Nor was anywhere very safe. With the end of the Terror had come a surge in brigandage and lawlessness, as former Jacobins and revolutionaries found themselves without employment and those they had persecuted sought revenge. The counter-revolutionary White Terror had seen the Trees of Liberty chopped down, while royalist ‘companies of Jesus’ scoured the countryside for ‘terrorist Jacobins’. One of the first acts of the new government in Paris had been to add a seventh ministry, that of the Police, to the six agreed under the Constitution of Year III; but the new police were ineffective, not least because there was no money with which to pay them, and judges were in any case too afraid to pass sentences and witnesses too afraid to speak. The assault on France’s magnificent forests for firewood, begun during the hard winters of 1793, 1794 and 1795, had opened great tracts of land. Up and down the country, along roads that had got much worse during seven years of neglect, diligences were regularly stopped by brigands, their bands swollen by deserters from the army.
What terrified Lucie most were the gangs of so-called ‘chauffeurs’, ‘heaters’. These outlaws broke into houses where they suspected they might find money and burnt the feet of those inside over the open fire until they revealed their hiding places. Not far from Le Bouilh, chauffeurs had crippled a shopkeeper. When, in December, Frédéric set off to inspect the family properties at Tesson, Ambleville and La Roche Chalais, leaving her and the children with Marguerite, two maids and a drunken manservant, Lucie spent the nights sitting up in bed trembling with fear, listening to the creaks in the vast, echoing house, worrying that the few dilapidated planks securing the ground-floor windows would be too flimsy to protect them against intruders. ‘I longed,’ wrote Lucie later, ‘for my farm, my good negroes and the peace of those months.’ She feared for Frédéric, travelling the countryside alone. She had started having nightmares, in which he was being hunted, and from which she woke up covered in sweat, her heart ‘beating heavily and painfully’.
When Frédéric arrived back, he brought more bad news: the château of Tesson, which his father had filled with valuable pictures and furniture, had been stripped bare, its contents sold, the wallpapers torn from the walls, its shutters ripped off. The house at Saintes had been reduced to a worthless ruin. Lucie felt saddened not just for her family but for France. ‘No one,’ she wrote later, ‘would see again the room in which he had been born, or the bed in which his father had died.’
In July 1797, when Charlotte was 8 months old, Frédéric decided that he needed to go to Paris to try to put the family affairs in better order. Humbert was now 7, and both children were thriving. Frédéric’s brother-in-law Augustin de Lameth, who had spent some months in prison after Cécile’s death, had become mayor of Hénencourt, but he had lost almost all of his property in the revolution. All four de Lameth brothers had survived; the family was trying to mend the political differences that had divided them during the Terror. Mme de Montesson, Frédéric’s elderly friend, released from her own time in prison, wrote proposing that they should stay in her house. Mme de Staël was back in Paris, working hard on Talleyrand’s behalf to find him a position in the new government, as was the Princesse d’Hénin, who was staying with Mme de Poix.
Taking Marguerite and the two children, and planning to be away no longer than six weeks and to return in time for the grape harvest, Lucie and Frédéric took very little luggage with them. Lucie was still breast-feeding Charlotte. They travelled via Tesson, where Lucie saw for herself the complete destruction of the house, and where she was able to thank the elderly Grégoire and his wife for having saved Frédéric’s life during the Terror. Though as many as half a million previously landless people had become individual proprietors as a result of the revolution, having bought land at a hundredth of its true value, the countryside they saw as their hired coach rumbled its way slowly north was extremely poor, the villages filthy, the children barefoot, the inns without linen or cutlery.
Paris was very altered. The city had been overtaken by a heedless longing for happiness. No longer subdued or diminished by fear, people wanted to forget, to celebrate the fact that they were alive. Though the streets were filthy, full of wild dogs and pigs and the carcasses of dead animals, though the city had lost almost a fifth of its inhabitants to the wars, emigration and the revolution, though there had never been so many abandoned babies left on the streets, people arriving in Paris in 1797 were amazed by its air of gaiety. At least 14 of the 23 theatres had a play every night, often a tale of tyranny defeated by valiant men. A new language had been invented for the stage, a debased ‘langue poissarde’, a fishwife’s language, enriched by the vocabulary of the revolution, with new words like ‘terrorism’ and ‘decadi’ heard in the popular plays about a character called Madame Argot, ‘Madam Jargon’. In the streets were puppet shows, ventriloquists, conjurors; balloons of every colour and size floated above the city.
And people were dancing, as they had never danced before, to forget, to pretend that nothing had happened, in cabarets, in cellars, in halls and in empty former mansions, the women dressed as nymphs and Greek goddesses, scented and floating like Venuses under the chipped gold cornices. ‘There is dancing in Les Carmes, where throats were cut,’ wrote Mercier, once again chronicling the everyday life of the city, ‘in the Jesuites, in the seminary of Saint Sulpice, in the Daughters of Sainte Marie, in three or four churches, in the Hôtel Maubert and the Hôtel Richelieu…’ In the Tivoli pleasure gardens, 8 acres of flowers, artificial mountains and lakes, once the property of Boutin, treasurer to the navy and executed early in the revolution, they danced the waltz, newly arrived from central Europe. It was, observed one disapproving traveller, ‘an intimate dance, requiring the two dancers to join closely together, and to glide, like oil across polished marble’. To add buoyancy to their steps, men sometimes wore lead soles by day so that their evening pumps seemed weightless.
At a subscription dance for the ‘victims of the Terror’ at which all the guests had lost someone to the guillotine, dancers wore red ribbons tied around their necks to suggest a severed head, a ‘depravation’ noted Helen Maria Williams who passed through Paris that winter, ‘not merely of manners, but of the heart’. At balls, lit by a profusion of candles and smelling strongly of flowers, ladies’ maids hovered, waiting to replace gloves, soiled shoes and ribbons of guests who danced all night. Parisians now not only looked different, and behaved differently: they also had different tastes.
When they were not dancing, they were gambling, in spite of frequent attempts at prohibition, at lotto, trente et un, faro, backgammon, picquet, whist and all forms of cards and dice, people who had lost their fortunes risking what little they had left. The new game of roulette had become so popular that wheels were set up in public squares and in the foyers of theatres. After the claustrophobia of the revolution, Parisians longed to be outside, to walk in the gardens of the Tuileries, to ride in the Bois de Boulogne, to play ‘diable’, a form of badminton with racket and balls, among the orange trees on the Terrasse des Feuillants. After years of military bands and the beat of drums, they wanted concerts, romantic songs, comic operas. The quarrels between melodic Piccinnistes and stern Gluckistes had resumed. For a while, the harp became the preferred instrument, favoured by women after a doctor claimed its reverberations through the chest were a protection against heart problems. ‘I want Italian singers to settle in Paris,’ announced the composer Grétry, ‘Italian music is the antidote to the evil we must put behind us.’
In the absence of religion, magnificent displays celebrating patriotism, with mythical gods and goddesses, chariots and statues of Apollo, brought crowds onto the streets. In the underground Café du Sauvage, a man dressed up as an Indian, said to be Robespierre’s coachman, played the timbals and made terrible faces and noises. In the Jardin des Plantes, Baba the elephant fired a pistol with his trunk. Along the Promenade des Tilleuls, two dromedaries grazed. Parisians were reading, too, in ways that they had not read before, particularly novels, sitti
ng in cabarets de lecture, special reading rooms, or taking books out of the new lending libraries. Three poets had gone to the guillotine–Fabre d’Églantine, Jean-Antoine Roucher and André Chénier–but others were taking their place in an explosion of works in verse. Never had there been a time more dedicated to public pleasure.
Lucie and Frédéric had last seen Paris in March 1793, as the Terror was taking hold. Following the death of Robespierre and his followers, a five-member executive committee, the Directoire, had been established on 1 November 1795, elected by a new Council of Five Hundred and a second Council of Elders. Along with the monarchy and arbitrary and despotic rule, the three Estates had vanished. Having inherited an empty treasury, unpaid taxes, public institutions without funds and a near worthless paper currency, the assignats, the Directoire had nonetheless succeeded in bringing some measure of confidence and calm, introducing compulsory and free public education–though there were no teachers to teach it–and a more coherent system of taxation. France was still at war with Britain and Austria, but peace treaties had been signed with Prussia, Holland and Spain.
Every day, at one o’clock, one of the five Directors, in their ceremonial costumes of red, white, blue and gold, held public audiences in the Luxembourg. Not one of these men, as Lucie soon remarked, could be described as very impressive. There was the seductive and cynical Barras, a close-shaven, sinister-looking man both lazy and venal, whose dinner parties were the most sought after in Paris; the heavy-drinking Reubell, with legs too small for his body, reported by an English agent in Paris to his superiors in London to be of a ‘rapaciousness without equal’; the feeble, doctrinaire La Revéllière, head of the new sect of theophilanthropists; Carnot, a military engineer known for his organisational skills; and a harmless naval officer called Le Tourneur. Of these, Barras was the man of the moment. ‘He is playing the Prince,’ reported an English agent to his masters in London. Lucie would later say that they had all been ‘drawn from the dregs of the gutter’.
Mme de Montesson and Pulchérie de Valance greeted Lucie and Frédéric warmly. Lucie, noting that the French liked nothing better than someone new and different, found herself the centre of attraction. ‘The strangeness of the life I had led in America and my wish to return there,’ she noted wryly, ‘made me quite the rage for at least a month.’ One by one, the nobles who had survived the violence by living quietly on their estates, and the émigrés, returning from Holland, Spain, Italy, the German States and England, were making their way cautiously back into the city. Most were now very poor. As in Bordeaux, they found their former mansions boarded up, with signs that they were for sale; when they could, they moved back in, perching disconsolately in magnificent rooms, stripped of their mirrors, curtains and furniture. Six thousand private houses stood empty. In the Boulevard des Italiens, soon known as ‘le petit Koblenz’ on account of all the émigrés who gathered there, friends met again and cried in each others’ arms. Because no one wanted to be thought wealthy, people professed total penury. ‘The supreme bon ton was to have been ruined,’ wrote the Baron de Frémilly, ‘to have been a “suspect”, persecuted, above all in prison…’
Many returning from exile spent their days searching for their ransacked possessions along the banks of the Seine, where stalls had been set up selling porcelain, glass, furniture, tapestries, all stolen or confiscated from the houses of the çi-devant nobility. The former convent of Les Petits Augustins had been renamed the Museum of French Monuments and was now a depository for church treasures, statues of the saints, sarcophagi, obelisks, bronze casts of kings and martyrs and stained-glass windows all piled on top of each other. As Marat had remarked early in the revolution, praising those who were setting fire to the fine mansions of the Faubourg Saint-Germain, liberty could only be built on equality, and how could mansions be shared other than by demolishing them? There were melancholy outings to the cemetery of the Madeleine, where the heads and bodies brought in baskets from the scaffold had been tossed into a ‘ditch of the guillotined’.
Those who ventured as far as Versailles found more scenes of destruction, the avenues of trees cut down, the porphyry and alabaster busts cracked and chipped, grass growing in the courtyards, the magnificent furniture, pictures and tapestries sold off. In the park, the setting for so many elegant and magical receptions, the fountains stood silent, the statues mutilated, the lake a dark grey swamp. Only the Orangerie had survived, with its 1,200 orange trees, some dating to the 17th century. And the frescoed temple of Flora seemed strangely untouched, as if Marie Antoinette was about to arrive to dine beneath the painted garlands and arabesques, though the eight sphinxes crouching on the staircase had had their noses and ears chopped off. Frédéric Meyer, strolling through the Queen’s apartments in Versailles, heard the sound of flutes and a harp, playing first an andante and then an adagio. He followed the music to what had been Marie Antoinette’s bedroom, where a solitary clock was sounding the hour.
Lucie and Frédéric soon discovered that no quarter of Paris had been more profoundly altered by the revolution than the Faubourg Saint-Germain and the streets running from the rue de Varennes to the end of the rue de Grenelle. It was as if ‘an army of Huns or Vandals’ had passed that way. The Hôtel Biron, where Lucie had paid visits as a child, was now a dance hall; the Hôtel Vaudreuil, once renowned for its collection of paintings by David, Boucher, Greuze and Poussin, lay in ruins; the Hôtel de Conti was a horse market. Though Lucie’s house in the rue du Bac was relatively unscathed, still owned by Mme de Staël’s husband, the nearby convent of the Récollettes had been turned into a theatre, its saints defaced, its cloisters overgrown and full of rubbish. Of Lucie’s former neighbours, the Maréchal de Mailly, at number 1 rue du Bac, had survived the attack on the Tuileries in August 1792, only to be arrested, to escape, to be caught again and finally beheaded, at the age of 86. The Duc de Clermont-Tonnerre and his son, who had once lived between Lucie’s house and the missionary order in whose orchards and gardens she had walked as a child, had been among the last to die.
Soon after reaching Paris, Lucie went to call on Thérésia Cabarrus, married for the past three years to Tallien, by whom she had a child. She was living on the edge of the Champs-Elysées, in a charming small thatched house hidden by poplars and lime trees called La Chaumière, which looked like a country cottage from the outside but was extremely luxurious inside, with frescoes in the Roman and Etruscan style. The two women greeted each other affectionately. Recounting to Lucie the story of her ordeal in prison and her last-minute rescue by Tallien as she was about to appear before the revolutionary tribunal, Thérésia told of his subsequent furious jealousy, and how she sometimes now feared for her life. Tallien had much to be jealous about. Thérésia, whose tale of deliverance and whose exploits in Bordeaux had made her the toast of Paris, had become one of the most fashionable women in a city longing for extravagance and beauty. ‘This woman,’ observed Pitt on a visit to Paris, ‘would be capable of closing the gates of hell.’
Thérésia was to be seen at public dances, dressed à la sauvage, in flesh-coloured clinging culottes, with diamond rings on her toes, or à la Cleopatra, or à la Diane, or à la Psyche, any dress with a Greek or Roman theme. Her high-waisted, white muslin dresses, simple straw hats, shawls, preferably from Kashmir, were admired and copied throughout Paris. When she dressed as Diana, said Barras, who was widely known to be her lover, she was the ‘female dictator of beauty’. In 1795, Mlle Bertin had returned to reopen her shop in the rue de la Loi, but it was the new Journal des Dames et des Modes, started by a former abbé and professor of philosophy called La Mesangère, which was setting the tone not only for Paris but for much of Europe.
The Journal de Lyon of 21 February 1793 had been the first to use the word ‘muscadin’ to denote the opponents of the revolution, the word taken from the apprentice grocers of Lyon who smelt strongly of nutmeg. Distinguished by their exotic appearance–long, powdered hair, cravats worn right up to their bottom lip, grey or brown r
edingotes borrowed from the English, tight breeches and white stockings–the muscadins were parading around Paris in the summer of 1797, staves in their hands, occasionally brawling with the remaining pockets of Jacobins. At their more fanciful, they were known as ‘incroyables’ or rather ‘incoyables’ because they lisped their ‘r’s. Mercier particularly disliked the fashion for enormous cravats, saying that the ‘head reposes on a cravat as on a cushion in the form of a wash-basin; with others it serves as a grave for their chins’.
Their women companions, known as ‘merveilleuses’, carried fans on which were painted portraits of Marie Antoinette; they left the feeding of their babies to goats, of which there were many, wandering around the streets, because wet-nurses were hard to find. Both men and women had fleurs de lys sewn on to their clothes. As in the years leading up to the revolution, people were once again wearing the signs of their political allegiances: royalists blond wigs and black collars, Jacobins red collars and pantaloons. In the Journal des Dames et des Modes, La Mesangère suggested that nuns, released from their convents, should dress like Roman vestal virgins.
Dancing to the Precipice Page 29
