Frédéric’s job, however, would not be easy. Over his prefects as over all other aspects of his Empire, Napoleon liked to retain control. He personally vetted and selected every prefect, as well as many sous-préfets and mayors, and paid them according to the size and strategic importance of their departments; he sent inspectors to check up on them, scrutinised their reports, criticised their personal lives and sacked them at will. From his prefects he expected absolute submission and blind zeal. If they were seen to assume excessive power, they were called to order; if they abused it, they were removed. When the Prefect of Montenotte was reported to have taken his mistress on a trip rather than his wife, he was informed that the Emperor insisted on ‘la plus grande décence’, total respectability. Their job, Napoleon told them, was to rally hearts to a common love of the motherland, no easy task in an empire that stretched from the Baltic sea to European Turkey and the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies, and which included, among its vassals, 32 German kings, princes and dukes. And Frédéric was not quite the loyal, unquestioning servant Napoleon appeared to take him for. There was a streak of independence in his character, and more than a little yearning for the lost monarchy; and he could, when pressed, be very stubborn.
Frédéric had gone on ahead. Lucie, Aymar, the two girls and Mme de Maurville reached Brussels in the summer of 1808. They found waiting for them a palatial mansion with extensive gardens, filled with servants, and a handsome, cultured, prosperous city, the streets paved and well lit, the buildings in good repair, the theatres playing to full houses. In the upper town, the ville haute, behind its 14th-century walls, were the houses of the aristocracy, the royal palaces and the guild houses, some identified not by numbers but by the names of flowers and animals, others painted pale green or yellow, with Ionic columns. In the ville haute, French was spoken.
Below, in the ville basse in the valley, along the banks of the canal and the river, life centred around the markets for wheat, flax, tobacco, linen, lace and beer, conveyed to customers throughout Europe by canal or road. In the new greenhouses grew grapes and pineapples. In the streets of Brussels could be seen dogs harnessed to wheelbarrows, and on fine evenings, people strolled along L’Allée Verte by the Palais Royale. Brussels was a city of pigeon fanciers, of public fountains with excellent water and of horse-racing; Lucie’s uncle Lord Dillon was still remembered as one of three English lords who had brought their horses to race in Belgium long before the revolution. When Voltaire had visited the city in 1742, he observed that while Brussels had very few interesting people, it had exceptionally interesting books.
Belgium had been an early victim of the passion for conquest that gripped France during the revolution. A part of the Spanish Netherlands at the end of the 17th century, it had been French, Austrian, briefly independent, then Austrian again. With Dumouriez’s victory at Jemappes in 1792, it became French; a year later, it fell again to the Austrians. But in 1794, General Pichegru, advancing over frozen water in an exceptionally cold winter, had brought Jacobism to Brussels, along with the cockade, a Tree of Liberty planted in the fine Gothic and baroque Grand’ Place, and the loss of cart-loads of art plundered from the city’s richly endowed churches and monasteries.
On 1 October 1795, the Austrian Netherlands, Flanders and Liège were all annexed to France and split into nine departments. Brussels, the seat of the prefecture of the department of the Dyle, was the most important. Napoleon had since done much to restore Belgian prosperity, ordering dozens of Brussels’s famously comfortable carriages, with their glass windows, and instructing Josephine and her ladies-in-waiting to buy Belgian lace.
By 1808, Brussels had been French for 13 years. The first prefect, Louis-Gustave de Pontécoulant, was a Norman aristocrat and a cartographer who had worked hard to provide an efficient economy, based on Paris. He had welcomed as visitors to their native home the two composers Gossec and Grétry, restored churches and encouraged the production of lace. After five years, Napoleon had recalled him to Paris and made him a senator, sending in his place M. de Chabon, an even better administrator, who had set about restoring to their rightful owners property that had been confiscated. De Chabon earned a reputation for justice. He was, Lucie conceded, ‘worthy, enlightened and firm’, all virtues to which she was much attached.
She felt, however, that neither of these two men had done much to woo the affronted Belgian nobility, a tight-knit circle of some 300 families, most of them related in some way to one another, living in haughty and faded seclusion in and around the Grand’ Place. Lucie, who immediately identified her role as ambassadress to these people, reflected that de Pontécoulant had failed on account of his wife, a former mistress of Mirabeau’s, whose origins, she concluded, ‘held little attraction’ for the Bruxellois, and de Chabon on account of his own, an ailing, obscure woman ‘from a very modest level of society’. Lucie herself, she noted with pleasure, was already known to the beau monde of Brussels through the Abbé Delille’s popular poem, La Pitié, published in 1802, which talked of a young lady-in-waiting to Marie Antoinette, who had milked cows in the forests of the New World. In the haute ville, Lucie was received ‘with the greatest kindness’. It was made clear to her that the Belgians were delighted that their salons were again to be ‘presided over by an aristocrat’. Only Lucie’s extreme directness excuses a tone that sometimes sounded extremely snobbish.
Along with her impeccable breeding, Lucie held another important card. Before the revolution, in the salons of the Faubourg Saint-Germain, Lucie had often met the Duchesse d’Arenberg, the last descendant of a famous Belgian 15th-century warrior baron. Mme d’Arenberg was known in Brussels as the Dowager, and regarded as the Queen Mother. She had perfect 18th-century manners, rode out in all weathers in an open carriage, was devoted to her grown-up children and particularly to her blind son, and received every evening between seven and nine. The Dowager was the arbiter of Brussels society. Letters of introduction had been sent ahead by the Princesse de Poix and Mme de Beauvau; the day after she reached Brussels, Lucie went to call. She was invited to dinner, whereupon ‘the whole town signed our book’.
Lucie was an assiduous worker. Whether milking cows, sewing linen or making butter, she had always risen at dawn. Her job in Brussels, as she saw it, was to understand the nobility and charm them. ‘To overcome their aloofness’, she decided, needed influence, and influence would come from her salon. As people came to call on her, she began to put together a list of their names, their relations, their occupations and their interests. She borrowed books on the peerage from the Bibliothèque de Bourgogne, and she called on the services of a former Commander of the Knights of Malta, who came to the house every evening to answer a list of questions she had drawn up during the day. By the end of the month, she felt that she knew Brussels well, down to its ‘different liaisons’, its ‘animosities’ and its ‘bickerings’.
Refusing to pay or receive visits in the mornings, which she spent with Cécile and Charlotte, she gave up the rest of the day to making friends with the ville haute. For the first time since the ministry in The Hague, she had a large staff to help her: a butler-valet, two liveried footmen, an office boy, a porter, an office footman, two stable boys and any number of cooks, maids and kitchen servants. Unimpressed by grandeur, largely indifferent to comfort, she took great pleasure in her own competence at organisation.
Just the same, it was not always smooth. Brussels was a city of intrigues, in an age of uncertain power and precarious fortunes. Though she and Frédéric made friends readily, there were people who were envious of a position apparently won without effort. In Brussels were two Frenchwomen, senior to Lucie in that their husbands held higher-ranking positions. One was Mme de Chambarlhac, the wife of the General commanding the division garrisoned in Brussels. She was a handsome woman in her 40s from a noble family, but she was rumoured to have been plucked out of a convent by her husband during the Italian campaign and to have followed him around, dressed in a hussar’s uniform. Living rough among soldi
ers, Lucie decided, had ruined Mme de Chambarlhac’s manners beyond repair. The second was Mme Betz, the wife of the First President. Mme Betz was in her 50s and wore, Lucie thought, unsuitably deep décolleté. Neither of these two ladies was ever invited to dine with the Dowager. Lucie, who was, did not care to receive them either. ‘Naturally,’ she wrote, ‘I could not consider any connection’ with such people, while the General she considered ‘a fool’. The jealousy and animosity of these two women, along with that of their husbands’, simmered.
Soon after reaching Brussels, Frédéric received a visit from the Comte de Liederkerke, who had been a junior officer in his regiment many years before. The count, who came from a very wealthy old Belgian family, asked whether his only son, Auguste, a probationer in the Council of State, might work for him as a secretary. Frédéric agreed. Humbert had left Antwerp and now arrived to join them, in order to study for the Council of State himself, and the prefecture, to Lucie’s intense pleasure, was soon full of children and young people. Brussels, with its good food, its wines from Flanders and the Rhine, its games of whist and lotto at the Dowager’s suppers, was turning out to be a pleasant posting.
General Henri Bertrand, Napoleon’s favourite aide-de-camp, had not stopped yearning for Lucie’s half-sister Fanny. He was a military engineer by training, a good-looking man with curly dark hair and regular features, sturdy, reserved and somewhat stubborn. Fanny held out against him for two years, displeasing Napoleon greatly one day by exclaiming, when he yet again asked her to consider the match, ‘What, sire!…Why not the Pope’s monkey?’ But one day the Emperor sent her 30,000 francs with which to buy a wardrobe so that she could accompany Josephine to Fontainebleau. Josephine was very fond of Fanny, though Lucie herself found her ‘extremely frivolous’. It was while at Fontainebleau that Fanny relented and agreed to marry Bertrand. Napoleon, remarked Lucie, was someone to whom one could refuse nothing, ‘so gracefully and so winningly did he set about obtaining what he wanted’. He was not as graceful with everyone.
Fanny’s elder half-sister, the unhappy Betsy de Fitz-James, had died recently, leaving four young children. But Napoleon would not hear of Fanny’s marriage being delayed; he allowed her eight days, as he wished to be present, after which he was leaving to rejoin his army. Early in September, Lucie was suddenly ordered to Paris: the Emperor had announced that she alone would be able to arrange the ceremony in time. She hastened to obey. ‘Although the letter was a very friendly one,’ she wrote, ‘it was clearly a command.’
Leaving Brussels at once and travelling all night–the new four-horse vélocitères travelled faster than the old turgotines–Lucie reached the Princesse d’Hénin’s house in the rue de Miromesnil at dawn. She paused only long enough to change her dress and send for a carriage to take her to her stepmother’s house in the rue Joubert. There she found that Mme Dillon and Fanny had left for Beauregard, Mme de Boigne’s house not far from Saint-Cloud. Lucie had not met her cousins, Adèle de Boigne, wife of the unfortunate General, or her mother, Mme d’Osmond, since her childhood at Hautefontaine. Hurrying on, she was at Beauregard by 11.30. ‘Ah,’ exclaimed Fanny, on seeing her, ‘we’re saved. Here is my sister!’ Mme Dillon was still in bed, and very reluctant to be rushed. Lucie urged her to dress quickly and to accompany her back to Paris, so that they could begin making plans. While waiting, she strolled around the park with Bertrand, whom she found initially shy and awkward, but soon won over. By lunchtime they had come ‘to understand one another well’. Lunch was taken with Mme de Boigne and Mme d’Osmond, neither of whom, remarked Lucie briskly, ‘could abide me’. She ate heartily, having had nothing all day.
There was much to arrange. A judge had to be found to concoct a new birth certificate for Fanny, her own having disappeared somewhere in Flanders. Napoleon himself signed the marriage contracts of his favourite courtiers, and as her stepmother kept neither paper nor pens in her house, confirming Lucie’s opinion of her as an uneducated and foolish woman, she had to send out to d’Expilly, Paris’s finest stationer, for supplies. Napoleon had said that he would attend the wedding, so every detail had to be perfect. Lucie was informed that she personally was to be presented to the Emperor at Saint-Cloud next morning, and that she was to wear ‘court dress and plumes’.
Lucie’s intrepid life in the wastes of North America was well known to Napoleon, who clearly admired her boldness and was appreciative of her aristocratic origins. For her part, Lucie was surprised at how little frightened she was of a man of whom most of his courtiers were terrified. At Saint-Cloud, he greeted her, she reported later, ‘graciously’, and asked her about Brussels and its ‘high society’ as if to suggest that it was the only kind that might interest her. He teased both her and Mme de Bassano–wife of Napoleon’s recently ennobled secretary M. Maret–about having made them rise so early; Mme de Bassano pouted, later telling Lucie that Napoleon had become ‘most attentive to her’. Lucie was not the only intelligent woman to be dazzled when singled out by the Emperor.
The Emperor had given orders that Fanny and General Bertrand were to be married in the chapel of the Château de Saint-Leu, which belonged to his stepdaughter Hortense, Queen of Holland. At 3.30 in the afternoon of 17 September, Lucie followed a long procession of plumed, beribboned, decorated and gaudily dressed grandees from the château to the chapel, where the nuptial blessing was given by the Bishop of Nancy. Talleyrand and Maret, respectively Prince de Bénévent and Duc de Bassano, stood as witnesses for Fanny; Maréchal Berthier and Grand Maréchal Duroc for Bertrand. ‘I am happy for you,’ wrote Josephine in a little book for Fanny, which was also signed by Hortense and Napoleon’s sister Pauline. Afterwards came a dinner and dancing; Hortense, who normally loved dancing, sulked because Napoleon had ordered her to give up her own set of emeralds and diamonds as an additional wedding present to Fanny. Though the Emperor himself did not attend, his presents were lavish: three properties, one in Poland, a second in Westphalia, a third in Hanover. Lucie found the whole event somewhat ‘insipid’. Without the lustre of Napoleon’s presence, the artifice of the imperial court held little attraction for her.
The year 1808 was the one in which Napoleon’s rule reached its most glorious phase. The continent of Europe lay at his feet, with Austria and Prussia his allies, Russia, who was at war with the Ottoman Empire, neutral, and only Britain, Sicily and Sweden holding out against him. Three of his brothers were on thrones: Joseph in Spain, Louis in Holland, Jerome in Westphalia. Since French was now the language of Europe’s courts, there was no need for Frenchmen to learn another language. Though France had indeed lost most of its colonies to the British, and the French merchant fleet was either paralysed or destroyed, the economy was healthy, with manufacturers finding outlets throughout the French-dominated continent, while agrarian reforms and the abolition of internal trade barriers, both legacies of the revolution, were beginning to show results.
At home, the Senate and the Corps Législatif were subdued and impotent; the Tribunat had been closed down. Almost all traces of republican liberty had vanished. It was no longer possible to gather, to talk or to write freely. The press was censored, and newspapers had been reduced to theatre reviews and paeans of praise for Napoleon. Though Le Journal des Dames et des Modes had illustrations showing women driving coaches and flying balloons, in practice the Code Napoléon had returned them to their hearths, forbidding them to travel, inherit or hold a bank account without their husbands’ permission. Art in all its forms, from literature and poetry to painting and the theatre, colluded in glorifying the Emperor, artists having learnt that only lofty moral subjects would keep them out of prison. Secret police infiltrated every corner of private and public life. Troublemakers like Mme de Staël had been banished to internal exile; in eight state prisons languished those suspected of conspiracy. Even from his entourage, Napoleon would tolerate no contradiction. Many of the worst repressions of the ancien régime were being surpassed.
But the city of Paris itself had never looked mor
e imposing. Like the Pharaohs, Napoleon intended to leave great monuments–paid for out of the heavy contributions levied on conquered enemies–by which his deeds would be remembered. Three thousand metres of new quays stretched along the banks of the Seine. There were new bridges–du Louvre, des Arts and d’Austerlitz–new museums and new schools. On top of the Colonne d’Austerlitz, cast after 1,200 cannons captured at the battle were melted down, the bronze statue of the Emperor was seen leaning on a sword, holding in one hand a globe, surmounted by the figure of Victory. The old palaces of the ancien régime were being restored, to house ministers and the imperial nobility. The Canal de l’Ourcq was at last bringing fresh water to Paris from three separate rivers, while the Louvre overflowed with most of the masterpieces of European art.
It was after the Battle of Austerlitz in 1805 that Napoleon’s court had grown truly sumptuous. Having seduced the nobles of the ancien régime with honours and positions, bestowed on them his new Légion d’Honneur, and elevated his family and generals with imperial titles and fortunes pillaged across conquered Europe, the Emperor had imposed a military dictatorship on social life at court. Courtiers wore so many decorations that these looked not like orders and medals but ‘a new style of dressing’. ‘What I want is grandeur,’ he announced. ‘Whatever is grand is always beautiful.’ It was indeed grand; but it was also stultifyingly formal and often extremely boring, a pale and exquisitely orchestrated shadow of pre-revolutionary spontaneity and gaiety. ‘Fear assumed the mask of respect,’ wrote the Vicomtesse de Noailles. ‘It was not a court, but a power: but what a power!’
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