When the Terror had begun, Bordeaux, of all French cities, was perhaps the most open to reform. Grown rich on wine, slaves and commerce, its ships had carried eau-de-vie, lard, beef, linen and the famed red wines of Haut Brion and Lafite to America, bringing back coffee from Martinique, indigo from Saint-Domingue, and sugar, to be refined in warehouses around the city. Its real fortune, however, lay in wine. Foreign merchants most often came to collect their cargos themselves, the English taking the reds, the Dutch some of the whites, and the Bordelais keeping the best Graves and Sauternes for themselves. At Le Bouilh, M. de la Tour du Pin had planned extensive vineyards.
Drawn by legislation that was both liberal and protectionist, hundreds of foreigners had settled in the city, bankers, shipbuilders and merchants, who spent lavishly on handsome, unadorned buildings in the creamy local stone along the quays. From their balconies, they looked out across the city to the surrounding hills, where many had also built châteaux or country mansions to escape the summer heat. The skies were blue, the river was majestic, and on fine evenings the Bordelais strolled along avenues planted with limes and poplars. It was in his Château de La Brède near Bordeaux that Montesquieu wrote Les Lettres Persanes and De l’Esprit des lois, and where, inspired by him, belles-lettres and scientific and artistic academies flourished throughout the 18th century. In Bordeaux, ‘as in Paris’, noted one visitor, ‘it was le bon ton which counted’. Because of the lively overseas trade, most Bordelais knew a great deal about what was going on in other parts of the world.
In Bordeaux, after the fall of the Bastille, a revolt, inspired by and paid for by the Girondin municipality, had flared up against over-zealous local Jacobins, and a federalist army was mobilised to defy the dictatorship of Paris. Young men drilled on the slopes of the Château-Trompette, where jugglers, cock fights and exotic animals had once entertained the crowds. But the federalists were weak and there were too few of them, and Bordeaux soon set up its own Garde Nationale. But it took a milder form than in Paris. Ruled in an orderly and fair way by a kind of spontaneous council and a moderate city administration, it had at first remained largely impervious to the revolutionary violence stirring the north. By the end of 1791, the old noblesse de robe, which had dominated Bordeaux for the previous three centuries, had for the most part retired to their properties in the surrounding hills, where, like M. de Brouquens, they hoped to sit out the troubles. Their places had been taken by rich merchants who kept up the tradition of orderliness and dealt calmly with the overthrow of guilds and corporations. On the tracts of land confiscated from the Church, they built new roads and planned imposing new buildings. Right up until the end of 1792, a cult of revolution, efficient and even somewhat aristocratic, seemed to have taken over smoothly from that of religion.
But the tranquillity could not last. Bit by bit, a city driven for centuries by work, by trade, by its vineyards and intellectual circles, began to alter. Merchants, their fortunes hit by the revolt of the slaves of Saint-Domingue, by the war with England and by the closure of the Chamber of Commerce, ceased to trade. Victor Louis’s colonnaded theatre was turned over to plays of a patriotic, exhortatory nature, in which kings were portrayed as rapacious and tyrannical, nobles as frivolous, priests as artful and hypocritical. And a rival authority, incoherent and domineering, began to emerge in opposition to the municipality through Jacobin clubs and popular societies. The day came when two refractory abbots, seized in a nearby town, were brought to Bordeaux and had their throats cut in the courtyard of the old archbishop’s palace. The statue of Louis XV was pulled off its pedestal in the Place Royale. In January 1793, not long before Lucie and Frédéric fled Paris, battles raged between the Jacobins, raised from among the discontented and the disoccupied, and the more moderate Girondins, who were forging links with the federalists across the south, resolving, like the rebels in the Vendée, to defy the dictatorial rule of Paris.
Bordeaux would not experience the same atrocities as federalist Lyon, where the ex-Oratorian Joseph Fouché and Jean-Marie Collot d’Herbois sent 1,700 men, women and children to their deaths, many of them mown down by cannon and shovelled into mass graves. But the temerity of the Bordelais would not be allowed to go unpunished. As Fouché remarked, ‘Terror, salutary terror, is the order of the day.’
The first agents of the terror, the représentants en mission, sent from Paris to quell the rebels, bring orthodoxy to disaffected areas, and complete the violent dechristianisation of France by smashing altars, images of saints and crucifixes, arrived soon after Lucie and Frédéric moved to Canoles. These agents were heckled, threatened and forced to retire to the safety of a nearby town.
But on 16 October 1793, the day of Marie Antoinette’s execution, a revolutionary army of 2,000 sans-culottes, with 200 cavalry, under the command of General Brume, escorting three men from the Convention, marched into the city. Not one of the three was vicious in the way of Fouché or Collot d’Herbois: Claude Ysabeau, a former vicar, was ponderous but could be generous; Marc-Antoine Baudot, a doctor, though an ardent republican, was optimistic by nature; while Jean-Lambert Tallien, volatile and given to violence, was also capable of clemency. What made them lethal, however, was their choice of men to carry out their orders: a clock-maker called Bertrand, better known for his thieving than for his clocks, was appointed mayor, and Jean-Baptiste Lacombe, a crafty and corrupt teacher and militant Jacobin with a long thin face, was named President of the Revolutionary Tribunal. It would later be said that between them, and the scores of spies, fanatics and criminals they recruited, justice in Bordeaux would be turned into a ‘tribunal of rapine and blood’. It would also be remarked that neither Bertrand nor Lacombe was actually a native of Bordeaux, and that the Bordelais had needed such men to sully their hands, so that their own might stay clean. From Canoles on the outskirts of the city, Lucie heard of ‘this army of butchers, dragging a guillotine behind them’, getting greedier every day.
On 23 October Bordeaux woke to the sounds of the guillotine going up in the former Place Dauphine, recently renamed the Place Nationale, and to the shouts of town criers beating their drums and calling out that the time had come to cut off the heads of traitors. What surprised everyone was the ease, the lack of all opposition, with which the Terror had arrived. It was as if, by being submissive, many Bordelais believed they might yet escape retribution. Lucie, observing the speed with which they capitulated, remarked with scorn that a little courage might well have been enough to keep the ‘fanatics’ at bay. When an order went out for all citizens to surrender their weapons, and people hastened to obey, she noted that it did not ‘seem to have occurred to anyone that it would have been far braver to use them in self-defence’.
Lucie and Frédéric discussed leaving for Spain, but Lucie was now in the ninth month of her pregnancy, and to reach Spain they would have had to pass through the French lines. Once the baby was born, they decided, Frédéric would seek shelter somewhere else.
Late one night, just at the moment that Lucie realised that she was going into labour, news reached Canoles that people in nearby country houses–‘bad citizens’–were being rounded up and taken to one of the makeshift detention centres in former seminaries, convents and public buildings, to await hearings before Lacombe. Dr Dupouy, come to attend the birth, was said to be on the list of wanted men. Their host de Brouquens sent a trusted servant to stand on the road leading to Canoles, in order to be able to warn of approaching danger so that Frédéric could escape from the house and slip away by another path through the vineyards. The birth was fortunately both quick and easy. No sooner was the baby born, a girl, and given the name Séraphine, than Frédéric left for Le Bouilh, where he intended to stay secretly while they worked out what to do. Dr Dupouy, not daring to go home, was found a hiding place in an alcove in the baby’s room. ‘I suffered more from fear,’ wrote Lucie later, ‘than from the actual pain of my daughter’s birth.’ Not knowing what ‘fate held in store’ or when she would see Frédéric again, all she coul
d think about was recovering her strength ‘so that I might deal with whatever might arise’.
Three days later, de Brouquens returned to Bordeaux, where the revolutionary committee was already at work rounding up suspects in the middle of the night to send before Lacombe, whose phrase ‘we are fascinated by your case’ had already become synonymous with execution. The Terror had taken its first victims, borne away to the Place Nationale by tumbril at ten each morning, the mounted guards of the escort, the ‘cavaliers de la mort’ clattering over the cobblestones. The terrified Bordelais kept their windows shuttered. One of the first to die was a good friend of de Brouquens’s, the much-loved and respected former mayor, François-Armand de Saige, accused of having incited the Girondins to rise against the Jacobins. Four other prominent Girondins, who had come to take refuge in the city, were hunted down; two managed to commit suicide before they were caught, but one, Barbaroux, succeeded only in wounding himself and was dragged dying to the guillotine.
Bordeaux, like Paris and the other cities in which the executioners were at work, had its own tricoteuses, knitting and singing at the foot of the guillotine. Actors, accused of being subversive, merchants suspected of hoarding, priests caught hiding in attics or cellars, or behind altars, were dragged before the tribunal. De Brouquens himself was arrested on his return from Canoles, but managed to convince Lacombe that it was not in anyone’s interests to do away with the official provisioner of food for the army in the south.
Three nights later, just as de Brouquens was going to bed in his house in Bordeaux, guards arrived with orders to escort him immediately to Canoles, insisting that they needed to examine any papers and documents held there. In vain, he protested that he seldom used the house. Lucie was asleep when a terrified servant shook her awake to say that soldiers were on the way, a friendly guard, loyal to de Brouquens, having found a way to send word ahead. Before disappearing into the night, the servant slipped a packet under Lucie’s pillow, containing money that de Brouquens had put on one side for emergencies such as this. Taking care to conceal the packet from Séraphine’s nurse, a girl Lucie deeply mistrusted, she pushed Humbert’s bed across the alcove in which the doctor crouched, and got back into her own bed, taking the baby with her. In the drawing room, Zamore hastily laid out a meal of pâté, wine and liqueurs. And then, Lucie wrote, ‘we all waited resolutely for the arrival of the enemy’.
Half an hour later, she heard the clatter of clogs on the flagstone floors. She lay stiff with fear, clasping Séraphine to her, listening as the men combed the house for incriminating documents. At last, she heard a voice ask: ‘Who is in the bedroom?’ And then there was silence. For the next two hours, the men searched the house, pausing only to eat and drink; but they did not open Lucie’s door and nor did they discover Dr Dupouy. When they left, de Brouquens told her that he had said that he was looking after the sick and delicate daughter of an old friend, who had just given birth to a baby.
Once Dr Dupouy had recovered from the fright of the nocturnal visit, he was happy to spend his days instructing Lucie in the rudiments of surgery and midwifery. In return, she taught him embroidery, dressmaking and knitting, accomplishments learnt from the servants with whom she had spent so much of her lonely childhood. Many years later Dr Dupouy told her that his new skills had saved him from acute boredom when he had been forced to hide for many months with a peasant family in the Landes, whose kindness he was able to repay by making them shirts and stockings. In the evenings in Canoles, while Lucie sewed, the doctor read aloud from the newspapers, though what they contained often terrified and appalled them.
It was in the local paper that one evening Lucie and Dr Dupouy came across a full account of Marie Antoinette’s trial. It brought home to them the true extent of their danger. The callous nature of the proceedings dismayed them–when a juror called Antonelle had heard the sentence, he had ordered a celebration dinner of foie gras, thrushes, quails au gratin, sweetbreads, a pullet, Sancerre and Champagne–but they were more alarmed when they read further. The Public Prosecutor, according to the report, had asked M. de la Tour du Pin where his son was living. Frédéric’s father, for whom lying was repugnant, replied that he was staying on his estates near Bordeaux. A warrant for Frédéric’s arrest had apparently already been despatched to Saint-André-en-Cubzac.
Frédéric had taken the precaution of keeping a strong horse stabled and ready at Le Bouilh. As soon as he learnt of his father’s indiscretion, he set out, in thunder and driving rain, disguised as a merchant in search of supplies of grain, planning to make his way to his father’s other estate at Tesson. There a trustworthy servant called Grégoire and his wife were still living in the house, though it had been sequestrated after orders that the ‘nation be put in possession of the property of traitors’. Shortly before dawn, as he rode past a posting stage not far from Tesson, he was offered shelter by a villager. Sitting by the fire, he found an elderly man: this turned out to be the local mayor. They discussed the high price of grain and cattle. Frédéric was then asked to produce his passport. Finding no visa on it for any forward journey, the mayor ordered Frédéric to remain where he was until morning, when the local Municipal Council could be informed. Frédéric kept his head. Very calmly, he walked to the door, as if to check on the weather. Surreptitiously stretching out his hand, he silently unhooked his horse’s bridle from the door-post, leapt into the saddle and galloped off before the mayor had time to get to his feet.
It was clearly too dangerous for him to go to Tesson. At nearby Mirabeau, he went in search of a former groom of his father’s, a man called Tétard well known to the family. Tétard now kept an inn. But he also had a wife and small children, and feared for their lives should Frédéric be discovered in their house. However, he had a brother-in-law, a locksmith called Potier who, though married, had no children, and was willing to hide Frédéric in a small windowless room, little bigger than a cupboard, in return for a generous sum of money. All day, while men worked in the adjacent forge, separated from Frédéric’s room only by a plank of wood, he had to stay absolutely still and in the dark. Only once the men had gone home was he able to join Potier and his wife for dinner. From time to time, Tétard came with the local gazette and news of Lucie and the children. Frédéric thought of making his way to join the rebels in the Vendée, but such was the strength of their royalist fervour that he doubted they would welcome a man who had remained for so long working for the Constituent Assembly. In any case, once it became known that Frédéric was in the Vendée, all chances of either his wife or his father surviving the rage of the revolutionaries would be lost.
The months passed very slowly. Bit by bit, Lucie regained her strength and with it her determination. On her walks around Canoles, she occasionally came across traces of hiding places, clearly occupied by others like her, on the run from the guards scouring the countryside for suspects. She would leave out food, to find it gone next day. By late winter she began to worry that her continuing presence at Canoles might endanger de Brouquens, who had been placed under permanent house arrest in the city. One of the few people who was occasionally able to visit her was a young relation of de Brouquens’s, a M. de Chambeau, who was also in hiding, having found refuge in the house of a man called Bonie in the centre of Bordeaux. Bonie was, to all appearances, the perfect Jacobin, an ardent member of a political ‘section’ and never to be seen without his sans-culotte jacket, clogs and sabre. But he was also a good-hearted and generous man, and when de Chambeau told him of Lucie’s predicament, with her father and father-in-law both in prison in Paris, her husband in hiding, and two small children to care for, he offered her rooms in an empty, dilapidated apartment overlooking a small garden and hidden away behind a wood store in the heart of the old city.
As a hiding place, the rooms in the Place Puy-Paulin were excellent. Lucie moved in, taking with her Marguerite, constantly ill with malaria, Zamore, who as a free slave ostensibly waiting to join the army could come and go as he wished in Bordeau
x’s large community of blacks, Humbert and Séraphine and their nurse. She also took with her the cook, who was able to get a job with the représentants en mission and bring back not only news but food to cook for the household. Restless and energetic, it was not long before Lucie was looking for ways to keep occupied. Hearing that an Italian singer called Ferrari was in Bordeaux and that he was a fervent royalist, she invited him to give her singing lessons, which had been interrupted by the years of revolution. It served to pass the long hours of idleness and fear. Even in the shadow of the guillotine, some semblance of normal everyday life went on. And it was indeed in its shadow: from her room behind the wood store, Lucie could hear the clatter of hooves from the horses pulling the tumbril to the Place Nationale, the rattle and crash of the plunging blade, the shouts and songs of the crowd, as heads and trunks were thrown into baskets ready to be taken for burial in communal pits in the cemetery of Saint-Seurin.
Much of her time was spent trying to find food to feed her household. A tough new form of rationing had been introduced, with taxes imposed on all goods and punishment by death for all who sought to evade them. Since farmers now received less money for their grain, meat and vegetables than they could produce them for, many preferred not to sell them at all. Famine and malnutrition spread around the city. Ration cards were issued for bread that was black and glutinous, and lists were posted on every house giving the names of all their inhabitants and what they were entitled to. They were written on paper with tricolour edges under the words ‘Liberty, Equality, Fraternity or Death’. Lucie wrote their own names as faintly and illegibly as possible, to be washed away by rain, and was able to boost Zamore’s meagre ration by obtaining double for herself as a wet-nurse since she was still breast-feeding Séraphine.
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