Lucie was not alone in fearing the cross-currents of intrigue and discontent. Writing to Castlereagh in October, Wellington remarked that though Paris seemed tranquil, ‘there exists a good deal of uncertainty and uneasiness in the mind of almost every individual that is in it’. The Comte d’Artois, surrounded by a group of ultra-royalists–the ‘ultras’–made little secret of his desire to abrogate the Charter and restore royal absolutism. Much of the army, on the other hand, put on half-pay in an effort to reduce France’s vast debts, mourned Napoleon’s departure. Fouché, who had abandoned Napoleon, nonetheless spoke yearningly of a regency under Marie-Louise, or even of having the Duc d’Orléans on the throne instead of Louis XVIII. There were complaints on all sides of Louis’s deafness to the mood of the country. In Queen Hortense’s drawing room, which had become a meeting place for disaffected soldiers and courtiers, young men wore her favourite flower, a violet, in their buttonholes, as a sign of their attachment to the exiled Emperor. The corridors of the Tuileries were full of rumours about Napoleon.
Lucie had been right to feel apprehensive. One morning, couriers, having ridden day and night from the south, brought the news that Napoleon had landed with 900 men in Golfe Juan. He had been on Elba for just ten months. It was the first of his Hundred Days. ‘Soldiers,’ declared the deposed Emperor as he travelled north, unopposed and gathering entire garrisons along the way, ‘in my exile I heard your voice.’ Maréchal Ney, who had fought heroically during the Napoleonic wars, then been among the first generals to rally to Louis XVIII, was hastily despatched to check Napoleon’s advance. Swearing before he left to return with the former emperor in an iron cage, he had a change of heart and joined Napoleon instead.
When word of Napoleon’s return reached Vienna, where the Congress was still in session, the four Allied powers declared war, not on France, but on Napoleon personally. Bonaparte, said Talleyrand, was a ‘threat to world peace’. Frédéric, declaring that his job as plenipotentiary ‘now seems to me insignificant’, asked Talleyrand whether he might return to France. Unlike Ney, Frédéric, having given his allegiance once again to the Bourbons, was not about to go back on his word. Talleyrand hesitated, then agreed to let Frédéric go south in order to raise support for the King among soldiers garrisoned in Toulon, and to convey to the Duc d’Angoulême, stationed in the Rhone valley, assurances of Allied commitment.
Travelling via Genoa and Nice, Frédéric reached Toulon, talked for four hours to the garrison, where he found the men extremely reluctant to support the Bourbons and eager to see Napoleon in power again, and went on to another garrison in Marseilles. He arrived to learn that the Duc d’Angoulême had already capitulated to Napoleon. Standing in the main square, Frédéric addressed the military and civilian authorities of Marseilles, as well as the Gardes Nationales and the people of the city, explaining the position of the Allies. It was his hope, he declared, that Louis XVIII would not lose his throne. The assembled crowds made it clear that it was not a hope they shared. After this, deciding that there was nothing more that he could do except ‘give way before the storm’, he took a boat to Genoa. Thrown off course by heavy winds, he reached Barcelona instead and from there made his way to Madrid and then Lisbon, where he found a ship bound for England. He stayed 24 hours in London, and dined with the Duchesse d’Angoulême, who had managed to escape and cross the Channel. He was certain, he assured her, that the Allies would do all they could to return Louis XVIII to the throne. With ‘tears in her eyes’, Frédéric reported later, the Duchess replied: ‘I believe you. The King will return to France. But, oh unhappy France.’ (The Duchess, remarked Napoleon later, was the ‘only man of her family’.)
In Paris, news of Napoleon’s approach had been greeted with extreme alarm. Princes, courtiers, ministers and their entourages piled their valuables into carriages and scattered north, west and east. For many of them it was their third or even fourth departure into exile. At midnight on 19 March, in pouring rain, Louis XVIII left for Lille, from where, after much uncertainty, he made his way to Ghent. Lucie, having decided to go to Brussels, went to the Ministry of the Interior to collect money owed to Frédéric. She was told to come back later for the money.
In the rue de Varennes, the Princesse d’Hénin and the now extremely stout Lally-Tollendal were frantically packing; they, too, had decided to make their way to Brussels. It was some hours before sufficiently strong horses could be found to drag their vast carriage, and it was not until late that the party finally set out. Lucie was delayed further by her banker, and by the time she had collected 12,000 francs in napoléons, there were very few available horses left in Paris. She spent the night at her window, anxiously watching soldiers file past, bunches of violets attached to their uniforms, sign of their allegiance to Napoleon, very visible by the light of the street lamps. At six next morning, two puny horses and a small barouche were produced and Lucie, Cécile, Aymar and a young Belgian maid set out for Brussels. Humbert had vanished somewhere with the Black Musketeers. The Faubourg Saint-Germain was deserted. It was Lucie’s fourth flight into exile.
On 20 March, Napoleon arrived back in the Tuileries. The fleurs de lys were removed, the bees painted back on. Just a week before, thousands of people had lined the quays of the Seine to watch the first steam boat come up the river.
Lucie reached Brussels without trouble, and was soon installed in a rented apartment in the old city, where she met up with Princesse d’Hénin, Claire Duras and her mother and daughter, all once again refugees. It was many worrying days before she had news of Humbert or Frédéric. Then Charlotte arrived from Vienna, to describe how, with the news of Napoleon’s advance, the Congress had dissolved and kings, statesmen and courtiers, instantly forgetting their differences, had scurried for home. Lucie was not greatly comforted to learn that Frédéric had insisted on going south in search of the Duc d’Angoulême. To Mme de Staël, who was back at Coppet and to whom she had become much closer in recent months, she wrote asking whether she had heard from him. ‘If you only knew, my dearest, how acutely anxious people who feel deeply and are unable to take life lightly suffer at times like this, you would guess how I feel…This is the sort of situation that wears my mind down like a nail file…’ Brussels, she wrote, had become a military camp, full of cannons, drums and trumpets, with everyone fearful of a sudden invasion by Napoleon’s troops. ‘Goodbye my dear, write to me, love me as you do those for whom you care most deeply.’ Then she added: ‘If, at this moment of trial, God were to send skirts to all those in Brussels who are not real men, we would find ourselves in the midst of an enormous convent.’
One evening, when Lucie and Claire were together, a servant appeared to say that there was a ‘gentleman’ of their acquaintance who wished to speak to them but did not dare enter as he was not correctly dressed. Even in the middle of war, the manners of the court had to be observed. It was the Duc de Berri, who told them that a band of brigands had attacked his carriage and made off with everything he possessed. Lucie, who still had many friends in Brussels, arranged for a new wardrobe to be assembled. She also called on the Prince of Orange, who, after the defeat of Napoleon at Leipzig, had been made Prince Sovereign of Belgium and the United Provinces. The Prince received her warmly in the very rooms that had been hers when Frédéric was Prefect to the Dyle. ‘In this salon,’ he told her, ‘I try to discover ways to be as well loved as your husband was.’ (‘Alas,’ wrote Lucie later, ‘the poor prince never succeeded.’) Lucie mentioned her son-in-law Auguste to the Prince, who agreed to take the young man on to his staff. When it came to obtaining favours for those she loved, Lucie was ruthless.
In Ghent, a prosperous cotton-and paper-manufacturing town, Louis XVIII was lent a fine 18th-century mansion with a large hall, where he and those of his ministers and courtiers who had followed him met every day to discuss the day’s news. The court in exile, presided over by the ever present de Blacas, remained a centre of intrigue, ultras and royalists, officers and diplomats, speculators, visito
rs and spies all spreading rumours and gossip. Chateaubriand, who, to his great satisfaction, had been appointed interim Minister of the Interior, had started a daily paper, Le Journal Universel, to which Lally-Tollendal contributed articles. Though there was a cautious feeling of optimism that Napoleon would soon be defeated, the foreign powers appearing to be unanimous in their intention to crush him, the émigrés lived frugally, remembering the money squandered at Koblenz.
The weather was fine and warm and there were occasional outings to the surrounding countryside, to pause at inns to eat fish from the rivers, washed down with Louvain beer. On Sundays, the entire French community dressed up to accompany the King, in his uniform of pale blue silk embroidered in silver, to Mass in the cathedral. The loss of his kingdom had not diminished Louis’s appetite. On the night of his arrival in Ghent, he polished off 100 oysters. Unlike Napoleon, who wished to get through his meals in under ten minutes, the King spent hours at table, savouring the sauces, trying out new dishes, tasting the Lafittes and the Tokais he particularly enjoyed, and the truffles in champagne, to which he was very partial. In Ghent, Louis’s more moderate views were being constantly challenged by d’Artois and the ultras gathered round him, who insisted that Napoleon had been able to return precisely because the Charter had been so liberal, and talked of the punishments they would mete out, once the Bourbons were back in power, to those who had rallied to the former Emperor. Talleyrand, playing a waiting game, did not hurry to Ghent.
In Paris Napoleon’s return had not proved as triumphal as he had hoped. Though large sections of the army had indeed gone over to him, drawn by his audacity, or disenchanted by the restored Bourbons, there were few cheers on the Champs de Mars when he proclaimed a new liberal republic. Parts of France had remained royalist, and he was having trouble raising men for the coming battles against the Allied powers. James Gallatin, a young American who had accompanied his father to Paris, noted that at the Opéra one night Napoleon looked ‘fat, very dull, tired and bored’. Fanny, to her delight, was back in Paris, having returned with Madame Mère on a 74-gun ship of war sent by Murat to collect them from Elba.
Frédéric was eventually able to make his way to Brussels. For a while, the family was reunited, except for Humbert, who was with the Musketeers in Ghent. Humbert, Lucie wrote to her cousin Charlotte Beddingfield, ‘at this moment of crisis is showing himself to be as noble, strong and manly as any loving mother could wish for’. Like Vienna at the height of the Congress, Brussels was immensely social. ‘This is without exception,’ wrote one young society lady to her mother in England, ‘the most Gossiping Place I ever heard of.’ Lucie complained wryly to Mme de Staël that she sometimes wished that God, who had given her the power of thought but not that of speech, had withheld speech as well, and made her deaf and dumb into the bargain, for she loathed ‘chatter’.
Wellington had reached Brussels early in April; on 3 May he was appointed commander-in-chief of the Dutch and Belgian forces. Drawing up his men for the definitive battle against Napoleon, he had decided to intermingle veteran soldiers with fresh recruits, regular soldiers with militia; he complained that his army of 92,000 men was ‘weak and ill-equipped’ and his staff very inexperienced. To keep up morale, Wellington insisted on attending and giving parties, and he went to watch the English play cricket at Enghien; but on 8 June he warned the Duchess of Richmond not to organise a picnic too close to the border with France. In L’Oracle, Brussels’s daily paper, Wellington was referred to as the ‘hero of our age’. For her part, Lucie herself doubted that Napoleon would ever invade Belgium. The Emperor, she told Mme de Staël, was by all reports a ‘changed man’. From all sides she had heard that his claws had been drawn and that he was now ‘all moderation, sweetness and liberality’.
In 1814, waiting to be sent as Governor General to Canada, Charles, 4th Duke of Richmond and former Lord Lieutenant of Ireland, had moved to Brussels, taking over a house that had belonged to a carriage-maker in the rue de la Blanchisserie. Its former ballroom, used by the carriage-maker as a factory, had been papered in a pattern of roses and trellises, and it was here that on the night of 15 June the Duke and Duchess gave a ball. Most of the 222 guests were English, the men nearly all senior officers in Wellington’s army, but Lucie and Frédéric were invited, together with Charlotte and Auguste. Wellington had received word that Napoleon had crossed the border, driven back a Prussian corps and occupied Charleroi, but he decided to let the ball go ahead so as not to spread alarm. As the evening wore on, the officers slipped away. Some had time to reach their barracks and change out of evening dress; others had arranged for servants to stand by with uniforms and horses. Among those who hastened away was Auguste, who went to join the Prince of Orange. But the dancing went on, and after supper was served at midnight, the bagpipes were played.
The Battle of Waterloo was fought between Napoleon and the Allied forces of Britain, Germany, Belgium, Holland and Prussia, with slightly more men and guns on the French side. At dawn, the outcome of the battle still uncertain, the inhabitants of Brussels, fearing the possible arrival of the French, began packing. From the city’s ramparts, Lucie watched cart-loads of wounded men arriving from the battlefield. There was a constant booming from the cannons and heavy rain had turned the surrounding countryside into mud. Suddenly a troop of cavalry appeared out of the rain, and galloped through the streets, scattering the carts of wounded men and overturning carriages piled high with baggage, leaving a trail of cases and clothes. Rumours spread that the French were arriving. ‘It was the most terrible sight I have ever seen,’ Lucie later wrote to her English cousin Charlotte. ‘Nothing can quite convey the idea of a town of 70,000 people seized by panic, all trying to flee at once. It seemed as if the end of the world had come.’ It was some time before reassuring messages arrived, with the news that victory had gone not to Napoleon, but to the Allies.
As it gradually became clear, over the next few days, that Napoleon was retreating towards Paris, his army having virtually ceased to exist, people set out for the battlefields to see what they could do for the wounded. Brussels soon became a vast army hospital, 20,000 wounded men taken into churches, covered markets and private houses. Among the dead and dying were officers from the Duchess of Richmond’s ball, some still in silk stockings, breeches and buckles, having not had time to change into their uniforms. On 22 July, Lucie wrote to Charlotte that she had come across her young cousin Browne, the son of Lord Kenmare, lying wounded in a shed by the river with a smashed thigh and broken leg; she had taken him home with her to care for.
Over the coming weeks, visitors to Brussels would get their coachmen to take them out to Quatre-Bras and Mont-Saint-Jean, to look at the skeletons of the fallen horses and collect musket balls as mementoes. ‘Alas,’ wrote Lucie to her cousin Charlotte, reviewing the events of the past few days with her clear and sceptical eye, ‘I think that poor France is forever lost. I cannot believe that what has just taken place was the way to save her.’
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
Embarking on a Career of Grief
This time, the Allies were not quite as forgiving. During Napoleon’s Hundred Days, much had been said and written about Louis XVIII’s failure to govern, and the need to find other solutions for France, possibly in the shape of his cousin Louis-Philippe, son of the guillotined Duc d’Orléans. But the Battle of Waterloo, and Wellington’s continued preference for the Bourbons, won the day. Louis XVIII was to be given back his crown. An armistice was signed on 3 July; the Allies entered Paris on 7 August.
A young officer called Alexandre Mercier, advancing towards the capital with the Allied troops, later described scenes of looting, destruction and drunkenness as châteaux were broken into, portraits sliced out of their frames with knives, furniture smashed, wallpapers stripped from walls, marble fireplaces shattered into splinters. In one château, Mercier came across a room ‘which seemed to have been chosen as a place of execution for porcelain…The most ravishing Sèvres and Dresden vases, tea sets,
all piled up in fragments on the floor.’ In another, soldiers had dragged their bayonets across a fresco of a forest with nymphs playing in a pond. General Blücher had announced his intention of blowing up the Pont d’Iéna, named after a Prussian defeat in 1806, but the bridge was saved when Wellington posted a British sentry to stand guard.
In late June, Louis XVIII, travelling behind the Allies, met Talleyrand in Mons. Napoleon had abdicated once again and Fouché had been acting as provisional governor. Chateaubriand, who was at Saint-Denis when Fouché and Talleyrand came to greet the King, left a memorable description of the moment. He saw, he later wrote, ‘passing in the shadows, Vice leaning on the arm of Crime’, Fouché and Talleyrand, as ‘the loyal regicide, kneeling, laid the hands which caused the head of Louis XVI to fall between the hands of the brother of the royal martyr; the renegade bishop stood surety for the oath’. Neither would receive the silver medal of loyalty, with its portrait of the King on one side and the word ‘fidélité’ on a crown of laurel and oak on the other, given to those who had remained faithful to Louis and gone with him to Ghent.
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