Dancing to the Precipice

by Caroline Moorehead

  And after Parliament passed the Aliens Bill in 1793, putting the French émigrés under police surveillance, Talleyrand, perceived as an influential and dangerous intriguer, received orders to leave. His first thought had been to remain somewhere in Europe, but one by one Russia, Prussia, Tuscany and Denmark closed their doors to him; even his good friend Mme de Staël, agitating on his behalf with the Swiss cantons, was unable to persuade any one of them to take him in. That left America. In March 1794, just as Lucie and Frédéric were leaving Bordeaux, Talleyrand set sail from England in the Penn, bound for Philadelphia, taking with him his friend de Beaumetz and a valet. He told Mme de Staël that he was not sorry to leave a country where ‘life was so royally disagreeable’.

  Though his first impressions of America were far from favourable–he wrote to Mme de Staël that ‘if I have to stay in this country a year I shall die’–and though George Washington, committed to a policy of neutrality towards the new French government, refused to receive him, Talleyrand found friends in Philadelphia. He was soon paying calls, risking the disapproval of the town when he was rumoured to have taken a mulatto mistress. With the heat of May, and fears of a possible epidemic of yellow fever, he had decided to make a journey through Maine and Upper New York state, in search of land to invest in and hoping to meet Lucie and Frédéric, having heard that they had escaped Bordeaux successfully. In February, one of General Schuyler’s other daughters, living in London, had written to her sister Elizabeth, introducing Talleyrand and de Beaumetz. ‘To your care, dear Elizabeth, I commit these interesting Strangers…who left their country when Anarchy and Cruelty prevailed.’

  Though genuinely impressed by the vast empty landscape, Talleyrand was a man of cities. The long report he wrote of his travels was full of poetical descriptions of forests ‘as old as the world itself’. But the farmers he met along the way struck him as ‘lazy and grasping…without the slightest trace of delicacy’. Revealingly, as he rode along, his mind turned to building ‘cities, villages and hamlets…’. The Indians, he added, were smelly and useless.

  The travellers had picked up news of Lucie as they passed through Boston, where they found that she had been much admired for her excellent English and unaffected manners and the fact that ‘she sleeps every night with her husband’. As Talleyrand told Mme de Staël ruefully, such devotion was necessary in America, where ‘illicitness’ did not find favour. Tracking her down to the wooden cabin in Troy, the travellers had brought with them an invitation to dinner from the Schuylers, and promised to return next day to taste her roast mutton.

  Reaching Albany later that afternoon, they found the General waiting for them in the garden, brandishing a newspaper and calling out: ‘Come quickly, there is exciting news from France.’ The local paper, reporting events that now lay many weeks in the past, carried an account of the fall of Robespierre and the abrupt end of the Terror in Paris: how, in June, Tallien, ousted from power and desperate to save Thérésia, who had been arrested and was about to be tried, had mounted a challenge to Robespierre’s dictatorial powers over the Convention; how he had won sufficient backing to have Robespierre arrested, together with Saint-Just; how Robespierre had shot himself but survived, though half his jaw had been crushed; and how, on 10 thermidor, 11 July, Paris had woken to find the guillotine back in the Place de la Révolution–moved some time earlier after complaints about the blood from the headless corpses–and to witness Robespierre and 17 of his followers mount the scaffold. Soon after, the Public Prosecutor, Fouquier-Tinville, had followed him to the guillotine. In Bordeaux, the last to die had been the infamous Lacombe.

  Around the Schuylers’ table, wrote Lucie, ‘we all rejoiced together’. The talk was of the end of the revolution and a quick return to France. Talleyrand was particularly pleased that his sister-in-law, the wife of his brother Archambauld, who had stayed in France in the hopes of saving the family fortune only to find herself arrested, would now be freed. It was only later that night, reading the papers more closely, that he discovered her name on the list of those who had died in the frenetic final killings of June and July. Among the last to be executed, they discovered, were the wife, daughter-in-law, granddaughter, brother and sister-in-law of the Duc de Noailles–all close friends to Lucie and Frédéric–three generations in a single day, their hands tied behind them, the Maréchale in a bonnet and black taffeta, borne to their deaths through a thunderstorm and heavy rain. Hidden in the crowd, but making his way alongside the tumbril and seen by the women, had walked the family priest, pronouncing absolution.

  Lucie was struck by how very upset Talleyrand appeared at the news of his sister-in-law’s death, and how ‘amiable and graceful’ he was when he came to visit them the next day, with his intelligent conversation and old-world courtesy. He spoke to her with an ‘almost paternal kindliness which was delightful’, and took great pains, with an ‘exquisite sense of propriety’, not to say things that might shock her. Many years later, reflecting in her shrewd way on Talleyrand’s subtle and scheming nature, Lucie wrote: ‘One might, in one’s inmost mind, regret having so many reasons for not holding him in respect, but memories of his wrong-doing were always dispelled by an hour of his conversation. Worthless himself, he had, oddly enough, a horror of wrong-doing in others. Listening to him, and not knowing him, one thought him a virtuous man.’

  For the days that Talleyrand and de Beaumetz stayed in Albany, where Alexander Hamilton had come to join them, there were long evenings at the Schuylers’ and much interesting talk about the need for a liberal constitution and at least an appearance of democracy in both America and France. Talleyrand and Hamilton shared the view that real power should always reside in the hands of ‘gentlemen of standing’. Hamilton, Talleyrand would later say, was one of the three great men of his age, along with Fox and Napoleon. Hamilton and Talleyrand were somewhat alike, being slender and not very tall, but while Talleyrand was pale and watchful, Hamilton had a ruddy complexion and reddish hair, and he was energetic and quick in his movements. What puzzled Talleyrand was Hamilton’s decision to give up his job in the Treasury in order to earn more as a lawyer and to spend time with his eight children, and he remarked how strange it was that anyone so talented would yield power so readily.

  When soon afterwards he went to Troy to dine with Lucie and Frédéric, Talleyrand took with him a medicine chest and presents of a side-saddle and bridle for Lucie, a perfectly timed gift for she had just acquired a mare to ride. He was accompanied by a tall, fair-haired Englishman called Mr Law, a former colonial governor in India, recently widowed by a rich Brahmin who had left him a considerable fortune. Lucie enjoyed Law’s wit and his clever remarks, but found him highly nervous and eccentric, as all Englishmen were, ‘to a greater or lesser extent’. Since she had become skilled at milking her cow, she was able to give them cream for dinner. Before leaving, Talleyrand told her that Law had been so moved by the spectacle of such a well-bred woman milking her cow and doing her own washing that he had been unable to sleep, and now wished to make them a gift of some money to make their lives easier. Lucie and Frédéric, though much touched, refused: they would call on him, they said, if ever they found themselves in serious difficulties.

  Lucie and Frédéric waited impatiently for the moment they could take over their farm. The snows arrived suddenly, with a force and abruptness that startled them. In the space of a few days, thick black clouds, driven by bitterly cold north-west winds, sent everyone hurrying to put under cover boats, outside furniture and tools. The winds were followed by the rapid freezing of the wide river, along which pine branches were hastily laid to mark out a path so that travellers would find their way, before heavy snow descended, reducing all visibility to just a few yards. The Hudson would now stay frozen for several months.

  As soon as the snow stopped falling, Frédéric loaded their two working sledges and their one ‘pleasure’ sled, which was shaped like a large box and had room for six people, and harnessed them to the four horses they had boug
ht during the autumn. Together with M. de Chambeau, who had become a competent carpenter, they set out for the farm. The settlers had left the house in a very bad state. Constructed as a single-storey house, with a dairy and cellar tucked underneath, its wooden frame was filled in with bricks dried in the sun which Frédéric finished with plaster and painted, while M. de Chambeau mended the beams and Lucie cleaned. Lucie was a ferocious worker, saying later that as long as they lived in Troy she never remained in bed beyond sunrise, and admitting that for M. de Chambeau and Frédéric a little idleness might have been preferable.

  With 150 acres of crops and a large orchard, help was needed and slaves, their new friends told them, were the people to provide it. Though in his original draft of the Declaration of Independence Jefferson had included an attack on slavery, by the time the final document appeared slave-owners in the south had forced him to reconsider, and all that remained was an ambiguous reference to bondage. Even Jefferson, however, did not personally consider the blacks inherently equal, saying that though as brave and indeed more adventurous than whites, ‘in imagination they are dull, tasteless and anomalous’. But the fighting against the English in the north had seriously disrupted patterns of slavery, and many slaves had fled their owners–some 30,000 were said to have escaped from plantations in Virginia alone–finding sanctuary in the confusion of armies on the move. Several thousand had fought–and many had died–on both sides. With the peace, and the heady rhetoric of the new nation, many former slaves had protested that they too had a ‘natural and inalienable’ right to life, liberty and happiness. A number of Northern slave-owners had gone along with the spirit of the revolution, and freed their slaves; other, less fortunate slaves had found themselves abandoned by the departing English, to be rounded up and re-enslaved. After all, as the popular English physician Dr Charles White had pointed out, blacks occupied a different ‘station’ from whites, being an intermediary species somewhere between white men and apes.

  Lucie and Frédéric were deeply uneasy about the idea of owning a human being, but when they learnt that a slave dissatisfied with his master could officially request to be sold, and heard of just such a young man, they climbed into their red and yellow sled and set off to find his Dutch owner, a Mr Henry Lansing. The slave was called Minck, and he was eager to escape not just the harshness of his employer, but the severity of his own parents, both of them slaves in the same household. A deal was quickly struck, Mr Lansing being much impressed when he learnt that Frédéric had represented the French government in Holland. Before night fell they were on their way home, Minck driving the sledge, bringing with him only the best suit which he was wearing, everything else, down to his moccasins, belonging to his former owner and remaining behind. Lucie felt appalled, as she recorded later, by the ease with which a man could be bought and sold. For all her father’s support of the slavers, her views had remained firmly with the abolitionists. In the Albany Gazette, where ‘very lively Negro wenches’ were advertised, the reward for finding an escaped slave was the same as that for a lost horse.

  The next slave to arrive was Minck’s father, Prime, a man well known to the Schuylers and the van Rensselaers for his farming skills, though Minck himself was not pleased to find himself again under his father’s yoke. Lucie also wanted a woman to help her in the dairy, and heard of a slave called Judith, in her 30s and the mother of a small girl, who had been forcibly separated from her husband. Taking a bag of money with her, Lucie visited her owner, a Mr Wilbeck, and said to him that it was well known locally that Judith wished to leave and that he had treated her with great brutality. A truculent Mr Wilbeck took the money and handed over the woman and her young daughter; when Judith learnt that she was to be reunited with her husband, whom Lucie and Frédéric also bought, she fainted. She too was now carried back by sledge to the farm, where M. de Chambeau had prepared a room for them in the granary, something they had never had before.

  Before long, Lucie and Judith were making cream and excellent yellow butter, on which they stamped the de La Tour du Pin crest and which Prime took to market to sell ‘arranged daintily in a very clean basket on a fine cloth’. Though unable to read or write, Prime kept meticulous accounts in his head. Lucie made herself popular locally by adopting the dress worn by farmers’ wives: a blue-and-black-striped woollen skirt, full but not too long, a dark calico bodice, with her hair parted and piled up in a coil, held in place with a comb. No one around Albany wore jewellery, fans, patches or ribbons. Only when visiting the Schuylers or van Rensselaers did she put on a gown and stays, or one of the riding habits brought over in the Diana.

  Spring arrived with the same abruptness as the snow. Towards the end of February, the north-westerly wind suddenly dropped, and a southerly wind began to blow. The snow melted so quickly that for several days people were trapped indoors by raging torrents along the roads. The spectacle of the ice as it broke drew everyone to the river banks. As the water below the thick ice began to stir, swollen by the snow melt, a first crack appeared along the middle of the river, bursting with a roar like thunder as shoals of ice broke away and gigantic blocks of ice rose into the air, the light refracted into rainbows. In less than a week, the meadows around the farm were green and covered in wild flowers.

  The savages, as Lucie called them, had not been seen all winter. With the better weather, the Iroquois began to reappear around Troy and Albany, bringing deerskin moccasins to sell, stuffed with buffalo hair or moss for warmth, along with carved wooden implements and long gaiter-like leggings, worn by the farmers to protect their calves and shins. Lucie had been startled when she had first encountered two naked Indians, walking slowly up the street, but she had become accustomed to their ways. They were, she said, as ‘sensitive to good manners and a friendly reception as any Court gentleman’.

  For their part, the Indians around Albany seemed to like her, finding her different from the dour Dutch farmers’ wives, and referred to her as ‘Mrs Latour from the old country’. Before the snows had begun, an Indian man had asked her if he might cut branches from a particular kind of willow that grew on their property, promising to weave baskets for her during the winter. Being, as she said, rather doubtful as to whether savages kept their promises, she was agreeably surprised when, a week after the snows had melted, he reappeared, carrying a neat pile of six baskets, all fitting inside each other, so closely woven that they held water as well as any earthenware jug. Refusing to take money, he accepted a jar of buttermilk. Lucie had grown fond of a very ugly elderly Indian woman, who had matted grey hair and wore nothing but a tattered shawl and the remains of an apron, to whom she gave old remnants of feathers and ends of ribbons, once part of her fashionable wardrobe. What the old squaw, as Lucie called her, really liked was to be allowed to look at herself in Lucie’s mirror, after which she would cast benign spells over their chickens and cows.

  In the autumn of 1794, the Jay Treaty had been signed with Britain, finally resolving the last of the border crises. The USA now had the right to build forts wherever it chose on the remaining Indian territories, and the Indians themselves no longer had much sway with either side. Knox, the Secretary of War, favoured presents along with diplomacy, but in the long run wanted to see all frontier lands transferred from natives to settlers, believing that in any case the Indians would probably die out, especially if they did not embrace Christianity. The skirmishes that had long marked life in the less charted north, with soldiers returning to describe warriors painted and tattooed, their earlobes weighed down with ornaments and uttering piercing screams, were few and far between. If around Albany the Iroquois men continued to hunt beaver and bear for meat, roasting the fatty bear on top of venison, turkey and mallard in order to baste them as they cooked, and to collect maple sap to turn into brown sugar by slashing the tree trunks with their tomahawks, it was as objects of curiosity rather than as intimidating strangers that they were increasingly regarded. Fear of intoxicated Indians causing trouble had led legislators to outlaw the tr
ade in alcohol, but inebriated Indians, having bartered their furs for liquor, were occasionally to be seen wandering around the streets of Troy and Albany. It was a very long time since Columbus, arriving in America, had been impressed by the resourcefulness of the Indians.

  An officer in Frédéric’s regiment, M. de Novion, arrived one day on a visit, hoping to buy a farm and learn from the La Tour du Pins the skills that he would need. As he spoke no English, had neither wife nor children, and had never been near a farm, Lucie had doubts as to his suitability. She took him out riding to show him the land. After a few miles, realising that she had forgotten her whip and had no knife with which to cut one, she caught sight of an Indian she knew. To M. de Novion’s evident disgust and horror, she called out to him and the man approached, wearing only a very thin strip of blue cloth between his legs, and went off to cut her a switch with his tomahawk. M. de Novion asked Lucie what she would have done had she been alone. Nothing, she replied, adding mischievously that had she asked her Indian friend to do so, he would willingly have felled the Frenchman with his tomahawk. That evening, M. de Novion told Frédéric that he had decided to live in New York, where, noted Lucie mockingly, ‘civilisation seemed slightly more further advanced’.

  For all her reserve about many of the Dutch settlers, whom Lucie found overly keen on money, she was happy in Troy. In the spring, the flocks of geese, duck and passenger pigeons, flying low between the coastal swamps where they wintered and the Great Lakes where they bred, were so dense that they cast a shadow over the streets below. Towards May, sharp-nosed sturgeon, up to 8 feet long and weighing up to 200 pounds, known as ‘Albany beef’ to the locals, appeared in the river and were fished from canoes, to be dried and pickled, the oil used for bruises and cuts. The surrounding forests were full of edible mushrooms and nuts, and in the summer months the fields were red with strawberries. In 1796, the first genuinely American cookbook had been published, a pocket-sized treatise ‘adapted to this country and all grades of life’ by Amelia Simmons, who won much acclaim by calling herself ‘an orphan’, with recipes geared to settler life–Indian pudding, cranberry sauce and cornmeal cake. (For the perfect syllabub, Simmons recommended sweetening a quart of cider with ‘double refined sugar’, before ‘milking the cow into your liquor’.)