France’s roads, in the 1780s, were appalling: rutted, uneven and stony, long stretches virtually impassable. There was a constant risk of carriages overturning, and the party’s progress was frequently delayed when heavy rains flooded the route and the carriages had to be floated across swollen fords. Inside, Lucie and Mme de Rothe held up their long skirts to prevent their getting wet. Montpellier, their destination, lay over 600 kilometres from Paris. They travelled from before dawn each morning until early evening when they stopped at a post house for dinner, ordered in advance by M. Combes, and to which their own chef put the finishing touches, having brought with him meat jellies and sauces prepared before leaving Paris. Lucie shared a room, and a bed, with Mme de Rothe and the scolding was merciless. ‘I was never allowed to go to bed on arrival,’ Lucie wrote later, ‘despite the fact that each evening I was exhausted with weariness, for she would not allow me to sleep in the carriage or even to lean back.’ Mme de Rothe’s ruthless insistence on polite behaviour could be sadistic.
The Archbishop preferred to spend no time in Lyons, a natural stopping place, because he did not admire the current incumbent, Archbishop Montazet, considered too godly by the wordly Versailles cleric, and so the two great coaches and their outriders lumbered on, down the valley of the Rhône, to Montélimar. At La Palud, the cortège stopped to allow the Archbishop to change into his purple robes, his shoes with gold buckles, his tricorne hat with gold acorns and the Order of the Holy Ghost. Entering the Languedoc proper at Pont Saint-Esprit, they were greeted by an entire garrison in ceremonial dress, and all the local civil and ecclesiastical dignitaries in full regalia. The Archbishop gave a short speech; he was an elegant figure, if somewhat haughty, and his voice was pleasant. Arrival at Montpellier, after a night at Nîmes, was timed for after sunset, to avoid the necessity of a salute of guns, which would have offended the feelings of the Comte de Périgord, commander of the Languedoc, who was not entitled to one. Even so far from Versailles, the minutiae of etiquette and rank were jealously observed.
Medieval Montpellier was a rich city, a centre for wine, wool and verdigris, and it had traded in eau-de-vie and leather with the Levant for many years. It had a renowned medical school, a Royal Society of Science, a flourishing theatre with monthly comic operas, and a powerful masonic lodge. Its Société des Beaux Arts ran classes in drawing and engraving. In the dark, narrow streets, little altered since the Middle Ages, tailors sat cross-legged in their windows, and in the counting houses merchants weighed coins. Though Narbonne was neither the grandest nor the most opulent of the bishoprics, the Dillons lived and entertained in considerable grandeur.
Wherever they were, the household followed the same, impeccably organised ritual, the servants in their places, liveried and powdered, Lucie properly turned out, her hair dressed, within hours of arrival. Every year, the Archbishop rented the same palatial house, furnished in crimson damask, with Turkish carpets and vast stone fireplaces; the dining room sat 50 guests. He set aside his mornings for work, for which he wore a clerical robe in crimson velvet; as president of the Estates, he was left free to carry out his duties and enjoy his revenues and exalted status without interference. Lucie was allowed to study physics with the Abbé Bertholon, helping in his laboratory with his experiments, while her English maid Miss Beck cleaned and dried the apparatus. Though harsh towards her granddaughter when it came to behaviour, Mme de Rothe’s desire for her to receive all the benefits of Enlightenment education was genuine.
Dinner was at three o’clock, in full dress and jewellery, the Archbishop by now having changed into black velvet, with diamond buttons. Whenever there were Englishmen present, Lucie was placed next to them; it taught her, she wrote later, the art of conversation, deciding which subject would most interest her neighbours. With the cool and appraising eye that would later mark her memoirs, she noted that they were often people of ‘importance’, and that just occasionally they were ‘of learning too’. Each of the male guests brought his own servant, who waited on him, fetching wine from the sideboard–it was seldom kept on the table–and finding dishes his master liked from among the dozens that covered the long table. The food, on such occasions, would all be put on to the table at once, for maximum effect, the grandest dishes in the middle, artfully arranged so that they complemented one another. Jellies, moulded and dyed in blue or violet, were created with expensive indigo. With the help of their own servants, the diners worked their way towards the centre. As Voltaire had remarked, there was bon ton in food as in all else, and a man of taste would recognise in an instant the good from the bad.
Lucie’s servant wore her own livery, which should have been blue but was in fact red, since her blue English livery was considered too close to the Bourbon blue reserved for the royal family. He also dressed and powdered her hair. Lucie and her grandmother were the only women present, something much remarked on in the town, where there was talk of a ‘harem’, the gossip of Paris having preceded the party south. ‘The Archbishop,’ recalled a visiting prelate later, ‘divided his time in two: in the mornings, he chased a Cardinal’s hat; in the afternoons, he looked for amusement.’ Despite an unfortunate rumour that he had had a hand in the murder of an unruly Jansenist, who refused to be evicted from his monastery, the Archbishop was well liked for the prosperity he brought to the area. He was also feared, for he could be intimidating. ‘Monsignor,’ he told one troublesome bishop, who had foolishly voiced some contrary opinion, ‘this is not a parliament: our assemblies permit of no discussion.’ The political economist Adam Smith, visiting France to study the administration of the Estates and stopping in Montpellier, came away impressed; the Archbishop, he declared, was a most effective administrator.
For the Languedoc, the annual meeting of the Estates was the peak of the social year. In the mornings, Mme de Rothe and Lucie set out along the narrow streets, carried in sedan chairs, to pay visits; in the evenings, there were balls and receptions; on Sundays, after Mass in the cathedral, walks along the Promenade du Peyrou. Processions, an important part of 18th-century French life, were colourful and imposing affairs, with trumpeters, mace bearers, halberdiers with spears, orphans in coarse uniforms of the poorhouse, consuls in ceremonial robes of scarlet with purple hoods, magistrates in black silk soutanes and ermine hoods, and crosses borne high above the crowds, a long river of wealth, privilege, silk, uniforms and corporate order, weaving its way down the narrow streets. As Archbishop of Narbonne, Dillon was allowed to wear pink. Never had the splendour of the immensely rich and powerful French Church seemed so entrenched.
The signing of the peace treaty between England and America finally brought Arthur home from St Kitts, where he had ruled briefly as governor before handing the island over to the English. When Lucie returned to Paris at the beginning of 1784, just before her 14th birthday, she found him waiting for her. Arthur was now 33; he had been away almost five years. Her great pleasure in his return was, however, very brief. Pausing in Martinique on his way home, Arthur had met and become attached to the 31-year-old widow of a naval officer, the Comtesse de la Touche. She was a rich Creole, with two small children, Elizabeth and Alexandre, and a large plantation. She was also, Lucie noted crisply, amiable and good, though weak, ‘with the careless good nature of all Creoles’, a dangerous trait which she had unfortunately passed on to her children.
When Arthur arrived back in Paris he brought with him not only news of his engagement, but his betrothed herself, and he was eager for the marriage to take place as soon as possible, as he wanted a son. Mme de Rothe had always assumed that were he to marry again, he would choose a bride from among his English Catholic relations. She found the idea of a Creole abhorrent. Despite the fact that the King and Marie Antoinette had consented to sign the marriage certificate and the new Countess Dillon was presented at court, Lucie was forbidden to attend the wedding. ‘This was,’ Lucie wrote later, resorting to the terseness to which she was prone when faced with painful events, ‘a great grief to me.’
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bsp; Arthur, like everyone else, was afraid of Mme de Rothe, and in any case he was conscious that Lucie’s future lay with her inheritance in France, and not with her stepbrother and stepsister in the West Indies. Writing to his brother, he reported that he had attempted to see Lucie several times, and that he was trying to obtain from Mme de Rothe a clear understanding of his daughter’s financial position, but that she was never at home when he went to call. For himself, he wrote, he was determined to be ‘happy and independent’, and his second marriage was exactly what he needed. In England, where Arthur took his bride, there were several references in The Times to his honourable and generous conduct towards the vanquished English after the battle for Saint Eustatius, and the couple were fêted by his relations and received at court. As his sister Lady Jerningham observed, Arthur was a very good-hearted man.
Arthur had long hoped to be made governor of Martinique or San Domingue, large, prosperous islands rich in plantations and slaves. After his excellent record in the American war, he felt that one or other was his due. But Mme de Rothe was not without influence, and after the Archbishop refused to plead his case with the King, Arthur was obliged to accept the considerably less prestigious Tobago.
Lucie was only permitted to meet her stepmother once. Then her father departed for the West Indies, taking with him his wife and their new baby, Fanny. They left behind in Paris the two older children, Elizabeth, always known as Betsy, in the convent of the Assumption, Alexandre in a school with a tutor. But the cruellest blow, for Lucie, was the decision that her own much-loved tutor, M. Combes, who had protected and cared for her for the past seven years, would accompany Arthur as his secretary.
Before leaving, Arthur, who had finally managed to see Mme de Rothe, spoke to her about a young man whom he believed might make a good husband for Lucie. His name was Frédéric de Gouvernet and they had become friends during the American war, where Frédéric served as a young aide-de-camp. Frédéric, said Arthur, was not only much liked and esteemed by his fellow officers, but he was the only son of a prominent noble family. Mme de Rothe refused even to consider such a match. She knew Frédéric by reputation, she said, and he was ugly, short and a ‘bad lot’. The amiable but weak Arthur did not insist. As he left, he gave the Archbishop full powers of proxy to arrange whatever marriage for Lucie he thought best. But Lucie herself, who had talked at length to her father about Frédéric, had been intrigued by the idea of the young officer. She discussed him with her cousin Dominic Sheldon, who had come to live with them, and who had met Frédéric several times in Paris. But when she learnt that Frédéric had indeed been very wild in his youth, she resolved to think no more about him. Her curious and unhappy childhood was producing a girl of strong character and determined ways.
In the spring of 1794 Lucie turned 14. She was no prettier in a conventional way than she had been as a small child, but she was robust and energetic, and her liveliness and intelligence made her very attractive. With every month that passed, she minded her grandmother’s scoldings less, ‘either because I had become used to ill-treatment, or because…the calm with which I met the calumnies she spread in every direction…forced her to hold me in a certain degree of respect’. She was now also taller than her grandmother. Later, she wondered whether there was not an element of fear in Mme de Rothe’s newfound restraint, lest her granddaughter, who would soon be entering society, tell the world about what she had endured. Mme de Rothe had foolishly never tried to conceal her dislike for Marie Antoinette, nor her resentment at the Queen’s evident fondness for Thérèse-Lucy; the thought that Lucie might soon be repeating her disparaging remarks at Versailles must have been disquieting.
And Lucie, at last, was allowed greater freedom to move around Paris. The city had never been so beguiling. Though the winters of 1783 and 1784 were bitterly cold, the Seine icing over and the temperature never rising above freezing for weeks on end, and though wolves were spotted prowling around the outskirts, the mood in the capital was buoyant. Efforts to control public spending had been defeated and a new policy, spending more and borrowing more, had been adopted. Around the perimeter of Paris, an immense wall, 3 metres tall, was rising to encircle the city, as a way of preventing the flow of untaxed goods and in the hopes that the increased excise revenue would boost the dwindling reserves of money in the government coffers. Money was being poured into sugar refineries, coal mines, armaments and dockyards.
The new rich, or those who now felt rich, looking for ways to spend their money, were commissioning pictures, and particularly portraits. Elisabeth Vigée-Lebrun, one of the very few women in a field dominated by men, was at work on what would become 30 sentimental portraits of the Queen and her children, in which she took care to play down Marie Antoinette’s narrow Habsburg face, pale protruding eyes and thick lower lip. In the hierarchy of desirable art, flowers were at the bottom, followed by landscapes, animals and human beings, the high ground taken by allegorical compositions. Jacques-Louis David was the rising star of the neo-classical movement. In the newly fashionable Chaussée d’Antin, the rich widow of a banker from Geneva opened her hôtel particulier, built by Leroux, to visitors. Those prepared to buy tickets could wander among its frescoed rooms, where Bacchus, Hercules and Cupid sported with Pleasure and Liberty, or stroll on the terrace among grottoes, statues and Corinthian peristyles.
No quarter of Paris was in a greater state of upheaval than the streets surrounding the Palais-Royal, opposite the Tuileries. Originally built for Cardinal Richelieu in 1629, the Palais-Royal itself was occupied by the Duc d’Orléans, first Prince of the Blood, and his son, the Duc de Chartres. Louis XVI, pious, serious, awkward with people, and his cousin, the indolent, good-looking Duc de Chartres, had never liked one another.* With houses in Brighton and London and with horses that he raced at Newmarket under his pink and black colours, the Duc de Chartres was rapidly running out of money. To remain solvent, he had decided to develop the Palais-Royal by surrounding the gardens with buildings and arcades and renting them out. By the time Lucie returned to Paris in the spring of 1784, these gleaming white stone arcades housed cafés, shops and clubs, where members dined, played chess and discussed politics. And, since the Palais-Royal was the private preserve of the Orléans family, the city police were virtually banned, with the result that the arcades were becoming a haven for private publishers of forbidden books and pamphlets.
Since America, England and France had signed the peace treaty of Versailles in September 1793, relations between the French and the Americans had become extremely close. Lafayette, returning to Paris, was greeted as a hero. The English, estranged from France for the four years of the American war, now hastened back across the Channel. Anglomania soon reached heights of absurdity. The Duc de Chartres had his gardens at Monceau filled with a ‘profusion of English delights’, though few of them could actually be said to be English: a Dutch windmill, a fort with a drawbridge, ruins of a Temple of Mars, a minaret, an obelisk, a Tartar tent and a merry-go-round with a dragon. People who had never spoken English before took to reading Shakespeare–sometimes written ‘Sakespear’–drinking punch, and wearing coats with triple lapels. ‘Anglomanes’ carried walking sticks, wore small neat wigs and ate ‘rostbif’; they played whist and dice, and drove a high-slung, two-wheel carriage called a wiski. When they began heating their bedrooms and installing the first flush lavatories, they called them ‘à l’anglaise’ as a tribute to what they perceived as the English attention to comfort. Their wives read translations of English novels, with plots that usually revolved around French lovers fleeing wrathful parents to England, the land of freedom and serious thought, or bloodthirsty milords, cold beauties and phlegmatic heroes. ‘We seem to want at all cost to be English,’ complained the gloomy Baronne d’Oberkirch, ‘we are trying to forget our past in order to forge a new future, getting rid of our fashions and our customs in order to become like our neighbours, whom we loathe.’
With these English came Dillon friends and relations, among them the
young Arthur Wellesley and his sister Anne, to visit Paris and congregate round the Archbishop. Lucie was able to practise her English. She was particularly attached to her aunt, Lady Jerningham, who had been made godmother to her new half-sister, Fanny.
Not everyone admired what they found. The English agrarian reformer Arthur Young noted that, compared to London, Paris was exceedingly dirty, inconvenient, full of terrifyingly fast cabriolets which made the pavementless streets a constant hazard, while the thick clinging mud meant that ‘all persons of small or moderate fortune and who could not afford carriages’ were forced to wear black, with black stockings. ‘Such a mixture of Pomp and Beggary, filth and magnificence,’ wrote 19-year-old Francis Burdett to his aunt in London. The British, accustomed to substantial meals, with a great deal of meat, were highly dubious about fricasseed frogs and unidentifiable sauces. Mercier, ever critical of his countrymen, remarked that while the French indulged in ‘silly luxury, which kills true happiness and wastes energy and money’, the English offered a model of ‘peacefulness and decent conduct of domestic life’. Parisian women, he observed, made particularly poor wives and mothers, though they could be good friends.*
Paris, meanwhile, was consumed with balloon fever. Two brothers, the Montgolfiers, having experimented with bags made of linen, lined with paper and filled with heated air, built a ‘vast machine’, 60 feet high and 43 feet in diameter, and decorated it with painted paper. On its first outing, the balloon rose into perfect blue skies above Versailles and travelled slowly over Paris for 25 minutes at a height of 100 metres. There were other launchings, with a duck and a dog. After the Montgolfiers’ balloons, others took to the skies, prompting fears among young women that marauding Turks or ‘Barbares’ would descend and pluck them from their gardens. A Mr Blanchard and a Dr Jeffries crossed from Dover to the French coast in two and a half hours, bringing with them letters from ‘people of distinction’ addressed to the French nobility. Entrepreneurial dressmakers turned out hats shaped like balloons, writers composed plays and verses with balloons in them, artists used balloons with which to decorate fans and snuffboxes. When the craze for balloons palled, it was replaced by one for a fashion able Viennese quack, Franz Anton Mesmer, who held that all illness resulted from an imbalance of magnetic fluids. Mesmer, who received his patients in a lilac silk dressing gown and gold slippers, claimed to be able to rebalance them, using a special iron rod, and to cure gout, asthma and even epilepsy. And after Mesmer, the curious and the gullible moved on to the occult, to sorcerers, somnambulists, alchemists and hypnotists. For a while, Cagliostro, the son of a Sicilian Jew, charmed the Faubourg Saint-Germain and Versailles with his deep, metallic voice and his black embroidered coat, as he gazed into his crystal ball and promised them gold and diamonds.
Dancing to the Precipice Page 7