M. d’Arblay, after dwelling upon these sad events, remarked:- “I see no hope of tranquillity for my unhappy country during my lifetime. The people are so vitiated by the impunity of crime, and by becoming accustomed to the sight of bloodshed, that to all appearances there will be neither peace nor security in France for thirty or forty years to come. But happily for us,” he added more cheerfully, “you have adopted us, and I hope we shall never leave you.”
“Yesterday (Saturday, December 15),” continues Mrs. Phillips, “I was very pleasantly surprised by a visit from M. de Narbonne, who was as gracious and as pleasant as ever he could be. We talked over Marmontel’s new tales, which, I believe, I mentioned his having been so good as to lend me; he told me the author of them was in Paris, unhappy enough in seeing the state of public affairs - ‘Mais pour l’interieur de sa Maison, on ne peut guère voir de bonheur plus parfait . . . . C’est un homme rempli de sentiment et douceur.’
“He had heard nothing new from France, but mentioned with great concern the indiscretion of the King in having kept all his letters since the Revolution; that the papers lately discovered in the Tuileries would bring ruin and death on hundreds of his friends; and that almost every one in that number s’y trouvait compliqué some way or other. A decree of accusation had been lancé against M. de Talleyrand, not for anything found from himself, but because M. de la Porte, long since executed . . . had written to the King that l’Evéque d’Autun was well disposed to serve him. Can there be injustice more flagrant?
“M. Talleyrand, it seems, had purposed returning, and hoped to settle his affairs in France in person, but now he must be content with life; and as for his property (save what he may chance to have in other countries), he must certainly lose all . . . . They are now printing, by order of the Convention, all the letters to the King’s brothers which had been seized at Verdun and in other places; amongst them some from ‘le traître Narbonne,’ in which he professed his firm and unalterable attachment to royalty and made offers of his services to the Princes.
“But the M. de Narbonne whose letters are printed is not our M. de Narbonne, but a relation of his, a man of true honour, but a decided aristocrat from the beginning of the Revolution who had consequently devoted himself to the party of the Princes. The Convention knew this perfectly, M. de Narbonne said, but it suited their purpose best to enter into no explanations, but to let all who were not so well informed conclude that ‘ce traître de Narbonne’ and ‘ce scélérat de Narbonne’ was the Minister, in whom such conduct would really have been a treachery . . . . He spoke with considerable emotion on the subject, and said that, after all his losses and all that he had undergone, that which he felt most severely was the expectation of being ‘confondu avec tous les scélérats de sa malheureuse patrie’ not only ‘de son vivant’ but by posterity.
“Monday, December 17, in the morning, Mr. and Mrs. Lock called, and with them came Madame de la Châtre to take leave.
“She now told us (perfectly in confidence) that Madame de Broglie had found a friend in the Mayor of Boulogne, that she was lodged in his house, and that she could answer for her (Madame de la Châtre) being received by him as well as she could desire . . . . Madame de la Châtre said all her friends who had ventured upon writing to her entreated her not to lose the present moment to return, as the three months allowed for the return of those excepted in the decree once past, all hope would be lost for ever. Madame de Broglie, who is her cousin, was most excessively urgent to her to lose not an instant in returning. ‘Vous croyez donç, Madame,’ said I rather tristement, ‘y aller?’ ‘Oui, sûrement, je l’éspère; car sans celà, tous mes projets sont anéanties. Si enfin je n’y pouvais aller, je serais réduite à presque rien.’
. . . “I tried to hope without fearing for her, and, indeed, most sincerely offer up my petitions for her safety. Heaven prosper her! Her courage and spirits are wonderful.”
Madame de Broglie’s “little son,” who in after years wrote of those troubled times, says: “I have but a faint recollection of the short time we spent in the neighbourhood of London with Madame de la Châtre, a friend of my mother and her son, a young man of great promise . . . but I distinctly remember the precautions we had to take when returning to France. An English boat landed us at night, in great secrecy, on the beach of Boulogne. I recollect the state of excitement in which we found the population, and which affected even our own servants.” Speaking of their life in Paris during the Revolution the same writer says: “The events which struck me most were - first the sacking of the Hotel de Castries. From our windows we could hear distinctly the yells of the mob and the fall of the furniture which they threw down from the windows, and second the grand spectacle of the Fête of the Federation.[] I still see, in the midst of the excited people which thronged the Champs de Mars, the ladies wearing tricolour ribbons, and pretending to wield shovels and to wheel barrows. My mother was one of them.”
CHAPTER X. AN EVENING AT NORBURY PARK
MRS. PHILLIPS, writing to her sister Fanny, remarks: “Friday, December 21, we dined at Norbury Park, and met our French friends.”
We can imagine the company arriving on that Christmas evening at the beautiful mansion of Norbury, and fancy we see Mr. and Mrs. Lock receiving them in the great “Picture Room,” whose decorated walls and ceiling would form a quaint background to such a scene. “The room,” writes one of the artists who painted it long ago, “represents a bower or arbour admitting a fictitious sky through a large oval at the top, and covered at the angles with trellis-work, interwoven with honeysuckles, vines and clustering grapes. . . . The sides of the room are divided by eight painted pilasters appearing to support the trellis roof and open to four views. That towards the south is real - the other three (representing lakes and mountains) are artificial. [The sun is depicted as setting on the western side of the room] and
THE PICTURE-ROOM, NORBURY PARK
when,” remarks the artist, with enthusiasm, “the natural hour corresponds with the hour represented, there is a coincidence of artificial and natural light, and all the landscapes both within and without the room appear illumined by the same sun.”[]
“Dinner over, M. d’Arblay came in to coffee before the other gentlemen,” writes Mrs. Phillips. “We had been talking of Madame de la Châtre and conjecturing conjectures about her sposo: we were all curious, and all inclined to imagine him old, ugly, proud, aristocratic - a kind of ancient and formal courtier, so we questioned M. d’Arblay, acknowledging our curiosity, and that we wished to know enfin, if M. de la Châtre was digne d’être l’épouse d’une personne si aimable et si charmante que Madame de la Châtre.” He looked very drolly, scarce able to meet our eyes; but at last, as he is la franchise même, he answered: “M. de la Châtre is an excellent man - an excellent man; but he is brusque comme un cheval de carrosse.”
“We were in the midst of our coffee when St. Jean came forward to M. de Narbonne and said somebody wanted to speak to him. He went out of the room; in two minutes he returned, followed by a gentleman in a great coat, whom we had never seen, and whom he introduced immediately to Mrs. Lock by the name of M. de la Châtre! The appearance of M. de la Châtre was something like a coup de théatre; for, despite our curiosity, I had no idea we should ever see him, thinking that nothing could detach him from the service of the French Princes.
“His abord and behaviour answered extremely well the idea M. d’Arblay had given us of him, who in the word brusque rather meant unpolished in manners than harsh in character.
“He is quite old enough to be father to Madame de la Châtre, and had he been presented to us as such, all our wonder would have been to see so little elegance in the parent of such a woman.
“After the first introduction was over, he turned his back to the fire, and began sans façon a most confidential discourse with M. de Narbonne. They had not met since the beginning of the Revolution, and, having been of very different parties, it was curious and pleasant to see them now, in their mutual misfo
rtunes, meet en bons amis. They rallied each other sur leurs disgraces very good-humouredly and comically; and though poor M. de la Châtre had missed his wife by only one day, and his son by a few hours, nothing seemed to give him de l’humeur. He gave an account of his disastrous journey since he had quitted the Princes, who are themselves reduced to great distress and were unable to pay him his
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MRS. LOCK
arrears; he said he could not get a sous from France, nor had done for two years. All the money he had, with his papers and clothes, were contained in a little box, with which he had embarked in a small boat - I could not hear whence; but the weather was tempestuous, and he, with nearly all the passengers, landed and walked to the nearest town, leaving his box and two faithful servants (who had never, he said, quitted him since he left France) in the boat. He had scarce been an hour at the auberge when news was brought that the boat had sunk.
“At this M. de Narbonne threw himself on his seat, exclaiming against the hard fate which pursued all ses malheureux amis!
“‘Wait a bit,’ cried the good-humoured M. de la Châtre, ‘I have not finished yet. We were informed that no one had perished and that even the contents of the vessel had been saved.’
“He said, however, that, being now in danger of falling into the hands of the French, he dared not stop for his box or servants; but, leaving a note of directions behind him, he proceeded incognito, and at length got on board a packet-boat bound for England, in which though he found several of his countrymen and old acquaintance, he dared not discover himself till they were en pleine mer.
“‘And, you see,’ he remarked, ‘there is no end to my unlucky adventures; for the first thing I hear on my arrival at this place is that my wife left for France yesterday, and Alphonse this very day, and God knows if I shall see him again for forty years to come.’
“How very, very unfortunate! We were all truly sorry for him; however, he went on gaily enough, laughing at ses amis les constitutionnaires, and M. de Narbonne, with much more wit and not less good-humour, retorting back his raillery on the parti de Brunswick.
“‘Eh bien,’ said M. de la Châtre, ‘each in his turn. You were the first to be ruined. You framed a constitution which could not hold water.’
“‘Pardon me,’ cried M. d’Arblay with quickness, ‘it was never tried.’
“‘Well, it was set aside all the same; there is no question about it now,’ said M. de la Châtre; ‘and there is nothing left for all of us to do but to starve merrily together.’
“M. de la Châtre mentioned the quinzaine in which the Princes’ army had been paid up as the most wretched he had ever known. ‘It was a time of grief, of suffering, and of despair, impossible for you to imagine. Of 22,000 men who formed the army of the emigrants, 16,000 were gentlemen - men of family and fortune, who were now, with their families, destitute.’”
This sudden disbanding took place upon the
THE HALL, NORBURY PARK
retreat of the Duke of Brunswick before the victorious army of the Revolutionists. General Custine, who had seized Worms, Spire, Frankfurt, Wurtzberg, and Mayence, was threatening Coblentz. There Louis XVI.’s brothers were living in fancied security surrounded by their pigmy court - a court as full of etiquette and ceremonial as that of the Grand Monarque himself! When the news arrived of the invaders’ approach a general flight commenced not only of the Princes and courtiers, but of all the inhabitants of those regions bordering the Rhine, and so thronged were the roads with carriages, horsemen, and waggons, that the whole route from Mayence to Cologne, we are told, resembled the busy thoroughfare of a city. The soldiers of the émigrés’ army, repulsed on all sides, wandered from place to place begging their bread, while their officers were but little better off.[]
“M. de la Châtre mentioned two of the officers,” continues Mrs. Phillips, “who had engaged themselves lately in some orchestra where they played first and second flute. ‘They are the envy, I assure you, of the whole army,’ said he, ‘for, generally speaking, we soldiers can do nothing whatever but fight.’
“‘The Princes,’ he said, ‘had been twice arrested for debt in different places - that they were now so reduced that they dined the Comte d’Artois, children, tutors, &c. - eight or nine persons in all - upon one single dish; and burnt de la chandelle parceque les bougies coutaient trop cher.’
“. . . M. de Narbonne asked how he (M. de la Châtre) had been able to travel, since his money and clothes had been left behind.
“‘ Most fortunately,’ he replied, ‘I had my purse with me, but on reaching London I had to apply to a tailor for clothes, for I was informed at my inn that if I walked about in the suit I was then wearing, I should be a public laughing-stock.
“‘Well, the tailor made me this waistcoat that you see, et ces culottes’ (in a low voice, but laughing, to M. de Narbonne). They were, I must tell you, of the most common and cheap materials; but M. de Narbonne, interrupting him gravely but very good-naturedly, said, ‘Eh bien, you can go anywhere as you are now. In this country people can go where they like in such an attire.’
“‘You see this overcoat,’ replied M. de la Châtre, who continued the whole evening in it, ‘the tailor made it also. But as to my coat there was no time to make one as I could not wait longer (in London). He therefore lent me his own coat.’
“‘What, the tailor?’
“‘Yes, certainly - you see it is quite becoming.’
“There was something so frank and so good-humoured in all this that, added to the deplorable situation to which he was reduced, I could almost have cried, though it was impossible to forbear laughing.”
Fanny Burney, from her home in Chelsea Hospital, was following the Mickleham émigrés with eager interest, an interest which she could not overcome, in spite of prejudices engendered by her life at Court, which made her suspicious of reformers as a class and inclined to believe that a king must always be in the right.
“Your French colonies,” she writes, “are truly attractive. I am sure they must be so to have caught me so substantially, fundamentally, the foe of all their proceedings while in power. . de la Châtre has my whole heart. I am his friend, not only upon the pleas of compassion, but upon the firm basis of principle. My heart ached to read of his 22,000 fellow sufferers for loyalty. I like, too, his brusque and franc character.
. . . “Poor M. d’Arblay’s belief in perpetual banishment is dreadful . . . . (His) speech should be translated and read to all English imitators of French reformers. What a picture of the now reformed! . . . I am glad M. d’Arblay has joined the set at Junipère.”
CHAPTER XI. A KING’S DEATH
TOWARDS the end of January 1793, Fanny Burney went to Norbury Park to visit her friends the Locks.
Soon after her arrival the news reached the Mickleham colony of the execution of Louis XVI. Fanny writes to her father:
“I have been wholly without spirit for writing, reading, working, or even walking or conversing ever since my arrival. The dreadful tragedy acted in France has entirely absorbed me . . . . Except the period of the illness of our own inestimable King, I have never been so overcome with grief and dismay for any but personal and family calamities. O what a tragedy! How implacable its villainy, and how severe its sorrows!
. . . Good Heaven! what must have been the sufferings of the few unhardened in crimes who inhabit that city of horrors, if I, an English person, have been so deeply afflicted that even this sweet house and society - even my Susan and her lovely children - have been incapable to give me any pleasure?
. . . “M. de Narbonne and M. d’Arblay have been almost annihilated; they are for ever repining that they are French, and though two of the most accomplished and elegant men I ever saw, they break our hearts with the humiliation they feel for their guiltless birth in that guilty country! ‘Is it possible, Mr. Lock,’ cries M. de Narbonne, ‘that you can still retain friendly feelings towards those who have the shame and the misfortune to be born Frenchm
en?’”
A few days later Fanny writes: “I hear daily more and more affecting accounts of the saint-like end of the martyred Louis. Madame de Staël, daughter of M. Necker, is now at the head of the colony of French noblesse established near Mickleham. She has just received by a private letter many particulars not yet made public, and which the Commune and Commissaries of the Temple had ordered should be suppressed. It has been exacted by those cautious men of blood that nothing should be printed that could attendrir le peuple.
. . . “When the King left the Temple to go to the place of execution, the cries of his wretched family were heard loud and shrill through the courts without. Good Heaven! what distress and horror equalled ever what they must then experience?
“When he arrived at the scaffold his Confessor, as if with the courage of inspiration, called out to him aloud, after his last benediction: ‘Fils de Saint Louis, montez au ciel!’ The King ascended with firmness, and meant to harangue his guilty subjects; but the wretch Santerre said he was not there to speak, and the drums drowned the words, except to those nearest the terrible spot. To those he audibly was heard to say ‘Citoyens, je meurs innocent! Je pardonne à mes assassins; et je souhaite que ma mort soit utile à mon peuple.’”
The “Confessor,” as the reader will remember, was the Abbé Edgeworth,[] known in France as the Abbé de Firmont. He has left on record his experiences of that solemn time. About a week before the King’s execution he wrote to Edmund Burke, who had urged him to fly from France: “The Malheureux Maître charges me not to quit the country, for that I am the person he intends to employ to prepare him for death, in case the iniquity of the nation should commit that last act of cruelty and parricide. In these circumstances I must endeavour to prepare myself, too, for death; for I am convinced that popular rage will not
Complete Works of Frances Burney Page 717