There was another princess, not one of the ‘combinées’ but a family friend, whom Lucie now met again. This was the Princesse de Beauvau, for whom the Chevalier de Boufflers, returning to Paris from his post as governor of Senegal, had recently brought back a small black child as a present, along with a parakeet that spoke both Senegalese and French for the Queen, and an ostrich for the Duc de Nivernais. The Princesse de Beauvau was not the only 18th-century Parisian to have a black child, bought, and kept perfumed, as a pet. Often compared to monkeys, and dressed as blackamoors, or rajahs, or in tiny military uniforms, these children were said to rank in their mistresses’ affection along with ‘parrots, greyhounds, spaniels and cats’. In the Palais-Royal, little Scipio, who could walk on his hands, carried his mistress’s parasol. In portraits of the time, small black turbaned children were portrayed with baskets of fruit, playing with jewels, or handing their mistress a letter or a fan.
Lucie was discovering that it was wise to be accepted by these witty princesses combinées, who ‘upheld one another, defended one another, adopted one another’s ideas, friends, opinions and tastes’, for they protected any young woman they liked against the malice of the court and Paris society. What she really liked and admired about them was not only their loyalty to one another and their erudition, but the fact that they were for the most part very discreet about their affairs, and usually faithful to those they loved. The ladies of the court, by contrast, ‘flaunted’ their liaisons ‘shamelessly’. ‘I knew,’ wrote Lucie, ‘how important it was for me to make friends with older women, who in those days were all-powerful.’ Though content with her new life, Lucie was already looking to a successful future.
Around these witty princesses combinées, in whose circle Lucie spent an increasing amount of time, gathered a coterie of amusing men, such as Frédéric’s brothers-in-law, the de Lameth brothers, and the Duc de Guines, later renowned for wearing rose-coloured jackets and short tight trousers. They welcomed Lucie and seemed to take pleasure in her evident enjoyment of their company. It was the Duc de Guines who told his daughter, as she was about to be presented at court: ‘In this country vices do not matter, but ridicule kills.’
But it was not all about frivolity and wit. Most of the habitués of these salons were friends and followers of the Swiss Protestant banker, Necker, whose wife Suzanne, a tall, very pale woman who was said to rest only in her bath, also held a salon. Mme Necker had been a governess and was reputed to be extremely snobbish. Lucie referred to her as ‘priggish’ and ‘pedantic’. ‘When God created Mme Necker,’ wrote Baronne d’Oberkirch in her memoirs, ‘he dipped her first, inside and out, in a bucket of starch.’ But since Mme Necker was also witty and had an excellent cook, Parisian society flocked to her drawing room.
In 1786, the Neckers’ only child, Germaine, had married the Baron de Staël, the Swedish Ambassador to Paris, bringing with her a dowry of 650,000 livres, magnificent diamonds, a splendid trousseau and a carriage and four horses. Germaine, a childhood friend of Frédéric’s, now lived in Lucie’s old house in the rue du Bac, which she had filled with magnificent chandeliers, obelisks and marble columns. It was not a happy marriage. Germaine said of her husband that he was a ‘totally honest man, incapable of saying, or doing, anything stupid’ but that he lacked resourcefulness and energy. Germaine was not pretty, but she had a large bosom and strong features, and shining, very expressive eyes, and she had grown up listening not only to Voltaire, but to Gibbon, Hume and Walpole, sitting on a footstool by her mother’s chair. In 1787, when Lucie met her, she was 21, a forceful, self-assured young woman who spoke good English and revelled in the art of conversation. Not naturally given to subservience, she liked to argue and to analyse.
It was an extraordinary moment to be young and to be French. Paris was alive with ideas and arguments, rumours and opinions. Never had the salons been so lively nor their guests more outspoken and opinionated. ‘All heads were turned,’ wrote the Duc de Levis. ‘Soldiers talked about government, magistrates gave up the law and dreamt of politics. Men of letters wanted to make laws, clerics talked finance and women spoke of everything…It was enough to sparkle among the women, since they directed opinion.’ Love, added Thomas Jefferson, writing to a friend in London, had ‘lost its part in conversation’. Though not for Lucie: even if he was frequently away with his regiment, her marriage to Frédéric was turning out to be extremely happy.
In 1784, Jefferson, one of the authors of the American Declaration of Independence, had agreed to join Benjamin Franklin and John Adams in Paris as Commissioners with the task of convincing the French government that the United States remained a good financial risk, with great promise of growth and development. The war and subsequent break with the British had left America saddled with debts for goods ordered from merchants in London and Glasgow, while the traditional markets for its tobacco, whale oil, rice and wheat had been cut off. In Paris, Jefferson’s view that happiness resided ultimately in the elevated principles of a well-ordered state found ready listeners among Frédéric and the young liberal nobles who had returned from the American campaigns excited by its vision of equality. As Mercier remarked, America was proof of what ‘Man can do when he adds knowledge to a generous heart’. When these liberal aristocrats met, the conversation turned naturally to how the American experience might somehow be applied to France.
Listening to Frédéric and his friends, Lucie was acquiring a political education, even if she often found the incessant talk about the precariousness of French society tedious. What astonished her, when writing her memoirs almost half a century later, was that even when discussing the growing sense of unrest, the word ‘revolution’ was never uttered. ‘Had anyone dared to use it,’ she would write, ‘he would have been thought mad.’
In the exalted and high-minded salon of Mme Helvétius, widow of the philosopher and close companion to Franklin, in whose drawing room in Auteuil prowled 18 angora cats dressed in satin, the Commissioners met and made friends with the liberal Frenchmen of the day. There was the mathematician and philosopher Marie-Jean Condorcet, a tall, ungainly, dishevelled figure, with very white skin. Condorcet was a visionary optimist, standing at the liberal end of the philosophers and believing in the utopian reform of French society. There was also the Duc de La Rochefoucault, a reflective, urbane gentleman-farmer, who shared Jefferson’s interests in scientific agrarian experiments and had a model farm in Normandy. During the American war, with Franklin’s help, La Rochefoucault had translated various key documents and published them in clandestine periodicals in France. By 1787, 25 Frenchmen had been elected members of the prestigious American Philosophical Society. Others, like Arthur Dillon, had been made members of the Cincinnatus Society,* a group of young officers, French and American, who had fought together for George Washington.
The three Commissioners, with the help of George Washington’s agent in Paris, an articulate, patrician New York businessman called Gouverneur Morris, presided over gatherings for the growing American community and their French liberal friends. There they discussed, long into night, the rights of man, the abolition of slavery and equality for women. Jefferson himself, a tall, sinewy, rather stiff man, with greying strawberry-blond hair and red cheeks, kept a lavish table and served excellent wines, saying that good wine stimulated the intellect and conversation.
By 1787 the Americans in Paris had been joined by Thomas Paine, already known for the French translation of his book, Common Sense. But they now lost Franklin, who was 79 and ailing, and in such physical discomfort that Marie Antoinette lent him a special mule-drawn litter in which he could recline on cushions to carry him from Paris to the ship that was to bear him to America. Franklin was greatly missed, by the many women he had charmed and by the French liberals. His parting gift from the King was a portrait encrusted in diamonds, and his luggage, as he lumbered across Brittany behind his mules, included 23 cases of books, a dismantled printing press and various sets of printer’s type, a cabriolet, a crate of fru
it trees and two of Mme Helvétius’s angora cats. For the Americans left behind debating ideas with Frédéric and his friends about prosperity and enlightenment, the question was how to transform a country of some 26 million people, at least 25 million of whom had never known either prosperity or liberty, into a functioning republic.
Lucie was drawn into this American world not only by Frédéric and the de Lameth brothers, but by her excellent spoken English. Teased by the young men she met for her unfeigned devotion to her husband, she was conscious of the need to win her way back into the favour of her mother’s friends, both in Paris and at court, alienated since Thérèse-Lucy’s death by Mme de Rothe’s sniping and abrasive manner. One of these was the Rochechouart family, where Lucie had practised the piano as a child, and where she returned to sing at musical gatherings still held every week in the rue de Grenelle. Her friend Rosalie-Sabine had contracted a wasting illness and had grown into a misshapen hunchback, and neither her good nature, nor her intelligence, nor her remarkable singing voice, could reconcile her young husband to living with her. He had fled to Russia, to join the Imperial army.
Soon after settling in Paris, Lucie was taken by Frédéric to call on Mme de Montesson, one of the older women he most admired and in whose house he had lived as a young man. She had not long before put off her mourning for her husband, and returned from a convent to her house in the Chaussée d’Antin. Mme de Montesson–for reasons of protocol–was not received at court, but in Paris her invitations were much sought after. She had always been devoted to Frédéric and now treated Lucie as a daughter, introducing her to her formidable niece, Félicité de Genlis. Mme de Genlis was tutor to the young Princesse d’Orléans, known as ‘Mademoiselle’, and to her three brothers. Soon after being appointed–her curious title of tutor explained by the fact that the post was usually held by a man–Mme de Genlis had started a school in a specially built pavilion at the Convent of Belle Chasse, to which the princes came from the Palais-Royal every day. In appearance more handsome than pretty, she was 41, with a pronounced nose and a large mouth. She was bringing up the princes frugally, to follow Rousseau’s precepts about nature, character-training and physical exercise. Buffon declared that she was ‘training souls’.
In the pavilion in the Chasse Midi, where Lucie was taken to visit her, history was taught with magic lanterns, supper was conducted in Italian, and time was found for literary criticism, mechanics, botany, anatomy, mineralogy, fencing and book-binding. The walls of the school rooms were decorated with busts of the Roman emperors. Pupils rose at 6.30 and breakfasted on bread and grapes, Mme de Genlis no more believing in greed than she did in holidays. Setting herself up as a beacon of morality, in a society buffeted by scandals, she had founded an Order of Perseverance, whose members wore enamel rings engraved with the words ‘candour, loyalty, courage, chastity, virtue, goodness and perseverance’. She also played the harp. Among her pupils was a little girl, la belle Pamela, an English child brought at the age of 5 from her penniless parents to be a companion to Mademoiselle, though it was rumoured in Paris that she was in fact Mme de Genlis’s own daughter by the Duc d’Orléans.
Lucie soon became friendly with Pulchérie de Valance, Mme de Genlis’s grown-up daughter. Three years older than Lucie, and also pregnant, she was married to a man of whom some said that he was her great-aunt’s lover. When there were evening dances at the pavilion at Belle Chasse, there was never anything to eat, and only water to drink, Mme de Genlis extending her frugality to her guests. With Mme de Montesson, or with Frédéric, Lucie was also an occasional guest at the Palais-Royal, where the Duc d’Orléans, who was not frugal at all, gave glittering supper parties. Neither she nor Frédéric liked or admired the world of the Palais-Royal, where there was much criticism of the King and Marie Antoinette and where, Lucie wrote later, the Duke ‘corrupted everything within reach’.
In February 1788, while at court one Sunday evening, Lucie heard the clocks strike nine while she was still some way from the Queen’s apartments. She was now almost five months pregnant. Fearing she would be late, she began to run. Her hoop caught in a doorway, and she stumbled. Two days later, she miscarried.
When Mme de Rothe returned to Paris soon afterwards, Lucie and Frédéric reluctantly moved back to live with her–as was expected of a young couple with no establishment yet of their own–but relations between her jealous, angry grandmother and Frédéric soon grew so strained that the young couple were asked to leave. Paris and the court were quick to take sides, some blaming Frédéric for being overly hasty and unaccommodating, others pointing to Mme de Rothe’s dictatorial ways. Lucie, who had strong feelings about family loyalty, felt torn.
They were offered an apartment in the Princesse d’Hénin’s house in the rue de Vermeuil, overlooking a small, dark garden, and gratefully moved in, taking with them Marguerite, Lucie’s much-loved childhood maid. Lucie was soon pregnant again. Whenever they could, they escaped to Passy, where the princesses combinées shared a house; but Lucie was often required at court, though Marie Antoinette now excused her from the long walk to Chapel, for fear that she might again slip and fall. Instead, she helped in the elaborate ritual of making the Queen’s bed, stripping the sheets and handing them in baskets lined with green silk to footmen. Marie Antoinette herself had lost her daughter, Sophie, just before her 1st birthday. Sophie had always been sickly, but the Queen was heartbroken. Asked by a courtier how she could grieve for a baby so young, of whom she as yet knew so little, the Queen replied: ‘She might have become my friend.’ Madame Vigée-Lebrun was asked to paint out the baby from the most recent group portrait of the Queen and her children, leaving the figure of the Dauphin pointing to an empty cradle.
In December, Lucie gave birth to a stillborn baby, strangled by the umbilical cord. Labour lasted 24 hours ‘of unbearable pain’, and she almost died. It was her second lost child, but as with all the most unhappy events in her life, she chose not to dwell on it. Nor were miscarriages or stillborn children unusual; few 18th-century women managed to keep all of their babies.
For the rest of that winter she was confined to her bed, recovering slowly from puerperal fever. When she at last felt better, she returned to see her friend Rosalie-Sabine at the Hôtel de Rochechouart where she sang contralto in musical evenings with singers from the Opéra. Viotti, the celebrated violinist, accompanied them. Rehearsals lasted all day, and for the final performance friends from the Faubourg Saint-Germain provided an audience. Later, talking of this time, Lucie would remember and miss the ease and the good manners, the way the generations mixed and enjoyed each other’s company, and regret that the old ladies, who had once set the tone and the etiquette of the salons, were no longer to be found in society.
Lucie was now 18; with her fair hair and light complexion, and her excellent spoken English, she was much in fashion in a city obsessed by all things English. Even Marie Antoinette commented on her English manners, and the way that she remembered to shake hands when English visitors came to court. She was becoming, not only more certain of her opinions and feelings, but bolder; and she was not without vanity. At a ball given by the outgoing English Ambassador, the Duke of Dorset, she decided to ignore the instructions to wear only white and ordered a dress in blue crêpe, with matching blue flowers. To this she added gloves and a fan trimmed in blue and when Léonard came to dress her hair, she asked him to weave blue flowers into the meshes. To her satisfaction, she was much remarked on; the Duke of Dorset observed that the Irish had always been unruly.
Many years later, the Vicomtesse de Noailles, granddaughter to one of the princesses combinées, looking back fondly at a moment when Paris seemed so lively, so full of warmth and splendour, would write: ‘While we waited for the catastrophe, society, social life, was delicious.’ What she did not add was that it was also often very spiteful. Behind the perfect courtesy and the rigid etiquette there was both self-regard and malice; the constant quarrels between the stiff-necked Mme Necker and the sharp-tongued Mme
de Genlis kept all Paris amused.
Away from the elegant talk, the nuances of bon ton and esprit, the glitter of costume and livery, France was edging towards bankruptcy. Arthur Young, travelling on his horse through the countryside, remarked on the squalor and backwardness, and on the cripplingly hard labour, particularly of the women. Seeing so many without shoes or stockings reminded him of the misery of Ireland. Everywhere, people were poor, and often hungry; for many, meals consisted of little but soup, made from bread, water and vegetables. The peasants, whole families living in a single room, locked into a feudal system, paying much of their harvest in tithes and taxes to absent noble landowners, were also battling a vicious circle. There was never enough grain to feed the animals, and never enough animals to produce enough manure to feed the fields and thus increase their yields. Working from before dawn until after dusk, there was very little to cushion them against illness, drought or sudden calamities.
Children who could not be fed were sometimes smothered. ‘The whole parish is poor,’ wrote one country priest. ‘There are at most twenty households or families who are living decently; all the rest struggle to get by on their wits.’ So endemic was poverty that it had spawned a whole new vocabulary: there were the shameful poor, the indigent, the wretched, the professional beggars and the beggars by necessity. As the price of grain kept rising–it had risen by 65 per cent since 1770, the year of Lucie’s birth–so France saw ever more abandoned babies, and ever greater number of vagrants of all ages, poaching, stealing firewood, picking pockets. Highway robbery had become so menacing that it was made punishable by death on the wheel.
Dancing to the Precipice Page 11