Fanny Burney

by Claire Harman

  Juniper Hall was a former coaching inn that had been extended and redesigned in the 1770s. It now had two new wings, a landscaped garden and an elegant drawing room in the Adam style designed by the amateur artist Lady Templetown, a friend of Fredy Locke. It was part of the Juniper Hill estate, owned in 1792 by a lottery-owner called Jenkinson, but the Hall was never used as a family home, despite the expensive improvements. In his far superior property about a mile and a half away, Norbury Park, William Locke heard the local gossip that the Hall had been leased to ‘French papishes’ who were thought unlikely to pay their way.8 As an anti-xenophobic gesture, Locke immediately offered to stand surety for the rent of Juniper Hall, and made a point of befriending the new colony of exiles. He also made a prudent appearance at a rally in Epsom that December of the gentlemen, yeomen and farmers of Surrey ‘for the purpose of expressing their Loyalty to the King, and their attachment to every Branch of the present happy Constitution in Church and State’.9 In days of suspended diplomatic relations with France and increasing official anxiety about Jacobinism and sedition, Locke didn’t want his friendliness towards the odd collection of destitute aristocrats in Mickleham to be taken amiss.

  Among the refugees at Juniper Hall was Narbonne’s devoted friend Alexandre d’Arblay, a thirty-eight-year-old career soldier from Joigny in Burgundy who had served as Adjutant-General under Lafayette in the Army of the North campaign against Austria that year and who had made his way via Holland and Harwich to London after the capture of Lafayette at Longwy. Susan Phillips, delighted to meet a lieutenant of her hero, described d’Arblay to her sister thus:

  a true militaire, franc et loyal – open as the day – warmly affectionate to his friends – intelligent, ready, and amusing in conversation, with a great share of gaieté de coeur.10

  D’Arblay’s long career in the army had begun at the age of fourteen, but though hard-working and dedicated, he lacked the sort of drive that worldly success requires, and his ascent through the ranks had been slow.11 He was a cultivated man, a music-lover who liked to compose a little poetry, and seems to have been happier obeying orders than giving them. D’Arblay was honourable, courageous and intensely loyal but had an unlucky streak which a critical observer might interpret as a certain lack of competence. He was in charge of the guards at the Tuileries, for instance, the night in June 1791 when Louis XVI and his family made their ultimately unsuccessful escape to Varennes. If there was a plot among the officers to allow the King to escape, d’Arblay seems to have been kept in ignorance of it. It is impossible not to suspect that he was being set up as a stooge on this occasion. If the King had not been recaptured, d’Arblay’s life would almost certainly have been forfeit.

  D’Arblay’s open manner, sensitivity and charm, however, endeared him to many people. He often visited the Phillipses’ cottage on the main street in Mickleham, and Susan sent long accounts of their conversations to her sister. D’Arblay seems to have given up the idea of being able to return home to France and saw, with prescience, the unlikelihood of a lasting peace within thirty or even forty years: ‘I see no hope of peace in my unhappy country during my lifetime’, he told Mrs Phillips sadly, ‘The People are so vitiated by the breakdown of law – by disorders of every kind – by the constant sight of blood’.12 Fanny, writing back to Susan, carefully interpreted the stranger’s words as fuel for her anti-liberal feelings, saying they should be read to ‘all English Imitators of French Reformers […] New Systems, I fear, in States, are always dangerous, if not wicked; Grievance by grievance, wrong by wrong, must only be assailed, & breathing time allowed to old prejudices, & old habits, between all that is done.’13 To Mrs Locke’s similarly enthusiastic letters about the Juniper Hall set, Fanny replied, ‘Your French Colonies are truly attractive – I am sure they must be so to have caught me, so substantially, fundamentally, the foe of all their proceedings while in power’. Again, this apparent concession to emotion was prelude to a form of reproach: ‘[W]hat of misery can equal the misery of such a Revolution! – I am daily more & more in charity with all fixed Governments.’14

  Fanny went to stay at Norbury Park in mid to late January 1793 and it was there that she finally met the French exiles, whose cultivation and good manners impressed her very favourably. The timing of their meeting was fortuitous, for it meant that she had a chance to form an opinion of both d’Arblay and Narbonne before the awful news reached London on the morning of 24 January of the execution of Louis XVI three days earlier. The whole Juniper Hall community was in shock, complicated, on the part of the émigrés, by guilt, fear and the need to demonstrate their disapproval and distress. Fanny wrote to her father that her new acquaintances had been ‘almost annihilated – they are for-ever repining that they are French, &, though two of the most accomplished & elegant Men I ever saw, they break our Hearts with the humiliation they feel for their guiltless BIRTH in that guilty Country – “Is it possible” cries M. de Narbonne, “that you, Mr Lock, retain one jot of goodwill towards those who have the shame and misery of having been born French?”’15 Narbonne looked jaundiced with shock, and d’Arblay, ‘from a very fine figure & good face, was changed as if by Magic in one night’ to ‘meagre’ and ‘miserable’. Howevermuch the friendly Lockes and Phillipses might sympathise with their plight, none of the émigré party knew how the wider English community would treat them now, and in truth no objective person could have failed to connect the Constitutionalists with the regicides, albeit indirectly. With the expectation of war getting stronger every day, they holed up at Juniper Hall, waiting on events.

  At this critical juncture in the progress of the Revolution, Fanny ceased to cavil at her friends’ liberalism. Possibly with a sense of relief at being again unanimous with Susan, she transferred her full support and sympathy to the ‘guiltless’ émigrés. She wrote to her father that, with the exception of George Ill’s illness, she had ‘never been so overcome with grief & dismay for any but personal & family calamities’,16 and requested her mourning clothes to be sent from Chelsea immediately, so that she could appear among the Juniperians without shame. She must have realised that in her father’s opinion no amount of mourning could obscure the treasonable nature of these dangerous French liberals, and that he would deeply disapprove any further fraternisation with them. Yet Fanny was suddenly quite ardent in their defence. In the light of the rapidly developing intimacy between herself and the Chevalier d’Arblay over the next month, it seems that she had probably fallen in love with him at first sight, and was already, in this first letter to her father mentioning d’Arblay, adopting the methods of special pleading that characterise her correspondence with him over the next few months as she tried (fruitlessly) to change Dr Burney’s mind about the ‘French sufferers’ at Mickleham.

  The community at Juniper Hall was enlivened by the arrival towards the end of January of Anne-Louise-Germaine de Staël, twenty-six-year-old daughter of Jacques Necker, the French King’s former Minister of Finance. Madame de Staël had recently given birth to a son at her parents’ home in Switzerland, but the months in Paris preceding that confinement had been fraught with personal danger. As the author of an admired study of Rousseau (published in 1788) and wife of the Swedish Ambassador to Paris, Madame de Staël had enjoyed a prominent role in Parisian intellectual life; her salon was a meeting-place for Constitutionalists and she used her influence to aid the safe passage of many refugees out of France during the turbulent autumn of 1792. When she tried to leave Paris herself, however, she had to run the gauntlet of the mob and was taken before Robespierre, accused of betraying the Revolution. Only her diplomatic status (and considerable personal bravery in standing up to Robespierre) got her safely away.

  She brought with her to Juniper Hall not only these dramatic histories but further news about ‘the saint like end of the martyred Louis’, as Fanny styled it; how the King’s last words were drowned out by drums on the orders of Santerre and how the eight-year-old Dauphin pleaded in vain to be allowed to beg mercy for his
father before the Convention. These affecting tales, told by the charismatic young authoress, inspired a warm response from Fanny: ‘She is one of the first women I have ever met with for abilities & extraordinary intellects’, she wrote to her father,17 this despite the Duc de Liancourt’s warnings that Madame de Staël was ‘one of the most offensively presumptuous women in the world, though of distinguished talents’.18

  It is not surprising that Fanny’s letters of this period are full of superlatives: the company at Juniper Hall, which also briefly included the former Bishop of Autun, Charles Maurice de Talleyrand Périgord, was the most brilliant and animated that she had known in her long experience of distinguished and famous people. Even unobtrusive Monsieur d’Arblay was described as ‘one of the most delightful Characters I have ever met, for openness, probity, intellectual knowledge, & unhackneyed manners’. If Fanny was already enamoured of the gentle chevalier, with his large dark eyes, dark eyebrows and greying hair, receding at the front but flowing down over his collar behind in the new informal style, it seems very likely that he had fallen for her as quickly. By the end of their second week of acquaintance, he had suggested – insisted – that he become her tutor in French, which she accepted gladly. She forbore to mention that she already read and wrote the language very well.* Clearly she hadn’t been speaking much French in front of the foreign grandees, constrained by her unconquerable shyness, or ‘folly of fear’, as she described it to Mrs Locke.20 Monsieur d’Arblay teased her gently about this: ‘Since as your friends are quite ignorant of your knoledges in the french language, the are been surely surprised of your unexpected improvement.’21 There was no question, however, of not going ahead with the lessons. Fanny was amply motivated, writing to her new ‘Master of the Language’, ‘I have never had a real desire to write, speak or hear French until now’.22 The lessons became two-way, and therefore, of course, more frequent, with each party composing short ‘themes’ or essays in the language of the other, and sending them for correction and improvement. ‘[O]ur lessonings are mutual’, Fanny wrote to Mrs Locke, ‘& more entertaining than can easily be conceived.’23

  The thèmes that Fanny and Monsieur d’Arblay exchanged between February and April 1793 were never formal or particularly educational, but from the start a substitute for correspondence, often more intimate and immediate than their later actual correspondence. The two ‘students’ had agreed to write on whatever they liked (or could express), which in Monsieur d’Arblay’s case was often a simple commentary on what was going on around him in the drawing room at Juniper Hall. One of his thèmes, a note to Fanny (with her subsequent corrections added in square brackets) has a charming immediacy, and a strong French accent:

  ‘Why do’nt you get down? [come down] every body in the drawing room calls after you [asks for you]. Some thought you were gone to Darking. Some others, you had got a Sittkness; at last [others that you had got a sickness at least]. – Mr Narbonne was affraid to finding you [was afraid of finding you] low-spirited, and all the society schew [shewed] an uneasiness wich I have desired to put an end [uneasiness to which I desired to put an end].’24

  Fanny’s replies were lively, confident, even playful. D’Arblay was soon calling her his ‘Master in gown’, but his English seems, if anything, to have got worse under her tutelage, and when he had anything important to convey he always did it in French, establishing early on the language they would speak most often together in their strange bilingual marriage. The significance of this ‘simple, yet curious’ first phase of their courtship was such to Fanny that the thèmes were especially carefully preserved among her papers, ‘to obviate their [the next generation] being Dupes of false accounts’.25

  Fanny’s immediately strong feelings for Monsieur d’Arblay undoubtedly coloured her view of the whole Juniper community. Madame de Staël, who was delighted to find the famous authoress of Cecilia among her new English neighbours, reminded Fanny particularly of Hester Thrale, whom she resembled ‘exactly […] in the ardour & warmth of her temper & partialities […] but she has infinitely more depth, & seems an even profound politician & metaphysician’.26 Narbonne, Fanny wrote to her father, ‘bears the highest character for goodness, parts, sweetness of manners & ready wit’, and as for Narbonne’s devoted Monsieur d’Arblay, he was surely ‘one of the most singularly interesting Characters that can ever have been formed. He has a sincerity, a frankness, an ingenuous openness of nature that I had been injust enough to think could not belong to a French Man.’ To Mrs Locke, she admitted that something like Juniper-fever had taken hold of her: ‘I am always exposing myself to the wrath of John Bull when this coterie come in competition. It is inconceivable what a convert M. de Talleyrand has made of me; I think him now one of the first members, & one of the most charming, of this exquisite set. Susanna is as completely a prosilyte. His powers of entertainment are astonishing both in information & in raillery. We know nothing of how the rest of the World goes on.’27

  Unfortunately, the rest of the world went on with a rather less admiring view of the émigrés at Mickleham, and back in Chelsea, Charles Burney read his daughter’s eulogies with growing alarm. France had declared war on Britain and Holland at the end of January 1793, and the new Aliens Bill required the registration (and surveillance) of all these suspect Frenchmen. Worse still, though Dr Burney did not doubt Madame de Staël’s intellectual status or ‘captivating powers’, he had heard rumours about her moral character from the Burkes and Mrs Ord, who, with her close connection to the Court, was someone to take particularly seriously. He did not, in his immediate reply to Fanny, dwell on the gossip, which was that Madame de Staël had a ‘partiality’ for Narbonne, but warned her that Necker’s former administration and those associated with it were currently ‘held in greater horror by aristocrats than even the members of the present Convention’.28 He advised both his daughters to have as little to do with Madame de Staël as possible and to make any excuse to avoid staying at Juniper Hall.

  Fanny responded with a spirited, not to say gushing, defence of the Constitutionalists. In her opinion they had been horribly misrepresented by Jacobins (‘that fiend-like set’) and the corrupt noblesse alike. Anti-Constitutionalist propaganda made little impact on Fanny any more – she had heard it all discussed at Juniper Hall – but the scandalous possibility that Madame de Staël and Narbonne could be lovers had never crossed her mind. Her reasons for thinking it ‘a gross calumny’ show her prejudice and unworldliness at full stretch:

  she [Madame de Staël] loves [Monsieur de Narbonne] even tenderly, but so openly, so simply, so unaffectedly, & with such utter freedom from all coquetry, that if they were two Men, or two women, their affection could not, I think, be more obviously undesigning. She is very plain; – he is very handsome; – her intellectual endowments must be with him her sole attraction.29

  Fanny’s assumption that there are certain ‘rules’ about sexual attraction (not to mention her apparent ignorance of the existence of homosexuality, and what was and wasn’t ‘undesigning’ between people) seems extraordinarily naive in a woman brought up among demi-mondaines and bohemians, and must colour our view of all her stated opinions about other people’s sex lives. This is particularly relevant to the scandal over the elopement, four years later, of James Burney and his half-sister Sarah. On that occasion, Fanny’s first instinct that something awful must be going on was quashed by her disinclination to think ‘something awful’ possible. As an adolescent it was not so surprising that Fanny took people at face value (one remembers how little trouble the Italian soprano Lucrezia Agujari had convincing the Burney girls of her purity); as an adult she never really understood that denying the obvious about one’s sex life was the polite way of admitting to it.

  Though she was a prude herself, Fanny naturally enough found other prudes rather dull; thus her horror of immorality was forever coming into conflict with her attraction to charming, affable, sexy people. Sometimes it took years for the penny to drop even halfway. The relationship bet
ween the Princesse d’Hénin and Lally-Tolendal (living together quite openly in Richmond in 1792) was still puzzling Fanny in 1815, when she began to suspect that they might have a ‘secret marriage’. Even when the case was notorious, such as that of Lady Elizabeth Foster, bosom friend of the Duchess of Devonshire and mistress of the Duke of Devonshire, charm was able to win over Fanny’s deep initial distaste, and she ended their first meeting in August 1791 ‘in fervent wishes that calumny, not truth, may have condemned her, & in something like a fascinated feel in her favour’.30 It was one of Fanny’s strengths that she was aware of this susceptibility and the confusedly ‘mixt sensations of pain & pleasure’ it caused: the stories she had heard about Lady Elizabeth and the Devonshires ‘made me shudder at their power of pleasing’, but ‘the excellence of the behaviour & manner I witnessed, contradicted them all & rendered these objects of defamation patterns of virtue!’31

  Others were not quite so easily swayed. Charles Burney had received a letter from his old friend James Hutton32 expressing his extreme disquiet at learning of Fanny’s association with Madame de Staël, whom he heard had come to England ‘to intrigue here, and […] to follow Mr de Narbonne’.33 Fanny should avoid any connection with such ‘an Adulterous Demoniac’, who could only be intending to exploit her celebrity in a way ‘most horrible Prejudicial to Fanny’. Hutton’s letter, sent on by their father, caused Fanny and Susan great disturbance. While apparently holding to her opinion that Madame de Staël was being ‘cruelly calumniated, & truly worthy of every protection & support’,34 Fanny made no delay in arranging to return to London and sent her excuses to Juniper Hall, begging off the latest of Madame de Staël’s fervent invitations with the excuse of a sore throat. Mrs Locke, who was back in London with her family for the season, had also sent news about scandal being attached to Madame de Staël’s name. The sisters wrote to her in distress, not knowing what to believe of their charming and brilliant French friends. Fanny’s remark seems particularly melancholy, weighted, as it undoubtedly was, by anxieties about the grounds of her relationship with d’Arblay: ‘& we had been liking & loving these exquisite people more & more every day without suspicion or controul!’