Most of the prefects had their protectors at court. Whether Talleyrand was a protector to Frédéric is not clear, but he was noticeably present at most of the crucial moments of Frédéric’s life. He would, however, have been able to do nothing to shelter Frédéric from the spies, agents and secret police who were active in every corner of the Empire, often spying not only on their neighbours but on each other. ‘Spy on everyone except for me,’ Napoleon had ordered his police; and gendarmerie, guards, aides-de-camp, prefects, generals and mayors all duly sent constant reports back to him from wherever they were.
What they had to say in the winter of 1811 was not encouraging, either about events in Belgium or in the rest of the Empire. Despite constant rises in taxation, the deficit in the Treasury was such that Napoleon had cancelled the arrears of pay owed to soldiers killed in action. Led by the Banque de France, banks had been drawn into a cycle of competitive discounting: businesses were failing on all sides. There were several bankruptcies in the Dyle. A terrible summer, with storms in some places and scorching heat in others, had combined with the British blockade to produce acute shortages of flour, and the potato so hated by the French was again back in evidence. From the provinces came reports of increased brigandage and ever more beggars. Posters were seen with the words ‘bread, work or death’.
In Paris, censorship was so extreme that the Gazette de France was reduced to talking about religion and the Journal de Paris about entertainments. The press, Réal informed the Conseil d’Etat with satisfaction, ‘is in a state of absolute servitude’. Though Mme de Staël agreed to remove 11 passages considered anti-French from De l’Allemagne, her long awaited book on German culture, Rovigo commanded that the entire edition of 10,000 copies be seized and burnt, and ordered her to leave France once again. Mme de Récamier, threatened with exile herself should she pay her friend a visit, said to Rovigo: ‘One can forgive a great man the weakness of loving women, but not that of fearing them.’
In June 1812, troops of French soldiers began passing through Brussels on their way east across the river Niemen. It was the start of the Russian campaign. Soon groups of officers, with just a few hours in which to rest and eat, appeared at the prefecture, where Lucie gave them dinner before they disappeared into the night. Orders arrived to requisition farm wagons and horses, with forage, sometimes as many as 80 or 100 carts a day.
The Grande Armée–some 600,000 men and 200,000 horses, the largest army ever assembled in Europe, with Italian, Austrian, Polish and German soldiers fighting alongside the French–was soon advancing against a retreating Russian enemy, whose scorched earth policy drew them ever deeper into Russia. At the Battle of Borodino, at the end of August, the French lost 30,000 men, dead or wounded; among them were 43 generals. Napoleon continued to advance on Moscow. How the fire that destroyed four fifths of the largely wooden city started no one discovered. By the time the French were forced to retreat, the Russian winter was on them. Less than a sixth of the Grande Armée came home.
It was some time before the full scale of the disaster became known. In Brussels the autumn passed uneventfully, broken only by Auguste de Liederkerke’s attentions to Charlotte, now 16, a tall, accomplished girl, not pretty, as Lucie noted in her straightforward way, but quick, cheerful and always helpful. ‘Her qualities of heart,’ wrote Lucie, ‘surpassed even those of her mind.’ Such was Charlotte’s love of books that her mother removed her light each night before going to bed, to prevent her daughter from reading and writing until dawn. ‘You will laugh at me,’ Lucie wrote to a friend, ‘but at the moment I am in love with a young man of 22…whom I hope to make my son-in-law.’
On New Year’s Day 1813, Auguste’s mother called at the prefecture to ask formally for Charlotte’s hand for her son. Cécile was away in a convent, preparing for her First Communion, but Lucie promised that she could return in time for the wedding. Better still, Humbert, whose ‘aptitude for business matters, zeal and love for work’ had greatly endeared him to his superiors in Florence, was to be transferred as Sub-Prefect to nearby Sens, but not before Lucie had irritated Fanny and Bertrand by her blatant attempts to advance her son’s career. Where Frédéric and the children were concerned, Lucie had very little shame. To add further to their happiness, their dear friend M. de Chambeau was not only back in France but had been posted to Antwerp, and so was able to visit them in Brussels.
It was now that a blow fell. Frédéric’s enemies had proved too powerful. One morning, when Lucie was in the prefecture and Frédéric away trying to raise more soldiers for Napoleon, a courier arrived from Paris with the news that Frédéric had been dismissed. He had, in the euphemism of the Ministry of the Interior, been ‘called to other duties’; Rovigo was thought to be behind the sacking. Lucie’s first thought was that the Liederkerke family might break off the engagement, but as soon as he heard the news Auguste insisted that nothing would cause him to change his mind. Lucie’s next step was, given her nature, predictable. M. Réal had been right to mistrust her forcefulness. Without even waiting for Frédéric to return, she left for Paris, travelling by coach through the night. ‘I decided,’ she wrote later, ‘not to give in without a struggle.’ That Paris might be consumed by the news from Russia does not seem to have occurred to her. Nor, apparently, what Frédéric would feel about her journey. It was almost always Lucie, now, who was the more forceful and resolute of the two.
Reaching the Faubourg Saint-Germain at ten o’clock next evening she went straight to Claire de Duras’s house, to find 14-year-old Félicie and 13-year-old Clara in bed and their mother out. A servant was sent to fetch her. Soon Lucie, who had developed a fever during her journey, was put to bed in a nearby apartment; a doctor arrived to give her a ‘calming potion’.
She slept all next day, rose at five, dressed in her most elegant clothes and ordered a livery carriage. Taking Claire with her, she set out for Versailles where she believed she would find Napoleon, who had hastened home ahead of his straggling small army of survivors when he learnt of a coup d’état being planned against him. The Emperor was in fact in the Trianon, recently restored for his use. Lucie took rooms in an inn and wrote out, in her careful, neat hand, a copy of a draft letter that she had brought with her, and addressed it to Napoleon. She and Claire got back into their carriage and had themselves driven to the Trianon, where the chamberlain on duty happened to be an old friend, Adrien de Mun. He promised to deliver her letter in person. That evening, a palace servant in lace and gold brought word that the Emperor would see her next day. Lucie slept soundly, rose, fortified herself with a large cup of coffee, and set out for the Trianon.
The interview with Napoleon lasted, she calculated later, exactly 59 minutes. From Napoleon’s opening words–‘Madame, I fear that you are very displeased with me’–it went extremely well. Later, Lucie would describe this encounter as one of the most important occasions of her life. Having listened carefully to her account of Frédéric’s difficulties in Brussels, including his brushes with M. Réal and General Chambarlhac and his wife, the former nun, he said: ‘I was wrong. But what can be done about it?’ As they talked, Napoleon walked briskly up and down the room, Lucie trying to keep pace with him. On his desk were papers relating to vacant prefectures. He paused, looked down the list, then asked: ‘There is Amiens. Would that suit you?’ It suited Lucie perfectly: Humbert, at Sens, would be very near. Before she left, bearing with her instructions to tell the various officials of his decision, Napoleon asked Lucie whether she had forgiven him; she, in turn, asked him to forgive her for her outspokenness. ‘You were right to do so,’ he replied. She curtsied and he walked to the door to see her out. This, too, was an honour.
A few days later, at a drawing room reception at court, she met the Emperor again. Catching sight of her standing behind a row of ladies, he came over and smiled: ‘Are you pleased with me, Madame?’ The ladies parted to let Lucie come forward. It was the last time, she wrote, ‘I was to see the great man’. Later, she would describe the charm a
nd sweetness of his smile, all the more remarkable because of the contrast with his normally severe expression.
Frédéric’s appointment to Amiens was posted in Le Moniteur. Lucie was warmly congratulated by friends who had heard of his disgrace and feared that nothing could be done to save him. Napoleon was not known to change his mind, and colleagues were amazed by Lucie’s success. She returned to Brussels to pack up the prefecture and restore the rooms to precisely the way they had been before her arrival five years earlier. Charlotte and Auguste’s wedding had been set for the end of May, and to Lucie’s delight Auguste had been appointed Sub-Prefect of Amiens, so she would not lose her daughter. Not wishing to offend the incoming Prefect by too great a show of popularity, Frédéric asked the mayor, their old friend the Duc d’Ursel, to conduct the civil ceremony at ten o’clock at night, when the streets were usually empty. Just the same, the family emerged to crowds of well-wishers, and when they returned to the house that had been lent to them by friends, they found that all the musicians of Brussels had gathered to serenade them.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
Oh Unhappy France!
Lucie, Frédéric, Cécile and Aymar, taking with them the newly married Charlotte and Auguste, arrived in Amiens towards the end of March 1813. A prosperous wool-manufacturing town, Amiens was set in the flat, somewhat marshy, malarial plains of Picardy, 150 kilometres north of Paris. Frédéric’s brother-in-law, Augustin, whose home at Hénencourt lay not far away, was waiting to introduce them to the town’s leading families. The prefecture was a charming two-storey, grey-stone, 18th-century mansion, set back from the road and reached through an imposing stone gateway; behind were pretty, landscaped gardens stretching away to fields and forests.
Lucie was delighted with the house and its grounds, saying that they made her feel that she was living in the country; but she felt rather less warmly towards the officials who governed Amiens. For the most part, she noted, the men were ‘utterly vulgar’, while their wives were remarkable chiefly for their ‘grotesque appearance and ridiculous behaviour’. They also had an absurd habit of addressing their husbands as ‘ma poule’–my chicken–or ‘mon rat’. The years of poverty and turmoil had done nothing to diminish Lucie’s taste for bon ton. Nor had they altered her belief in the innate superiority of the aristocracy, views that sometimes sat oddly with her instinct for fairness or her genuinely kind heart; or, indeed, her very real support for the liberties proclaimed by the revolution. She and Charlotte briskly resolved to mix with none but Amiens’s older families and long-established merchants.
Angélique de Maussion, whose husband had been in prison with Augustin de Lameth during the revolution, met Lucie and Frédéric soon after their arrival. Frédéric, she wrote later, was likeable, clever and warm-hearted, while Lucie was ‘belle, like the whole of her family, but also blessed with a strong character and a good mind’. Having been through so much, ‘she had become what by birth she was destined to be: a great and noble woman’. What most people remarked on now, when they were introduced to Lucie, was how formidable she could be.
One of Frédéric’s first and most unpleasant jobs was to recruit yet more soldiers for Napoleon’s struggling armies, no easy task in a country openly longing for peace. Commissioners, sent to all parts of France by the Senate not long before to help with recruitment, had returned with reports of apathy, exhaustion and resentment. Over 2 million men had been called up since 1805, and nearly a million were dead, in Spain, in Russia, in Italy, killed in campaigns fought backwards and forwards across Europe. It would later be said that half of all French boys born between 1790 and 1795 had either been killed or wounded in Napoleon’s wars. As Prefect of the Somme, Frédéric had orders to call up all remaining healthy, well-built men under the age of 35, both single and married, regardless of whether they had already served in the army, providing that they were of good moral character and stood at least 1 metre 65 centimetres in their bare feet. So acute was the shortage of young men that nearly all the guests at balls were women. The ‘sun of Austerlitz’, remarked Aimée de Coigny, had turned into a ‘ball of fire devouring France’.
When not away reluctantly seeking men for the army, Frédéric spent much of his time finding pallets, blankets and linen for the troops, and also money, through the compulsory sale of lands. The former nobility, he noted, often seemed more willing to yield up their sons than their money. As in Brussels, Frédéric did not hurry to send off ever younger boys to the front, which was once again earning him a reputation for royalist, anti-Napoleonic leanings.
But Frédéric, for all his patrician airs, remained, like Lucie, convinced that the roots of the revolution had lain in the errors and profligacy of the court and the ancien régime. Both of them regarded all talk about a possible return of the exiled Bourbons with profound misgivings. ‘All the errors and vices which had been at the root of the first revolution were still too vivid,’ wrote Lucie. ‘Their weakness would bring in its train abuses of every kind.’ Even if many of their friends–Amédée de Duras, Mathieu de Montmorency–were known to be organising a secret royalist network in central France, meeting at Ussé, Frédéric would have no part in it. The most he was prepared to do to defy Napoleon was to hold back, as he had in Brussels, on the levies of young men for Napoleon’s armies.
Amiens, surrounded by pleasant countryside and home to several of her aristocratic friends, with Humbert not far away as Sub-Prefect in Würtemberg, suited Lucie well. With false news of victories despatched back to France by Napoleon, it seemed as if the Empire remained safe. Soon after their arrival, the theatre season opened with a production of Molière’s Le Misanthrope. There was a lecture on botany, given at one of the excellent local scientific academies, and Frédéric was asked to address the chamber of commerce on the subject of a new machine for slicing beets.
Frédéric was often away, travelling around Picardy on tours of inspection, worrying Lucie by the amount of time he spent in low-lying, mosquito-infested areas. Lucie, left alone with Cécile and Aymar–Charlotte, already pregnant, was frequently absent with Auguste–wrote to Claire de Duras, hoping to mend their friendship. She described her immense pride and pleasure in Cécile, now 14 and her closest friend and companion since Charlotte’s marriage. Cécile, wrote Lucie, was clever, thoughtful and loving, and she sang extremely well; like Charlotte, she spoke and read fluently in both English and Italian. ‘Her one fault,’ wrote Lucie, ‘is that she is too good.’
For her own part, she was occasionally overcome by melancholy and despair, for which she blamed the weather of northern France and her own weakness, though her age–43–may also have been to blame. ‘This illness,’ she wrote, describing what can only have been depression, ‘for it is indeed an illness, to which I would infinitely prefer a fever or gout, makes me the unhappiest person in the world. Among other things, I think that I am going mad; I feel terrifyingly oppressed, my heart beats and my head feels heavy, and my thoughts are scrambled…’ It was the first time–indeed, the only time–that Lucie admitted openly to such feelings. For a woman whose face was so determinedly set against self-pity or self-indulgence, these frailties were both disturbing and very puzzling. She did not plan to indulge them.
Lally-Tollendal and the Princesse d’Hénin were spending the summer with the Princesse de Poix at the Château de Mouchy, not far from Beauvais. In the summer of 1813 Lucie went to join them, planning to return by way of Paris. There she hoped to see Talleyrand in order to make sense of a mysterious message that he had sent Frédéric via a colleague neither of them quite trusted. Claire was also at Mouchy with her two daughters and her new son-in-law, Léopold de Talmont. In August, Félicie, Lucie’s goddaughter, though just 15, had agreed to marry the good-looking and charming only son of the Prince de Talmont, whose father, one of the royalist heroes of the Vendée, had been killed fighting revolutionary troops. Claire, who had always loved Félicie more than Clara, had strongly opposed the match. But Félicie, who was as wilful and excitable as her mo
ther, and also very much in love, had gone ahead regardless, and was now openly more affectionate towards Léopold’s mother than towards her own.
At Mouchy, Lucie found Claire in a terrible mood, having already fallen out with Léopold, spending her days writing long angry letters to her new son-in-law, sending them by footman from one end of the château to the other. Once again resorting to what she somewhat disingenuously referred to as ‘the frankness of affectionate and sincere friendship’, Lucie argued Léopold’s case. But she was unable either to deflect Clare’s wrath or sweeten her temper, and both she and her hostess wearied of Claire’s continual scenes. Lucie was much attached to the capricious Félicie, whose liveliness and good heart she valued.
In Paris, pausing at Lally-Tollendal’s apartment only to change her dress, Lucie went straight to see Talleyrand in the rue Saint-Florentin, off the rue de Rivoli. He received her, she wrote later, ‘as always, with the amiable courtesy of long friendship’. For all his slyness and treachery, Talleyrand possessed, she wrote, ‘greater charm than I have ever known in any other man. Attempts to arm oneself against his immorality, his conduct, his way of life, against all the faults attributed to him were vain. His charm always penetrated the armour and left one like a bird fascinated by a serpent’s gaze.’ Aimée de Coigny would also write of serpents in the context of Talleyrand, saying that, like a snake with its skin, he changed his moods, but with a swiftness that could be terrifying. Talleyrand, as enigmatic as ever, asked Lucie to delay her departure for Amiens by 24 hours; but he refused to say why.
Dancing to the Precipice Page 41
