It was an extremely cold winter; snow lay across northern France. Taking with her Humbert, now aged 2½, Zamore, Marguerite and one other manservant, Lucie left The Hague in a carriage on 1 December 1792. Buried under a pile of pelisses and bearskins, she clutched Humbert to her, wrapped up tightly like a small Eskimo. They had taken the painful decision to leave Frédéric’s sister behind, with her two young sons. Cécile, very weak and coughing blood, was too ill to travel. Many years later, Lucie would regard this journey as the defining moment in her life, the one at which she finally recognised that nothing would ever be the same again, that the pampered years of balls, dazzling clothes and jewellery, times she described as ‘weakness and illusions’, were over.
What she did not know, when she left The Hague, was just how far the French had already advanced. Reaching the border with the Austrian Netherlands, she learnt that Antwerp had fallen and though a room was at last found for them, the town was crammed with rowdy soldiers, celebrating their recent victory. Standing at the window, Lucie watched as a vast bonfire was lit in the main square, the flames soon ‘leaping high as the rooftops’. Drunken French soldiers, reeling and swaying, fed the flames with furniture, books, clothes and portraits dragged out of the surrounding houses. Meanwhile ‘dreadful-looking women, their hair loose and their dress in disorder, mingling with this gang of madmen’, plied them with vintage wine looted from the cellars of rich Antwerp merchants, singing obscene songs and dancing around the flames. All night, appalled, Lucie watched from her window, ‘fascinated and terrified, unable to tear myself away despite my horror’.
Leaving Antwerp next morning, accompanied by a friend of Arthur’s, they drove through the French encampment, and Lucie noted how few of the men had proper uniforms. ‘These conquerors,’ she observed, ‘who were already making the fine armies of Austria and Prussia quake in their shoes, had all the appearance of a horde of bandits.’ Their cloaks, hastily made up in every conceivable colour out of material requisitioned from stores along the way, reminded her of a vast human rainbow, or a gigantic flower-bed, brilliant against the white of the thick snow. It was their red bonnets that lent them an air of menace.
Lucie’s heavily laden carriage moved very slowly along roads cluttered with wagons and ammunition carts, occasionally halted by officious commanders wanting to see their papers. In Mons, drunken men tried to break into the room in which the women had barricaded themselves with Humbert, but they fell back just as Lucie was preparing to hit them with a flaming log pulled from the fire. Nearing Hénencourt, where she was hoping to find Frédéric, they came across a squadron of well-mounted black soldiers, led by the Duc d’Orléans’s manservant, Edward, going to join the fighting in the north. Many of these black former footmen had been in service with the nobility and, their employers having fled, were joining the army as volunteers. Lucie feared that she would lose Zamore to them, but after spending a day with his friends, riding part of the way with them, he returned that night to her side. As they crawled their way over frozen, muddy tracks, past châteaux that had been looted and set fire to, Lucie reflected on her life. At that moment, she wrote later, she felt overwhelmingly sad; her ‘carefree youth’ struck her as sickeningly frivolous. Doing what she had so often done in the past, imagining situations and events that might lie in the future, she started to sketch out the dangers that awaited her, so that she might be better prepared. From that day onward, she would write, ‘my life was different, my moral outlook transformed’.
Frédéric was not, as she had hoped, at Hénencourt with Augustin de Lameth. Travel around France had become extremely difficult, with detailed passports and permits–specifying age, height, length of nose, shape of mouth and face, type of chin, and colour of hair and eyebrows–needed for the shortest journeys, and he had been unable to leave Paris. Augustin was alone, very gloomy and anxious about his wife Cécile and the children and about the encircling violence. Lucie, entrusting Humbert to Marguerite’s care, set out to look for Frédéric, taking with her Zamore for the 160-kilometre journey to Paris and carrying false papers, provided by a friendly official in Hénencourt, to say that she had been resident there since the spring.
After an interrupted and uneasy journey, constantly stopped at roadblocks by suspicious Gardes, she found Frédéric at Passy on the outskirts of Paris, living secretly in a house belonging to the Princesse de Poix. They were its only occupants and decided to keep to the back rooms, leaving the front of the house shuttered to give the impression that it was empty. Humbert would be left in safety at Hénencourt. Frédéric’s father was in hiding not far away in a house belonging to his cousin at Auteuil. It could be reached from Passy by little-frequented footpaths and every day, slipping out of the house through a concealed side door, Lucie and Frédéric made their way through the wintry countryside to see him. They had discovered a ramshackle cabriolet and a very old horse, and planned to make forays into Paris to find out what could be done about salvaging the house in the rue du Bac.
Paris was much altered. In the 15 months that Lucie had been away everything that had once made the city the envy of the civilised world was either destroyed or under attack: libraries and priceless antiques chopped up for firewood, churches and convents desecrated, crowns, coats of arms, fleurs de lys all defaced or chipped away, the statues of the French kings in the places Vendôme, des Victoires and Royale toppled from their pedestals, volumes of heraldry and registers of nobility publicly burnt. In the Faubourg Saint-Germain, Lucie and Frédéric, venturing cautiously past the Église des Théatins, now a grain store, and the Convent of the Récolettes, now the Théatre des Victoires Nationales, found the once exotic and sweet-smelling gardens abandoned and overgrown. The Hôtel de Bourbon, confiscated from the Prince de Condé, had been transformed into a prison, where the few Swiss Guards who had survived the massacre in the Tuileries were locked up. Lucie and Frédéric learnt that the liberal monarchist Stanislas de Clermont-Tonnerre had been murdered outside his house in the rue du Cherche Midi, and the Duc de la Rochefoucault dragged from his carriage and lynched in front of his wife and daughter. ‘In Holland,’ Lucie wrote later, ‘I had been spoiled, admired and flattered…The revolution was now all about me, dark, menacing, laden with danger.’
The signs of revolution, as Lucie and Frédéric moved around Paris, were indeed everywhere; it was the speed with which it had happened that was so striking. Many of the street names had already changed–there would be 4,000 new names by 1793–losing their ecclesiastical and noble connotations: the rue de Condé had become rue de l’Égalité, the rue Comtesse d’Artois was now the rue Montorgueil. Citizens addressed each other as ‘tu’, and signed their letters ‘ton-Concitoyen’. And just as Notre Dame was now the Temple of Reason, so playing cards had shed their kings and queens, to become ‘Génie’, talent, and ‘Liberté ’.
In this new world, time itself was to be thought anew. A special commission had been appointed to give the old Gregorian calendar a revolutionary twist, and the model they had come up with, disdaining the superstitions and tyrannies of the past, looked to the seasons and changing weather of the agricultural world. ‘We can no longer count the years,’ said Fabre d’Églantin, ‘during which kings oppressed us as a time in which we lived.’ The first moment of the declared Republic, 9.18 plus 30 seconds on the morning of 22 September, 1792, had been the time of the vendange, the grape harvest, and so became vendémiaire; brumaire was the month of mists; frimaire, that of cold. Each of the twelve months was divided into 10-day periods, the décades, periods in which people were encouraged to contemplate the fruit, flowers and produce of the moment. For fructidor, on the cusp between summer and autumn, the calendar prescribed eglantine, roses, crayfish, chestnuts, hops and sorghum. Since each month was to be an equal 30 days, the five days left over in the year were declared to be sans-culottides, to be devoted to festivals of industry, heroism and patriotic games. Fructidor was becoming a popular name for new babies.
And, for all the shortages,
the almost total lack of coffee and soap–which meant that skin diseases were multiplying–for all the bread queues and bread rationing, there was something hopeful and bracing in the air, remarked on by the few foreign visitors left in the city. The English traveller, Mr Twiss, walking around the streets, observed how much better dressed ordinary women seemed, even wearing earrings as they served behind their stalls, and how few children were to be seen barefoot. He approved of the simpler dresses, the way lace, silk and velvet had been replaced by cotton and linen, and the new short haircuts for men, shorn like David’s heroes of antiquity. David had designed a new uniform for men, with a short tunic, held together at the waist by a wide scarf, tight breeches and a three-quarter-length cape, inspired by the Romans and the Renaissance; but it was generally found to be too fanciful to be worn.
Most of the fashionable modistes had followed the émigrés into exile, Rose Bertin taking with her four of her famous dolls, like the one given to Lucie by de Lauzun, splendid in the full panoply of the ancien régime. It was no longer either right or appropriate, noted the editor of the Journal de la Mode et du Goût, for women to have an air of meekness or submission; on the contrary, given the new laws promising them freedom from parental and marital control, and providing for divorce on equal terms, their manner should be ‘decisive’, their head ‘held high’, their step ‘resolute’. Citoyens and citoyennes were encouraged to abandon the flowery talk of the aristocrats and use coarse and vulgar oaths. Some of these bold citoyennes could be found at Meot’s, in the Palais-Royal, where a former chef served 22 white and 27 red wines, some of them looted from the cellars of émigrés, or eating ices in the boxes at the back of the Assembly, as they heckled the speakers.
Since the revolution, the Palais-Royal had become ‘un grand marché de chair’, a market place for flesh, with girls as young as 12 soliciting for custom, no longer harried by the police, who were more intent on catching refractory priests and suspicious nobles. Mr Twiss, strolling in the arcades, noted that there were canaries, white mice and linnets for sale, and what he called ‘lion cats’ from Syria, with ruffs and tails spread over their backs like squirrels, as well as a lively commerce in libellous books. A two-volume Private Life of the Queen, complete with obscene drawings, was selling well. Prevented from exploring further by the ‘disturbances’, he was disappointed to hear that ‘aristocratic plants’ had been banned, though just what those were he did not say. At Versailles, he discovered that most of the famous stable of horses had gone off to the army, and that the magnificent furniture, tapestries and pictures that had once made Versailles one of the most beautiful courts of Europe, were soon to be auctioned in 17,182 lots in the Cour des Princes. Lucie, taking stock of the extraordinary changes brought about in the 15 months of her absence from Paris, reproached herself for the ‘futility’ of her past life. ‘A bitter sadness filled my heart,’ she wrote later, adding that it made her determined to face the future with ‘very great courage’.
On 1 January, Mme de Staël, who in November had given birth to a second boy, Matthias Albert, arrived in Passy to stay with Lucie and Frédéric. Nicknamed by her enemies as the ‘Bacchante de la Révolution’, having ‘Girondins for dinner, Jacobins for supper, and at night everyone’, and ‘derided and lampooned by every journal in the capital’, she had left her children with her parents in Switzerland. She was frantic with anxiety about the Comte de Narbonne, her son’s father, whom she had earlier helped to escape to London, but who was now proposing to return to Paris rather than risk permanent exile and the forfeiture of all his property under the new laws.
Lucie had not seen her father since her departure for The Hague. Returning into Paris early in January 1793, she found him living in a furnished house in the Chaussée d’Antin. He was running up further debts in wine, trying to avoid creditors pressing with unpaid bills for lace, porcelain, carpets and shoes, and unable to leave the city until a trusted messenger he had despatched to Martinique returned with money from his wife. While waiting, he continued to drink, and to gamble, particularly at cards. Arthur was now 42, but appeared considerably younger. ‘I looked on him more as a brother than a father,’ wrote Lucie. ‘No one was ever more noble in manner or more aristocratic in bearing.’ They often dined together, when she and Frédéric came into Paris from Passy, and she was delighted by how attached to each other her husband and her father seemed to be.
Arthur, always heedless of his own safety, was taking enormous risks, and spent his days lobbying the Assembly on behalf of the King. He was trying to convince the deputies that it was in their own political interests to remove the royal family to somewhere that they could be protected, where they would then be unable to communicate either with foreign or hidden royalists. But Arthur had enemies, particularly Dumouriez, who had turned against him just as he had once turned against Frédéric.
Just how possible it was to try Louis XVI was a question that had divided the National Convention for some months. In theory, under the Constitution of 1791, he could not be tried at all, for no court had jurisdiction over a king. But the endless debates had brought to the fore a young protégé of Robespierre, Louis-Antoine Saint-Just, who wore a single gold earring and let his black hair fall loose down to his shoulders. ‘One cannot reign innocently,’ Saint-Just told the Convention. His case was greatly strengthened by the discovery of an iron chest hidden in the Tuileries, containing damning evidence of royal duplicity. This was the chest in which Frédéric’s incriminating memorandum had been put. For a few alarming days, Frédéric and Lucie feared arrest. But the initials on the document–M. de G–were believed to be those of a M. de Gouvion, who had since conveniently died.
On 11 December, the man now known to the French as ‘Louis Capet’–the name of an earlier French dynasty–was taken before the Convention and indicted for ‘shedding French blood’. Louis had been tubercular in his youth, but his years of passionate hunting had made him physically robust. Locked up in the Temple, he spent his days reading, later saying that he had read 250 books, most of them history or geography, in four months of captivity; he also translated Horace Walpole’s Richard III into French. The royal family lived quietly and simply, both the King and the Queen giving the children lessons and playing skittles with them. The once plump Marie Antoinette had grown thin and haggard, and her hair had turned completely white; her sumptuous wardrobe had gone, to be replaced by a brown linen gown and lawn cap.
On 26 December 1792, the trial of the King opened before the National Convention. An account of the trial of another king, the English Charles I, was being read all around the hall. Saint-Just rose to argue that Louis should die, not for what he did, but for who he was; Robespierre declared that he had condemned himself by his actions; Danton observed that revolutions could not be made with rosewater. In his diary, Marat noted: ‘I shall never believe in the Republic, until the head of Louis Capet is no longer on his shoulders.’ Since the trial itself was a violation of France’s new criminal code, Louis could, perhaps, have emerged innocent. In fact his guilt had already been decided.
On 4 January, voting began. There were three questions. Was the King guilty or innocent? If guilty, what should the sentence be? And should there be a popular referendum?
There were 749 deputies present when, on 15 January, the first and third questions were settled: a verdict of guilty was passed by 693 of them, the few others abstaining, or being absent, and the decision was taken not to hold a referendum. In the corridors, Arthur, going from friend to friend, still believed that the King could be saved. At nine o’clock on the evening of 16 January, one by one, the deputies went up to the tribune to decide on the King’s fate. The hall was full of a whispering, almost festive, crowd. Tom Paine, who had been made a deputy despite his poor French, suggested through an interpreter that Louis should be deported to America; it was wrong, he said, that the ‘man who helped my much loved America to burst her fetters’ should die on a scaffold. Condorcet voted that the King should be sent to the
galleys. Twelve hours later, at nine on the morning of the 17th, there was a majority of 70 for execution. Among those voting for death were the King’s cousin, Philippe-Egalité, the former Duc d’Orléans, who looked miserable and distracted. Lucie and Frédéric had spent the night in the Chaussée d’Antin with Arthur, ‘suffering,’ as she wrote later, ‘an anxiety it is quite impossible to convey’. When the news of the verdict came, they began to discuss ways in which the King might still be rescued. Arthur was convinced that some kind of ‘revolt’ or popular uprising would take place.
The execution had been set for the morning of 21 January. The King was allowed a brief, miserable farewell from his family. Early that morning, Lucie and Frédéric, back in their house in Passy, stood at the open window, hoping to hear the ‘rattle of musketry’ that would tell them that ‘so great a crime’ had not gone un-challenged. They heard nothing. ‘The deepest silence,’ wrote Lucie later, ‘lay like a pall over the regicide city.’ The gates to Paris had been barricaded shut. It was a bitterly cold, damp, foggy morning. The King, escorted by 1,200 guards, was brought from the Temple to the Place de la Révolution in a closed carriage along streets lined four-deep with soldiers. The procession lasted two hours. People had been ordered to keep their shutters and doors closed. ‘One might have thought that the freezing atmosphere of the day had benumbed every tongue,’ observed J. G. Millingen, one of the very few foreigners left in Paris. The drums beat. Louis, composed and dignified, spent a few minutes in prayer before climbing the steps to the scaffold and raising his arm: ‘Peuple, je meurs innocent.’ He was 38. Later, Mercier, who had abstained from voting in the Convention, recorded that the executioner gathered up little parcels of hair and fragments of the King’s clothing to sell.
Dancing to the Precipice Page 20