armies.
Amiens, surrounded by pleasant countryside and home to several of her aristocratic friends, with Humbert not far away as Sub-Prefect in Würtemberg, suited Lucie well. With false news of victories despatched back to France by Napoleon, it seemed as if the Empire remained safe. Soon after their arrival, the theatre season opened with a production of Molière’s Le Misanthrope. There was a lecture on botany, given at one of the excellent local scientific academies, and Frédéric was asked to address the chamber of commerce on the subject of a new machine for slicing beets.
Frédéric was often away, travelling around Picardy on tours of inspection, worrying Lucie by the amount of time he spent in low-lying, mosquito-infested areas. Lucie, left alone with Cécile and Aymar–Charlotte, already pregnant, was frequently absent with Auguste–wrote to Claire de Duras, hoping to mend their friendship. She described her immense pride and pleasure in Cécile, now 14 and her closest friend and companion since Charlotte’s marriage. Cécile, wrote Lucie, was clever, thoughtful and loving, and she sang extremely well; like Charlotte, she spoke and read fluently in both English and Italian. ‘Her one fault,’ wrote Lucie, ‘is that she is too good.’
For her own part, she was occasionally overcome by melancholy and despair, for which she blamed the weather of northern France and her own weakness, though her age–43–may also have been to blame. ‘This illness,’ she wrote, describing what can only have been depression, ‘for it is indeed an illness, to which I would infinitely prefer a fever or gout, makes me the unhappiest person in the world. Among other things, I think that I am going mad; I feel terrifyingly oppressed, my heart beats and my head feels heavy, and my thoughts are scrambled…’ It was the first time–indeed, the only time–that Lucie admitted openly to such feelings. For a woman whose face was so determinedly set against self-pity or self-indulgence, these frailties were both disturbing and very puzzling. She did not plan to indulge them.
Lally-Tollendal and the Princesse d’Hénin were spending the summer with the Princesse de Poix at the Château de Mouchy, not far from Beauvais. In the summer of 1813 Lucie went to join them, planning to return by way of Paris. There she hoped to see Talleyrand in order to make sense of a mysterious message that he had sent Frédéric via a colleague neither of them quite trusted. Claire was also at Mouchy with her two daughters and her new son-in-law, Léopold de Talmont. In August, Félicie, Lucie’s goddaughter, though just 15, had agreed to marry the good-looking and charming only son of the Prince de Talmont, whose father, one of the royalist heroes of the Vendée, had been killed fighting revolutionary troops. Claire, who had always loved Félicie more than Clara, had strongly opposed the match. But Félicie, who was as wilful and excitable as her mother, and also very much in love, had gone ahead regardless, and was now openly more affectionate towards Léopold’s mother than towards her own.
At Mouchy, Lucie found Claire in a terrible mood, having already fallen out with Léopold, spending her days writing long angry letters to her new son-in-law, sending them by footman from one end of the château to the other. Once again resorting to what she somewhat disingenuously referred to as ‘the frankness of affectionate and sincere friendship’, Lucie argued Léopold’s case. But she was unable either to deflect Clare’s wrath or sweeten her temper, and both she and her hostess wearied of Claire’s continual scenes. Lucie was much attached to the capricious Félicie, whose liveliness and good heart she valued.
In Paris, pausing at Lally-Tollendal’s apartment only to change her dress, Lucie went straight to see Talleyrand in the rue Saint-Florentin, off the rue de Rivoli. He received her, she wrote later, ‘as always, with the amiable courtesy of long friendship’. For all his slyness and treachery, Talleyrand possessed, she wrote, ‘greater charm than I have ever known in any other man. Attempts to arm oneself against his immorality, his conduct, his way of life, against all the faults attributed to him were vain. His charm always penetrated the armour and left one like a bird fascinated by a serpent’s gaze.’ Aimée de Coigny would also write of serpents in the context of Talleyrand, saying that, like a snake with its skin, he changed his moods, but with a swiftness that could be terrifying. Talleyrand, as enigmatic as ever, asked Lucie to delay her departure for Amiens by 24 hours; but he refused to say why.
That night, she heard salvoes announcing Napoleon’s return into the city. Next evening, Talleyrand failed to appear. Lucie had spent the day visiting her half-sister Fanny, living in splendour in the Tuileries since Bertrand had been appointed Grand Maréchal du Palais. When Talleyrand finally appeared, at eleven o’clock at night, he said nothing but wandered idly around Lally-Tollendal’s rooms, admiring the portraits of English kings that hung on the walls. Lucie asked him about Napoleon. ‘Don’t talk to me about your Emperor,’ Talleyrand replied. ‘He’s finished.’ Pressed further, he added: ‘He has lost all his stores and equipment…It’s all over.’ It was, as Lucie knew, a long time since Talleyrand’s complicated relationship with Napoleon, which had started out with mutual attraction, had turned to hatred and contempt. Plotting with Austria and Russia in 1808, and Britain in 1810, Talleyrand had remained committed to the goal of a peaceful and equally balanced Europe rather than a supreme and conquering France. His treachery, a historian would later write, was ‘sustained and remorseless, occupying all his waking hours’.
Then Talleyrand handed Lucie a cutting from an English newspaper, giving an account of a dinner in London held by the Prince Regent for Louis XVI’s daughter, the Duchesse d’Angoulême. Lucie, puzzled, asked him to explain. ‘Ah, how stupid you are,’ exclaimed Talleyrand, putting on his coat and disappearing into the night. ‘Give Gouvernet my good wishes. I am sending him this news for lunch.’ When, next morning, Lucie repeated the conversation to Frédéric, he found it just as perplexing, saying only that if it was by such means that the Bourbons hoped to recover their throne, then ‘they would not remain on it for long’. For the moment, Lucie and Frédéric remained loyal to the Emperor, and in any case both were extremely nervous of Talleyrand’s intrigues, Lucie noting that they felt that he ‘would stop at nothing and had no scruple whatsoever in leading people into danger and then abandoning them in order to save himself’.
It was towards the middle of the autumn of 1813, wrote Lucie, that ‘the first real rumbles of the approaching storm were heard’. News began to reach Amiens of French military defeats. Since the summer, when the Emperor Francis had declared war on Napoleon–his son-in-law–over half a million Allied troops had been pouring into central Europe, pledged to impose peace through a coalition masterminded by the British Foreign Minister, Viscount Castlereagh, and using military tactics successfully learnt from Napoleon. In Spain, Wellington was routing the French troops. Bavaria had joined the coalition; Germany was now largely liberated. With the Battle of Leipzig on 16 October, against a combined force of Russians, Austrians, Prussians and Swedes, in which the French forces were outnumbered by two to one, much of what remained of the Grande Armée was lost, though the news sent back to France continued to cast defeats as victories. On 22 December, the Allied armies crossed the Rhine; offers of peace–and even the throne–in exchange for a return to the borders of 1791, were rejected by Napoleon. By January 1814, Allied soldiers, fighting for the first time on French soil, occupied a long line stretching from Langres to Namur.
On 17 February, Amiens woke to learn that there was fighting not far away, at Montdidier. A week later, Allied troops reached nearby Troyes. Then came news that a party of Cossacks had broken away from the main cavalry and were looting the surrounding countryside, carrying away pigs, cows, wine, wheat and sugar and raping any women they could find. In the town people began to bury and hide their most valuable possessions; wine merchants and jewellers removed the signs from their doors. Charlotte was nearing the end of her pregnancy. Lucie and Frédéric moved her, Cécile and Aymar, together with many of their own belongings, into a safer apartment in the centre of the town, but remained themselves in the prefecture to await developments. Men started to fortify the ramparts and chop down trees for a palisade, while a squadron of Chasseurs was despatched to confront the marauding Cossacks, who eventually galloped away, terrifying villagers by their strange uniforms and wild appearance.
Würtemberg had already been taken by the Allies, and Humbert, ill with pleurisy, had only just managed to escape in time to Paris. Having recovered, he made his way to Amiens, where Frédéric soon sent him back to Paris to find Talleyrand and try to discover what was happening. By now Paris was full of royalists, watching and scheming, men who had never abandoned their preference for a restored Bourbon monarchy and who had hated Napoleon and now wished to place Louis XVIII on the throne of France. In the rue Saint-Florentin, Talleyrand told Humbert to wait in an anteroom. At six o’clock next morning, while Humbert was still asleep on a bench, Talleyrand emerged, fully dressed and in his wig, tapped him on his shoulder and said: ‘Go now. Wear a white cockade and shout: Long live the King!’
For Frédéric and Lucie, constitutional monarchists at heart and loyal servants to Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette, but who had agreed to serve Napoleon, the return of the Bourbons was at once a solution to France’s current ills, and personally unsettling. They were not alone in their fears that retribution might follow against those who had supported Napoleon, nor in their deep misgivings about what kind of a King Louis XVIII would turn out to be.
As a young man, long before the revolution, Louis XVIII had been very fond of his food. Descriptions of him at 20 invariably included the word ‘stout’. By 1814, when he was 59, he was enormous, a short, waddling, cold, calculating man who believed, with total certainty, in the divine right of kings. When Louis moved, observed Grenville, it was like watching ‘the heavings of a ship’. But he was also witty, clever and extremely well read, with a particular liking for the worldly Horace; unlike his brother, Louis XVI, he preferred literature and the arts to machinery and the sciences. He had, with a great deal of patience, endured 22 years of exile, moved on from state to state by rulers embarrassed by his presence, kept afloat by the fluctuating generosity of foreign governments. And all the time he had held on to his conviction that the throne of France belonged to the descendants of St Louis. The long years of tedious and impoverished exile had somewhat softened his earlier inflexibility. While continuing to maintain that the revolution had been an aberration, perpetrated by murderous usurpers, he had become more moderate, accepting that there could be no total return to the ancien régime, but only to some kind of constitutional monarchy. Pacifist by conviction, willing to recognise the errors of the past and retain whatever sensible gains had emerged with the Consulate and the Empire, he would say about himself: ‘I may not have much strength of character, but I believe myself to be more timid and easy-going than weak.’
For the last years of his exile, Louis XVIII had lived in England, at Hartwell House in Buckinghamshire, where he was wheeled around the gardens in a rolling chair, surrounded by elderly aristocrats, setting policies for his government in exile. On 1 February 1813, he had issued a proclamation: if he were returned to France, there would be no vengeance and no conscription. France would again become a country of peace, happiness and unity, and a country of manners, for Louis knew about manners and the way that kings should behave.
In 1799, his niece Madame Royale–the only surviving child of Marie Antoinette and Louis XVI, who had lived in exile in Vienna after her cousin, Emperor Francis of Austria, exchanged her against French prisoners–had married another cousin, the Duc d’Angoulême, elder son of the Comte d’Artois. During her years of seclusion, locked up alone in the Temple from the age of 14, and told of the death of her mother, aunt and brother only later, the Duchess had learnt to appear at all times impassive. She had a long, somewhat large nose and her eyes, which tended to look red as if she had been crying, had an enquiring, wary look. Her failure to have children was said to have ‘dried her heart’ and made her gloomy and pious. Louis XVIII’s wife, Marie-Josephine of Savoy, had died in 1810, at which time the Duchess had taken her aunt’s place as royal hostess. Like her uncle, she had been in England, waiting for the day when she would return to the court of France.
This campaign’s last battle between Napoleon’s troops and the Allied forces was fought on 30 March 1814, just below the heights of Montmartre. Next day, in bright sunshine, the King of Prussia, together with Tsar Alexander of Russia, wearing a coat trimmed with fur and gold epaulettes, and Prince Schwartzenberg, representing the Emperor of Austria, rode down the Champs-Elysées. It was the first time since the Hundred Years War that a foreign army had entered Paris. Watching the long lines of soldiers in their different coloured uniforms, the Parisians who lined the streets were at first silent, filled, noted a diplomat called André Delrieu, with ‘passive and lugubrious consternation’; but then, bit by bit, the crowds came alive, women climbing out of their carriages to walk with the soldiers.
The Allies had somewhat conflicting views as to what should become of France and its fallen Emperor. The Tsar wanted to see General Bernadotte, Crown Prince of Sweden and former French Maréchal, on the French throne; the English favoured Louis XVIII; while the Emperor Francis would have liked to see his grandson, Napoleon and Marie-Louise’s son, eventually become King. And there was still the question of a possible settlement with Napoleon. In the event, a bandwagon began to roll for the Bourbons, the Allied leaders declared themselves for Louis XVIII, and on 1 April a provisional government for France was appointed, with Talleyrand at its head. The return of a Bourbon king to the throne of France had become, as Tsar Alexander remarked, a ‘necessary consequence imposed by the weight of circumstances’.
Next day, the Senate voted to depose Napoleon. In return for abdicating not only his own rights but those of his family, the former Emperor was offered Elba as a sovereign principality; for the Empress Marie-Louise, who soon left Paris for Austria with her son in a convoy of carriages, weighed down with treasure, there would be the duchies of Parma, Piacenza and Guastalla. Just before signing, Napoleon swallowed a dose of poison he had carried around with him for years. But he recovered, and on 13 April signed an Act of Abdication, before leaving for the south, in 14 carriages. He was accompanied by four Allied commissioners, 400 soldiers, a number of courtiers and servants, and a large library of books, including a complete edition of Le Moniteur Universel and the works of Rousseau, Voltaire, Plutarch, Cervantes and Fénelon.
At Saint-Raphael, having been jeered and threatened along the way, he boarded a British warship, the Undaunted, which took him to Elba. The faithful Bertrand had opted to stay by Napoleon’s side. Fanny, to her great despair, joined them soon after, taking with her to Elba the three children, aged 6, 5 and 4. She was again pregnant. A boy, Alexandre, born at the end of August, lived only 3 months. Fanny hated Elba, spending most of her time with Madame Mère. Her extreme lack of punctuality was soon reported to be exasperating Napoleon.
Because of Louis XVIII’s gout, which he spoke of as ‘an enemy with whom I must live and die’, it was his elegant, ambitious younger brother, the Comte d’Artois, who rode into Paris first, to install himself in the Tuileries. Over the next few days, Talleyrand, Maréchal Ney and the Duchesse de Courlande all gave balls, at which victors and vanquished mixed. At the Opéra, ladies wore the white lilies of the Bourbons in their hair and carried them in bouquets and as garlands. Napoleon’s bees and eagles were scrubbed and scratched away, his portraits, which hung on innumerable walls all over France, were taken down; the white cockade and the fleurs de lys were back in evidence. ‘Once again,’ wrote the Vicomtesse de Noailles, granddaughter of the Princesse de Poix, ‘we climbed back on to the throne with the Bourbons.’ The Vicomtesse was one of the many aristocratic ladies who had longed for the fall of Napoleon, saying that his ambitions had hung over her ‘like a guillotine permanently in place’. The Cossacks, with their small horses and high saddles, which they mounted even to cross a square, had set up their bivouacs in the Champs-Elysées, and here, as night fell, they could be heard singing mournful airs round their camp fires.
Four days before the Undaunted pulled out of Saint-Raphael, Louis XVIII had been helped on to an English ship to bear him across the Channel, accompanied by the Duchesse d’Angoulême in her prim, old-fashioned clothes, and the 80-year-old Prince de Condé. With them went the Duc de Blacas, Louis’s taciturn confidant, a man with very short legs and a long body, bald under his blond wig. As the boat neared Calais, cannons were fired to salute their return; from afar the beach looked black with people, who cheered and wept. The royal party proceeded slowly towards Paris, every step of the way marked by triumphal arches, speeches and choirs singing Te Deums.
In Amiens, Humbert’s words from Talleyrand had been greeted with uncertainty, no one sure as to their exact meaning. But once it became known that Napoleon had abdicated, and that he had accepted a large settlement, there was widespread anger that so many young men had died apparently in vain. People came to the prefecture, shouting ‘Vive le roi’, and Lucie handed out white cockades, brought back from Paris by Humbert in his barouche. By the light of flares, and to the sound of ringing bells, Amiens declared for Talleyrand’s provisional government. In the theatre, players hastily staged a production of The Hunting Party of Henri IV, which had been censored by Napoleon, and when the actor reached the line ‘Vive Henri IV’ the entire audience rose to its feet and cheered. On 14 April, a Prussian troop of 2,000 men clattered through the town to much applause. The ten years of Napoleon’s rule were shed with surprising ease.
Having been informed that the King intended to spend a night at the prefecture in Amiens, Frédéric set off for Nampont-Saint-Martin, where the royal party would first enter the Department of the Somme. Lucie was visited in the prefecture by people offering pictures, flowers, shrubs and ornaments to decorate her rooms for the great occasion. Next came a number of elderly courtiers, anxious to find favour with Louis XVIII and put behind them any service rendered to Napoleon. Though fond of these old friends, whom Lucie had known since childhood, she was exasperated by their display of ‘prejudice, hatred, pettiness and bitterness’ towards the fallen Emperor. Her first glimpses of the Restoration did not impress her.
On 28 April, the carriage drawn by eight magnificent white horses and bearing Louis XVIII, the Duchesse d’Angoulême and the Prince de Condé rumbled into Amiens, where the streets had been hung with white sheets and scattered with flowers. As it entered the town, the millers of Amiens, according to an ancient tradition, asked to be allowed to unhitch the horses and draw the coach themselves, in their new grey suits and white felt hats, bought specifically for the task. Twelve young girls, led by Cécile, presented bouquets to the Duchess. In the cathedral, where the Te Deum was sung, people cried with joy. The doors were kept shut until the King was seated: when they were swung open, a great roar was heard ‘as of a flood breaking its banks’ as people surged inside.
That evening, Lucie was seated next to the King, who pleased her with the courtesy and charm he showed the ordinary people of Amiens. They were 25 at table. Louis XVIII declared that, like his brother, he would eat in public, those waiting to be presented standing around the room at a little distance from the table. Angélique de Maussion, who was an accomplished painter, was allowed to sit nearby and sketch the King. Lucie was considerably less taken with the Duchesse d’Angoulême, who chose to ignore Angélique, even after learning that Angélique had offered to help Marie Antoinette escape when they were prisoners together during the Terror.
Lucie’s much-loved cousin, Edward Jerningham and his new wife Emily had accompanied the royal party to France, Edward having pleased the King by articles he had written in English newspapers praising the Bourbons. She had not seen him since she had left England 15 years earlier. Together, they discussed how the Duchess might be helped to take more trouble with her appearance, abandon the heavy style of an earlier age in order to create a more elegant first impression on Paris, a city for which elegance remained essential. ‘The obstinacy of the Princess,’ noted Lucie, ‘was immovable.’ In the cathedral, observing Louis XVIII and the Duchess, brother-in-law and daughter to Marie Antoinette, Lucie had been filled with emotion. Now she felt only foreboding. ‘Alas,’ she wrote, ‘my illusions were to last less than twenty-four hours.’
Next morning, leaving 600 men wounded in fighting in the north to recover in Amiens’s hospital, the royal cortège set off for Compiègne, where Claire de Duras, Chateaubriand, Talleyrand, Maréchal Ney and many other of Napoleon’s generals and courtiers were waiting to greet them. Most had quickly and conveniently forgotten their years of service to Napoleon. Compiègne itself was in some chaos, its fine library of books partly destroyed by cannon fire. After discussions with senators come out from Paris to greet him, Louis XVIII issued a first proclamation, promising to adopt a liberal Constitution, to preserve liberty and to honour existing pensions, titles and decorations.
The château was seething with anxious people, come to press their suit with the restored Bourbons, scrambling over each other for preferment, for rewards, for places at court. Those who had held positions under Napoleon were desperate to hold on to them, those who had lost out by remaining monarchist now hoped for recognition and restitution. When, on 4 May, Louis at last entered Paris, to a Te Deum in Notre Dame and the obligatory balloon ascension by Mme Garnerin, Mme de Boigne remarked that it was so ‘like a party that it is a pity it is a conquest’. That evening, such were the fireworks that the Seine looked like a river of fire. ‘These excellent princes delight us all,’ Claire wrote to her daughter Clara. ‘We are very happy. It all seems like a dream.’ For Claire and Amédée, the return of the Bourbons was all they desired; for Lucie and Frédéric, it was all rather more complicated. Leaving aside their own personal feelings about any restoration of the Bourbons, there was still the question of how the new King would view those who had held prominent posts under Napoleon.
The question, too, was just what kind of a monarchy it would turn out to be. By education, instinct and experience, Louis XVIII belonged to the 18th century, to a world in which an elite of aristocrats and churchmen ruled from de haut en bas. In exile he had often spoken of the necessity of not taking revenge, and of moderation, not out of laziness but as the best policy. But behind his benign air of fatherly concern lay an ‘olympian egoism’. He knew that he would have to make concessions, and had in fact no desire for authoritarian rule; but what he understood in his bones was the ancien régime.
Those closest to him shared his certitudes. There was his head-strong younger brother, the Comte d’Artois, now known as Monsieur, who made very little effort to conceal his distaste for anything that touched on revolution. There was d’Artois’s elder son, the Duc d’Angoulême, who though honest and sensible was handicapped by feelings of inferiority caused by his small size, poor sight, nervous tics, stutter and reported impotence. The Duchess, only surviving child of a queen many now chose to recall with nostalgia, could have won considerable sympathy and understanding. But the pale, trembling orphan of the Temple had become stiff and overbearing, with a grating voice and hard features, having inherited her father’s brusqueness but not his bonhomie, and Marie Antoinette’s pride but not her gracefulness. To charm the French, that left only the Duc de Berri, d’Artois’s second son, another red-faced small man with short legs and no neck, but witty, generous and physically brave, if irascible.
For the moment, the imperfections of the restored Bourbons did not matter. Having refused to accept a Constitution proposed by the French Senate, Louis set about drafting a Charter of his own, coming up with 74 articles which promised equality before the law, freedom from arbitrary arrest, and reasonable liberty for the press, while retaining for the Crown the power to declare war or make peace. The King would be able neither to suspend laws nor dispense with them. A Chamber of Peers was set up, the revolution and the English system suggesting the need for one. All this was welcome to Lucie and Frédéric and allayed some of their fears about a restored autocratic monarchy. To Lucie’s added pleasure, Frédéric, far from being punished for his years as Prefect, was rewarded with a peerage, for the wholehearted welcome he had extended to the new King. He now became the Marquis de la Tour du Pin Gouvernet. The second Chamber, that of the Deputies, was severely limited from the beginning by making only the 1 per cent of Frenchmen who paid over 300 francs a year in taxes eligible to vote.
The moderate tone of the Restoration was apparent in Louis XVIII’s choice of ministers: Frédéric’s friend, the elderly Malouet at the Ministry of the Marine, the Abbé de Montesquiou at the Ministry of the Interior, and Talleyrand back in Foreign Affairs, a post he had held, at various times, under the Directoire, the Consulat and the Empire. The Abbé de Montesquiou had resumed his ecclesiastical title, dress and manner, which Lucie, who could remember him in his defrocked days in a rose-coloured waistcoat laughing heartily at the theatre, found absurd. ‘We must thank Providence,’ remarked the new Director General of the Police, ‘that we have a King made of dough of the finest constitutional flour’, which sounded flattering until he added that it was all rather like a ‘trompe l’oeil of divine right masquerading as a constitutional monarchy’. Frédéric and Lucie were not alone in feeling wary about the shape of things to come. With the end of ten years of Empire, and the very real changes brought about by the revolution, there was a profound question about how exactly the new France would be governed.
Fearing that any post in the new administration would be inferior to his two prefectships, Frédéric decided to return to diplomacy. He went to see Talleyrand, who rather to his disappointment offered him the embassy at The Hague. But he took comfort from the fact that as he left, Talleyrand added, ‘Take that post for the time being.’ When he talked it over with Lucie, they agreed that this undoubtedly meant that something better would be forthcoming.
The Allies had been most circumspect with the conquered French, their officers enforcing on their soldiers courtesy and respect for property. Though the 5,000 or so people whom Napoleon had rewarded with lands or revenues on foreign soil saw them confiscated, France was allowed to revert to the borders of 1792. Nor did it have to pay indemnities. It was also allowed to hold on to the stolen art in the Louvre.
Lucie arrived back in Paris, to an apartment in the Princesse d’Hénin’s house in the rue de Varennes, to find Wellington preparing to take the job of British Ambassador. Claire, as wife to a senior courtier, was happily ensconced in the Tuileries, where the Duchesse d’Angoulême, now known as Madame, cast a chill over court life. The Duchess had barely been stopped from insisting that women return to the hoops of the 1780s. Just the same, only the chosen few were allowed to enter the throne room, the rest simply filing past the door, and Amédée de Duras, ‘more duke than the late M. de Saint-Simon…graceless and scarcely polite’, was busy concocting rules for precedence and hierarchy. For his part, the King appeared wrapped up in his own thoughts, eating gargantuan meals–he thought nothing of putting away a plate of cutlets as an hors d’oeuvre–before being wheeled back to his rooms to entertain his favourites with his erudite and elegant Latin quotations, aphorisms and metaphors. No restored monarch, it would be said, had ever treated those who restored him with such disdain: even the Tsar, arguably the most powerful ruler in Europe, had to present himself twice before he was received.
One evening Lucie was invited to a ball given by Prince Schwartzenberg. It was, she wrote later, not only ‘the oddest spectacle to anyone given to reflection’ to find herself surrounded by all the people, furniture and food that had so recently been those of Napoleon’s court; it was also sad. Looking around her, listening to Claire talk about her good fortune, she reflected that ‘not one of all the people there’ was worthy to be Napoleon’s conqueror, and that she was probably the only guest to feel shame at the speed with which Parisian society had gone over to the victors. Lucie’s perception of events and people was unusually candid; never swayed by fashion or intrigue, it was as if she brought to her surroundings a curiously pure eye.
Even Josephine, despite her years as Empress, lost none of her friends and admirers with Napoleon’s abdication. Malmaison continued to attract foreign visitors, come to look at the pictures and sculptures that made it more a museum than a house, and to stroll in the now famous hothouses where 184 new species had flowered for the first time in France. But late in May Josephine went riding with the Tsar and caught a cold, which turned into pneumonia. She died on the 29th, at the age of 50, just as the Allies were preparing to pull their soldiers out of Paris. She left no will, and her remarkable collections, divided by her children Hortense and Eugène, soon disappeared in sales and restitutions around the world.
Europe had been at war for more than 20 years. In those two decades, territories had changed hands, frontiers had vanished, dynasties had been overthrown and new monarchs brought to the throne. In September 1814, preparing for the Congress in Vienna which was to settle the affairs of Europe, Talleyrand wrote an analysis of what he hoped to achieve for France. Frédéric had been correct in suspecting that Talleyrand had plans for him: Lucie, calling on him one day, was informed that her husband was to prepare himself to leave immediately for Vienna as one of the plenipotentiaries at the talks. Talleyrand’s own entourage included, not his wife, judged too blowsy and undistinguished, but his 21-year-old niece by marriage, the beautiful and accomplished Comtesse Dorothée de Périgord, who was to act as his hostess. Lucie longed to accompany them, but Humbert had joined the King’s military Household, becoming a lieutenant in the Black Musketeers–so called after their black horses–and was looking for a wife. It was decided that she would remain in Paris with him, and that Auguste de Liederkerke would go with Frédéric to Vienna as his private secretary. Charlotte had given birth to a baby girl, Marie, and Lucie did not wish to be too far from them.
There had been considerable jealousy at the news of Frédéric’s appointment, particularly when it became known that he would also retain his job as ambassador to Holland; Claire, in particular, was furious, having gone to great lengths to secure for Chateaubriand one of the postings to Vienna, and failed to do so. ‘Can one love without suffering?’ she wrote mournfully to a friend, fretting about Chateaubriand’s future. ‘To live is always to suffer.’ Yet again, as in Brussels, there was something in Frédéric’s uncompromising honesty that seemed to invite attack. At every turn Frédéric, like Lucie, was emerging as a figure strangely out of tune with the evasions and scheming of his age.
Vienna, in September 1814, was full not only of statesmen and their entourages, but of reigning royal families and courtiers from all over Europe. The German principalities, Italian states, Swiss cantons and the Catholic Church were all represented. At one moment, two emperors and two empresses, four kings, one queen, two heirs to the throne and three princes were all staying in the Royal Palace at the same time. Of the 100,000 foreigners gathered in Vienna for the Congress, it was said that 95,000 had come not to work but to be reminded of the grandeur and pleasures of 18th-century society. There were balls, banquets, hunting parties and even a medieval tournament held in the baroque hall of the Imperial Riding School. The Congress, remarked the 80-year-old Prince de Ligne, who better than anyone could remember the splendour of Versailles, ‘ne marche pas, mais il danse’.*
Even so, the work done by Frédéric and his colleagues was both important and tricky, not least because of the real differences between the major powers, who in any case all wanted to exclude France from the preliminary talks. The Tsar wanted to emerge from the Congress with a kingdom taken from Poland; Prussia wished to swallow up Saxony; Metternich, the Austrian Minister for Foreign Affairs and the dominant statesman at the Congress, had no intention of allowing French soldiers to remain on Italian soil. Talleyrand, for his part, wanted to promote European equilibrium based not solely on military parity, but on principles of law and justice. As the soirées and receptions grew ever more fanciful and splendid, the relations between the powers grew steadily more tense. Out of the disagreements, Talleyrand soon drew a triumph for France, a secret treaty of mutual support with Austria and Britain, backed by some of the smaller states.
Lucie, having settled 8-year-old Aymar in Paris with a tutor in rue Notre-Dame-des-Champs, went to collect Charlotte and her baby daughter from Brussels, and installed them with her in the rue de Varennes. In the evenings they went out to call on the Princesse de Poix, who was once again drawing together the friends of her youth to talk about Voltaire and Montesquieu. They visited Claire in the Tuileries, and Lucie’s stepmother Mme Dillon in the Faubourg Saint-Germain. In all these salons, Lucie was becoming uncomfortably conscious of undercurrents of intrigue running through Parisian social life. It reminded her of the uneasy months before Napoleon’s coup of 18 brumaire.
Though Louis XVIII was personally popular–and showed Lucie particular marks of favour when she attended the court receptions–the rest of the royal family were already much disliked. The Duc de Berri’s temper was offensive to many of his former supporters, while the Duchesse d’Angoulême’s grim and despondent expression soured life at court. The excessive formality and etiquette, claimed the younger courtiers, were out of tune with the realities of the new France. It was no secret that discontent with the Bourbons was building up among Napoleon’s former maréchals such as Ney, nor that his stepdaughter Queen Hortense’s salon was often filled with soldiers openly regretting Napoleon’s departure. What alarmed Lucie was the way that at court and in most royalist circles it had become fashionable to ridicule all talk of conspiracy. She was increasingly aware of whispering on all sides, odd glances, secret meetings.
Lucie might have worried more had she not been overwhelmed by more personal troubles. Her granddaughter Marie was nearly a year old and teething. One day she caught a fever: her temperature kept rising. There was nothing anyone could do. The baby died, while in Lucie’s arms. ‘I wept for her,’ she wrote later, ‘as if she had been my own child.’ It was Humbert who attended to the funeral, while Lucie took the inconsolable Charlotte away to stay with the Princesse d’Hénin, then arranged for her to join Frédéric in Vienna. Lucie had now seen three infants–two of her own and a grandchild–die in the first few years of life.
Then came another crisis. Going to visit Aymar in his tutor’s house, she discovered him in bed with a high temperature in the infirmary, a gloomy, north-facing room. Discovering that no doctor was due to call, she took her carriage in search of her own, a young man called Dr Auvily. They returned to find that Aymar was worse. Dr Auvily diagnosed pleurisy and told Lucie that if she wished to save his life, she should remove him instantly from the icy room. Aymar was wrapped in blankets and taken back to the rue de Varennes. On the sixth day, it was thought that he would not pull through and Humbert was told to prepare Lucie for his death.
But Dr Auvily refused to give up hope. Resorting to one of the more drastic remedies of early medicine, he had the little boy swaddled in a plaster jacket impregnated with cantharidin, used to raise blisters, leaving only his arms and feet bare, to which were applied mustard poultices. Every two minutes, Aymar was forced to swallow a teaspoon of warm liquid. Remarkably, he survived. Though the cantharidin had reduced his body to one large sore, his temperature fell. When he was able to leave the house again, Lucie asked Amédée to get her a special pass for the Louvre, and there, for the next six weeks, Aymar ran around in the warmth among the stolen Raphaels and Titians.
Even at the height of the Empire, Paris had not seen balls and receptions of such brilliance as those given in Paris during the winter of 1814. Lucie and Claire had decided to take Mme de Staël’s 19-year-old daughter, Albertine, into society and to wean her off her mother’s inelegant dresses and odd costumes in time for her marriage to the Duc de Broglie. Mme de Staël had been one of the first of Napoleon’s exiled opponents to return to Paris, and was now making up for the wasted years of banishment with gatherings at which she drew together victors and vanquished, Bourbons and Bonapartistes. Somewhat stouter, but no less passionate, she continued to hold forth to admiring audiences on politics and literature. Her epitaph on Napoleon was unforgiving: a ‘Condottiere without manners, without fatherland, without morality, an oriental despot, a new Attila, a warrior who knew only how to corrupt and annihilate’.
Lucie, who had continued to meet her from time to time during her ten years of exile, was in her drawing room in Paris one day when Wellington came to call. He had recently bought Pauline Borghese’s house in the Faubourg Saint-Honoré for 820,000 francs. Wellington was not an altogether popular choice as British Ambassador, some of the French feeling that it had been tactless to appoint a man who had spent the previous six years engaged in defeating the French armies in Spain. Others complained that his dress was too casual and his open affair with a former mistress of Napoleon’s too scandalous. But Lucie, who had known him as Arthur Wellesley since she was a child, met him again with pleasure.
With the Restoration, the English had once again poured across the Channel, delighted after a ten-year break to resume their grand tours of Europe, and to start them, as they had in the past, in Paris. Some 23,000 people crossed the Channel in 1815, to be charmed by the many new restaurants and cafés–there were said to be over 3,000 of each–by the new paintings by David’s pupil Gros, by the ageing Talma, still playing his heroic roles, and by the wide tree-lined boulevards down which they wandered on fine afternoons. There was a new rhinoceros in the Jardin des Plantes, and at 188 rue Saint-Honoré could be seen the ‘Venus Hottentote’, a Botswana bushwoman with vast buttocks. The visitors gambled and danced–the cotillon, the polka, the waltz–at afternoon thé dansants.
The reaction of French society to their English visitors was somewhat disdainful. Deprived of French elegance for a decade, the English were said to have ‘acquired the easy-going manners and customs of the tropics’. Cartoons in France portrayed the taller, plumper English girls as insipid, gawky and stiff. For their part, Englishwomen criticised their hosts for being ‘pedantic and frivolous’, overly conscious of social rank, and no better than ‘amiable but thoughtless children’ over matters of money. Lady Granville, soon to become British Ambassadress to Paris, admitted to feeling grudging admiration for the ‘aplomb’ of many French-women, but seriously doubted whether they were capable of the deep thoughts and feelings of Englishwomen.
Very quickly, salon life resumed; Parisian society, as Benjamin Constant observed, had no trouble jumping from ‘one branch to another’. In the Tuileries, Claire de Duras vacillated between inviting ardent monarchists or liberal intellectuals, and allowed her salon to be dominated by the mournful Chateaubriand, who insisted on imposing his ‘irritating, bitter and morose vanity’ on all around. Mme de Récamier was also back in Paris, and it was in her salon that a new fashion was being tried out, that of putting out four or five little circles of chairs for female guests, between which were left corridors for the men–and herself–to circulate. To Claire’s despair, Chateaubriand was beginning to show a marked interest in Mme Récamier.
Mme de Genlis had also weathered the jump from revolution through Directoire, Consulat and Empire to Restoration with exceptional ease. She had retired to the Convent of the Carmelites, ‘disenchanted with the vanities of the world and the chimeras of celebrity’. Thin and pale but having lost none of her verve, she spent her days playing the harp and painting pictures of flowers. She was at work on a Dictionnaire Critique et Raisonné of etiquette and manners, in which she was trying to explain, to a generation who had never known it, the pleasures of délicatesse, bon ton, politesse and douceur. Before the revolution, she wrote, young women had been gentle and reserved, which was what they should be. They had since become bold and assertive, which made them seem prematurely aged. ‘Gentleness’ and ‘submission’, as prescribed by the evangelists, was what women should aim for. Not everyone agreed: in the Journal des Dames et des Modes, women, portrayed sometimes as weak, sometimes as strong, but always as charming, were urged to heed the Comte de Saint-Simon’s words: ‘Rise up, Monsieur le Comte, you have great things to accomplish.’ New manuals were appearing, on how to live, behave, dress and run a house, stressing thrift and orderliness, so that men could return in the evenings from public life into havens of domestic happiness.
Lucie was not alone in fearing the cross-currents of intrigue and discontent. Writing to Castlereagh in October, Wellington remarked that though Paris seemed tranquil, ‘there exists a good deal of uncertainty and uneasiness in the mind of almost every individual that is in it’. The Comte d’Artois, surrounded by a group of ultra-royalists–the ‘ultras’–made little secret of his desire to abrogate the Charter and restore royal absolutism. Much of the army, on the other hand, put on half-pay in an effort to reduce France’s vast debts, mourned Napoleon’s departure. Fouché, who had abandoned Napoleon, nonetheless spoke yearningly of a regency under Marie-Louise, or even of having the Duc d’Orléans on the throne instead of Louis XVIII. There were complaints on all sides of Louis’s deafness to the mood of the country. In Queen Hortense’s drawing room, which had become a meeting place for disaffected soldiers and courtiers, young men wore her favourite flower, a violet, in their buttonholes, as a sign of their attachment to the exiled Emperor. The corridors of the Tuileries were full of rumours about Napoleon.
Lucie had been right to feel apprehensive. One morning, couriers, having ridden day and night from the south, brought the news that Napoleon had landed with 900 men in Golfe Juan. He had been on Elba for just ten months. It was the first of his Hundred Days. ‘Soldiers,’ declared the deposed Emperor as he travelled north, unopposed and gathering entire garrisons along the way, ‘in my exile I heard your voice.’ Maréchal Ney, who had fought heroically during the Napoleonic wars, then been among the first generals to rally to Louis XVIII, was hastily despatched to check Napoleon’s advance. Swearing before he left to return with the former emperor in an iron cage, he had a change of heart and joined Napoleon instead.
When word of Napoleon’s return reached Vienna, where the Congress was still in session, the four Allied powers declared war, not on France, but on Napoleon personally. Bonaparte, said Talleyrand, was a ‘threat to world peace’. Frédéric, declaring that his job as plenipotentiary ‘now seems to me insignificant’, asked Talleyrand whether he might return to France. Unlike Ney, Frédéric, having given his allegiance once again to the Bourbons, was not about to go back on his word. Talleyrand hesitated, then agreed to let Frédéric go south in order to raise support for the King among soldiers garrisoned in Toulon, and to convey to the Duc d’Angoulême, stationed in the Rhone valley, assurances of Allied commitment.
Travelling via Genoa and Nice, Frédéric reached Toulon, talked for four hours to the garrison, where he found the men extremely reluctant to support the Bourbons and eager to see Napoleon in power again, and went on to another garrison in Marseilles. He arrived to learn that the Duc d’Angoulême had already capitulated to Napoleon. Standing in the main square, Frédéric addressed the military and civilian authorities of Marseilles, as well as the Gardes Nationales and the people of the city, explaining the position of the Allies. It was his hope, he declared, that Louis XVIII would not lose his throne. The assembled crowds made it clear that it was not a hope they shared. After this, deciding that there was nothing more that he could do except ‘give way before the storm’, he took a boat to Genoa. Thrown off course by heavy winds, he reached Barcelona instead and from there made his way to Madrid and then Lisbon, where he found a ship bound for England. He stayed 24 hours in London, and dined with the Duchesse d’Angoulême, who had managed to escape and cross the Channel. He was certain, he assured her, that the Allies would do all they could to return Louis XVIII to the throne. With ‘tears in her eyes’, Frédéric reported later, the Duchess replied: ‘I believe you. The King will return to France. But, oh unhappy France.’ (The Duchess, remarked Napoleon later, was the ‘only man of her family’.)
In Paris, news of Napoleon’s approach had been greeted with extreme alarm. Princes, courtiers, ministers and their entourages piled their valuables into carriages and scattered north, west and east. For many of them it was their third or even fourth departure into exile. At midnight on 19 March, in pouring rain, Louis XVIII left for Lille, from where, after much uncertainty, he made his way to Ghent. Lucie, having decided to go to Brussels, went to the Ministry of the Interior to collect money owed to Frédéric. She was told to come back later for the money.
In the rue de Varennes, the Princesse d’Hénin and the now extremely stout Lally-Tollendal were frantically packing; they, too, had decided to make their way to Brussels. It was some hours before sufficiently strong horses could be found to drag their vast carriage, and it was not until late that the party finally set out. Lucie was delayed further by her banker, and by the time she had collected 12,000 francs in napoléons, there were very few available horses left in Paris. She spent the night at her window, anxiously watching soldiers file past, bunches of violets attached to their uniforms, sign of their allegiance to Napoleon, very visible by the light of the street lamps. At six next morning, two puny horses and a small barouche were produced and Lucie, Cécile, Aymar and a young Belgian maid set out for Brussels. Humbert had vanished somewhere with the Black Musketeers. The Faubourg Saint-Germain was deserted. It was Lucie’s fourth flight into exile.
On 20 March, Napoleon arrived back in the Tuileries. The fleurs de lys were removed, the bees painted back on. Just a week before, thousands of people had lined the quays of the Seine to watch the first steam boat come up the river.
Lucie reached Brussels without trouble, and was soon installed in a rented apartment in the old city, where she met up with Princesse d’Hénin, Claire Duras and her mother and daughter, all once again refugees. It was many worrying days before she had news of Humbert or Frédéric. Then Charlotte arrived from Vienna, to describe how, with the news of Napoleon’s advance, the Congress had dissolved and kings, statesmen and courtiers, instantly forgetting their differences, had scurried for home. Lucie was not greatly comforted to learn that Frédéric had insisted on going south in search of the Duc d’Angoulême. To Mme de Staël, who was back at Coppet and to whom she had become much closer in recent months, she wrote asking whether she had heard from him. ‘If you only knew, my dearest, how acutely anxious people who feel deeply and are unable to take life lightly suffer at times like this, you would guess how I feel…This is the sort of situation that wears my mind down like a nail file…’ Brussels, she wrote, had become a military camp, full of cannons, drums and trumpets, with everyone fearful of a sudden invasion by Napoleon’s troops. ‘Goodbye my dear, write to me, love me as you do those for whom you care most deeply.’ Then she added: ‘If, at this moment of trial, God were to send skirts to all those in Brussels who are not real men, we would find ourselves in the midst of an enormous convent.’
One evening, when Lucie and Claire were together, a servant appeared to say that there was a ‘gentleman’ of their acquaintance who wished to speak to them but did not dare enter as he was not correctly dressed. Even in the middle of war, the manners of the court had to be observed. It was the Duc de Berri, who told them that a band of brigands had attacked his carriage and made off with everything he possessed. Lucie, who still had many friends in Brussels, arranged for a new wardrobe to be assembled. She also called on the Prince of Orange, who, after the defeat of Napoleon at Leipzig, had been made Prince Sovereign of Belgium and the United Provinces. The Prince received her warmly in the very rooms that had been hers when Frédéric was Prefect to the Dyle. ‘In this salon,’ he told her, ‘I try to discover ways to be as well loved as your husband was.’ (‘Alas,’ wrote Lucie later, ‘the poor prince never succeeded.’) Lucie mentioned her son-in-law Auguste to the Prince, who agreed to take the young man on to his staff. When it came to obtaining favours for those she loved, Lucie was ruthless.
In Ghent, a prosperous cotton-and paper-manufacturing town, Louis XVIII was lent a fine 18th-century mansion with a large hall, where he and those of his ministers and courtiers who had followed him met every day to discuss the day’s news. The court in exile, presided over by the ever present de Blacas, remained a centre of intrigue, ultras and royalists, officers and diplomats, speculators, visitors and spies all spreading rumours and gossip. Chateaubriand, who, to his great satisfaction, had been appointed interim Minister of the Interior, had started a daily paper, Le Journal Universel, to which Lally-Tollendal contributed articles. Though there was a cautious feeling of optimism that Napoleon would soon be defeated, the foreign powers appearing to be unanimous in their intention to crush him, the émigrés lived frugally, remembering the money squandered at Koblenz.
The weather was fine and warm and there were occasional outings to the surrounding countryside, to pause at inns to eat fish from the rivers, washed down with Louvain beer. On Sundays, the entire French community dressed up to accompany the King, in his uniform of pale blue silk embroidered in silver, to Mass in the cathedral. The loss of his kingdom had not diminished Louis’s appetite. On the night of his arrival in Ghent, he polished off 100 oysters. Unlike Napoleon, who wished to get through his meals in under ten minutes, the King spent hours at table, savouring the sauces, trying out new dishes, tasting the Lafittes and the Tokais he particularly enjoyed, and the truffles in champagne, to which he was very partial. In Ghent, Louis’s more moderate views were being constantly challenged by d’Artois and the ultras gathered round him, who insisted that Napoleon had been able to return precisely because the Charter had been so liberal, and talked of the punishments they would mete out, once the Bourbons were back in power, to those who had rallied to the former Emperor. Talleyrand, playing a waiting game, did not hurry to Ghent.
In Paris Napoleon’s return had not proved as triumphal as he had hoped. Though large sections of the army had indeed gone over to him, drawn by his audacity, or disenchanted by the restored Bourbons, there were few cheers on the Champs de Mars when he proclaimed a new liberal republic. Parts of France had remained royalist, and he was having trouble raising men for the coming battles against the Allied powers. James Gallatin, a young American who had accompanied his father to Paris, noted that at the Opéra one night Napoleon looked ‘fat, very dull, tired and bored’. Fanny, to her delight, was back in Paris, having returned with Madame Mère on a 74-gun ship of war sent by Murat to collect them from Elba.
Frédéric was eventually able to make his way to Brussels. For a while, the family was reunited, except for Humbert, who was with the Musketeers in Ghent. Humbert, Lucie wrote to her cousin Charlotte Beddingfield, ‘at this moment of crisis is showing himself to be as noble, strong and manly as any loving mother could wish for’. Like Vienna at the height of the Congress, Brussels was immensely social. ‘This is without exception,’ wrote one young society lady to her mother in England, ‘the most Gossiping Place I ever heard of.’ Lucie complained wryly to Mme de Staël that she sometimes wished that God, who had given her the power of thought but not that of speech, had withheld speech as well, and made her deaf and dumb into the bargain, for she loathed ‘chatter’.
Wellington had reached Brussels early in April; on 3 May he was appointed commander-in-chief of the Dutch and Belgian forces. Drawing up his men for the definitive battle against Napoleon, he had decided to intermingle veteran soldiers with fresh recruits, regular soldiers with militia; he complained that his army of 92,000 men was ‘weak and ill-equipped’ and his staff very inexperienced. To keep up morale, Wellington insisted on attending and giving parties, and he went to watch the English play cricket at Enghien; but on 8 June he warned the Duchess of Richmond not to organise a picnic too close to the border with France. In L’Oracle, Brussels’s daily paper, Wellington was referred to as the ‘hero of our age’. For her part, Lucie herself doubted that Napoleon would ever invade Belgium. The Emperor, she told Mme de Staël, was by all reports a ‘changed man’. From all sides she had heard that his claws had been drawn and that he was now ‘all moderation, sweetness and liberality’.
In 1814, waiting to be sent as Governor General to Canada, Charles, 4th Duke of Richmond and former Lord Lieutenant of Ireland, had moved to Brussels, taking over a house that had belonged to a carriage-maker in the rue de la Blanchisserie. Its former ballroom, used by the carriage-maker as a factory, had been papered in a pattern of roses and trellises, and it was here that on the night of 15 June the Duke and Duchess gave a ball. Most of the 222 guests were English, the men nearly all senior officers in Wellington’s army, but Lucie and Frédéric were invited, together with Charlotte and Auguste. Wellington had received word that Napoleon had crossed the border, driven back a Prussian corps and occupied Charleroi, but he decided to let the ball go ahead so as not to spread alarm. As the evening wore on, the officers slipped away. Some had time to reach their barracks and change out of evening dress; others had arranged for servants to stand by with uniforms and horses. Among those who hastened away was Auguste, who went to join the Prince of Orange. But the dancing went on, and after supper was served at midnight, the bagpipes were played.
The Battle of Waterloo was fought between Napoleon and the Allied forces of Britain, Germany, Belgium, Holland and Prussia, with slightly more men and guns on the French side. At dawn, the outcome of the battle still uncertain, the inhabitants of Brussels, fearing the possible arrival of the French, began packing. From the city’s ramparts, Lucie watched cart-loads of wounded men arriving from the battlefield. There was a constant booming from the cannons and heavy rain had turned the surrounding countryside into mud. Suddenly a troop of cavalry appeared out of the rain, and galloped through the streets, scattering the carts of wounded men and overturning carriages piled high with baggage, leaving a trail of cases and clothes. Rumours spread that the French were arriving. ‘It was the most terrible sight I have ever seen,’ Lucie later wrote to her English cousin Charlotte. ‘Nothing can quite convey the idea of a town of 70,000 people seized by panic, all trying to flee at once. It seemed as if the end of the world had come.’ It was some time before reassuring messages arrived, with the news that victory had gone not to Napoleon, but to the Allies.
As it gradually became clear, over the next few days, that Napoleon was retreating towards Paris, his army having virtually ceased to exist, people set out for the battlefields to see what they could do for the wounded. Brussels soon became a vast army hospital, 20,000 wounded men taken into churches, covered markets and private houses. Among the dead and dying were officers from the Duchess of Richmond’s ball, some still in silk stockings, breeches and buckles, having not had time to change into their uniforms. On 22 July, Lucie wrote to Charlotte that she had come across her young cousin Browne, the son of Lord Kenmare, lying wounded in a shed by the river with a smashed thigh and broken leg; she had taken him home with her to care for.
Over the coming weeks, visitors to Brussels would get their coachmen to take them out to Quatre-Bras and Mont-Saint-Jean, to look at the skeletons of the fallen horses and collect musket balls as mementoes. ‘Alas,’ wrote Lucie to her cousin Charlotte, reviewing the events of the past few days with her clear and sceptical eye, ‘I think that poor France is forever lost. I cannot believe that what has just taken place was the way to save her.’