And many were extremely badly off, particularly the widows with young children, and the elderly clerics, living in damp dark lodgings in Southwark or Somerstown, mostly on a diet of potatoes, the staple food of the poor which the French much despised. Chateaubriand, who began his period of exile in a garret off Holborn and was capable of feeling aggrieved in almost any circumstance in which he found himself, wrote later that ‘I was eaten up with hunger…I sucked linen rags dipped in water, I chewed grass and paper. When I went past bakeries I was horribly tormented.’ Chateaubriand soon gravitated to smarter lodgings in Marylebone.
Some of the worst poverty was alleviated by a number of charit able ventures, both public and private. Jean-François de la Marche, Bishop of Saint-Pol de Léon, had fled to England from Brittany in the spring of 1791. Though he was over 60, his health was good and he set up a Committee for the Relief of the French Clergy and Laity in Golden Square, where he began distributing relief at the rate of 1 shilling a day for adult men, and half as much for women and servants. Reports to the committee, listing the worst cases, spoke of ‘Mme de D…dead of hunger…she has left a paralysed husband and three sons, all three sick’ and ‘Mme de B…left without anything and five children who are completely naked’. As needs increased, the administration of the fund was taken over by the government. In its editorials The Times urged Londoners to respond generously: ‘Should this country,’ the paper asked, ‘not afford some further protection to these unfortunate strangers, whither must they fly?’
But as the months and then the years passed, even those who had arrived with money began to run out of funds. Our fortunes, wrote the Marquis de Tremane to the Prince de Bouillon, a rich and philanthropic Frenchman who did a great deal to support those worst off, ‘are simply not lasting as long as our persecution’. Some of the émigrés fell ill, others lost their jobs. M. de Rodire, who taught French, ‘lost his scholars’. Mlle le Boucher went mad. The disastrous Quiberon expedition in 1795, after which many of those who were not killed in battle were guillotined under the émigré laws, had left many hundreds of widows and small children, reduced to selling off, one by one, all their possessions. For a single year, the committee estimated that it needed to raise at least £150,000 for the destitute émigrés, a quarter of it going to members of the nobility. Some of the money went on health, the Middlesex Hospital having agreed in 1793 to open two special wards for ‘sick French clergy’. Most of them were reported to suffer from bad eyesight and ‘grande faiblesse’, extreme feebleness, though there were official complaints about the number of leeches used in a single year–36,100–and the quantity of wine the French patients drank (49 dozen bottles). Could some of these French priests, asked The Times, not be persuaded to help get in the harvest?
But it was not all grim. Lucie was only one of many writers who later pointed out that wherever possible, even in the midst of misery, the French émigrés remained astonishingly cheerful and that when they got together, they laughed. The French, remarked Lucie, ‘are by nature gay, so that although we were desolate, ruined and furious, we nonetheless succeeded in preserving our good humour’. Though few could afford a carriage–the Abbé Baston, who found London ‘monstrously big’, complained that his long walks were ruined by impudent women who buffeted him off the pavements–and very few owned the changes of dress necessary to go out in society, most nonetheless took pleasure in brightly coloured, noisy, smelly, bustling Georgian London.
They went, when they had the money, to the vast new Drury Lane theatre, or to the Vauxhall and the Ranelagh pleasure gardens, where they sat under arbours of honeysuckle and roses and listened to music or danced late into the night. They strolled along Charing Cross, through Leicester Square and Piccadilly, and watched street shows of freaks, midgets, women gladiators and even mathematical pigs, and if they were lucky they saw the ‘amazing Learn’d Dog’ which could answer questions on Ovid’s Metamorphoses, knew the Greek alphabet and could tell the time. For the more robust, there was bear-baiting and cock-fighting.
The Abbé Tardy, who wrote a guide to help his compatriots navigate the hazards of this alien land, recommended excursions to Hackney, ‘the richest village in Europe’, and to the ‘mountain of Sydenham’ to admire the views over London. Those who wished to learn to swim he directed to the Peerless Pool, near Finsbury Square. Good coffee, he warned, was all but impossible to find; best to drink port wine, ‘which the climate of England demands’. On the subject of boiled vegetables in white sauces, and cold boiled meat, which his readers should expect to encounter if they stayed in a pension, the Abbé was very gloomy.
When not weakened by illness, the French émigrés, whatever their class and background, were extremely resourceful. In workshops up and down Marylebone, women who had grown up surrounded by servants, never doing anything that resembled work, now embroidered chiffon dresses and made straw hats, sending the men to the Cornhill to buy the straw, and giving the youngest women the unenviable task of selling the hats to milliners. Two hundred priests made carpets for the Marquis of Buckingham, while monks entertained Lord Bridgewater’s guests by strolling up and down the lawns of his country estate, reading their breviaries. Jean-Baptiste Cléry, Louis XVI’s valet, gave readings from his account of the King’s tearful parting from his family. Jean-Gabriel Peltier had a miniature guillotine built of walnut and, appealing to the macabre and ghoulish in Georgian England, announced: ‘Today we guillotine a goose, tomorrow a duck.’ Mlle Merelle gave harp lessons; M. de Gaumont bound books; the Marquis de Chavannes sold coal and the Comte de Belinaye wine. M. d’Albignac tossed salads at fashionable dinner parties. The Comtesse de Guery’s ice creams became popular with the Prince of Wales; and when the Abbé Delille, the ‘blind bard of emigration’, reciting Milton in French in the Duchess of Devonshire’s drawing room, reached the part about the King’s execution, his listeners wept. Pierre Danloux, bitter foe in Paris of David, spent ten years in England painting portraits–among them that of Betsy de Fitz-James–charging 15 guineas for a bust and 50 for a full-length picture. Dispossessed, sad and fearful for their future, they complained, as Lucie noted, remarkably little.
Soho, first populated by the French Protestant Huguenots fleeing persecution in the 1680s, became a gathering place for émigré writers and artists. They congregated in a bookshop run by a former Benedictine monk, who used his own library to start his business, or at the émigré school opened by the Abbé Carron in the Tottenham Court Road; and they met after Mass on Sundays in St Patrick’s Chapel in Sutton Street, consecrated in 1792 as the first Catholic chapel to be built that was not attached to an embassy. A few wrote novels, often heavily autobiographical in nature, full of English ‘mylords’ and examples of ‘délicatesse’, which fed the new appetite for romantic fiction on both sides of the Channel. The Comtesse de Flahaut, Talleyrand’s mistress and mother of his child, sick of making straw hats, wrote her immensely successful Adèle de Senange. Those who had money were expected to share it. When guests left the Duchesse de Fitz-James’s soirées, they were supposed to slip some money under their plates.
And some young women, who could find no way to make money, contracted hasty marriages, like that of the Comtesse d’Osmond’s daughter, Adèle, who at 17 accepted the hand of the 42-year-old General de Boigne, marrying him 12 days after their first meeting. The Comtesse d’Osmond was the Dillon relation who had come to Hautefontaine when Lucie was a child to beg the Archbishop’s help at court, and who had much disapproved of the lax morals of the house. Both Adèle and her mother made very little effort to conceal their distaste for the General, who was both rich and generous; soon, their criticisms and mockery were being repeated around London and General Boigne’s shortcomings became a topic for gossip throughout the European émigré world.
Lucie and Frédéric were beginning to experience money problems of their own. Forced to flee Paris at such short notice without returning to Le Bouilh, they had brought almost nothing out with them. They could have applied to the
Bishop of Saint-Pol de Léon, but felt that this would embarrass their rich relations. Though Frédéric was considered a traitor by Mme de Rothe for his early enthusiasm for the revolution, the Archbishop offered to write to Lord Dillon on their behalf, pointing out that however badly her husband had behaved, this should not be used as a reason not to help Lucie. She was, after all, his niece. When he had been the head of the family, ‘in my days of glory and opulence’, he had felt an obligation to provide ‘for all my relations in trouble’. The letter yielded nothing. The single invitation to his box at the opera was Lord Dillon’s sole gesture towards his French niece.
On returning to London, however, Lucie and Frédéric learnt of a sad but very welcome legacy. A letter came from Martinique, informing them of the death of M. Combes, Lucie’s much-loved tutor at Hautefontaine, whom Arthur had appointed Registrar of Martinique. Living in Arthur’s house on the island, M. Combes had managed to save 60,000 francs. While the de la Tour du Pins had been in Albany, M. Combes had repeatedly tried to send them money, only to be thwarted at every turn by Lucie’s stepmother, who had borrowed the capital–against interest–and found constant excuses for not paying it back. Not long before his death, M. Combes had written to say that the grief of knowing Lucie to be in a foreign country, without money, was slowly killing him. With interest accrued over the years, M. Combes’s legacy amounted to slightly more than 71,000 francs.
The life of the French planters in exile was considerably more comfortable than that of the French mainland émigrés. Most had managed to bring out with them at least part of their considerable fortune and many continued to receive rents and revenues from their plantations in the West Indies. Since many had settled in Marylebone, in fashionable houses in and around Manchester Square, also home to the richer noble Parisians, the area was referred to as ‘le Faubourg Saint-Germain’. It was here that Lucie’s stepmother had found a house, and where she entertained on a lavish scale. Until news of M. Combes’s bequest reached London, she had treated Lucie with affection. Overnight, she became distant and increasingly hostile. Referring Frédéric to her Creole agent for the money, she pleaded that funds were not arriving and that the sugar harvest had been poor. Small sums were advanced, with extreme reluctance. ‘We were given as alms,’ noted Lucie bitterly, ‘what was really our own property.’
Not willing to be a constant burden on Lady Jerningham, and in any case well aware of Mme d’Hénin’s proprietary feelings towards Frédéric, they now accepted her invitation to share her house in Richmond. Lucie, worrying constantly about money, was also conscious of the need for clothes for the coming baby. She wished they had never left Cossey.
Richmond lay 9 miles west of central London, reached along the river, through countryside filled by market gardens and hamlets going down to the water’s edge. The Abbé de Blanc, an early visitor, described it as an immense garden offering the eye ‘a kind of image of earthly paradise’. A bridge had been built in 1777 to join Richmond to Twickenham, and Garrick’s theatre, just off the Green, was popular with both residents and visitors. Richmond itself remained a charming small country town, with views across the fields to spires and the white gables of farmhouses, and in the distance the grey towers of Windsor. Up and down the Thames, watermen waited to ferry travellers across. Rich merchants, wanting summer houses close to the city, had bought land on which to build imposing new mansions and villas; cottages had gone up in the lanes and alleys behind. The mail arrived at 9 in the morning, and there was a regular coach service all through the day to London from the courtyard of the Old Ship Inn.
Since 1789, some 40 French émigrés had settled in Richmond, most of them aristocrats and royalists. They found life cheaper and less crowded than in London. One of the first to arrive had been Amélie de Lauzun, wife of Arthur’s faithless friend, though by 1797 she was dead, having returned too soon to Paris and gone to the guillotine for treason not long after her husband. Horace Walpole, living nearby at Strawberry Hill, befriended many of the émigrés, playing lotto with them in the evenings, and referring to Richmond as ‘une véritable petty France’. Though frequently impatient at the endless gossip about their ‘absurd countrymen’, he had been horrified by the news of the September massacres, and repelled by the fact that so many of the ‘perpetrators or advocates for such universal devastation’ had been philosophers, geometricians and astronomers.
When the Princesse d’Hénin had first fled to England in September 1792, she and Lally-Tollendal had shared a house in a damp valley in Surrey at the foot of Box Hill, 20 miles from London, with Mme de Staël, her lover the Comte de Narbonne and Talleyrand. Juniper Hall, a red-brick former coaching inn, had acquired a reputation for intrigue and scandal, both Mme de Staël and the Princesse d’Hénin living openly with their lovers in what were described as the ‘elegantly disordered alcoves of Les Liaisons Dangereuses’. Though their view that despite the horrors and the excesses, the revolution had been both necessary and inevitable had made them suspect in the eyes of both Pitt’s government and most of the exiled royalists, Mme de Staël’s brilliance and fascination had drawn many visitors to Juniper Hall. But in the spring of 1793, Mme de Staël had tired of England, telling Gibbon that the Tories had crushed all serious argument and made London the most boring city on earth, and she returned to Switzerland and to her parents. The author Fanny Burney, who had recently left her position at court and lived nearby, met her future husband Alexandre d’Arblay at Juniper Hall. She described the weak but scholarly Lally-Tollendal as the Cicero of the French Revolution.
When Juniper Hall was given up, Princesse d’Hénin and Lally-Tollendal had moved to Richmond, to a small white gabled house in Osmond Row, and it was here that Lucie, Frédéric and the children were invited to occupy the ground floor. Though pretty, the house was extremely cramped. Lucie shared one small room with Charlotte, Frédéric a second with Humbert. It is not clear where Marguerite slept. There was nowhere for them to sit or to receive visitors, other than in the Princesse d’Hénin’s drawing room. Lucie admired Frédéric’s aunt; but she was not fond of her. She found her manners too autocratic and her tongue too sharp. The Princesse’s bad temper and outspoken views, which had grown sharper with time and misfortune, had already alienated much of the émigré community. Every day, Lucie would write, she was forced to suffer ‘showers of pinpricks’. Lally-Tollendal was scarcely better liked. In the royalist salons, he was referred to as ‘the people’s dregs’; Lucie, who appreciated his kindness, considered him the ‘most timorous of gentlemen’ and had little patience with the way that he never dared risk any amusing remark for fear that it offend the Princesse d’Hénin.
In the evenings in Osmond Row, they were joined by other disaffected émigrés, all of them at odds with the royalist Relief Committee. From time to time, Chateaubriand came to read aloud from his new novel, Atala. Lucie, at 28 considerably younger than the rest of the party, and describing herself later as ‘laughter-loving’, found these evenings very tedious. She was bored not only by the ceaseless political debate, but by Lally-Tollendal’s insistence on discussing his recent Défense des Emigrés, a long tirade, not so much against the revolution itself as the arbitrary injustice of the émigré laws, which condemned them all, regardless of their views and positions, as traitors and cowards. Adèle de Boigne, in her acerbic memoirs, noted that his contemporaries referred to Lally-Tollendal as ‘the fattest of sensitive men’, whereas they might have done better to add that he was ‘the flattest of humorous’ ones, always weeping and snivelling over the past.
But Richmond was not without its pleasures. That summer, the Princesse de Bouillon, the extremely ugly companion of the Prince de Salm, of whom Lucie had grown fond in Paris just before the revolution, arrived in Richmond to collect a legacy left her by the unfortunate Amélie de Lauzun. In the eight years since they had last met, Mme de Bouillon had grown even uglier, her back more humped, her ‘yellow, dried skin’ clinging to her bones, her mouth so full of black and broken teeth that
she was terrifying to look at. But the Princess had lost neither her charm nor her wit, and soon introduced Lucie to the Duchess of Devonshire, who gave a lunch party for the French émigrés in the newly done-up Chiswick House. The once famously beautiful Duchess was now 40 and worried about losing her sight; her looks were going, and she had become, as a friend maliciously wrote, ‘corpulent…her complexion coarse, one eye gone and her neck immense’. The Devonshire House Circle, with its Whig aristocracy and its passion for the theatre and gambling, satirised by Sheridan in The School for Scandal, was winding down, and the Duchess spent more of her time at Chiswick House, calling it her ‘earthly paradise’. She had planted lilac, honeysuckle and roses near the house, to scent the air. Later, the Duchess’s sister, Lady Bessborough, invited Lucie and Frédéric to a dinner at her house in Roehampton. And there was a visit to Hampton Court, where Lucie again met Anne Wellesley, with whom she had played as a child. Lucie, though seven months pregnant, loved these outings.
The Princesse de Bouillon now offered to exchange her larger and more comfortable lodgings in Richmond for the two ground-floor rooms in Osmond Row, saying that she was lonely on her own. They had scarcely moved into their new home when Lucie gave birth to a son, a ‘strong and beautiful child’. She called him Edward, after his godfather, Lady Jerningham’s son and her former page at her wedding. There were now once again three children in the family: Humbert, who had turned 9, the plump Charlotte, almost 2, and the new baby. While Marguerite cooked, Lucie sewed and ironed; an English nurse was hired to help with Edward. Humbert’s English was so good that on his way to school he called at the local shop to place the daily order.
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