The farm was prospering, there were enough French émigrés in the area to provide company, and they spent many evenings with the Schuylers and van Rensselaers, people with whom Lucie could talk and play music. With the invalid Mrs Rensselaer, whose knowledge of French literature surpassed that of many of her Parisian friends, she passed agreeable hours of conversation. It was at the Rensselaer house that she met the wife of the Anglican minister, Mrs Ellison, a middle-aged woman whose great sorrow in life was to be childless. Mrs Ellison was much taken by Humbert, now 5, tall for his age and speaking English better than French, and she begged Lucie to let him spend the summer with her in Albany. Lucie worried about the dangers of the farm and the amount of time Humbert spent with the horses and the slaves, and also that he had developed a habit of wandering off to look for the Indians, who occasionally, she had been told, kidnapped children; so she agreed to let him go.
Early in the summer of 1795, they received a visit from the Duc de Rochefoucault de Liancourt, who had escaped from France and was travelling through upper New York state with a former naval officer called Aristide du Petit-Thouars. Talleyrand had given the travellers an introduction to the Schuylers and van Rensselaers, but before taking them into Albany Lucie insisted that de Liancourt change out of his filthy clothes into something more appropriate. Even then she complained that he looked more like a shipwrecked sailor than the former First Gentleman of the Bedchamber. For his part, de Liancourt appeared astonished to see Lucie emerge in an elegant dress and a fine hat.
The visit to Mrs Rensselaer was not a success. She declared afterwards that she found de Liancourt ‘a very mediocre man’, as did Lucie, who was profoundly irritated by his opinionated manners and his ignorant criticisms of America. Later, in his immensely long account of his travels in North America–which were indeed full of ‘sickly trees’, apathetic, covetous Dutchmen, and cowardly bears and wolves–de Liancourt was fulsome in his approval of Lucie. Of all stalwart Frenchwomen, he wrote, she was the most admirable and but for her devoted support, Frédéric might have ‘sunk under their misfortunes’. Reading his words, Lucie would feel guilty about not having liked him better, but cross when she read his verdict on the inhabitants of Albany, ‘a set of people remarkable neither for activity nor politeness…the most detestable beings I have hitherto met’. Only a rattlesnake emerged well: though awake, noted de Liancourt, ‘she showed no sort of malignity’.
M. du Petit-Thouars, on the other hand, charmed his hosts; he was, noted Lucie, exceptionally ‘witty and gay’. Even de Liancourt admitted that his travelling companion ‘conversed with exquisite sense’. He made Lucie and Frédéric laugh with stories about the colony of French émigrés at Asylum on the banks of the Susquehanna where he had just spent some months. Planned by the Vicomte de Noailles, Lafayette’s brother-in-law, and the Marquis de Talon, Asylum had included piazzas, summer houses and shutters of a kind never seen before in America, and a special house for Marie Antoinette, designed when it was still thought that she might escape. After her death there had been talk of the Dauphin finding refuge there. But the land had turned out too rugged and mountainous for the fruit trees, while the canon, archdeacon, two abbés and various countesses had proved inept farmers; and Asylum, like Gallipoli, was foundering, its inhabitants reduced to eating robins and boiled tadpoles. Du Petit-Thouars was sad to leave Troy, where he had found his hosts less prone to the general contempt for the Americans that seemed to afflict so many of the French émigrés; and Lucie, in particular, he was enchanted by, saying that she was not only very pretty, but graceful, cheerful, a model of elegance for the local ladies, and that she possessed ‘outstanding cool-headedness and endurance’. There was something about the wholesomeness of their life that did indeed suit Lucie perfectly.
But she had not been well. Ever since the spring, when she had almost had a serious accident in the river, crossing with her highly strung mare on a ferry carrying four enormous oxen, she had had recurrent bouts of fever, which annoyed her principally because they left her unable to work. She attributed them to the shock, and characterisically blamed herself for being weak. Though the existence of malaria–‘mal’aria’–and its connection to swamps and marshes had long been known in Europe, where it flared annually to epidemic proportions, no one had yet worked out that it was transmitted by mosquitoes. Believed to come from ‘poisonous miasmas’, exhalations rising from decomposing vegetation–and even, on occasion, from putrid cabbages, potatoes, onions, coffee, chocolate, old books, locusts, beached whales and the entrails of fish–these spring and autumn fevers were a constant menace along the Ohio, Mississippi, Hudson and their tributaries.*
Lucie’s attacks lasted five to six hours, bringing headaches, fever and exhaustion; she felt hot and sweated, then cold and shook. Even the quinqina from Peruvian bark, sent to her by Talleyrand from Philadelphia, and already known to act as a cure, did little to shake it off. (A remedy she seems not to have tried is one described in the Boston Gazette the previous September: ‘Just before going to bed, let the patient take off his or her clothes and stand under a sieve suspended by a line; let the person pour into the sieve a pail filled with water just drawn from the well. The shock will be considerable…but the effect will be pleasing.’)
Soon after de Liancourt’s visit, a letter arrived from Talleyrand saying that he had, by good fortune, learnt that the firm holding Lucie and Frédéric’s money in Philadelphia was on the verge of bankruptcy, and that he had been able to withdraw their Dutch bills of exchange just in time. However, the bank needed Frédéric to sign the release papers. As the harvest was still a month away, Humbert was happy with Mrs Ellison and a neighbour offered to care for Séraphine, who was now almost 2, they decided to accept Mr Law’s invitation to be his guests in New York, where Lucie could see a doctor before travelling on to Philadelphia.
Before they left, this time by boat, the Albany Register carried an article about the death in his dank prison in Paris of the 10-year-old Louis Charles, Louis XVII, a sad, forgotten child, on 8 June.
Steamships were yet to be invented, though steam was already in use to power factories, and Lucie herself had a steam spit for the mutton and turkey she roasted on Sundays. With Albany set to become the new state capital, and Troy growing rapidly into a centre for ironworks, the river did a considerable trade, schooners, brigs and sloops all competing for a place by the quays, along with ‘battoes’, the flat-bottomed pine boats designed by the French to carry furs and wheat. Nearly all the larger sailing boats were equipped to carry passengers. The 164-mile trip to New York took between three days and a week, depending on the wind, the currents, and the expertise of the pilot whose job it was to know exactly how far each tide, whether flood or ebb, would carry the craft through the Hudson’s many reaches.
Lucie was enchanted by their gradual journey, travelling so slowly on windless days that the boat seemed to glide. She sat on deck watching villages and farms slip by, tracing the smoke from the fires started by settlers to clear the land as it rose into the still air, looking out across dense forests of pine, oak, ash and elm, and at the clearings with their orderly rows of cherry and apple trees. She was particularly struck by the deep dark water of the gorges, and the mountains that climbed steeply behind them. Never, she wrote later, had she seen anything to compare with the stretch of river at West Point, its ancient trees seeming to hang far out over the water, and in later life she hoped that they had been spared the ‘soulless, frenzied clearing of land’.
In 1795, New York was a town of some 45,000 people, with 2,500 slaves; founded by the Dutch in 1614, it had a busy port, churches of all denominations, numbered houses in brick, and named and paved streets packed with stores and constantly blocked by hackneys, diligences and wagons. Broadway, its widest street, cut the city from north to south. Rents were considered exorbit ant, drinking water was sold in barrels–the local water being full of gnats and said to be undrinkable unless laced with brandy–and New York’s pickled oysters, regarded
as the finest in America, were shipped as far afield as the West Indies, preserved in a mixture of allspice, vinegar and mace. Merchants and brokers met at Tontine’s coffee house, which kept the gazettes of both Paris and London. After Albany, Lucie was delighted by New York, though Talleyrand and de Chaumetz, meeting the sloop, were appalled by how pale she was and how much weight she seemed to have lost.
In the afternoons, Alexander Hamilton joined the party on the terrace of Law’s house on Broadway. From then until after midnight, under a starry sky and in great heat, they would sit talking. Law described his elephants and palanquins in Patna, while Frédéric and Talleyrand argued about the ‘absurd theories’ of the French Constituent Assembly, and how too great a love of money had a paralysing effect on intellectual and artistic endeavour. As Talleyrand said, the USA was a young nation, with all the arrogance of adolescence, and he was yet to meet a Frenchman who did not ‘feel a stranger’. When Hamilton described the beginnings of the war of independence Lucie remarked, with one of her occasional flashes of sharpness, that it was considerably more interesting than the ‘insipid memoirs of that simpleton Lafayette’. The talk never ceased; the party gathered night after night and continued their conversation. Mr Law, saddened to think that these evenings would ever end, said to his manservant about his guests: ‘If they leave me, I am a dead man.’
When the moment came to move on to Philadelphia, Lucie was not well enough to travel. So it was Frédéric who was introduced to George Washington and saw the city described by the Comte de Ségur as a ‘noble temple put up to liberty’. On reaching Philadelphia he quickly joined the group of liberal, royalist French émigrés, men who had known each other for many years, had fled to America in ones and twos and now gathered every evening in the bookshop started at 84 First Street by Moreau de Saint Méry. There was the Vicomte de Noailles, the historian and philosopher, with whom Frédéric had served in America, and the Comte de Volney, recently escaped from a Parisian prison, who would spend the next three years gloomily scouring America for minerals, rocks and geological specimens, harassed by gnats, complaining that the evergreens were ‘dwarfish’, and that Indians had mouths shaped like those of sharks. At night, when Moreau closed up shop, the friends, each of whom in his own way had helped to bring about the revolution that led to their exile, and each of whom saw his own future only back in France, moved upstairs to continue talking far into the night, until asked to leave by Moreau’s exhausted wife.
From France had just come news that the exiled Louis XVIII had issued a manifesto promising punishment for the regicides and a return to power of both nobles and clergy.* From Paris too came further accounts of Robespierre’s death, his body torn apart by delirious crowds, the bleeding limbs paraded triumphantly around the city. Week after week, the Courrier Français ran stories about those who had been tried and guillotined, and how each had conducted himself at the end. In Paris, 2,639 people had died under the guillotine, half of them in the 47 days leading up to Robespierre’s death; surprisingly few–485–had been members of the nobility. A further 14,000 had been guillotined in other parts of France. The revolution, claimed the reports reaching Philadelphia, had taken 35,000 to 40,000 lives, including those who had died in prison or been executed without trial.
At the Fête des Victoires in July, Thérésia Cabarrus, now married to Tallien, had been called ‘Notre Dame de Septembre’, because Tallien was blamed for the September massacres in the prisons; but that was before his triumphant defeat of Robespierre, after which she became ‘Notre Dame de Thermidor’, on account of all the lives she was said to have saved in Bordeaux.
Though George Washington had already chosen the site for the new national capital on the Potomac, and Major L’Enfant was at work designing streets, drives and avenues radiating out from Capitol Hill, Philadelphia in 1795 was still the centre of American political and cultural life. It was here that the greatest number of French émigrés had settled, earning meagre livings as teachers of French, music, dancing and fencing, as clock-menders, dress-and wig-makers and chefs. Brillat-Savarin, one of the most renowned chefs of his day, was teaching Americans how to cook wings of partridge ‘en papillotte’, scramble eggs with cheese, and stew squirrels in Madeira, reluctantly admitting that there was much flavour in a good turkey. Jefferson, who was extremely interested in food and had returned from Europe with a waffle iron from Holland and a spaghetti machine from Italy, had turned his vegetable garden at Monticello over to experiments with eggplants, Savoy cabbage, endives and tomatoes, hitherto regarded as too poisonous to eat. Jefferson was said to like his ice cream enveloped in a crust of warm pastry.
Philadelphia ate lavishly. In the markets, noted one French émigré approvingly, were to be found 52 different kinds of meat and game and dozens of varieties of fish, though lobsters, reported by early Dutch settlers to grow to 6 feet in length, were not just smaller but scarce, having apparently been frightened away by cannon fire during the revolution. The French, their Philadelphian hosts reluctantly admitted, had brought a transformation to the American kitchen, even if Amelia Simmons’s successor, Lucy Emerson, noted disdainfully in her popular New England cookbook that ‘Gar-lics, though much used by the French, are better adapted to medicine than cookery’. The querulous Volney admitted to enjoying ‘le pie de pumkine’ but marvelled at the way Americans washed down their meat and vegetables with coffee and milk. When Volney’s comments on America were published not long afterwards, Samuel Beck, a Bostonian, described their author as a ‘timid, peevish, sour-tempered man’.
The Philadelphians also drank well. In smart society, wine, especially the ‘sombre and somewhat heavy’ reds from Hermitage and Côtes du Rhone, were increasingly replacing cider and Madeira at meals. Jefferson, who called wine ‘a necessity of life’, said that it stimulated intelligent conversation, whereas spirits only led to drunkenness.
With the arrival of ships from France came jams, syrups, chocolates, wines, brandies, raisins, almonds, hats and the latest French dresses, advertised by merchants in the daily Courrier Français. But the news from Paris was mostly bleak, of outbreaks of violence between Jacobins and counter-revolutionaries, of the settling of old scores and growing disorder and scarcity in the capital. While the French Revolution had originally been greeted by the Americans with approval, the New York Daily Gazette observing that ‘the flame of liberty expands from city to city’, its turbulent course had soured the views of many. As Hamilton observed, it was hard to go on supporting a revolution that had plainly substituted ‘to the mild and beneficent religion of the Gospel a gloomy, persecuting and desolating atheism’. Pleas by the new French Consul in Philadelphia, Fauchet, that the revolution in France, as in America, had simply been an attempt to embody in fundamental laws safeguards for people’s political and social liberties, counted for less than the reports of bloodshed arriving on every vessel. Even Fauchet now admitted that the execution of the King and Marie Antoinette, and the fall of America’s idol Lafayette, had between them stamped out most feelings of warmth towards the French. Talleyrand, writing to his friend Lord Lansdowne shortly before Frédéric’s visit to Philadelphia, observed that in the long run, America’s ties to England were so deep and so natural that they were the obvious allies, and not the French, with whom relations never rose above the superficial and the sentimental.
Now that the Terror was over, the French were starting to think about going home; the Americans were beginning to long for them to do so. Increasingly, the émigrés detected an ‘epidemic of animosity’ directed against them.
After three weeks in New York, restored to health by Law’s housekeeper, who insisted that she rest and brought her endless small cups of broth, Lucie was ready to return to Albany and the children. Frédéric came back from Philadelphia, tantalising her with his descriptions of George Washington. The long evenings of talk under the stars on Law’s veranda resumed. Later, Lucie would remember these weeks in New York as ones of exceptional ‘contentment’.
; Then a sudden rumour spread that yellow fever had broken out in a street close to Mr Law’s house on Broadway. Yellow fever, the ‘malignant’ or ‘putrid’ fever, thought to have been carried to the USA from Barbados in the 1690s, was one of the most feared of all infectious diseases; people were still haunted by the epidemic that had struck Philadelphia two summers before, which had killed a tenth of the population, despite the ministrations of the ‘miasmanists’ and the ‘contagionists’ and their various remedies of purging and bleeding. Health, many doctors still maintained, was restored by eliminating morbid matter: if the patient died, it had not been sufficiently eliminated. Smallpox, for which vaccination now existed, held fewer terrors; when yellow fever struck, however, people fled.
That night both Lucie and Frédéric woke feeling extremely ill. Not knowing whether they too had been infected, or whether they had simply overeaten on the bananas, pineapples and other exotic fruits recently arrived from the Caribbean, they decided to leave New York immediately, before being trapped in the city by quarantine restrictions. By daylight they had packed and were at the port, looking for a sloop to carry them back up the Hudson. They quickly recovered: their malaise had been fruit, not fever.
Dancing to the Precipice Page 27