Chateaubriand’s 1801 romance Atala was one of the cult books of the age and had ‘bewitched all the reading females into a sort of idolatry of its writer’. When Fanny was properly introduced to him later the same day, she enlarged rather tactlessly on the superior merits of his 1811 Itinéraire de Paris à Jerusalem, but it was probably all one to Chateaubriand, who maintained ‘an air of gentlemanly serenity’65 on the subject of which was the greatest of his great works.
The Princesse and her party reached Brussels on 24 March, still without news of d’Arblay. After five frantic days of enquiry, a letter finally arrived from d’Arblay to Madame de Maurville, the Princesse’s cousin (at whose house they were staying), explaining that he was ill with fever at Ypres. The Maison du Roi had been disbanded unceremoniously when the King realised that it would be impossible to enter Belgium with household troops and that he could no longer afford to fund them anyway. Officers who felt willing to pay their own expenses were invited to follow the King, which d’Arblay, predictably, had chosen to do. Unfortunately, he had been forced to abandon all his expensive war-gear – including the horses – at Béthune when a false alarm of imminent action drew his compagnie in a different direction. Nevertheless he intended to press on to Ghent when well enough to do so.
Armed with this information, Fanny decided to stay put in Brussels and wait to see how and where she could be reunited with her husband. As she recovered from the ordeal of her flight from Paris, she began to regret more and more the loss of her possessions there, which, she felt sure, would be looted or destroyed by the Bonapartists. Foremost among her treasures were the mass of manuscripts she had brought over from England, including her father’s memoirs, Susan’s letters and journals, all the family papers with which she had been entrusted and her own diaries of the past forty-seven years – ‘all of my own inedited mss! – of my whole life!’66 For such an archivally-minded person, the prospect of having lost all these precious documents was extraordinarily upsetting, and she returned to the subject again and again in long letters to d’Arblay and to her family.
For the first weeks of her four months in Brussels Fanny was sharing a house with the Princesse d’Hénin and Lally-Toléndal. Brussels was filling up with Allied troops, but war had not yet been declared on Napoleon, who had entered Paris on 20 March and now held defensive positions in the north of France. The cautious, conspiratorial atmosphere of Brussels was as remarkable as the inertia that had struck Paris a few weeks before. No one really believed that Bonaparte was conquerable – he was certainly not predictable – and though the Allies were gathering force in Belgium, their overall strategy remained obscure.
Fanny’s most heartfelt wishes were granted when d’Arblay arrived unannounced in Brussels in late April, having been granted a congé to visit his wife. He looked terribly ill, ‘thinned & changed inconceivably’,67 but despite their terrible anxieties about each other and about their son (who had left Cambridge for the foreseeable future due to the outbreak of a putrid fever there) they snatched some pleasures together, including a concert attended by the Queen of the Netherlands at which the Duke of Wellington impressively stopped his officers singing an encore to ‘Rule, Britannia!’ The sight of so many foreign troops enjoying some eve-of-battle jingoism prior to invading his native land cannot have been comfortable to d’Arblay, howevermuch his wife thought that without the presence of Wellington ‘all public Hope would be lost’.68
D’Arblay was also painfully aware how quickly the Bourbon cause was losing ground among his old friends. The liberal faction, anticipating the need to find a moderate alternative to both Louis XVIII and to Napoleon, was now backing ‘M. d’O’ – Louis-Philippe, Duc d’Orléans – who had already been discussing with the English Prince Regent how to bring about a successful second restoration in France. The Princesse d’Hénin was one of many Constitutionalists who were now rooting for Orléans; they included Lafayette, who had come out of his retirement at La Grange and had just been elected Deputy for Seine-et-Marne, with whom the Princesse was again in correspondence. While he was in Brussels visiting Fanny, d’Arblay must have had an argument with Lally-Tolendal and the Princesse about their new allegiances, because before leaving he felt it desirable to move his wife out of the shared house and to a small apartment on the Marché au Bois. In the following weeks it became clear to Fanny that her old friends were avoiding her. ‘[Y]our last vivacité has made a sore impression’, she wrote to d’Arblay a month after his departure. ‘The tide can no longer, I fear, be stopt! the round Letter [Orléans] makes way perceptibly!’69 But for the Chevalier, who had rather burnt his boats by accepting a position in the Bourbon royal household, it was a tide he felt honour-bound to resist.
In this strangely isolated state, Fanny stayed on in Brussels while d’Arblay returned to Ghent, whence he was almost immediately transferred to duty at Trèves (Triers) to mediate between the anti-French Prussian army and the French population in the lower Rhine. He and his handful of fellow-officers were also meant to be finding requisitions and volunteers (i.e. deserters) for the ailing royalist army, but once in faraway Trèves they seem to have been rather forgotten by their superiors as events on the other side of the Netherlands came to a crisis. All through June and July 1815, Sub-Lieutenant d’Arblay was completely dependent on his wife’s letters from Brussels for news of the campaign of which he was meant to be part.
Much of what Fanny heard in the weeks prior to Waterloo was, of course, wildly inaccurate or speculative. Refugees and deserters strayed through Brussels, each with a different tale to tell, but as Fanny wrote later, ‘nothing was known – every thing was imagined’.70 A ‘British underofficer’ assured her that the Allies were aiming at ‘the surrender, by the Inhabitants, of Buonaparte or the Destruction of all France’.71 Another strangely apocalyptic rumour was that Wellington had sixteen million artillery rockets at his disposal that would leave France ‘a burning heap of ashes!’72 Brussels continued to fill up with British troops, clearly in readiness for some ‘inexpressibly dreadful’ confrontation, but at the same time there was a strange lull in Bonaparte’s activities. ‘How awful is this pause!’ Fanny wrote to her husband. ‘How, & in what manner will it terminate? I shudder – but try vainly to run from the subject’.73
The answer to her question came soon enough. Fanny was woken in the night on 15 June by confused noises in the street and the sound of a bugle. On her way back from the post office the next day she stood in a doorway to let a body of troops pass by only to find that it was not one troop but the whole company of the Brunswickers, dressed in full uniform and clearly going off to battle. That day and the next the sound of cannon began (from Quatre Bras) and the whole town became anxiously alert. The differences of opinion between Fanny and her friends were instantly forgotten in the common crisis, and she spent 17 June going between one and the other of them, the Princesse d’Hénin, Madame de Maurville, Madame La Tour du Pin and the Boyds (an English couple with five daughters Fanny had befriended during her stay), ‘joining in & changing plans 20 times in an Hour’.74 ‘All the people of Brussels lived in the streets’, she wrote memorably in her ‘Waterloo Journal’:
Doors seemed of no use, for they were never shut. The Individuals, when they re-entered their houses, only resided at the Windows: so that the whole population of the City seemed constantly in Public view. Not only Business as well as Society was annihilated, but even every species of occupation. All of which we seemed capable was to Enquire or to relate, to speak, or to hear.75
Early in the morning of the eighteenth, Mrs Boyd and her daughter Ann appeared at Fanny’s door in a panic, saying that the news was bad and that they were leaving immediately for Antwerp by barge. Fanny hurriedly packed her few things and went on foot to the Boyds’ house (there were no carriages to be had at all), from where they set out for the wharf. On the way they heard ‘a growling noise like distant thunder’,76 and in a few minutes were overtaken by a long procession of carts and baggage wagons, full of men
and machinery. The barge was ready, but the wharf was so crowded that Mr Boyd left his womenfolk in an inn while he tried to find the boat’s master. He came back with the news that Wellington had ordered the evacuation of Brussels, and all watertransport had been requisitioned for wounded officers. Fanny and her friends had no choice but to return to their apartments in the town, walking against a tide of wounded soldiers, the sound of cannon louder in their ears than ever, the shock-waves from the guns only nine miles away powerful enough to break windows in some of the houses.77
News of the battle changed dramatically twice during the day: first it was said that Wellington and Blucher had been victorious, then that Napoleon was working at Wellington’s right wing and was expected to take Brussels in the morning. At one point, Fanny saw a captured General tied to his warhorse whom the crowds were proclaiming as Bonaparte (it was the Comte de Lobau). Soon after, there was a howl ‘violent, loud, affrighting & issuing from many voices’:
I ran to the Window, & saw the Marchée aux Bois suddenly filling with a rushing populace, pouring in from all its avenues, & hurrying on, rapidly, & yet in a scrambling manner, as if unconscious in what direction: while Women with Children in their arms, or clinging to their cloathes, ran screaming out of doors: & cries, though not a word was ejaculated, filled the air: and, from every house, I saw Windows closing, & shutters fastening: – – all this, though long in writing, was presented to my Eyes in a single moment and was followed in another by a burst into my Apartment, to announce that the French were come!78
Fanny rushed off to rejoin the Boyds, but the streets were too full of people and she ended up at Madame de Maurville’s house on the rue de la Montagne. Together they received a very encouraging first-hand account of the battle from an English Commissary who had just arrived from the scene, but even he had to admit that the outcome was not absolutely sure and that the battlefield was in ‘excessive disorder’.79 The French that had been mistaken for invading hordes approaching the town earlier in the day were in fact hundreds of prisoners who were being herded into Brussels. But rumour was more powerful than fact, and had a louder voice: ‘The crowds in the streets, the turbulence, the inquietude, the bustle, the noise, the cries, the almost yells – though proceeding, I now believe, only from wanton Boys, mingling with disorderly females, or frightened mothers, kept up perpetual expectation of annoyance’.80
During the evening of the eighteenth Fanny went back to the Boyds’, intending to try to set off again with them by barge very early the next morning (Mr Boyd, a wealthy merchant, must have bribed someone handsomely to secure this boat). She could not sleep, so sat up writing an account of her terrifying day to her husband:
We none of us go to Bed, but they are all gone to lie down, in their cloaths; & I have tried to do the same, but excessive inquietude prevents my sleeping. I must now make up this confused scrawl, with repeated petition for a Line to Made de Burney, poste restante, Anvers. Heaven bless & preserve you, O mon ami!81
Before she had finished this letter, an English officer brought further evidence that the enemy had been routed and that Brussels was saved. This persuaded Fanny to stay put in Brussels, where she had at least the comfort of being able to send and receive letters from Trèves. The Boyds tried to argue with her, but it was no good: ‘They wondered at my temerity, & probably blamed it; but there was no time for discussion, & we separated.’82
Temerity is indeed a word not often associated with Madame d’Arblay, but she displayed it here, along with a shrewd awareness of what the real personal dangers were. ‘If B[onaparte] does not obtain Brussels by a Coup de Main’, she wrote the next day to George Ill’s daughter Princess Elizabeth (with whom she had begun a correspondence on her return to France in 1814), ‘he can only obtain it by the loss of Paris – since, if he stays longer away, the allies will enter in his absence, – & the Victory of a Town will cost him a Kingdom.’83 All her other acquaintances had left Brussels by this time except Madame de Maurville (who thought Fanny had gone to Antwerp), and she was forced to spend a day in ‘a sort of hopeless seclusion’ on her own in her apartment, waiting for confirmation of the victory. This only came on the twentieth, two days after the battle of Waterloo itself, when Fanny’s confidence was rewarded with copious news of ‘the matchless Triumph of the matchless Wellington’.84
Once the threat of invasion was over and Wellington and Blucher had gone on towards Paris, civilians began filtering back into Brussels. The scale of the victory became clearer, and so did the scale of the devastation: thousands of bodies were lying in the midsummer sun on the battlefield where a new army, of local peasants, was employed digging graves for the ‘Piles of Dead – heaps, Masses, hills of Dead!’85 The wounded were still coming in four days after the battle on every conceivable kind of vehicle and being billeted all round Brussels in churches, workhouses and private homes. The town had become, in Fanny’s phrase, a ‘Walking Hospital’:86 ‘For more than a week from this time, I never approached my Window but to witness sights of wretchedness’, she wrote in her journal. ‘Maimed, wounded, bleeding, mutilated, tortured victims of this exterminating contest, passed by every minute: – the fainting, the sick, the dying & the Dead, on Brancards, in Carts, in Waggons, succeeded one another without intermission.’87 The sick or maimed prisoners were left till last and arrived in Brussels in a state which distressed Fanny, who was spending ‘half the day’ in the makeshift hospitals, winding lint for bandages: ‘the blood that dried upon their skins & their Garments, joined to the dreadful sores occasioned by this corrosive neglect, produced an effect so pestiferous, that, at every new entry, Eau de Cologne, or vinegar, were resorted to by every Inhabitant, even amongst the shop-keepers, even amongst the commonest persons, for averting the menaced contagion’.88 The authorities’ assurances that everything possible was being done for these ‘poor wretches’ did not particularly convince her.
Fanny’s letters to her husband, still at his distant post in Trèves, become noticeably more excited at the approach of the peace on 26 June and the prospect of the speedy re-enthronement of Louis XVIII. It must have been humbling for d’Arblay to hear the news this way, especially at a time when all faithful royalists might have been expecting some reward. Despite persistent requests to the Minister of War, de Feltre, to be reunited with the Maison du Roi, d’Arblay never got an answer to any of his letters, and was chagrined to hear that the King’s entourage had re-entered Paris in triumph without him. He seemed to have been altogether forgotten.
Even had d’Arblay been younger and more dynamic, his prospects under the Bourbon re-restoration would have been poor. His son Alex, who had spent the whole of 1815 drifting from one friend’s house to another because of the fever at Cambridge, gave a youthfully sarcastic but astute summary of the situation in a letter to his mother:
The King is in the hands of the Jacobins – of his Brother’s murderers – of Buoney’s friends – of a set of ruffians – Fouché at the head – the crafty Talleyrand &c is it likely that such men should call such loyal subjects as my Father round the throne? And what honour to him if he was asked to mix with such people? such company? […] What can we expect from a superannuated Monarch, an Esclave couronné ruling a demoralised nation with revolutionary Ministers?89
Fanny did not record her response to this disrespectful view of the monarch for whom her husband was prepared to give ‘the last drop of his blood’.90 She and her son were never quite on the same wavelength. She disliked his habit of quoting poetry at her in his letters, ‘apropos to nothing, copied from printed Books!’91 This seemed actually insulting at a time when Fanny craved hard news from England or sympathy for her own plight, the seriousness of which Alex did not appear to recognise. His rhapsodic manner seemed a symptom of his general moral malaise, as Fanny told him in no uncertain terms:
Your expressions [upon a return to Camilla Cottage in 1815] lose much of their effect by being over strained, recherchée, & designing to be pathetic. We never touch others, my dear A
lex, where we study to shew we are touched ourselves. I beg you, when you write to me, to let your pen paint your thoughts as they rise, not as you seek for, or labour to embellish them. I remember you once wrote me a letter so very fine from Cambridge, that if it had not made me laugh, it would most certainly have made me sick.92
There was a long silence from Alex after this letter. His reply, on 24 May (now missing, possibly destroyed because of its contents), must have expressed a certain pique at his mother’s criticism, because in her next letter she refers to ‘that touch of l’amour propre that makes you so sensitive to my attack upon a few laboured flowers of rhetoric’.93 Her cheery dismissal of his ‘sensitivity’ indicates some of the ways in which Madame d’Arblay might have been alienating her son for years. From the time of his going to Cambridge onwards, her anxieties about his ‘apathy’ and ‘inertia’ had cast a shadow over everything, even his successes. Just as his apparent laziness and ‘secret vanity’ annoyed her, it is clear from his letters of this period that there were things about his parents (such as their political naivety) that exasperated Alex in return. But it seems safe to say that he probably kept his mother in ignorance of anything too close to his heart, fearing the intrusiveness of her interest and attention.
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