This time their boat went aground on a sandbank and rather than wait to be towed off, they had themselves rowed a little way up one of the Hudson’s smaller tributaries, between climbing plants and wild vines that met above their heads in garlands, where they had heard that some French émigrés were farming. The two young Frenchmen, who were delighted to see visitors, appeared to live in a mixture of penury and luxury. Having found that the farming methods brought with them from a sugar plantation in Saint-Domingue were utterly unsuited to the American climate and soil, they were fast running out of money; but they continued to eat off magnificent, if chipped and unmatching, porcelain, salvaged from earlier splendour in pre-revolutionary France.
Lucie and Frédéric reached Troy to find Séraphine well and the farm preparing for an exceptional crop of apples and grain. Lucie settled back with pleasure to the routine of her days. Neighbours dropped by to remark on the improvements they had made to the farm and to praise M. de Chambeau’s elegant new ‘noble hog sty’. She was, as she noted, very happy. But then she was dealt ‘the most unexpected and what seemed to me then the most cruel blow that any mortal could endure’.
One morning Séraphine, a bright, cheerful, affectionate child of 2, woke with what Lucie described as a ‘sudden paralysis of the stomach and intestines’. The Albany doctor, fetched by M. de Chambeau, told them there was nothing he could do. A few hours later Séraphine was dead. One of the small Schuyler boys, with whom she had been playing the previous day, died shortly after.
There was no Catholic priest in Albany. Frédéric and Lucie buried Séraphine in a small enclosure near the farm, Frédéric conducting the funeral service himself. ‘This cruel loss,’ Lucie would write many years later, ‘threw us all into the deepest sadness and despondency.’ She had always maintained that, surrounded as a child by the spectacle of corruption and scandal in the Church, she retained nothing but bad memories of religion; it was as if, she would say, ‘all concern with morality had been stifled out of my heart’. But now, kneeling by Séraphine’s grave, she felt herself change, drawn towards a God who would give her the courage to endure such terrible grief. ‘God bided His time to work a change of heart in me,’ she wrote. ‘The hour had come when I was forced to recognise the hand that had stricken me.’ And ever afterwards, she would write, divine will was to find her ‘submissive and resigned’, though there was something in her nature that was profoundly alien to submission.
To combat her sadness, Lucie set about her work with even greater frenzy. She collected 5½-year-old Humbert from Albany and brought him back to the farm. She decided to teach him herself, rather than send him to school; he was a clever and biddable pupil. At all other moments of the day, which for her started before dawn, she threw herself into the harvest and pressing of the apple crop, the cider squeezed out by an old mill driven by a horse, on which Humbert rode round and round, then put into brandy casks from Bordeaux. So delicious was the result that their cider fetched double the usual price in Albany. The maize crop was no less good, the final shucking of the ears of corn done, according to local custom, all through one night in a barn lit by candles, with the help of both their white and their black neighbours, working together over great pitchers of hot milk, laced with cider and flavoured with brown sugar, cinnamon and nutmeg. Then came the ploughing, the stacking of wood, the repairing and repainting of the sledges in preparation for the coming winter.
Lucie bought blue and white checked flannel to make shirts for their slaves and engaged a tailor to come and sew waistcoats and thick lined capes. No minute of her long day was left unfilled. Every week, she washed the family’s clothes, did all the ironing, remarking how well her childhood with the servants at Montfermeil had equipped her for these tasks, and made the butter and cream, taking pleasure in the fact that her dairy was considered to be not just the cleanest but the most elegant in the neighbourhood. Slowly, very slowly, the days passed.
Winter came early in 1795. By early November, the black clouds bringing snow began to gather in the west. Within a week, the Hudson and the Mohawk were frozen solid, and the surrounding country lay under deep banks of snow. The short dark days were broken only by occasional visits to the Schuylers and the van Rennselaers. One morning a parcel arrived from Talleyrand, containing a valuable cameo of Marie Antoinette, a gold watch and a casket, all of which Lucie had left behind in Brussels with her banker friend, and which had been appropriated by the diplomat meant to be bringing them out to her. Talleyrand, spotting the cameo in a friend’s house in Philadelphia, confronted the young man and retrieved her possessions.
Lucie was once again pregnant. This was her sixth pregnancy; but of all the children she might have had growing by her side, there was only Humbert. Towards the end of the winter, she came down with measles and was for a while very ill. But neither Humbert, who slept in her room, nor the others caught the disease, and by spring she had recovered.
With the end of the snows came an unexpected letter from France. Their sans-culottes friend Bonie wrote from Bordeaux with the news that the property sequestrated from the émigrés and the nobility during the revolution was to be restored to its rightful owners. Frédéric’s mother had already taken possession of her house and lands at Tesson and Saintes. The seal on Le Bouilh could now be lifted, but only, it seemed, if its owners returned within 12 months to sign the papers. At the farm in Troy it was as if, wrote Lucie, a firebrand had exploded, each seeing in the news a different story. Frédéric and M. de Chambeau were overjoyed, released at last from all pretence that they might wish to spend the rest of their lives in America.
Despite Séraphine’s death, Lucie felt differently. She had felt safe on the farm, and what she remembered most clearly about France was that it was the country where she had lost her youth, ‘crushed out of being by numberless, unforgettable terrors’. She dreaded going back; the idea filled her with foreboding. But she said nothing of this to Frédéric, beyond asking that she be allowed to give the four black slaves, to whom she had become much attached, their freedom. When she gathered them in the drawing room and gave them the news, they wept. Never in her life, she would write, had she felt such pleasure in an act of her own. At the ceremony of manumission, which took place in public, in the presence of the disapproving Justice of the Peace, who was not in favour of abolition, and all the assembled black slaves of Albany, Minck, Prime, Judith and her husband knelt in turn in front of Frédéric. One by one, he laid his hand on their heads in token of liberation, following the practice of ancient Rome.
The end of their American adventure came quickly. Having distributed the smaller pieces of porcelain and some of Lucie’s gowns as presents, and sold the horses, furniture and stock for good prices, Frédéric, Lucie, Humbert and the ever faithful M. de Chambeau boarded a sloop for New York. Mr Law was away, so they stayed with a French banker, M. Olive, his wife and eight children in their house on the banks of the Hudson. They found Talleyrand in residence, also preparing to leave for France, Mme de Staël having written to urge him to return as quickly as possible in order to serve the new government. For a while it looked as if they might travel together, but Lucie and Frédéric wanted to approach Bordeaux from Spain, so as to be sure that France was indeed at peace, while Talleyrand feared that Spain’s Most Catholic Majesty might take against a cleric who had not been a ‘sufficiently edifying bishop’.
All over America, the French were preparing to go home, selling up their properties and booking passages on all available ships, intensely relieved that they could now abandon their precarious lives as dancing teachers and pastry cooks. Though apprehensive about what awaited them in France, where they had lost relations, friends and possessions, they felt a sense of urgency to leave. Few of them had enjoyed their exile. They had found America too rugged, its food too peculiar, its women too virtuous and assertive. They had missed the culture, the subtlety and the many nuances of language and behaviour that were so familiar and pleasing to them. Lucie was among the very few who h
ad felt herself to be genuinely content. As for the Americans, they had found their French visitors perplexing, if elegant.
On 6 May 1796, almost exactly two years after their terrifying escape from Bordeaux, Frédéric, Lucie, M. de Chambeau and Humbert embarked on the Maria Josepha, a 400-ton English vessel bound for Cadiz with a cargo of corn. The weather was fine. One of the other passengers, Mme Tisserandot, was also expecting a baby. Lucie spent the 40-day crossing sewing for the captain and the crew, as well as making over her own clothes. By the time Cape St Vincent was sighted, the entire wardrobe of the ship was in good order.
CHAPTER TEN
Incroyables and Merveilleuses
Lucie spent the first ten days of their return to Europe in quarantine in the harbour of Cadiz, a condition imposed by the Spanish to control the spread of epidemics. She was in her sixth month of pregnancy; Mme Tisserandot, also bound for France, was in her eighth. The two women, delighted after so many days at sea to see fresh fruit, pulled up baskets of figs, oranges and strawberries from fruit sellers who rowed out to the Maria Josepha. When finally permitted ashore, the Frenchwomen found themselves the objects of considerable curiosity, a large crowd gathering to stare at their coloured gowns and straw hats as if they were two exotic beasts. To escape the ceaseless scrutiny, they bought black skirts and mantillas. Lucie, who had dysentery, felt very ill. Accustomed to the ‘exquisite cleanliness’ of America, she found their Spanish inn ‘disgustingly’ dirty.
All her life, Lucie would be captivated by new sights and places; she was naturally curious, observant about small details, and for the most part easy-going, though she was capable of being both prim and censorious. Direct herself, she disliked evasiveness in others. She could be firm, but not unkind; she appreciated kindness in others and often remarked on acts of generosity and thoughtfulness. The French Consul General in Cadiz, M. de Roquesante, a ci-devant noble turned ardent republican, to whom Frédéric had to apply for their visas, struck her as extremely unpleasant, particularly after he and Frédéric had a sharp exchange over the recent death of a hero of the Vendée. Frédéric’s unwillingness to compromise or feign was becoming more marked. But an English merchant in Cadiz, Mr Langton, married to the sister of Théobald Dillon, the officer murdered by his men in Lille, charmed her by his solicitousness.
In the evenings, when the temperature at last dropped to below 35° C, they strolled up and down the Boulevard de l’Alameda, looking out across the sea and enjoying the spectacle of small Spanish grandee children in their full finery of brocade and powdered wigs. One afternoon, on the Feast of St John, they went to watch the leading matador of Cadiz fighting bulls so magnificent that Lucie thought that each would have made the fortune of any American farmer. The moment of the bull’s death, with the matador poised gracefully for the kill, left a lasting impression on her, as did the Spanish method of keeping the bull-ring cool by spraying cold water over the awning shading the spectators.
Since Spain had concluded a peace treaty with France, most of its previously considerable army had been disbanded. Without pay or work, destitute soldiers had taken to the mountains from where they attacked travellers labouring their way up and down the steep passes. For safety, people now journeyed in convoys of 15 to 20 covered wagons, pulled by mules, the men of the party heavily armed. Though Lucie was still not very well, she was anxious to reach Le Bouilh before the birth of her baby, due in early November; she noted, with her customary robustness, that it was not in her nature to be defeated by small obstacles. Hiring their own wagon, with a wicker and tarpaulin hood, in which a mattress for her to lie on had been laid over their baggage and packed in with straw, they duly set out for Madrid. Frédéric, Humbert and M. de Chambeau perched at the front, their frisky mule trotting rapidly over good roads. Whenever they could, they did a leg of the journey by water, rejoining the convoy at a later spot. At Xeres, they spent the night in the wagon, repelled by the dirty beds of the inn.
The convoy was approaching Córdoba, crossing a long, empty plain, when Mme Tisserandot went into labour. A halt was called and Lucie helped deliver a baby girl. Since all the clothes for the baby were packed in her wagon, and the convoy was reluctant to pause for long in such a desolate spot, Lucie and the muleteer, having washed the baby in wine, wrapped her in shawls and then hastened to catch up with the rest of the party. It was night when they finally reached Córdoba. The servants at the inn, seeing what they took to be an injured woman in the wagon, apparently the victim of an attack by bandits, fled, not wishing to be called later as witnesses. In total darkness, Lucie unpacked the bags to find clothes for Mme Tisserandot and her child.
Next morning, the convoy waited an hour for the baby to be baptised in Córdoba cathedral. The convoy travelled slowly on across Spain, through groves of lemon trees, across parched plains and up into the Sierra Morena, Lucie loving the flowering pomegranate trees around the wells and the green valleys full of weeping willows, deliciously shady after the bleaching sun of the plains. It took them almost three weeks to reach Madrid.
Once again, they had letters of introduction and soon found themselves well looked after; they were received cordially by the French Ambassador, who had once served under Lucie’s father. Lucie was anxious to press on, but it was not until six weeks later that letters at last arrived from Bonie and de Brouquens, reassuring them that it was safe for them to return to France. The last stage of their slow journey, in an enormous ancient carriage pulled by six mules, with a seventh, known as the generala, out in front to guide the way, took them past the Escorial, where Lucie reflected severely that to collect so much splendour in a place of such solitude could serve no other purpose than to ‘make us aware of the futility and vanity of the works of man’. They were all much saddened by their recent parting from M. de Chambeau who, his name not yet removed from the list of proscribed French émigrés, could not go home.
‘I felt no pleasure,’ wrote Lucie, many years later, ‘returning to France.’ She was haunted by the horror of her last six months in Bordeaux, and dreaded seeing Le Bouilh, which they knew to have been taken over by the municipality. Frédéric’s mother, back in control of most of her own properties, she remembered as suspicious and obstinate. Archbishop Dillon’s house at Hautefontaine had been sequestrated. The status of her own house in the rue du Bac was unknown. And, now that the lands of the former nobility and clergy had been split up and sold, the revenues on which the family had once lived had disappeared. It was to vast debts, rather than to a comfortable income, that she and Frédéric were returning. When, stopping in Bayonne for yet more papers, Frédéric was summoned before the President of the Department to answer questions, even the presence of the reassuring Bonie could not calm her fears. Though Frédéric’s name had definitively been removed from all lists of émigrés, as had that of his dead sister Cécile, which meant that in theory their property might legitimately be returned to them, there were many hurdles still to cross.
Their first sight of Le Bouilh, on an autumn day when mists and rains traditionally cast the Languedoc in soft grey light, was grim. When they had last seen the château, in the autumn of 1793, it was a well-furnished, comfortable home, with an excellent library, fine pictures, silver and crystal chandeliers, a well-equipped kitchen and a vast amount of the finest linen. Now Le Bouilh appeared vast, gaunt, unwelcoming. The garden was overgrown, the outbuildings derelict; the immense high-ceilinged drawing rooms with their tile and stone floors echoed at every step. Not long after their escape to America, they learnt, men from the local municipality had arrived to conduct a sale of the château’s entire contents, moving from room to room like locusts until it was stripped bare, a screen, commode and secrétaire, together with three walnut chairs covered in black leather, going one day, bed-hangings, napkins, sheets, aprons, tablecloths, cushions, covers, the next. No item, however small, remained, though pouring rain and cold winds during the sales had apparently kept many buyers away. All copper, iron and lead items had gone to the mint to
be melted down for the army. The last object to go, lot 359, had been an orange tree in a pot. Surveying the desolate scene, Lucie and Frédéric set about unpacking the crates that had been sent on ahead by boat from their farm.
Much of the furniture of Le Bouilh had, it soon turned out, been bought by neighbours, either, as Lucie noted crossly, out of envy, or out of greed. By the next day, shamefaced people began appearing at the door carrying tables, chairs and mirrors, offering to sell them back at the prices they had paid for them. The priceless copper kitchen utensils, taken away to be melted down, had been overlooked at the mint and were now returned, as was Frédéric’s father’s excellent library, which was discovered unharmed in a nearby storehouse. Bit by bit, the unfinished, ungainly château began to take on something of its former appearance.
And there was an enormous, unexpected pleasure when Marguerite, having heard of their return, appeared from Paris. She had been living with Lucie’s friend Pulchérie de Valance, who had survived and been released from prison after Robespierre’s fall. Marguerite herself had been saved when a stranger in the street had pulled her into an alley-way and warned her to remove the starched white apron she always wore, saying that it was bound to inflame revolutionary tempers; she had spent the Terror looking after two small children whose parents had been arrested. Marguerite reached Le Bouilh in time to help Dr Dupouy, the timorous doctor who had looked after Lucie during Séraphine’s birth, deliver her new baby on 1 November. It was a girl and they named her Charlotte, after their dear friend Charles de Chambeau. There was once again a second child in the family.
The de la Tour du Pins were not alone in their misfortune, nor indeed among the hardest hit. The Gironde was one of the areas of France where the losses of the nobility had been the heaviest, and where the revolutionary committees had been most zealous in dividing and selling off vineyards. Some 16,400 members of the French aristocracy had emigrated during the revolution, 624 of them from Bordeaux alone. Though relatively few had perished under the guillotine–79 nobles out of the 301 condemned to death in Bordeaux, along with 24 nuns, 30 priests, 28 seam-stresses, washerwomen and cooks executed for harbouring refratory priests, 2 miniature painters and 6 scribes–those who now came home found their properties stripped down to the locks and wooden window-frames. Bordeaux itself, where the population had shrunk by almost a quarter, was silent and deserted after dark, the lamps no longer lit. The once long alleys of poplars leading up to handsome mansions of yellow stone, with white shutters and slate roofs, had been chopped down for firewood. It was clear to none of those returning how they would survive.
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