The new baby came early. On 18 October, Lucie was dressing when she caught sight of Dr Dupouy, the doctor who had delivered Séraphine and Charlotte and who happened to be staying at Le Bouilh for a few days, walking past her window. Asking what he was doing up so early, she learnt that he had been called out to sign the death certificate of a neighbour who had died in the night. Lucie, who knew the woman well and had spoken to her the previous day, was shocked and upset. She went into labour. A boy was born; they called him Aymar. There were now five children in the house: Humbert, 16 and soon to leave, 10-year-old Charlotte who was turning out to be clever and full of curiosity, 6-year-old Cécile, and the new baby, Aymar. Elisa, Lally-Tollendal’s daughter, was the fifth.
Lucie herself was ill again after Aymar’s birth, with ‘double tertian fever’, presumably malaria, the fever recurring every day. She recovered slowly, but by Christmas felt well enough to take the baby to Bordeaux to be vaccinated against smallpox. The city’s fortunes had revived, with a series of excellent years for wine, and a forest of masts stretched as far as the eye could see along the estuary. The whole family spent six weeks staying in M de Brouquens’s house, attending balls and furthering Elisa’s marriage prospects. Elisa was 18, small, with thick black hair, and, at a time when dancing was considered an art, was much admired as an exceptionally graceful dancer.
At Mass one day Elisa attracted the notice of one of Bordeaux’s most eligible young men, a M. Henri d’Aux. M. de Brouquens helped Lucie arrange a number of meetings between the young couple; in due course, the d’Aux family came to ask for Elisa’s hand. Lucie noted in her critical way that though indeed extremely rich and a gentleman of the old school, Henri’s father was ‘without a vestige of intelligence or learning’. Lally-Tollendal had promised Elisa a fine dowry if he were repaid a debt owed him by the state since the revolution. Napoleon, who wanted Lally-Tollendal in the government, secured the repayment and the bride’s father arrived from Paris bearing a hundred sacks of money, each containing 1,000 francs. It was more money than Lucie had ever seen in her life.
The wedding was celebrated at Le Bouilh on 1 April 1807. For the dinner Lucie, Charlotte and Mme de Maurville made a centre-piece of red and white daisies, the flowers spelling out the names of Elisa and Henri against a background of green moss.
Soon after the grape harvest of 1807, 17-year-old Humbert left to take up his post as M. Malouet’s secretary in Amiens. Lucie had been dreading this moment: when it came she was heartbroken. ‘The gaiety of our house went with him,’ she wrote. Charlotte, who was 11, and to whom he had been an affectionate brother and companion, felt his loss equally keenly.
Frédéric, who accompanied Humbert to Amiens, paused in Paris, where he was given a surprisingly warm welcome by Lucie’s stepmother. Lucie’s half-sister Fanny was now 23. Elegant rather than pretty, and somewhat capricious, Fanny had fallen in love with Prince Alphonse Pignatelli, and would have married him, had he not fallen ill. When Pignatelli realised that he did not have long to live, he had pressed Fanny to marry him, in order to leave her his considerable fortune. But Fanny had refused, and Pignatelli had died. Since then, General Henri Bertrand, one of Napoleon’s aides-de-camp, had fallen in love with her and Napoleon was urging her to accept. But Fanny remained stubbornly opposed. When Frédéric called on Mme Dillon, she begged him to see the Empress Josephine on her behalf, in order to convey Fanny’s final refusal.
In the Tuileries, Frédéric was received in Josephine’s bedroom, where a deep alcove had been curtained off. He delivered Fanny’s message, but the Empress detained him with questions about himself and Lucie, and about their future plans. Frédéric spoke out freely; it was not in his nature to be discreet. Later that evening, Frédéric called on Talleyrand who, he discovered, already knew all about the meeting from Napoleon. The Emperor had listened to every word, hidden behind the curtain in the alcove. ‘Fortunately for you,’ Talleyrand told Frédéric, ‘your aristocratic airs have saved you. They happen to be the fashion in the Tuileries just now.’
That October Lucie learnt that a number of officers were to pass through Saint-André-en-Cubzac, on their way to the French border. Intending to bring the Iberian peninsula under direct French control in order to dominate the entire Mediterranean, Napoleon was pouring French troops into Spain, ostensibly under the guise of offering Portugal to Spain, which he accused of refusing to enforce the blockade against England. At Mass one morning, she caught sight of a particularly handsome young officer, splendidly turned out in the white cloak, baggy purple trousers and sabre of an aide-de-camp to General Murat. It turned out to be Frédéric’s nephew, Alfred de Lameth, elated at the prospect of action in Spain. Lucie had always been fond of him. Before leaving, Alfred opened his writing case and presented her with a small knife with a mother-of-pearl handle, saying that he wished her to have something to remember him by.
While Frédéric was still away in Amiens, the Princesse d’Hénin wrote from Paris to say that the Emperor would be passing through Saint-André-en-Cubzac on his way to Bayonne. After the French had entered the Iberian peninsula, the Portuguese royal family had fled to Brazil. Napoleon, playing off various factions against each other, had sent 100,000 French troops to Spain and had taken the citadels of Pamplona and Barcelona. In March 1808, King Charles IV abdicated in favour of his son Ferdinand, but then revoked the abdication, and Napoleon had summoned a meeting of all concerned to Bayonne.
Lucie, Mme de Maurville and Charlotte joined the crowds thronging the banks of the river, where a brigantine waited to carry the Emperor across the Dordogne. The scene, wrote Lucie, was one of extraordinary excitement. ‘A madness, a kind of delirium’ seemed to descend on people for whom Napoleon had acquired an almost godlike heroic status. They waited all day, Lucie cursing that Frédéric would miss what might have been a chance to attract the Emperor’s notice. She and Frédéric were increasingly worried about money: the eau-de-vie venture had not proved profitable and the turnover barely covered their daily expenses. When Napoleon finally arrived, followed by a detachment of chasseurs, it was all rather disappointing. The Emperor appeared sullen and bored while the mayor delivered his speech of welcome, then hastened away as soon as he could. ‘We returned to Le Bouilh,’ wrote Lucie, ‘tired and very out of temper.’
It was therefore with some surprise that Lucie received a summons next day to attend on Josephine, who was following Napoleon to Bayonne. The court was in mourning for the King of Denmark, and she had no time to do more than add black ribbons to a grey satin dress before setting off for Bordeaux. ‘Hesitation,’ she wrote, ‘was unthinkable.’ Lucie had not lost all pleasure in her own appearance. She thought her improvised costume ‘admirably becoming to a woman of 38 who, I say it without vanity, looked less than 30’.
That night, Napoleon, no longer as sallow and emaciated as he had been at the time of her stay in Paris, his angular features softened and his appearance considerably neater, entered the great dining room of the palace in Bordeaux where crowds gathered to greet him. While waiting, Lucie had been one of those marshalled into groups in a ‘military manoeuvre’ that had all the ladies standing in perfect straight lines. Catching sight of her, Napoleon asked her, laughing, why she mourned the King of Denmark so little that she was not in black. Replying that she had no black gown, she said that she had decided to come anyway as she was not prepared to renounce the pleasure of meeting her Emperor. Josephine, who had Lucie called out of the receiving line into a small salon, greeted her with great friendliness.
Next day, Lucie was informed that Napoleon had ordered that she spend each evening of Josephine’s stay in Bordeaux in attendance on her. What struck Lucie was the fact that even while conducting a war with half of Europe, Napoleon found time to oversee every detail of his administration and his court, down to the clothes that Josephine should wear and the conversations she should hold; and that Josephine would not have dreamt of disobeying him. Lucie was ‘cruelly disappointed’ when she learnt that Napo
leon himself had already left for Bayonne. Something about him had always charmed her. Each time she saw him, she wrote, ‘my heart beat fast with excitement’.
Frédéric had returned and was present at the evening receptions where he played backgammon with Josephine. While in Paris he had heard from Talleyrand that Napoleon, wishing for an heir to his throne, was beginning to talk of a divorce from Josephine, who had not borne him a child and was now 43. That he could father one himself was clear from the fact that one of his mistresses had given him a son in 1806. Frédéric felt very uneasy when Josephine, pleased to find someone not at court with whom to talk, wanted to confide in him her terror of being discarded. She felt particularly bitter towards Talleyrand, whom she suspected–rightly–of encouraging the divorce. Napoleon had gone on ahead to Bayonne and Josephine was waiting and longing to be summoned to join him. One evening, she asked Lucie to help her decipher a scribbled note from the Emperor, saying that he was having trouble in Bayonne, where both King Charles IV and his son Ferdinand were assembled.
When Josephine was finally called to Bayonne, Lucie was not sorry to return to Le Bouilh. Ten days of imperial life, in full court dress, missing her children, were enough. She was only sorry that Frédéric seemed no nearer to preferment, and that, living with no fortune so far from Paris, it was extremely unlikely that anything would ever come his way.
In 1807, the royal families of Europe, jockeying for power and prestige and territorially ambitious, had between them descended to levels of intrigue, profligacy and lack of dignity that made the excesses of Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette seem insignificant. Charles IV, who had been on the throne of Spain for almost 20 years, was a credulous, intellectually feeble man, who preferred hunting and his own poor playing of the violin to government, and who allowed himself to be led by his coarse and vicious wife, Queen Maria Luisa, by whom he had 14 children, several of them subjects of Goya’s finest portraits. For some years, real power had lain with her greedy and dissolute lover, the present Chief Minister, Manuel Godoy. Like some of the other enlightened despots of Europe, the Spanish royal family believed that reform, should any be necessary, must come from above, and not from the people. By the spring of 1808, however, Charles IV had signed away his claims to the Spanish throne in favour of Napoleon; in exchange he was to receive a pension and a comfortable exile.
In May word came from M. de Brouquens that the deposed royal family would be spending a few days in Bordeaux on their way to Fontainebleau, and that Napoleon had ordered that Lucie was to serve as lady-in-waiting to Queen Maria Luisa during her stay. Elisa had also been appointed to serve her. When a chamberlain accompanying the royal party showed Lucie into the Queen’s apartments, he whispered that she should try her best not to laugh. The doors opened: Lucie felt more inclined to cry. The Queen was dressing. Apart from a very short cambric skirt, all she was wearing was a muslin fichu across her bosom, ‘the driest, leanest and darkest bosom you can imagine’. She was short, stout, with a peeved expression and a loud, harsh voice, and her grey hair was piled high with red and yellow roses. Napoleon found her very ugly, as he told Talleyrand, and ‘with her yellow skin, just like a mummy’. Her expression, he went on, was ‘nasty and treacherous’, adding that what he particularly disliked was her deep décolleté and her bare arms. Having brought very little with her from Madrid, the Queen was putting on a totally unsuitable dress in yellow crêpe and satin lent to her by Josephine. Lucie found her pitiful.
Over the next few days, Lucie was constantly at the little court in exile. She presented Bordeaux’s dignitaries to the royal couple, took meals with them, and listened to Maria Luisa railing against her sons, denouncing them as monsters and the cause of all their misfortunes, and saying that no punishment would be too bad for them. ‘It made me shudder,’ she wrote. The two young men had been sent as prisoners, under house arrest, to Talleyrand’s château at Valençay. Lucie also took strongly against the dissolute Godoy, who had been made Prince de la Paix, and who was very rude to her. The court consisted of a number of attendants, both Spanish and French, who found Lucie’s agreeable nature extremely helpful, and kept repeating that they would like Napoleon to appoint her a permanent member of the Spanish court in exile. Lucie’s one fear was that the Emperor might be persuaded to agree. One evening, knowing that the unregal Charles IV regarded himself as a fine violinist, she arranged a musical soirée, discreetly employing a proper musician to take over his part in the quartet whenever he lost his place. She was very relieved when she finally ‘bade farewell to these unhappy foreigners’ on the banks of the Dordogne, where a brigantine was to carry them across the river on the next leg of their journey into exile.
The King had left turmoil behind him in Spain. In May 1808, the people of Madrid rose up against the occupying forces. Though Joseph Bonaparte, Napoleon’s brother, proclaimed King of Spain in June, had ruled decently in Naples and promised to do so again in Spain, the Spanish felt furious that a vast French army was in occupation. The profoundly conservative Spanish clergy and the great feudal landowners were united in their dislike of the Napoleonic Code, in their opposition to liberal reform and in their refusal to contemplate the loss of their feudal dues. Small local uprisings were fast turning into a full-scale popular insurrection, all sides acting with extreme brutality. With each ambush of French troops, brutal reprisals were visited on the Spanish people. News reached Le Bouilh one day that Alfred de Lameth, Frédéric’s handsome nephew, had been attacked and killed while crossing a village on his way to lunch at Maréchal Soult’s headquarters. The French immediately set fire to the village, killing as many of its inhabitants as they could find. Until her death, over 40 years later, Lucie kept Alfred’s little knife, with the mother-of-pearl handle.
Late one evening, when Frédéric was in Bordeaux on business, and Lucie alone with the children at Le Bouilh, a messenger arrived bearing a note from him. It contained a single sentence. ‘I am Prefect of Brussels…Brussels lies just ten leagues from Antwerp.’ Preferment had finally come.
They learnt later from Napoleon’s secretary, M. Malet, that the Emperor, in keeping with his practice of monitoring every appointment and decision even when on campaign, had been presented with a name for a possible new incumbent for the vacant post of Préfet de la Dyle, crossed it out, and written Frédéric’s name in its place. ‘Like Cincinnatus,’ Lucie would write, Frédéric ‘had been summoned from his plough and given the finest prefecture in France.’
Lucie’s first thought was not of the salary and prestige of the job, but that she would soon be reunited with Humbert. Then she set about preparing for the move. ‘In the important moments of life,’ wrote Lucie revealingly, in words that said much about her decisive and determined nature, ‘any thought which has not occurred in the first 24 hours is either pointless, or idle repetition.’
By the time Frédéric reappeared next day, Lucie had already mapped out their future. ‘I was ready to tell him the plans and arrangements which seemed to me necessary.’ Eleven-year-old Charlotte, evidently taking after her mother in energy and determination, had studied all available maps and gazetteers of the Dyle and was waiting to discuss them with her father. The eight years of peaceful domestic inactivity had come to an end. Lucie had been a happy and loving mother; but in her pleasure and eagerness, one senses a longing for something new.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
Not a Court, but a Power
‘My prefects, my priests, my rectors,’ replied Napoleon, when asked how he planned to administer his Empire. In 1790, as part of the reorganisation of the country, France had been split up into 83 departments, their names chosen from local rivers and mountains; as conquered countries were brought into the fold, so the numbers of the departments grew. When he let it be known that he would appoint prefects from all political sides, ambassadors, soldiers and ministers hastened to offer themselves. Few shared Frédéric’s reticence about seeking preferment. However, from his earliest days as Consul, Napoleon had also been mu
ch taken with the idea of nobility. He was appreciative of those of the ancien régime who rallied to him, and constantly sought ways to bring more back into the fold. Increasingly, he wished to see fewer former Jacobins and more aristocrats among his prefects. Frédéric, ‘ci-devant Comte, Colonel, Ministre Plénipotentiare du roi en Hollande’, was a natural choice. Hiding behind the curtain in the alcove in Josephine’s room, Napoleon had been impressed by Frédéric’s ‘aristocratic airs’, his evident honesty and his obvious attachment to his family. Lucie, with her training at the court of Marie Antoinette, her excellent English and her pleasing ways, would serve France no less well than her husband.
Formally appointed on 12 May 1808, by Napoleon, Conquéreur des Français, Roi d’Italie et Protecteur de la Confédération du Rhin, Frédéric listed his fortune as ‘none’. He explained that his revenues before the revolution had indeed come to 44,000 francs a year, but said that all he had left were a few worthless vines in Bordeaux. ‘I have often been told,’ he added, ‘that one should not allow oneself to become poor. But I do not believe in such things. I offer myself simply as I am.’ Frédéric’s poverty and his rectitude both promised that the new prefect would prove hard-working and biddable. One of his first acts as prefect was in fact to send out his signature, so that it would be recognised as authentic on official documents; he signed it Latourdupin, as a single word, in a rounded, firm, legible hand. With the post came pomp, splendour and considerable power, for, in keeping with his ideas about authoritarian rule, Napoleon placed local administration in the hands of a single man, assisted by two councillors. He called his prefects ‘des empereurs au petit pied’, emperors in miniature, and gave them uniforms in blue, red and white, their blue coats embroidered with silver, their red sashes trimmed with a silver fringe. The wheel had turned full circle: the prefects were almost indistinguishable from the intendants of the ancien régime.
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