Some of these French exiles, preceding Lucie and Frédéric and landing on shores they had imagined hospitable and full of possibilities for work and happiness, had quickly become disillusioned. In place of a libertarian arcadia, they had found a hard land, energetic and tolerant, but vulgar and materialistic in ways they had not expected. They felt alien, sick with longing for France and for the graceful, polished society they had known; they were poor, ill-adapted to hard work, and fearful of the moral and cultural dangers that might lie in all this rugged prosperity. As Gouverneur Morris noted, they had chosen to disregard Benjamin Franklin’s warning that the point about America was that it was neither rich nor poor, but ‘rather a general happy mediocrity’.
And some of the émigrés had been swindled. From 1788, American speculators had been sending their agents to Paris to sell frontier lands, spinning tales of ‘smiling farms’, rivers full of fish, forests teeming in game, and vegetables of unimaginable size growing wild. As the revolution took hold, the offers had begun to look more enticing. A month after the fall of the Bastille, a poet called Joel Barlow, working for the Scioto company and helped by a crooked Englishman called Playfair, had succeeded in selling title deeds to 100-acre plots for the planned new town of Gallipoli on the Ohio, a river known, they claimed, for its enormous fish and the way that the trees along its banks spewed sugar from their trunks. A thousand émigrés set sail, to find the company on the verge of bankruptcy and in any case without rights to the land it had promised. Though half of them did indeed spend the first winter crouched on the banks of the Ohio, they were ‘peruke’-makers, artists and shopkeepers, utterly unsuited to life in the wilderness. They found the Indians menacing and the cold appalling. A visitor to the colony wrote that the inhabitants had a ‘wild appearance and sallow complexions, thin visages and sickly looks’. Within six months the project collapsed, leaving them destitute and reviving all the Abbé Raynal’s fears that the New World was no place for civilised Europeans, and that America’s peculiar climate had caused its people to degenerate, morally, physically and intellectually. All through the terrifying Parisian winter of 1793 and spring of 1794 other Frenchmen, fleeing the Terror, had been duped by similar schemes, lured by similarly chimerical promises, most of them doomed to bankruptcy.
Mr Geyer had offered Frédéric and Lucie a farm that he owned 18 miles from Boston. But Frédéric, who spoke very little English, had dreamt of settling nearer to French-speaking Canada. Soon after reaching Boston, they received a letter from the Princesse d’Hénin, who had taken refuge outside London with a group of aristocratic émigrés, with letters of introduction to General Schuyler, one of the heroes of the American War of Independence. Schuyler lived on his estates in Albany in upper New York State. The general was married to Catherine van Rennsselaer, descendant of the Dutch ‘patroon’, a diamond merchant who had first colonised the area and owned over 700,000 acres of land; they were rich farmers known for their hospitality towards earlier French travellers. In reply to a letter, the Schuylers wrote back, pressing Frédéric and Lucie to visit Albany and saying that it would not be hard to find them a farm. Before leaving Boston, Lucie held a sale of some of the possessions Zamore had hastily crammed into crates and which she believed would find no place in their new lives. Elegant dresses, laces and fabrics went to fashionable Bostonian ladies, who still looked to Paris for new designs, as did Lucie’s piano, which had made the journey safely. The money raised was converted into bills of exchange. Having been so careful to bring all these things with her, Lucie now parted with them without regret, reflecting that the life that awaited her would involve ‘conditions com parable with those of peasants in Europe’. She appeared little bothered by their loss.
Early in June, with the weather good and the trees in flower, Frédéric, Lucie and the children, taking the devoted M. de Chambeau and the terrier with them, left for the 165-mile trip to Albany. They had decided to travel by road rather than by sloop up the Hudson, hoping to get a clearer picture of their new country. Much of their route lay through forest of oak and pine, the road little more than a cutting opened by felling trees and leaving them lying along the side to mark the way. They saw squirrels the size of small cats and ‘thickets of flowering rhododendrons, some of them purple, others pale lilac, and roses of every kind’. In the many creeks and rivers grew water-lilies in full flower. ‘This unspoilt nature enchanted me,’ wrote Lucie. From time to time they came across clearings where farmers had put up wooden frame houses and were growing crops of peas, beans, potatoes and turnips. One night, stopping in an inn, Lucie heard ‘a stream of French oaths’ coming from the adjoining room. M. de Chambeau, not having been warned about this local custom, had been woken by another traveller climbing into his bed.
It was only once they had left Boston that Frédéric told Lucie the news that had just arrived on a boat from France. He had waited, hoping that the journey might distract her.
On 13 April, not long after they had set sail from Bordeaux, Arthur had been brought before the Revolutionary Tribunal in Paris and accused of conspiring against the republic, of being in league with Pitt in trying to put Louis back on the throne and of having helped France’s enemies to escape. ‘It is Dillon,’ said Le Moniteur in its coverage of the trial, ‘who is the spirit behind all the counter-revolutionary plots.’ In court, Arthur had answered each absurd accusation clearly and with courage. Not long before, he had written to Robespierre: ‘I have always fled before even the shadow of any plot, and I have despised and detested plotters…An incorruptible patriot like yourself should love and respect the truth.’ Arthur was one of 27 people tried that day, most of them accused with him of the ‘Luxembourg conspiracy’, a fanciful and convoluted tale of intrigue and spying. Arthur and Desmoulins’s widow, the 23-year-old Lucile, were, so their accusers claimed, guilty of trying to raise money to finance a movement to assassinate true patriots. The jury had retired for three hours. They returned with 19 verdicts of death. Arthur’s and Lucile’s were among them.
At six o’clock that same day, their hands tied behind them, they had been put into tumbrils and taken to the Place de la République. The frail 77-year-old former Bishop of Paris went with them, even though he had loudly renounced his faith. When the carts arrived to take them on their last journey, Lucile asked Arthur to forgive her for being the cause of his death. ‘You were only the pretext,’ he replied. At the foot of the scaffold, her nerve gave way: she shrank back from the executioner’s grasp and asked Arthur to go first. Arthur climbed the steps, calmly removed his cravat and shouted ‘Vive le Roi’ before the blade fell. Lucie had been expecting his death; but it did not lessen the grief she felt.
This was not the only painful news to reach the travellers. On 28 April, Frédéric’s father, who had so enraged the Public Prosecutor by referring to Marie Antoinette as ‘Sa Majesté’, followed Arthur to the guillotine. He was executed on the same day as his first cousin, the distinguished Marquis de la Tour du Pin, who had been a member of the Assembly of Notables. With them went three carts of ‘nobles, foreigners, indolent men and hired orators of the combined powers’, as the French papers described them.
Paris, according to the newspapers reaching America, was running out of food, its prisons were overflowing, its inhabitants cowed by terror. ‘The very paving stones smell of blood,’ wrote one reporter, ‘and the river itself seems to run red.’ The city, once indescribably noisy, now lived in ‘the silence of the grave’. Lucie and Frédéric learnt that in Bordeaux, in order to make heads fall faster, a guillotine had been erected to sever seven heads at a single stroke. It was enough, now, to ‘slander patriotism’ to be found guilty. When the victims died before they reached the scaffold, as did some who had tried to commit suicide, their corpses were guillotined. The Duc de Châtelet was unfortunate: he had tried to pierce his heart with a broken bottle and arrived at the guillotine drenched in blood, but alive.
With her mother, father, father-in-law, sister-in-law all dead, her great-
uncle and grandmother in England, Versailles deserted, the nobility murdered or scattered, the world in which Lucie had spent the first 19 years of her life had vanished.*
The busy trading port of Albany, known to the Indians as Muhattoes and to the early Dutch settlers as Oranienburgh, was a pleasant, small town of some 1,500 houses. It had 6,000 inhabitants, 2,000 of whom were slaves. One of the oldest settlements in North America, Albany lay on the banks of the Hudson, and many of its houses had gardens down to the water. There was a market place, a prison, a town hall, a new bathing establishment and a number of English and Dutch churches. Its streets were regular, straight and paved with cobblestones, and in front of their Dutch-style shingled and gabled houses, people had planted lime trees, often marking the birth of each new baby with a sapling. In summer, families sat out on their porches, the Dutch fathers smoking pipes, watching the cows returning from their communal pastures to be milked. On the sandy hills surrounding the town, and all along the banks of the Hudson, raspberries and blueberries grew in abundance among the willows and wild roses. The land here, wrote an early missionary, was very like Germany, and the wine made from local grapes was good; but there were rattlesnakes, ‘variegated like spotted dogs’, and they made a noise like crickets. The forests that lay all around, of maple, poplar, chestnut and oak, were full of skunks.
Albany had begun as a frontier town, a starting-off point for journeys into the uncharted interior, and a depot for the furs brought from the interior to be shipped down the Hudson. While the 1783 Treaty of Paris had ended hostilities between the British Crown and the American secessionist states, leaving Canada in British hands but accepting a new border through the Great Lakes, it had no direct bearing on the standing of the Indian tribes who had been placed on the American side of the border. Congress had quickly set about entering into treaties with the Mohawks, the Senecas, the Cayugas and the Onondagas.
In October 1784, anxious to protect their frontiers from the British in Canada, it negotiated with representatives of the Iroquois Six Nations Confederacy, the 10,000 or so Indians whose ancestral hunting grounds stretched from the Hudson Valley to Lake Erie, persuading them to relinquish lands on which military forts were built in return for guarantees that they could continue to occupy a portion of their homelands. But only in theory: in practice, revolutionary soldiers, returning from the north with tales of fertile alluvial soil and well-watered fields, abandoned their stony and debt-ridden New England farms and migrated up the Hudson, arriving in groups by river in summer and overland by sled in winter, to occupy lands ‘subleased’ in deals to last ‘while water runs and grass grows’, which effectively appropriated most of the native territory.
The Iroquois gathered, talked, complained; but to no avail. By the summer of 1794 the forests where Indians had once hunted plentiful elk, deer, bear, raccoon, porcupine and wild mink were largely in the hands of ever-growing numbers of settlers, who chopped down the trees and planted potatoes, peas and corn, let their pigs roam to eat the wild plants favoured by the Iroquois and dammed their streams for sawmills. The settlers, noted Jefferson’s friend, Elkanah Watson, a man interested in the development of the land, ‘are swarming into these fertile regions in shoals, like the ancient Israelites seeking the land of promise’. An early casualty had been the rare white beaver, which had totally disappeared. In the luggage of one group of settlers, migrating north through Albany, came a printing press, destined, noted The Albany Register, ‘to shed its light abroad over the western wilds’.
A key figure in the negotiations with the Iroquois was General Schuyler, who for almost 40 years had known and dealt with the Indians, and whose ancestor, Pieter Schuyler, had taken a Mohawk chief to Queen Anne’s court in London and brought him home wearing a light blue suit, trimmed with silver lace. Though loved and respected by the settlers for his generosity in restoring the town after a terrible fire in 1792, Schuyler was a controversial figure, having long taken the view that it was Albany, and not Congress, that should have the final say on all matters dealing with the Indian lands. Exploiting the trust the Iroquois had placed in him, Schuyler had flouted Congressional laws, dispossessing the Indians in favour of the farmers and merchants. His dream was to open a canal from the Hudson river to the Great Lakes, to make the flow of goods faster and cheaper. Like the van Rensselaers, to whom the Schuylers were closely related, the General was enormously rich, owning over 10,000 acres of land, along with sawmills, hemp and flax mills, and a stately Georgian mansion in the centre of the town. His daughter Elizabeth was married to Alexander Hamilton, currently Secretary of the Treasury in Philadelphia.
Both the Schuylers and the van Rensselaers welcomed Lucie and Frédéric warmly. The General, a tall, commanding, somewhat austere man, declared that he would regard her as his sixth daughter. Mrs Rensselaer, one of his own five daughters, was not much older than Lucie and spoke good French; she was an invalid, confined for months on end to an armchair, where, clever and well informed, she liked to sit talking to visitors. Like Lucie, she had been reared on the Enlightenment. She immediately impressed Lucie with her grasp of the intricacies of the French troubles, much of it learnt from a close reading of the newspapers. Her insights, remarked Lucie, into the ‘vices of the upper classes and the follies of the middle classes’ were far more interesting and acute than those of most of her French acquaintances. In the drawing room of the Schuyler mansion, with its hand-painted wallpapers and stucco garlands so beloved of French 18th-century decorators, its Brussels carpets, yellow damask coverings and silver and glasses brought back from Europe, where young girls did their embroidery and played the pianoforte, Lucie rediscovered some of the conversation and the music of her early childhood. After five years of uncertainty and fear, it all seemed very reassuring.
As they did not want to live in Albany itself, Lucie, Frédéric and the children went to stay with a farmer not far away, hoping to learn from him the rudiments of their new life. M. de Chambeau apprenticed himself to a carpenter in nearby Troy, returning each week to spend Sundays with them. He had just heard that his own father had been guillotined. While Frédéric searched for possible properties to buy with the money they had managed to bring from France, Lucie, determined to acquire all possible skills, rose before daylight each day to help the farmer’s wife, making clothes for the family as well as black mourning dresses for herself. Opposite the farmhouse, on the other side of the river, lay the road to Canada, and on it stood a large inn, where news, gazettes and sale notices were posted. In the early mornings, Lucie explored her surroundings, marvelling at the speed with which the local vegetation seemed to grow, riding on horseback through fields of Indian corn that stood taller than her horse, and forcing herself to cross the river over a floating bridge of logs tied together, which, until she mastered them, greatly unnerved her. Abhorring cowardice, ‘I was careful not to tell anyone my fears’, she practised making the crossing until she could do so without hesitation.
Albany had two weekly papers, The Gazette and The Register, both full of advertisements for Irish linens, women’s gloves, Malaga raisins, all the luxury items newly arrived from Europe, together with notices about escaped slaves and missing horses. Early in August, a ‘composition’ mounted by a travelling Italian artist reached Albany. It depicted Louis XVI taking leave of Marie Antoinette in the Temple, with, as The Register put it, ‘a countenance very expressive of his feelings’, and the actual guillotining of the King, his head falling, ‘the lips which are first red, turning blue’, the whole performance orchestrated by an invisible machine. Even so far from France, it was impossible to escape the revolution. It was in the local paper that Lucie read about the execution of the King’s sister, Mme Elisabeth. ‘Blood flowed everywhere,’ she wrote. ‘Nor could we see an end to it.’
In September, Frédéric found them a home. It was a newly built farmhouse, 4 miles outside Albany on the road between the new settlement of Troy and Schenectady, down which passed a constant stream of wagons loaded with pelts
. The lands surrounding Troy were the former hunting grounds of the Mohawk Indians, and it was at Troy that the wide, sluggish Hudson met the greatest of its tributaries, the Mohawk. The farm was exactly what they wanted. It had 150 acres of crops, a quarter of an acre of vegetable garden, an orchard with 10-year-old apple trees producing excellent cider, and extensive woods and pastures. Since the owners did not wish to move until the first snows, Lucie and Frédéric rented a log cabin in Troy itself, only recently incorporated as a village but growing rapidly, with new potash works, paper mills and tanning yards. Lucie was in the courtyard, chopping the bone of a leg of mutton ready for the spit, when she heard a familiar deep voice behind her saying that he had never seen mutton so magnificently speared. It was Talleyrand. With him was the Chevalier de Beaumetz, jurist and reviser of the French penal code and a former deputy to the National Assembly, who after the attack on the Tuileries had escaped Paris disguised as a travelling merchant. Both men had exchanged their silk and ruffles for clothes more suited to the American outback, the elegant and fastidious Talleyrand barely recognisable in rugged hunting shirt and waistcoat. They had brought with them a present of Stilton cheese.
Talleyrand had initially left France for England with Danton’s help in September 1792 on the pretext that he would write a report on France’s relations with the European powers, intending to return if it seemed safe for him to do so. But when Louis XVI’s iron chest was discovered, it was found to include letters from Talleyrand to the King, assuring him of his loyalty: next day, in the Convention, Talleyrand was accused of treachery and his name added to the list of proscribed émigrés. His position in London, however, was precarious. Lord Grenville, Minister for Foreign Affairs, disliked his manner, saying that it was cold and arrogant. Shunned by both the court and the government, Talleyrand spent his time with Fox, Sheridan and other members of the opposition.
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