At 10.30, still standing shocked and silent at their open window, Lucie and Frédéric heard the familiar noises of Paris resume. Trying to appear calm and composed, they set out on foot for the city. Avoiding the Place de la Révolution, they went in search first of Arthur, then of their elderly friends, Mme de Montesson and Mme de Poix. ‘People scarcely spoke,’ noted Lucie, ‘so terrified were they.’ It was as if, she thought, each one of them felt a measure of personal responsibility for the King’s death. Frédéric blamed himself bitterly for not having believed that the execution would actually go ahead.
Returning that night to Passy, they found two monarchist friends, Mathieu de Montmorency and the Abbé de Damas, waiting for them. Both men had witnessed the execution, and both now feared that their angry exclamations might have been overheard, which could bring instant arrest. Lucie and Frédéric agreed to hide them until they could get away. In Paris the mayor had decreed that the city would be illuminated for the next few days, despite a full moon, saying that these ‘unsettled times’ were not the moment to practise economies.
An English visitor, who had attended the execution, was later said to have dipped his handkerchief in the King’s blood and sent it to London, where it was prominently displayed. The English reacted with horror and disbelief to the news of Louis’s death. The theatres closed and at a memorial service the King’s last written words were read aloud to a weeping congregation. ‘I leave my soul to my creator…’ Louis had written. ‘I advise my son, should he have the misfortune to become king, to give himself up entirely to his subjects…’ Until now determinedly neutral, Pitt, calling the execution the ‘foulest and most atrocious’ act the world had ever seen, ordered Chauvelin, the French Ambassador, to leave England.
The war was spreading, both against enemies coming from across the borders, and within France itself, where counter-revolutionary groups were joining forces. In the Vendée, an isolated, rural area in the south-west, an eruption of popular anger, triggered by the arrival of recruiting agents, and fanned by energetic, popular, ‘non-juring’ priests, burst out into rebellion against Paris.
Towards the middle of March, as the Convention announced that it intended to hunt down enemies of the state and try them before special revolutionary courts, M. de la Tour du Pin was arrested, together with a cousin, the Marquis de Gouvernet, mistaken by the police for Frédéric. Taken before the Paris Commune, they were repeatedly questioned about the events at Nancy in which Frédéric had played a part and blamed for the death of so many ‘good patriots’. Though they were soon released, M. de la Tour du Pin begged Lucie and Frédéric to leave Paris for Bordeaux. He thought that they should hide on his estate at Le Bouilh before crossing the border into Spain or even joining up with the rebels in the Vendée.
Lucie was extremely reluctant to leave her father, whose careless ways and outspoken views terrified her. ‘It grieved me profoundly,’ she wrote. ‘His originality of mind and evenness of temper made him a most agreeable companion. He was my friend, and a comrade also to my husband.’ Arthur had been offered and refused the Army of the Rhine as second-in-command under General Custine. He had since been struck off the list of general officers and been warned that he was under suspicion for ‘anti-civic activities’. France was at war on all fronts: against possible invasion, against angry Vendéens, against counter-revolutionaries. It was an anxious and sad small party that now set off south, for news had just come that Cécile, alone with her two children in The Hague, had died. And Lucie was once again pregnant, though she was still weak from her miscarriage in Holland.
Taking with them Humbert, Marguerite and Zamore, she and Frédéric set out by carriage through countryside plagued by brigands and hungry and sick deserters from the army. They left behind them a city increasingly short of food and riven by rumours of conspiracy, black marketeering and treachery, with the sans-culottes and the new extreme left-wing enragés closing in on anyone suspected of uncertain loyalty, and a new tribunal to judge all those said to violate the security of the state; and the Jacobins, day by day, acquiring ever greater power.
CHAPTER EIGHT
Heads Falling like Tiles
Le Bouilh was to have been the finest château of the Bordeaux nobility, a mansion fit for the King, as M. de la Tour du Pin had assured Louis XVI when he complained that there was nowhere of sufficient grandeur in the region for a royal visit. Making the most of the celebrated Victor Louis’s presence in Bordeaux to design the city’s new theatre in the late 1780s, M. de la Tour du Pin had asked the architect to build him a château consisting of two wings, joined by an arcaded gallery and a cupola, with rows of Doric columns and a terrace above. It was to be vast, and extremely grand. But when, in 1790, he was summoned to Paris to take up the post of Minister for War, all work on Le Bouilh stopped, leaving only one wing finished, the columns unadorned and just 90 of the planned 180 rooms completed. The property had been left with an awkward, somewhat top-heavy air, not so much unfinished as oddly proportioned.
Even so, the building that had risen on the ruins of an earlier fortified medieval mansion was extremely imposing, with high ceilings, drawing rooms decorated with stuccoed garlands, shells and musical instruments, great marble fireplaces and chandeliers. The rooms were filled with tapestries and there was a renowned collection of maps and globes which M. de la Tour du Pin planned to spend his old age studying. Approached along an avenue of poplars, through a curved courtyard with stables and a forge, Le Bouilh also had a neo-classical ‘château d’eau’ or pump house. There was a magnificent walled kitchen garden, with pools fed by the hydraulic water system. The French windows in the drawing room opened on to a formal garden and lawns with views over vineyards to the Garonne beyond. It was a tranquil place.
By 1793, the journey from Paris to Bordeaux by the rapid new turgotine had come down to five and a half days, but Lucie’s carriage moved very slowly, on account of the atrocious roads and her anxiety not to lose her baby. It was mid-April by the time the party reached Le Bouilh, to find the great house shuttered. There were wheelbarrows and scaffolding, abandoned from the day work had ceased. Lucie was nonetheless delighted with the house. There was an excellent library and while Frédéric read aloud to her from books of history and French literature, she spent the evenings sewing clothes for the coming child. She had done well, she reflected, to pay such close attention to her sewing lessons at Hautefontaine. Below, in a semi-basement, were the vaulted kitchens, with rows of copper pots and a flagstone floor, soon taken over by Marguerite and Zamore. Later, Lucie would remember the four months they stayed at Le Bouilh as a time of perfect love for Frédéric, when the feelings they had for each other seemed to shelter them from the surrounding troubles. ‘There was,’ she would write, ‘no flaw in our domestic happiness. None of the disasters that threatened had the power to alarm us as long as we could bear them together.’
Every day, however, it was becoming harder to keep these dangers at bay. The news from Paris was increasingly grim. On 1 July, Arthur was arrested and sent to the Luxembourg, one of some 50 different schools, convents, barracks and former hospitals that had been turned into prisons. Charged with being a ringleader in a counter-revolutionary plot, Arthur was questioned about how he spent his days. He replied that, since his dismissal from the army, he had led a retired life, with no intimate friends; that he ate at home, sometimes in the company of Condorcet or Camille Desmoulins, and that he occasionally went to a club to play billiards. Among his few possessions seized by the police were maps and atlases, several volumes of travel and history, and a file of letters from General Dumouriez, who, not long before, had deserted and crossed over behind enemy lines.
In the national archives in Paris, written on crumbling paper in faint ink, are the accounts of Arthur’s expenditure on food while a prisoner, in orderly columns giving date, item and cost. They make poignant reading. On 15 August, he ordered in soup, a dish of braised cabbage, a roast, a bowl of apricots, coffee, bread, three bottles of w
ine and four of beer. On the 16th, he asked for soup, roast pork, a ‘fresh egg’, some more apricots, salad, a dessert, coffee and bread, as well as two bottles of wine and three of beer. Most days, there was wine, beer and brandy; occasionally an omelette, artichokes or spinach. In among the accounts are letters from Arthur’s wife in Martinique, begging him to come home, and to stop gambling, as well as his own petition to the Ministry of War for a pension, in recompense for 38 years of service, including a ‘harsh’ tour of duty in the colonies.
Soon after hearing of Arthur’s arrest, Frédéric and Lucie learnt that M. de la Tour du Pin had also been detained, and that orders had been issued to sequestrate his property in Saintes and his château at Tesson. Papers relating to his case gave his height at 5 feet 2 inches, his nose as aquiline, his eyes as blue and his face as ‘full’; they stated that he wore a wig. Since a ‘rascally’ local lawyer in nearby Saint-André-en-Cubzac had spread a rumour that Le Bouilh itself was subject to a lien, Frédéric feared that the château would also be impounded. Anxious about the coming baby, they accepted an invitation from their friend M. de Brouquens, provisioner of the army in the south, to move into a small isolated house he owned called Canoles, set in the middle of the Haut Brion vineyards on the edge of Bordeaux, with useful tracks leading off in every direction, and no village nearby. They moved in September, taking with them Zamore and Marguerite.
It was not an altogether prudent move: the Terror was coming closer, and Bordeaux was in the eye of a new storm. All during the spring and summer of 1793, a battle had raged in the Convention in Paris between the Montagnards, the fanatical men of the Mountain, and the milder Girondins sitting below them, their disagreements fuelled by accusations of corruption and speculation, by plots and counter-plots, the protagonists tearing each other apart in furious speeches that lasted long into the nights. By late July, the Girondins were on the run, many in hiding in and around Paris. A new nine-man Committee of Public Safety under Robespierre and Saint-Just was turning itself into the most concentrated and powerful state machine France had ever known, with a programme of economic regulation, military mobilisation and an official ideology to replace the haphazard and anarchical politics of the street. ‘Let us be terrible,’ declared Danton, ‘so that the people will not have to be.’ Networks of spies and informers fanned out to provide information about ‘non-juror’ priests, hidden nobles and hoarders of food, while revolutionary mobs of sans-culottes ransacked the countryside for concealed sacks of grain.
With the murder of the Jacobin Marat in his bath by the young Charlotte Corday, and the sense of panic created by the news that Toulon had opened its harbour to the British fleet, the Jacobins were able to rouse French citizens to war against the ‘enemies of the people’, both within France and across its borders. It was enough, now, simply to be a priest, a nobleman, a royalist, a would-be émigré or even a ‘false republican’ to become a ‘suspect’. ‘Those who want to do good in this world,’ Saint-Just told the Convention, ‘must sleep only in the tomb.’ The levée in March had brought 300,000 men under arms; metallurgical factories were turned over to producing cannons, rifles, balls and shot; church bells were melted down; the Tuileries gardens were dug up and planted with potatoes. Under the Tree of Liberty in Paris, the Committee of Public Safety made a bonfire of newspapers and ‘counter-revolutionary speeches’ before debating a proposal to burn all libraries.
Reading the Paris papers, when they were able to get them at Saint-André-en-Cubzac, and questioning travellers arriving from the north, Frédéric and Lucie learnt that the guillotine in the Place de la République, placed by the side of the statue of Liberty, cap on head, spear in hand, shield by her side, was working at such speed that the tricoteuses were splattered with blood as they knitted, and came away with their feet wet. During a 47-day period, citizens lost their heads at the rate of 30 a day, sped on their way by the implacable Public Prosecutor, Fouquier-Tinville, borne to the guillotine in carts through crowds of jeering onlookers. On 13 September 1793, there were, according to Le Moniteur, 1,877 people awaiting trial. There was very little mercy. To process the guilty faster, Robespierre longed for a blade which could cut several heads at a single go.
For the first time in the history of France, the prisons contained not petty thieves and murderers but counts, seamstresses, lawyers, tanners, maids, priests, wig-makers, marquises, schoolteachers, all held together in a way they had never been before. Once the daily list of names for the guillotine had appeared, and people knew that they were not on that day’s, they then threw themselves into a frenzy of games, cards, madrigals and charades. There had been an expectation that the women would cry and collapse: for the most part they remained stoical and calm. Frédéric’s father was reported to be insisting on keeping his wig and dressing every day as for his former life.
In August, while Lucie and Frédéric were still at Le Bouilh, Marie Antoinette, ‘veuve de Louis Capet, ci-devant roi des Français’, gaunt and white-haired, had been moved to the Conciergerie, the ‘anti-chamber of the revolutionary tribunal’ from which few people emerged alive. She was held in a small damp cell, whose only light at night came from a lantern hanging outside her barred window. She spent the days crocheting and reading. The case against the ‘Austrian she-wolf’ was that she was immoral, corrupt, greedy, lustful and treacherous; she had, said her accusers, squandered France’s fortune and held orgies at Versailles and committed incest with her son. Her trial opened on 14 August.
The following day, the 15th, M. de la Tour du Pin was called as a witness. Asked if he knew the Queen, he bowed low before her, and said that he had indeed had the honour of knowing her for many years; but, he added, he knew no ill of her. Challenged to admit that it was on Marie Antoinette’s orders that he had sent his son to massacre the ‘brave soldiers’ of Nancy, he denied it. Accused of running down the army on her orders, he replied that he was not aware that he had run it down at all. Frédéric’s father was questioned for several hours; his manner remained calm and dignified. Not everyone called to give evidence was as loyal.
Right up until the moment of the verdict, Marie Antoinette herself seemed to believe that she would still be ransomed and sent to her nephew in Austria. When informed that she was to go to the guillotine, she was asked whether she wanted to say anything. She shook her head. At eleven o’clock next day, her hands bound, wearing a white piqué dress, white bonnet and black stockings, she was taken to the Place de la République in an open cart, staring straight ahead of her, silent and calm. On Marie Antoinette’s feet were a pair of kid shoes, carefully preserved through 76 days of captivity. She stumbled as she mounted the steps to the scaffold, but remained composed.
After the execution, Hébert, in the Père Duchesne, wrote of his joy at having seen with his own eyes, ‘the head…separated from the fucking tart’s neck’. In his memoirs, the Comte de Saint-Priest would say that though the Queen had been weak and not very bright, ‘she was never evil or cruel…she never betrayed France and…at moments of great danger she showed a kind of magnanimity’.
In Bordeaux, lists of those who had gone to the guillotine were passed from hand to hand. Every day that Frédéric ventured into the city he returned with the names of friends and relations who were either already dead or in prison, awaiting their trials. There was Mme du Barry, Louis XV’s last mistress, betrayed by her black servant, who had so often accompanied her to balls dressed as a hussar with a plumed cap. In the cart carrying her to her death, Mme du Barry was reported to have wept and called for help. There was M. de Genlis, husband of the royal tutor, father of Lucie’s friend Pulchérie, who was now in prison herself; the Prince d’Hénin, Frédéric’s aunt’s wayward husband; and Philippe-Egalité, whose betrayal of his cousin the King had not been enough to save him. Philippe-Egalité’s servant, Edward, whom Lucie had encountered leading his troop of black volunteers near Hénencourt, followed his master to the guillotine.
Titled soldiers, many of them men with whom Frédér
ic had served in America, were being rounded up and sentenced for treachery and incompetence. General Custine, M. de la Tour du Pin’s good friend, went to his death with the words ‘I die calm and innocent’; the Duc de Lauzun, who had given Lucie her court doll, insisted on finishing a bottle of Burgundy and a plate of oysters in the tumbril. ‘I am dying at a moment when the people have lost their senses,’ Larousse, one of 21 leading Girondins sentenced to death, told his judges, ‘you will die the day that they recover them.’ In prison, Condorcet, the celebrated author of Mathématique Sociale, took poison. On hearing her sentence of death, Olympe de Gouges, who had dreamt of a female Convention and a world in which women would be equal, cried out: ‘I wanted so much to be someone.’ For her own troublesome political fervour, the strong and articulate Mme Roland followed her soon after; her husband, hearing that she had been guillotined, slashed his own throat with a dagger. It was becoming harder every day for Lucie and Frédéric to believe that they would ever escape alive.
Dancing to the Precipice Page 21
