CHAPTER TWELVE
Toothless Dogs and Clawless Cats
While Lucie was recovering, Frédéric managed to buy a small barouche and a horse for 200 francs. On a fine morning, they set out for Paris, but the weather soon turned stormy, with squalls of driving rain; Frédéric and Humbert sat hunched at the front under a single umbrella, while Lucie, Charlotte and Marguerite cowered under the hood. At Bremen, they paused for two days in an inn to dry out by the warmth of one of Germany’s immense wood stoves. When they took to the road again, deep snow lay on the open heath; the barouche turned over in the snowdrifts, leaving them shaken but unhurt.
Late one evening, they reached the Hanoverian garrison town of Wildeshausen, where a regimental ball was to be held that night. Every room was already taken. They were huddling around the fire in the town’s only inn when an officer, saying that he expected to be dancing all night, offered them his room. Greatly relieved, they ordered supper to be sent up. It was now that Lucie realised that she was going into labour. Frédéric became distraught; Lucie tried to comfort him, saying that babies could, after all, be born anywhere; but, she wrote later, ‘it is impossible to describe his despair’.
With difficulty, for none of them spoke German, a French barber, who had deserted during the Seven Years War, was found to interpret; he in turn fetched the doctor, an elegant young officer who came straight from the ball. Since Lucie lay swaddled in her cloak, it took some minutes to explain the nature of the problem. Once he had grasped the situation, the doctor, helped by the barber, Denis, efficiently arranged for the family to move into two un-occupied rooms belonging to a rich farmer on the edge of the town, Lucie as always supervising every step. ‘As I was not yet in much pain,’ she wrote later, ‘I had time to attend to all our small arrangements.’ Increasingly, it was Lucie rather than the anxious and good-natured Frédéric who tended to take charge.
It was here, on the morning of 13 February 1800, that a small, frail girl was born, ‘so thin and delicate that I hardly dared hope she would live’. Lucie estimated that she was about six weeks premature. They called her Cécile, after Frédéric’s sister. She was baptised in the Catholic church in Wildeshausen; Denis and his wife, who spoke not a word of French, acted as godparents.
Within hours of the birth, the local magistrate summoned Frédéric and informed him that they would have to leave the town within 48 hours, the Electorate of Hanover having strict rules about French émigrés travelling on what were clearly false Danish passports. But when he learnt their real name, he recalled how kindly his nephew had been treated by Frédéric when Minister at The Hague, after which the whole town opened its doors to the travellers and their delicate new baby. When, two weeks later, they left the farmer’s house and set forth again, officers from the garrison, the elegant doctor among them, escorted them on the first lap of their journey towards Holland. Inside the barouche, Lucie clasped Cécile tightly to her, never once exposing her to the ‘icy air of those northern plains’.
At Utrecht, reached after many slow, jolting days on the road, they were surprised to encounter the Princesse d’Hénin, who was on her own way back to Paris. She had paused in Utrecht to visit Lafayette, who, having been freed from five years’ captivity, was living nearby at Vianen and now hoped to be allowed to return to France. During his years in prison he and the Princesse d’Hénin had kept up a secret correspondence, some of his letters written with a toothpick in vinegar and charcoal on scraps of paper.
With new passports from the French Ambassador to Holland, whom Frédéric knew from his time in the French Foreign Ministry–papers as false as all the rest, stating that the family had never been in England–they travelled on to Paris where Augustin de Lameth had secured lodgings for them in the rue de Miromesnil. The house belonged to a former mistress of the Duc de Bourbon; one of Lucie’s first acts was to drape muslin over the full-length mirrors that covered the walls, saying that it irritated her to keep seeing her reflection at every turn.
It was not just a new century. Though the country was at a low ebb, its factories in ruins, its schools without teachers, its churches closed and its Treasury empty, and though thousands of destitute people wandered the streets of Paris, there was a real feeling that France had at last been delivered from a long nightmare. The revolution was truly over. And it was calm, without the frenzy that had marked the Directoire. Under the three new Consuls, genuine order was gradually being established. The Vendée, where civil war had simmered on, was being pacified. Several of the most unpopular and harsh laws had already been rescinded. Daily newspapers had been reduced from a chaotic 73 to 13, and these were under police surveillance. A new inspector-general of the gendarmerie had been named to fight brigandage, escort prisoners and ‘ensure the safety of people and property’. It was becoming strict and orderly, but after ten years of uncertainty, most found it all extremely reassuring.
And the émigrés were finally coming home, even those who had not dared do so in 1797. Singly and in groups, many on false passports and under assumed names, some wearing the thread-bare fashions of the ancien régime, others in disguise, they were making their way back to the outskirts of the city, venturing into the centre only when they perceived others doing so in safety. By the end of the Terror there had been 146,000 names of émigrés on the proscribed list, men and women prohibited from returning to France. But the Directoire had removed 13,000 of them and the new Consulat looked set to remove many more. The émigrés longed to be home. Whatever their politics and their parties, they longed to find out what was left of former possessions, to learn who had survived and who gone to the guillotine, to discover the shape and mood of the new France. Some were hoping to be reunited with children left behind with servants, fearing that they might have abandoned the old courtesies and gone the way of the merveilleuses and muscadins. ‘It has become as fashionable to come home,’ noted the Comte de Neuilly drily, ‘as it once was to flee.’
It was not, however, as easy or as straightforward as it may have seemed. In positions of power were many people whose new fortunes rested on stolen émigré property, or who feared that they might lose their jobs to better candidates returning from abroad. Over a million people had bought property belonging to the Church or to the émigrés, who were said to have lost possessions valued at some 2 milliard francs. Fouché, the Minister for Police, who had helped himself to several large estates, intended to fight hard against all requests for ‘radiation’, the removal of names from the hated émigré list. Fouché was using spies to gather incriminating information about anti-revolutionary activities during the years of exile.
Lucie and Frédéric were not on the list of the proscribed, but Frédéric’s mother was, even though she had barely stepped outside her convent in the rue des Fossés Saint-Victor. Just the same, they needed certificates to prove that they had never left France. And though these documents were widely known to be fabrications, in due course Lucie was forced to present herself, with her ‘cloud of witnesses’, at her local municipal office. The mayor signed the papers, laughing as he whispered in her ear that he knew that every bit of clothing she was wearing came from England. Frédéric had written to Alexander Hamilton before leaving London asking him to sell their farm in Troy, and was hoping to be able to retrieve or buy back at least some of their former possessions with the money. Hautefontaine, condemned as a nest of aristocrats and ‘non-juror’ priests, had been sold in 1799 to a speculator, together with 1,709 separate pieces of furniture, glass, kitchenware and linen, and could not be got back. But its library of 3,000 books, including 112 volumes of Pancoucke’s Encyclopédie, was intact, carted off to the Château de Compiègne with libraries from other châteaux; and this he was hoping to recover.
In the spring and summer of 1800, the Place Vendôme became Paris’s most elegant social meeting place. It was here, in a building on the corner of the rue Saint-Honoré, that a Commission des Émigrés had been set up to hear cases and hand down verdicts, the favourable on
es often the result of handsome bribes. Newly returned émigrés, from Koblenz, Lausanne, Madrid, St Petersburg or London, hastened to the Place Vendôme to greet friends, discuss strategies, talk over plans, enquire about jobs, and to seek, after many years of absence, lost friends and relations. Some had been away for ten years. Not all knew the fate of people they loved. By early autumn, 8,083 requests had been filed with the commission; Fouché managed to reject 1,747 of them. With his lank fair hair, long pale face, staccato voice and jerky movements, Fouché, who had sent some 2,000 Lyonnais to their deaths with the words ‘no mitigation, no delay, no postponement of punishment’, was turning into a man many Parisians feared.
When Chateaubriand returned to Paris in 1800, he expected to ‘descend into Hell’. Instead, in the Champs-Elysées, he was greeted by music, the sound of violins, horns, clarinets and drums sounding out cheerfully to a people intent on normality and reassurance. Given his morose nature, Chateaubriand chose to dwell on the belfries stripped of their bells during the Terror, and the headless statues of saints, but most other émigrés, reaching the city from their years of anxiety and exile, were delighted by the liveliness and sense of order of Paris. It was tranquil, and stable, in a way which might actually last.
The revolution had done away with the salons of the Faubourg Saint-Germain, but now, searching for the familiar in a world torn apart by a hatred that many still found impossible to comprehend, bold aristocratic women began opening their doors once again to those coming from abroad or creeping back into the open after years of terrified concealment. What they longed for was the ‘douceur de vivre’ that had once made their lives so pleasing. One of the first salons to reopen was that of Frédéric’s friend, Mme de Montesson. Now in her 60s, the widow of the Duc d’Orléans had kept her youthful complexion and striking violet eyes, though she moved a little stiffly, telling friends that her bones ached from the 18 months she had spent in prison.
Announcing that she intended to give a dinner at two o’clock every Wednesday, at which the harp would be played and perhaps a book read aloud, Mme de Montesson soon gathered around her a dozen of the surviving luminaries of the ancien régime. It was said that it was in her salon that men wore silk stockings and buckles for the first time since the revolution. The food was excellent, the footmen wore livery and the china came from Sèvres. Elegant and understated, invariably wearing white or becoming shades of cream, Mme de Montesson let it be known that she would rise to greet no one, except for Napoleon’s wife, Josephine, or in order to show to the door someone she did not wish to receive again, and that she would tolerate no politics in her salon. Guests quickly read into her ‘open’ or ‘shut’ expression whether they were in favour or not; just the barest lowering of her voice was enough to keep passions in check. According to her great-niece, Mme Bochsa, no one knew better how to freeze people out with ‘nuanced and knowing politeness’.
Just the same, most people found Mme de Montesson more intimate and welcoming that Mme de Genlis, who, though better educated, was prone to pedantry. In her new salon, Mme de Genlis was blaming Voltaire and the Encyclopédistes for having paved the way for murderers like Robespierre. In the rue de Cléry, Mme Vigée-Lebrun, allowed back from St Petersburg only after 254 artists signed a petition on her behalf, had opened her long gallery to a resident music society. Musical soirées were becoming fashionable once again, leading the Goncourt brothers later to observe that many in the audience, believing that it was bon ton to listen to music, were in fact ‘heroically bored’ at having to do so. It was in the rue de Cléry that The Marriage of Figaro and Don Giovanni were sung for the first time in the original Italian.
And in a house lent to Mme de Beauvau in the Faubourg Saint-Germain, the three surviving ‘princesses combinées’–d’Hénin, de Poix and de Beauvau–met again, receiving their visitors stretched out on chaises longues, drinking coffee from a gold coffee pot. Mme de Poix had gone completely blind. Mme de Beauvau was sharing her very small house with her sister-in-law, the former abbess of Saint-Antoine des Champs, as well as two former ladies-in-waiting to Marie Antoinette, and Ourika, the Senegalese girl given to her as a gift by the Chevalier de Boufflers. Lally-Tollendal, who was considered very greedy by the princesses, was often tearful when talking about the past.
In these salons, Lucie and Frédéric rediscovered a world and friends that they had almost forgotten. Mme de Staël, at work on a novel, was gathering around her political figures of every persuasion, artists, émigrés, old Jacobins and royalists, talking, arguing, reasoning far into the night as she had always done. Many of the old nobility, Lucie observed, were hastening to make their peace with Napoleon, though seldom taking the trouble to conceal their contempt for his rough ways when among friends.
It was not long before they encountered Talleyrand, enjoying his position as Minister for Foreign Affairs, who asked them whether there was anything they needed. Lucie, remarking wryly that Talleyrand had ‘steered his fortunes with much skill’, told him that their financial problems were such that they had no choice but to settle at Le Bouilh. ‘So much the worse for you,’ Talleyrand replied, ‘but it’s folly.’ There was always money, he added, when you needed it. Talleyrand, noted Lucie, was as ever ‘amiable, but not really helpful’. A young English visitor called Catherine Wilmot, finding herself next to him at a reception, left a memorable if somewhat fanciful description of the man now rising to be the most important statesman of the age. He was wearing, she noted, an embroidered scarlet velvet coat and ruffles. ‘At a distance, his Face is large, pale and soft, like a Cream Cheese, but on approaching nearer, cunning and rank hypocrisy supplant all other resemblances…Gobbling like a Duck in my ear about the vicissitudes of fortune and happiness…he presented me with his fat paw.’ Talleyrand himself had given a magnificent ball in the rue du Bac shortly before Lucie’s return. ‘All these parties,’ wrote a returning noblewoman, ‘were lovely; above all, they possessed the charm of things that you thought you had lost and now discovered were still there.’
What soon became clear, however, was that a quite separate and very different kind of salon life was developing in Paris. It was more frivolous and considerably more luxurious and it was taking place, not in the faded surroundings of the ancien régime, with their chipped plates and empty rooms, but in the magnificent newly decorated houses of the agioteurs–the speculators–and the bankers. Foremost among these were the receptions held by Lucie’s friend, Thérésia, who, though still married to the jealous Tallien, had spent the years of the Directoire as mistress to Barras, filling his apartments in the Luxembourg with works of art that had once belonged to Marie Antoinette. Thérésia, now 27, still charmed Paris with her yellow straw hats, crowns of flowers, white dresses à la Mameluk and scarves woven becomingly around her short curls. She had a rival in Mme Récamier, described as so beautiful that she had been made ‘by the Creator for the happiness of man’, a ‘coquette’ with all the ‘charm, the virtue, the inconstancy and the weakness of the perfect woman’, even if some considered her chest too flat, her arms rather thin and her hair, though silky, thin.
It was Mme Récamier who gave the first masked ball at the Opéra since the revolution. Her salon was described as being too small for the many émigrés, former Jacobins, liberals, artists and officers who flocked to see her perform her famous shawl dance, her face unpowdered, wearing white muslin and satin, her curly hair framed by a black ribbon placed low over her forehead. At Mme Récamier’s, the dancing was so animated and lasted for so long that ladies changed their fans, bouquets and shoes several times during the evening. After dinner, favoured guests were given tours of her bedroom, with its white-and-gold bed, with bronze candelabras and violet damask falling in pleats, a white marble statue of Silence on one side and a golden lamp in the shape of a genii holding an urn on the other. In the bathing cabinet, the bath could be turned into a sofa edged with gold. Mme de Récamier, though considerably younger, had been befriended by Mme de Staël, and was said to be acqu
iring a distinct taste for intellectual conversation.
These new salons, observed Sophie Gay, who would later write two volumes about society in France after the revolution, were turning into places where the ‘debris’ of the ancien régime could meet the new political leaders of the day, each needing the other, the ‘anciens’ because they longed to feel wanted, the parvenus because they liked to be admired. Republicans and royalists, attempting to reinvent themselves in this new Consular Paris, where everything changed every day and no one knew what would happen next, ‘played together without liking each other, but without fearing each other either, rather as poor toothless dogs might play with cats which had had their claws removed’.
In February, Napoleon, the Corsican artillery officer whose valour at the siege of Toulon had won him glory, had used a plebiscite to have himself made First Consul, equivalent to the title of Princeps given by the Roman Senate to Augustus. He and Josephine had moved out of the Luxembourg and into the Tuileries, Napoleon taking the first-floor rooms overlooking the gardens. Josephine chose Marie Antoinette’s apartments on the ground floor, where in just a few months the Queen’s hair had turned completely white. Bronzes and tapestries were brought from Versailles, and the fashionable Percier and Fontaine decorated a drawing room in yellow and lilac silk. The Consul’s apartments were widely praised as in surprisingly good taste. Napoleon was already talking of making Paris ‘not only the most beautiful city that ever existed, but that could ever exist’, and plans were being discussed to tackle the stench and murkiness of the city’s labyrinth of dark alley-ways and its contaminated supplies of water.
Napoleon was not the first man to dream of a grander, cleaner, better lit Paris, but the public works he envisaged, for the immediate glory of his army and later for his own, were on a scale not contemplated before. The Louvre, reduced to a blackened, crumbling ruin, its outer walls sprouting a warren of ramshackle hovels, was to be cleaned up and joined to the Tuileries; the gardens were to be enlarged, and, where potatoes had grown during the revolution, lawns were planted with avenues of trees and trellises covered in flowering creepers. At the Palais-Royal, 496 lime trees had already been placed in long straight lines. Napoleon preferred engineers to architects, sculptors to painters; he liked colonnades and the regular contours of classical buildings. The Paris he planned would be symmetrical and monumental, full of triumphal arches, and it would have a necropolis, like Cairo’s City of the Dead.
Dancing to the Precipice Page 34