Liberty: The Lives and Times of Six Women in Revolutionary France

by Moore, Lucy

  Over the next eighteen months Germaine made regular experimental forays back to Paris, retreating at hints from the police or warnings from friends, and never able to re-establish herself securely in France because the government made it clear to her that she was not welcome there. Her ‘intriguing’ was seen as perfidious and her writings incendiary. Hell, she wrote, began to appear to her ‘in the shape of exile’.

  18

  ICÔNE

  Juliette Récamier

  APRIL 1797–APRIL 1811

  A serene light on a stormy scene.

  FRANÇOIS-RENÉ DE CHATEAUBRIAND

  IN JUNE 1796, Benjamin Constant’s cousin Charles met Thérésia Tallien for the first time. Excitedly, he reported back that the most celebrated woman in Paris was ‘brilliant with youth and health’. She was wearing a dress tied beneath the breasts with a green and orange ribbon, and her necklace of enormous amber beads made it look as if she really had ‘a huge heart of gold’. In a clear voice vibrating with emotion, she regaled the gathering with what had clearly become her party piece, recounting her dreadful experiences during the Terror: her arrest at Versailles, being held for a day with nothing to eat or drink, forced to strip in front of eight Guardsmen and locked for twenty-five days in solitary confinement.

  Two months later, as their friendship deepened, Thérésia showed Charles the letters she had written Tallien from prison. Constant, who found her beautiful and charming in person, was amazed to discover, on reading the letters, that they were vulgar, written in bad style and taste: ‘she speaks of her caboche [thick skull, noddle], her carcasse, she says gibier de guillotine [guillotine fodder], she describes her guards, she remembers so crudely the moments spent in Tallien’s arms.’ Seductive but unestimable, Constant said, Thérésia reminded him of Mme du Barry; but asked how she could have been otherwise, given the course her life had taken and the adulation that had been lavished upon her since her teens. He reported that she had been supplanted as the uncrowned queen of Directory society by the eighteen-year-old Juliette Récamier. Thérésia had, he said in November 1796, ‘reigned in peace until Juliette appeared’.

  Thérésia’s successor was the chaste beauty who had been married at fifteen, at the height of the Terror, to the forty-one-year-old financier Jacques-Rose Récamier. Nothing in their conduct towards one another indicated that their relationship was anything but filial. While Juliette and her mother lived just outside Paris in the château de Clichy and her husband dined with them every day, he spent every night in town; his morals were said to be old-fashioned, probably a euphemism for keeping a mistress. Their classical hunting-lodge at Clichy, on the banks of the Seine near Neuilly, was said to have been built by Louis XV for one of his mistresses.

  From the moment she emerged on to the Parisian scene, Juliette was adored. Joséphine, in particular, seems to have made a point of including her in the round of parties and gossip that fuelled Directory society. Writing to Talleyrand in the spring of 1796 about the dashing hussar Hippolyte Charles, with whom she was falling in love, Joséphine declared that Thérésia, Fortunée Hamelin and Juliette had all lost heir heads over him. The following month Juliette formed part of a tableau alongside Joséphine and Thérésia at a reception at the Luxembourg celebrating Napoléon’s victories in Italy. She was seen during this period going up to Barras’s apartments with Joséphine and Thérésia.

  Afterwards, Juliette and Thérésia both played down their friendship but a portrait of the two women, Juliette leaning her head on Thérésia’s shoulder, reveals their early intimacy. Certainly in 1796 and 1797 they moved in the same circles, attended the same balls, watched the same plays, were dressed by the same couturiers and admired by the same men.

  Their subsequent rift, if rift there was, may have been caused by Thérésia’s resentment of her younger rival’s success. Charles Constant describes her on one occasion, threatened by Juliette’s presence, throwing off her cashmere shawl and standing up to display ‘her fine figure, her bare arms, her grace, the beauties of every kind which so few other women possess in so perfect a degree’. Juliette, ‘with her quiet dress and simple grace’, praised Thérésia and made no attempt to cast her ‘splendours in the shade’–a response potentially more galling than any other.

  Gossip columns pictured Thérésia criticizing the young woman. ‘Are not her shoulders very large, her head too long, and her neck too short? Who does not remark that her lips are too thin, her teeth uneven, her fingers too small, and her feet too broad? Does not she walk as if she were running errands? And does she not still look like a mantua-maker?’ she was imagined to have said. ‘Her eyelids are surely painted, and the colour of her cheeks artificial; and when she speaks, what a disagreeable accent, what antiquated words, and what common and ridiculous expressions!’

  Thérésia’s defenders held that the fault was Juliette’s. Many years later, when both women had died, Juliette’s niece Amélie Lenormant published a memoir of her life. Soon afterwards, a friend of Thérésia’s sent some of her letters to the author Arsène Houssaye, proposing her as a suitable subject with the words: ‘Avenge thus the arrogance of this scornful beauty’. Apparently Juliette had lorded it over Thérésia and, when Thérésia was rejected by imperial society, pretended that they had never known one another. No record of Juliette’s behaviour elsewhere makes this self-serving meanness sound likely, although her niece, in an effort to erase any hint of scandal from Juliette’s life–not that there was much–insisted that she had never been a merveilleuse and specifically denied any acquaintance with Mme Tallien and her friends.

  By late 1797, the careless gaiety that had characterized the first years following Robespierre’s fall–and characterized Thérésia herself, the symbol of that period–had faded, although its mood of decadent extravagance was more pervasive than ever. The French needed a new idol, free from any taint of revolutionary violence, cynicism or exploitation. The virginal Juliette Récamier, whose burgeoning celebrity was almost a reproach to Thérésia, seemed created to fill this role.

  Where Juliette differentiated herself from the merveilleuses was her real but deliberately nurtured image of modest chastity. She may have formed part of Thérésia’s circle, but she remained untouched by the air of corruption and debauchery that clung to her friends. She was, said Mme de Boigne, ‘the perfect woman’, with all the charms, virtues and frailties that implied. Sweet-natured and high-minded, her appeal lay more in the passive qualities of reflecting her friends’ interests and talents than in demonstrating her own. Her detractors thought her coquettish, indolent and proud, with the air of a convent girl; her admirers praised her quiet piety, her charitable works, her loyalty to her friends, her generosity and flair as a hostess and her overwhelming desire to please, which grew not out of the wish to be admired (perhaps another tacit reproach to Thérésia) but out of the wish to be loved.

  Juliette’s beauty, according to Récamier’s nephew, ‘was the least of her gifts’ but it was no insignificant thing. Having heard of this paragon, Mme de Boigne was surprised that she hardly noticed her when she first saw her; then she looked again and found that she was ‘wholly beautiful’, with looks that appeared ‘to greater and greater advantage every time she was seen’.

  Tall and slim, radiantly pale, Juliette had a delicate, open face bare of makeup. Her looks were enhanced by her selfconsciously austere style, an intentional reflection of her gentle serenity. She wore only white dresses–adding fuel to the rumours of her virginity–gathered beneath the bosom with plain blue, black or gold belts, no jewels except pearls–more symbols of purity–and her hair was simply drawn up with a thin ribbon in a tumble of chestnut curls.

  One visitor, arriving in Paris at the height of Juliette’s fame, expected to encounter ‘a vain coquet, enveloped in clouds of incense, hardened by wealth, seeing and loving nothing in the world but herself; receiving homage as a duty with chilling pride’. Instead, he found her, in her unembellished white dress, ‘like a violet in the grass
’: ‘she seemed to blush at being so beauteous’. Other observers confirm that she ‘seemed anxious to conceal her own attractions to enhance those of others’.

  Despite her undoubted modesty, Juliette was very conscious of her powers of seduction. ‘You intoxicate yourself with the perfumes that are burnt at your feet,’ said one disconsolate devotee. Admirer after admirer, excited rather than discouraged by her notorious chastity, pursued her, and all were rejected with such warmth and graceful tact that they continued to adore her even when they knew there was no hope. She was made, said another, ‘to electrify the world’.

  Juliette both enjoyed and despised her celebrity, accepting the adulation with which she was showered as her due, somehow managing to encourage it without seeming to. She was fully aware of the effect she created, of ‘the enthusiasm that I excited, the approval that my face obtained, the murmur of praise to be heard through the crowd’ when she appeared. Her niece described Juliette standing up to get a better view of Napoléon as he finished his speech at the reception given in his honour at the Luxembourg in December 1797. Every head turned to look back at her; a rumble of appreciation swelled through the audience. For a moment it was she and not Napoléon on whom all eyes rested. He ‘threw her a look of intolerable harshness’ and Juliette sat back down.

  Mme Lenormant makes out that this was the innocent Juliette’s first foray into society, that no one in the audience would have known who she was; in fact, given the intimacy of Directory high society, she would have been familiar to most people there. Her standing up at such a crucial moment can only have been designed to draw attention to herself. This tension between reserve and display, between chastity and sensuality, was the essence of her appeal.

  One of Juliette’s first conquests was the ambitious, arrogant Lucien Bonaparte, six years Napoléon’s junior. Tall and lanky, not handsome but appealing because of his classical republican idealism and his passion for government, Lucien had arrived in Paris on Napoléon’s coattails, hoping to build a career and a fortune on the foundation of his brother’s. Meeting Juliette in the summer of 1797, he fell deeply in love with her.

  He began writing her poetic letters from ‘Romeo’, describing her arrival at a party with everyone clustering round her exclaiming at her beauty. All glances, he said, were her property when she appeared. ‘At each of your movements, with each fold of your gown, it seemed as though flowers were opening.’ Outwardly, Juliette met his passion with her usual cool serenity. Lucien told her that her immovable tranquillity was killing him, complaining that she could even make indifference charming. Inside, the sheltered girl was stirred. The ‘idea of a man, entirely engrossed with me’ had touched her; his agitation and despair had stimulated her imagination and excited her compassion.

  Unmoved by her superficial life and her relationship with her husband, Juliette felt that her ‘heart was made to love and to suffer…As I loved nothing and only suffered from indifference, I considered that I was forgoing my destiny’. The ardent, romantic Lucien seemed to offer her a chance, for the first time, to feel. But when she discovered the scale of his ambition and the way he consoled himself for her lack with ‘vulgar pleasures’–actresses and whores–she closed her heart to him and returned to her usual state of dreamy melancholy.

  Juliette dealt with Lucien’s unrequited adoration as she would deal with so many men in the coming years, with a combination of sympathy and negligence. ‘Touched by the pain she had caused, sorry for the man’s emotion,’ she restored ‘hope without being aware of it, merely by her pity, and [destroyed] it by her carelessness as soon as she had calmed the grief which had called forth this fleeting pity’. According to the critic Charles-Augustin de Sainte-Beuve, a friend, Juliette was a sorceress whose great talent lay in converting love into friendship, while leaving in the new association all the ‘perfume’ of the old.

  It would take a woman, rather than a man, to raise her out of her apathy. In the autumn of 1798, Récamier arrived at Clichy with a woman unknown to Juliette and left them alone without introducing them, saying only that she had come to talk about the sale of a house. Her guest was eccentrically dressed, in a morning gown and a tiny hat laden with flowers; Juliette was ‘struck by the beauty of her eyes and her expression’. When she began talking, saying how delighted she was finally to meet Juliette and mentioning her father, Necker, Juliette realized that the visitor was Germaine de Staël, who, despite her fear of exile, had ventured as close to Paris as her father’s house at Saint-Ouen. Récamier had contacted her about buying one of Necker’s properties, a house on the rue du Mont Blanc (now the rue de la Chaussée d’Antin) near where Thérésia had lived when she first came out of prison in the summer of 1794.

  Juliette had read Germaine’s Letters on Jean-Jacques Rousseau, and blushed to find herself in the presence of an author she admired so passionately. She was both intimidated and attracted by her, and shyly stammered out some compliments. Germaine, looking at her with friendly curiosity in her large eyes, began showering her with frank praise that Juliette confessed she found irresistible, and asked her to come often to see her before she left France for Coppet the following month.

  This was the start of a friendship that would define both women and endure for the rest of their lives. Germaine, who had few female friends, saw Juliette as a vision of perfection, the embodiment of all the exquisitely feminine qualities of reserve, serenity and physical delicacy she was so conscious of lacking. ‘An expression at one and the same time naïve and passionate gave her person an indescribable voluptuousness and a singularly likeable innocence,’ Germaine wrote of her in her novel Delphine (interestingly, she called the character based on Juliette ‘Thérèse’). If she wanted ‘to portray a celestial being’, she told Juliette, ‘it would be your expressions I should use’.

  It was fashionable for women of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries to develop intense, almost romantic friendships like those between Germaine and Juliette and between Thérésia and Joséphine. Inspired by the intimacy between fictional heroines like Julie and Claire in La Nouvelle Héloïse, women looked to each other to provide them with companionship and emotional (and perhaps physical) solace and comfort, especially when the men in their lives were remote or unloving. Germaine cast herself in the role of adoring and sometimes jealous swain in her letters to Juliette. ‘Do not have a greater friendship for any other woman than you have for me,’ she pleaded in one. ‘Say to me I love you,’ she wrote in another, addressing Juliette as her angel. ‘The emotion I will feel at those words will make me believe I am holding you to my heart.’

  Juliette, timid and more used to receiving affection than giving it, was less forthcoming, earning frequent reproaches from Germaine. ‘Why, whether in love or in friendship, is one never necessary to you?’ she complained. But Juliette, rescued by Germaine from her life of banal frivolity, was equally committed to her. After their meeting, she wrote, ‘I thought of nothing but Mme de Staël’.

  Their friendship gave Juliette the chance to become something more than a simpering, affected merveilleuse. Through Germaine she was introduced to a sparkling circle of intellectuals where her own intuitive intelligence and interests could shine. Nothing was more engaging than watching Germaine and Juliette converse, wrote an enthralled Benjamin Constant, who saw them as beautifully complementary forces.

  The speed with which one was able to express a thousand new thoughts, the speed with which the other was able to grasp and judge them; there was that strong male intelligence which unveiled everything, and the delicate feminine one which understood everything; all this was united in a way impossible to describe if one had not had the happiness of witnessing it for oneself.

  Imposing without being large, elegant without being ostentatious, the house Jacques Récamier bought from Necker at 7 rue du Mont Blanc became one of the most celebrated in Paris. The interior was a masterpiece of Directory style, designed by Louis Berthaut and assembled by the Jacob brothers, who had fitted out the new
lywed Bonapartes’ house the previous year. Its bold modernity did not appeal to everyone. Laure d’Abrantes’s old-fashioned mother thought it looked empty and uncomfortable.

  Funded by her immensely rich and generous husband, Juliette entertained lavishly. This was the era of the nouveaux riches, before, as Hortense de Beauharnais noted, ‘good society’ had been revived: ‘The wealth of France had passed into the pockets of the tradespeople, and it was they who entertained, and who squandered in a single night’s entertainment a fortune they had acquired too easily.’ Juliette’s guests would arrive to find all the doors thrown open and the house blazing with expensive candlelight. Lamps illuminated the courtyard and rare shrubs stood in pots on the steps, which were covered with Turkish carpets. Like Joséphine Bonaparte, Juliette loved flowers. Her garden at Clichy was exquisite and her houses overflowed with blooms.

  Dancing carried on through the night; supper was served at two in the morning. All the new dances were introduced at Juliette’s balls, where Fortunée Hamelin’s dancing was outshone only by her hostess’s. Sometimes, with a show of reluctance, Juliette would allow herself to be persuaded to perform a solo shawl dance. In Corinne, Germaine ascribed Juliette’s dancing to her heroine, a fictionalized, idealized self-portrait. She described her as a poet in her dancing, imaginative and emotional. ‘In all her movements there was a graceful litheness, a modesty mingled with sensual delight,’ she wrote. ‘She appeared animated by an enthusiasm for life, youth and beauty which seemed to give an assurance that to be happy she needed no one else.’ Crowds massed to watch Juliette; men kicked off their shoes and stood on the Jacob chairs to get a better view.

  Juliette would invite her female guests to come and look at her gold and violet bedroom, reckoned to be the most beautiful in Paris; the men would rush to follow. Echoing the boudoirs of both Thérésia and Joséphine, the walls of her bedroom and bathroom were panelled in mirrors, recalling the legend of Psyche as told by La Fontaine, a story very much in vogue during the Directory. La Fontaine’s Psyche lived in an enchanted palace filled with portraits of herself, before which she wallowed in ecstasies of narcissism while her invisible lover looked on.