One of her first visitors after the birth was the Chevalier Jerningham, who wrote to tell his sister-in-law that he had not found Lucie in good health. Lady Jerningham’s response was to charge him with finding somewhere in Richmond for her niece’s growing family, sending £45 to put down on a charming small early Jacobean terrace house at number 3 The Green. It belonged to a famous Drury Lane actress who never used it, but who had furnished its very small rooms with perfect taste. It was, wrote Lucie, ‘beyond anything we could have wished’.
It is sometimes as if the lives of Frédéric and Lucie were marked with particular tragedy; they accept, they endure, they recover, only to be struck down again. They do not complain. Georgian London was a sickly, unhealthy place, even if vaccination was making huge strides against smallpox and the plague had disappeared. Fevers–typhus, dysentery, measles, influenza, tuberculosis–still struck out of the blue, rampaging unchecked in epidemic waves. At a time when far more people died young than old, parents could not expect to see all their children survive beyond infancy. But Lucie and Frédéric had already lost Séraphine, and Lucie had miscarried three babies and seen another die at birth. Even for the times, her losses were extreme.
The day that they were due to move into their new terrace house, Edward, just 3 months old, caught pleurisy. The autumn was damp and cold and Lucie blamed the English nurse for not taking better care of him. Within days, Edward was dead. Lucie, who had been breast-feeding him, fell ‘very ill, and was’ she would write, ‘myself near death’. ‘The grief’, she wrote many years later, was such that ‘it curdled my milk’. This time, she took many months to recover. In her memoirs, she made little of Edward’s death, preferring to remain silent. But the gaps in her narrative, at moments of tragedy like this, were telling. It was as if she retired into herself, and simply concentrated on surviving; and, after a period, she picked up the thread again.
Getting rid of the English nursemaid, she now had only Marguerite to help her. Humbert went to school every afternoon, before going on to spend an hour or so at the home of a French émigré called M. de Thuisy and his four young sons. Lucie and Frédéric grew fond of this family and M. de Thuisy made a point of calling every week on the day Lucie did the ironing, when he would sit by the fire as they talked, handing her the hot irons, which he had first cleaned on brick and sandpaper. England was a country, Lucie was discovering, where those not possessed of a great fortune could still live comfortably. She delighted in the daily visits of the butcher to the house and in the fact that there was never any haggling over price or weight.
They were once again very short of money. Lucie’s stepmother’s repayments had trickled almost to a halt. The kind M. de Thuisy, observing their anxiety, found ways of bringing her sewing, particularly linen to be marked, at which she excelled. One morning, when they were down to their last 600 francs, a despairing letter arrived from M. de Chambeau, still in Spain waiting to be allowed to return home and himself left with nothing. His rich uncle had recently died in France, leaving him his entire fortune; but as a proscribed émigré, liable to be arrested if he returned to France, he was not permitted to inherit. Frédéric, taking most of their remaining money, hastened to a banker and took out a bill of exchange, payable to M. de Chambeau in Madrid. They now had a single £5 note left. As if by instinct, one morning soon after, Edward Jerningham rode to Richmond to call on them. Lucie, who was very fond of him, regarded him somewhat as the younger brother she had never had. Edward had just turned 21 and come into a sizeable inheritance. As he left the house, Lucie saw him slip something into her work-basket, but he appeared so embarrassed that she said nothing. After he had ridden away, she found an envelope with the words: ‘Given to my dear cousin, by her friend Ned’. It contained a note for £100.
Bit by bit, Lucie started going out again. She was once again in touch with her childhood friend, Amédée de Duras, with whom she had often played music in the Faubourg Saint-Germain, and who had fled to London soon after the revolution. Amédée had recently married Claire de Kersaint, the rich only daughter of the naval hero in the American wars, who had gone to the guillotine at about the same time as Arthur, accused of spying for England. Kersaint had tried, but failed, to kill himself while in prison. He had sat briefly with Arthur in the Assembly.
The marriage, at which the Princesse d’Hénin stood in for Claire’s mother, who was ill, brought together the cream of the Faubourg Saint-Germain in exile. Like Mme de Staël, Claire was too manly to be beautiful, but her somewhat wary expression suggested both intelligence and great determination. She was small, just over 5 feet, with brown eyes, black hair and a small mouth. Writing later about those who had been young in the Terror, she would say that they ‘would carry to their graves the premature melancholy that filled their souls’. Lucie was devoted to Amédée but deplored his haughty manner. After the young couple moved nearby to Teddington, she spent many hours comforting Claire for his infidelities, calming her storms of fury and despair, while reprimanding Amédée for his waywardness. As Lucie noted, Claire, who was 22, wanted romance, while Amédée was the least romantic of men. Lucie counselled patience and forbearance: she told Claire to try to make their house more pleasant, so that Amédée would not wish so often to get away; but then Lucie’s own marriage remained an exceptionally happy one, and her feelings for Claire would always be ambivalent.
When Claire gave birth to a daughter, Félicie, Lucie was asked to be her godmother. Though increasingly accepting of her new friend, she remarked, in the clear and critical tone that she frequently adopted when describing behaviour that was in some way wanting, that beneath the younger woman’s apparent passion and intelligence, lay ‘arrogance and tyranny’. In Teddington, Claire became increasingly distraught; she wept incessantly, while Amédée grew ever more bored. Lucie told her that Amédée hated scenes, and pointed out that love could not be commanded. ‘Having lectured the husband,’ she wrote later, ‘I consoled the wife.’ Her troubled friendship with Claire, which was to last for many years, would cause her much unhappiness.
Shortly after the birth of a second daughter, called Clara, Amédée, a First Gentleman of the Bedchamber, was summoned to do his tour of duty at Mitau, in the Duchy of Courland where Louis XVIII maintained his court in exile. The children were to be left with Mme de Thuisy. But on reaching Mitau, Amédée was informed that the King had let it be known that he would receive no one who had sat in the Assembly in Paris at the time of his brother’s trial and execution. Admiral Kersaint had been present that day: Claire would not be welcome at court. In 1795, Louis XVIII had drawn up a list of names of those who had rallied to the new French government, according to the wickedness of their deeds and the punishment they would receive. Those who had voted for the death of the King had an ‘e’ by their name, for écartelé, drawn and quartered, then there were those with a ‘p’ for pendu, hanged, those with an ‘r’ for roué, to be put to the rack, and those he called ‘heedless, pusillanimous and stupid’, who had a ‘g’ for galères, the galleys. Lafayette and two of the de Lameth brothers had ‘r’s.
One of Lucie’s neighbours in Richmond was a Miss Lydia White, a well-known local bluestocking, who, together with her unmarried sister, held musical evenings. Enjoying Lucie’s stories of her life in Albany, they pressed her to borrow books from their well-stocked library. When the two sisters moved away from Richmond, Lucie, knowing that she could not afford one of the many costly circulating libraries, resigned herself to a bookless life. A little later, a box full of books arrived from Hookman’s Library in London, with a letter telling her that she was entitled to request any number of French and English volumes from the stock of 20,000 books, and that if she put in her order by the seven o’clock morning coach, she would receive them the same evening. She never learnt who was responsible for the gift, but assumed it was the Misses White.
Other acts of kindness touched her. An alderman lived in the next door house on the Green. Having befriended the talkative Humbert, a
nd learnt from him details of the family’s misfortunes, he sent round a constant supply of fruit from his hothouses, with notes saying that they were for ‘the young gentleman’. He also had pots of sweet-smelling plants placed all along their shared railings, so that their scent floated into Lucie’s rooms. And there were occasional outings, to Teddington to practise music with Amédée, to London to visit Lady Jerningham or to hear Johann Baptist Cramer play at a private party in London, where Lucie, accustomed to the respect accorded music and musicians in France, was shocked that no one stopped talking to listen.
For a while, the émigré community was full of rumours of a possible invasion by the French, and it was said that Napoleon might land with his men on the Norfolk Broads. Lady Jerningham’s reaction was to declare that she would raise an army of ‘stout robust young female peasants, dairy maids, servants, field workers, the wives and daughters of rustics’ and arm them with pikes. They were to wear neat plain uniforms and their task would be to drive the cattle and horses inland, away from the coast where they might be seized by the invaders.
One week, Lucie and Frédéric accompanied their old friend M. de Poix on an expedition to Windsor, Oxford, Blenheim and Stowe, pausing along the way to inspect the country houses open to visitors in the absence of their owners. With her not always well-concealed disdain for the English, Lucie observed that it was only in their country settings that English gentlemen ‘really became “grands seigneurs”’. Enjoying herself, she also remarked on the improved weather: away from London it seemed to her no worse than that of Holland.
Though they had at last extracted some more money out of Lucie’s stepmother–with the result that they were now cut by that entire side of the family–Frédéric was thinking of arranging for Lucie to return briefly to Paris to see what could be salvaged of their property. There was again news from France that in order to recover confiscated property, owners had to apply for it in person. Lucie would, they both thought, be able to travel in safety under her English name, though the English did not look kindly on the French who chose to cross backwards and forwards between the two countries. ‘What loyalty can be expected from men, who on their arrival at Paris, proceed even to the length of taking the oath of hatred against Royalty,’ asked The Times, ‘while in this country they affect a strong attachment to Kingly government?’
Lucie herself was extremely reluctant to go; she feared not the dangers, but the parting from Frédéric and the children. It was on the day she was due to leave Richmond that news came of the fate of two émigrés, men who had partnered her at dances in Paris before the revolution, and who had recently returned secretly to Paris on the same mission. They had been caught, and shot. Lucie’s trip was abandoned. The days passed very slowly. Her health was poor and she felt permanently listless. ‘My life in Richmond,’ she wrote later, ‘was very monotonous.’ She was once again pregnant. She was 29: this was her eighth pregnancy.
Lady Jerningham need not have feared a French invasion: Napoleon’s eye was on Egypt, where the writ of the Ottoman Empire was weak and where the Beys who governed it were subjecting French merchants to constant vexations. Egypt also promised to be the route by which it would be possible to strike at England’s coveted possessions in India. Having led his ragged, exhausted troops to victory after victory in Italy, Napoleon had returned to Paris a conquering hero, who had changed the map of Europe in France’s favour and made the revolution seem respectable again. The Egyptian expedition, however, proved expensive in men, decimated by ferocious Mameluke warriors, eye diseases and the plague, while Admiral Nelson had laid waste to the French navy off Alexandria, effectively cutting off the French from their homeland. Napoleon, remarked General Kleber, was the kind of general who needed a monthly income of 10,000 men.
On 23 August 1799, leaving his army behind in Egypt and passing off his defeats as victories, Napoleon set sail for France. He landed in Fréjus on 9 October. The Austrians were driving the French out of Germany, the Russians harrying them in Italy; Paris was in a state of unease. Barras, the only one of the five original Directors still in power, was negotiating with the exiled Louis XVIII for a return of the Bourbon monarchy; the Abbé Sieyès, whose pamphlet about the Third Estate was widely regarded as one of the defining documents of the revolution, was plotting on the contrary for a stronger executive. (When asked where he had spent the revolution, Sieyès memorably replied: ‘I survived.’)
Napoleon, approached both by Barras and by Sieyès for his support, agreed to back Sieyès, on condition that a new Constitution be drafted. On 9 November–18 brumaire–an emergency was declared. Napoleon was given the command of the troops in the Paris region, the Directoire was overthrown, and Barras was removed, though not without some resistance from the assembled deputies, which evaporated when confronted by the bayonets of Napoleon’s grenadiers. The days of the corrupt, incompetent Directoire were over.
Ten years of constant war and political turmoil had made the French long for peace and order. Napoleon was a man untainted by the venality of the Directoire, someone who could put both the revolution and its chaotic aftermath to rest. In him, royalists chose to see someone capable of restoring the monarchy; the former Jacobins preferred to believe that he could prevent it. Napoleon deftly engineered that authority would be vested in three Consuls, elected for ten years. There would be a Council of State to draft bills, a Tribunate to discuss them, and a Legislative Assembly to vote on them. After a brief interim period, a moderate lawyer, Jean-Jacques de Cambacérès, and a disciple of Rousseau’s called Charles-François Lebrun, joined Napoleon as Consuls. ‘Bonaparte has his eye on a dictatorship,’ warned an English agent, reporting to his superiors in London. ‘He wants to play Cromwell…’
In London, the news of Napoleon’s return and the fall of the Directoire was greeted with cautious optimism. The last two years had disillusioned many of the émigrés, France appearing to be as oppressive in peace as it was in war. The revolution, argued the émigré journalists, had turned out to be synonymous not with liberty but with destruction. But there was also a sense of excitement that it might at last be possible to go home in safety.
At Cossey, where Frédéric, Lucie and the children had joined Lady Jerningham to spend another winter in the country, letters arrived from de Brouquens and Augustin de Lameth urging them to return. Since England and France were still at war, they were advised to travel via Holland on German passports. Lucie was seven months pregnant and Lady Jerningham suggested that she let Frédéric go alone. She unnerved her niece still further by saying that she would be happy to bring up the new baby as her own. Lucie rejected both ideas: she had no intention of being parted either from her baby or from Frédéric. And she feared that if he were obliged to flee again, he would make his way to Le Bouilh, and then to Spain, where it might take her many months to join him.
Unwilling at first to believe that there could be any serious difficulties in obtaining French passports, Frédéric went to call on the Bishop of Arras, the sole accredited minister of the court in exile with the power to grant them. The Bishop was unhelpful. He was not interested in assisting anyone, he told Frédéric, who did not have the patience to wait until the counter-revolution and the restoration of the Bourbons. In the event, Dutch passports were secured, and passages booked for the family and Marguerite on a Royal Navy packet travelling from Great Yarmouth to Cuxhaven. Because of terrible weather, gale winds blowing from the north-west, they spent a miserable month waiting in dreary lodgings in Great Yarmouth, unable even to visit nearby Cossey lest the captain suddenly decide to weigh anchor. The day Lucie’s baby was due was getting uncomfortably close, and she was terrified that she might give birth before reaching Paris. Eventually, at the very end of December, they woke to a fine morning and the captain summoned the passengers on board.
The sea was still very rough, and the 14 French, German and Russian passengers huddled in a single cabin. Lucie found a bunk, keeping Charlotte close to her, but the hatches had been battene
d down and there was no fresh air. Frédéric and Marguerite, overcome with sickness, ‘lay like dead things’. Only Humbert remained on his feet. The boat heaved and tossed for 48 hours, and those passengers who were not actually sick got drunk on brandy and punch. Lucie would later remember these two days as among the most unpleasant of her life. For a while, it seemed as if they might have to put back or, if the ice was very thick in the estuary, land on a small island nearby.
But the weather cleared, the ice proved less thick than had been feared, and the boat anchored at Cuxhaven. A kind gesture on the part of the captain, by providing her with a small boat to take her closer to the jetty with Charlotte, nearly proved fatal. With the boat rocking from side to side, Lucie slipped and was only prevented from falling into the sea by two sailors who, while hauling her up on shore, at the same time yanked her arms in such a way that she was in the most terrible pain. Clutching Charlotte in aching arms, she was barely able to reach Frédéric, waiting close by with a cart.
Every inn in Cuxhaven was full of émigrés trying to reach France. Only after some hours did a landlord, taking pity on Lucie’s condition, allow the family in, and provided straw mattresses and blankets for them to sleep on the floor. Lucie had by now developed a high fever. She became delirious, and Frédéric feared that she might miscarry. A doctor was found, and through an interpreter Lucie described her accident. He prescribed a strong sedative and applied a plaster made of barley boiled in red wine to her painful side. Twenty-four hours later, she woke, feeling perfectly well again. She was, as she frequently remarked, blessed with excellent health and a determined nature.
Dancing to the Precipice Page 33