Mme de Staël, too, was dying. Earlier in the year, leaving a party, she had fainted. She was now back in Paris, clinging to the gathering of friends she so loved and needed, arriving at receptions exhausted but then, buoyed up by the conversation and the company, talking as brilliantly as she had ever talked. Louis XVIII had finally repaid the 1.9 million francs owed to her father. But as the days passed, so she found it harder to leave her sofa. When friends came to see her they found her skin blotchy, but they remarked on the way that, without rising, she could still hold the entire room spellbound. To Chateaubriand, who often visited her, she said: ‘I have always been the same, lively and sad. I have loved God, my father and liberty.’ She died on 14 July 1817, the anniversary of the fall of the Bastille.
The terms negotiated by Richelieu with the Allies in the Second Treaty of Paris had again been surprisingly mild. In Paris, with the foreign soldiers gone, three distinct political movements, grouped around different men, ideas and newspapers, were taking shape. There were the ‘ultras’, who continued to wish to reverse everything the Enlightenment and the revolution had stood for and who spoke of the Charter as a ‘work of folly and shadows’: these were the ‘green cabinet’, green being the colour adopted by the Comte d’Artois backed by some of the restored senior clergy, by the secret monarchist and Catholic Chevaliers de la Foi, by men like Chateaubriand, Mathieu de Montmorency and the Duc de Fitz-James. Then there was the ‘constitutional’ party, the group of intellectuals who opposed the ultras and gathered around Mme de Staël’s son-in-law, the Duc de Broglie and the historian Guizot; and a third party of independents, lying somewhere in the middle, a loose gathering of republicans, Bonapartists and Orléanists, many of them Freemasons.
Of all Louis’s ministers, Richelieu, the dry, seemingly cold Président du Conseil, with his ironic glance and his air of gloom, was the most sensible and moderate; but the King did not much care for him. On the other hand, Louis XVIII did like Décazes, his Minister for Police, a charming, intelligent and good-looking royalist, whom Talleyrand said reminded him of a wig-maker. Décazes was appalled by the violence and extremism of the ultras, and worried about the very real threat that they posed to the stability of France. On 5 September 1816, the Chamber was dissolved; in new elections the number of ultras in power shrank to 92. Louis had always said that what he desired was ‘repos’, a restful and peaceful France, and that disobedient and reactionary subjects were fatal to the health of the country. And, for a while, ‘repos’ did indeed come to France. Though Richelieu fell, and the new ministry, dominated by Décazes, carried France further towards the left, the country became both peaceful and prosperous enough for the war indemnities to be paid off quicker than expected. That autumn, the grape harvest all over France was exceptionally good: wine-makers referred to it as the ‘wine of departure’, naming it after the foreigners’ withdrawal from French soil.
In September 1818, soon after Charlotte had given birth to a strong and healthy daughter–she was so large that for a while Lucie thought it must be twins–Frédéric was sent to negotiate the terms of the early withdrawal of the Allied forces at the Congress of Aix-la-Chapelle. Charlotte called her new baby Cécile, but since her sister’s death was still so raw in their minds, she was at first known as Séraphine; though Séraphine too was the name of another dead child, Lucie’s first daughter.
Louis XVIII desired not only repos but luxury. While the last of Napoleon’s bees were turned into fleurs de lys, he set about enjoying his great court, his gilded royal palaces, and his delicious food: pheasants and partridges from the royal parks, pears from the royal gardens, truffles from Piedmont, oysters from the Channel. Wanting to be seen by his people, Louis drove out every afternoon, surrounded by his Gardes de Corps in their tall crested helmets. In the Tuileries, where chairs had been strengthened to bear the weight of his great bulk, he was surrounded by innumerable footmen, in his red, blue and silver livery, and by the friends who had remained consistently loyal to the Bourbons. The atmosphere of deferential silence in which he liked to live–though in private his anecdotes were said to be so lewd that one diarist, the Comte de Saint-Chamans, refused to record them–was made easier by the whole web of customs and etiquette, the pomp and majesty of traditional Bourbon monarchy. In the King’s presence, not even members of his family addressed each other as ‘tu’.
For the first time in over a century, Paris became a truly royal city. Louis opened his official bedroom and state apartments to the public, appointed Cherubini to compose rousing choral music, and instructed his court to turn out in their most magnificent costumes for Mass in the chapel of the Tuileries on Sundays. He ordered carpets woven with garlands, and appointed the neo-classical painter Gérard Premier Peintre du Roi. Enormous, red-faced, smiling, with his three chins and his ‘penetrating, lynx-like, look’, Louis also found time to enjoy a new favourite, the 35-year-old Zoe Talon, Comtesse de Cayla, a former pupil of Mme Campan’s academy. Mme de Cayla was an agreeable, plump, blonde, seductive woman, with pock-marked skin and bad teeth, for whom the King would build a pavilion of marble and acacia, with an orangerie and stables, later home to the sheep with long silky coats to which she would give her name. Mme de Cayla’s husband was said to have gone mad as a result of her infidelities. Growing older, Louis spoke of the ‘exhausting glories’ of royal life.
Though Louis did not himself care for salons, Parisian society had never lost its taste for the intimate, subtle groupings of friends, come together to talk of politics, or literature, or about each other. When Mme de Staël died, Claire de Duras, deciding that her friend’s mantle had fallen on her, invited to her new salon in the rue de Varennes foreigners, artists, ultras and politicians. Though fashionable, Claire’s salon was regarded as not very relaxed, due to her tendency to lecture people rather than talk to them. It lacked, observed the guests, that guiding spirit of the 18th-century salons, where strong women like Madame du Deffand kept the tone high and the talk witty.
Claire herself had suffered a blow when her daughter Félicie, who had been left a widow at 17, had first chosen to remain with her mother-in-law, the Princesse de Talmont, and then married again, against her wishes. Auguste de la Rochejaquelin was another hero of the Vendée, whose brother Louis had died fighting the revolutionary army. Bitter about the rejection, feeling betrayed by the daughter she preferred, Claire refused to attend the wedding, though she had been present when, two weeks earlier, Clara had made what she considered a good match, to Henri de Chastellux, the King permitting him to take the old Duras title of Duc de Rauzun, there being no male Duras descendants. Claire continued to scheme on behalf of the constantly dissatisfied Chateaubriand, but the chère soeur was having to fight terrible jealousy towards Mme Récamier, who had become decidedly close to him. An earlier love of Chateaubriand’s, Claire’s cousin Nathalie, had recently lost her wits; as had his sister not long before. ‘Ah my God! Poor Nathalie!’ Chateaubriand wrote to Claire, with the self-regard that Lucie so deplored in him. ‘How the fates pursue me! Didn’t I tell you that everyone I have ever loved, known, spent time with, had gone mad?’ Lucie’s distaste for Chateaubriand had not been lost on the poet, who carefully erased her presence from his published memoirs.
The King’s repos, and that of France itself, was now shattered by a former royal saddler called Louis-Pierre Louvel. In May 1816, the small, fair-haired, pigeon-toed but extremely attractive granddaughter of Ferdinand I of the Two Sicilies, the Bourbon Marie-Caroline of Naples, had arrived in Marseilles in a golden barge, with 24 oarsmen in white satin and blue-and-gold sashes, to marry the wild and quick-tempered Duc de Berri. As with Marie Antoinette and Louis XVI, her first meeting with d’Artois’s younger son took place in a clearing in the Bois de Fontainebleau. The marriage, in Notre Dame, was exceptionally magnificent and the fountains of Paris flowed all day with wine. Though the new Duchess was barely literate, and showed no interest in the tutors provided for her, she was charming and high-spirited and soon lightened the lea
den atmosphere of the stuffy court. She was also the Bourbons’ one hope for an heir.
On 13 February, soon after Frédéric’s return from Aix-en-Chapelle, a masked ball was held in Paris. It was midnight when word reached the revellers that the Duc de Berri had been stabbed by Louvel, a solitary nationalist fanatic intent on avenging Waterloo and exterminating the Bourbons. Without changing, harlequins, shepherdesses and paladins hastened to the Tuileries for news. The Duc de Berri died six hours later, but not before he had told the King that his wife was pregnant. They already had one daughter, but had lost a son and another daughter. When, not long afterwards a boy was born–the Duchess refusing to allow the umbilical cord to be cut before the witnesses appointed by the King had seen the baby attached to her–there was widespread rejoicing that a Bourbon heir had finally appeared. The King, come to see the baby, wet his lips with wine from Turançon, as was the custom.
But even while rejoicing went on over the new Duc de Bordeaux, as he had been named, a storm of anti-liberal feeling had been released by the murder of his father. While Louvel went to the guillotine, Décazes, whose moderate leanings and conciliatory attitude towards former revolutionaries were blamed for de Berri’s death, was forced to resign. And though Richelieu was brought back as Président du Conseil, only to be forced out again, the ultras were gaining in power, censorship of the press was tightened up, and emergency laws passed allowing for detention, without trial, for those suspected of plotting against the state. A dry, charmless, provincial noble from Toulouse called the Comte de Villèle, who in 1814 had advocated returning to the ancien régime and was widely seen as one of the leaders of the ultras, was rising to power. De Berri’s violent death had the effect of dissolving the centrists, and leaving just two parties, ultras and liberals, who viewed each other as bitter enemies.
Frédéric, still Ambassador to Holland and sending back regular reports to Paris on the state of disaffection of the Dutch and the Belgians, was named by Louis Ambassador Extraordinary to Spain, in order to press the Spanish King to adopt a Charter along the lines of the French one. But the British were unwilling to see further French influence in the Spanish peninsula and managed to intervene; and even before he got there, Frédéric was recalled. Italy, a mosaic of small states, in some of which revolutionary ideas appeared to be on the verge of triumphing over conservative rule, was now regarded as one of the most volatile countries of Europe. Frédéric, whose performance in Holland had pleased the King, was asked whether he would like to go as the new Ambassador to Turin.
Lucie, having once again fought back unbearable grief and despair, had resolved to take up a new occupation. She would write her memoirs. They would be not a book, for that might suggest publication in her lifetime, nor confessions, nor an essay on her opinions, nor ‘the journal of my heart’, but merely ‘a few facts from a troubled and restless life’. Confessing that her thoughts rambled, that her memory was poor and that she had a tendency to be led astray by her imagination, she set to work on 1 January 1820. ‘Let us make the most,’ she wrote, ‘of the warmth that is left to me, and which may at any moment be chilled by the infirmities of age.’ Lucie was 50. Over the next 30 years she would write one of the finest memoirs of the age.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
A Pocket Tyranny
By 1820, with Europe at peace after many years of revolutionary upheavals, travellers were again making their way south across Europe and into Italy. They came to see for themselves what had happened to the places they knew from the Grand Tours of the 18th century, to spend the winter months in hotels in Florence and Lucca, to explore the excavations at Pompeii, and to follow Childe Harold through the ruins of Rome. Napoleon had opened the Corniche along the French Riviera, but for Frédéric, who travelled on ahead of the others, as for most of those coming from the north, the route to Italy remained over the Mont Cenis pass to Susa and then crossing the Duchy of Savoy. Officially informed of his new posting in April, it was August when he set out. Frédéric was evidently much in favour with Louis XVIII, who wrote to his dear ‘brother and cousin’ Victor Emmanuel I, that he was sending him a man of ‘zeal, prudence and great loyalty’.
Lucie and Aymar, pausing on their way to see Charlotte in Berne, where Auguste had been made Minister for Holland, joined him in the early autumn. Lucie was extremely, and anxiously, attached to her last surviving daughter. In her cool, clear-eyed way, she described her as not exactly witty or loving or even of irreproachable behaviour, but ‘divertissante’, fun to be with, which was immensely important to her since she found so many people tedious. Their journey over the Alps took three days. Travellers compared the French stagecoaches to slave ships or the Black Hole of Calcutta for heat, stuffiness and bad smells, six people crammed inside an airless box, with a wicker basket like a hen coop above their heads, stuffed with coats and bags.
The diligence left Lyons at seven in the evening. Until midnight it climbed slowly. Lucie and Aymar woke to farms, thatched cottages and the sloping valleys of Savoy, and stopped for breakfast and a thorough customs search at the border town of Pont de Beauvoisin, where travellers often forfeited books considered inflammatory by the police. At Les Echelles, they exchanged their slender French horses for six large, strong-boned animals with high haunches. And, as night fell, they entered a tunnel at Saint-Christophe-la-Grotte, emerging into ‘an entire kingdom of mountains’, with snowy precipices and sunless valleys. From the top of the pass, looking down, could be seen waterfalls and, far below, horses and carts labouring up the track towards them, ‘like crows or flies’. When the diligence finally reached the plains of Lombardy, Lucie found them to be covered in mulberry trees, Indian corn and vines of Muscat grapes, strung in festoons between the trees. The long, straight road leading to Turin, where they encountered minuscule carts, drawn by large dogs, was shaded by elm trees, and in the distance, rising above the plain like a pointed cone tipped with snow, could be seen Monte Viso, whose thick forests sheltered wild boar, renowned for their size and fierceness.
Both Frédéric and Lucie were delighted by Turin. They took a house on the edge of the city, on a hillside overlooking the Po, with views across the plains to the Alps where snow lay on the peaks all year round. Their ‘panorama’, Lucie told Félicie, was ‘the finest that I have ever seen’. A Roman colony under Augustus, for centuries destroyed and rebuilt, deserted and repeopled, Turin, the smallest royal capital of Europe, was quite unlike other Italian cities. Built on a grid, its streets wide and absolutely straight, intersecting each other at right angles and running in direct lines from gate to gate through large and imposing squares with arcades, it had none of the charm and lightness of the Tuscan towns. Its predominant colour was neither yellow nor ochre but grey; its feel was northern, even somewhat French. But Lucie liked its handsome houses, with their white or striped awnings over the windows to keep out the summer heat, and the way that the well-paved streets were kept clean by sluices of crystal-clear water. She felt relieved by its sense of sobriety and orderliness.
On the ground floor of their rented house were the hall, kitchen, offices and dining room, where Frédéric hung the portrait of Louis XVIII by Gérard, a personal present from the King; above, there was a drawing room and bedrooms for themselves, the children and guests. There was also a small chapel attached to the house. Lucie soon settled into a routine. She rose at 7.30 and went to Mass; then came a lengthy, slow toilette, before breakfast at 10, a substantial meal of kidneys and eggs, taken on her white-and-blue English plates. While Frédéric went into Turin to pay visits–having been instructed by the French Foreign Ministry to present France in a grand and powerful light–Lucie worked with Aymar on his lessons, sewed, painted and wrote letters. Her plan, she explained, was to write at least three times a week to Charlotte. From time to time, she worked on her memoirs.
At two o’clock, one of the footmen came to offer lunch; she had soup or some fruit and sometimes a small glass of vermouth, which she considered rather bitter. In the evening, w
hen Turin came alive, there were expeditions into the city, to receptions or to the opera, where the castrato Giovanni Battista Velutti and Domenico Donzetti, a ‘tenore robusto’, ‘sing like angels, but to whom I alone listen’, as she wrote to Félicie. The opera, she explained, was the centre of social life, but everyone chattered and paid visits to each other’s boxes, pausing only to listen to their favourite arias. The stage of the Teatro Regio was enormous, large enough to accommodate, as happened with the more spectacular performances, an entire troop of cavalry. Turin in winter, Lucie soon discovered, was very cold, and often foggy, thick mists rising from the river, but she felt well. The air was clean, and in spite of eating red partridges–a delicacy she was dubious about–she suffered from no stomach upsets. ‘We are very happy here,’ she noted. ‘All I ask is that we be allowed to remain.’
For a French ambassador in 1820, Turin was an important posting. The patchwork of states that was Italy was simmering with cross-currents of revolt. In 1720, the then Duke of Savoy in Piedmont had acquired half-wild Sardinia, and because Sardinia was a kingdom, the dukes were allowed to incorporate a royal title. In 1796, Piedmont had been one of the first places to fall to Napoleon, who, along with knocking down Turin’s ramparts, had eventually installed his sister Pauline and her husband Prince Borghese as governors, ordering them to replicate the manners of the French court and enforce the Code Napoléon. When, in 1815, France was defeated, the Congress of Vienna, in which Frédéric had played a part, reneging on an earlier promise of independence made to Genoa, ceded not only Genoa, but also a strip of the Riviera, to the Kingdom of Sardinia.
King Victor Emmanuel I, returning from his long exile, immediately set aside the Napoleonic Code, reintroduced pre-revolutionary laws, reestablished feudalism, sacked Napoleon’s teachers and put education back in the hands of the Jesuits. He returned Jews to their ghettos. Long after much of Europe had abandoned them, Victor Emmanuel wore wigs. On learning that the King of Bavaria had become a liberal, and that the King of Prussia had promised his people a Constitution, he declared: ‘Io solo sono veramente re’–‘I alone am truly King’. Piedmont was again the least enlightened part of Italy. ‘Of all the little despotisms of Italy,’ remarked Lady Morgan, continuing on her travels around Europe, ‘Piedmont seems the most complete, perfect and compact; in a word, a “despotisme de poche”,’ a pocket tyranny.
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