When, early next morning, the sly nurse arrived to dress Séraphine, she brought with her a message. Bonie was at home and wished to see her. Very casually, keeping her excitement under control, Lucie finished dressing and then, saying that she was going out, flew along the corridors to another part of the house, where Bonie had a secret room. Bonie, it turned out, had hired a fishing boat, and brought Frédéric to Bordeaux by a different route. Though they had exchanged letters, Lucie had not seen Frédéric for six months. ‘In every lifetime,’ she wrote later, ‘there are a few luminous memories that shine like stars in the darkness of night…We were happy, and death, which we felt so very close to us, no longer frightened us, for it was possible again to hope that if it struck it would strike us down together.’
Time, however, was pressing and there was still much to do. A friend of Lucie’s father, a ship-broker, agreed to arrange with the captain of the Diana for their passages. Surreptitiously, so as not to alert the nurse, Zamore was given the task of packing the linen and silver, brought from Le Bouilh and hidden locked in cupboards, into crates, ready for removal to the Diana. With them went 50 bottles of Burgundy, a few jars of potted goose, a small case of bottled jam and some potatoes, the only food they had managed to gather for the journey. A piano went too, no one imagining that Lucie could survive in the New World without one, or indeed that she might find one there.
Then one morning, to their great alarm, the whole family had to present themselves to the clerk at the municipality for their permits to be exchanged for passports. Dressed in elegant but well-used clothes–for Lucie was to pass herself off as an English-woman fallen on hard times–they shrank back into the dimly lit corner of the busy passport office, relying on Bonie, who accompanied them, to smooth over all awkwardness. There was a terrible moment later that evening when Lucie took the passports for their final visas to Thérésia, who was to give them to Tallien, only to find her in tears, Tallien having already departed in disgrace for Paris, and her own immediate future far from safe. It was now up to his colleague, the cold-blooded Ysabeau to provide the indispensable visas; and these were only obtained because Tallien’s secretary Alexander was a kind man and was able adroitly to hurry the process through by presenting the passports late at night, when Ysabeau was about to dine and did not bother to scrutinise what he was signing.
Lucie, Frédéric and the two children were now free to depart. The timing could not have been more fortunate. The next morning the harsh young Jullien, little more than a boy, reached Bordeaux. Announcing that Ysabeau and Tallien had both been far too lenient, too lacking in true revolutionary ardour, he set about hunting down the remaining Girondins and nobles, hidden away in attics, in concealed vaults behind wine vats, in cellars, in cupboards and on their country estates. In the coming weeks, he would send 71 people to the guillotine.
In Paris, where Arthur and Frédéric’s father remained in prison, the Terror was approaching its most murderous phase. Robespierre and Fouqier-Tinville, dreaming of a commonwealth of virtue, were despatching 30 to 40 people to the guillotine each day. Many of them were taken away in groups: magistrates one day, tax inspectors the next, or even several generations of one family. ‘Heads,’ remarked Fouquier-Tinville, ‘are falling like tiles.’ One by one, the men who had shaped the revolution and sent others to the guillotine were becoming victims themselves of stronger and cannier political forces.
There was Hébert, who went to the scaffold with 19 of his friends. After Hébert came Danton, fighting to the bitter end with great booming tirades of rhetoric, who left behind him a 16-year-old wife; and Camille Desmoulins who, when asked his age by the Tribunal, replied: ‘The same age as the sans-culotte Jesus when he died, the critical age for patriots.’ Accused of spending his time with aristocrats and of praising his friend Arthur Dillon with the words that the General was ‘neither Royalist, nor Republican, nor Jacobin, nor Aristocrat, nor Democrat: he was simply a Soldier’, Desmoulins could have gone back on his words. Instead, he spoke out. ‘I am proud,’ he declared, ‘even if I am alone to oppose the injustice of Rome for the services of Coriolanus.’ There are, observed Robespierre, ‘only a few serpents left for us to crush’.
Paris’s places of detention were filled to overflowing, some 7,000 people crammed into humid and unhealthy barracks, convents and former palaces, prey to typhus, dysentery and influenza. The surviving ci-devant nobles continued to keep fear at bay by charades, cards and rhyming couplets, and by singing, even on the way to the scaffold, faithful to bon ton until the end. As the historian Taine would later observe, the nobility went to their deaths with dignity, ease and serenity, all the savoir-faire that was second nature to them.
By March, M. de la Tour du Pin was imprisoned in the Conciergerie, on the Quai de l’Horloge, next to the Palais de Justice, where he continued to receive visitors in formal dress, wearing his wig. Arthur had also been moved to the Conciergerie, accused, in the wake of his friend Camille Desmoulins’s death, of a conspiracy involving Lucile, Desmoulins’s 23-year-old wife. Dillon, said his accusers, had never ‘ceased to conspire against the republic’. Arthur knew himself to be guiltless. ‘If,’ he had written to Desmoulins earlier, having handed over all his papers willingly to the authorities, ‘a single suspect line is found, then I will accept the harshest treatment.’ Later, an anonymous writer would describe Lucie’s father during his weeks in prison as drinking heavily ‘and when he was not drunk, he played backgammon’. Lucile Desmoulins, arrested soon after her husband’s death and charged with the same conspiracy, had been to plead with Robespierre for Desmoulins’s life; Robespierre had been witness at their wedding and was the godfather of her 18-month-old son, Horace.
In Bordeaux, there was one last gathering with the friends who had saved Lucie and Frédéric’s lives: M. de Brouquens, described by the Comte de Paroy as ‘the best man who ever lived’, M. Meyer, the Dutch Consul in whose house Frédéric had been hidden, and Thérésia, who wept as they left. Lucie found the parting from Marguerite particularly hard, and both she and Frédéric dreaded the thought of what might befall their fathers, shut up in Paris’s revolutionary prisons. And then the moment came when, feigning an afternoon stroll with the children in the public gardens, they climbed into the dinghy sent by the captain of the Diana to collect them at the end of the Quai des Chartrons. At the very last minute, M. de Chambeau, who had just learnt that his father had been denounced by a servant who had worked for him for 30 years and had been arrested with papers revealing that his son was in hiding in Bordeaux, was able to get a passport as their legal representative and went with them. ‘There is no doubt,’ wrote Lucie, ‘that the heave of the oar with which the sailor pushed us off from the shore was the happiest moment in my life.’
CHAPTER NINE
Mrs Latour from the Old Country
Sturdy, with a broad beam and a single, tall mast, the 150-ton Diana was one of hundreds of boats built in dockyards dotted along America’s eastern seaboard to transport cargo between Europe and the New World in the 18th century. It was small and uncomfortable, with just four sailors under a young and in-experienced captain and an older mate, both from Nantucket. Lucie, Frédéric and the children shared one cramped cabin, M de Chambeau had another. But in the first relief and euphoria of escape, none of this mattered. They were in any case immediately distracted by being stopped, on three separate occasions, by guards doing sentinel duty along the Garonne, each time risking discovery and fearing for their lives. On the last inspection, Lucie was forced to hand over a lamb, secured at the last minute by M. de Chambeau as food for the crossing, to a covetous official.
It was when the Diana finally pulled out into the open sea that the full discomfort of their journey hit them. The Atlantic passage westward, particularly during the equinoctial spring gales, was renowned for its battering winds and immense seas. It was not unusual for a boat to lose its mainmast and to have its sails shredded. Soon after they left the estuary, one of the sailors slipped from the mas
thead to the deck below and though he survived, his injuries kept him confined to his hammock. Frédéric was an appalling sailor. With the first big waves, he took to his bunk and for the next 30 days seldom left it, able to keep down only weak tea and biscuits soaked in wine. Apart from Lucie’s 50 packing cases and the piano, the Diana carried no cargo, which made the rolling more pronounced.
What chiefly afflicted Lucie, however, was hunger. The captain had also had trouble finding food for the voyage and as the days went by and their rations grew smaller she worried that her milk was again drying up: Séraphine, who slept happily all day, soothed by the swaying of her bed, was beginning to look shrivelled and pinched. ‘I could see,’ wrote Lucie later, ‘my daughter shrinking visibly.’ At night, fearing that as the boat rolled she might squash her, Lucie fashioned a strap with which to tie herself firmly to the bed-frame. Having slept all day, Séraphine spent the nights awake.
The young captain, for his part, was terrified of Algerian pirates, of privateers, the semi-legal pirates encouraged in wartime to seize the ships of enemy nations, and of the French navy, known to be patrolling the seas off the French coast in search of royalists escaping revolutionary justice. Determined to avoid a life of slavery in Algeria, or summary justice in a French court, he insisted on heading due north to Ireland, into pitching seas.
One black, rolling day, what they most dreaded happened: the Atlante, a French man-of-war, drew alongside and only the rough seas prevented its sailors from boarding the Diana. Instead, the French captain ordered the Diana to follow him back to Brest, making his point by sending a couple of cannon shots across their bows. The Atlante, as Lucie knew, had recently escorted a party of escaping French back to Brest, where they had all been guillotined. But a dense fog came down, the captain of the Diana dawdled, and as soon as the Atlante was out of sight, he hoisted all sails, and they scuttled away towards the north-west. The Diana was now blown to the Azores, where Lucie and Frédéric begged the captain to put them ashore, thinking that they would pick up a boat for England. Though angry at his refusal, Lucie would later feel nothing but gratitude. Just at the time that they would have reached England, an expedition of French royalists set out for Quiberon Bay on the coast of Brittany, planning to confront the revolutionary army. Frédéric, she reasoned, would have felt bound to join the ill-fated raid and would certainly have died with the other aristocrats in the ensuing massacre.
For Lucie, life on board was taken up with looking after the seasick Frédéric, breast-feeding Séraphine and keeping Humbert from falling overboard, with the help of the obliging M. de Chambeau, and trying to learn something about life in America from the entertaining young cook, Boyd. Finding her long hair unmanageable, she took the kitchen scissors and, to Frédéric’s displeasure, chopped it off and threw it overboard, and with it ‘all the frivolous ideas which my pretty fair curls had encouraged’. She spent her days propped up in the galley, open to the winds but warmed by the stove, listening to Boyd’s descriptions of his Boston childhood, and trying to stretch out the ever-dwindling supplies of dried haricot beans and ship’s biscuit. She was disgusted to see weevils squirm out the moment it was mixed with water. Her gums began to bleed. Humbert, constantly in tears, begged her for food that had been eaten days before. ‘I could not rid myself of the fear,’ Lucie wrote later, ‘that I would see my children die of hunger.’ Day after day, strong westerly winds beat the Diana back so that often they seemed merely to be marking time. For ten days, an impenetrable fog blanketed out even the riggings.
The captain had a little terrier, Black, to which he was much attached. On 12 May, after 60 days at sea, on a morning of warm weather and calmer seas when Lucie and Frédéric had taken the children up on deck, Black was seen to behave very strangely, racing up and down, barking and licking their hands. Suddenly, out of the mist, a pilot boat came in sight. Unbeknownst to the captain, the Diana lay just outside Boston. Even better, the pilot had with him a large, recently caught fish, some fresh white bread and a jar of butter. As they devoured the food, the Diana was towed out of the choppy seas and into a passage of flat water, surrounded by green fields with dense, flowering vegetation. After so many days of blue and grey light, of salty air and the sucking sound of the waves, the colours and the smell of land from the pine, spruce and balsam that grew along the shores were overwhelming. ‘Like the changing decor on a theatre stage,’ Lucie wrote, ‘the friendly land appeared, waiting to welcome us.’ Four-year-old Humbert, who had suffered acutely from the terror of their escape and the loss of ‘the fine bread and the good milk of earlier days’, was beside himself ‘with transports of joy’.
Just outside the harbour, the captain dropped anchor and had himself rowed to shore, promising to find them lodgings. While they waited, supplies of fresh fruit and vegetables were brought out to the boat; these were soon followed by parties of Frenchmen, clamouring for news from home. Most were small tradesmen and artisans, ruined by the revolution, who had left France several years earlier in search of work, but whose sympathies remained firmly with the revolutionaries. Lucie’s first human encounters in the New World, after almost two months of solitude and pitching seas, were far from pleasant. She found herself harangued by belligerent Frenchmen, angry that she had so little news to give them, and angry too that another aristocratic family had escaped the guillotine. After a few heated exchanges, the Frenchmen pulled away for shore. Lucie and Frédéric were left to contemplate their new home. Boston’s fine port lay spread out before them, with its tidy rows of ships and its church spires rising behind tall buildings, and the hills beyond.
Long before dawn the next morning, Lucie was awake and dressed. As soon as the dinghy was ready, they had themselves rowed to shore, sad to leave the crew with whom they had spent so many close and anxious weeks. The long wharf in Boston, where passengers were landed from their boats, was a confused, noisy mass of people. There were porters heaving crates, stevedores pushing carts and loading bales, all speaking a dozen different languages as they jostled their way along the quays, between horses pulling drays, pigs and cows being herded on to boats, carriages carrying merchants, passers-by come to watch. Above screeched gulls. Behind were narrow, crooked roads, most of them unpaved, lined by brick or pine clapboard houses painted in different colours, two or three storeys high, with small roof terraces and gardens with apple and cherry trees in blossom. Between the low green hills, cows and sheep grazed. In the evenings, and on Sundays, people strolled up and down a public walk they called the mall, half a mile of turf and gravel, shaded by elm trees. It was very ordinary, and welcoming, in ways that Lucie had forgotten existed. Only someone who had been through the anguish she had lived through, she noted, would ever ‘be able to fully appreciate my joy when I set foot on that friendly shore’.
By 1794, America’s Atlantic seaboard had a population of 2 million people. The promise of the New World, and the conflicts of the old, had between them brought English, Scots, Welsh and Irish, Germans and Dutch, Swiss, Swedes, Jews from all over Europe and slaves from Africa. Driven from their homes by dispossession and penury, they had come to settle and to trade in ports and cities along a thousand miles of coastline, importing manufactured goods, olive oil, salt, wine and brandy from Europe, cloth, tea and spices from India, sugar, coffee, indigo and rum from the West Indies, trading them on to the different states, often by river or canal.
The first thing Lucie and Frédéric did on landing was to be taken by the young captain to the best inn in town, where he had ordered the sort of food of which they had been so long deprived. Lucie would later write of this meal that it gave her ‘a pleasure so vivid that it surpassed any pleasures I had known until then’. After this, he took them to a lodging house run by a Mrs Pierce, with the help of her mother and her daughter, where their drawing room looked out over Market Square, the liveliest part of town, and their bedroom across to the shipyards. The three Bostonian women took the family to their hearts, the grandmother taking charge of the precoci
ous Humbert, who was already speaking some English, while the daughter looked after Séraphine. That first night the household was woken by scratching at the door. The captain’s small terrier Black was discovered shivering outside, having escaped from the Diana and swum to shore. Despite his fondness for his dog, the captain agreed to part with her.
Lucie and Frédéric were taken to meet Mr Geyer, one of Boston’s richest merchants; Mr Geyer spoke good French, but his wife and daughter did not, and they were delighted to find that Lucie’s English was excellent. Having followed the news from France closely–the French papers, brought over by packet boat and merchant vessels, arrived with a delay of about six weeks, when their contents were picked up and printed by papers across the country–they were extremely sympathetic towards their visitors, insisting on believing that Lucie’s cropped hair had been cut by the executioner in preparation for the guillotine. ‘By the evening of the first day,’ wrote Lucie, ‘we felt as settled there as if no grief or anxiety had ever troubled our lives.’
Though Lucie did not again encounter the unfriendly French who had rowed out to the Diana, Boston was full of French émigrés, come over in two waves, the first as voluntary exiles in 1789 after the fall of the Bastille, the second those escaping like Lucie and Frédéric from the revolutionary guillotine. More recently had come French colonial settlers from Saint-Domingue, fleeing the slave uprising of Toussaint L’Ouverture. By 1794, some 20,000 French men and women had reached America and were eking out precarious livings as dancing masters, chefs, teachers of French and music or on small farms. On his travels around America in 1791, Chateaubriand, who wrote lyrically about the primitive natural life, described coming across a former chef, M. Violet, teaching Indians to dance near Albany, half-naked men with rings in their noses and feathers in their hair, prancing while he fiddled, in full dress of apple-green coat, his hair powdered, taking his pay in beaver skins and bear ham.
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