It was not all, of course, about ideas. For it was in the Parisian salons of Mme du Deffand and Mme Geoffrin–the latter was the last real patroness of the Encyclopédie, a woman neither clever nor educated enough to join in the conversations but shrewd enough to preside and keep control–that the idea of the ‘douceur de vivre’, that elusive and untranslatable concept, was born. It was an art that consisted in living well, with courtesy, elegance and mutual pleasure, in which pleasing others was a form of pleasure in itself, and where etiquette, ‘politesse’, and ‘bon ton’ provided protection from confusion and the uncertainties of the outside world. Voice, gesture, self-awareness, amiability, and even silence, all possessed meanings. Even Hume, who held that English political life was greatly superior to French, agreed that the French, in their salons, had ‘perfected that art, the most useful and agreeable of any, l’art de vivre, the art of society and conversation’. Mme du Deffand and Mme Geoffrin did not die until Lucie was nearly 10, and their influence was felt strongly throughout the Faubourg Saint-Germain.
And as the nobility, across the 18th century, became more and more alienated from the governance of France, stifled by those in power at Versailles, repelled by the licentiousness of the Orléans Regency, so in their salons these women and their friends re-defined themselves through their attachment to exquisite manners, and through their wit and epigrams and word games. Flattery was tolerated, provided it did not turn into adulation; teasing was permitted, but not malicious mockery, for that would transgress against courtesy. And it was happiness, that concept dear to Voltaire, defined by Montesquieu as the perpetual satisfaction of endlessly deferred desires on one hand and a state of tranquillity on the other, that most interested them. ‘It is to this noble sub-ordination,’ wrote Talleyrand, the man who would later mourn the loss of the ‘douceur de vivre’, ‘that we owe the art of seemliness, the elegance of custom, the exquisite good manners with which this magnificent age is imprinted.’ It was in Talleyrand’s world that Arthur and Thérèse-Lucy moved.
And nor was it all serious or all very kind. The elderly Princesse de Ligne, whose pale, plump, shiny face ended in three chins, was described as resembling a melting candle, while of the Duchesse de Mazarin it was said that she had the freshness not of the proverbial rose, but of meat in a butcher’s shop. It was at her reception that a flock of sheep, newly washed and guarded by a shepherdess, a dancer at the opera, intended to look decorous in the garden, panicked and got loose among the guests, bleating and crashing into the wall of mirrors that ran the length of a long gallery.
For her entire childhood, until the revolution put an end to it for ever, Lucie lived in a world in which elegance of performance was a form of freedom of expression. The people who filled her life were witty, full of curiosity, eager to learn, attentive to the meanings of words and their most subtle nuances, convinced that culture could overcome prejudice, ignorance and the brutality of the instincts. And they sincerely believed that France itself was more cultured, more intellectually interesting, more attuned to manners and taste than any other country in the world. It gave her a cast of mind she never lost, a taste for conversation that went well beyond the simple imparting of ideas, and an attachment to manners and the need to give pleasure to others before oneself. Allied to her own innate intelligence, and her too early understanding of unhappiness and the importance of self-reliance, it gave her a strength remarkable in so young a girl.
Rousseau’s call for a return to nature and behaviour that was natural, rather than artificial, had struck a chord with the French nobility. By the 1770s they were beginning to look to the countryside for a retreat into a welcome and healthy simplicity. The habit of swaddling newborn babies and sending them to wet-nurses was abandoned in favour of breast-feeding them at home. (Crawling, however, was discouraged as ‘animal-like’.) In the wake of Émile and La Nouvelle Héloïse, people flocked to the country, to picnic, to walk, and to look for plants. Increasingly, the nobility took to spending longer periods of time in their country estates, though many of their pleasures travelled with them from Paris. By the 18th century such was the obsession with theatre that country houses had miniature halls complete with boxes built for amateur theatricals, in which house parties acted out proverbs, staged comic operas and wrote their own plays. Where there were no little theatres, they used the orangeries or outhouses.
In 1764, Lucie’s grandfather, General de Rothe, had bought a château at Hautefontaine, 20 kilometres west of Compiègne, perched on the side of a hill overlooking a gorge above a hamlet. The wooded valley, of beech and oak, was surrounded by lakes, by fields of wheat and meadows, by a few vines, and by quarries which sent stone to Paris, 60 kilometres away. The château, rebuilt in 1720 round a central hall, with a large dining room giving a view down a long avenue of trees to a fortified 12th-century church, had a particularly fine staircase, rising to the first floor in stone, continuing in wood above. There were 25 separate apartments for guests, each with its own adjoining bedroom, plus a closet, a dressing room and a room for a servant, reached by an internal staircase. The fireplaces were of marble and the house, unusually for the times, had a bathroom attached to the main bedroom. Surrounding the château were walled gardens, a park, a field for archery and a dovecot, this last a status symbol reserved for the nobility. The General lived to enjoy his retreat for just two years.
Archbishop Dillon, however, loved Hautefontaine and as it now belonged to Mme de Rothe, it was his to use. Early each spring, Mme de Rothe, Thérèse-Lucy and Lucie moved from Paris, bringing with them servants, horses, carriages and books from the Archbishop’s library. They were joined in late summer by Arthur, back from his annual four months’ service with his regiment. Together with extra people brought in from the village there were 40 servants, from a maître d’hôtel to a frotteur, a man whose sole job it was to keep the floors of the château polished. The Rothes were liked locally, having brought prosperity to the valley, and the village now had among its inhabitants a tailor, a locksmith and a shoemaker to serve the château. Mindful of Rousseau’s celebration of the simple life, the Archbishop and his guests attended local weddings and feast days and acted as witnesses to the marriages between their servants. For the Fête des Roses, the prettiest and most virtuous village girl was crowned with flowers and given a dowry. On Sundays, Lucie accompanied her mother, grandmother and great-great-uncle to the wooden pew reserved for them at the front of the church, though it would be said that the books carried by their guests were more likely to be novels of a scabrous nature than prayer books. Something of the irreverence of the household, its disdain for conventional religious observance, marked Lucie, even as a small child.
In the 1770s, the English were much in vogue for their horses and their hunt, and the Archbishop, along with his other worldly pursuits, was a keen follower, keeping a pack of hounds just outside the village, in order that their barking should not disturb his guests. The hunt servants, in their Dillon liveries, were all English, as was the gardener’s wife, and with them Lucie read Robinson Crusoe and practised her English. The surrounding forests of Compiègne and Villers-Cotterêts were rich in stag and boar, and as soon as Lucie was able to ride she was allowed to join the hunt. Out hunting one day as a small child, she fell off her horse and broke her leg. Borne home on a stretcher made of branches, bearing the pain without complaint, she was put to bed for six weeks while it healed. During the day, her mother and her friends sat by her side, reading to her from the Arabian Nights. In the evenings a small puppet theatre would be wheeled into her room, Thérèse-Lucy and her Parisian visitors taking different parts, which they either sang or spoke, giving Lucie a delight in plays and ‘works of romance and the imagination’ that she never lost. She would remember the time she spent in bed with her broken leg as one of the happiest moments of her childhood.
It was at Hautefontaine that she made a companion and a friend of a servant, a young woman from nearby Compiègne who could neither read nor write but who was
evidently as devoted to her small charge as Lucie was to her. Marguerite would remain with Lucie until her death. She had, Lucie wrote, ‘the heaven-sent gift of healthy judgement, fairness of mind and strength of soul…She helped me to see evil wherever it existed and…encouraged me in virtue.’ Wary of the bickerings and jealousies of the household, and lonely, Lucie had found an ally. It was as well that she had, she noted later, for the things she witnessed ‘might have been expected to warp my mind, pervert my affections, deprave my character and destroy every notion of religion and morality’.
At Hautefontaine, the Archbishop kept open house, even if some of the guests complained that Mme de Rothe was a trouble-maker with disagreeable manners. Members of Paris’s beau monde came for long stays, and with them many Dillon relations, Irish and English and French, descendants of the soldiers who had come to France with James II, and others who had followed in their wake to become merchants and bankers. There was Édouard, ‘le beau Dillon’, a famously handsome man, popular at court, and Arthur’s sister Frances, married to Sir William Jerningham. François Sheldon, Lucie’s cousin, celebrated his marriage in Hautefontaine Church. Not all the Dillon diaspora had prospered. Robert, a wine merchant in Bordeaux, had died some years earlier leaving a widow of 32, expecting her 13th child, and as they grew up these impecunious children looked to the Archbishop for patronage.
The Archbishop shared the considerable expenses of his excellent hunt, said to be the envy even of the King, with two younger men, both courtiers at Versailles. One was the Duc de Lauzun, a soldier and friend of Arthur’s, a buccaneering figure rapidly going through the fortunes of his pale and unhappy wife, Amélie. The other was the Prince de Guéménée. Both men were said to be in thrall to Thérèse-Lucy’s charm and gentle manner. On New Year’s Day 1777, Lauzun presented Lucie with a doll, with a full wardrobe of exquisite clothes, of the kind that did the rounds of foreign courts, advertising French fashions, la grande Pandora in court clothes, la petite in everyday wear. He had ordered it from the Queen’s dressmaker, Rose Bertin, and the doll had a ‘well-made foot and a very good wig’ as well as silk stockings, high-heeled shoes, a petticoat hemmed in embroidery, a bone corset, and a number of caps, hats and bouquets of flowers. The Prince de Guéménée, whose own wife was frequently detained at court by duties, became a constant visitor to the château, often bringing with him sheet music and sometimes even musicians from Paris. In Paris, Lucie’s mother sang with Niccolò Piccinni, the new Italian favourite, ‘a lively agreeable little man, rather grave for an Italian, so full of fire and genius’, whose compositions were rapidly rivalling those of Gluck in popularity and causing bitter feuds between Gluckinistes and Piccinnistes. (Gluck’s compositions, noted Lord Herbert, on a visit to Paris, were ‘worse than ten thousand Cats and Dogs howling’.)
Adèle d’Osmond, a distant cousin of Lucie’s, whose acerbic memoirs dwelt at some length on the Dillon family, would later write that her mother was so appalled by the libertine tone of Hautefontaine during her visits that she was frequently in tears. Unable to leave because of her need for support, she found herself mercilessly teased for her prudery, until the day when a visiting prelate, as worldly as the Archbishop, took her to one side. ‘If you wish to be happy here,’ he said, ‘you must conceal your love for your husband. Conjugal love is the only kind that is not tolerated here.’ It was all, as the habitués of the salons had perceived so clearly, a question of ‘politesse’ and ‘bon ton’, at both of which Thérèse-Lucy excelled. Etiquette dictated that while there could be no display of physical intimacy–for a man to place his hand on the back of a woman’s chair was considered a grave breach of manners–a play on words, however risqué, was all part of the wit and art of 18th-century conversation. Later, Adèle d’Osmond would admit that when she arrived at Hautefontaine for the first time she had been convinced that Mme Dillon and the Prince de Guéménée were lovers; but after six months, she doubted it. Even Lucie, however, wondered later whether her mother was ‘sufficiently distant in her relations with the men she liked’. Arthur, much disliked by his autocratic mother-in-law, seldom came to Hautefontaine, and there had been no child born after Lucie. Thérèse-Lucy’s arranged marriage had not brought happiness to either one of them.
In the evenings, after meals that were more like banquets, in the large dining room with its carved wooden furniture and sumptuous hangings, the party would sit down to the gaming tables, to gamble at tric trac–a form of backgammon–or to play whist. Some evenings there were charades or short plays, in which all the guests, and some of the servants, had parts; on others, the visitors gathered round to listen to Thérèse-Lucy play.
When Lucie was seven, Thérèse-Lucy was named lady-in-waiting to Marie Antoinette; much of her time would now be spent at court, and Lucie was left to the mercy of Mme de Rothe’s whims. But long after Hautefontaine had disappeared, Lucie remembered how she had grown up, the only child in this large, rich, hospitable, ungodly family, in which they rarely sat down to meals without guests, knowing that one day it would all be hers.
CHAPTER TWO
A Talent for Deception
That Lucie would receive a good education was never in doubt. The Encyclopédistes and the salons of Mme du Deffand and Mme Geoffrin had made certain of that. Lucie was also extremely fortunate in the timing of her childhood. With the revolution would disappear much of the equality won for women by men such as Diderot–who taught his daughter Angélique to ‘raisonner juste’, think clearly, saying that knowledge would make the world a place in which ‘children, becoming better instructed than us, may at the same time become more virtuous and happy’. It was Diderot who pointed out that girls needed to accept their biological condition, but that their education could provide the way for making that prison as comfortable as possible.
The only question was what form Lucie’s schooling should take. By the 1770s, Saint-Cyr, the celebrated school started by Madame de Maintenon–where nobly born girls were urged never to forget that they descended from warriors, and that their appearance mattered, since beauty was a gift from God–had long since closed. But convent schools, many of them run by the Ursulines, survived and much of the nobility continued to send their daughters away at 7, seeing them only occasionally until they emerged to marry and even then only in a parlour and in the presence of a nun. One possibility was that Lucie might join her English cousin Charlotte, Lady Jerningham’s daughter, in a convent not far from the rue du Bac. From time to time, Lucie was taken to visit her, but Charlotte herself never left the convent or its grounds. But Mme de Rothe and Thérèse-Lucy, schooled by Diderot and the salons, had no sympathy for what they regarded as the meagre offerings of the fashionable Parisian convents, where girls studied little beyond literature, dancing and mathematics and where the emphasis was on learning to please, while mastering and understanding nuances of gesture and demeanour.
To Lucie’s great relief, Arthur and Thérèse-Lucy decided to educate their only child at home. Nothing could have pleased her more, for she continued to show signs of being hugely curious about the world, certain that some great adventure lay in store for her. She envied Marguerite her village life and, when the young woman returned from visits to her family, begged her to describe in detail every minute of her time away. She was already conscious, she wrote later, of longing for a world in which people were not forced, as she was, ‘to hide their tastes and ideas’.
M. Combes was asked to stay on and teach her French, mathematics, history, geography and the sciences, and a maid was brought from London with whom she could practise her English. At Hautefontaine, whenever she could escape this Englishwoman who was meant, to Lucie’s distress, to replace Marguerite as her daily companion, she would walk down to the village to watch the apothecary conducting experiments in his small laboratory. Learning was rapidly becoming not just a pleasure but a necessary distraction. With the shrewdness of a lonely child, she was discovering that the way to escape punishment and ridicule was to appear at all times
impassive and obedient. ‘How careful,’ Lucie would write, almost 50 years later, ‘one should be when bringing children up not to wound their affections, nor to be deceived by the apparent shallowness of their natures.’ In old age, recalling the indignities to which Marguerite was subjected, she would still feel angry.
Like her mother, Lucie was musical. Round the corner from 91 rue du Bac, at 110 rue de Grenelle, lived Thérèse-Lucy’s closest friend, Mme de Rochechouart, whose daughter Rosalie-Sabine had been born just before Lucie. It was here, as she grew up, that Lucie went to play the violin with other members of the family. In 1770, Paris was full of music teachers and organists, many of them embroiled in the squabbles between those who followed Piccinni’s tender and intimate melodies, and those who supported the Bohemian Gluck and argued that music should take on all the grandeur and pathos of great theatre, with dignity rather than gallantry, and a minimum of unnecessary dances.
Up and down the Faubourg Saint-Germain, celebrated musicians and singers, come from Germany, Italy and England, performed at small private gatherings in special rooms painted with nymphs and Pans, clutching hautbois, lutes and tambourines. Paris, rather than Mannheim, was rapidly becoming the most important European musical centre, especially for symphonies. In 1778, when Lucie was 8, Mozart composed his Paris Symphony, the 31st. On the Quai Voltaire, the Marquise de Villette seated her guests on chairs carved in the shape of lyres. Thé à l’anglaise, a meal much in fashion in the 1770s, at which guests not only drank tea but consumed large quantities of food, was invariably taken to the sound of a harp or a violin. In the Rochechouarts’ house, Lucie learnt the art of graceful performance.
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