It was not surprising, perhaps, that the libellistes found much to satirise, nor that when Marie Antoinette was discovered to have ordered 172 new gowns in a single year, she was quickly nicknamed Madame Déficit. Marie Antoinette, noted the Marquis de Bombelles, surrounded herself with people too weak and irresolute to act as sensible guides, leaving her to flit from idea to idea, from ‘one branch to another’.
When Marie Antoinette started spending more time at Le Petit Trianon, she asked Rose Bertin to design dresses and hats such as shepherdesses might wear. White, said to have been introduced originally by the Creoles of Saint Domingue arriving in France, became the Queen’s favourite colour, whether in linen, lawn or calico. The mood for absurdity and exaggeration was at last passing. Marie Antoinette was reported to have decided to ‘renounce plumes, flowers and pink’. A spirit of economy was sweeping Versailles, where the Queen’s candles had until now been blown out and replaced whenever she left a room, and new ones lit, even if she was only gone for a few minutes. The King declared that he would reduce the expenditure of his immense stables by cutting the number of horses from 2,400 to 1,125; but there was not much he could do about the vast costs of the separate households of his sisters, aunts, brothers and nephews, all borne by him.
The cutbacks in spending, the spirit of sobriety and sensibleness, all came, however, too late. Versailles, for long a centre for cliques and a source of gossip and scandals, was widely perceived as too outrageous, too extravagant. Marie Antoinette herself, a little stouter and her health not very good, had never recovered from the affair of the diamond necklace; she now inspired both dislike and lack of respect among people who thought her foolish, indiscreet and selfish. Le parti de la reine, the Queen’s coterie, was seen as not only pro-Habsburg but meddlesome in the affairs of state. At Le Petit Trianon, the mistrusted Polignac family were thought to be too powerful. Paradoxically, even the Queen’s newfound taste for simplicity in dress was not what the public wanted of a queen.
Louis XVI had come to the throne in 1774 professing his intention to be responsive to the needs and desires of his people. He might, perhaps, have steered a successful middle course, somewhere between the autocracy of his grandfather and a more egalitarian form of governance. As it was, he vacillated between despotic rule and attempts at modernisation; and, as the 1780s wore on, so a financial crisis began to overwhelm France, where, across all fields, from the army to the Church, the sciences to the civil service, men were speaking and acting together, exploring the new ideas handed down by the Encyclopédistes in ways that they never had before. By attacking intolerance, fanaticism and superstition, by advocating the removal of education from the clergy and putting it in the hands of intellectuals, by placing new emphasis on individual values and freedoms–all ideas supported by Frédéric and his friends–Diderot and his fellow authors had effectively challenged the most enduring received wisdoms of the century.
Though the heady days that followed the Treaty of Versailles, when the country had seemed on the brink of a glorious future, lay only four years in the past, France itself had never been in greater disarray than it was now, its diplomacy stalled over ill-advised deals, its economy in desperate need of rescue and unable to float further loans. The witty, articulate Charles-Alexandre de Calonne, Controller General since 1783, had gambled on the future by borrowing and some 45 million livres had been added to the already immense interest payments left by Necker. There had been a number of spectacular bankruptcies, furthering fears of chaos. Under the twists and turns of economic policy–there had been 10 finance ministers in 15 years–the country was floundering.
Calonne and Louis XVI now took a radical step. They announced that they would invoke the Assembly of Notables, an archaic body chosen by the King from France’s three ‘Estates’–the clergy, the nobility and the ‘third’ estate, the people–in order to lay before them a package of reforms based around a new and permanent land tax on all landowners, regardless of class or rank. This new land tax, it was argued, would be both simpler and fairer, in that it would draw on the wealthy, who notoriously escaped taxation, and at the same time bypass the venal magistracy. The Assembly had last met, in response to the wishes of Cardinal Richelieu, in 1626. Archbishop Dillon, regarded as one of France’s three leading ‘administrative prelates’, was named as one of its 144 members and the Assembly was to meet at Versailles, where Lucie and Mme de Rothe would join him. Already there were protests from senior clerics and courtiers, who saw in these reforms a dangerous challenge to the idea of an absolute monarchy and an all-powerful Church, hitherto set in an immutable social order.
The Assembly opened on 22 February 1787, with the wholehearted backing of the King, and each of its seven committees was chaired by one of the royal princes. Away from the official sessions, the notables used their time to meet informally and to make deals; Mme de Rothe presided over long evenings while the Archbishop and his supporters talked and argued. ‘And so,’ wrote the anonymous author of the Correspondance Secrète, ‘the time passes in cabals, in intestinal fermentations, when the affairs of state should demand total concentration.’ Archbishop Dillon, he added, was a ‘prelate ever ready to talk, having an abundance of words and a penury of wits’. Though opposition to the land tax was almost unanimous among the nobles and the immensely rich clerics, not even they could fail to be shocked by the terrifying size of the deficit in the country’s finances: it stood, Calonne informed them, at 112 million livres, of which well over a third was going to service loans. The economic picture was worse, far worse, than anyone had suspected.
Looking back, almost half a century later, Lucie would say that, for her, the opening of the Assembly of Notables marked the first day of the French Revolution.
In the spring of 1786, Lucie celebrated her 16th birthday. Mme de Rothe informed her that she was making arrangements for her betrothal to the Marquis Adrien de Laval. ‘The name,’ noted Lucie, ‘sounded well in my aristocratic ears.’ Adrien’s older brother had recently died and he was heir to a considerable fortune; he had therefore left the seminary where he had been studying and gone into the army. Better, a quick marriage would release her from her grandmother’s clutches. ‘I was no longer a child,’ Lucie wrote. ‘My education had begun so early that by the time I was 16, I was as mature as most girls are at 25, and my grandmother was making my life miserably unhappy.’ Maturity, for Lucie, had brought with it increasing determination and a definite confidence in her own worth; and she had no intention of making a rash or unworthy match. There was already something formidable in her refusal to be buffeted by the wishes of others.
Lucie was widely regarded as an excellent catch. Sole heiress to Hautefontaine, Montfermeil, the house in the rue du Bac and the rents on the Hôtel de Ville, she was known to have been promised a position at court. And ‘to be at court’, as she noted, ‘was a magic phrase’. Many years later, describing herself at the time, she coolly recorded that she was tall, with a ‘dazzlingly clear and transparent complexion’, thick ash-blonde hair and a good figure, which between them made her overshadow far better-looking girls, particularly by day when her unblemished skin could best be appreciated. ‘My best feature,’ she wrote, ‘was my mouth, for my lips were well shaped and had a fresh look. I also had very good teeth.’ Good skin and teeth, in an age of smallpox and primitive dentistry, were among the features of a girl most often remarked on. Her forehead was high and her nose she described as ‘Grecian, but long and too heavy at the tip’. She suspected, however, that people nevertheless found her ugly, deducing this from the way they compared her to certain other girls, whose looks she considered ‘hideous’. This realistic appraisal of her own looks enabled her, she wrote, to avoid all the pangs of ‘demeaning jealousy’ that affected prettier girls. ‘I set myself a code,’ Lucie noted somewhat smugly in old age, ‘and I have never departed from it.’
Already, her tone could be almost unnervingly detached. The years of unhappiness under Mme de Rothe’s tyrannical tutel
age had crushed none of her curiosity, but they had made her level-headed and highly critical, both of herself and of others. What made her most angry with herself was that she remained very shy on social occasions, so shy that her legs wobbled. This was a weakness and ‘cowardly’. However, she derived a great deal of pleasure from a friend made at around this time. This was the 85-year-old Maréchal de Biron, father of Arthur’s friend the Duc de Lauzun, one of the last surviving members of the court of Louis XIV. The Maréchal had taken a liking to Lucie and at the grand dinners in his magnificent house in the Faubourg Saint-Germain, to which she sometimes accompanied her grandmother, she would find herself seated next to him. When you grow old, he said to her one day over dinner, never either bore young people or try to dress in ways unbecoming to your age. She remembered and heeded his words. One day, she heard the Maréchal tell her great-uncle that were he not still married–he had been estranged from his wife for many years–he would have asked for Lucie’s hand, despite the very great difference in their ages. Lucie watched and admired the ease and courtesy with which he handled his vast acquaintance; and later she would recall him with admiration and affection.
The betrothal to Adrien did not take place, though they were to remain friends all their lives: Adrien’s grandfather, the Maréchal de Laval, chose for him another bride, with a grander title and a larger dowry. Mme de Rothe’s next choice was the young Vicomte de Fleury; Lucie turned him down on the grounds that he lacked intelligence, distinction and a sufficiently ‘illustrious’ family. Then came Espérance de l’Aigle, whose father’s estate, Tracy, lay close to Hautefontaine, and with whom she had often played as a child. Lucie refused him too. Mme de Rothe was not pleased, though she made clear that she was determined to do everything in her power to bring about an excellent marriage for her only granddaughter. Only years later did Lucie come to realise that Mme de Rothe had quite other reasons for this sudden desire to make her happy: like the Prince de Guéménée, Archbishop Dillon was now severely in debt, and he had convinced her grandmother that more money needed urgently to be brought into the family. The fact that he had effectively squandered Lucie’s inheritance was never mentioned. ‘Violence and duplicity’ was how Lucie would later describe the situation.
Lucie herself, however, had other ideas, unusual at a time when young girls were expected to look favourably on the marriages their parents arranged for them. She had still never actually set eyes on Frédéric-Séraphim de Gouvernet, whose father’s château, Le Bouilh, she had passed by without seeing. But something in her increasingly strong and stubborn nature, combined perhaps with a desire to thwart Mme de Rothe, who thought him a very poor match, now resolved her to accept no one else. She told her cousin, Dominic Sheldon, that she had made up her mind and he tried hard to argue her out of what he called an ‘obsession’. She refused to listen.
Frédéric, meanwhile, having heard much about Lucie from her father, decided that the moment had come for him to take a wife. Through his cousin, the Archbishop of Auch, he approached Archbishop Dillon and offered for Lucie’s hand. Mme de Rothe protested, but Marie Antoinette herself let it be known that she was in favour; and other members of Frédéric’s large and prominent family came forward to put pressure for the match to take place. Mme de Rothe expected–and wished–Lucie to refuse. Without hesitating, Lucie accepted. ‘It was an instinct,’ she wrote later, ‘a guidance from above…I felt that I belonged to him, that my whole life was his.’ Negotiations now opened between the two families. Frédéric, like Lucie, was heir to a considerable fortune in feudal dues, several estates, invested money, leases from mills and a toll river crossing, in all bringing in some 30,000 francs a year.
Frédéric was an interesting young man. He was 11 years older than Lucie, and had served with distinction in America with Lafayette, which was when he had impressed Arthur with his intelligence and courage. What was more, he came from a remarkable family, with a long line of illustrious ancestors–Lucie noted and appreciated illustrious forebears–descending from the dukes of Aquitaine, and bearing as their coat of arms two winged griffins and several dolphins. His maternal grandfather, M. de Monconseil, page to Louis XIV, had once set the King’s wig on fire while conducting him back from visiting his mistress, Mme de Maintenon. M. de Monconseil had risen to become commander of the army in Upper Alsace, then used a fortune made gambling to buy a vast estate at Saintonge. Though he had recently died, his widow, Mme de Monconseil, was known to be anxious for the marriage to Lucie to take place. She was a friend of Voltaire’s, and she was generally referred to in her circle as ‘une grande intrigante’, a great schemer. Former lady-in-waiting to the Queen of Poland, and remembered for the spectacular parties she gave at her country house, Bagatelle, Mme de Monconseil was 85, a witty, forceful woman, cynical in the manner of the early 18th-century salon hostesses.
Frédéric’s mother, Cécile, was Mme de Monconseil’s eldest daughter, but after a series of scandals many years earlier she had been shut away in a convent, as was still the custom in many families. There she had been enclosed for the past 20 years. Her sister Adélaïde, Frédéric’s aunt, had been married, at 15, to the Prince d’Hénin. Mme de Monconseil and the young Princesse d’Hénin held a perpetual salon in the fashionable Chaussée d’Antin, with beds and sofas in the antechambers, so that guests simply came and stayed for several days; mother and daughter were regarded as powerful figures in Paris society. The Princesse d’Hénin, observed the Marquis de Bombelles, who was to publish 71 volumes of diaries before the end of the century, was pretty, fashionable and no less scheming than her mother.
The Princesse d’Hénin would play a central part in Lucie’s life. She was not an easy woman, being both impetuous and irascible; but she was a generous and devoted friend. Her own story was not unlike that of many of the women of the nobility at the end of the 18th century. She had been born in 1750, a very late baby, after Mme de Monconseil had been married for 24 years, and as a small child she was always known as Bijou or ‘la seconde mademoiselle’, the first, Frédéric’s mother Cécile, being already 15. Having made her first appearance in society at the age of 7, dressed as a little peasant girl at a reception for King Stanislav of Poland, Adélaïde had spent the next seven years enclosed in a convent in the rue du Chasse Midi, before being married to a captain of the Guards. The Prince d’Hénin was a sickly, ugly, dissolute young man with the reputation of being profoundly boring. Bijou, who was extremely pretty and argumentative, and who never sat still, was known as ‘la merveilleuse Princesse d’Hénin’. But not for long. Shortly before her 17th birthday, she caught smallpox; she recovered, but was left with scars all over her face, which wept (though some said that it was shock at a scandal that erupted one night at a fancy dress ball that had given her herpes and ruined her skin).
The Princesse had not, however, lost her good teeth, her pleasing figure, her thick hair and shining eyes. The Prince, after a few weak attempts at fidelity, returned to his mistress, an actress, and the Princesse, once she had got over the loss of her beauty, chose from her many admirers the Chevalier de Coigny, principal equerry to the King, as her cavaliere servante. What she lacked in looks, she made up for in elegance: she ordered her gowns from the renowned Mlle Couvert, her hats from Rose Bertin, her pomades and scents from a special perfumer at Versailles. The silk for her dresses came from China. Every summer, she moved from Paris to her mother’s château, Bagatelle, and later to a rented house in Passy, in which the Chevalier was given his own set of rooms. The Princesse was one of the 12 Ladies of the Queen’s Household and, at 32, renowned for her wit and her sharp tongue.
Before the marriage contract had been agreed, Lucie heard of the sudden death of Mme de Monconseil. To her great relief, Frédéric informed the Archbishop and Mme de Rothe that he still wished to proceed with the marriage. As soon as he was able to get away, he hastened south to Le Bouilh for his father’s formal permission, returning with it in record time, which Lucie considered to be in the ‘very best
taste’. They had still not actually met, the custom being to delay any encounter until after the signing of the marriage contract. It was from behind a heavy curtain that she first set eyes on her future husband, getting out of a cabriolet drawn by ‘a fine and very spirited grey’, soberly dressed in deep mourning for his grandmother; she found him not ugly at all, as Mme de Rothe maintained, but resolute and energetic. His military hat, denoting his high rank, combined with his youthful appearance, made him look ‘very dashing’. ‘His assurance and air of decision pleased me immediately,’ she wrote.
The next step was a visit to the Dillon house in the rue du Bac by the Princesse d’Hénin. Terrified at the impression she might make, Lucie, summoned to the drawing room, was unable to speak. Her legs trembled. Her English aunt, Lady Jerningham, come to Paris to remove her daughter Charlotte from the convent in which she had spent three enclosed years, tried to smooth over the moment of presentation. But it was not until the Princesse d’Hénin, having scrutinised Lucie carefully all over, pronounced, ‘Oh what a pretty figure. She is charming. My nephew is so lucky’, that Lucie found her voice. For this first encounter, Lucie had defied Mme de Rothe and insisted on choosing her own dress: a plain white muslin gown, with a waistband of dark blue ribbon and a fringe of brightly coloured silk along the hem. ‘They said,’ she wrote rather smugly, ‘I was as pretty as a picture. They looked at my hair which was really very beautiful.’ With her engagement, Lucie was enjoying her new powers.
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