From this moment on, Frédéric came to Lucie’s house every day. Once he brought with him his brother-in-law, the tall and solemn Marquis Augustin de Lameth, married since 1777 to his only sister, Cécile-Suzanne, and two of de Lameth’s brothers, Charles and Alexandre. The Marquis de Lameth owned the château of Hénéncourt, near Amiens in Picardy, and was an officer in the King’s Regiment; like Frédéric he was a man with a passion for fairness and discipline. The more time she spent with Frédéric, the more Lucie was convinced that her choice had been right: she found his tastes and his ideas to be much like her own and was sure that the dissoluteness of his youth was a thing of the distant past. On the contrary, he seemed to her serious, conscientious and very clear in his views. ‘We became,’ she wrote later, ‘increasingly certain that we were made for one another…trying to understand and know each other, each one of us studying the opinions and tastes of the other…what pleasant plans we made for our future.’ She also enjoyed listening to him as he argued over dinner about what was being discussed in Paris, though she found the political content boring. She was still just 17.
It was now that she was at last introduced to her future father-in-law, Jean-Frédéric de la Tour du Pin Gouvernet, head of one branch of his large and powerful family. Like his son, he was short, with an upright, military bearing and fine eyes and teeth, something Lucie immediately remarked on. Like Frédéric, too, he had been a soldier since early boyhood. Since his appointment as commander of the provinces of Saintonge and Poitou, he came only rarely to Paris, preferring to spend what time he could get away from his duties at Le Bouilh, where he was adding to the château and making a garden. Lucie found him easy and very charming, and felt that everything about him belonged to an earlier, more formal age. She admired him all the more when she was told that he owed his many promotions in the Grenadiers de France, a regiment made up of the cream of all other regiments, not to intrigues and favours at court, but to his own merits, though this had earned him the contempt of Mme de Monconseil, his mother-in-law, who had also resented his severity towards her errant older daughter.
Both Frédéric and his father regarded themselves as liberals; they were monarchists, but they shared a dream of a reformed liberal monarchy, with far greater taxation of the wealthy Church and aristocracy and far more spending on France’s impoverished people. Together with other liberal aristocrats, men such as the de Lameth brothers and the Duc de Lauzun, they were ready to question the very foundations on which 18th-century France was built, and to attack privilege as part of the ‘debris of an irrelevant, pernicious gothic world’. But they did not see a need to get rid of the King.
Marie Antoinette, learning that the marriage had been settled, asked to see Lucie. The honour was pleasing to all except to Lucie herself, who could think only of the Queen’s heartlessness at the time of her mother’s funeral. What she feared now was a display of sentimental hypocrisy. It was as she expected. After Lucie was taken to Versailles, and had kissed her hand, Marie Antoinette was full of affection and kindness. Lucie found herself frozen with shyness and dislike and unable to respond. Many years later, she regretted the bad impression that she had made that day, and wished she had made more efforts to please the Queen, and later had been more able to offer her useful help.
At Montfermeil, where the marriage was to take place in the Folie Joyeuse, Lucie was given an apartment, newly furnished with hangings of Indian calico, decorated with a pattern of flowers and birds and lined in bright green silk. In the cupboards was Mme de Rothe’s trousseau of household linen, and lace and muslin gowns. The Princesse d’Hénin sent a tea table and a Sèvres porcelain tea service in silver gilt, and Lucie’s English grandfather, Viscount Dillon, some valuable earrings. Frédéric’s presents were generous and imaginative: jewellery, ribbons, flowers, feathers, gloves, lace, hats, bonnets and capes, as well as 70 volumes of English poetry and some framed English prints, along with a jardinière filled with exotic and rare plants.
The wedding took place at midday on 22 May. Lucie wore white crêpe and Brussels lace, with two streamers flowing from her bonnet and orange blossom in her hair. The guests included Frédéric’s mother, allowed out of her convent for the day and whom Lucie met for the first time. Lady Jerningham and her husband Sir William Jerningham, Charlotte, Dominic Sheldon and various other English relations were there, as were the de Lameth brothers, the Princesse d’Hénin, a number of senior clerics and several government ministers. Lucie crossed the courtyard from the house to the chapel on the arm of 16-year-old Edward, her youngest and favourite Jerningham cousin, to whom she later presented a sword. A 7-year-old nephew of Frédéric’s, Alfred de Lameth, helped to hold the wedding canopy. In her old age, remembering her wedding day, Lucie dwelt on the elegance and the splendour of the occasion, simply because of its contrast with everything that followed.
Her great-uncle did not officiate at the Mass, but he gave a nuptial blessing and preached a short sermon, and Lucie was then embraced by all the ladies, one by one, in order of kinship and age. After the ceremony came the handing out of knots, favours, cords and fans to the wedding guests, expensive trimmings in gold and embroidery carefully tailored to rank and status, essential for any such grand occasion. While waiting for the wedding dinner, which took place at four in the afternoon, Lucie went to visit the long tables set nearby, one for the liveried servants in their many-coloured uniforms, the other for local peasants and farmers, in whose company, escaping Mme de Rothe, she had spent many happy hours. The evening finished with a concert. Next morning, the Princesse d’Hénin informed her that, five days later, as the new Comtesse de Gouvernet, she was to be formally presented at court.
CHAPTER FOUR
The Colour of Hope
There was very little time for Lucie to prepare for the ceremony of presentation at court that had continued more or less unchanged for over a century. Dress, deportment, jewellery, timing, all had to be impeccable; any slip or breach would provide Versailles with malicious gossip for days. To Mme de Rothe’s annoyance, Lucie was entrusted to the Princesse d’Hénin to be schooled for the coming ordeal, which would include not merely her reception by the Queen but the regular Sundays at court, when manners and ceremonial were still rigidly orchestrated.
In Paris, the Princesse d’Hénin took her to M. Huart, dancing master to the nobility, a large man who looked absurd in his powdered wig and, worn around his generous middle, the hoop he put on to act the part of Marie Antoinette. M. Huart taught her how to curtsey, how to walk backwards in her own hoop and very long train, and when and how to remove her glove and bend to kiss the hem of the Queen’s gown, and then to recognise the sign which indicated that she should rise.
Five days of rehearsals later, Lucie and the Princesse d’Hénin arrived at Versailles. Full court dress required a special bodice, laced at the back, a lawn chemise which left the shoulders and neck bare, and much cream-coloured lace. Because she was still in half-mourning for Mme de Monconseil, Lucie’s dress was white, embroidered with pearls and silver. Round her neck, she wore eight rows of large diamonds, lent to her by Marie Antoinette, with more diamonds in clusters in her hair. The three required curtseys went well; after this, came presentations to the King and the Princes of the Blood. That night, Lucie was required to attend the ‘jeu’, the playing of chess, cards and backgammon. The whole day, Lucie would write, ‘was very embarrassing and exceedingly tiring. It meant being stared at by the whole court and torn to shreds by every critical tongue.’
Marie Antoinette had decided that Lucie would not take her mother’s place in her household until she reached 19, but that whenever she was at court for the formal Sunday ceremonial, she could be included in the ritual of the Queen’s lever. As with the presentation, every movement at the lever was regulated according to status and etiquette, the various princesses, marquises, duchesses and comtesses advancing and retreating as they proffered first one article of clothing and then another. Sometimes, so many women were present, puffed
out in their immense hoops, their dressed and powdered hair towering above them, that they were obliged to bunch closely together to allow the Queen space in which to move. All but the very elderly and the very pregnant had to remain standing. Marie Antoinette treated Lucie kindly, though not without flashes of somewhat malicious teasing, her barbed compliments painful to a shy 17-year-old. When Lucie’s glowing adolescent complexion was perceived to be uncomfortably more attractive than the Queen’s, an old friend of her mother’s suggested to her that she should avoid, when in the Queen’s presence, standing in the full light of day.
On Sundays, the King appeared towards the end of the morning. He was so short-sighted that he seldom recognised his courtiers. When he did, he was friendly. Lucie, with her irreverent eye, noted that he looked ‘like some peasant shambling along behind his plough’, constantly fiddling with his hat and sword, but that in full court dress and jewellery he was capable of being ‘magnificent’. Processing to the chapel through the long Salon of Hercules under Lemoyne’s frescoes, fading from the glow of innumerable candles, required another terrifying ordeal of rank and procedure. Walking became a sort of shuffle, so as not to step on the train of the woman in front. Once through the salon, it turned into a frenzied, but subdued, scramble, the trains whipped smartly over the hoops as the women rushed for the best places in the chapel, places where they would be seen, and where they found their servants waiting with missals in red velvet bags. A number of older aristocratic ladies came to Versailles from Paris for the Sunday receptions, dressed in court gowns with skirts longer than those worn by Lucie and the younger girls; they were nicknamed the ‘stragglers’.
At the royal dinner that followed the Sunday Mass, Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette ate alone, on two green thrones set side by side. On the other side of the table, on low stools, perched the grandest of the courtiers; the rest stood. The King, noted Lucie, ‘ate heartily’; the Queen ‘neither removed her gloves nor unfolded her napkin’. Everyone watched. As soon as they could escape, the courtiers bowed and curtseyed, then hurried away to pay their visits to the royal princes, racing from one end of the palace of Versailles to the other, the women clutching their trains, easing their hoops through narrow doorways, perched on heels that were 3 inches high, scattering powder and pomade from their artfully dressed hair. Later came the obligatory attendance at the ‘jeu’. Those ladies fortunate enough to have their hair done by Léonard, sometimes hours before dawn such was his popularity, would have to spend the day concentrating on keeping their heads still, for fear that the carefully concocted edifice would crumble.
Of all the royal visits Lucie was obliged to pay, those she most enjoyed were the ones to the charming and good-looking 30-year-old Comte d’Artois, the King’s youngest brother, whom the Princesse d’Hénin knew well. Lucie had already noted that it had become fashionable to pronounce oneself bored at Versailles, bored with the court, the uniforms, the rules, the company, and that whenever they could, the courtiers escaped to Paris. ‘All the ties,’ she observed, ‘were being loosened, and it was, alas, the nobility who led the way. Unnoticed, the spirit of revolt was rampant.’
As the Minister for War, the Maréchal de Ségur, who had been a guest at Lucie’s wedding, had given Frédéric a month’s leave from his regiment, they remained at Montfermeil. ‘We were aware,’ Lucie would write, ‘of a deep conviction that however great the reverses we might have to endure, we would find in our mutual love the strength to withstand them unfalteringly.’ They spent their days hunting in the surrounding forests, Lucie riding a ‘fine grey’ given to her by her great-uncle, wearing the most fashionable English riding dress and hat, sent specially from England; sometimes they paid visits, in an elegant little carriage also given to her by the Archbishop. She was happy, in a way she had never been before, even if to Mme de Rothe’s habitual dislike of her granddaughter was now added jealousy, for Frédéric seemed to get on irritatingly well with the Archbishop. Frédéric also made it plain that he knew, from friends at court, about Mme de Rothe’s mean-spiritedness, and he did all he could to shield Lucie from her attacks. Mme de Rothe, in return, never missed a chance to speak ill of him behind his back. ‘She delighted,’ wrote Lucie later, ‘in all kinds of painful, hurtful remarks.’
When Frédéric was obliged to return to his regiment, he arranged for Lucie to move out of Mme de Rothe’s house and join the Princesse d’Hénin in her official rooms in the Courtyard of the Princes at Versailles. There, standing at the windows which looked across the great central courtyard, she observed the bustle of the court. Sometimes she took refuge with her new sister-in-law Cécile at Hénencourt, a pale pink-red brick château, with a colonnaded front, curved courtyards, a moat and a dovecot. The gardens had been laid out by Le Nôtre, and beyond a pond in the shape of a four-leaf clover lay fields and forests. When they were on leave from their regiments, Frédéric and Augustin de Lameth joined them. ‘To live with my husband and his amiable sister,’ wrote Lucie, ‘seemed to change my whole existence…Never had I enjoyed myself so much.’
In the late summer, Lucie discovered that she was pregnant. To her great pleasure, this meant that she would be unable to accompany the Archbishop and Mme de Rothe on their annual journey to Montpellier. Since Frédéric was again with his regiment, she went to stay with the Princesse d’Hénin who, after her mother’s death, had taken a house in the Faubourg Saint-Germain where she spent much of the winter. The Queen gave them permission to use her boxes at the Opéra, the Comédie-Française and the Comédie-Italienne, where the new popular light operas were sung in French. In each theatre, the Queen’s box, just above the stage, was furnished like a drawing room, with dressing and writing tables, and two warm, well-lit anterooms behind, guarded by footmen in the King’s livery. From here, Lucie had fine views of the Indian ambassadors sent by Tippoo Sahib, the francophile ruler of Mysore, to ask the French to support him against the English. The three richly dressed Indians with long white beards sat in a special box, propping their yellow leather slippers over the side, to the delight of the audience below.
The exodus of the nobility from Versailles was becoming more marked. ‘La ville’, Paris itself, was turning into the real centre of the social world, much of it grouped, as in the past, around a number of salons, presided over by powerful women, each with her own political bent. Now, however, the talk was less of ‘politesse’ and ‘esprit’ and more of politics and the economy, how to cope with France’s national debt which continued to mount month by month.
Both the Princesse d’Hénin and her companion the Chevalier de Coigny had become fond of Lucie and since it was the custom for a new bride during her first year in society never to go out unaccompanied, Frédéric’s aunt became her willing chaperone. According to the starchier ladies at Versailles, Lucie should also have had a liveried footman constantly at her side, but Frédéric had little time for such conventions. Like the Princesse, the Chevalier was witty and charming, with a wry, mocking tone. Lucie, who called him a ‘stout, gay and amiable knight’, enjoyed his fund of anecdotes about court life, to which she listened closely, believing that they would prove helpful to her later with Marie Antoinette. ‘A knowledge of the past,’ she had decided, ‘would be very useful to me.’ But when, one day, she and the Princesse drove out to Longchamps during the annual fashionable parade, she was shocked to be overtaken by an identical matching carriage, bearing the identical Hénin livery. It turned out to be the Prince’s brazen mistress. It was absurd to have been so surprised, Lucie would later remark, with a touch of the snobbery that occasionally coloured her remarks, since the ‘common people’, who had ‘no shades of feeling’, were all the time being ‘set such a bad example’ by the arrogant and ill-mannered nobility. Between them, the Prince and the Princesse d’Hénin spent and borrowed prodigiously, paying off their vast debts in small, reluctant amounts.
The libellistes and the pamphleteers, who delighted in society scandal, often reported on the activities of the Hénins, and parti
cularly on those of the Princesse, who, together with her friends the Princesse de Poix, the Duchesse de Lauzun and the Comtesse de Simiane, were known as the ‘princesses combinées’. These four friends, close since childhood, followers of Rousseau, Voltaire and the Encyclopédistes, saw themselves as arbiters of ‘bon ton’. The Duchesse de Lauzun, unhappy wife of Arthur’s faithless friend, was a gentle, sweet-natured woman, left for months on end by her husband, who, like the Prince d’Hénin, preferred an actress at the Comédie-Française. She owned a library of rare books, including a manuscript, in Rousseau’s own hand, of La Nouvelle Héloïse; it was in her library that Lucie came across a letter that Rousseau had written, explaining the reasons for putting his children into a foundling home, reasons that struck her as ignoble. The Princesse de Poix, who had been a close friend of Lucie’s mother, was a clever and studious woman who had been left partially paralysed after the birth of her second child.
In the wider circle of these ‘princesses combinées’, to whom Lucie was now introduced, there was also the Princesse de Bouillon, married while still a child to an extremely rich and well-born man, who happened to be mentally deficient, and so never appeared in public. She was, thought Lucie, one of the most distinguished and charming women she had ever encountered, but also extremely ugly, thin as a skeleton, with ‘a flat Germanic face, a turned-up nose, ugly teeth, and yellow hair’. But when she drew up her stick-like legs, crossed her emaciated arms and began to speak, she would sparkle, from behind that ‘collection of fleshless bones’, as Lucie would write, ‘with so much wit, originality and amusing conversation that one was carried away on the wings of enchantment’. Even the skeletal Princesse de Bouillon had a lover, the tall, somewhat insipid Prince Emmanuel de Salm, and the little girl seen around her house bore a great resemblance to them both. The Princesse was evidently much taken with Lucie, despite the 22-year difference in their ages, and to Lucie’s great pride and pleasure, ‘allowed me to visit her as if I had been her contemporary’.
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