She and Frédéric were, once again, searching for a home. The epidemic of cholera that had raged across France–killing over 19,000 people in Paris alone, at times so virulent that the city seemed deserted except for those carrying litters of the dead–had spread to Germany and Italy. Italians were fleeing north over the borders into Switzerland and France. Félicie, who had bought a house in Lausanne, offered it to them when she was at last able to return to Ussé with Auguste. Lucie would have much preferred Italy, despite the cholera, being, as Frédéric said, ‘of a totally fatalistic nature’, but they were frightened for Aymar and Cécile. Lucie also worried that if she left Lausanne, she might never see Félicie again, for her goddaughter had never liked Italy. ‘I have only one desire,’ she wrote, ‘and that is to see you.’ What she really hoped was that she might spend the last years of her life living with Félicie; but she was coming to understand that this would never happen. Félicie was too restless, too volatile. ‘There are things in life that one should neither analyse nor go on and on about,’ she wrote sadly. ‘They are as they are. One must bear them. Absence is one of these.’
In the autumn of 1835 they moved into Félicie’s house, the Villa Sainte-Lucie; it was warm and pleasant and it had a large terrace with fruit trees. Lucie, however, was bored. ‘This has never happened to me before,’ she wrote. ‘I look at the lake and see it as a mirage in the desert.’ They had an elderly French visitor who could not bear to see the family so apparently cheerful with so little and whose sense of discontent was such that it was like ‘Vesuvius erupting’.
Early in December, Frédéric had severe pains in his stomach; a little later he was struck down with ‘gout of the head’, for which he was given morphine. He now spent much of his time in his room, reading and writing to Hadelin, long letters mulling over his own life and urging the young man to study, to think on serious matters, to develop a taste for reflection. He should turn, he wrote, towards ‘the vast questions of humanity: there you will find true riches’. More than anything Frédéric ever wrote, these letters to his grandson revealed a thoughtful and liberal man, intelligent, full of fears and doubts about the future, and intensely clear about the nature of responsibility. It was in history, he told Hadelin, that he should seek to find ways of understanding the world, and to learn how to make his mark on it; for it was to history that ‘one must look to discover motives and judgements, the source of ideas, the proof of theories too often imaginary and vague’. Reflection, he added, was ‘the intellectual crutch on which the traveller must lean on his road to knowledge’.
Some time towards the end of 1836, Félicie at last came to visit them. She was still there when, on 26 February 1837, Frédéric died. He was 78. As a diplomat, he had been proud of the grandeur of France; as a prefect he had been a liberal and a reformer, never shying away from speaking out, and never afraid to admit to making mistakes; and he had spent his entire life striving for morality. If he had sacrificed both himself and those around him to his ideals, he had also loved and looked after them. It had been a singularly happy marriage. He and Lucie had been together almost exactly 50 years.
Lucie now needed all the courage and the resignation she had ever possessed. She reacted to Frédéric’s death as she had always reacted to loss: she retreated into herself, wrote little, endured, let the time pass. This was the first blow she had had to survive alone.
When Félicie departed again for Ussé, she suggested that they continue to live in the little house in Lausanne. Lucie always found parting from Félicie painful; it was even worse now. ‘The moment you left,’ she wrote to her, ‘I sank into a sea of sadness and felt that I was drowning…I pray to God to give me strength. I am fighting as hard as I can against despair and hopelessness.’
Very slowly, the days and then the weeks passed; Lucie recovered some of her confidence. She talked of completing her memoirs, started almost 20 years before and continued in a desultory way since then. She travelled a little with Cécile, around Switzerland, to spas and mountain villages, and loved its sense of peace and equality, in comparison with which France seemed to her filled with ‘vainglorious castles and sad hovels’, and ‘wicked and despicable’ men. When a priest in Lausanne proposed saying a Mass for Frédéric, she shrank back, saying that she could not bear to have people looking at her or intruding on the intimacy of her grief. She was not lonely, sitting in the little garden, under the lilac and the flowering chestnut tree; Félicie had left her a cat. Very occasionally, she and Cécile went out rowing on the lake, stopping to eat in an inn on the waterside, after which she would paint or draw. ‘I feel myself to be an old tree,’ she wrote, ‘from which every day someone cuts off a branch; the trunk, which once sustained it, no longer exists; all that is left are a few faded leaves. Ah! how terrible it is to become old.’ Sometimes she spoke of wishing that she had died with Frédéric. She could not get used to the fact that there was no longer the person about whom she could say: ‘This is another me.’ In April 1838 she had a fall, which left her bruised all over and with a black eye. The doctor put her on a strict diet which, she said, with a touch of her old humour and self-mockery, made her wrinkles look more pronounced and her nose bigger. She was now always enveloped in black, but her expression remained wry and quizzical.
Lucie worried constantly about Cécile, whose health was often poor, with headaches and sudden attacks of anxiety, and about Aymar, whose life in Lausanne seemed to have been reduced to playing whist and falling asleep after dinner, ‘squatting on his wicker chair like a chicken on a perch’, but this did not bother her as she loved him ‘as much asleep as awake’. Hearing of the death of Talleyrand, she doubted that anyone would mourn him; she reflected that he was after all not much older than she was, but that to her he had always seemed to belong to another generation. As much as she was able, she forced herself to go out, pay visits, receive guests, in order that Cécile would meet people and have some kind of life. She avoided the Vendéen exiles who had settled along the shores of the lake and whose company she found profoundly boring. Their sighs, she said, ‘would turn a windmill’. The small lives of a small society had always filled her with dread. When her granddaughter left, she said, she would become like a bear, and go nowhere.
In the spring of 1841, Cécile was 23, a thoughtful young woman with strong views of her own. The few young men who had asked for her hand had been politely but firmly turned down. Auguste was still in Rome, complaining of ill-health, and Lucie railed against his meanness towards his daughter. To make a little money, Cécile embroidered tobacco pouches and Aymar drew. But in May Auguste suddenly announced that he would be taking Cécile back to Belgium, to live in the Château de Vêves near Dinant with his father and sister. The days before her departure were agony for them both, Cécile silent and fighting back tears, Lucie so distraught that she longed for her to leave, so that the terrible moment of parting would be over. ‘At my age,’ she wrote, ‘separations are serious things. This little one has become a friend, a companion, someone to whom I can talk of anything. I am like a cat: when they suffer, they go away alone to a corner of the attic.’
At first, Cécile’s daily letters from Belgium were despairing. Her grandfather was ‘at the last point of decrepitude’, while her aunt would allow her neither to be sad nor to be ill. But bit by bit her spirits improved, and she became close to Hadelin. In October Lucie travelled to Brussels, where Cécile had just announced her engagement to a man she had chosen for herself, the younger son of the Baron de Beckman, who looked more Spanish than Belgian, with an ‘aquiline nose, black hair and a small mouth, deep-set dark eyes and a lovely smile’. Ferdinand, noted Lucie, would bring her granddaughter not just money and security but ‘love’. She was delighted to see Cécile so happy. She stayed for the wedding, though she was irritated by Auguste’s arguments over the trousseau.
For a while, she agreed to settle at Noisy, thinking that she should cease to be a burden on Aymar. Hadelin had also married and was living not far away, and
Lucie continued to worry that he was too like his father, cold and weak, and she regarded weakness as ‘the greatest cause of danger and unhappiness’. But she hated the grey skies of the Ardennes, and the good circulating library in Brussels was not enough to keep loneliness at bay. She missed Aymar, as she always missed Félicie; alone, she spent the days remembering, mourning the past. When Auguste fussily told her that the arrangement was not to his liking, she was delighted to return to Lausanne.
That autumn, Cécile and Ferdinand spent several months with her in Switzerland. Cécile was four months pregnant and Lucie found her much softened. They read Shakespeare–Lucie did not care for the comedies–and Dickens. She was now hard at work on her memoirs, and had just reached the march on Versailles in October 1789, when she had stood at Mme d’Hénin’s windows and watched the women of Paris advance under the pouring rain. It seemed to her an unimaginably long time ago. Though she longed for Félicie to visit her, she was not discontented, or would not allow herself to be. ‘I feel all right here,’ she wrote. ‘I am very afraid of having to leave and die far from the person from whom I was never apart for so many long years.’ She liked the hills and crooked streets of Lausanne, the sailing boats that looked like feluccas on the water, and her very occasional outings on the William Tell, the new steamboat that went up and down the lake, though she said that she now went out so little that a trip to Geneva was ‘like going to China’. With each new spring, she was charmed again by the greenery and the buds. Not long before his death, Frédéric had written to Félicie about Lucie: ‘My wife’s bottomless reserves of courage will always serve you well. Ah! how admirable it is to be so completely buffeted by storms, yet to remain so fundamentally unbroken.’
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
The Rhapsodies of Life
Lucie lived for another 11 years. At 72, she remained very upright and her hair was still fair and thick. Rheumatism in her hands and knees sometimes made writing and walking difficult. Her sight was not always good. She wore nothing but black.
Taking stock of her life, she wondered whether it might not be best for her to retire to a convent, in order to leave Aymar not just free but in possession of the whole of Frédéric’s 3,000 francs pension, which was all they had between them. But she did not think she could quite bear it. ‘The word sacrifice,’ she wrote to Félicie, ‘does not seem to be in my dictionary.’ She was being modest rather than disingenuous. More than that, she could not contemplate parting from Aymar: the day that he wished to leave her would be that of her ‘spiritual death’ if not her physical one. Félicie wanted them to stay on in her house in Lausanne, but Lucie felt stubborn about their poverty. She and Aymar discussed settling somewhere in Italy, where everything would be cheaper, and where she was drawn by the thought of the yellow light and the warm skies. It had to be in a town: she needed to be able to watch people walking in the street.
In early November 1842 they hired a barouche and, taking a maid called Claudine with them, set out for the walled town of Lucca, where Napoleon’s eldest sister Princess Elisa had ruled with ruthless efficiency, leaving a legacy of schools, libraries and artistic foundations. They took lodgings and walked around the ramparts; in the evenings Lucie sewed and read in their landlord’s well-stocked library. But Lucca was full of foreigners, Swiss, English, Russians and Germans, come to spend the winter looking at Tuscany, and the only apartments still empty were expensive. At the end of the year they moved on to Pisa, having heard that it was less fashionable and that the cholera epidemic of the 1830s had left many houses empty. In ‘The Tower of Famine’ Shelley had written of a desolate place ‘which was the cradle and is now the grave / Of an extinguished people’, but even so he considered that no sight matched that of the sunset in Pisa, seen from along the sweep of the Arno. It was in Pisa that Byron, living in his menagerie of dogs, monkeys and exotic birds, had written part of Don Juan.
Their first glimpse of the town, approached across a gentle plain lying between the Apennines and the sea, was of the great dome of the cathedral, with its leaning tower nearby, then of houses, walls and an aqueduct. Lucie and Aymar found rooms at 717 Lung’Arno, in front of the charming black-and-white-striped, 13th-century, Gothic Church of Santa Maria della Spina, with its spires and statues and its dark mullioned windows. They had a large sitting room, with an open fire and an alcove with a writing table by the window, where Lucie sat writing her memoirs and her letters looking out over the river. There was a green carpet and a desk, on which she placed a picture of Félicie. She was pleased with Pisa and the grass that grew among the cobbles along the deserted streets, despite its air of ‘melancholy stillness’, observing that the climate of Italy was for her like putting oil in a rusty old lock. At eight every morning, she crossed the road for early Mass in Santa Maria della Spina, sometimes going on to walk in the Campo Santo, where, she said, she hoped she might one day be buried. In the evenings, now that Frédéric was dead, it was Lucie who read aloud, while Aymar carved and painted small items of furniture which he sold. When, late at night, he went to smoke a last cigar by the river, she sewed socks.
Though she found Pisa’s circulating library to be poor, she liked the sense of equality in Italian churches, and she made friends with the local priest. She was scornful, however, about Pisan society, dismissing the evening passeggiata–stroll–along the banks of the Arno as being ‘what passes here for people of distinction’; Lucie had not lost her taste for distinction. She was hard at work copying out her memoirs into red leather notebooks, carefully numbering the pages, and filling every inch of the paper in her small, neat, sloping hand, never altering or crossing anything out. They were not intended for publication, she said, but as a record, for Aymar. She was resolved neither to romanticise her own past nor that of France, but to look back, with a precise, cool eye, on the world that she had known; and there was something dutiful in her determination to set things down as she had seen them, without embellishment or apology. ‘I am busy describing the rhapsodies of my life,’ she wrote, with all her old self-mockery, to Félicie. ‘Old age has so far got me only by the heels, which ache (gout I think, or rheumatism).’ She felt, she added, happy and at peace. It was a refrain she had sung all her life, as if the words themselves kept sadness and disorder at bay.
They lived frugally. They walked everywhere, very occasionally hiring a carriage to take them to the pinewoods by the sea, where they saw deer and came back with bags full of pine cones for the fire, and sometimes with violets. Though a new train service ran between Pisa and Livorno, some 15 miles away, they never took it. Sometimes there was no money for tapestry wool and Lucie was forced to abandon a pleasure and a habit of a lifetime. At one point, overcoming her deep revulsion for begging, she wrote to Lord Clifford’s heirs, asking whether she might have the £300 he had promised her in his will after she had had his son living with them in Turin for almost two years. But she received no reply. Lucie and Aymar moved into cheaper, smaller lodgings, away from the river.
But there were frequent letters and occasional visits from Cécile and Hadelin, both happy and with children of their own, and visits from other foreigners settled in Pisa and old friends from Lucie’s distant past. Only once in all those years, in 1847, did Félicie come, still young-looking in her mid-forties, though her thick fair hair had gone completely white.
Like Félicie, Lucie retained a streak of restlessness, and her curiosity had never left her. If anyone proposed a trip to America, India, Tahiti or Sydney, she announced, she would accept it in a second. Meanwhile she was content to spend her life looking after Aymar, anticipating his every wish, cooking him the meals he liked, just as she had done for his father. ‘I do not want to fail in this duty,’ she wrote, ‘which is also the happiness of my last years.’ But she had lost neither her wit nor her sharpness, remarking when she read Chateaubriand’s La Vie de Rance, that there was nothing more pitiful than the ‘decrepitude of genius’. When asked by Hadelin to be godmother to his new baby, she wrote to say tha
t he was to tell the godfather, a man in his 20s, that though Lucie was three times his age, ‘sixty years ago I was one of the most fashionable lionnes’–lionesses–‘in the whole of Paris’.
The year 1848 was one of revolution in Europe. Hunger, unemployment and economic depression, spreading through Italy, Germany, France and Austria, fuelled liberal and nationalist movements and brought down governments. In Vienna, Metternich, after 27 years as Chancellor, fell. The new Pope, Pius IX, promised reforms; the rulers of Naples, Tuscany and even Piedmont, where Charles Albert had proved an even more repressive ruler than Charles Felix, were forced to grant constitutions. For a while, Louis-Philippe in France hung on to rigid conservatism. ‘Our civilisation is very ill,’ wrote Count Molé, a man who had served almost as many rulers as Talleyrand, ‘and nothing would be less surprising than a good cataclysm which would put an end to it all.’ He did not have long to wait. The opposition, gathering strength from the rising price of bread, panic among speculators, issues of electoral reform and clashes between the army and the National Guard, drove Louis-Philippe off the throne and to a second exile in England. The Bourbons and the Orléans had gone: there would never be another king of France. A mob entered and ransacked the Tuileries, as it had 56 years before, spilling so much wine that several revellers were rumoured to have drowned. The poet Lamartine, conservative turned republican, was named head of a provisional government, only to be ousted in the struggles that followed the setting up of the Second Republic.
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