Lucie had not met either Napoleon or Josephine. But she had known and often danced with Josephine’s first husband, M. de Beauharnais, just before the revolution, when he was reputed to be the finest dancer in Paris. Instinctively admiring of Napoleon’s military victories, she felt ambivalent about Josephine’s social pretensions, remarking, in her most lofty manner, that Josephine, the daughter of a plantation owner from Martinique, had not possessed the necessary degrees of nobility to make her a fully accepted guest at Marie Antoinette’s court. However, Lucie and Josephine were distantly related through Mme Dillon, whose mother was Josephine’s aunt, and soon after reaching Paris Lucie received an invitation to call. Mindful of her own more elevated social standing, and sensing that it was just a move to win over a former lady-in-waiting to Marie Antoinette, Lucie decided to delay. ‘I determined,’ she wrote later, with the strong sense of herself that was becoming more marked, ‘to increase the value of my condescension by making her wait a little.’
When she did finally consent to call, she found herself captivated by Josephine’s open and friendly manner, and by her evident desire to help as many of the émigrés return to Paris as possible. In the Tuileries, Josephine had three small black boys-in-waiting and a Mameluke in Turkish dress at the door. ‘She bore herself like a Queen,’ wrote Lucie, ‘though not outstandingly intelligent, she well understood her husband’s plan: he was counting on her to win the allegiance of the upper ranks of society.’ It was not, she added, a difficult task: everyone was ‘hastening to gather around the rising star’. In 1800, Josephine was 37; she was not exactly pretty, but she had delicate features and all who knew her remarked on the kindness of her voice and expression, and her ‘perfect’ figure, even if some could not help adding that her complexion was suspiciously dark and her teeth extremely poor.
Napoleon had begun confiscating art in 1794 while campaigning in the Netherlands and the Rhineland, when four commissioners–a botanist, an architect, a librarian and a geologist–had been despatched to the conquered territories to select and send back furniture, books, maps and pictures. In 1798, in the wake of his military victories in Italy, had come priceless books from Pope Pius VI’s magnificent library. They had reached Paris in time to be paraded around the Champs de Mars on the anniversary of Robespierre’s fall, escorted by a procession of curators and archivists, and by a number of ostriches, gazelles and camels, which happened to have arrived at the same time from North Africa. The arrival of carts, groaning under trophies, Veroneses from Padua, Leonardo da Vincis from Milan, pearls and precious stones from Bologna, had become a familiar sight on the streets of the capital.
Never had there been a greater appetite for the new, to be fed by new foods–salami from Bologna, sweetmeats from Egypt–by new meals–le thé, and a déjeuner à la fourchette of kidneys and pickled onions which could be taken at any time of the day–and even by new smells. Consular Paris smelt delicious, at least for the rich, the fashion for all things Greek including strongly scented baths: Thérésia took hers in strawberries and raspberries. Even language was new. The exaggerations that had marked the conversations in the pre-revolutionary salons of the Faubourg Saint-Germain with their flowery expressions of loathing and passion, had been replaced by shorter, sharper phrases. It made women, said Mme de Genlis, sound less affected, but at the same time colder and less welcoming. No longer did men lower their voices when addressing women or refrain from paying them direct compliments. Gone was the chaperone doing embroidery in one corner when a man came to call, and gone were the two lackeys, with flares, accompanying women out at night. Before the revolution, remarked Mme de Genlis wistfully, aristocratic ladies had required ‘witnesses and light’.
In 1800 the very fabric of the city itself seemed to change day by day. Dresses worn white one day, were zigzagged in violet or blue the next; ribbons were first striped, then chequered. Carriages were higher off the ground, then lower. In the houses of the rich bankers and speculators in the Chaussée d’Antin–the Faubourg Saint-Germain had been abandoned as too shabby–Percier and Fontaine, drawing on the recent excavations at Pompeii, were producing interiors in violets and pale greens, pastoral scenes giving way to the geometrical, garlands to winged sphinxes, caryatids, Venuses, nymphs and Graces, painted, chiselled or sculpted, in marble, leather and bronze. Salons became atriums. The moribund silk industry in Lyons was undergoing a rapid transformation, as Napoleon insisted that Anglomania should be forsaken in order to revive French textiles. In the rue Mestrée, the Frères Jacob were charging exorbitant prices for furniture made from mahogany and maple, for ebony clocks with gold figures and Egyptian hieroglyphics, for imitation marble and porphyry.
Much of this new longing for luxury was being expressed in clothes, where wigs of every colour, from canary to orange, had suddenly come into fashion. Thérésia was said to own 30. The Chaussée d’Antin, said an English visitor disapprovingly, was full of men who looked like women and women who looked like prostitutes, even if, in the Tuileries, Napoleon let it be known that he was not in favour of so much nudity, and preferred to see his guests in decorous white silk and satin. Undergarments, abandoned during the Directoire, were reappearing. The men, on the other hand, he wished to see in uniform. One of the first decrees issued by the Consulate had been that Consuls, ministers, members of the Legislative and the Conseil d’Etat were all to have their own official uniforms, in varying shades and degrees of gold, lace, embroidery and plumes, outfits that would become gaudier and more theatrical as the years passed.
A special regiment of young volunteer hussars, in which the sons of the old noble families hastened to enrol, among them Frédéric’s 18-year-old nephew Alfred de Lameth, were decked out in yellow, to be nicknamed ‘canaries’ by the people of Paris. August von Kotzebue, a German writer who visited Paris at around this time, remarked on the extraordinary amount of jewellery that women wore at night, seldom leaving their houses without seven or eight rows of gold chain around their necks, rings on every finger, medallions studded with diamonds and gold pins in their hair. Mme Récamier wore pearls, claiming that diamonds did not suit her as well. For those who wished to keep abreast of these changing styles, Le Journal des Dames et des Modes had separate supplements for furniture and decoration and was available in the cabinets de lecture, where issues could be rented by the hour. When the news was good, the Journal had its models smile. But whether good or bad, the models were always elegant, reclining on beds, watering flowers or feeding birds, for the main occupation of women now was to be elegant.
While Napoleon was in Egypt, Josephine had bought Malmaison, a three-storey, 18th-century stone house just outside Paris, with 300 acres of parkland, vineyards and fields running down to the Seine. She furnished it with sphinxes and a great deal of malachite, ebony, marble and bronze and a ‘patriotic’ bed in the shape of a campaign tent with drums for stools. When Lucie was invited to Malmaison, Josephine insisted on taking her on a complete tour of the house, stopping by every picture and sculpture to explain how each had been the gift of some grateful foreign court. Lucie was not just bored, but cross. ‘The good woman,’ she wrote later, ‘was an inveterate liar. Even when the plain truth’–that they had all been looted at the point of a sword–‘would have been more striking than an invention, she preferred to invent.’
Formality and etiquette were already beginning to cast an oppressive hand over life in the Tuileries and at Malmaison, and Napoleon had turned to Mme de Montesson and Mme de Genlis for the bon ton he wished to see around him. At her new school in Saint-Germain, Mme Campan, Marie Antoinette’s lady-in-waiting, was teaching the daughters of the speculators and bankers the manners of the ancien régime.
On the anniversary of 14 July, Frédéric and Lucie accompanied M. de Poix to watch a formation of veterans of the recent French victories at Marengo, many of them wounded and in tattered uniforms, carrying the standards and flags captured from the Austrians. They were surprised to find the crowds quiet and apathetic. A longing f
or peace and order, an exhaustion with turmoil and military valour, seemed to have settled over the city. Already people were beginning to talk of Robespierre and the ‘reign of Terror’ as if it had all happened somewhere else and a long time ago.
In September, taking with them as a tutor for Humbert M. de Calonne, a ‘non-juror’ priest who had spent the years of revolution in exile in Italy, they set out for Le Bouilh. They had neither the money nor the inclination for life in the new Paris. While Frédéric travelled on his own to see his mother’s lands at Tesson on the way, Lucie hired a carriage large enough for herself, Marguerite, M. de Calonne, a maid and the three children. Humbert, who was 10, perched up beside the coachman. They made very slow progress, seldom covering more than 75 kilometres in 24 hours; the roads remained appalling, despite a new toll designed to raise money for repairs.
At Cholet, near Angers, they fell in with a woman on her way to Bordeaux to sell cloth. With brigands menacing many of the main highways, they were pleased to travel in convoy. It was from this woman, who had fought with the royalists, that they learnt the full story of the Vendée’s long battle against revolutionary France, and the brutality with which it had been crushed, Cholet itself having been virtually destroyed in the fighting. For Lucie, the story of the Vendéen uprising came as an almost complete surprise. In her five months in Paris, she had heard little mention of it.
They found Le Bouilh, which they had left in the care of a reliable housekeeper, almost untouched; the land, however, had been neglected, and with the price of wine much reduced by continuing hostilities with England, the estate was worth almost nothing. The conscientious and hard-working Frédéric was neither a manager nor a businessman. The house in the rue du Bac had been sold for very little, Tesson and the estates at Saintes were either in ruins or had been sold, Hautefontaine had been taken by the state. To try to build up some kind of security, for Humbert was growing up and would soon be in need of a career, Frédéric bought a distillery, hoping that the higher profits from eau-de-vie might bring in a decent income.
The ungainly château began to fill up. A cousin of Frédéric’s called Mme de Maurville arrived; she was the impoverished widow of an admiral and her only son had been a pupil at Burke’s school for émigrés in London. Before long, they were joined by the Princesse d’Hénin, from whom Lucie never seemed able to escape for long, accepting with remarkable forbearance the volatile and domineering older woman. The Princesse would stay at Le Bouilh on and off for almost two years. Though the household was constantly thrown into turmoil by her capriciousness, and no one dared oppose her for fear of provoking a tantrum, Lucie accepted and appreciated her evident love for Frédéric, even if she doubted that the Princesse felt much affection for herself.
The Princesse d’Hénin brought with her Elisa, Lally-Tollendal’s 14-year-old daughter, a docile, affectionate girl who had been learning the ways of the ancien régime at Mme Campan’s academy. Lally-Tollendal wanted Elisa to live at Le Bouilh and agreed to pay the de la Tour du Pins the same fees as he had been paying Mme Camban, an arrangement Lucie found embarrassing but necessary. She was fond of the biddable Elisa, saying that her mind had been ‘completely neglected’, and she taught her English, leaving Frédéric to take history and geography and M. de Calonne Italian. With her usual clear and sometimes chilly eye, Lucie observed that Mme de Maurville and Elisa were ‘both about equally lacking in intelligence’, and she suspected that their feelings towards herself were probably closer to respect and awe than to affection. She added: ‘Despite whatever may have been said of me, I am not a domineering woman.’ Perhaps not; but she was certainly forceful, and becoming more so.
In the evenings, reverting to a habit started in the first years of their marriage, Frédéric read aloud to the assembled household. The vast château, with its high-ceilinged rooms and echoing halls, was filled with noise and children. There were occasional visits to Bordeaux, where the city’s fortunes were gradually rising, as American ships were once again docking in the port, and ways were found to circumvent the British blockade. The wine harvest of 1798 had been one of the best of the entire 18th century. Under Napoleon’s drive to revitalise the country, an envoy had arrived from Paris to run the police; the streets had been cleaned and lit by the new oil lighting; a fire service had been set up, a literary circle established, lycées were opening. The weeks passed, peaceful and contented. ‘I was very happy,’ noted Lucie, many years later, ‘we were at last all united and in our own house.’ Humbert, Charlotte and Cécile were all healthy.
Another visitor was Claire de Duras and her two small daughters, Clara and Lucie’s goddaughter Félicie. Claire had returned alone to Paris, living with her mother-in-law while she tried to arrange for the names of Amédée and of her own mother to be removed from the list of proscribed émigrés. She was taking steps to reclaim the Kersaint lands and houses. Though it was some time before Amédée, First Gentleman of the Bedchamber to the exiled Louis XVIII, was allowed back, they were planning to buy the white, turreted medieval château of Ussé overlooking the Indre valley. Before leaving Paris, Claire had opened her own salon, gathering around her people who still dreamt of a Bourbon restoration and were irked by France’s increasing subservience to Napoleon. Lucie found Claire agreeably changed; she observed crisply that Claire, having accepted that she would never win people with her looks, had fallen back on her intelligence and her wit, of which she had a great deal, and was clearly using them to good effect. Until now, Lucie, always moving, always alert for trouble, had had neither the time nor the place to enjoy close friendships with other women. With the difficult and self-obsessed Claire, she began to explore the possibilities of intimacy.
It was from her visitors that Lucie followed Consular life in Paris. To celebrate the first anniversary of 18 brumaire the famous ballooning couple, M. and Mme Garnerin, rose above the city before sending down a small dog suspended from one of Garnerin’s fashionable new parachutes. Paris had lost none of its delight in spectacles. But soon after, as the First Consul was in his carriage on the way to hear the first performance of Haydn’s Creation, an ‘infernal machine’ had exploded in a water wagon along his route, killing 20 people and destroying several houses, though Napoleon and Josephine were both unhurt. There was also news of Talleyrand, whom Napoleon, in keeping with the stricter moral tone of Paris, had obliged to marry his mistress of many years, Catherine Grand, the former wife of a British civil servant in Calcutta, who had been very beautiful but was reputed to be getting fat. It was said that she had once entertained Édouard Dillon, ‘le beau Dillon’, naked, covered only by her immensely long hair. And the Consuls were finally allowing the return of all the émigrés, except those excluded on account of their open hostility to the new government, though those who accepted Napoleon’s amnesty for their past misdeeds were kept under surveillance and warned that they might be expelled again at any time. Lucie and Frédéric’s great friend M. de Chambeau was at last on his way home.
For some, it had all come too late. Of the 14 male members of a family called de Jallays, all were dead, killed off by prison, the guillotine, penury or the war. And there were many thousands of families made permanently destitute by the forced sale of their lands. At a hospice in Paris could be seen elderly noblewomen, sitting on a row of chairs outside the door. Whenever they caught sight of someone they believed to have taken any of their former possessions, they withdrew silently into the chapel to pray.
Mme de Staël, too, was running into difficulties. She had published her novel Delphine, to considerable acclaim. But her glittering salon, at which she entertained ardent royalists with her disquisitions on platonic love, Protestantism and the Enlightenment, talking rapidly, never at a loss for words, her eyes sparkling with vivacity and wit, and looking, as one visitor remarked, ‘more virile than feminine’, had attracted the attention of Fouché’s spies. After Napoleon abruptly dismissed 20 members of the Tribunat, among them her companion Benjamin Constant, Mme de Staël had taken
to writing mordant epigrams about the ‘sultan’. The day came when Napoleon decided to tolerate her no longer. Mme de Staël was ordered to withdraw to no closer than 40 leagues from Paris. It would be ten years before she was able to return and exile was extremely painful for her. It was only in Paris, she said mournfully, that ‘French conversation could be found’.
Mme de Staël was not the only Frenchwoman who had turned to fiction. Claire de Duras and Mme de Genlis were both taking up their pens to produce novels about duty, devotion and unhappy love affairs, in a world suddenly devoted to luxury and ostentation, in which women were no longer the centre of their worlds but relegated to the edges. In many of these books–published, it was said, at the rate of four a day–it was sometimes as if only the classical myths could expiate a sense of guilt about the death of the King and the end of the monarchy.
Among the returning émigrés were many priests, ‘non-jurors’ who had escaped the guillotine and spent the revolution in the Catholic countries surrounding France. Over 24,000 priests had gone into exile, a far greater number than the nobility. Until the summer of 1801, the only religious cult tolerated in France remained that of the theophilanthropists, deists believing in God but not in a Church. But France had tired of civic and philosophical holidays, of the forced jollity of feast days celebrating the virtues of Marcus Aurelius or the heroism of William Tell. When Chateaubriand, a man tuned to nostalgia, published his Génie du Christianisme, he found willing listeners not only in the Chaussée d’Antin and the Faubourg Saint-Germain but in the Tuileries. Like Mme de Genlis, Chateaubriand blamed Voltaire for inciting atheism. Dechristianisation, he said, had ruined the prestige and power of France; religion was all about the soul, conjugal love, filial devotion and maternal tenderness, and without God, men turned to crimes that no temporal laws could check.
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