Three hours later a rather solemn man, who introduced himself as the President of the Dôle commune, appeared. After much discussion, Lucie’s cook was despatched to Paris to fetch letters to authenticate their story, and the three women were sent to sleep in a nearby house. Next morning, they were subjected to hostile questioning, one man asking Lucie why she needed quite so many shoes for a 6-week stay in Switzerland. The rumour in Dôle was that Mme d’Hénin was the Queen and Lucie her sister-in-law. It was now that Lucie realised that some of the officers who had come to lunch on the day of the celebration at the Champs de Mars were probably stationed in the garrison near Dôle. They were fetched and quickly recognised her and an embarrassed President bowed them on their way, but not before the young officers had terrified her with their professions of loyalty towards the ancien régime, and much flowery language. The party crossed the border and reached Nyon late that night; Lucie woke with delight next morning to see the lake of Geneva sparkling in the dawn light. It was her first visit to a foreign country.
The first French émigrés, dusty, exhausted and weighed down by luggage, had arrived in Switzerland soon after the fall of the Bastille. By the summer of 1790, many of the hotels along the lake of Geneva were full to overflowing with unhappy marquises, counts and senior prelates. Switzerland, being neutral, was attractive, even if each of the 13 cantons had somewhat different reactions to the revolution in France; the Catholic cantons of Fribourg and Soleure were the most welcoming to the nobility and to the nuns and monks forced out of their monasteries. Mme de Staël’s father, M. Necker, departing the French court for the third and last time, had bought a property at Coppet, a two-storey manor house overlooking the lake, with vineyards and orchards. Mme de Staël herself loved the property but complained that life in Switzerland was narrow and puritanical and that there was something hypocritical about the Swiss, saying that their love of equality was ‘no more than a wish to bring everyone down’.
Lucie spent the first fortnight in Lausanne. She was introduced to Gibbon, a frequent resident of the large English community, and found his appearance ‘so grotesque that it was difficult not to laugh’. Gibbon, whose last volume of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire had appeared not long before, was suffering from a chronic and disfiguring inflammation of the testicles, all too visible in an age of tight clothes. Lally-Tollendal was also in poor shape: he had not only caught smallpox–from which he recovered–but had been forced by the imperious Mme d’Hénin to marry his former mistress, a Miss Halkett, niece to Lord Loughborough, by whom he had a daughter. It was a marriage in name only, for Mme d’Hénin had no intention of parting with him.
In the 18th century, the French aristocracy travelled very little, preferring to stay in surroundings and company they found congenial and considered superior to anything they might find abroad. Growing up in a sheltered world, where position and manners were so carefully prescribed, many were finding exile trying. Some rose to the challenge, and as their money started to run out, turned their hand to giving lessons or making hats. In Lausanne, the Vicomtesse de Montmorency-Laval was embroidering waistcoats, while her son Mathieu, a fervent royalist and friend of Frédéric’s, farmed. Forced to give up her carriages and footmen, the Princesse de Conti ordered a pair of stout walking shoes and could be seen striding in the countryside, evidently enjoying a lack of formality denied her by the pretentiousness of the ancien régime. Some of these exiles ventured as far as Chamonix, which by the 1780s had become a fashionable resort for climbers.
But among the émigrés, as Lucie soon noted with disgust, there were many who struggled to hold on to the world they knew, complained of their small lodgings and frugal food, and behaved with disdain towards their Swiss hosts, mocking the simplicity of their ways. ‘They all brought,’ she wrote, ‘the airs and insolence of Paris society…and were everlastingly amazed that there should exist in the world anything besides themselves and their ways.’ In the summer of 1790, the inn at Sécheron became a haven for these ungrateful exiles, and their arrogance and ignorance drove Lucie away to share a house with Pulchérie de Valance and her children at Paquis, near Geneva. As the celebrated novelist Isabelle de Charrière, who had a salon to which she invited the émigrés, remarked: ‘These French are unbelievable…They are spoiling their cause wherever they go, they destroy all sense of pity for them…You can see that the French nobility is nothing but wind, that it isn’t worth a thing, that its day is past and it is already being forgotten.’ Lucie, observing the insularity and self-absorption of her compatriots, worried that she herself might come across as equally ridiculous. ‘I cannot be certain,’ she wrote, ‘that I did not sometimes fall into these same errors.’ She was after all, as she noted many years later, of their class and their world, and these were the manners she had grown up with. But Lucie, though never as clever as Mme de Staël, was shrewd, practical, generous-spirited and far better educated than most of them. More important, perhaps, she was full of curiosity and eager to learn; and she never took herself too seriously.
Soon after reaching Switzerland, Lucie received a letter from Frédéric saying that he was being sent by his father to Nancy, with orders for the Marquis de Bouillé, commander-in-chief in Lorraine and Alsace and a veteran of the American wars, to quell a local mutiny of three regiments. By 1790, sporadic mutinies were flaring up throughout France’s army, which like other institutions was riddled with anomalies and ancient privileges. Though the troops were frequently well trained and well led, their officers were still all of noble birth, and most of the appointments were bought. Morale was low and army discipline savage.
At Nancy a group of soldiers, vowing to throw off the tyranny of their officers, had barricaded themselves into their garrison, having first seized the regimental funds, and taken hostage the commandant of the town, M. de Malseigne. A cavalry regiment had then gone over to the rebels. M. de la Tour du Pin’s orders to M. de Bouillé, to be transmitted by Frédéric, were to put down the mutiny with utmost severity, but only if certain of victory, because the men were ‘in a mood for insurrection’. An example, he and Lafayette agreed, had to be made.
On reaching M. de Bouillé’s headquarters, Frédéric was sent into Nancy to negotiate with the rebels. He found M. de Malseigne safe, but the mutineers adamant that they would not capitulate without guarantees of reform. Frédéric refused to make any such promise. He returned to M. de Bouillé and a decision was taken to march on the town, despite fears that M. de Malseigne would pay for the attack with his life. Before they left, however, M. de Malseigne appeared, exhausted and wet, having managed to slip away from his guards and reach a river, pursued by the rebels, across which he forced his horse to swim. Next morning, M. de Bouillé ordered the attack.
As Frédéric and his men neared Nancy, they saw a young officer on the rebel side ordering his men not to fire, and indicating that he wished to talk. Frédéric ordered his own men to hold their fire and then rode ahead to meet him. But as he neared the city gates, soldiers in the town lit the fuse of a cannon loaded with grapeshot. Frédéric’s horse was hit. Behind him, many of his men were killed. While Frédéric’s soldiers forced their way forwards, entered the town and overpowered the mutineers, his servant discovered him lying bruised and shaken among the dead bodies and carried him away to safety. M. Désilles, the courageous young officer who had tried to prevent the fighting, was badly wounded by shots fired by his own men.
Among the rebels were men from a Swiss regiment, which had retained the privilege of trying its own soldiers. There was a court martial, after which 27 men were executed. The two mutinying French regiments were disbanded and their troops sent to other units; a considerable number were either shot or sent to penal servitude. Frédéric, who soon recovered, was despatched to Paris with news of the assault on Nancy. Arriving at the Ministry of War in his dirty uniform, he was taken straight to the King, who for once agreed to overlook the etiquette that demanded that no military uniforms be worn at court.
&nb
sp; A mutiny had indeed been successfully crushed, but it would have repercussions, many of them adding to the chaos into which France was sliding. And it would have repercussions for Frédéric too, now marked as an enemy of the ordinary soldier. A number of reforms were indeed immediately instigated–cruel punishments and press-ganging were abolished, along with venal posts, and officers were to be selected henceforth on the basis of merit rather than lineage–but something about the bloodshed at Nancy, and the fact that it had been until that moment a garrison of model discipline, was not forgotten. Officers from across the entire French army began to emigrate, crossing the borders to join the Princes at Koblenz: in the next 18 months, the army would lose a third of its officer class in resignations or emigration. And many ordinary soldiers, lured by better pay and greater freedom, drifted away from their regiments to join the Garde Nationale, in whose clubs they heard much talk about the perfidy of the nobility. Soon France possessed a whole parallel army, over which M. de la Tour du Pin, as Minister for War ostensibly in charge, had no control. ‘The army,’ he warned, ‘risks falling into the most turbulent anarchy…Today, the soldier has neither judges nor laws: we need to give him back both.’
What Lucie did not know, and Mme d’Hénin did not tell her, was that the first news of the defeat of the mutiny at Nancy to reach Geneva contained a rumour that Frédéric had been killed. She learnt the full details of his escape only in a letter that reached her after he had recovered. His death would have been such a profound blow that she could not bear to dwell on the thought of it. In early October, he arrived in person to collect her. But he was anxious not to spend too long away from his father, whose problems at the Ministry of War were becoming more acute every day. They travelled back by way of Alsace, where Frédéric had a brief meeting with M. de Bouillé on the road near Neuf Brisach, the two men pacing up and down as they talked, while Lucie waited in the carriage. M. de Bouillé had sent Frédéric a horse, ‘which I hope you will keep for affection of me’, to replace the one shot under him at Nancy. As they drove on through Nancy their carriage passed below the windows of the room in which M. Désilles, the brave young officer, lay dying, a sentinel posted at the door to prevent passers-by from making too much noise. They reached Paris to find Humbert in excellent health and ‘much improved in looks’, lovingly watched over by Marguerite with what Lucie called ‘incomparable, unfailing care’.
Lucie, returning to the Hôtel de Choiseul, resumed her life of dinners, rides, musical soirées at the Hotel de Rochechouart, and visits with Frédéric to Mme de Staël’s salon where she endured, rather than enjoyed, the hours of her forceful hostess’s ‘masculine attitude and powerful conversation’. The abolition of noble titles had done little to curb the sense of privilege in many of the older families, and Lucie found herself acting as chaperone to the young Nathalie de Noailles, whose mother, Mme de Laborde, though pleasingly rich, was not considered sufficiently well bred to take her daughter into society. Nathalie’s father-in-law was the Prince de Poix, in whose house Lucie had lived at Versailles, and she looked on Nathalie as a younger sister; the two girls often went out in matching dresses and with similarly dressed hair. Looking back on this friendship many years later, Lucie remarked complacently that she had never ‘suffered from that smallness of mind which made some women jealous of the success of other young women’.
More surprising, perhaps, was how unreflective Lucie appeared to be of the revolution gathering pace around her. Even as the army was losing all its officers, as the Assembly was turning steadily more hostile towards the aristocracy and senior prelates, as friends and relations were frantically packing to leave France–all things she witnessed every day and heard about at length from Frédéric, from her father-in-law and from Arthur–Lucie continued to pay visits and to enjoy herself. If her refusal to acknowledge what was happened seems wilful, it has to be remembered that she was just 20, that she had a small baby, that she had finally escaped her terrible grandmother and that she was very much in love with her husband. She was happy.
In the winter of 1790, Paris was busier, more frenetic, than it had ever been. Leaving Versailles deserted, the several thousand courtiers and ministers, together with their relations and servants, in all some 60,000 people depending for their livelihood on the court, had followed the royal family back to the capital and were established in mansions in the faubourgs of Saint-Germain and Saint-Honoré, where their carriages added further chaos to the crowded narrow streets. Even the now daily departures of frightened noble families, for whom, noted Lucie, ‘to emigrate was a point of honour’, did little to diminish the bustle of the city.
In the Tuileries, the elaborate ritual of the lever and the coucher remained unchanged, the royal family dined in public on Thursdays and Sundays and the 5-year-old Dauphin, using a special small hoe and rake, gardened in a little railed-off corner of the park, guarded by two grenadiers. Though not in formal attendance at court, Lucie occasionally joined the diminishing throng of courtiers in the gloomy galleries of the Tuileries. In the Tuileries gardens, aristocratic women in the latest fashions strolled and gossiped, while at the same moment a crowd in the nearby Palais-Royal listened to a speaker haranguing against ‘the perfidy of the court, the arrogance of the nobles and the cupidity of the rich’. Visitors remarked on a new air of pride and independence in ordinary men and women, who seemed to walk and stand differently.
Even the salons, where Lucie spent her evenings, were changing. Gone were Suzanne Necker’s polite disquisitions on the nature of piety, or Mme du Deffand’s play of words on platonic love. In their place had come gatherings of furious debate and partisanship, where the talk was all of the new Constitution, of how far liberty could be allowed to govern the workings of a modern state. The salons had lost their lightness, the Goncourt brothers would later write; they were no longer schools for manners and gallantry, but political debating societies. Manon Philipon, passionate admirer of Rousseau and married to Roland de la Platière, former inspector general of manufactures for Picardy, held a salon for the rising Jacobin stars; Mme de Staël, back in the rue du Bac, drew the liberal royalists; while Josephine de Beaumarchais, the Creole wife of a member of the lower nobility and related to Lucie through her new stepmother, gathered the centrists, in what would later be called a ‘nest for the Assembly’.
In the house of the romantic novelist Adelaïde de Flahaut, Talleyrand, father of her son, held sway and here guests debated the political nuances of events that seemed to come fast one upon another. Talleyrand, noted Gouverneur Morris, was referred to as the ‘monstre mitré’, the mitred monster. Morris himself was having an affair with Mme de Flahaut, and recorded in his diary that she was an ‘elegant woman and a snug Party’. One of the few remaining Americans in Paris, Morris was enjoying himself. He found the city to be ‘in a sort of Whirlwind which turns [one] round so fast that one can see nothing…as all Men and Things are in the same vertiginous Situation, you can neither fix yourself nor your Object for regular examination’. The Parisians, he added, were good, but the background was ‘deeply and darkly shaded’.
The cafés, too, of which, according to Mercier there were now over 600 and more opening all the time, had taken on different political hues. In the Café Turc, on the rue Charlot, men of the centre played billiards, draughts, chess and tric-trac. The Jacobins met in the rue de Turnon, while in the Taverne Anglaise in the arcades of the Palais-Royal, surrounded by Chinese wallpapers and lanterns, entrepreneurs and soldiers discussed finance and political stability over cutlets, sweetbread and fricassees of chicken. Zoppi’s was where Danton and Marat drank punch. Street life, too, had changed. Reformers, looking to nature as a source of freedom and to natural laws as the way to restore it, had succeeded in getting public animal fights banned. Posters all over the city showed birds bursting out of cages. Festivals and street theatre were to be about peace, not ferocity. In caricatures, the nobility was portrayed in the shape of carnivores; in one picture, the King appeared as a voraciou
s pig-like animal, timid and very fat, who spent his days drinking.
Nor had fashion ever been so full of meaning. Always a mirror to French life, it now provided subtle indications of political allegiances. A tricolour cockade, worn in the buttonhole or pinned to a hat, was mandatory, but a red-and-black pierrot jacket with white feathers indicated that you supported the ‘non-juror’ clergy, while plain déshabillé, with white fichu and bonnet, were signs of democratic leanings. A military look was also in fashion; as the Magasin des Modes Nouvelles observed: ‘We have all become soldiers now.’ Plates, cups, posters, even prints from the toile-de-Jouy factory, all bore scenes of social commentary, one of the favourites being the fall of the Bastille. The ‘bizarre and enchanting’ spirit of Louis XV, with its soft and sentimental contours, had given way entirely to a taste for purity and antiquity, lines that were rigid, straight, ‘inexorable’ and ‘unfriendly’. All shades of pink, citrus yellow and maroon had disappeared: everything was now red, green or dark brown, which was known as Etruscan. Beds were ‘patriotique’ or ‘à la Fédération’. The bolder ci-devant nobles painted clouds over the coats of arms on their carriages, to suggest a mist temporarily obscuring their glory, and dressed their servants in outrageous costumes, since liveries were forbidden. When she went out visiting now, Lucie dressed more simply and used a plain, unadorned carriage.
Paris in the winter of 1790 was still full of the English, residents who had stayed on, travellers, seamstresses, grooms, soldiers of fortune who had served with the French. The new fashions, and the debates in the Assembly, were noted and reported back to London where Edmund Burke’s Reflections on the French Revolution had been published in November. It caused a great stir. The fall of the Bastille had been greeted initially with enthusiasm, the British Ambassador to Paris, the Duke of Dorset, writing in a glowing despatch about the ‘greatest revolution that we know anything of’ while Wordsworth composed his memorable lines: ‘Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive / But to be young was very heaven’.
Dancing to the Precipice Page 16
