Dancing to the Precipice

by Caroline Moorehead

  But this was only one part of the capital, the part lived in by the poor. To the west, Paris was an enormous garden, dotted with magnificent houses and thickly covered in trees. Approaching the city in 1767 along the tree-lined road from Versailles, Benjamin Franklin marvelled at Paris’s ‘prodigious mixture of magnificence and negligence’, and at the blinding pearly splendour of the steeples bathed in hazy light. The flour windmills on the hills of Montmartre reminded him of a majestic family of eagles taking flight. Franklin was not the only late 18th-century traveller to remark on the perfectly manicured paths of the Tuileries leading to the Louvre, nor on the size and majesty of the new Place Louis XV with Edmé Bouchardon’s fine equestrian statue of the king. Others, coming from England, Germany or Italy, were overwhelmed by the grandeur in which the French nobility lived–though disapproving of the dirt–and by the opulence of the gold, silver and velvet liveries worn by their servants.

  The Parisian garden was a world of perfection, of art and nature shaped into an oasis of delight, in which fountains trickled and caged birds sang. In the Faubourg Saint-Germain visitors stopped in the cafés which served coffee–introduced to Louis XIV by the Sultan Mahommet–to sit at marble-topped tables, read newspapers and observe the ladies who ordered their coachmen to pause while they sent a servant in to collect a cup. For Lucie’s English relations, who often crossed the Channel to visit the Dillons, Paris, with its ebullient public street life, its street vendors selling sorbets, fruits glacés and fresh raspberries, was a source of endless entertainment and wonder. When, not long after Lucie’s birth, an animal with the head of a leopard, large shining eyes, the teeth of a lion, long moustaches and feet webbed like those of a goose was captured in the Straits of Magellan and brought to France, it was the first seal ever seen in Paris and it caused a sensation.

  During the Orléans Regency and the long reign of Louis XV, very little had been done to change the face of Paris. But by 1770 the city’s economy, stagnant during the Seven Years War, had revived and Paris itself was in what Mercier called a ‘fureur de bâtir’, a fury of building. Streets were being straightened, new squares built, the old wooden houses on the bridges over the Seine demolished. Pavements were being created, to lift pedestrians out of the mud. Windows were enlarged and given glass panes. The dark, dank, medieval streets were to be opened up to the light, illuminated, made cleaner. Religious orders, exorbitantly rich in property and land, perceiving the steep rise in land prices, were negotiating sales of some of their extensive grounds.

  To fill and decorate their new hôtels particuliers in the up-and-coming Chaussée d’Antin, in the Faubourg Saint-Honoré and along the Champs-Elysées, with their intimate, ornate interiors and their Boucher ceilings of amorous shepherds, the nobility and the rich financiers needed furniture, hangings and portraits. They found their pictures in the biannual exhibitions mounted in the Salon Carré of the Louvre, densely hung from eye level to ceiling with Chardin’s still lives and interiors, Greuze’s moral tales and the new high-minded scenes of classical antiquity, inspired by recent archaeological finds at Herculaneum and in Greece and Asia Minor. The first griffins and sphinxes, returning with travellers from Baalbek and Palmyra, made their appearance not long before Lucie’s birth. On panels in the new drawing rooms and libraries, Bacchus and Ceres cavorted among fawns. It was a time for collecting: shells, thimbles, lacquer boxes, telescopes, flowers–real, painted, artificial, embroidered, woven–stools, screens, porcelain from China, tiles from Delft, cups from Sèvres. Never before or since, it would be said, was so much effort expended on dress, fashion, luxury and comfort.

  Architects now looked to Palladio for façades that would follow classical proportions. Rococo, the last swan song of the baroque, was fast falling from favour. The rich wanted their buildings majestic, but they also wanted them pleasing to the eye, ornamented with medallions and arabesques, with lyres, ribbons and roses, with painted wallpapers showing pastoral scenes. Whether in painting, statuary or stucco, there were to be allegories of nature, childhood and love, embracing the art of living and of happiness. ‘A young gentleman,’ observed Voltaire, ‘is fortunately neither a painter, nor a musician, nor an architect, nor a sculptor, but he causes these arts to flower with his magnificence.’ Salons were to be square if the intention was to hold serious conversation, oval if the purpose was voluptuous. Bedrooms were to be green, the colour of rest. Louis XIII’s stiff high-backed chairs had long since given way to rounded sofas, ottomans, Turkish carpets and cushions. Unseen hands fed stoves through openings in other rooms. Skilled masons were summoned from the Limousin, carpenters from Normandy, armies of plasterers, roofers and joiners, who left trails of white footprints along the roads.

  Nor was sculpture limited to buildings. Lucie’s first sight of a formal dinner was of liveried servants bearing vast platters of sculpted food. By the 1770s master pastry cooks were vying with architects to construct miniature landscapes down the centre of dining tables, rococo scenes spun in coloured sugar, biscuit dough, wax and silk, amplified by artfully placed mirrors. People talked of food and cooking as a kind of chemistry, in which ever more arcane ingredients were blended into imaginative combinations. Larks, bunting, teal, herons and egrets appeared on menus, but peacock had been replaced by turkey as the preferred roast for banquets. One of the first lexicons of French food, the Dictionnaire portatif de la cuisine, published three years before Lucie’s birth, listed 40 ways to prepare a bird. The potato was regarded as suitable only for pigs. There was a growing demand for freshness, for meat and game served pink and roasted, browned with dotted pieces of fat which burnt crisply. Food was glorious, elaborate, absurd: when the Prince de Ligne wanted to send a gift to the Prince de Conti, he sent him a beautiful young girl, buried under mounds of pigs’ heads, with cheese from the Hainaut, capons from Campire, rabbits from Os, oysters from Ostend and shrimps from Antwerp.

  Mercier left a picture of the typical Paris day, in the years just before the revolution. At one in the morning, came 6,000 peasants, bringing food and vegetables to Les Halles, the largest of the capital’s many markets; at six, came the bakers, bringing fresh bread; at seven, gardeners, going to their plots; at nine, wig-makers, carrying freshly powdered wigs to clients; at ten, lawyers and plaintiffs on the way to their court cases at the Châtelet; at two, those dining in town, be-wigged, powdered, walking on the tips of their toes to keep the hems of their clothes clean. From five in the afternoon, chaos and confusion, as the aristocracy set out on their social rounds; at midnight, the sound of carriages and horses, carrying the revellers home.

  It was a world, for a rich, pretty child of the nobility, heiress to a great fortune, of fêtes champêtres, of ceilings covered in nymphs at play, of picnics in the shade of fake ruined Roman temples, of blind man’s buff played by men in tall silvery wigs, of black servant boys in turbans laying out food on white tablecloths. But for Lucie, who had all this and more, her first years were lonely and confusing.

  Her father, Arthur, who loved her, was often away with his regiment. Her mother, Thérèse-Lucy, whom Lucie would always remember as ‘beautiful and sweet-tempered as an angel’, was completely in the power of Mme de Rothe. Married at 17 to a boy only a year older than herself, whom she had known and played with as a child and for whom she felt only sisterly affection, Thérèse-Lucy was far too afraid to ask for anything for herself, her husband or her daughter. On the very rare occasions when Thérèse-Lucy summoned up the courage to talk about money, Mme de Rothe ‘flew into a passion and maternal affection gave way to one of those incredible hatreds so beloved of writers of romances and tragedies’.

  How Lucie’s grandmother came by her grim character is nowhere revealed; she remained a strangely one-dimensional figure in Lucie’s memoirs. But it cannot have been easy for her, even in such licentious times, to carry off a liaison so at odds with Church and society. Archbishop Dillon was, after all, a leading figure in the French Catholic Church, and the court, often forgiving towards men who
transgressed, could be merciless towards women. Whatever the reason, Mme de Rothe’s dark nature seems to have cast an unremittingly bleak light over Lucie’s childhood; never, in anything she wrote later, would she recall a moment of tenderness or affection. Duty, obligation, occasionally; but never, towards her or towards anyone else, love.

  Lucie herself, an only child in a house at war, in which both her mother and her grandmother wished to use her as their spy, was aware, even when very young, of the powerlessness of her frail mother and the strength of her malicious grandmother, who, when crossed, would beat and lock up the small girl for the most minor misdeeds. ‘The continual warring in the house,’ Lucie would write, ‘meant that I was perpetually on the defensive…If my mother wanted me to do something, my grandmother would forbid it. I was silent, and therefore accused of being surly and taciturn. I became the butt for the moods of all and sundry.’ Caught between her somewhat frivolous and weak mother and her angry grandmother, Lucie, while pretending to play with her doll or read her books, observed and remembered. ‘I acquired the habit of hiding my feelings and judging for myself the actions of my parents.’ To escape, she took refuge in fantasy, as many small children do, imagining another world, inventing changes of fortune where her own resourcefulness would bring her freedom and happiness. Already, at an age when more fortunate children begin to comprehend the love that binds families together, Lucie was learning about duplicity, guile and power. Later, she would write that her first thoughts were all connected with this hatred, and that ‘reserve and discretion’ became her earliest and most useful weapons.

  Forty years later, recalling her years in her grandmother’s house, Lucie would write: ‘I had no real childhood.’

  Number 91 rue du Bac was a restless, uneasy house, but it was also an extremely cultivated one. In Lucie’s grandmother’s drawing room, and among her father’s friends, there was constant talk of natural history, of exploration and of the possibilities offered by scientific enquiry. The house contained a large library, exceptionally well stocked for the period, and by the age of 7 Lucie was reading ‘voraciously and indiscriminately’. A tutor was found to teach her the harpsichord, a young organist from Béziers called M. Combes, who, discovering his pupil to be full of curiosity, tried to share some of his other studies with her. Lucie was fortunate in that she was born not simply at the moment when the Encyclopédistes were completing their monumental reordering of human knowledge, but into a family with roots and connections among philosophers and writers. Lucie was exposed, not only to the works of the great Encyclopédistes, but to those of their number still alive in the 1770s–men such as Voltaire, Rousseau and Condorcet–who were all visitors to the salons frequented by Arthur and Thérèse-Lucy. It was these ideas, enormously exciting and often very daring in Paris just before the revolution, that provided Lucie with her first taste of knowledge. M. Combes would later say that he was sometimes forced to slow down her studies in order that she should not overtake him. Curiosity and loneliness became Lucie’s spurs towards a world of the mind.

  Ever since Aristotle, philosophers had been arranging and re arranging the map of mental knowledge. The origins of the remarkable intellectual experience that became known as the Enlightenment lay neither in the 18th century nor in France; but in the Paris of Louis XV. The quest to sort out and clarify phenomena, to open man up to scientific scrutiny, took a particular form, shaped by men such as Diderot and Montesquieu and promoted and even paid for by the women who, for well over a century, perfected the art of the French salon. Neither Mme de Rothe nor Thérèse-Lucy held a salon of their own, but their friends and relations did, and what they discussed there was much talked about in the rue du Bac.

  The Encyclopédie, published in 17 volumes between 1751 and 1772, was the work of 150 known and dozens of unknown contributors, who, under the driving spirit of Denis Diderot, set out to draw up a systematic account of the ‘order and concatenation of human knowledge’. It was to be, said one of its founders, Jean d’Alembert, a ‘kind of world map’ showing not only the principal countries of the mind, but the roads leading between them, a ‘history of the human spirit, not of men’s vanity’. He saw it as a Lockean version of Bacon’s tree of knowledge, starting from the premise that we can know nothing beyond what comes to us from sensation and reflection, and that, as sentient, cogent beings, we have no choice but to sweep away the cobwebs of superstition and darkness.

  Knowledge, said Diderot, was power; by charting its contours, the Encyclopédistes thought that they might conquer the world. No longer would the universe be a mystery, but a machine that could be taken to bits, examined, altered and improved. Even death, with its ritual of confession, resignation and absolution, was no longer to be feared, but accepted as a natural and gradual process. The frontispiece to the first volume showed Reason pulling a veil from the eyes of Truth, while grey clouds behind it drifted away. Hardly surprising, then, that the Encyclopédistes found themselves increasingly unpopular with the Church and the court, or that Diderot spent some time in prison for an essay on heresy.* Or that Lucie, an only child in a house full of adults, permitted to sit silently in her grandmother’s drawing room, was intrigued by what she heard.

  To delineate this new order of knowledge and draw fresh lines between the known and the unknown, d’Alembert, himself a mathematician, commissioned entries on astronomy, architecture, food, the arts, mathematics, literature, the occult, love, mechanics, optics, and these were available to Lucie as she grew up. ‘I was,’ she would write, ‘remarkably eager to learn. I wanted to know about everything, from cooking to experiments in chemistry.’ Appetite for the printed word was rising year by year. The timing for the Encyclopédie had been good: though the sources of many of the great rivers remained mysterious, the surface of the oceans was being explored and mapped, while exotic new species of plants and animals were being brought back from the colonies. Even so, it was inconceivable that any other part of the world would match Europe: ‘All Asia is buried in the most profound darkness,’ observed the Comte de Volney. ‘The Chinese…offer to my view an abortive civilisation and a race of automatons…The Indian vegetates in an incurable apathy. The Tartar…lives in the barbarity of his ancestors.’

  Among the most celebrated of the philosophers was Voltaire, whose ideas on personal and religious freedom and material progress had been refined during a visit to England in the 1720s. What Voltaire called for, before retiring to his house at Ferney on the Swiss border, was a representative government, a spirit of tolerance and material happiness, even, if need be, luxury, providing it was of the right kind, ‘polite’ and not ‘frivolous or lazy’.

  In these views, he was opposed by another of the great figures of the Enlightenment years, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, who argued that, on the contrary, man, in becoming modern, had lost his innocence and health and was now miserable: born free, he wrote in his widely quoted Social Contract, which appeared in 1762, man was now ‘everywhere in chains’. The material prosperity born of progress had served only to corrupt his pristine purity. In the years immediately before Lucie’s birth, Rousseau published two of the 18th century’s best-selling novels, Émile and La Nouvelle Héloïse, in which he called for readers to abandon the false lures of society and retire to nature and solitude, there to ponder the unmediated word of God. In Rousseau’s novels, lovers teach each other to love, and to read so deeply that literature is absorbed into life.

  Both Voltaire and Rousseau feared for France’s future. In 1764, Voltaire wrote that he regretted that he would not be alive to witness a ‘revolution that cannot fail to happen’. Rousseau, for his part, believed that it was not only the French monarchy, but the royal families of all Europe who did not have much time left on their thrones. ‘They have all shone brightly, and every state that shines so brightly is on its path to decline…We are approaching a moment of crisis and a century of revolutions.’ But that was in the 1760s, and neither Versailles nor the court was listening, though the message did not go
unheard in the Faubourg Saint-Germain, where the Dillons were not the only family drawn to the heady world of new freedoms.

  The Enlightenment, as it unfolded, touched most of educated Europe, but in France, and particularly in Paris, its direction was determined early by a succession of highly intelligent, imaginative, bold women who invited into their salons ‘honnêtes gens’, men of letters, scholars and socialites who were, like themselves, tolerant, reasonable, full of restraint and self-respect, hostile to the idea of a powerful and controlling Church and monarchy. The life of the Parisian salon had started in 1613 when Madame de Rambouillet opened her famous Blue Room to a collection of witty, erudite friends. And it had been carried on down the years, one hostess succeeding, and sometimes rivalling, another, handing down their guests as one died and another took over. It was into this world that Lucie was born and where she grew up, and it left an indelible print on her.

  In rooms that were themselves especially charming, intimate and conducive to conversation, her mother’s and her grandmother’s friends presided over talk that embraced gallantry but not love; morals but not religion; philosophy, literature and the sciences but neither domestic matters (too boring) nor politics (too dangerous). Over dinners habitués debated moral dilemmas, composed maxims and satirical verses, discussed free will, geometry, economics, and read aloud to each other from their new works. In the second volume of the Encyclopédie, published in 1752–and immediately viewed as subversive–conversation was described as a river of talk, flowing lightly, without affectation, moving from topic to topic, neither a game of chess nor a contest of arms. (Rousseau complained that this exquisite courtesy was nothing but a mask for sterility and sophistry.) For the philosophers of the Enlightenment and their friends, the salons were the one place where ideas of this kind could be aired in safety, where no questions were deemed too sensitive to debate, no thoughts too perilous to think. Many severed their links with their religious upbringings.