Fanny Burney

by Claire Harman

  This was not only a blow to his pride and his expectations (he thought of it as ‘cette disgrace’), but forced a huge disruption on his wife and child. D’Arblay’s latest passport, issued in connection with his military service, prevented his return to England for another year. If the family was not to be separated all that time, there was nothing for it but for Fanny and Alex to join him in Paris.

  Fanny faced the prospect of leaving her precious home in West Humble and moving abroad for up to eighteen months with stoical resignation, fortified by relief that d’Arblay was not going to Santo Domingo after all. She set about arranging for Camilla Cottage to be let and, on William Locke’s advice, spent quite a bit of money sprucing it up to attract the right sort of tenant (it must indeed have seemed quite Spartan to the Lord of Norbury Park). The Lockes asked Fanny to take with her back to Paris a protégée of theirs, six-year-old Adrienne de Chavagnac, who was going to be reunited with her émigré parents. Little did Fanny realise that she herself was about to become a sort of refugee, detained in France not for one year, but ten. It was as well that she didn’t know this when she bade the Lockes, her father and siblings goodbye on 14 April 1802, and caught the Paris diligence with Alex and little Adrienne from the White Bear Hotel on Piccadilly.

  Though she was unassisted, unaccompanied, uncomfortable about the language and had two excited children to look after, Fanny’s first ever journey abroad passed off pretty well. Sea-sickness made the Channel crossing a misery, but as soon as they arrived at Calais, Fanny was absorbed by the novelty of the scene. She and the children wandered out into the streets of the town and felt perfectly safe – much to her surprise: Fanny admitted that she had ‘conceived an horrific idea of the populace of this Country, imagining them all transformed into bloody monsters’.32 On their two-day journey to Paris, she was further impressed by the kindness and good manners of the villagers she met at every relais, piously rejoicing at Bonaparte’s recent restoration of freedom of worship in the Concordat. By the time Madame d’Arblay fell into her husband’s arms at the coach stop on rue Nôtre Dame des Victoires she was already feeling less apprehensive about what life would be like in this alien land.

  D’Arblay had found an apartment in the Hôtel Marengo, near the Champs Élysées, then a relatively retired spot ‘entirely out of the violent bustle & close air of Paris’, as Fanny described it to her father. Narbonne lived nearby, and visited frequently, though Fanny was less ready to encourage a renewal of friendship with Madame de Staël, or with the novelist Madame de Genlis, who was also re-established – very successfully – in the French capital. The d’Arblays’ near-neighbour Madame d’Hénin came to visit the Hôtel Marengo on Fanny’s first day there, bringing tea and a teapot. Fanny was to see a great deal of this friend in the coming months, who tirelessly showed her the sights of Paris and found her a reliable femme de chambre.

  The new French fashions for light drapery, translucent muslins and minimal underwear were not quite as shocking as reports in England had led Fanny to expect, but all the same it was obvious that Madame d’Arblay, now aged fifty, was never going to wear them. Madame d’Hénin and the maid looked at Fanny’s wardrobe in horror, as Fanny reported back amusedly to Miss Planta in Windsor:

  This won’t do! – That you can never wear! This you can never be seen in! That would make you stared at as a curiosity! THREE petticoats! No one wears more than one! STAYS? every body has left off even corsets! – Shift sleeves? not a soul now wears even a chemise! &c &c. – In short I found all that I possessed seemed so hideously old fashioned, or so comically rustic, that as soon as it was decreed I must make my appearance in the grande monde hopeless of success in exhibiting myself in the costume francais, I gave over the attempt, & ventured to come forth as a Gothic anglaise, who had never heard of, or never heeded, the reigning metamorphoses. 33

  Fanny had no desire to enter Parisian society and hoped to ride out her visit to France in modest obscurity. The new meritocracy created by Napoleon was an intimidating group, flaunting money and titles for the first time in years. There was no way in which the d’Arblays could compete with those who had flourished under the Directory and who now, like General Hulin (who had served as a Captain under d’Arblay before the Revolution), appeared at parades and reviews decked out in astonishingly showy uniforms, while d’Arblay was in a scruffy old coat and ‘complete undress’.34 Although France was still nominally a republic, Napoleon’s elevation to Consul for life in 1802 – a stepping-stone on his way to becoming Emperor two years later – was ushering in a new epoch of national confidence and pride. Bonaparte’s face was on everything, from medallions to barley-sugar sticks, and his fame was awe-inspiring, as Fanny soon had the chance to witness and experience herself. Only a fortnight after her arrival in Paris, d’Arblay secured tickets for a review of troops in the Tuileries at which the First Consul was going to preside. The crowd was extremely large, and short-sighted Madame d’Arblay would have seen nothing at all if she hadn’t been identified as a foreigner and given one of the best places (an example of French good manners which impressed her deeply):

  At length, the two human hedges were finally formed, the door of the Audience Chamber was thrown wide open with a commanding crash, a vivacious officer-Centinel – or I know not what, nimbly descended the three steps into our Apartment, &[…] called out, in a loud & authoritative voice, ‘Le Premier Consul!’ […] I had a view so near, though so brief, of his face, as to be very much struck by it: it is of a deeply impressive cast, pale even to sallowness, while not only in the Eye, but in every feature, Care, Thought, Melancholy, & Meditation are strongly marked, with so much of character, nay, Genius, & so penetrating a seriousness – or rather sadness, as powerfully to sink into an observer’s mind[.]35

  The review in the Tuileries took place when the Peace of Amiens between England and France was scarcely two months old, and when Fanny could dwell on Bonaparte’s abstract virtues without worrying too much about his martial ambitions. She began to feel very differently about the First Consul as the prospect of war built up again the following year.

  The small circle of ‘female worthies’ with whom Fanny associated were mostly middle-aged ci-devant aristocrats like Madame d’Hénin and Madame (formerly Vicomtesse) de Laval, who had little money with which to enjoy the sophisticated cultural life of Paris but who maintained a genteel, intelligent and mutually supportive society of their own. Madame de Tessé, sixty-five-year-old former lady-in-waiting to Marie-Antoinette, was of this company, a lady whom d’Arblay described as ‘one of the first Women of the best French society’;36 her niece, Adrienne de Noailles, was the resourceful and heroic wife of d’Arblay’s former commander Lafayette (to whose rural retreat, La Grange, the d’Arblays were invited in June 1802). The elderly abbess Catherine de Fay de Latour-Maubourg was also of this circle with her niece Madame de Maisonneuve, who became one of Fanny’s closest friends in France. Fanny was fortunate to have a member of her family living in Paris at this time too: Hetty’s daughter Maria had moved there recently with her husband Antoine Bourdois (affectionately known to little Alex as ‘Bood’), a well-off native of Joigny and old friend of the d’Arblay family. The match between him and dowerless Maria Burney had been engineered by Fanny and her husband several years before and had proved a great success. It was a relief to have this charming and familiar young couple living within easy reach on the rue de Choiseul.

  As Fanny had predicted, d’Arblay was seriously considering a permanent ‘change of system’, and, perhaps encouraged by the ease with which Fanny had made friends, soon came up with a plan to spend six months of every year at Camilla Cottage, four months in Paris and two in Joigny. He didn’t realise (because she hid it as well as possible) how increasingly important retirement was to his wife. When they spent a fortnight with the Bazille clan in Joigny in late June, Fanny found the visit almost intolerable. She loved the Bazilles and appreciated the fuss they made of their nephew and his family, but the small-town life that d�
��Arblay thrived on destroyed her sense of well-being as much as had Court life, as she wrote in comic exasperation to Hetty:

  M. D’arblay is related, though very distantly, to a quarter of the town, & the other 3 quarters are his friends or acquaintance: & all of them came first to see me; next to know how I did after the journey; next were all to be waited upon in return; next came to thank me for my visit; next to know how the air of Joigny agreed with me; next to make a little farther acquaintance; & finally to make a visit of congé.37

  ‘Interruption, & visiting’ were still Fanny’s idea of hell.

  Just as they couldn’t decide where to live, the d’Arblays also had a continuing struggle over which language was going to predominate in their household, since neither of them was truly bilingual. D’Arblay’s letters to his wife are in French, hers mostly in English, but English was the language they spoke at home – at least, it was when they were in France. Fanny could understand and read French very well by now, but was frustrated at her lack of fluency in speech. ‘You have hardly an idea what a check it is to my declamatory powers that if I think of speaking, I cannot utter a word!’ she wrote to Fredy Locke. ‘All my eloquence hangs on being surprised into an harangue, before I consider in what language I am delivering it’.38 She found the effort of speaking French tiring and boring: ‘my voice is as wearied of pronouncing as my brain is wearied in searching words to pronounce’.39 The resulting tongue-tie was like a return to her silent, blushing youth.

  It wasn’t only her ‘declamatory powers’ that were checked in this period; Fanny also felt that for some reason or other her ‘epistolary spirit’ had ‘flown’.40 ‘I never wrote so few letters in my life’, she said41 – nor, she might have added, got so few replies. Her father, now approaching his eightieth year, was no longer a good correspondent, and despite resolutions with Hetty, Charlotte and Fredy Locke to keep a letter always on the stocks, ready for any opportunity to get it transported across the Channel, there was something deadening about the delays involved.

  Within a couple of months of Fanny’s arrival in Paris the d’Arblays moved from the Hôtel Marengo to the airy suburb of Monceau because of Alex’s persistent illnesses in the city; in October 1802 they moved again, to 54 rue Basse, a house built into a hill overlooking the Seine at Passy.* They bought this ‘queer, irregular, odd house’42 in order to have some property in France to substantiate d’Arblay’s citizenship, since his hopes of reclaiming his land in Joigny had failed.* ‘It is just the place for such odd folks,’ Fanny wrote to Mrs Locke, ‘for we descend to enter it.’43 The cottage was mostly unfurnished when they moved in, and they had to send the builders away due to lack of cash, but Fanny liked the privacy of owning her own home, which became another ‘hermitage’. Presumably uncle Bazille helped out with the purchase; it is hard to see how else the penniless d’Arblays could have afforded it, cut off from Fanny’s small Court pension and the even smaller amount of rent they were owed at Camilla Cottage, which had only attracted a three-month let. D’Arblay’s own hopes of a pension were eventually realised in April 1803, through the offices of Lauriston again, but amounted to a mere £62 10s a year, half what he was expecting.

  Fanny had been planning to return to England in October 1803, but events overtook her. War between France and England was imminent. On 12 May, the day the British Ambassador Lord Whitworth left Paris, the dramatist Bertie Greatheed called on the d’Arblays in Passy for the first time and found Monsieur in ‘the greatest agitation’. Madame kept to her room, clearly in no state to entertain. ‘This approaching war seems quite to overset them,’ Greatheed wrote in his journal, ‘so linked are they to both countries that to separate from either is ruin and to hold both impossible.’44 His observation was perspicacious: the d’Arblays’ loyalties were painfully confused. ‘War […] seems inevitable,’ Fanny wrote the same day to Fredy Locke, ‘& my grief – I, who feel myself now of Two Countries – is far greater than I can wish to express.’45

  With the declaration of war on 16 May 1803, there was no longer any question of choice in the matter of where the d’Arblays’ were going to live. Now it was Fanny’s turn to be an alien in an enemy country. Bonaparte decreed on 22 May that all Englishmen and women in France between the ages of eighteen and sixty were to be considered prisoners of war. Severe travel restrictions and coastal blockades cut off any chance of Fanny keeping in touch with her family in England except by getting letters smuggled through on the very rare occasions when they could place them with trustworthy travellers. In 1804 she wrote only one letter to England – to her elderly father – and in 1807 she mentioned two that were ‘antiques that had waited 3 or 4 years some opportunity’. There was little chance of knowing, under these circumstances, if letters got to their destination or not, or whether they passed through the censor’s office on the way. Dr Burney was completely dissuaded from writing to Fanny because of his fear of her vulnerability, and advised the rest of the family not to risk writing to Paris either. He imagined that Fanny, with her Court and social connections in England, could easily be suspected of spying.

  The d’Arblays therefore lived in a strange news blackout that lasted nine years. Letters that did trickle through from family and friends in England kept off politics and the war; consequently the d’Arblays didn’t even hear of the British victory at Trafalgar until 1812 – seven years after the battle. Similarly, Fanny had no idea until long after the event that her half-brother Richard had died out in Calcutta, aged only forty; that Sarah and James had finished their experiment in cohabitation in 1803 (James went back to his family and Sarah went off to be a governess in Cheshire); that Ralph Broome had died in 1805, leaving Charlotte widowed for the second time; that in 1807 her favourite niece, Charlotte Francis, had married a man called Barrett thirty years her senior and her most beautiful niece, Fanny Phillips, had found a husband rich enough to pay her debts and satisfy her extravagant tastes. Queeney Thrale had married too, at the age of forty-three. Her husband was Baron (later Viscount) Keith, Admiral of the White, the distinguished Commander-in-Chief of the Channel Fleet in the later stages of the Napoleonic war. Queeney’s mother, Mrs Piozzi, had begun a correspondence and friendship with Marianne Francis, Charlotte’s second daughter, a pious, self-possessed young woman who never married but devoted herself to private study and philanthropy. Perhaps it is just as well that Fanny did not know how she had been replaced in Mrs Piozzi’s affections by her niece, nor of how often gossip about ‘Madame Dab’ was passed along to Streatham Park via this channel.

  There was little for the d’Arblays to do after the outbreak of war but keep their heads down, but with no chance of money coming from England and no recourse to their most reliable source of income, Fanny’s pen, the family was in a worse financial position than ever. In March 1805 d’Arblay began work on a salary of about £150 a year as a humble rédacteur in the Ministry of the Interior, a post he kept right through to the Restoration. After the first few months of pen-pushing he was so restless that he was briefly tempted by Narbonne’s suggestion to join Napoleon’s Polish campaign, but his principles and his chivalrous respect for his wife’s feelings prevented him from doing so. Fanny’s implacable objection to militarism and her reluctance to let d’Arblay risk his life in battle clashed once again with the family tradition, instincts and training of her frustrated soldier husband.

  The health and education of Alex was a constant preoccupation of both his parents, who fussed continually over their hyperactive, precocious sauvage. Fanny was a firm believer in preventive medicine (they had submitted Alex to the risky new smallpox vaccination in 1798), and had always been keen on dosing her child up. The treatments she mentions giving him in these years in Paris include her old favourites, James’s powders and bark, as well as saline draughts, asses’ milk, red port infused with garlic, rhubarb and senna (together), sulphur, cream of tartar with honey, and raw turnip juice. No wonder the child felt sick most of the time and looked as thin as a ‘live skeleton’.46 And whil
e his mother hung over his bedside, administering turnip juice on a spoon, his father was anxiously monitoring the boy’s studies and trying to rectify bad habits such as his obsessive interest in mathematical problems, which kept the child awake at night. Alex’s absent-mindedness, asociability and general lack of connection with the outside world were already marked at the age of ten.

  The d’Arblays devoted a great deal of energy to their son’s education, but the time came when he began to out-learn them. Fanny had been planning to send him to his uncle Charles’s school in Greenwich on their return to England, but their detention in France necessitated finding him a place locally. Being possessive, anxious parents, unwilling ‘to relinquish entirely Our home system’,47 they persuaded Monsieur Sencier, the head of the pension on the rue Basse, to take Alex for mornings only. After only ten months of this dual regime, the boy won four first prizes at the end-of-year examination, for Mythology, Version, Thème and Bonne Conduite, much to his parents’ delight and pride. Neither Fanny nor d’Arblay seemed to anticipate any problems that might arise from Alex always being odd-man-out at school – the only externe, a skinny anglais, a winner of prizes for Bonne Conduite. The degree of control his parents exerted over him was extraordinary. At the age when d’Arblay himself had joined the army, Alex was being treated to evenings of family reading, his father carefully censoring ‘all such passages as might tarnish the lovely purity of his innocence by any dangerous impressions’.48

  When the d’Arblays had to move back into the centre of Paris in the winter of 1806 to alleviate the unpleasantness of commuting (d’Arblay had been walking to and from his office in the sixième arrondissement along the muddy lanes to save money), Alex of course had to move schools. Monsieur Hix’s big school of almost two hundred boys was primarily for boarders, but again the d’Arblays made an exception of their son and insisted on sending him as a day pupil, this time on grounds of his health. Alex performed even better here than at Passy, but at a cost. Not surprisingly, the boys in his class developed a strong dislike of the little swot, and his superflux of merit points was deeply resented. The disaffected pupils were soon petitioning that d’Arblay be moved up to the next class, as Fanny related with misplaced pride in a long account to her father: