Lucie’s first act was to send word to her aunt, Lady Jerningham, and by the time they reached London that night Edward, the young page at her wedding, was waiting to take them to the Jerningham house in Bolton Row off Piccadilly. There they found Sir William’s brother, the Chevalier Jerningham, a frequent visitor during Lucie’s childhood to the rue du Bac and Hautefontaine. Lady Jerningham was a forceful, good-hearted woman and much attached to Lucie, who noted with considerable pleasure how kind her aunt was to Frédéric and how genuinely taken she seemed to be with Humbert. ‘We established ourselves,’ wrote Lucie, ‘as if we had been the children of the house.’ Of all her relations, both French and English, Lucie felt fondest of her English aunt.
London, at the end of the 18th century, had seen vast changes. It was the age of the Georgian terrace house and the neo-classical architecture made fashionable by Robert Adam, James Gibbs and Sir John Soane. With just under a million people, London was the largest city in Europe, owning and building more ships than anywhere in the world. Like Paris, it was noisy, packed with wagons, carriages and markets, its streets full of itinerant vendors ringing their bells and singing out their wares: cigars and walking sticks, rat poison and shirt buttons, shellfish and sheep’s trotters. As Paris did for France, London represented the heart of the country. Sydney Smith, obliged to live in his parish in Yorkshire, remarked that for him it meant being ‘12 miles from the nearest lemon’.
But while France had suffered greatly from its political revolution, England had been growing rich from its inventions in industry and agriculture, from its new machinery for spinning, smelting and pumping, an explosion of technology that had brought with it extraordinary wealth, but also brutal and dangerous conditions. England was the country where the basic inventions that would create modern industry were made, perfected and introduced, but children as young as 5 were going to work cleaning chimneys.
To house London’s ever-growing population, the city had been moving west, past Mayfair and Piccadilly, and north, through Marylebone towards Islington and Highgate, where visitors were warned that the cold of the winter was so extreme that ‘many constitutions cannot endure it’. Though Hampstead was still a heath, menaced by highwaymen, and Kensington and Chelsea were villages, surrounded by countryside, London was soon to engulf them. To amuse and simplify the lives of Londoners, there were new gadgets: toothbrushes, roller skates, ball-cocks, dumb-waiters and fountain pens. The sandwich had just made its appearance, as had toast, though the young Swedish scientist, Peter Kalm, maintained that toast had been invented because it was the only way to spread butter on to bread in an English winter.
Almost every French visitor, having dutifully praised the spaciousness and cleanliness of the fine new Georgian squares and the excellence of the street lighting, remarked on the tangled lanes that lay behind them, with their hidden courtyards and dark alleyways, home to the poor, of whom there were a growing number, hit hard by spiralling grain prices and the enclosures of common land. The year of Lucie’s arrival, Irish rebels were sent off to Botany Bay, to join the English felons, men and women convicted for stealing sheep and poaching deer, in the harsh penal settlements of newly discovered Australia.
The French also remarked on the desolation of the London Sunday, the streets silent and deserted, the few passers-by ‘like walking shadows’. As the Comte de Montloisier put it, the English were a ‘semi-paralysed people’. And there were very few indeed who did not comment on the fog, the swirling greyish-white mists from the coal-burning stoves which obliterated the city for days at a stretch. It was the fog, remarked Montloisier, which was responsible for the lack of ‘animal vitality’ in Londoners, and for their permanent ‘état de spleen’, an affliction that combined boredom and melancholy and often led to madness and suicide. In his seven years in London, he noted gloomily, he saw the grapes growing on a wall opposite his house change colour only once. Just occasionally, this moroseness was described as having something of the much loved French ‘sensibilité’; more often it was seen as seriousness so profound that some French visitors wondered whether the English, enveloped in fog and puffed up like balloons on butter and beer, were in fact capable of laughter at all.
The ‘era of Jacobinism’ that had preceded Lucie to London had brought with it more austere fashions. Gone were the buckles, ruffles and powdered wigs* for men, the ‘plumpers’ designed to fatten the cheeks of sallow women, the 4-feet-tall ostrich feathers, the hoops and the false buttocks; except at court, where George III and his German-speaking Queen Charlotte had been on the throne for more than 30 years, presiding over a staid Windsor, where hoops remained de rigueur on formal occasions. George III’s first spell of madness had happened soon after the fall of the Bastille, in the summer of 1789. Compared to Versailles, the French courtiers found Windsor painfully cold and stupefyingly dull.
Shortly before Lucie’s arrival, the Princess Royal had married the hereditary Prince of Württemberg, a man so fat that Napoleon would later remark that God had created him merely to see how far the human skin could be stretched without bursting. Whether at court or in the drawing rooms of London society, Englishwomen remained, to the surprise and annoyance of their French guests, firmly in their segregated and inferior places, expected to withdraw after dinner to allow the men to talk literature and politics. In England, a visitor smugly remarked, women were ‘the momentary toy of passion’, while in France they were companions ‘in the hours of reason and conversation’. As Jane Austen put it, ‘Imbecility in females is a great enhancement of their personal charms’, something that Lucie, brought up to talk intelligently, would find extraordinary. The French were also disconcerted by the casual manners of their hosts, the way young people hummed, put their feet up and perched on tables.
With rich relations able to take the family in, Lucie’s position in London was considerably easier than that of all but a handful of the other French émigrés. But it was also strewn with emotional traps. Her stepmother, Countess Dillon, had reached England some time before, bringing with her Betsy and Alexandre, her two children by her first husband, and 13-year-old Fanny, her daughter by Arthur. Two other daughters by Arthur, whom Lucie had never seen, had died in infancy.
Lucie was fond of the gentle, good-natured Betsy, whom she had known when at a convent school in Paris, and who had just made what was turning into an unhappy marriage with the well-connected but wayward Edward de Fitz-James. Betsy was pregnant and clearly miserable. ‘She was a sweet girl,’ Lucie wrote later, ‘and deserved a better fate.’ Edward’s mother, the Duchesse de Fitz-James, ran what was described as the gayest of the French salons in London, the one where ‘la haute émigration’, the most noble émigrés, gathered. Lucie felt rather less affection for Alexandre who, though carefree and charming, had, she said, ‘little intelligence and even less learning’, lacked all talent and was interested only in fashion, horses and ‘small intrigues’. Like his mother, whom Lucie described grudgingly as a woman ‘not without a certain natural wit’, Alexandre had never been known to open a book.
Fearing to be greeted coldly by her stepmother, Lucie was relieved and pleased when Mme Dillon came to call, eager for an account of Arthur’s last winter in Paris. Though they had much to talk about, Lucie felt surprised that her clever and well-educated father had chosen to marry such a woman.
More problematic was how Lucie would be received by her grandmother, the ill-tempered Mme de Rothe, who had fled from Koblenz to London with Archbishop Dillon after the defeat of the émigré army. To Lucie’s enduring relief, they had not met since Lucie’s departure for Holland nine years earlier, and there had been virtually no contact between them in all that time. Persuaded by Lady Jerningham that it was her duty to show her grandmother some mark of respect, Lucie, taking the bright and easy-going Humbert with her, but leaving Frédéric behind, went to call. What Frédéric did not tell her until later was that Mme de Rothe had been spreading malicious stories about Arthur and about himself around London, and that
she had stipulated that on no account would she receive him.
Mme de Rothe and the weak but not unkind Archbishop were living in a modest house in Thayer Street on a pension of £1,000 a year provided by Arthur’s eldest brother, Lord Dillon. One of the servants who had accompanied them into exile, Michel Esquerre, mistakenly believing it safe to return to France, had gone home and been guillotined in May 1794. The Archbishop was now 84; the authorities, who, through agents, kept a close eye on the émigrés settled in England, listed him as a ‘rebel to his country and his Church’.
When his manservant, who remembered Lucie from Hautefontaine and burst into tears on seeing her at the door, announced her, the Archbishop greeted her most affectionately. He hugged Humbert ‘again and again’ and soon began questioning him in French and English, evidently much charmed by the little boy. He pressed Lucie to return next day to dine with him and the six elderly bishops from the Languedoc who shared his meals and whom Lucie remembered from her travels to Narbonne.
Mme de Rothe was icy. Lucie kissed her hand; her grandmother addressed her as ‘Madame’. Learning that Lady Jerningham had invited the family to spend the winter at Cossey Hall, near Norwich in Norfolk, further displeased her and Lucie watched with mounting anxiety as Mme de Rothe began to mutter to herself under her breath, a sign Lucie remembered as heralding an outburst of ill-temper. After half an hour, trembling lest her grandmother embark on a long list of accusations against her father or against Frédéric, Lucie kissed her hand again and left.
Lucie never referred to her grandmother again, in anything she wrote, though she paid many visits to the Archbishop and cannot have failed to have met her. It was as if her profoundly unhappy childhood had simply never happened.
After this, came a visit to Lord Dillon, who greeted her with a ‘cool courtesy’, and offered her his box at the Opera; but nothing else. Then Lucie called on Lord Kenmare and his 18-year-old daughter Charlotte, who were both warm and affectionate.
There was one family visit left, and in some ways Lucie feared it the most. There was something in her relationship with Frédéric’s forceful aunt that had always troubled and unnerved her. The Princesse d’Hénin was living in Richmond, where many of the aristocratic émigrés had settled, sharing a small house with her faithful and cowed companion, Lally-Tollendal. This second exile had not softened her forceful nature and she made no effort to conceal her envy at Lucie’s invitation to Cossey, all the greater since Lally-Tollendal had spent many pleasant months there on his own as the guest of Lady Jerningham. But the Princesse d’Hénin was never cold and unjust in the manner of Mme de Rothe, and Lucie was grateful that she was now generous enough to see how important Lady Jerningham’s support would be to the family. It was with considerable relief that Lucie, her round of visits completed, prepared to leave for the country. What little she had seen of the émigrés in London, gossiping and intriguing, while fluttering shamelessly around the ‘pale constellation’ of rich and fashionable hostesses, had depressed her exceedingly.
The party, consisting of Lucie, Frédéric, the children and Marguerite, as well as Lucie’s stepmother and her children and various maids and grooms, travelled to Norfolk in a convoy of carriages, crawling slowly over terrible roads marked, for the first time since the Romans, by regular milestones. The mail coach service had recently been extended as far as Norwich, and couriers passed them on the road at the considerably faster speed of 9 miles an hour. Lucie, for whom new sights and new places never failed to raise her spirits and give her pleasure, greatly enjoyed a day they spent on the way at the races in Newmarket. They reached Cossey at the beginning of October; the weather was windy but mild.
Cossey Hall, not far from Great Yarmouth on the Norfolk coast, which had been in the Jerningham family since the middle of the 16th century, was a large, red-brick, partly medieval and partly Tudor house, with a single tower. It had projecting wings, angled buttresses and gables, topped by square pinnacles. More imposing and eccentric than beautiful, it was said to have been lived in for a while by Anne of Cleves, when banished from court by Henry VIII. But its setting, in the middle of a valley through which wound the river Wensum, surrounded by forests of oak, beech and chestnut, was delightful. The park was full of deer and, compared to the severe geometric parterres and gravelled paths of the great French gardens, seemed, with its grass, ponds and walks, very informal. The walled kitchen garden had glasshouses for tomatoes and peaches and a 60-foot run of cucumber pits. A hamlet of about 600 people, most of them living on an island of cottages contained in a loop of the river, provided staff for the estate. After the ruggedness of Albany, it was all very gentle. When the weather was good, Lucie, wearing a new riding habit given to her by her stepmother, went out on one of Edward de Fitz-James’s horses, on a side-saddle he had thoughtfully provided.
As Catholics, Sir William Jerningham and his brother the Chevalier, a Knight of Malta, had been educated in France, Sir William staying on to serve at court and in the army. With memories of the Gordon riots of 1780, and their virulent attacks on Catholics by a burning, looting mob, fresh in people’s minds, the Jerningham chapel at Cossey remained hidden away at the top of the house in the gables, though by the end of the 18th century restrictions against Catholics were beginning to ease. Sir William, who had returned from France to campaign on behalf of English Catholics, was planning a new chapel in the grounds, modelled on King’s College Chapel in Cambridge. Since the beginning of the revolution, Lady Jerningham had been taking in as guests French refugee priests as well as the sisters from the Blue Nuns in the Faubourg Saint-Antoine, where she had studied as a girl, and her salon for the French had earned her the affectionate name of ‘her Catholic Majesty’. Ever practical, she had written to her daughter that ‘I like to have several People in the House, and a multitude cannot be had cheaper than with the unfortunate French: no Servants, no Horses, no Drinkings’.
About the inside of the house, with its mullioned windows, wood panelling and flagstones, Lucie would write only that it was ‘old but comfortable’; she approved of the food, saying that it was ‘plentiful and not too elaborate’. Coming from a Parisian childhood, where the nobility, though less wealthy than the English aristocracy, lived on a far more lavish scale, what she seems to have most liked was Cossey’s unpretentiousness, though with £18,000 a year in income, the Jerninghams were one of England’s small elite of privileged landed families. Accustomed to the acute cold of a North American winter, she does not appear to have noticed the chilliness and draughts for which English country houses were already famous.
They were a large group in the house, 19, including a Catholic chaplain, most of them in some way related. Charlotte, Lady Jerningham’s only daughter, who had recently married Sir Richard Bedingfield, lived not far away in a moated 15th-century fortified manor house. Both Sir William and his brother spoke excellent French and Lady Jerningham took charge of Humbert’s education, leading him off to her room every morning after breakfast to read and write in both French and English. Sir William, a warm-hearted, affable man, was writing a paper on mangel-wurzels. There was an excellent library for Frédéric to read in and among the pictures that hung on the panelled walls was a portrait of Queen Mary Tudor by Holbein.
Lucie had fled from France without warm clothes for either herself or the children, but when cold weather set in at the end of October, and it began to snow, Lady Jerningham sent out for winter wardrobes for them all. Knowing that Lucie could sew, and wanting to provide her with some occupation, she ordered lengths of different materials, tactfully pretending it would also encourage Fanny to sew. To distinguish her from another Dillon cousin called Fanny, Lucie’s stepsister, who was turning into a pretty, somewhat forceful girl, with an oval face and determined brown eyes, was known as the ‘little tall Fanny’.
A local parson, the Rev. P. Woodforde, coming to dine with the family at Cossey, was shocked to find them eating pheasant, swan and ham on Fridays and fast days. Lady Jerningham, he noted, was a
‘fine woman, thou’ large and extremely sensible but much given to satire’. Part of her sensibleness was to insist that Humbert and Charlotte be vaccinated against smallpox, and she sent to Norwich for her own doctor to carry it out. When spring came and the Jerninghams prepared to return to London, they pressed Lucie and Frédéric to remain at Cossey, in a small cottage in the grounds. But Frédéric had business in London to attend to; and Lucie was once again pregnant–her seventh pregnancy in as many years–and feeling very ill. Fearing that she might again miscarry, she preferred to be near good doctors. The pleasant months in the country came to an end. They had suited Lucie well, just as her years in Troy had suited her. Among the many advantages of her equable nature was a genuine ability to make the most of wherever she found herself, and a refusal to spend time regretting or anticipating.
For all the generosity of their English hosts, the French émigrés were seldom very happy in their state of exile. Those who had not grown up speaking English–the great majority–found the language hard; they hated the cold; they considered the fruit ‘bad, sour and half ripe’ and the tarts watery under their crusts of ‘half-cooked dough’. When the Marchese de Caracciolo wrote to the King of Naples that in England he had discovered a country of ‘22 religions and two sauces’, these were not words of praise. Fretting about events at home, mourning those who had gone to the guillotine, many of the émigrés had become crabby and quarrelsome, feeding, as Lucie had remarked, on gossip and rumour. They were being devoured, observed Mallet du Pan, editor of one of London’s three French language papers, Le Mercure Britannique, and briefly a spy for the British government, ‘by an indomitable spirit of discord, malice and despotism’.
Dancing to the Precipice Page 31