The reign of Louis XVIII, which had lasted, apart from the Hundred Days of Napoleon’s return, for just over 10 years, had been surprisingly prosperous. For all the bitter rivalries between ultras and liberals, the shrewd and subtle Villèle, with his long nose, pock-marked skin and nasal accent, had steered a deft course between them with caution and subterfuge. In 1822, Villèle had been ennobled and made President of the Council. He was neither eloquent, nor imaginative, nor brave, and he knew nothing at all about the arts or the sciences, but he was tenacious, instinctively attuned to politics, and he was not easily rattled. Though Pozzo di Borgo, the Tsar’s powerful Ambassador to France, insisted on talking about the ‘decrepitude of an ageing monarchy’, France had in fact grown steadily richer and more stable. After Britain, it was now the most active economy in the world.
All this was about to change, and the changes would ultimately bring devastating consequences to Frédéric and Lucie; though not quite yet. A new political world was emerging, heavily influenced by the right-wing ultras, and it was, once again, one that neither of them found sympathetic. The ultras came in many shapes–moderate, passionate, clerical, mystical, intransigent–but what they had in common was that all longed for the ancien régime. As the deputy Louis de Bonald put it, the ancien régime had been the most moral, spiritual and perfect age, and all the years since then had been mired in the ‘spirits of the shadows’. The revolution had been a time of madness, a monster ‘feeding on cadavers’; the Charter had been a foreign perversion and had to be repealed. What was needed was careful censorship (to stop peasants acquiring inflammatory ideas), judicious education (by priests), a return to a powerful landed aristocracy and above all the crushing of the new meddling, ambitious middle class. These views were anathema to Frédéric and Lucie.
As brother to the King, the Comte d’Artois had been content to bide his time, gathering around him ultras. Crowned Charles X in Rheims, in full panoply of regal splendour, he intended to return France to a better age of chivalry, and to rule by divine right, according to religion and its truths. Lazy, ignorant, stubborn, but neither cruel nor unjust, Charles X wished to govern as a powerful monarch, through the intermediary of his loyal servants, men who, like him, regarded kingship and Catholicism as inseparable, and the emerging middle class as nothing but a bothersome Third Estate. For himself, he preferred to go hunting. Though 67 years old, with a long face, short white whiskers and a slightly bovine expression, he was both fit and sprightly.
Because he liked to please, Charles did not go in for confrontation; because he preferred ease and comfort to formality, he surrounded himself with charming disorder, and made himself available to everyone, even regicides, defrocked bishops and Napoleon’s former maréchals. At the coronation, Talleyrand was again much in evidence, in a new carriage with his quarterings of three crowned lions, on hand as Grand Chamberlain to slip the King’s feet into their purple velvet boots. But behind the new King’s ease lay a clear purpose: it was to eradicate the last vestiges of revolutionary spirit, to cast Voltaire, Rousseau and the Enlightenment philosophes into the outer darkness, to clean up the godless universities, and to wage war on all the lawyers, teachers, entrepreneurs and industrialists who had risen up and made their fortunes. Natural rights, warned the Comte de Frémilly, who had watched the sans-culottes parade the heads of his friends on pikes around the streets of Paris in 1789, were a chimera. The new Directeur des Beaux Arts ordered that the naked statues in the Tuileries be dressed, and told actresses and dancers at the Opéra that if they wished to please him, they needed ‘loose trousers, and some morals’.
From his embassy in Turin, Frédéric had seen French foreign ministers come and go; none had shown much interest in the affairs of Piedmont. After Claire de Duras had worked to secure the Foreign Ministry for Chateaubriand, he had passed through Turin to see Frédéric and Lucie. She wrote to Félicie to say that he had spent many hours talking and that she felt exhausted at the thought of the turmoil into which Claire would be plunged once Chateaubriand was actually in power. ‘I have always been horrified by the spectacle of women meddling in the affairs of state,’ she wrote, in a letter that said more about herself than about Claire, ‘because it is my belief that they spoil everything, inflame everyone, and contribute only small insights and small passions.’ Her words were disingenuous: though in public Lucie was scrupulous in her deference to Frédéric, behind the scenes she remained forceful and not above a little meddling herself.
With Chateaubriand at the Foreign Ministry, Frédéric’s position was for a while relatively safe, but when, in August 1824, the arch conservative Duc de Damas was brought in, there were fresh calls for his dismissal, the ultras in Paris pressing for their relations to be appointed in his place. Though, wrote Lucie, ‘I cannot think why as [Turin] could please only people who are as sad, solitary and unhappy as we are’. Frédéric wanted to stay on in Turin until the beginning of 1829, when he would be 70, but he remained unpopular, not least because he still never missed a chance to complain about the Austrians. When he asked de Damas whether he might appoint Aymar, who had just turned 18 and was, according to Lucie, ‘spirited, sensible, tactful and possessed of beautiful and noble manners’, as second secretary in the embassy, he was informed curtly that his son would have to join the queue at the bottom.
With Cécile, Lucie was rediscovering the pleasures of teaching; she found the little girl sweet-natured and gentle and took care to organise her life very carefully, saying that she believed that ‘method and precision are both useful and necessary to women’. These were virtues she had held to all her life. Lucie had developed rheumatism in her knee but refused to go to one of the many spas that had become fashionable, insisting that she loathed such places. Bored by the company of the two young men attached as secretaries to the embassy, she preferred to spend her time with the Mother Superior of Les Dames du Sacré-Coeur, a woman who reminded her of ‘my poor beloved Charlotte’, or with the clever, witty, Comtesse Valpergue, who had a château in the Val d’Aosta. From time to time, Frédéric was obliged to accompany Charles-Felix and the court to Genoa. Left with one of the attachés, M. de Marcieu, a talkative and amiable young man, but very pedantic, Lucie wrote to Félicie that he reminded her of someone who had a great many clothes in his suitcase but who chose to go about naked. ‘Perhaps I am a bit like that myself? I am full of ideas, but I do not dress myself up to show them to all the world.’
Describing herself at around this time, writing with candour and humour, Lucie noted that her hips were rather wide–‘of huge dimensions’–that her waist was disproportionally narrow, and that, because her lower back was weak, she was obliged to wear a corset. Since she felt uncomfortable having anything tight around her neck or shoulders, what would suit her perfectly, she concluded, was to go around with an armoured girdle below her waist, and to remain naked above. She chose, now, to dress only in black, without ornament of any kind, having decided that grey tended sooner or later to go to lilac and look shabby. All vanity, however, had not deserted her: to Félicie she wrote somewhat smugly saying that her figure was still that of a woman 20 years younger, but that she preferred to keep it hidden. When Adrien de Laval, who had been suggested as a possible husband for her in 1787, came to Turin and they met for the first time in many years, she wrote that ‘we each found the other to be old: for my part, consenting to be so, while he does all he can to keep age at bay’. She was 55. A portrait showed her smiling slightly, with a rueful, quizzical expression, in the all-enveloping black dress she believed appropriate for her advanced age.
By the summer of 1825, Frédéric had been ambassador in Turin for five years. Though the city was not totally without its pleasures, particularly at carnival time, when Lucie had one of the much coveted boxes at the Teatro Regio, both of them longed for a break in their routine. Charles de Mercy-Argenteau, to whom they had remained extremely attached, had taken holy orders and they very much wanted to attend his first Mass in Rome. They also wished t
o spend a winter away from the snow and the icy winds of Turin, which, Lucie complained, made the city seem more like Russia than Europe. They had been saddened by the recent death of one of the young attachés in the embassy, whom they had nursed through typhus, but had not managed to save. The Duc de Damas, whom Lucie regularly referred to as a ‘monster’ or an ‘idéophobe’, someone allergic to ideas, when asked for his permission, said that they could take a long holiday only on half-pay, something their constant financial worries made impossible.
Aymar went off to Rome on his own, and Lucie spent five weeks on the lake at Evian with Auguste and the children, where, she wrote sadly, everything reminded her of Charlotte. But in Rome Aymar was introduced to the Princesse d’Esterhazy, who was close to the French court, and when the Princess wrote to Paris describing Lucie’s desire to visit Rome, de Damas felt obliged to offer Frédéric leave, on full pay. Early in October, they set out for the south.
For many travellers in the 1820s, reared on the classics and Goethe’s Italian Journey, Rome remained the symbol of the Grand Tour and the city they most wished to explore. Since the journey from Paris took 28 days by public diligence, visitors tended to stay for several months, crossing the Alps before the snows came and spending Christmas and Easter in Rome. The Holy City was said to be ‘pestilent with English…wishing to be at once cheap and magnificent’. The Piazza di Spagna was widely known as the Ghetto degli Inglesi, and the word inglese, ‘English’, had become synonymous with ‘foreigner’. They came, the English, French, Germans and Russians, to sketch, to look at churches and art galleries, and above all to wander in the ruins, absorbing what the Marquis de Custine called ‘le parfum de classicisme’. The Romantics too were discovering Rome, and visitors had ceased to regard the Romans solely as custodians of past splendours but rather saw them as a people struggling for unification.
Though Napoleon had outraged the Romans by his removal of the Pope and annexation of their city, and appalled them with his overhaul of laws, prisons and the postal service, the men he had sent as governors had proved conciliatory and astute. During the years of French domination more had been done to embellish the city than had been done by other governors in a century. Avenues of trees had been planted, monuments cleaned and restored, and the Pincio gardens laid out.
Lucie was charmed by Rome. After the severe right angles of Turin, she loved the ‘complete disorder of the buildings’, the way the narrow streets wound around the houses, the fact that no two were alike, and the soft and changing colours of the city in the southern light. The contrast was so striking, she wrote, that everywhere she walked, she felt surprise and pleasure. Adrien de Laval had been appointed Ambassador to Rome and it was with him that they met Mme d’Esterhazy and her six children, and Lucie was soon dreaming wistfully that one might make a good wife for Aymar, though the ages did not quite fit and there was no fortune on either side.
After Turin, Rome was extremely lively. In 1815, Pope Pius VII had offered a refuge to Mme Mère and the Imperial family, and Napoleon’s sister Pauline, Princess Borghese, had made Rome her home, holding court in the Villa Paolina by Porta Pia until her money, health and looks ran out and she retired to the better air of Florence to die. Mme Mère, until her own death in 1836, lived in splendour in Piazza Venezia, where she was said to sit at her first-floor window to watch the crowds strolling below. Shortly before Lucie’s arrival, the ex-queen Hortense, in whose house Lucie had arranged Fanny’s wedding, had arrived and opened a salon to which every new visitor sought an entrée. And in October 1823, made miserable by Chateaubriand’s dalliances with two new favourites, Mme Récamier had come to settle at 65 Via Babuino, in a house opposite the Greek church. She was still very beautiful, in her white dresses and blue shawls, still graceful as she undulated her hips in the shuttered light of her salon; in comparison, said David’s pupil, Etienne Delécluze, Italian women looked like ‘little savages’. After the starchy receptions in the dark palazzos of Turin, the light and frivolity of Rome were intoxicating to Lucie. There were also expeditions to Frascati, Albano and Tivoli, though visitors were warned against the mal’aria of the Campagna. At a ball given in the Palazzo Torlonia, 16 English aristocrats came in matching outfits and plumes and danced a contredanse. Writing to Félicie, Lucie reported that the gossip of the city was that by the early 1820s both Pauline and Hortense had decided that they wished after all to live with their husbands, neither of whom could abide them.
Charles de Mercy-Argenteau had been made a chamberlain at the Vatican by Leo XII, elected Pope in 1823. When Lucie and Frédéric were forced, reluctantly, to return to Turin in the middle of February 1826, they left Aymar with him. Lucie continued to hope for a diplomatic posting for her last remaining child, having decided that his particular mixture of curiosity and reserve, and his good knowledge of foreign languages, made him the perfect candidate. There had been a brief hope that Frédéric might exchange the embassy in Turin for that of Rome–much promoted by Lucie–but it came to nothing. When, not long afterwards, Chateaubriand was appointed ambassador instead, there were complaints that the once bustling French Embassy became sombre and silent. Mme Chateaubriand was said to be retiring and pious, while the poet was an uneasy host and more interested in himself than in his guests. Before Lucie left Rome, she sent Félicie a piece of stone as a paperweight, saying that she had picked it up on the path that Cato had walked when visiting Cicero. She looked on her and loved her as her own daughter, she said, then added: ‘But I hardly dare say this to you, because coming from me the name of daughter has a ring of death.’
One, perhaps inevitable, result of Lucie’s long and close marriage to Frédéric, of her absorption in her children and the tenderness she felt for Félicie, was that she had never devoted much time to exploring close friendships. Born early enough to have observed the dying days of the great 18th-century salons, to have heard for herself conversation elevated to an art form and used as an expression of affection and intimacy between people who wanted to please and amuse their friends and who delighted in one another’s company, she considered most of the people she had met since pale reflections of that subtle and lost world.
Circumscribed by formality and manners, seldom settled for long in a place she regarded as home, repeatedly battered by the loss of the children she loved, she had formed few deep and lasting attachments with either men or women with whom she might have developed trust and understanding. Her insights into character, her obvious enjoyment of wit and intelligence, her humour and occasional sharp tongue, and her very real generosity of spirit would have made her a most rewarding friend; but true friends had not come her way. The one exception, someone who had exasperated and tormented her for years, whom she criticised constantly yet could not quite bear to let go of, was Claire de Duras.
For Claire, the Restoration had brought worldly success, money and, through her husband’s position at court, power. But it had not brought happiness. Chateaubriand, who was probably incapable of real love, had eluded her; Félicie, the daughter for whom she felt most attachment, preferred her mother-in-law, the Princesse de Talmont. And her ceaseless intriguing on behalf of friends and relations had ended in ridicule. Having nagged Chateaubriand incessantly to promote Clara’s husband to the post of head of a political department, for which he had neither the skills nor the experience, she was obliged to see him ignominiously dismissed.
As early as 1813, when she declined to attend Félicie’s second wedding on the grounds of ill-health, Claire had taken refuge in being unwell. Whether her physical ailments were real, or the product of her frantic and tormented mind, it is impossible to know. But they caused her painful self-doubt, wounded pride and the sort of tricky changes of mood that she visited on Lucie, along with unbearable, all-devouring envy. The fact that Félicie and Lucie had become so close, driven into each other’s arms by Claire’s intriguing, must have been extremely hard to bear.
By the middle of the 1820s, Claire and Lucie had not seen each other for
more than six years. As Lucie noted sadly, ‘You cannot command friendship.’ Lucie’s sympathy for her old friend remained both sincere and shrewd. Hearing how acutely jealous Claire had become of her daughter’s mother-in-law, Mme de Talmont, she wrote to Félicie: ‘Your mother is much to be pitied; this illness of the heart and the mind is even harder for her than it is for other people, for they can escape or avoid it, while she, poor woman, cannot escape herself.’
But, sometime in 1818 or 1819, Claire had sought refuge in fiction. Her first novel, Ourika, about a black girl dying of un-requited love in an aristocratic French family, was enormously successful, in part because it touched on racial questions that were being talked about. Paris had lost none of its pleasure in turning events into fashions: there was an Ourika shawl, an Ourika colour and Gérard painted a celebrated picture of a dreamy black girl. Embroidering a rug for Félicie when she heard of Ourika’s success, Lucie observed wryly: ‘How pathetic it is that all I can give birth to is a carpet.’ Claire had sent a copy of the book, not to her, but to Frédéric. When Lucie read it, she remarked that she particularly disliked its heedless mixture of truth and invention, ‘one spoiling the other’. She had little patience with lack of clarity.
Dancing to the Precipice Page 48
