Lucie herself, with her quick ways, was growing up to be interesting-looking rather than conventionally pretty. She lacked the perfect 18th-century oval face with small straight nose and delicate features and her grey eyes were rather small. After an attack of smallpox at the age of 4–which had left her face remarkably unscarred–her eyelashes and eyebrows were somewhat sparse. Her nose, like her father’s, was long and a little heavy at the tip, but her mouth and her lips were full, her teeth excellent, and she had thick ash-blonde hair. She also had a charming smile.
There was another strand to Lucie’s life, and it came not from Paris and the world of the French nobility, but from America, where, after the colonies united against British rule and mobilised a militia, and Britain sent troops, fighting broke out in 1775. In 1776, 13 colonies voted to adopt a Declaration of Independence. As a soldier, the commander and proprietor of a regiment, Arthur had been following the rebellion closely. From her earliest childhood, Lucie had heard constant talk about this vast land, much of it of a wildly contradictory nature. The most damning picture came from a Dutchman who had never been there, Cornelius de Pauw. In his Recherches philosophiques sur les Américains, published in Paris in 1768, de Pauw reported that the New World was putrefying and swampy, covered in snakes, insects and lizards of monstrous size with odd numbers of toes. The men who inhabited this land of ‘noxious vapours’ were themselves very strange, more like orang-utans than humans, degenerate, sexless and absurdly small. The Indians, observed de Pauw, from a safe distance of 12,000 miles, were not only sexually frigid, but insensitive to pain, cowardly, indolent, and lacking in all curiosity; the same fate, he warned, would surely befall Europeans who ventured to settle in America. (Blacks who came to Europe, however, could hope to turn white.*)
Hector St John de Crèvecoeur, a Norman nobleman who had actually seen America for himself, described on the other hand an Arcadia of meadows and orchards, in which even the kingbirds guarding the cornfields were known for ‘their extreme vigilance, indefatigable perseverance, and their audacity’. Arthur and his military young friends warmed to this vision of a Utopian land of plenty, settled by wise farmers at peace with themselves and the world, which they seemed to be refashioning in the very mould the 18th-century rationalists aspired to. Arthur had read Voltaire, and with him admired William Penn and the Quakers in tolerant, contented Philadelphia. And when in 1767 and again in 1769, Benjamin Franklin had visited Paris, where he became very popular with the nobility and the court, Arthur and his friends were delighted to learn about life in this country of free trade and political radicalism. Arthur’s sympathies increasingly lay with the reformers and radicals whose unease about the profligacy of the French court was growing all the time.
Benjamin Franklin, for Arthur and his friends, was the perfect American emissary. Celebrated by Voltaire as a man of genius, discoverer of electricity, instrumental in bringing pavements and lighting to Philadelphia’s streets, he was courteous, sweet-tempered, prudent and wily; and he spoke passable French. He also looked the part. In a Paris of men in powdered wigs, ruffled lace and silk stockings, he wore a rebel’s plain brown coat when visiting Versailles, and wandered around Paris with a fur hat perched on his high domed forehead. Soon, a hairstyle à la Franklin was all the rage. The Comte de Ségur, contrasting the polish and magnificence of the French courtiers with the rustic simplicity and directness of Franklin, said that it made him think of sages of the time of Plato or Cato, introduced into ‘the midst of the effeminate and servile refinement of the 18th century’.
Franklin was also extremely shrewd. Perceiving the French fascination with the natural world, he played his homespun card to perfection. In the salons of Mme du Luxembourg and Mme du Deffand, where Arthur and the Duc de Lauzun met to debate metaphysics, he charmed his audience with his skill at mastering the rules of ‘bon ton’, his subtlety and understatement. He was ‘sensible’, sensitive, like the best of the salon habitués, and simple, and thus pleasing to the followers of Rousseau; but equally, he was scientific-minded and rational, which endeared him to Voltaire. The French philosophers, the liberal aristocratic soldiers, the worldly prelates and the essayists, all liked his energy and his versatility and they enjoyed listening to him talk about his glass-works and his tannery. And when, on 4 July 1776, word came that the 13 United States of America had declared independence from England, and, in Thomas Jefferson’s words, proclaimed the equality of all men and their ‘inalienable right’ to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, the young French officers, longing to see action, began to think that an American campaign, among people like Benjamin Franklin, was exactly what they wanted. The American rebels themselves were desperate for French aid: they needed money, weapons, gunpowder and material for uniforms.
Franklin himself, back in Paris in 1777 to promote the cause of American independence as ambassador to the court of Louis XVI, in his spectacles and tall beaver fur hat, encouraged them, making friends with the influential philosopher and mathematician Condorcet, and becoming a member of the Académie des Sciences and of a Parisian masonic lodge. One night, at a dinner attended by the Abbé Raynal, a convinced sceptic about the charms of the New World, at which the meagre size of the American people was brought up, Franklin asked first the Americans present, and then the French, in two separate groups, to stand up. As it happened, the Americans at the dinner were tall, vigorous men, and the French rather small; afterwards, Franklin referred to the Abbé as a ‘mere shrimp’.
In January 1777, the King, spurred on by visions of the economic and political rewards that might follow for France, granted the American rebels 2 million livres, without interest, to be repaid only when ‘the United States are settled in peace and prosperity’. The deal was to remain, for the moment, secret, the idea of insurgency terrifying to those Frenchmen who believed in absolute monarchy.
The risk was considerable. France, though politically at its most stable for some time, was financially faltering. There had been a series of bad harvests, and attacks on farmers and bakers. Turgot, the King’s Controller General, the man committed to humane reform and the sway of reason, who had spoken of ‘six years of despotism to establish liberty’, who had sought to unfetter trade from crippling restrictions, abolished forced labour for road-making and tried to curb expenditure, had been dismissed the previous year. ‘Monsieur Turgot wants to be me,’ the King had declared, ‘and I do not want him to be me.’ It was Jacques Necker, a rich Swiss banker, who had made his money from successful speculations, who would now, as Director General of finance, steer France’s fortunes through the costly coming American war, with a commitment to greater transparency in financial affairs, a leaner and more efficient tax policy and greater central control. Necker, a rather effeminate-looking man, with a severe expression and little interest in leisure, was humane and imaginative; he was also a master at floating loans.
A friend of Arthur Dillon’s, the Marquis de Lafayette was the first to slip away to Philadelphia where he offered his services as soldier to Washington. He was soon followed by other young aristocratic officers, longing for military glory. Expecting to be greeted as saviours, many were disappointed by their reception; they complained that the sheets in the inns were filthy and that the American soldiers lacked discipline. There were not enough commissions in the American army for all these aristocratic majors and colonels, few of whom spoke English, and no money with which to pay them. For their part, the Americans found their saviours arrogant. There was a humorous moment when a Bostonian grandee offered to give a banquet for the French. Informed that they lived on frogs and salad, he sent his servants to scour the surrounding swamps, and when the soup plates were handed round, each was found to contain a large green frog.
As Franklin’s popularity in Paris grew, and his likeness began to appear on medallions and snuffboxes, and the Comédie-Française staged two little-performed Molière plays because he expressed regret that he had never seen them, so his ceaseless lobbying began to pay off.
A French expeditionary force of 8,000 men, under the Comte de Rochambeau, was despatched to fight alongside the rebels, now increasingly hungry, cold and ill-equipped.
In the spring of 1777 Arthur was 29. Quick-tempered and enthusiastic, he embarked on 5 April with the 1,400 men of his regiment, flying their distinctive white and green flag of harp and crown, in a squadron destined initially for the West Indies. Lucie was allowed to go with him as far as Amiens, but Thérèse-Lucy and Mme de la Rothe accompanied him to Brest, where the French fleet was assembling, and where the Archbishop blessed the ships as they sailed out of harbour. Among the officers on the Diadème and the Annibal were four Dillons; three others sailed with a regiment led by Lauzun.
On their way home from Brest, Mme de Rothe and the Archbishop purchased the entire cargo of a ship that had just put in from the Far East, and returned to Hautefontaine with porcelains from China and Japan, chintzes from Persia, hangings, silks, damasks of every colour. On wet afternoons, Lucie and Marguerite went and watched as the crates and bales were unpacked and sorted out in a warehouse. ‘I was often told,’ she wrote later, ‘how it would indeed one day all be mine…But some presentiment of which I said nothing kept me from dwelling too much on future splendours. My young imagination was more inclined to dwell on thoughts of ruin and poverty.’
With her father’s departure, Lucie had lost an ally. Her mother, who had taken up her appointment as Marie Antoinette’s lady-in-waiting, was often away at court. With Arthur in America and without companions of her own age, she became ever quieter and more reserved. Mme de Rothe’s moods remained tempestuous.
Arthur was a good soldier, brave and resourceful. His superior officers said of him that he was ‘intrepid and swashbuckling’. He fought at Grenada, leading a column storming British fortifications above the harbour; though he lost 106 men dead and wounded, he captured or killed 700 English, together with their flags and cannons, which earned him a Croix-de-Saint-Louis. By September 1779, he was at Savannah, part of a French force of 3,500 men, where he led a pre-dawn attack against the British lines through a swamp, fired on from both front and flank. Conditions at Savannah were appalling: there were almost no tents and the men sat out the three-month siege in deep mud. Fighting alongside his close friends, the Comte de Noailles and Théodore de Lameth, Arthur was decorated again, rising to the rank of brigadier, though not without complaints by his superior officers that he was too prone to get into quarrels. By 1781, Arthur was in Tobago, preparing for a surprise raid on Saint Eustatius.
The war was in its closing stages. In June 1781, the French troops marched through Connecticut to join Washington’s men and the two armies proceeded south to New Jersey, Philadelphia, Maryland and Yorktown, where the French were waiting with naval support. And it was here, after a three-week siege, that General Cornwallis and the English surrendered. When news of the American victory reached Paris, a confectioner created a model of the blockade in spun sugar.
By now, Arthur and most of the liberal aristocratic French officers had come to like and appreciate their American fellow officers, who took them fox-hunting when the hostilities permitted. When they returned to France, after two years’ campaigning, they brought with them praise for a society both virtuous and egalitarian, in which land was owned without restrictions, even if they considered the Americans somewhat insensitive to beauty. The essence of art in all its forms, promoted and nurtured through the court at Versailles and the salons of Paris, was not, they claimed, to be found in Boston or Philadelphia.
For the French, the American war had been expensive. By early 1782, France had lent or given outright to the rebel cause $28 million. Another $6 million would follow. It was money France could ill afford. The previous year, Necker, whose strategy of no new taxes, no state bankruptcy and money to be levied through loans on international money markets had failed, had resigned after his attempts to limit spending had been foiled by the irresponsible nobility. He had also made himself unpopular by his attacks on venality and lack of accountability. For all his professed transparency, his famous Compte Rendu du Roi, an overview of France’s financial position, suggested a totally erroneous surplus instead of showing the actual enormous deficit, and had been ridiculed as a conte bleu (a fairy story). Crucially, Necker had concealed not only the vast sums eaten by the American war, but the extremely parlous state of current finances. Interest on the loans was already proving almost impossible to meet.
News of the American victory at Yorktown reached Paris soon after Marie Antoinette, after 11½ years of marriage, at last gave birth to a son. A daughter, Marie-Thérèse, known as Madame Fille du Roi, had been born in December 1778 (after childless years caused, it seemed, by the sexual awkwardness of the King); but girls could not succeed to the throne of France. Louis XVI ordered Paris to be illuminated, so that for several weeks the normally darkened city was visible for miles around. Masses and celebratory concerts were held and delegations of artisans arrived at Versailles, tailors with tiny uniforms, shoemakers with minute boots, musicians with child-sized instruments. The baby had been welcomed into the world, as custom and etiquette demanded, in a room full of people: the King, the royal family, the Princesses of the Blood, and a number of noble women with ‘honneurs’, certain rights at court. This time, Marie Antoinette had not fainted, as she had at her daughter’s birth, from heat and the press of people. The Princesse de Guéménée, wife of Mme Dillon’s friend the Prince and governess to the royal children, had then paraded the newborn baby through clapping crowds. He was given the name Louis-Joseph-Xavier-François.
The Archbishop had excellent connections at Versailles. Madame Adélaïde, Louis XV’s favourite daughter, painted in her youth by Nattier as a reclining nymph in a woodland setting, found his company amusing. It was through this friendship that the Archbishop was able to obtain favours at court for some of his impecunious Dillon relations, a matter of great import at a time when preferment ruled the fortunes of much of France’s nobility.
Marie Antoinette had never made any effort to conceal her dislike for Archbishop Dillon, and an even greater distate for Mme de Rothe. It was a measure of the Queen’s real fondness for Lucie’s mother that she had nonetheless taken Thérèse-Lucy into service at the court, where she constantly urged her to stand up to her domineering mother. Lucie would later say that Marie Antoinette, who appreciated high spirits and charm, had been dazzled by her mother’s many admirers. And when a ball was held at Versailles, by the Gardes du Corps, the royal bodyguards, to celebrate the birth of the Dauphin, Lucie was allowed to accompany her mother to the palace. It was her first visit to Versailles. She was 11 and she was expected to wear a miniature version of her mother’s full court dress, including a hooped skirt and powdered wig. In the Grande Salle des Spectacles, she watched as Marie Antoinette opened the dancing in a blue dress dotted with sapphires and diamonds. It was a spectacle Lucie never forgot. The young Queen had been so ‘young, beautiful and adored by all’. Many years later, when writing her memoirs, Lucie was haunted by the thought of how short a time Marie Antoinette had left to her.
The court at Versailles was still extremely youthful. Marie Antoinette was 26, the King 28, his brothers 27 and 25. But Versailles had retained much of the formality of earlier reigns. The court itself consisted of some 5,000 people, their separate roles filling 156 pages of the Almanach de Versailles, and their routines, duties and prerogatives were minutely observed. Who carried what, sat where, ate how, followed or preceded whom, wore what on which occasion, was all listed and followed. Women were admitted to court only if they could prove titles of nobility dating back to 1400. The ritual of the lever and the coucher, semi-public events in a royal life that was conducted on a permanently public stage, continued, and the morning toilette de la reine, at which Thérèse-Lucy, the other ladies-in-waiting and princesses of the royal family assisted the Queen to dress, remained a fixed point of Marie Antoinette’s day.
Clothes, like meals, were elaborate–Louis XVI was famously
greedy–costly, and subject to rigidly orchestrated rules and fashions. For the men, this meant special uniforms worn to accompany the King to particular residences–green at Compiègne, green and gold at Choisy–and to the hunt: blue, silver and red for deer, blue and crimson, with gold and silver lace, for boar. For the regular Sunday reception at court, the King put on the Order of the Holy Spirit, in diamonds. Wigs of all kinds, worn even by children at court, in all shades, natural, powdered or dyed, had been court uniform since the days of Louis XIII, who became bald when young. Arthur Young, the English agriculturist, complained during a visit to Paris, that once in silk breeches, stockings and powdered hair, it was impossible to ‘botanise in a watered meadow’. Young had a keen eye for what he called ‘trifles’, saying that ‘they mark the temper of a nation, better than objects of importance’.
For Lucie and her mother, as for all the women and girls who attended court, it was considerably more cumbersome. The enormous paniers, or hoops, named after a type of wicker frame under which hens were kept, and which were de rigueur for formal wear, meant that women had to enter rooms shuffling sideways, and sit like puppets, their feet sticking out. The wigs favoured by Marie Antoinette, elaborate pyramids stuffed with horsehair, sustained by gum arabic, tallow and hog’s grease and a forest of pins, sprinkled with flour and held in place at night by swathes of bandages, were often so tall that the women underneath them had to stick their heads out of carriage windows. They also itched unbearably and quickly smelt rancid. On top of this edifice was a pompon, named after Mme de Pompadour, composed of feathers, flowers and diamonds.
At court, guests were meant to glitter in jewels: diamonds, pearls, rubies, sapphires and emeralds fashioned into bouquets of flowers, worn in the hair, around the neck or sprinkled over dresses. There were ribbons, fans, gloves, muffs made of silk, feathers or fur. For walking, shoes were in leather; for an evening at court, in damask, trimmed with gold or silver braid, with narrow heels 3 inches high that made Lucie feel as if she was standing constantly on tiptoe. It made dancing, she wrote, ‘a form of torture’. The material used for the dresses changed with the seasons: flowered silk for spring and autumn, satin for summer, damask for winter, all of which, given the muddy state of the streets in Paris and Versailles, needed the constant attention of several maids. Since gold, silver and gauze could not be washed, a primitive form of dry cleaning with the vapour of sulphur was used. The heavy dusting of powder for wigs, delivered as a fine spray by an houppe de soie, left the room and everyone in it coated in white flour. Smell, ever a problem of 18th-century life, was countered by scented soaps, pellets, ‘odiferous balls’ and powders, the mouth washed out with rose water and a paste made of irises, though doctors warned that too strong odours could exhaust the psyche and cause anxiety.
Dancing to the Precipice Page 5