Frédéric, Lucie, Aymar and Cécile reached Paris soon after Lucie’s 60th birthday. It was their first visit for almost ten years. The winter was exceptionally cold; the Seine had frozen over at the end of November, and the thaw did not start until late in February. Sledges sped along the streets, with women dressed in thick furs. At balls and receptions, bare shoulders and arms were enveloped in shawls. There was an acute shortage of bread and at the Bal des Indigents, referred to by some as ‘the ball of the rich for the poor’, held at the Opéra in aid of those starving on the streets, ticket holders remarked on the brilliance of the light cast by the new gas lamps. ‘La vie élégante’, with its new aristocracy of money, journalism and politics, had taken over, said visitors to France, from the old ‘vie aristocratique’ of the ancien régime.
Spring was starting as they arrived. On the first fine days, Paris was as crowded, noisy, busy and foul-smelling from the ‘malodorous muck’ of the streets as it had been during Lucie’s childhood. The Seine had almost disappeared beneath the number of boats transporting food, wine and charcoal to the city; along the quays were anchored bathing establishments, offering every variety of bath, from Russian to Turkish or Chinese, hot or cold, scented, with or without a massage or attendants. In the Jardin des Plantes, a giraffe, sent as a gift to the King by the Pacha of Egypt, was taken from its enclosure by its African keeper for a walk around the gardens, dressed in a wool coat. It was said to be very partial to rose petals. In Le Rocher de Cancale, Paris’s ‘supreme temple of gastronomy’ on the corner of the rue Mandar and the rue Montorgueil, there were 112 fish dishes on the menu. Brillat-Savarin had inadvertently invented steaming, when the enormous turbot he was cooking proved too big for his largest pot and he borrowed a cauldron from a laundress, placing his fish surrounded by shallots and herbs in a wicker hamper above the boiling water.
Talma, the great heroic actor, was dead, but Mlle Mars, ‘young under the Directoire, beautiful under the Empire, glorious under the Restoration’, continued to draw crowds to the Comédie-Française, even if a marked taste for the ghoulish drew crowds to watch the guillotine at work, beheading dogs, at 20 francs a ticket. A ‘Combustible Spaniard’ was entertaining Parisians by sitting for 14 minutes in a hot oven, alongside a chicken, which cooked, after which he ate it. ‘Here pleasure is a luxury, a delight,’ noted one traveller, ‘and not a laborious affair, as in England…not a slow moving canal, but a wild and bubbling brook in which the French, like corks, dance for joy.’
At court, Charles X continued to pass his days hunting, travelling between Saint-Cloud and Paris in a cloud of soldiers, bodyguards and liveried attendants, while his courtiers went about their duties, impeccably uniformed. Their wives spent a great deal of time in church. ‘The good Lord,’ remarked a visitor, ‘is much in fashion these days.’ The Duchesse de Maille, who refused to attend court on the grounds that it was too dull, maintained that to please the King one had to be ‘ultra and stupid’, and to please the Duchesse d’Angoulême, ‘ultra and devout’. It was only the young Duchesse de Berri who brought life to the Tuileries, with her costume balls on Turkish, Persian and Scottish themes, and her new passion for swimming in the sea at Dieppe, something that few people had thought to do before. In mid-July, the Duchess, swathed in a long dark wool shift, wool trousers and a waxed taffeta cap, with boots to keep the crabs at bay, was escorted to the water’s edge by a doctor. She was then led into the sea by a ‘guide baigneur’ in a special uniform, watched by spectators with opera glasses from the sea front. A cannon was fired to herald the first swim of the year. In this outfit, observed one of her ladies-in-waiting sourly, even the most beautiful woman in the world looked like a ‘monstrosity’ as she emerged from the water enveloped in clinging, sagging wool.
There was, however, a rival court in the Palais-Royal, home once again to the Duc d’Orléans after his return from exile in 1817. Louis-Philippe was now 56, a portly, courteous figure, married to Marie-Amélie, one of Ferdinand IV’s 18 children, a tall, blue-eyed woman with a long face and a long neck, who described herself as having an ‘air of modest but imposing nobility’. Together, they had cleared the Palais-Royal of the rubbish that had accumulated during the Duke’s exile, and turned it into a salon for writers and intellectuals. ‘The Duc d’Orléans,’ his cousin Louis XVIII shrewdly once remarked, ‘remains absolutely still, but nevertheless I notice that he is moving forwards. What does one do to stop a man who does not move?’ To the Parisians, Louis-Philippe seemed not just appealing, with his open, easygoing manner, but approachable, and he was said to play with his children even when people came to dinner.
Lucie and Frédéric reached Paris too late for Mme de Genlis’s 85th birthday, a musical reception held by her niece Pulchérie de Valance, but, given Lucie’s feelings about fashionable society, this was not a hardship. As she said, ‘I love “home”’–using the word in English–‘wherever I find it…and I have no need of strangers in my life.’ During the ten years of Frédéric’s absence in Turin, the foreign embassies had turned into showcases for the countries they represented, the Austrians vying with the British for grandeur. ‘What,’ asked Lady Granville, wife of the British Ambassador, ‘would the parlez-vous do without us?’ Lady Granville, whose sharp tongue enlivened many gatherings, said that the American Ambassadress, Mrs Brown, when asked how she was, replied that she was in ‘foine spirits and very hoppy’.
It was soon after their return that Victor Hugo’s Ernani, which had been rehearsing in the arctic cold of the winter, opened in Paris. Its first night had been sold out for many months. Ernani, a tale of youthful love, fidelity and self-sacrifice, was not a particularly fine play but it hit a chord with the largely young audience who had queued for tickets. The Romantic school seemed to come of age; the day of the perfect meter and classical austerity was over. Voltaire and the subtle ironies of the 18th century were ‘so much debris and ancient ruins’. ‘Writers,’ announced Hugo, ‘have the right to take risks, to become daring, to create, to invent their style and not cling too hard to grammar.’ Ernani ran, to enormous excitement and much popular debate, for 45 performances, during which the Classicists and the Romantics in the audience came to blows. And it was not only in literature that Romanticism flourished. The ‘beau idéal’ that had inspired David and his disciples, with their heroes and their scenes from classical mythology, had been replaced by Delacroix’s taste for colour and the exotic, and soon by Corot and the new landscape painters. In music, Berlioz’s Symphonie fantastique was welcomed with delight. The composers who became popular after 1830–Chopin, Bellini, Meyerbeer–would have practically nothing in common with pre-revolutionary France. After 15 largely stagnant years, Paris was once again becoming the cultural heart of Europe.
Uneasy in Paris, profoundly disliking what they saw of the ultra government, Frédéric and Lucie had moved to Versailles. Frédéric decided that the moment had come for him to retire from the diplomatic service and settle at Le Bouilh–still unsold and heavily in debt. He was 71, and he was tired of intrigues. Versailles, they discovered, had become a melancholy and deserted town, the great palace given over to workmen preparing to turn its immense rooms into a museum. Lucie attended Mass in the Royal Chapel, remembering the last time she had been there, 42 years earlier. ‘Then,’ she wrote, ‘people found me beautiful and very fair-skinned, in my pink dress, wearing diamonds worth six million francs.’ They were invited to a reception at which Charles X–whom Lucie had known since he was a child–was present, but she insisted on remaining hidden in the background, saying that she preferred now to leave the bustle of society to others. They spent their days showing Cécile the sights and visiting a cousin of Lucie’s who had settled in France; she had nine children with whom Cécile played. In the evenings, in their lodgings, they read aloud from the diaries of Saint-Simon: they had reached the 12th volume. Lucie was content, saying that she felt fortunate in that she did not fret for the things she no longer had. ‘I am happy at heart,’ she noted, ‘and my peace of mind allows me to enjoy what I have left.’ It was an aspect of her nature that had served her well all her life.
Villèle’s cautious, repressive leadership had, by 1830, alienated even the right-wing Catholics. At court, Charles X, surrounded by complacent ultras, continuing to believe that the future for France lay in autocratic religious government, had become ever more remote, not only from the audiences who cheered Victor Hugo, but from the Chamber of Deputies. On 16 May 1830, fearing the winds of insurrection, the King abruptly dissolved Parliament; the Chambers were prorogued. The new electoral laws, it was announced, would effectively limit franchise still further. In the Palais-Royal, Louis-Philippe gave a magnificent ball for his brother-in-law, the King of Naples. ‘A Neapolitan night,’ remarked a deputy, listening to the shouts of ‘à bas les aristocrats’ coming from the street, ‘and as at Naples, we are dancing on a volcano.’ The words were almost exactly those used by Gouverneur Morris in 1792. On 26 July, Paris woke to learn that freedom of the press had been suppressed.
In Paris, journalists wrote angry pieces about the censorship of the press and editors, in defiance of the ban, printed them. The weather turned very hot. Printers and journalists gathered in the streets. Trees were chopped down and turned into barricades; pavements were ripped up. At Saint-Cloud, the King went out hunting and the courtiers played whist. On 29 July came an attack on the Louvre: some of the troops defected to the insurgents, the elderly Lafayette again at the centre of the rebellion. In the rue Florentin, Talleyrand, ever in tune with the currents of disaffection, paused to dictate a sentence to his secretary: ‘At five minutes past twelve,’ he recorded, ‘the elder branch of the Bourbons has ceased to reign.’
Next day, the weather still very hot, Paris was under siege: the banks, the stock exchange and the theatres stayed shut. Bands of young men gathered in the Champs-Elysées; young women attached tricolour cockades to their hats and belts. The name of Louis-Philippe was being openly discussed as a possible saviour of monarchy, a man who could both guarantee the rights of property and stability for the bourgeoisie and promise reform for the liberals. In the Tuileries, ministers found themselves isolated and powerless. From the windows of their lodgings in Versailles, Lucie and Frédéric listened for the noise of cannon or guns which might herald some kind of coup, much as they had once listened from Chantilly for the sounds that might have announced that Louis XVI had been rescued. It was the third time, Lucie reflected, that they had seen turmoil surround a king of France: Louis XVI, Louis XVIII and now Charles X. It was as if her entire adult life had been spent watching the rise and eclipse of kings.
Though it was now clear that the reign of Charles X was over, there were still hopes among the ultras that the monarchy might be kept in Bourbon hands. But the Dauphin, the small, awkward, stammering Duc d’Angoulême–of whom a courtier had written ‘he is not a Prince, and even less so a man: he’s a nothing, a human envelope, that’s all’–had neither the presence nor the courage for the role.
On the night of 30 July, the third day of what quickly became known as ‘Les Trois Glorieuses’, the three glorious days, the royal family left Saint-Cloud in a cortège of carriages on which the fleur de lys had been painted over, surrounded by bodyguards, cadets and horsemen. The Duchesse de Berri travelled on horseback, in men’s clothes, with two pistols at her waist.
They had reached Rambouillet, where they planned to sit out the troubles, when they learnt that Louis-Philippe had agreed to become Lieutenant General of the kingdom. On 2 August, Charles X formally abdicated, stating that he wished that the 9-year-old Duc de Bordeaux, the Duchesse de Berri’s son, be crowned in his place, as Henri V. But it was all too late: the insurrection was gathering pace. The royal party took the road for Cherbourg, escorted by 800 men of the household. At one stop, there being no square table of the kind that etiquette demanded the King sit at, the sides of a fine round acacia one were chopped off to make it square. The heat was appalling. The cortège rumbled slowly on towards the coast in clouds of dust. On 16 August, with crowds lining the docks in total silence, the former Charles X and his family boarded two British boats for Cowes and another exile.
When, in Versailles, Frédéric had learnt of the abdication he had not hesitated. Leaving Lucie and Cécile–Aymar was away hunting in the mountains–to make their way to Le Bouilh, he had set off immediately for Orléans, thinking that he might find Charles X there, preparing for a possible counter-attack. As with Louis XVI, 41 years before, he was ready, even at the age of 71, to die defending his king. Hearing that Charles was in fact on his way back to exile in England, Frédéric made his own way to Bordeaux.
In Paris, there had been violent confrontations between loyal troops and insurrectionaries, leaving 150 soldiers and 600 civilians dead. On 9 August, Louis-Philippe accepted the crown. And after many discussions and debates about press freedom and individual liberties, about education and religion, about the electoral laws and franchise, a new France was hammered out, one that would combine the cross-currents of Romanticism with those of industrial expansion and capitalist enterprise. The July revolution brought to power an intellectual and liberal elite, whose model was England; the Duc de Broglie, Mme de Staël’s son-in-law, was appointed to the Ministry of Education, François Guizot, translator of Gibbon and Shakespeare, to the Ministry of the Interior. The country they confronted had an empty treasury, a disordered capital, a disaffected civil service and divided and suspicious European allies. But Louis-Philippe, anxious to please and to be liked, was determined to keep France at peace, and though there would now be eight months of social disruption, savage anti-clericalism, bankruptcies and unemployment, and fears that the bellicosity of the emotional left might lead to war with the rest of Europe, bit by bit order was restored.
Talleyrand, the supreme conciliator, taking with him his niece Dorothée, set out for London, from which he had been expelled 36 years before, and where he would prove to be an exceptional ambassador. Though many of the old nobility regarded Louis-Philippe as a usurper, Mme de Boigne, Lucie’s cousin, considered him a giant among pygmies. And if writers like Hugo continued to think nostalgically of the lost douceur de vivre, the subtleties and nuances of another age, when sociability and worldliness were perceived as fundamentally important in themselves, they had also come to see them as insubstantial, even a little irritating.
Frédéric, as ever, had acted impetuously and with honour, but with little regard for the consequences. From Le Bouilh, he had written to the Chamber of Peers a letter later reprinted in Le Moniteur, stating that having sworn an oath of loyalty to Charles X, he could not now in all conscience swear another to the King who had taken his place. Like Lucie–only more adamantly–he believed that the Bourbons alone were the legitimate kings of France, and that the Orléans branch could never be anything but pretenders. The consequences were not long in coming. Banished from the Chamber of Peers, he forfeited his 12,000 francs annual salary. Having resigned from the embassy of Turin, he lost his diplomatic wages. All that was left was a modest pension and the very small revenues from Le Bouilh and Tesson. Debts of 300,000 francs were still outstanding, and all hopes of holding on to either of the two properties were abandoned. Nor had there been any compensation for the lands and wealth lost during the revolutionary years.
It was not in Lucie’s nature either to be reproachful or to complain. With winter coming, there were no immediate buyers for Le Bouilh, which, before a bridge was built over the Dordogne at Bordeaux, lay inconveniently far from the city. They had found the château very shabby, Lucie writing to Félicie: ‘Give me warning when you plan to come to stay, so that the only pair of sheets that is not covered in fleas can be washed.’ But were it not for their poverty, Lucie added, she would be perfectly content. She rose at six, or earlier, did lessons in history, geography and mathematics with Cécile, read, played music and discussed politics with Frédéric, and felt busy and useful.
She had bought Le Cuisinier Royal–it was characteristic that it did not occur to her to lower her standards–and with it was teaching both herself and their single elderly servant to cook, dish by dish. In order to save money they ate only what Le Bouilh and its farm produced. Dinner was at six, after which the family gathered around the lamp to sew and play piquet, while Frédéric read aloud, as he had always done. Since the Princesse d’Hénin’s legacy had been stolen, Frédéric’s cousin, Mme de Maurville, was again living with them, but she had lost her memory and was often bad-tempered. Cécile, now 11, sewed beautifully. In October, in perfect soft autumn weather, peasants from all around Saint-André-en-Cubzac came to help pick the grapes, gathering twice a day in the courtyard of Le Bouilh to eat soup, meat and bread. ‘We are as peaceful as doves,’ wrote Lucie.
Cholera, brought by the Russian army to Poland, had reached France. Its first cases in Paris had come soon after Lent, when some of the revellers, in their fancy dress, had fallen dying in the streets. There had been talk of witchcraft and poison, and the cholera, for which there was no known cure, was moving to other parts of the country. ‘My one wish,’ Lucie wrote to her grandson Hadelin, ‘is to die the last in my family, so that I may nurse and take care of those I love, before I join them in a better world.’ She meant precisely what she said: her love for her family had always been and remained the strongest and most important thing in her life.
It was not cholera, but misfortune of a different kind, one which they had not yet experienced, that hit them now.
The revolution of 1830, which had brought the liberals to power, had been disastrous for those referred to as the Bourbon royalists, men who, like Frédéric, could not tolerate the idea of the Orléans branch on the throne. Of the 75 prominent generals under Charles X, 65 lost their jobs. The royal bodyguards were dismissed, along with many civil servants, administrators and deputies.
No sooner had Charles X reached England than he made contact with those who remained loyal to him in France, and who were angry and apprehensive about what the July revolution might bring. After 40 years of swings of fortune, the royalists were masters of subversion and clandestinity. The west and south-west and the Vendée remained areas of known Bourbon support, with networks of secret societies and agents.
Among those who had accompanied the deposed King to England was Auguste de la Rochejacquelein, Félicie’s husband, whose two brothers had perished in earlier Vendéen insurrections and who was himself a soldier. By birth and by inclination, Auguste was an ‘ultra exalté’. Félicie, for her part, still childless at 31, had grown up wild and boyish, her imagination fed on tales of Vendéen heroism, and, in spite of all Claire’s efforts to turn her into an elegant courtier, had preferred to learn to shoot, ride bareback and break in horses. Drawn to the Duchesse de Berri, whose lady-in-waiting she became, she had come to believe that the future for France lay in the sole remaining Bourbon heir, the young Duc de Bordeaux. Together, to the disapproval of the court, the two women often dressed up in men’s clothes and went out hunting; but though they frowned on such antics, the courtiers were also charmed by the Duchesse’s silky fair hair, and the energy that she put into creating pleasure for herself and those around her.
After the Duchesse’s departure for London with Auguste and the court, Félicie retired to live in the Château de Laudebaudière in the Vendée, surrounding herself with a coterie of ardent royalists. Many of the young women, noted the local Prefect, M. de Sainte-Hermine, who had been ordered to keep an eye on them, were to be seen in men’s clothes. ‘An impenetrable air of secrecy reigns over the Château,’ he reported, ‘and only the initiates are party to its mysteries.’ He was right to be alarmed: Félicie and her friends were plotting.
In England, Auguste and the Duchesse de Berri were busy making plans for an insurrection, convinced that if the legitimate monarchy, in the form of the 9-year-old Duc de Bordeaux, could be restored to France, then it would follow that legitimacy would triumph, not only in France, but throughout Europe. Neither Charles X, nor de Blacas, who had accompanied him to exile in England as he had once accompanied his elder brother, were quite as keen on the idea of a military uprising. But Auguste and the Duchess continued to make their plans, drawing comfort from the uneasy state of France in the first months of Louis-Philippe’s reign. In Holland, Mme de Cayla, Louis XVIII’s favourite, and M. Ouvrard, the rich financier with whom Thérésia Tallien had once lived, were both prepared to raise money for the cause. Military leaders were appointed from among the secret ultras to co-ordinate the insurrection, which was to be triggered by the Duchesse’s return to France when, so they believed, disaffected people all over France would rise and sweep the young Duc de Bordeaux to the throne. Since Auguste remained abroad, it was Félicie who took his place as commander of one section of the Vendée. She was a natural soldier, if somewhat severe and brusque, devoted to her followers, competent, obedient to superior orders and apparently fearless. From England, the Duchesse de Berri sent her a lock of her hair.
It was at this point that Aymar entered the story. In 1830, Aymar was 24, an excitable, affectionate young man, whose passion for hunting had filled him with nostalgia for the romance and heroism of the Vendée. Lucie, for whom her sole remaining child possessed ‘a soul as pure as the purest mountain crystal’, admitted that even so he could be both unsophisticated and rough. Not long before, Aymar had met Félicie for the first time; he had been captivated by her high spirits and daredevil ways. Towards the end of 1830, with very little to keep him occupied at Le Bouilh, and hearing constant rumours about this possible uprising, he set out for Laudebaudière. There he found not only Félicie, but her friend, the sculptress Félicie de Fauveau, a manly-looking young woman whose uncompromising monarchist views and taste for the medieval and chivalric had won her fame in Paris. The château was full of young Bourbon royalists looking for adventure. Aymar joined the cause.
In January, as he and one of the other young men were making their way to Bordeaux, they were stopped by police and questioned. Aymar, as his mother acknowledged, was capable of arrogance. Accused of criticising the new government and praising the Vendéen rebels, he was sent for trial to the assizes in Niort in May. A letter to Frédéric had been found on him in which he had written: ‘There will be war, I think; I don’t quite dare say, I hope; but that would be the truth, because it would be very hard to imagine the people any more unhappy than they are…’ At Niort, he was sentenced to three months in prison; though the sentence was quashed, 2,000 francs of the fast-dwindling de la Tour du Pins’ fortunes had gone in lawyer’s fees. At this stage, however, Lucie was still speaking of ‘this stupid little affair of my son’s’.
By now, the Vendée had been split into separate sections to prepare for the uprising. But in September, when the different leaders–of whom Félicie was one–met to discuss tactics, it was agreed that it was too soon to act. To Auguste, Félicie wrote long letters calling for more guns, and more money, having by now gone through most of her own. Aymar had returned to the château of Laudebaudière and the little band of royalists passed their days training, recruiting men from among the local peasants and farmers and assembling weapons.
Early in August 1831, Aymar was sent by Félicie to carry a message hidden in the leaves of an album to Auguste in Spain, where he was trying to raise men and money for the cause. Pausing in Bordeaux to get a passport, Aymar was spotted by police and arrested. Frédéric, who saw him taken away, hurried back to the inn where Aymar had been staying and took away the album and several kilograms of ammunition. Aymar himself, left alone in a room in which a fire was burning, seized the chance to burn the bundle of papers he was carrying. Just the same, he was conducted, in handcuffs, back to the Vendée, where police questioned him about his friends in the château of Laudebaudière. What he did not know was that the château had been searched, that crates of guns, sabres, pistols and ammunition had been discovered, and that most of the others were already in detention. Félicie, dressed as a servant, had escaped.
Aymar was moved to the prison of La Roche-sur-Yon to await trial. Frédéric went with him, and took a room in the town, so that he could spend two hours every day with his son; Lucie stayed at Le Bouilh with Cécile. Three months later, Aymar was released for lack of evidence. To Félicie, Lucie wrote that their money was running very low, and that no buyer could be found for Le Bouilh. Everything that could be sold had already gone. ‘There are green leaves just appearing on the trees, but I, my dear child, am not growing green again, I am becoming old and obsolete and the vicissitudes of life no longer amuse me as they once did.’ Only her heart, she said, still felt warm, which was as well, for there was nothing in the world she so disliked as a cold heart.
The Vendée, to the royalist leaders, at last felt ready for insurrection, the people stirred out of the lethargy into which the July revolution had plunged them by the brutality of the local gendarmerie. The Vendée was good guerrilla country, with thick forests of oak and chestnut, fast-running rivers and narrow roads winding between deep ditches which offered perfect cover. Scores of men, trained and armed, were believed to be waiting for the Duchesse’s signal. In April 1832, having wasted a certain amount of time wandering around Europe, the Duchesse de Berri landed in Marseilles. She was surprised to find very little support or excitement, and pushed on to Toulouse and then to Bordeaux, where she spent two nights at Le Bouilh with Lucie and Frédéric. ‘Henri V,’ she told her followers, referring to her son, ‘summons you to arms. His mother, regent of France, is committed to your well-being. Long live the King, long live Henri V.’
The Duchess travelled on to the Vendée. But still the uprising did not come. Supporters shrank away, back to their farms and villages, saying that their weapons, left so long hidden in damp places, had rusted. In Paris, the staunch Bourbon royalists, Chateaubriand and Fitz-James, said that they could do nothing as they were being watched. Support that might have come from the Tsar of Russia or Metternich did not materialise.
Still the Duchess pressed on, using the code name of Petit Pierre, losing men in skirmishes with police and soldiers, making forced marches by night, sometimes on foot, sometimes on horseback, struggling on through driving rain over rocky ground. She was dressed as a peasant, her face smeared with mud. Aymar, terrified lest he miss out on the fighting, set out to join her. Hidden in Nantes by an elderly royalist, he met up with other supporters and they walked all through vineyards and along river banks, guided by loyalists.
But the moment had been lost; all element of surprise had vanished. When small bands of men did rise up and attack police stations and barracks they were easily rebuffed. The weather had turned cold and very wet: the rain poured down, soaking the rebels and their ammunition. The government soldiers, meanwhile, well fed, well equipped, and in far greater numbers, had no difficulty defeating them. When Aymar and his men attacked a village, burnt the tricolour flag and rang the church bells, it was all too late. The insurrection had collapsed.
The Duchesse de Berri, Félicie, Mlle de Fauveau and Aymar were among those who managed to escape capture. They made their way into Nantes, where some 400 of them were hidden in the cellars and attics of loyalists, while the soldiers searched the town and its surroundings. For almost four months, Aymar lived in hiding with two elderly sisters; under Mlle de Fauveau’s tuition, he began to paint a Gothic missal.
On the night of 6 November, the Duchesse de Berri was betrayed by one of her followers. The house in which she was hiding was surrounded by soldiers; she had just enough time to slip into a secret chamber behind the chimney. All that night, the men ransacked the house, finding nothing. Next morning, two young soldiers, left on guard and feeling cold, decided to light a fire in the chimney. The Duchess held out as long as she could, then burst out, her dress smouldering, into the room. She was taken off to prison at Blaye.
Her followers, meanwhile, were rounded up. Young men who had never set eyes on the Duc de Bordeaux now went to the scaffold in his name. In some parts of France the feelings against the rebels, inflamed by the liberal press, were so violent that the carts bearing them to trial were stoned. Aymar was lucky. On 26 November, disguised as an artisan and travelling on false papers, he managed to board a boat at Nantes bound for Jersey. Félicie, too, was lucky. She came out of hiding, caught a diligence for Paris, lay low for several months, then got out to Switzerland.
But for Lucie and Frédéric, the story of the Duchesse de Berri’s uprising was only just beginning. When an article had appeared in the government paper, L’Indicateur, about a ‘Carlist brigand, Aymar La Tour du Pin’ and the armed thefts he was carrying out in the countryside, Frédéric, with his customary impetuousness, had written a sharp letter of protest. Whatever else, he wrote, posterity would regard his son and the other young rebels as victims of their great ‘loyalty and devotion’. L’Indicateur refused to carry the letter, but the legitimist Journal de Guyenne agreed to run it. Frédéric was arrested, charged with incitation to civil war and sent for trial before the assizes of the Gironde, together with the editor of the paper.
In court, on 15 December 1832, Frédéric insisted on reading out a statement. His one regret, he said, was that, on account of his age, which was 73, he had been unable to stand at his son’s side among the insurgents. He felt nothing but shame, he declared, that he was not one of the ‘sainted victims’. Though Maître Saint-Marc, his highly regarded lawyer, put up an eloquent defence, pointing out that four members of Frédéric’s family had gone to the guillotine for the French monarchy, Frédéric was given three months in jail and a fine of 1,000 francs. It was considered very lenient, out of respect for Frédéric’s evident anguish and his long years of service to his country.
On 19 December, 1832, Frédéric entered Bordeaux’s notorious prison, the Fort du Hâ, where their friend M. de Chambeau had spent several months during the Terror. Lucie insisted on going with him.
The Fort du Hâ, built in 1456 as the residence of the King’s representative in the south, was a forbidding rectangular fortress, with towers, a moat and a dungeon. Used during the revolution of 1789 to house suspects, it was damp and semi-derelict. It had underground cells 6 inches deep in water, and child prisoners were said to be enclosed in its dark, airless dormitories. When, during the Directoire, Thérésia Tallien was asked why she wore rings on her toes, she replied that they helped conceal the scars of the rat bites she had received as a prisoner there.
Lucie and Frédéric, however, were not unhappy. Frédéric was always cheerful when he believed that what he was doing was right, and it was in Lucie’s nature to make the best of everything. Soon after their arrival, Frédéric wrote to Aymar that they had been given an airy room, overlooking the courtyard where the ‘criminals’ took their exercise. Though it saddened him to see them, he said that he greatly preferred the spectacle of men who had committed crimes through necessity, rather than that of many men in society, whose corruption and cowardice revolted him. Frédéric, who referred to Lucie as ‘your incomparable mother’, was already making plans for his release, when they would spend a few days putting order into their affairs, before meeting Aymar somewhere in Switzerland.
At the bottom of the letter, Lucie added a few words. ‘I feel myself to be in a palace,’ she wrote, ‘and the thought that I can be really helpful and agreeable to your father is unquestionably the nicest thing that has ever filled my heart.’ Since the weather outside was so wretched, she said that she did not mind not going out. It was carrying selflessness to an extreme degree. Neither she nor Frédéric uttered a single note of reproach. On the contrary, Frédéric insisted that Aymar had brought nothing but ‘honour to my white hair’. More surprising, perhaps, Aymar seemed to feel no remorse for where his escapade had led them; later, he would write that the insurrection and his part in it had transformed his life, which might otherwise have been spent in idleness and indecision.
Lucie, who was not a prisoner, was allowed to come and go. To Hadelin, Cécile’s brother, living in Rome with Auguste, who had been appointed Minister to the Vatican, she described their cell. It was sunny, she wrote, with two clean beds, several tables, a dresser with plates, a small cupboard for Frédéric and another for herself. In one corner, which they called the kitchen, there was a basket for wood, two pitchers of water, and several brooms ‘because I like it all to be clean’. In the ‘sitting room’ there was a comfortable chair for Frédéric and a wicker one for herself by the window, where she could see to sew. On the floor, there was a fox-fur carpet given to her by Frédéric. Lucie rose at 6.30, lit the fire, got dressed, helped Frédéric to get up, then made him a cup of hot chocolate that she had left melting by the fire. At nine o’clock arrived a maid, with the Gazette, who spent two hours cleaning and making lunch. At 5, Lucie lit the lamp and prepared supper: either two meat dishes, or one of meat and one of fish, stewed fruit, and a small glass of Médoc. A second daily paper was delivered between 7 and 8; after reading it and discussing the news, Frédéric went to bed. Lucie herself stayed up later. As prison, it was not harsh.
Five afternoons a week, between 1 and 2.30, Lucie went to visit her granddaughter Cécile, whom they had placed in a convent, walking the half-hour to the Sacré-Cœur and back for exercise, except if it was raining, when she took a carriage. On Wednesdays and Saturdays, Cécile came to spend the day in their cell. The one drawback that Lucie would admit to was the noise, both from the ‘common criminals’, some of them small children, sleeping on straw in rooms off the courtyard, and from what she referred to as ‘les prisonniers un peu messieurs’, the better class of prisoner, who argued loudly over their meals at a communal table. In her letters, she sought constantly for humorous details.
Under the terms of his sentence, Frédéric was permitted six regular visitors, who did not need passes, and occasional additional ones, who were vetted by the obliging prison governor. Two old friends, both of them lawyers and peers who, like Frédéric had resigned after the July revolution, came every day. When, towards the end of February, word came that the Duchesse de Berri was pregnant, as the result, she claimed, of a secret marriage that had taken place while in Italy on her way back to France, Lucie was outraged. She wrote to Aymar that there had never been a ‘more dishonourable act in the history of the world. It’s appalling! Miserable woman! How she deceived everyone!’ And when, shortly afterwards, word came the Duchess had announced that she had given up all pretensions to the throne for her son and that she was retiring to Sicily, the little group sitting around the fire in the cell during visiting hours in the Fort du Hâ agreed that she was ‘the most despicable of people’. What puzzled them was the identity of the child’s father, since the Duchess had been in the Vendée, and not in Italy, at the time of the supposed conception. For a while, they talked of little else.
Aymar was still in Jersey. At the beginning of March came the news that he had been condemned to death in absentia. Félicie was reported to be in Portugal, where she and Auguste were embroiled in trying to restore another dethroned legitimist ruler. What preoccupied Frédéric and Lucie most was not only where they would live, given that Aymar could not return to France, but what money they would have to live on. ‘We must resign ourselves, devote ourselves, to uncertainty,’ Frédéric told Aymar. They talked of Savoy, but agreed that it would have to be in a village or small town, since cities and spas were beyond their means. A cousin, Louis de la Tour du Pin, offered financial help, but they both found it very hard to think of accepting charity. Advertisements for the sale of Le Bouilh and Tesson had gone into the Paris papers. They were haunted by the thought that they might die leaving Aymar destitute. Frédéric came down with a chest infection and worried Lucie intensely by spitting blood. Leeches were applied; slowly, he recovered.
On 20 March 1833, Frédéric was released from the Fort du Hâ. By June they were in Nice–still part of Italy–reunited with Aymar; Auguste brought Hadelin to stay with them. Lucie noted that Auguste had lost his hair and that his sight was poor and she was irritated by the way he took so little notice of his daughter Cécile, whom he had not seen for four years. At 18, Hadelin, she wrote to Félicie, was tall, with a weak chest, and a rather unfeeling manner, probably ‘because he had been brought up by a father who hated intimacy’. She thought constantly and with longing of her tender, loving Charlotte. Life in Nice was cheap, but they soon realised that they would have to move to a smaller apartment and get rid of their cook. She saw her life, Lucie told Félicie, as a series of drawers, in which she placed what talents she possessed. ‘When those of a lady and an ambassadress were called for, I closed that of the housewife; now I know exactly where to look for what I shall need in my new situation, and I have completely forgotten all the other drawers, without experiencing the least vestiges of regret or complaint.’ She felt, she said, not just resigned but cheerful.
For a while, Lucie, Frédéric, Aymar and Cécile wandered, spending a few months here and there, usually in hotels, settling for a few months in Pinerolo, not too far from Turin, where Frédéric was obliged to go every three months to renew the certificate for his small pension. Wherever they were, they saw few people, spending their days reading, drawing, playing music; Cécile did her lessons, Lucie her tapestry. She had taken to writing stern letters to Hadelin, who was to study law in Paris. ‘I consider it important,’ she instructed him, ‘for you to move in a “high circle”’, adding, interestingly, ‘because I am not a liberal’, a reflection of her unchanging belief in the values of the aristocracy. It was also essential that he improve his spelling, grammar and handwriting. ‘A sales assistant would be embarrassed to write so badly…Beware of sentences that everyone uses without realising what they are saying.’
In the autumn of 1834, leaving Aymar in Italy, they returned to Le Bouilh, where the house remained unsold and their debts unpaid. While Cécile went on with her lessons and her drawing, Lucie embroidered a pair of slippers for Félicie. She missed her goddaughter, and she wrote to tell her so repeatedly, begging her to pay them a visit. From now until the end of her life, her longings for Félicie’s company would be a refrain that would run through all her letters.
In May 1833, Auguste, like Aymar, had been condemned to death in absentia for his part in the insurrection, but he had insisted on returning to France for an appeal, arguing that he personally had not been in the Vendée at the time, and he was acquitted. Félicie, who had been banished, also decided to appeal and returned for her hearing. Receiving no news, Lucie became frantic with worry, until she read in the Gazette that Félicie had conducted herself magnificently and quoted Joan of Arc. She, too, was acquitted. By contrast with her clever and imaginative goddaughter, Lucie herself, she wrote, using the words in English, was a ‘matter-of-fact person’, and incapable of being other than she was. And, she added ruefully, she suspected that she was losing, day by day, what little intelligence she had ever possessed. ‘Poverty shrinks the mind, I know this only too well.’ They were planning to spend a few days in Paris, but Lucie was adamant that this time she would see no one. ‘I know what it is to be old and poor,’ she wrote, ‘and to hear people whisper: “Who is that old woman over there?”’ But with Félicie, she added wistfully, she would not mind being poor. Félicie wrote, from time to time; but she did not come.
Somewhat to her surprise, Lucie enjoyed Paris. They took rooms in a hotel in the rue de Tournon and were immediately called on by old friends, even if Lucie remarked that they had only come to inspect what prison had done to them. She herself refused to pay visits, announcing that she did not intend to ‘show my old nose in society’. Amédée de Duras, who had since remarried, told her that he was astonished to see that she still had her teeth and that she had not become ‘decrepit’. She was touched by his words, but also a little impatient. ‘I suffer only in my heart, from not being able to see those whom I love,’ she wrote, ‘and not on account of worldly losses.’
The walls of Paris were covered in cartoons and caricatures of Louis-Philippe, whom Lucie continued to refer to as an ‘animal’. Thérésia Tallien had just died, at the age of 62, after a long and happy marriage to the Prince de Chimay, having had 11 children by four different men. Pulchérie de Valance brought them the gossip of Paris, Lucie observing that she would have preferred to talk politics, even if hers were of the wrong kind, and that she was no longer used to such egotistical, hypocritical chatter. Just the same, she was flattered to find herself ‘en vogue’ among fashionable Parisians. After a brief pause to digest the political tone of the new monarchy, some of the salons had opened again. Her cousin, Mme de Boigne, whom Lucie had never cared for, received politicians; Clara, Félicie’s sister, whom she did not care for much either, writers. On all sides, Lucie heard complaints that the court of Louis-Philippe was full of greedy shopkeepers. Mme Récamier was still receiving, and still wearing white, entertaining her guests in her rooms at L’Abbaye-aux-Blois, where she gave readings from Chateaubriand’s unpublished memoirs. In some ways, Paris had changed astonishingly little; as Talleyrand had once said, talking about the émigrés: ‘They have learnt nothing and forgotten nothing.’
Frédéric and Lucie returned to Le Bouilh in time to complete the sale on the property to a merchant from L’Isle de France for 160,000 francs, all of which would have to go towards paying off their debts. Lucie hated having to show the new owner around the château, discussing what they would leave and what they would take. ‘It’s rather like a foretaste of death,’ she wrote, ‘to see your ancestral roof taken from you.’ She had been happy at Le Bouilh. Many of her best years, when Humbert, Charlotte and Cécile were all alive, had been spent in those cavernous rooms. Its loss struck her like a blow to the heart with a double-edged sword, from whose wounds ‘one recovers only through perfect resignation to the will of God’. She had struggled for perfect resignation all her life.
There was one more visit to Paris, late that summer, a far easier journey than in her childhood: 72 hours, in a large diligence with separate compartments, drawn by eight horses, with stops at post-houses along the way. Even Bordeaux now had its first horse-drawn omnibus. Louis-Philippe had weathered five years of submerged plotting, revolutionary unrest and several attempts on his life, aided by France’s growing prosperity and his own tolerant and domestic nature. The King, said Victor Hugo, combined something of Charlemagne and something of a country solicitor. Mme d’Agoult, a leading society hostess and historian, complained that ‘Anglo-American habits…le club, le sport, le cigare’ had dealt the old salons a death blow and that ‘that innate gift which for two centuries made the Frenchwoman queen of everything most elegant in Europe’ had finally disappeared. The women who had taken her place, she said, were coarse, shrill and over-familiar, and knew nothing of the ‘discreet intimacies and delicate gallantry’ of the past.
Lucie was still in Paris when, on 28 July 1835, a ‘machine infernale’ exploded as the King rode out to review his troops on the Boulevard du Temple. He was unhurt, but 41 people were killed. From her hotel window, Lucie watched the funerals, a vast, silent crowd filing slowly past. The cartoons and caricatures disappeared from the streets. There were soldiers everywhere and much talk of press censorship. ‘Laws,’ she wrote, ‘will now slip through like honey.’ Before leaving Paris, she dined one last time with Amédée in Versailles. ‘We philosophised,’ she wrote, ‘on human affairs in this town of so many misfortunes.’
That summer they received word that Aymar was to be banned not only from France but from Piedmont. Lucie was worried chiefly about Cécile, whom she had come to love as her own daughter, and who was growing up to be charming, affectionate and strong-minded, and appeared determined to accept no husband other than one she chose herself. ‘I am a completely hopeless grandmother,’ she wrote sadly, ‘good for nothing at all, without money, position or contacts. I have nothing left to offer in this business of life.’ It was not, she added, that she felt cowardly or despairing; simply that ‘I no longer wish to swim against the current, because the world does not seem to me to be worth it’. She dreaded that a day might come when Auguste took her granddaughter to Brussels, in order to find her a husband.
So tender with those she loved, Lucie had lost none of her sharpness towards those she did not. She had met Fanny again briefly in 1827, but recorded nothing then about her feelings for the half-sister she had not seen for 16 years. In March 1836, she heard that Fanny had died of cancer, at the age of 51, and had been buried alongside her mother in the cemetery of Père Lachaise in Paris, leaving four sons and a daughter. Lucie’s first reaction was to worry for the children, for, she said, Bertrand was ‘three quarters mad and a fool’. But then she felt guilty that she seemed to feel so little affection for them, because it was against nature not to love the grandchildren of a father she herself had loved so much.
She and Frédéric were, once again, searching for a home. The epidemic of cholera that had raged across France–killing over 19,000 people in Paris alone, at times so virulent that the city seemed deserted except for those carrying litters of the dead–had spread to Germany and Italy. Italians were fleeing north over the borders into Switzerland and France. Félicie, who had bought a house in Lausanne, offered it to them when she was at last able to return to Ussé with Auguste. Lucie would have much preferred Italy, despite the cholera, being, as Frédéric said, ‘of a totally fatalistic nature’, but they were frightened for Aymar and Cécile. Lucie also worried that if she left Lausanne, she might never see Félicie again, for her goddaughter had never liked Italy. ‘I have only one desire,’ she wrote, ‘and that is to see you.’ What she really hoped was that she might spend the last years of her life living with Félicie; but she was coming to understand that this would never happen. Félicie was too restless, too volatile. ‘There are things in life that one should neither analyse nor go on and on about,’ she wrote sadly. ‘They are as they are. One must bear them. Absence is one of these.’
In the autumn of 1835 they moved into Félicie’s house, the Villa Sainte-Lucie; it was warm and pleasant and it had a large terrace with fruit trees. Lucie, however, was bored. ‘This has never happened to me before,’ she wrote. ‘I look at the lake and see it as a mirage in the desert.’ They had an elderly French visitor who could not bear to see the family so apparently cheerful with so little and whose sense of discontent was such that it was like ‘Vesuvius erupting’.
Early in December, Frédéric had severe pains in his stomach; a little later he was struck down with ‘gout of the head’, for which he was given morphine. He now spent much of his time in his room, reading and writing to Hadelin, long letters mulling over his own life and urging the young man to study, to think on serious matters, to develop a taste for reflection. He should turn, he wrote, towards ‘the vast questions of humanity: there you will find true riches’. More than anything Frédéric ever wrote, these letters to his grandson revealed a thoughtful and liberal man, intelligent, full of fears and doubts about the future, and intensely clear about the nature of responsibility. It was in history, he told Hadelin, that he should seek to find ways of understanding the world, and to learn how to make his mark on it; for it was to history that ‘one must look to discover motives and judgements, the source of ideas, the proof of theories too often imaginary and vague’. Reflection, he added, was ‘the intellectual crutch on which the traveller must lean on his road to knowledge’.
Some time towards the end of 1836, Félicie at last came to visit them. She was still there when, on 26 February 1837, Frédéric died. He was 78. As a diplomat, he had been proud of the grandeur of France; as a prefect he had been a liberal and a reformer, never shying away from speaking out, and never afraid to admit to making mistakes; and he had spent his entire life striving for morality. If he had sacrificed both himself and those around him to his ideals, he had also loved and looked after them. It had been a singularly happy marriage. He and Lucie had been together almost exactly 50 years.
Lucie now needed all the courage and the resignation she had ever possessed. She reacted to Frédéric’s death as she had always reacted to loss: she retreated into herself, wrote little, endured, let the time pass. This was the first blow she had had to survive alone.
When Félicie departed again for Ussé, she suggested that they continue to live in the little house in Lausanne. Lucie always found parting from Félicie painful; it was even worse now. ‘The moment you left,’ she wrote to her, ‘I sank into a sea of sadness and felt that I was drowning…I pray to God to give me strength. I am fighting as hard as I can against despair and hopelessness.’
Very slowly, the days and then the weeks passed; Lucie recovered some of her confidence. She talked of completing her memoirs, started almost 20 years before and continued in a desultory way since then. She travelled a little with Cécile, around Switzerland, to spas and mountain villages, and loved its sense of peace and equality, in comparison with which France seemed to her filled with ‘vainglorious castles and sad hovels’, and ‘wicked and despicable’ men. When a priest in Lausanne proposed saying a Mass for Frédéric, she shrank back, saying that she could not bear to have people looking at her or intruding on the intimacy of her grief. She was not lonely, sitting in the little garden, under the lilac and the flowering chestnut tree; Félicie had left her a cat. Very occasionally, she and Cécile went out rowing on the lake, stopping to eat in an inn on the waterside, after which she would paint or draw. ‘I feel myself to be an old tree,’ she wrote, ‘from which every day someone cuts off a branch; the trunk, which once sustained it, no longer exists; all that is left are a few faded leaves. Ah! how terrible it is to become old.’ Sometimes she spoke of wishing that she had died with Frédéric. She could not get used to the fact that there was no longer the person about whom she could say: ‘This is another me.’ In April 1838 she had a fall, which left her bruised all over and with a black eye. The doctor put her on a strict diet which, she said, with a touch of her old humour and self-mockery, made her wrinkles look more pronounced and her nose bigger. She was now always enveloped in black, but her expression remained wry and quizzical.
Lucie worried constantly about Cécile, whose health was often poor, with headaches and sudden attacks of anxiety, and about Aymar, whose life in Lausanne seemed to have been reduced to playing whist and falling asleep after dinner, ‘squatting on his wicker chair like a chicken on a perch’, but this did not bother her as she loved him ‘as much asleep as awake’. Hearing of the death of Talleyrand, she doubted that anyone would mourn him; she reflected that he was after all not much older than she was, but that to her he had always seemed to belong to another generation. As much as she was able, she forced herself to go out, pay visits, receive guests, in order that Cécile would meet people and have some kind of life. She avoided the Vendéen exiles who had settled along the shores of the lake and whose company she found profoundly boring. Their sighs, she said, ‘would turn a windmill’. The small lives of a small society had always filled her with dread. When her granddaughter left, she said, she would become like a bear, and go nowhere.
In the spring of 1841, Cécile was 23, a thoughtful young woman with strong views of her own. The few young men who had asked for her hand had been politely but firmly turned down. Auguste was still in Rome, complaining of ill-health, and Lucie railed against his meanness towards his daughter. To make a little money, Cécile embroidered tobacco pouches and Aymar drew. But in May Auguste suddenly announced that he would be taking Cécile back to Belgium, to live in the Château de Vêves near Dinant with his father and sister. The days before her departure were agony for them both, Cécile silent and fighting back tears, Lucie so distraught that she longed for her to leave, so that the terrible moment of parting would be over. ‘At my age,’ she wrote, ‘separations are serious things. This little one has become a friend, a companion, someone to whom I can talk of anything. I am like a cat: when they suffer, they go away alone to a corner of the attic.’
At first, Cécile’s daily letters from Belgium were despairing. Her grandfather was ‘at the last point of decrepitude’, while her aunt would allow her neither to be sad nor to be ill. But bit by bit her spirits improved, and she became close to Hadelin. In October Lucie travelled to Brussels, where Cécile had just announced her engagement to a man she had chosen for herself, the younger son of the Baron de Beckman, who looked more Spanish than Belgian, with an ‘aquiline nose, black hair and a small mouth, deep-set dark eyes and a lovely smile’. Ferdinand, noted Lucie, would bring her granddaughter not just money and security but ‘love’. She was delighted to see Cécile so happy. She stayed for the wedding, though she was irritated by Auguste’s arguments over the trousseau.
For a while, she agreed to settle at Noisy, thinking that she should cease to be a burden on Aymar. Hadelin had also married and was living not far away, and Lucie continued to worry that he was too like his father, cold and weak, and she regarded weakness as ‘the greatest cause of danger and unhappiness’. But she hated the grey skies of the Ardennes, and the good circulating library in Brussels was not enough to keep loneliness at bay. She missed Aymar, as she always missed Félicie; alone, she spent the days remembering, mourning the past. When Auguste fussily told her that the arrangement was not to his liking, she was delighted to return to Lausanne.
That autumn, Cécile and Ferdinand spent several months with her in Switzerland. Cécile was four months pregnant and Lucie found her much softened. They read Shakespeare–Lucie did not care for the comedies–and Dickens. She was now hard at work on her memoirs, and had just reached the march on Versailles in October 1789, when she had stood at Mme d’Hénin’s windows and watched the women of Paris advance under the pouring rain. It seemed to her an unimaginably long time ago. Though she longed for Félicie to visit her, she was not discontented, or would not allow herself to be. ‘I feel all right here,’ she wrote. ‘I am very afraid of having to leave and die far from the person from whom I was never apart for so many long years.’ She liked the hills and crooked streets of Lausanne, the sailing boats that looked like feluccas on the water, and her very occasional outings on the William Tell, the new steamboat that went up and down the lake, though she said that she now went out so little that a trip to Geneva was ‘like going to China’. With each new spring, she was charmed again by the greenery and the buds. Not long before his death, Frédéric had written to Félicie about Lucie: ‘My wife’s bottomless reserves of courage will always serve you well. Ah! how admirable it is to be so completely buffeted by storms, yet to remain so fundamentally unbroken.’