Very little of all this touched Lucie, who was in any case too serious and too poor to indulge in fashions. She laughed when she was offered 200 francs for her long fair hair, a hairdresser telling her that fair wigs were much in demand. ‘I naturally refused,’ she wrote later, ‘but from then on held my hair in great respect.’ Like the other ci-devant nobles, meeting once again in salons to revive the art of conversation, she was witnessing a new Paris rising on the ashes of the old; power had shifted from the nobility and the Church to the new rich, the bankers, the suppliers of goods to the army and the speculators, many of them using their fortunes to buy up the châteaux and mansions lying empty. Many of these people, now, held receptions more sumptuous than those under Louis XVI. Chez Mme de Staël, so it was said, ‘one sorts things out’, chez Talleyrand ‘one mocks’, and chez Mme Tallien ‘one negotiates’.
Speculation, born in the famine and misery of 1795, when the assignats lost their value as they multiplied to meet the expenses of the state, had made fortunes for those canny or ruthless enough to take risks. By 1797, Paris was in a fever of speculation, over food and soap, furniture and matches, even houses, sometimes bought and sold within days, without ever being seen, many of the deals concluded under the arcades of what was now known as Maison-Egalité, the old Palais-Royal. Here agents promised huge returns on fabulous scientific discoveries, like horses that did not need feeding, or mechanical carriages that ran on wheels. The Directoire was turning into one of the most corrupt periods in French history. Good living, complained Mercier, was making the Parisians ‘insolent, lazy, amoral and greedy’. In the house of one of the richest speculators, the cook produced a dinner of exotic birds, pies and pâtés of Indian curlews, Java pheasants and ostriches.
It was at dinner with Pulchérie de Valance that Lucie met Talleyrand again, as enigmatic and wily as ever, who casually let slip that he had just been appointed Foreign Minister. Nothing about Talleyrand would surprise her, noted Lucie, ‘unless, perhaps, it should be something lacking in taste’. Even serving an exceedingly corrupt government, she felt sure, Talleyrand would remain a very great gentleman. Talleyrand owed his appointment, so it was said, to Mme de Staël and Benjamin Constant, the pale-faced, carrot-haired romantic writer and ardent republican who was now her constant companion, and it was rumoured in Paris that Talleyrand had threatened to blow his brains out unless he was given a ministry. Talleyrand had needed help in securing power, Mme de Staël later observed, but once there ‘he had no need of anyone to keep it’.
Talleyrand now provided Lucie with a most enjoyable event, one that reminded her pleasurably of the elegance of her earlier years. His new post had coincided with the arrival in Paris of Ali Effendi, an emissary from the Sublime Porte, with an entourage of 50 attendant Turks. Since London, Berlin, Vienna and St Petersburg all had Turkish ambassadors, Paris was keen to follow suit. Ali Effendi arrived in Marseilles from Constantinople after a stormy 55-day journey and was taken aback to discover that he was expected to spend a further month in quarantine; his hosts placated him with a constant supply of fresh olives, truffles, anchovies, newspapers and yoghurt. After a royal procession across France, he reached Paris in July where the mansion of the ci-devant Princesse de Monaco had been put at his disposal. He was an instant, enormous, public success.
Within days, Turcomania had replaced Anglomania. Parisians did what they had always done when faced by an exciting event: they turned it into a fashion. Soon, women were wearing turbans and dresses à la Odalisque. The Journal de Paris, describing Ali Effendi as somewhat above medium height and livelier than his appearance suggested, remarked on his superb two-tiered turban, the top half green, the bottom white muslin, with a gold button perched on top. The Turkish emissary, they noted, wore ermine, which was apparently a summer fur, and the sleeves of his outer garment fell to well below his hands.
Ali Effendi’s visit lasted four weeks and began with a presentation of gifts to the Directors: a silk tent, ten magnificent Arab horses, precious stones, scents and essences. Night after night, balls and displays of fireworks were laid on for his benefit. Talleyrand invited Lucie to attend a lunch party in the ambassador’s honour, having arranged the room with sofas and low tables, with a sumptuous buffet, rising in tiers halfway up the wall and laden with every kind of delicious and exotic food. Leading his august Turkish guest to a divan, Talleyrand asked, through an interpreter, which lady Ali Effendi would care to have seated next to him. The Turk did not hesitate, as Lucie recorded later, adding that she was not really surprised, ‘for of all the ladies present, none could stand the brilliant light of a mid-August noon, whereas my own complexion and fair hair had nothing to fear from it’. Her gleaming skin never ceased to give her pleasure. Seated by his side, Lucie found the ambassador to be a handsome man in his 50s, who asked innumerable questions through his Greek interpreter, ‘and paid me a thousand amiable compliments’. On discovering that she particularly liked aromatic pastilles, he filled a handkerchief with a selection from his own pockets. Next day arrived a flask of attar of roses and a valuable length of green and gold cloth. To add to Lucie’s triumph–which created something of a stir–Thérésia Tallien had not been invited to the lunch.
It was very soon after her arrival in Paris that Lucie became uncomfortably aware that royalist sentiments, quite out of tune with the mood of the Directoire, were being expressed by people other than the foppish muscadins. In the salon of Mme de Montesson, deputies favourably disposed to the royalist cause talked openly about the prospects of a shift to the right and the eventual return to France of Louis XVIII, still in exile in England. Many of these people wore badges and ribbons by which to recognise each other, knotting their handkerchiefs in particular ways or wearing black velvet collars. At dinners given by their friend M. de Brouquens, who had survived the revolution in Bordeaux and returned to Paris, or in the drawing room of Mme de Staël, where Lucie spent part of every day, royalist deputies in the Assembly spoke freely of their hopes, despite the presence of the servants.
Lucie was treated as ‘ridiculous and pedantic’ when she pointed out that every word was making its way back to Talleyrand and to Fouché, the former Oratorian and arch republican recently appointed by Barras to run an unofficial secret police for the surveillance of the former nobility. The royalists had been greatly heartened by the elections in April, which had brought in a majority of avowed constitutional monarchists as new deputies, many of them men who had been imprisoned during the Terror. In May, after a plot by the left to overthrow the Directoire was uncovered and put down before it could do harm, the government swung further to the right.
At daybreak on 4 September 1797–18 fructidor, as it was known under the revolutionary calendar–Lucie was sitting on her bed feeding Charlotte when she heard loud noises coming from the street. Marguerite went to see what was happening and returned to say that soldiers and gun-carriages were pouring onto the nearby boulevard. Frédéric went off to find news. When he failed to return, Lucie and Pulchérie de Valance, modestly dressed so as not to attract attention, set out for Mme de Staël’s house, making their way through streets crowded with anxious, silent people. Several of the roads had been barricaded. Pushing their way to the front, they were in time to see a number of heavily guarded carriages pass by, in which sat several of the royalist deputies Lucie had met with M. de Brouquens. Seeing Lucie, the men waved, immediately provoking shouts of ‘Down with the royalists’ from, as Lucie wrote later, ‘a number of those horrible women who appear only during revolutions or disorders’.
They reached Mme de Staël’s apartments to learn that the Director Barras, fearing a monarchist takeover, had turned for help to Napoleon Bonaparte, the young general of the army in Italy whose military exploits had become the talk of Paris. Napoleon had despatched one of his subordinates to Paris, and the monarchists had quickly been crushed. The leaders of the conspiracy were all under arrest. Carnot, one of the two Directors involved, had fled; the other, the moderate royalist
Barthélemy, who had replaced Le Tourneur, was in prison.
Within hours, 60 right-wing deputies, including many of the men who had spoken out so freely in the salons in the Faubourg Saint-Germain, were on their way to the ‘dry guillotine’: this meant imprisonment in Guyana, the prisoners being sent across France in iron cages to the coast. Many would eventually die in Guyana. The results of the April elections were declared void and 177 of the new deputies banished. Members of the Bourbon royal family, such as the Prince de Conti and the Duchesse d’Orléans, had been rounded up and were to be deported to Spain. Over the next few weeks a military commission set up in the Hôtel de Ville passed death sentences on a number of plotters, several of them recently returned émigrés. In the name of suppressing a counter-revolutionary conspiracy, the remaining three members of the Directoire, Barras, Reubell and La Revéllière, with the support of the army, took over the administration of the state and outlawed all opposition. The first steps towards dictatorship had effectively been taken.
For the recently returned émigrés, just beginning to find their feet and retrieve what was left of their pre-revolutionary fortunes, the attempted right-wing coup spelt disaster. France’s new leaders were not prepared to see a return to power of monarchists. Under threat of arrest and trial before a military tribunal, some 150,000 people were ordered to leave Paris within 24 hours and France within a week.
Lucie’s first thought was how to warn the Princesse d’Hénin, who was staying just outside the city at Saint-Ouen with the Princess de Poix. The barricades were up all around Paris. No one was being permitted to leave without a passport. Since she was still feeding Charlotte, she was forced to take the baby with her. Passing herself off as a nurse to a friend with a valid passport to travel, she reached Saint-Ouen on foot, exhausted by the long trudge with her plump daughter. The émigrés sheltering there together, some of them under false names–the Princesse d’Hénin had a false passport in the name of a Swiss dressmaker–were appalled by Lucie’s news: many were in the middle of delicate negotiations for the return of their properties from the state.
For a while, Lucie and Frédéric, whose names had never been on any list of émigrés, hoped that they would not be affected by the new decree. They called on Talleyrand for advice, but found him too preoccupied with his own future to offer much reassurance. Even Tallien was unable to help, though he did provide them with passports. When it became clear that they, too, as ci-devant nobles at the court of Louis XVI, would have to leave France once again, they briefly considered going to Spain, and from there returning to America; but the Princesse d’Hénin, who intended to return to London, persuaded Frédéric that England would be better. The Faubourg Saint-Germain was in a state of turmoil, the streets full of unhappy and undecided people, wondering where to go and how to get there. No one could contemplate a return to the poverty and precariousness of exile without dread. Frédéric, who had been discussing the buying back of Hautefontaine, was forced to abandon all talks.
In a mood of profound gloom and uncertainty, with just two small trunks of clothes, everything else they possessed still at Le Bouilh, Lucie, Frédéric, the two children and Marguerite set out in a coach for Calais. This second emigration would prove more ruinous than the first.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
Hordes of Vagabond French
Their boat left Calais for Dover at eleven o’clock at night. Though the south-easterly wind was light and the sky cloudless, Frédéric immediately took to his bunk, overcome by his usual seasickness. Lucie went up on deck and found a hatch cover to perch on, holding Charlotte on her knee. Seated next to her was a young man who offered her a shoulder to lean against: he turned out to be the son of the editor of the Edinburgh Review, whom she had known in Boston. They spent the night talking about America; Lucie told him that if it proved impossible to return to France before too long, her plan–her wish–was to go back to the farm in Troy. With the pale dawn of an English September came her first sight of the cliffs of Dover.
By 1797, the English had become accustomed to their many French visitors, few of whom had risked, as Lucie and Frédéric had, too quick a return to France after the Terror. Fugitives from the revolution had been reaching the shores of the south coast since the summer of 1789, in waves that increased in response to each new incident of violence and each new repressive law against the French Church and the nobility. One of the first to come had been the Prince de Condé, who brought with him 28 servants; later had come soldiers, fleeing anarchy in the army, ‘non-juror’ clerics who refused to sever their vows to the Pope, aristocrats on the list of ‘suspects’, and all the wig-makers, chefs, valets and coachmen who had once looked after them. Many were unclear as to whether they were betraying the King in abandoning him to his fate, or had been driven into exile by his weakness. ‘La patrie [the fatherland] becomes a meaningless term,’ noted the Comte d’Antraigues, ‘when it has lost its laws, its customs, its habits…France for me is nothing but a corpse, and all one loves of the dead is the memory of them.’
Singly or in groups, among them entire congregations of priests and convents of nuns, these soldiers and clerics and servants had arrived, some bringing money in bags and accompanied by retainers, others destitute, bedraggled and disguised as women or sailors. When a party of 37 religious sisters from a convent at Montargin put ashore on Shoreham beach, curious spectators gathered to peer at the ‘fugitive virgins’. For the most part, those arriving had been received kindly and with generosity. While they were unlikely to ‘much contribute to our amusement’, said Gibbon, these people were entitled to pity and esteem.
Though by 1797 France was again at war with England, for the third time in 40 years, the French and the English were inextricably entangled, importing each other’s fashions and craftsmen, reading each other’s Enlightenment philosophers, sharing notions of ‘bon ton’ and good taste. When, before the revolution, the English aristocracy had visited Paris, they had mixed naturally with the inhabitants of the Faubourg Saint-Germain. Lucie’s family was in no way exceptional either in its fluent command of English, or in its many close English relations, particularly among the Catholics. The sons of recusant families were still obliged to travel to the continent to get a Catholic education. The Duc de Lauzun had shared a string of racehorses at Newmarket with Fox; the Duchess of Devonshire brought French interior decorators to Chatsworth. For the Whig women in particular, the salons of Paris, with their scholarly and formidable hostesses, to whom the great men of the day paid homage, had considerable appeal.
When the Bastille fell, the initial reaction in England had therefore been to welcome the revolution, precisely because it was perceived to be supported by Condorcet, Lafayette, Frédéric de la Tour du Pin and his father, all people the English knew and admired. For the English religious dissenters, as for the opposition Whigs, the defeat of the despotic Bourbons was a blow against tyranny. Fox spoke of the fall of the Bastille as ‘the greatest event that ever happened in the world’.
All this changed abruptly in 1792. With the attack on the Tuileries, the massacre of the priests in the prisons, and the execution of the King and Marie Antoinette, came the realisation that the bloodless revolution they had fondly imagined was an illusion. The stories of bloodshed carried across the Channel by the émigrés had shocked the English, bringing out the best in them, particularly as many of the French refugees displayed admirable stoicism in the face of their disasters. Those arriving throughout 1792 and 1793, among whom there were several thousand Catholic priests, were taken in and helped. The violence and confusion in France had lent itself naturally to caricature and provided Gillray with savage flights of fantasy, with his frolicking sans-culottes and sharp-toothed poissardes, perfect illustrations for Burke’s vision of the madness and destruction sweeping Europe.
But the French Revolution had had its own effect on England. It had rekindled a radicalism largely dormant in British politics since the early 1780s, bringing to the fore questions about human ri
ghts and social justice, questions raised by Thomas Paine in The Rights of Man, and Mary Wollstonecraft in A Vindication of the Rights of Women. The ownership of land, popular education, the role of the press and the Church, had all rapidly become topics fit for debate among people who no longer saw themselves as trapped within prescribed social spheres, but free to learn, to advance themselves and to challenge the rights of others. At the same time, renewed war with France had brought in its wake inflation, press gangs and crippling taxes. With republican stirrings and whispers becoming more audible, Pitt had responded by introducing penalties for sedition, libel and treason. The passage of the Aliens Act, in January 1793–which had caught Talleyrand in its net–had been designed to control republican spies and Jacobins; but for the French émigrés trying to reach England, it had meant more documents and passports and more daunting bureaucracy.
Burke had lived just long enough to see his warnings about a ‘despotic democracy’ in France, a ‘strange, nameless, wild thing’ liable to threaten all Europe, at first greeted as slightly absurd, at last taken seriously. In March 1797, not long before Lucie’s arrival, The Times warned against those ‘Foreigners…whose dangerous opinions, suspicious conduct and violent speeches call for the utmost vigilance and severity’, and urged that steps be taken to curb the spread of Jacobin ideas. Reports of ‘stout-made’ men landing from fishing boats, uttering ‘improper expressions relative to government’, were despatched from customs officers along the coast to London.
The England reached by Frédéric and Lucie and their children, on a blowy September morning in 1797, was therefore not as welcoming as it had been earlier. Eight years of steady arrivals, bringing some 25,000 Frenchmen, Frenchwomen and their children to England, added to growing shortages and political repression, had not made people eager to face a fresh surge of émigrés, what a British politician described as ‘hordes of vagabond French…pouring in upon us’. On the docks of Dover, as the de la Tour du Pins climbed ashore, they were treated roughly by the English customs officers, considerably worse, as Lucie observed, than they had been treated in Spain. It was not until she pointed out that she was an English subject, and gave them the names of her three English uncles–Lord Dillon, Lord Kenmare and Sir William Jerningham–that the brusque tone of the officers changed.
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