By the time Lucie paid her first visit to Versailles in 1781, the court was enjoying Marie Antoinette’s new passion for flowers, which now decorated tables, filled sachets, perfumed gloves, fans and handkerchiefs, and were worn draped over the head or wound around bodices, kept alive in artfully concealed ‘bosom bottles’. Musk, once popular, had been abandoned in favour of honeysuckle, ranunculus and hyacinth, lily of the valley and convolvulus. And some of these flowers at least made their way into Versailles’s gardens, in which Lucie strolled with Thérèse-Lucy when court duties allowed her mother a few hours off.
It was under Louis XIV’s landscape gardener Le Nôtre that Versailles had been transformed from what the Duc de Saint-Simon, the celebrated memoir writer, called ‘that most dismal and thankless spot’ into the most extravagant and influential garden in European history. As it grew, so it reflected the Sun King himself, his power, his concept of monarchy, even his love affairs. Versailles evolved into a vast and ever-spreading geometry of intersected walks, landscaped circles and squares, paths, parterres, copses, lakes and fishponds. Louis XIV’s gardens became his court, with a theatre, a concert hall, a conservatory and pleasure grounds, and fabulous water displays, all designed to distract his jaded court and keep them loyal. As at Tivoli near Rome, where water obsessed Hadrian, so Louis XIV had been in thrall to his cascading waterfalls, bubbling artificial springs, jets that spurted far above basins and fountains. Versailles was designed to provide a model of tranquillity and order in the tradition of great Renaissance gardens, reflected in regular avenues, in contrasts between light and shade and in the tensions of sudden vistas. Like Louis XIV, Le Nôtre hated flowers.
Reduced in scope and splendour first by the bankruptcy of Louis XIV’s last years, then by the Regent’s dislike of formal gardens, Versailles, by the time of Lucie’s first visit, was once again in the process of changing. Under the influence of Rousseau’s appeal for a return to the natural, sharp angles were being replaced by winding walks, formal parterres abandoned in favour of softer new arrangements of plants, and lakes and rivers created, artificially, to convey the simple, artless life.
This taste for simplicity found favour with Marie Antoinette who, not long after becoming Queen, asked Louis XVI’s permission to let her take over Le Petit Trianon, Louis XV’s gift to his mistress Madame de Pompadour. There Marie Antoinette set about creating a garden, in what was then known as the English style, of canals, winding paths and curving lakes, with screens of trees and trellises to preserve an impression of intimacy, and the sound of caged singing birds and tinkling water. It was in Le Petit Trianon and its famous hamlet, with its fake Norman farm buildings, that she escaped the stuffiness of court; and there that she created a theatre, with blue and gold papier mâché boxes, for the amateur theatricals in which she took the parts of shepherdess and village maiden.
Though the Prince de Guéménée had often tried to warn Thérèse-Lucy about the scandals increasingly engulfing the court, urging her to take great care not to become embroiled, Lucie’s mother, like Lucie, had a trusting and almost innocent nature. While others of Marie Antoinette’s favourites were busy furthering their own fortunes, through graft and financial deals, she played no part in their intrigues. But it was not only a matter of temperament and honesty: Thérèse-Lucy’s health was failing. She had not in fact felt well since the birth of her first child, Georges, when she was 18. Now, approaching her 30th birthday, she had little appetite, something the doctors ascribed to a ‘lacteal humour’ that had settled on her liver, but which Lucie ascribed to Mme de Rothe’s nastiness. In spite of being told that her blood was thin and inflamed, Thérèse-Lucy made little effort to take better care of herself, preferring to sing with Piccinni and to ride and hunt with the Prince de Guéménée in the forests around Hautefontaine.
Early in 1782, while Arthur was still in Tobago, where his military exploits had earned him the post of governor, Thérèse-Lucy began to cough blood. Mme de Rothe, maintaining that this was just an excuse to prevent her going to Hautefontaine, refused to believe that there was anything very seriously wrong with her. ‘Her invincible hatred and her suspicious nature,’ Lucie wrote later, ‘led her to see in my poor mother’s every action a calculated attempt to free herself from her authority.’ It was not until a doctor, diagnosing in Thérèse-Lucy’s now repeated haemorrhages a stomach complaint, insisted that she take a cure, that Mme de Rothe reluctantly consented to a visit to Spa, a fashionable health resort in the Ardennes, between Aix-la-Chapelle and Liège. Here frail patients were thought to benefit both from the calm life and the combination of acids and gases in the waters. Even so, it was Marie Antoinette, and not Mme de Rothe, who gave Thérèse-Lucy the money to make the journey.
Despite the efforts of the Enlightenment philosophers to clarify and categorise disease, it remained common in 18th-century France to attribute most illness to bad air, stemming from decomposing organic matter or ‘putrid exhalations’ rising out of the earth, or even to sorrow. Smallpox, measles and mumps were all known diseases, but ‘fevers’ could be bilious, autumnal, ephemeral or malignant, and whether ‘terminal diarrhoea’ meant gastric upset, dysentery, parasites or food poisoning, no one was sure. Equally, how disease was transmitted from one person to another remained a mystery. For the poor, and particularly the city poor, weakened by malnutrition, living in damp, dark rooms with bedding infested with vermin and using copper pots to cook with, illness was a long and baffling sequence of coughs, fevers, rashes, scabs and infected sores, most often ending in death. Water was polluted and alive with germs. Delicate children were doomed. Even the rich could not be cured of tuberculosis. As Thérèse-Lucy grew weaker, two of Lucie’s aunts were also coughing blood.
On the way to Spa, Thérèse-Lucy and Lucie stopped in Brussels, where Charles Dillon, Arthur’s brother, lived, not daring to return to London on account of vast debts at the gaming tables. Lucie liked his beautiful young wife, who had visited Paris the previous year to attend a ball at Versailles, and she enjoyed the company of her two small cousins. Thérèse-Lucy was very fond of her sister-in-law and in her letters addressed her as ‘ma chère soeur’, my dear sister. The Low Countries belonged to Austria, and Lucie and her mother called on the reigning Archduchess, Marie-Christine, Marie Antoinette’s sister. At Spa, a place much frequented by European royalty, Thérèse-Lucy took her small daughter dancing and soon the town was talking about the precocious French child who could dance the gavotte and the minuet with such grace. It was there, wrote Lucie that ‘I tasted for the first time the heady poison of praise and success’. It was also one of the rare moments in her childhood when she had her mother to herself, and Lucie, who was reading a romantic novel by the Abbé Prévost, extolling the virtues of devotion, longed to bestow her own loving feelings on her mother. But Thérèse-Lucy, evidently alarmed by her sickness and fearful that her daughter might catch it, kept her at a distance. ‘I often wept bitter tears,’ wrote Lucie, ‘because she would not allow me to nurse her, and I had no inkling of the cause of this strange aversion.’
Spa did not improve her mother’s health; rather, the haemorrhages increased. Thérèse-Lucy was very reluctant to return to Hautefontaine and to her mother’s tantrums and dreamt instead of travelling down to Naples, where the warmth and change of air might do her good. The spring and summer of 1782 were exceptionally cold in northern Europe and it rained ceaselessly. But when Thérèse-Lucy and Lucie reached Paris, it was clear that she was too ill to travel further.
Only now did Mme de Rothe realise that her only daughter was dying. Her manner underwent a profound transformation: from spiteful and tyrannical, she became tender and solicitous, insisting on giving up her own better rooms to the patient and personally seeing that she lacked for nothing. All this was witnessed by the 12-year-old Lucie with disbelief, and it was only many years later, looking back on the events of that terrible summer, that she understood that Mme de Rothe was a woman of passion and extremes and that her generosity now was
simply another facet of her domineering character. For her own part, she continued to mind not being allowed to nurse her mother. One day, Marie Antoinette came to the rue du Bac to visit her former lady-in-waiting; and as Thérèse-Lucy grew weaker, so she sent pages from Versailles every day to enquire about her health. Arthur did not return to Paris.
Early on the morning of 8 September 1782, Lucie was woken by Mme Nagle, a friend of her mother’s, and told that Mme Dillon had died in the night, in Marguerite’s arms. Mme Nagle had come to counsel her. Lucie was to go, immediately, to her grandmother, throw herself at her feet, and beg for her protection and care, without which, with her father away and in any case not in favour, she might well find herself banished to a convent, like her cousin Charlotte, and also very likely disinherited.
Though Lucie was repelled by the need to fawn and deceive, finding it ‘utterly repugnant’, she did as she was told. Dry-eyed and frozen with grief in the face of Mme de Rothe’s hysterical tears, she was accused of being cold and hardhearted. Later, she would wonder why, in this clerical household, there had been no chaplain on hand to give her mother the last rites. At the time she was conscious only of glimpsing, with a sudden adult understanding, a vision of the ‘long years of deceit into which I was being forced’.
CHAPTER THREE
A Sparkling Picture
Soon after the death of Lucie’s mother, the Archbishop set off south for his annual visit to Narbonne and Montpellier. As one of 158 senior prelates governing the immense French Church, he had presided since 1764 as a kind of viceroy over the states of the Languedoc, one of the largest and most independent provinces, stretching from the Pyrenees to Lyons. Some of the more spiritual bishops chose to remain in their sees, but since Louis XIV had dispensed with obligatory residence, Archbishop Dillon preferred to rule from afar, pressing the interests of the Languedoc at court, and descending to Montepellier only for the two months, November and December, when the Estates convened. It was then that the all-important question of the taxes voted by the clergy, the don gratuit, or free gift, were debated, along with public works for the region, for the Church was both extremely rich and very powerful.
There was little theological debate, for the great doctrinal battles between the Jansenists, with their puritanical stress on Augustine austerity and the innate corruptibility of human nature, and the Jesuits, who claimed that a formal observation of church practices was sufficient to achieve God’s grace, lay mostly in the past. A skilled and canny administrator, the Archbishop was frequently criticised for a lack of piety, but he was widely admired for what he did for the Languedoc. ‘With Monsignor Dillon,’ remarked a sharp-tongued local priest, ‘it was always the statesman first, the churchman second’, something that Lucie, even as a small child, had instinctively understood. But during the quarter-century of his administration, more roads, bridges and canals were built, and more schools to train engineers, miners and hydrologists opened, than in the entire previous century.
Left alone at Hautefontaine with Lucie, Mme de Rothe, who was still only in her early 50s, grew extremely bored. Few of the aristocratic young officers who had once hunted in the forest of Compiègne had returned from America. In any case, the Archbishop’s famous hunt, so envied by the King, had been disbanded in the wake of the charming, philandering Prince de Guéménée’s spectacular bankruptcy, rumoured to stand at over 25 million livres and to have left penniless 3,000 separate small creditors, shopkeepers, bookmakers and servants.* ‘Most of our great lords,’ noted the Marquis de Bombelles drily in his journal, ‘believe that they can get away with anything.’ The Duc de Lauzun paid some of the debts, and the King bought up part of the Guéménée estates, but the size and suddenness of the bankruptcy stunned Versailles, where the Prince was not the only courtier with debts. His wife, the somewhat eccentric Princesse, of whom it was said that she believed that her lapdogs were in touch with the spirits, was forced to step down as governess to the royal children. She retired to her father’s estates, and the Queen soon ceased to mention her name. This callousness came as no surprise to Lucie, who had learnt that the Queen, apparently so fond of Thérèse-Lucy, had entirely forgotten her within days of her death, to the extent that she had planned to go to the Comédie-Française on the day of her funeral. A reproachful courtier had to remind her that her carriage would have crossed with the cortège and the coffin.
Having nothing to distract her, Mme de Rothe took out her irritation on Lucie. When Thérèse-Lucy had died, she had taken possession of all her daughter’s papers and correspondence, and Lucie thought it likely that she had found extremely unflattering references to herself. ‘Her despotism,’ Lucie wrote, ‘ruled my entire life.’ Her tutor M. Combes told her over and over again that as a 12-year-old girl, whose mother was dead and whose father was still away in America, she could at any moment find herself disinherited. ‘And so,’ wrote Lucie, ‘I had to resolve to endure the daily trials which were the inevitable consequence of the terrible nature of this woman on whom I was dependent.’ For the next five years, she said, ‘not one day passed without my shedding bitter tears’.
Wishing to move closer to Paris, Mme de Rothe now bought a small property at Montfermeil, near Livry, called La Folie Joyeuse–folie after folia, the Latin for ‘leaves’, the currently fashionable name for country residences, and Joyeuse after a M. Joyeuse, who had completed only two very pretty wings with pavilions, before running out of money. The estate had a park, enclosed by a wall with gates leading directly out into the forest of Bondy. Carts, piled high with furniture, were despatched from Hautefontaine, but no further work was started on the house for, under French law, the manorial owner of the land, in this case the Comte de Montfermeil, could demand the house for his own at any time in the first year.
Mme de Rothe, distracted by the architects with whom she planned to build, found less time to criticise Lucie; who was in any case fascinated by their work and eager to be involved. Lucie was becoming fonder of her weak but clever great-uncle, the Archbishop who, discovering that she had a talent for numbers, took to discussing with her the plans and drawings for the new house, and asked her to ‘calculate and measure with his gardeners the slopes and other surfaces…and go through every detail of the estimates, checking the figures’. To pass the hours of her solitary day, Lucie set about learning: to sew and to embroider, to cook and to iron. Along with reading she was acquiring a taste for hard practical work. ‘I found time for everything, losing never a moment, strongly aware in my mind of all that I was taught and never forgetting it.’ Something about the bleakness of the household made her resolve to equip herself for anything that might come her way. ‘This prophetic instinct was always present in my mind and made me want to learn all the handicrafts necessary to a poor girl, and drew me away from the usual occupations of a young lady and an heiress.’ There was already something shrewd and resilient in Lucie. When visitors came to Montfermeil, she listened closely to their conversation, storing away bits of knowledge and information for later use.
Life was yet more lonely when they returned to Paris, where the Archbishop had been persuaded to move into a house in the nearby rue de Bourgogne, taking Mme de Rothe and Lucie with him, and letting 91 rue du Bac to Baron de Staël, Sweden’s ambassador to Paris. In theory, both the house in the rue du Bac and 4,000 francs in bonds on the Hôtel de Ville were Lucie’s inheritance, but no money seemed to come her way, not least because the Archbishop himself, living in a style far above his considerable ecclesiastical revenues, was fast getting into debt. None of this was known to Lucie. In Paris, Mme de Rothe was systematically driving a wedge between Lucie and her childhood friends, ‘by a refinement of cruelty’ making it seem that the break was instigated by Lucie herself. One of these girls was Rosalie-Sabine de Rochechouart who had recently been married, at the age of 12, to the 17-year-old Comte de Chinon, though she was not expected to live with him until she was older. At the slightest provocation, Lucie was reminded of the fate of one of her Dillon au
nts, who had been sent to a convent at the age of 7 and had never left it.
In the late autumn of 1783, when Lucie was a tall, bookish, independent-minded girl of 13 who spoke good English and had perfected the art of concealing her feelings, Mme de Rothe decided that they would accompany the Archbishop on his annual journey to the south. Lucie had never been further from Paris than Amiens. The party, which included the Archbishop’s secretary, four servants, a ladies’ maid, Lucie’s own English maid Miss Beck, two footmen, a butler and a chef, travelled in two berlines, enormous, cumbersome six-horse coaches. They took with them 18 horses and three couriers to act as outriders for there was a constant threat of highwaymen. M. Combes was sent on ahead to prepare their rooms at the inns, travelling by turgotine, a rapid one-passenger wagon on shafts, named after Turgot, the reforming minister of whom it was said that he was always in a hurry.
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