From early 1791, there had been secret plans on all sides–from Gouverneur Morris to Lucie’s father-in-law–to rescue the royal family and spirit them abroad, but the depressed and bewildered King continued to waver. In the evenings, in the rue de Varennes, Frédéric, Arthur and M. de la Tour du Pin talked urgently about what might be done to help them. An idea to take at least the Dauphin, who had recently been decreed as belonging to the nation rather than to his family, had been abandoned after the King and Queen announced that they did not want the family to be separated. Only after Easter did the King make up his mind.
Louis XVI had never reconciled himself to the Civil Constitution of the Clergy. In order to avoid taking communion from a ‘juror priest’, the royal family decided to spend Holy Week at Saint-Cloud, where it would be easier to smuggle in a non-juror. But their departure from the Tuileries, misconstrued by the people as an attempt to flee the country, ended in insults and threats, and even Lafayette was unable to persuade the Gardes to allow their carriage to pass. Something of the horror and hatred of the day, the hour and a half spent trapped in a carriage while the crowd shouted abuse all around them, suggested that flight might now be the only course left.
Lucie, having sold her saddle-horses, had gone to join Cécile at Hénencourt. She had taken with her not only Humbert’s wet-nurse, but Zamore, her fashionable black manservant, one of the 400 or so black Africans working for noble families in Paris at the time of the revolution. One morning, Zamore appeared in her rooms in a state of agitation. Two strangers, he told her, had passed through Hénencourt with a story that the royal family had vanished from the Tuileries. Lucie, fearing that Frédéric had been involved and was now in great danger, sent Zamore to Paris for news. She waited, in a ‘state of indescribable anxiety’. ‘The days,’ she wrote, ‘seemed centuries long.’
It was not until the evening of the third day that Zamore returned, bringing with him a ‘long and desperate’ letter from Frédéric. In it, he described how at midnight on 20 June, a coach carrying the King, the Queen, the two children–the Dauphin dressed as a girl–Mme Elisabeth, and the children’s governess, driven by Axel von Fersen, Marie Antoinette’s supposed lover, and accompanied by a small number of outriders, had left Paris on a circuitous route to the border with the Austrian Netherlands, leaving behind an open letter full of bitterness and accusations; how, on discovering their flight, a furious mob had besieged the Tuileries; and how, through a succession of errors, misjudgements, faulty timing and simple bad luck, they had been recognised at the small village of Sainte-Ménehould by a zealous postmaster called Drouet, and returned, disgraced, exhausted and frightened, through dust and blistering heat, to virtual imprisonment in the Tuileries. As their carriage had trundled back into Paris, crowds lined the streets to watch; ordered to show respect, Parisians remained silent, but they did not take off their hats. Lucie, learning that one of the courtiers who had been with them had offered to take the Dauphin on his horse and gallop off to safety, but that the Queen had refused, observed: ‘Unhappy Princess, mistrustful even of the most faithful among her servants!’
The King’s brother and his wife, travelling by another route and in a faster carriage, had managed to get away; even Fersen had been able to reach the border. The entire flight, Lucie wrote, had been nothing but a succession of ‘blunders and imprudences’, starting with the amount of luggage the royal party had insisted on taking with them: chamber pots, a heater, a walnut travelling case, along with the King’s robes and his crown, all of which served to slow down the carriage to little more than walking pace. Even so, when caught, the royal family were just 40 miles from the border. Before hearing of their capture, Gouverneur Morris wrote to Tom Paine: ‘If the King escapes, it means war; if not, a republic.’
For the next two months, until the Constitution was finally drafted and ready for signature, the royal family lived mournfully as prisoners inside the Tuileries, their existence tolerated as necessary by the dwindling number of deputies who continued to favour the retention of a king and a court. Many others were now calling openly for a republic. Louis and Marie Antoinette were closely watched day and night, by men who no longer bothered to show them much deference. On the gates of the Tuileries, someone had put up a placard: ‘maison à louer’, house for rent. The sacrosanct mystique and inviolability of the monarchy had effectively disappeared, never to return. Barnave, the deputy despatched by the Assembly to escort the royal prisoners from Varennes to Paris, casually ate his meals with them, an act of lèse-majesté that had not been seen before. ‘People call him Louis the false or the Fat Pig,’ wrote Mme Roland. ‘It is impossible to envisage a being so totally despised on the throne.’
The Constitution, redefining citizenship and setting out the role of the monarchy and the election of a government to serve the people, was presented to the King early in September. Louis was to remain king, with limited powers: he would be allowed to veto new laws, and to choose new ministers, but little else. Frédéric drew up a long memorandum which he signed ‘M. de G’, urging him not to endorse it; but Louis did so. The memorandum, instead of being destroyed, went into an iron chest, together with other documents. Frédéric’s position, as an aristocrat loyal to the King in a country hastening towards republicanism, was becoming very dangerous.
At the beginning of October, Lucie, Frédéric, Humbert and various servants set out for Holland, leaving behind them uncertainty, intrigues and talk of counter-revolution. On 21 September, the National Convention had proclaimed France a republic and abolished the monarchy. ‘To aggravate the horrors of this place,’ wrote William Augustin Miles, a pamphleteer and friend of Pitt, ‘every maniac almost is an assassin either in thought or deed.’ Cécile, Frédéric’s sister, who was ill and coughing constantly, went with them, taking her sons and their tutor, finding the thought of a lonely winter at Hénencourt unbearable. Augustin, who had left the army in March and had ceased to call himself a marquis, stayed behind to put together a local militia.
CHAPTER SEVEN
Standing on a Vast Volcano
Lucie would remember her year in Holland as the last heedless moment of her life. Later, she would wonder at her own frivolity and insouciance; but in the autumn of 1791, a determined young woman with a small healthy son and a husband she loved, accompanied by Marguerite and Zamore and her former tutor M. Combes, who had returned from America and was now secretary to Frédéric, she set out to enjoy life as the wife of a French ambassador. She was 21; she had a large wardrobe of Parisian dresses and good jewellery; and wherever she went, she was looked on with admiration.
Frédéric, for his part, was turning into a highly competent administrator, though somewhat outspoken. When doubts had been raised in the Assembly about appointing known monarchists to the diplomatic service, M. de Montmorin, the Foreign Minister, had pointed out that, given the royalist feelings at the courts of Europe, this was not the moment to send ‘people who have declared themselves in favour of revolution’. Frédéric’s political credentials, liberal yet aristocratic, were precisely what were needed. Even so, Mme de Staël, who, estranged from her husband was now mistress to the Comte de Narbonne and working hard behind the scenes for her friends, advised Frédéric to ‘study closely the men you meet and try rather to fascinate them with their own ideas rather than with yours’. He would do well, she said, to lie low, for the word around Paris was that he was ‘not very Constitutional’, and too close to the King. Try to write despatches ‘that sound very patriotic’, she added: to do otherwise had become foolish.
Frédéric’s position at The Hague was not an easy one. He had never been a diplomat and France’s relations with Holland were tense. After years of struggle between the French and the English for supremacy in Holland, with fortunes spent on spies and secret diplomacy, William V, Prince of Orange, a cautious, irresolute man with protruding eyes and bulging cheeks, had only recently agreed to recognise the new United States. At heart, he remained firmly in favour of the English
. There were two main parties, the ruling House of Orange, of which William was ‘stadtholder’–the chief executive and military commander–and the Patriots party, younger, more liberal and more open to France. Dutch citizens who supported William wore orange ribbons, whether as cockades in their hats or their buttonholes, or pinned to their dresses, a custom followed by Frédéric’s predecessor, a timorous diplomat called M. Caillard. Caillard, noted Lucie scornfully, was ‘prudent to the point of timidity’ and had kept his post ‘only by sending despatches exaggerating the difficulties’.
Frédéric, on the other hand, was already showing signs of the diplomatic stubbornness which would later mark many of his decisions. Though titles and liveries had been abolished in France, French diplomats abroad were allowed to use the King’s livery. Frédéric ordered his household to leave off both orange ribbon and tricolour cockade; Lucie supported him, remarking tartly that it would be unseemly to clutter the Bourbon livery with the insignia of someone who was nothing other than the senior officer of a republic, even if he was of excellent family and had married a Royal Highness.
Their stand earned them a few clashes with angry crowds, but the Dutch people were soon more interested in Zamore and his elegant wardrobe. Frédéric now settled down to negotiate his way between the cross-currents of revolutionary fervour drifting across Europe, while Lucie became, as she wryly wrote later, ‘the acknowledged leader of all society gatherings’. Unlike Sir James Harris, former English Minister at The Hague, who had found the city unremittingly dull, its inhabitants interested only in cards and food, Lucie was in a mood for parties. ‘I was dazzled,’ she would say, ‘by my own success’, and, she added, ‘little realising how short a time it would endure’. She was also pregnant again.
By the spring of 1792, what had started as a trickle of frightened people trying to escape the uncertain temper of Paris was turning into a river even if Talleyrand, when consulted, would advise his friends to hide somewhere, stay quietly in their châteaux, rather than leave the country. The word ‘émigré’ was a creation of the French Revolution, Edward Gibbon, in 1791, remarking on the large numbers of ‘emigrants of both sexes…escaping…the public ruin’. What had become known as ‘l’émigration élégante’, the elegant émigrés, had crossed the Channel to England; ‘l’émigration pauvre’, the least well-off, had gone to Soleure and Fribourg in Switzerland. There were French dukes, marquises, counts and their retinues, as well as royalist soldiers and ‘non-juror’ clerics, in every state and country bordering on France, their numbers growing with each violent incident. More or less tolerated by their hosts, they led lives as similar as they could make them to their former existence at Versailles. Horses with which to leave Paris were, at times of particular turbulence, in such short supply that oxen were harnessed to carriages instead, to be seen creaking at little more than a crawl out of the city gates. Until March 1792, there was no need for a passport to leave.
Koblenz, meanwhile, standing on the confluence of the Rhine and the Moselle, had become the capital of the military emigration. It was here that the King’s brothers, the Comte d’Artois and the Comte de Provence, had set up their headquarters and were assembling an army, l’Armée des Princes, the Army of the Princes out of disillusioned, royalist soldiers. Six thousand men, half the French officer corps, had gone into exile after the royal family’s disastrous attempt at escape. The 24-year-old René de Chateaubriand, recently returned from America, observed that they were a motley bunch of ‘grown men, old men, children just out of their cots, speaking the jargon of Normandy, Brittany, Picardy, the Auvergne, Gascony, Provence, the Languedoc’, sometimes several generations of the same family.
Viewed with extreme misgivings in France, and the cause of constant rumours of imminent invasion and counter-revolution, these soldiers, when not engaged in military tasks, spent their days intriguing. Swinging between optimism and pessimism, their mood was constantly jostled by inflammatory pamphlets smuggled over the border from France, and by the comings and goings of spies, Jacobins, recruiters and people carrying letters. Their families, mourning the douceur de vivre they had left behind, were already beginning to appal their hosts with their arrogance and frivolity. ‘We dance and we enjoy ourselves,’ wrote the Duchesse de Saulx-Tavannes about the émigrés in Brussels. But Lucie, nearby in The Hague, heard stories from her friends that the Belgian noble families, known for their modesty and simplicity, were terrified lest they become contaminated by the profligacy of their visitors.
Among the recent arrivals in Koblenz were Mme de Rothe and Archbishop Dillon, who had fled from Hautefontaine as more and more ‘refractory’ priests were rounded up, and there were fears that he might be taken with them and imprisoned. Though never overly concerned with piety, the Archbishop had a stubborn and courageous streak. He did not intend, at any price, to renounce what he believed to be the true vows of the Catholic Church.
At The Hague, Frédéric, closely following local events, listening to the gossip and reading the papers, both clandestine and those published openly, was soon aware that the French émigré army in Koblenz was looking for horses and weapons. His reports to Paris, either written in his own hand, or dictated to M. Combes, some of them in a code of neat numbers, gave precise accounts of the success of these ventures. Frédéric’s tone was careful, but already he was filling his despatches with his own opinions, which reflected his thoughtful nature. ‘The Dutch,’ he wrote, having not greatly taken to them, ‘are not people to give away cheaply what is theirs.’ In December, hearing of 15,000 guns and ammunition for sale, he asked the Foreign Ministry in Paris whether he should make an offer for them, to keep them out of the hands of the émigré officers. ‘I am as yet to find a single educated man,’ he wrote, with that sense of false security in which he and his colleagues continued to live, ‘who believes in the success of the French Revolution.’
In March 1792, as France’s revolution was heading into a new phase, Frédéric was abruptly informed that he had been dismissed. The weak but amiable M. de Montmorin had been replaced as Minister for Foreign Affairs by General Charles-François Dumouriez, an energetic, canny, ambitious soldier who had been a close friend of Mirabeau’s. Dumouriez, whose proposed reforms of the army were opposed to those of Frédéric’s father, bore a grudge against M. de la Tour du Pin: he repaid it by getting rid of Frédéric.
Moving out of the splendid French Embassy in The Hague into a smaller, rented house, Lucie gave proof of her spirit and sense of humour. To embarrass Frédéric’s replacement, she held a very public open-air sale of all the furniture and possessions for which they no longer had room, holding it on the promenade immediately in front of the embassy. Profiting from the lessons learnt about housekeeping and money during her childhood at Hautefontaine, she made a handsome sum, which she prudently entrusted to a Dutch banker in whom she had confidence. But she kept her lavish wardrobe and, having taught Zamore to dress her hair, continued to go to court, to dance and to pay visits. It was becoming impossible, however, even for the still carefree Lucie, to ignore the fact that the news from France, brought by visitors or carried back by Frédéric from his frequent trips to Paris, was becoming more alarming with every week that went by.
The acceptance by the King of the revised Constitution in September 1791 had been greeted with pleasure and relief. A Te Deum was sung in Notre Dame and a balloon, trailing tricolour ribbons, was sent up to hover above the Champs-Elysées. In the new Legislative Assembly that replaced the old Constituent Assembly–for which no former deputy was permitted to stand–the clergy and nobility had virtually disappeared. Apart from one or two revolutionary aristocrats, the Assembly was dominated by lawyers, with a sprinkling of mathematicians and historians, all well versed in revolutionary discourse, as well as journalists and editors such as Camille Desmoulins.
A new political grouping, the Feuillants, which included the two more militant de Lameth brothers, had split off from the Jacobins and was preaching a constitutional monarchy of t
he centre, with a stronger sense of public order to quell the frequent outbreaks of popular insurrection, and discipline imposed on the press, the political clubs and the army. But the Jacobins, though numerically smaller in the Assembly, had Marat, Danton and Robespierre, whose cold, moral earnestness and invective against royalists and aristocrats was remarked on by all visitors to Paris. Robespierre had about him ‘something sardonic and demoniac’, and, with his tawny-coloured eyes, looked like a brooding bird of prey. His political voice formed by the Oratorians and by his devotion to the teachings of Rousseau, Robespierre shared with his mentor a vision of an austere, virtuous and authoritarian republic, obedient to a controlling social order, views that would soon become the guiding spirit behind revolutionary absolutism.
The steady stream of émigrés leaving France to join the Army of the Princes in Koblenz had fed a growing sense of paranoia and mistrust in Paris. By the spring of 1792, the Assembly was in a fever of war rhetoric, speaker after speaker rising to denounce the legions of fanatical émigrés apparently massing on the border to attack France. Their passions were further enflamed when, on 7 February, Austria and Prussia signed a formal treaty of alliance. The Emperor Leopold, while concerned for the safety of his sister, Marie Antoinette, had been extremely reluctant to go to war, but his death had brought his more war-minded son Francis to the throne. On both sides, the mood was turning to war.
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