What she witnessed was not just the end of an era both of extremes of privilege and extremes of poverty and backwardness, but the birth of a recognisably modern world, a new ordering of society. She saw and recognised the changes and the need for them, and most she approved of. Given her intense self-awareness and her experiences of loss and tragedy–universal experiences she shares with women at all moments of history–it is sometimes tempting to think of her as a modern woman. But Lucie belonged firmly in her times, and she dealt with her life in the ways that her 18th-century upbringing had taught her; which is why it is so important to set her clearly in her background and the age she lived through.
What Lucie discovered, as she started writing, was that she had a natural talent for description, a canny eye for the telling detail and strong feelings about right and wrong. She had feared that her memory might be poor: on the contrary, it was precise and deep. And as she wrote, so the age that she had lived through and survived came alive under her pen. Others had endured the same hardships and recorded the turmoil that consumed France in the closing years of the 18th century and the first decades of the 19th. What gave Lucie’s memoirs and her letters their edge was something quite different. It was to do with a kind of purity. In an era of licentiousness and expediency, when the world of seduction and deceit depicted by Choderlos de Laclos in Les Liaisons dangereuses offered a mirror to the aristocratic life around her, when Catholic prelates thought nothing of fathering children, and preferment owed more to intrigue than to natural talent, Lucie retained all her life a moral clarity and simplicity. It might have made her dull and priggish. Instead, it turned her into an impressive reporter who observed and recorded a lost age with candour and humour. It made her a loving and faithful wife and a devoted mother. And it made her brave, which was fortunate, for the events that befell her would have broken a frailer spirit.
CHAPTER ONE
This Magnificent Age
When Lucie-Henriette Dillon, who all her life would be known as Lucie, was born at 91 rue du Bac on 25 February 1770, the Faubourg Saint-Germain was one of the most fashionable quarters of Paris. It was here, behind heavy wooden doors opening on to courtyards with stables and coach houses, that France’s noble families lived. Abandoning the overcrowded and unhealthy Marais on the right bank of the Seine, they had crossed the river in the middle of the 17th century and settled in great stone mansions, three and four storeys high, surrounding their properties with high walls and vying with each other in grandeur.
Of all the faubourg’s streets, the narrow rue du Bac, wandering down towards the river, was considered by many the most desirable. The first house, along the embankment, belonged to the Comte de Mailly; on the same side was the Marquis de Custine and further up, not far from number 91, was the Princesse de Salm, who wrote verse. Just around the corner lived the Duc de Biron, as did the Rochechouarts, where another baby, Rosalie-Sabine, was born a little before Lucie. In these houses, women held salons and sang, for the Faubourg Saint-Germain was both scholarly and musical. It was on the Duchesse de Castries’s harp in the rue de Varennes that Mozart, a few years later, composed his concerto for flute and harp.
At the far end of the rue du Bac, where the road ended and the open countryside began, a missionary order had built a clergy house, with lintels of carved griffins and cherubs; its orchards and a kitchen garden looked out to the woods behind. On all sides, Paris was surrounded by forest. In the spring and summer, when Lucie and her nurse walked towards the fields, the road smelt sweetly of lime from the pollarded trees, of roses, lavender and lilac and the rare and exotic plants grown by the Swiss gardeners employed by the nobility towards the end of the 18th century. Across the river lay the open countryside of the Champs-Elysées, where on Sundays Parisians brought their children to picnic and stroll under the avenues of chestnut trees.
Number 91 was an imposing, unadorned building, its main reception rooms on the first floor reached by a handsome exterior circular staircase. Inside, the drawing rooms were hung with crimson and yellow damask, and the gold and silver threads of the embroidered armchairs were reflected in mirrors that hung around the walls. Lucie’s mother, who was 20 at the time of her daughter’s birth, had a room elegantly furnished in acacia. Her singing voice was pleasant and she owned a pianoforte, one of the first to be seen in Paris and which Lucie, as a small child, was not allowed to touch.
The house was known locally as l’Hôtel de Rothe, after Lucie’s maternal grandmother, an imperious and ill-tempered woman, whose husband, Charles Edward de Rothe, a French general of Irish extraction, had died some years before; and it was here that Lucie and her parents lived.
On both sides of her interwoven family, Lucie was descended from the Irish Dillons of Roscommon. Her parents were second cousins. Their mutual ancestor, Theobald, 7th Viscount Dillon, had raised an Irish regiment in 1688 and followed James II to France, entering into service with the French, and remaining after James II’s Jacobite court in exile had found a home at the palace of Saint-Germain-en-Laye, west of Paris.
Lucie’s father, Arthur, had been a soldier since childhood, waiting in the wings until judged old enough to inherit the family vacancy of proprietory-colonel of the Dillon regiment, caused by the death in battle of two older uncles, whose heroism was part of family lore. He was a good-looking man, tall, with receding hair and an aquiline nose, a small mouth and large black eyes; a friend once said of him that he resembled a parrot eating a cherry. Serving in his regiment since the age of 16, he was passionate about all things military. Lucie’s mother, Thérèse-Lucy, was also tall, with ‘a pretty complexion and a charming face’ and the fair colouring of her Irish ancestors, though some considered her rather too thin. She was good-natured and light-hearted, if not always averse to using Lucie in her battles with her own mother. She was also poorly educated, and she loved everything Versailles and the court provided.
Soon after their arranged marriage in 1768, when Arthur was 18 and Thérèse-Lucy 17, a son was born. They christened him Georges, but like a great many children in the 18th century he died in early infancy. Lucie was born two years later. Neither Arthur nor his wife had any money of their own, and Mme de Rothe, who held the family purse-strings in a grip of iron, was extremely reluctant to pass on to Thérèse-Lucy, her only child, any of the fortune that should by rights have gone to her.
More significant, perhaps, in a household in which the young Dillons and their new daughter seemed merely to perch, tolerated but disapproved of by the domineering Mme de Rothe, was the presence of another member of the Dillon family. This was Arthur Richard Dillon, Archbishop of Toulouse and Narbonne, President of the Estates of the Languedoc and widely accepted to be the lover of Mme de Rothe, who was the daughter of his sister, Lady Forester. Though this was not a liaison of much matter in an era of worldly prelates, there were some at court who disapproved, and Mme de Rothe felt their disdain keenly. The Marquis de Bombelles, a celebrated chronicler of the ancien régime, who admired Thérèse-Lucy’s grace and charm, spoke openly of her as having been raised by a ‘mother without principles and an uncle, believed to be her father’. The Archbishop’s ‘indecency’, he remarked, should certainly have excluded him from his exalted position in the Church. Like Arthur and his young wife, the Archbishop, a somewhat portly figure of medium height, with a round moonlike face and a great passion for hunting, found it best to abide by Mme de Rothe’s wishes. In the Church, he was known as an administrator rather than an evangelist, though his thesis had been on the doctrine of grace.
On both counts, then, Lucie was closely related to France’s powerful elites: the nobility and the clergy.
February 1770, the month of Lucie’s birth, was extremely cold. The men at work on the new Salle de l’Opéra had fallen behind and the stage was still not ready, but at the Comédie-Française Beaumarchais’s new play, Les Deux Amis, an intricate tale of love and money, opened to a good reception, and the young Talma, with his clear voice and commanding presence, was being
hailed as the great coming tragedian. In the Mercure de France, Paris’s most popular paper, there was a long article about an eclipse of the sun, and much comment on the new inoculation–still in its experimental stage–against smallpox; and there was talk of James Cook’s recent discovery of Australia, as he sailed home from plotting the transit and eclipse of Venus in Tahiti. De Bachaumont’s Secret Diary, put together by a group of freethinkers and sceptics calling themselves les Paroissiens, kept all Paris entertained with gossip, rumour and court scandals. Due to a series of bad harvests, the economy, all over France, was reported to be faltering. The Foreign Minister, the Duc de Choiseul, was losing his struggle to impose reform through ambitious plans to alleviate poverty and improve agriculture, while trouble was brewing between the King, Louis XV, and his parliamentarians.
Thérèse-Lucy, in her elegant but cold room in the rue du Bac, took some time to recover from her daughter’s birth. The new baby was fair and it was thought likely that she would take after her mother and be tall.
On 16 May, when Lucie was three months old, Marie Antoinette, the 15th child and 8th surviving daughter of the Emperor and Empress of the Holy Roman Empire, arrived at Versailles from Vienna to be married to the 15-year-old Dauphin. She was 14, a graceful, fair-haired girl, with blue-grey eyes, a long neck, an aquiline nose and the famous Habsburg projecting lower lip, which gave her a pouting air. Her forehead was somewhat high and her hairline a bit uneven, which would pose a challenge to her dressmakers. Pretty rather than beautiful, Marie Antoinette was almost totally uneducated, though she sang charmingly and loved to dance. Both her written French–the lingua franca of all European courts–and her written German were extremely poor; her spoken French was far from perfect.
Her bridal journey, in 57 carriages, had been as splendid and luxurious as all the wealth and artistry of the Austrian court could make it, and she travelled in clothes of crimson taffeta, red velvet and gold embroidery in a gold and velvet coach. Parting from her Austrian suite on an island in the middle of the Rhine, after two and a half weeks on the road, she had been stripped, as ritual demanded, of everything belonging to her past, down to her undergarments and her much loved dog, a pug called Mops. The future queen of the French was permitted to retain nothing that belonged to a foreign power. Before Marie Antoinette left Vienna, her formidable mother, Maria Teresa, had instructed her never to display too much curiosity or to be over-familiar with those beneath her in rank; and, she had added, she should take great care to provoke no scandals.
Waiting to greet her in the forest near Compiègne, two days before her entry into Versailles, was her betrothed, Louis-Auguste, Dauphin of France since the death of his two older brothers. A heavily built youth in a long line of notoriously greedy and fat men, he was clumsy, tone-deaf and short-sighted, but also possessed of intelligence, curiosity, studiousness and a passion for hunting. With him had come his grandfather, Louis XV, now in the 55th year of his long reign, no longer the bien aimé, the much loved king, but the mal aimé, for a rule perceived as repressive and corrupt; and the Dauphin’s two younger brothers, the Comte de Provence, at 14 even stouter than Louis-Auguste, and the Comte d’Artois, 12, and widely acknowledged to be extremely good-looking. Accompanying these four were several high-ranking members of the French court, as well as three of the Dauphin’s aunts, Adélaïde, Victoire and Sophie, all in their late thirties, memorably described by Horace Walpole as ‘clumsy, plump old wenches’. Only later would Marie Antoinette meet the two princesses, her future sisters-in-law, 9-year-old Clothilde, whose girth was said to exceed her height, and 6-year-old Elisabeth. Life at Versailles, with its thousand rooms, its squabbling courtiers and legions of liveried servants, its rituals and its dramas, would prove to be far more public than that at the Austrian court.
Not a great deal had changed at Versailles since the King’s great-grandfather, Louis XIV, had moved the court from Paris in 1682 to the former hunting lodge on the main road to Normandy. Now, as then, ceremony and etiquette framed the royal day. In 1770, as in the 1680s, the King of France ruled by divine right, ‘rendering account…to God alone’, with wide powers over most temporal as well as ecclesiastical affairs. His court consisted of some 60 aristocratic dynasties and more than 200,000 nobles, split between the Noblesse de Robe, deriving their status from royal service, and the Noblesse d’Epée (sword) whose status came from military prowess. Public display, modes of address and formal ritualistic meals, rights and prerogatives, designed by the Sun King as a way of controlling his nobles, all remained in place, like an ancient and formal dance, even if, over the years, the squabbles had become more bitter and the rivalries more vicious.
With the years France’s unwieldy administration, a patchwork of provinces, municipalities, judicial territories and bishoprics, many with their own laws and dialects, had grown steadily more complicated and arcane. Nothing, in fact, was more bewildering than the absurd array of taxes, both direct and indirect, shot through with anomalies, and from which the nobility and clergy were largely exempt. Like Spain, Prussia and the Austrian Empire, France remained a hereditary absolute monarchy, under a king who governed centrally, using the much hated and feared lettres de cachet, the right to imprison at will, through secret orders.
Some 6,000 people, of all ranks but admitted only by ticket, attended Louis’s and Marie Antoinette’s wedding at Versailles. As courtiers, Mme de Rothe, the Archbishop, Arthur and Thérèse-Lucy would have been among them. The nobility wore full court dress, the women in hooped skirts, boned bodices, puffed sleeves and trains, their hair dressed and powdered, the men in swords, silk coats and breeches. Men and women alike glittered with jewels. Marie Antoinette, in white brocade and looking more like a child than a young woman, was presented with diamonds and a collar of pearls that had once belonged to Anne of Austria; her gifts from the King, delivered in a crimson velvet coffer, included a fan encrusted in diamonds. The Dauphin, for his part, appeared sulky. The Archbishop of Rheims was on hand to bless the marriage bed, into which the Dauphin was handed, as custom dictated, by the King. When, some time later, Paris celebrated the royal marriage, the day was marked by disaster: trenches, left by workmen, blocked the exits from the Place Louis XV and as the crowds pressed forward to watch the fireworks, 132 people were crushed or smothered in the rue Royale.
Soon after Lucie’s 4th birthday, just over four years later, smallpox took the life of Louis XV, and Marie Antoinette’s portly, serious, 20-year-old husband mounted the throne as Louis XVI, determined to be a virtuous ruler, responsive to the interests of his people. Appointing Jacques Turgot as his first Controller General, the new King declared: ‘I wish to be loved.’
In the 1770s Paris was noisy, smelly and the largest city in Europe after London. The narrow streets of the Marais were medieval stews of fetid, slippery filth. Vast crowds thronged damp, dark lanes down which, along central gutters, ran pungent rivers of rainwater and sewage, the mud so acid that it rotted anything it touched. Saltpetre caused the walls to ooze and form crusts. An appalling stench surrounded the tanners’ workshops and the slaughterhouses where butchers carved up the carcasses in the open, leaving grease, blood and entrails, while live animals, mainly cows and pigs, wandered at will. There were no pavements, no numbers on the houses and very little street lighting. To advertise their wares, shops hung out wooden or even stone signs, which swung dangerously in the wind. Louis-Sebastien Mercier, devoted and tetchy chronicler of 18th-century Parisian life, remarked on a glove hanging outside a glove-maker’s which was the size of a 3-year-old child. In their window boxes, dangling high above the streets, people grew flowers and herbs; and in their courtyards, they kept rabbits and chickens.
There was a constant wail of sound, as town criers shouted and merchants pushed through the people carrying produce brought in from the country; and among all this chaos sped carts and carriages causing frequent accidents. Typhus, typhoid and smallpox were rife. Bicêtre, the lunatic asylum and prison, was crammed with people who were
simply poor or very old, as well as epileptics, cripples, the mad and those with venereal diseases. The year that Lucie was born, over 6,000 babies, lice-ridden, stinking of urine, bundled into filthy rags, were abandoned in doorways and church porches, the more fortunate left at l’Hôpital des Enfants Trouvés in the shadow of Notre-Dame. Very few of them reached their first birthday. Unwanted children in the provinces were often sent to l’Hôpital in Paris, strapped on to a man’s back in a lined box with room for three babies, occasionally fed from a sponge soaked in wine or milk. On arrival, it was usual to find at least one dead.
Much of the life of the capital revolved around the Seine, which flowed through the centre in a south-westerly curve, and down which, from before daylight, came thousands of boats and barges bringing wood, flour, vegetables, wine and building materials to docks along the banks. Just as artisans were ruled over by guilds, so every movement of the river was regulated and taxed; oil, soap, coffee, herrings and blocks of marble from Dieppe and Holland were delivered to one place, wood to another. Fresh flowers were to be found on the Quai de la Mégisserie; wigs at the Quai de l’Horloge. On the bank by the Châtelet, six families had the concession to cook and sell tripe.
The Seine brought people too, passengers arriving by coches d’eau, water carriages run by the Diligences et Messageries. Smaller skiffs ferried people across from one bank to the other. Some of these passengers, like the wet-nurses who fed most of the children born in the city, were allowed to travel at reduced rates. Anchored here and there were barges where people could take baths, doing business between spring and late summer. It was forbidden to bathe in the open river in hours of daylight, and there were endless quarrels between those competing for the river, and fines for those who broke the rules.
Dancing to the Precipice Page 2
