Dancing to the Precipice

by Caroline Moorehead

  With the Comte de Ségur as Grand Master of Ceremonies–later described by Stendhal as a ‘dwarf…one of the Emperor’s weaknesses’–presiding over a court of several thousand people, many of whom moved with the Emperor from the Tuileries to Saint-Cloud, Fontainebleau and Compiègne, had come other ci-devant nobles to coach his clumsy generals and their ignorant young wives in the delicate subtleties and nuances of Marie Antoinette’s court. The women learned faster. ‘Adopt neither the posture of a fawning slave, not that of an insolent tribune,’ the Comtesse de Bradi instructed them. ‘Both roles make one look silly and ridiculous.’ In what Claire de Rémusat, who became lady-in-waiting to Josephine when she was 22, called ‘a daily growing despotism’, the parvenus were taught how to walk, stand, sit and bow by Despréaux, former dancing master to Marie Antoinette. They were told how to address each other–princes rated an ‘altesse royale’, grand marshals an ‘altesse sérénissime’–and how many plumes to wear. Rules and etiquette became a form of protection, against malicious remarks and embarrassing blunders. ‘These debutantes in the career of manners,’ observed Mme de Staël, still in exile and pining for Paris, ‘would make a mistake if they confused the outer appearance of things with good taste.’ Court balls had become cold and stiff. Napoleon, who did not care for dancing, had tried, and failed, to learn to waltz. ‘I am sorry for you,’ Talleyrand said to M. de Rémusat, Superintendant des Spectacles, ‘for you are in charge of amusing the unamusable.’

  There were, however, compensations, as Fanny Dillon had discovered. Fortunes were lavished on favourite generals to be spent on furs, carriages, silver, liveries, all the trappings of splendour. Josephine’s increasing acquisitiveness–for diamonds, dresses, jewellery–found a ready following in her ladies-in-waiting, and in the separate establishments run by Napoleon’s sisters, Elisa, Pauline and Caroline, and his stepdaughter, Hortense. Josephine herself changed her costume three times a day, never wore a pair of stockings twice and owned some 400 cashmere shawls, having them made into cushions for her dogs as she tired of them. A dress covered in thousands of fresh rose petals was designed to be worn only once. ‘No language,’ wrote the Duchesse d’Abrantès, whose husband General Junot had been made a duke, ‘can convey a clear idea of the magnificence, the magical luxury…of this plumed and glittering circle’, even if imperial receptions sometimes seemed more like ‘reviews at which there happened to be women’. Napoleon’s review of his guards in front of the Tuileries, held every Sunday when he was not away at the wars, was widely regarded as the finest military spectacle in Europe.

  Mme de Rémusat, who like many of the old nobility–and like Lucie herself–continued to regard her own culture, manners and education as greatly superior to that of the newcomers, left a description of Napoleon at this time. He was a man, she wrote, ‘ill-made, the upper part of his body…too long in proportion to his legs’, with thin chestnut hair, greyish blue eyes, very white skin, and a thin-lipped mouth, who in repose looked melancholy and meditative and when angry menacing. Napoleon was awkward, ‘deficient in education and manners’, but his ‘intellectual capacity’ was ‘vast’, and his long monologues, which took the place of ordinary conversation, were a pleasure to listen to. Napoleon, said Mme de Rémusat, was selfish, but possessed ‘fleeting tenderness’; and, just occasionally, he would appear in Josephine’s rooms in the evening and tell ghost stories.

  Mme de Rémusat was as clear, and as chilling, when contemplating Josephine, a woman ‘easy to move and easy to appease, incapable of lasting feeling, of sustained attention, of serious reflection’. It was Napoleon, she maintained, who had taught Josephine to despise morality and also ‘the art of lying, which they both practised with skill and effect’. By 1808, as Lucie quickly discovered, there were few details of the imperial couple’s intimate lives that were not observed, picked over, criticised and recorded, from Napoleon’s taste for fricasseed chicken, called Marengo, after the battle, to Josephine’s careful smile, deliberately restrained in order to avoid revealing her bad teeth. At Saint-Cloud, as in the Tuileries, all life hung on Napoleon’s pleasure.

  More celebrations followed Fanny’s wedding, each of the four witnesses holding a dinner in honour of the new couple in their mansions in Paris, where the mood these days was all for action rather than reflection, mirroring Napoleon’s military exploits. Lucie stayed on in Paris for some time. At the Salon des Expositions that summer, David, Gérard, Girodet, Gros and Guérin all exhibited pictures, most with heroic martial themes, cast in antiquity, the parallels with Napoleon’s feats clear to see. In the absence of new thoughts, and anxious not to dwell too heavily on the pleasures of the ancien régime, people were returning to the classics. Italian opera buffa, full of ‘improbabilities and follies’, had become very popular. Children were being christened Ossian, Porphrye and Zaphlora. Grimod de la Reynière was at work on his Manuel des Amphitryons, daringly taking menus from pre-revolutionary chefs. To sample the dishes which he invited readers to send in, Grimod had set up a Jury Dégustateur, which was attended by his large white angora cat; the jury, which spent five hours at table, sampled the dishes à la Russe, one by one, rather than having them all on the table at once, which was still the custom in France. Tasting a ragout of thrush, he declared that ‘one would eat one’s own father in this sauce’. The feet of a turkey, he added, were good for insomnia.

  Mme de Staël, whose romantic novel Corinne, published the previous year, had made Italy fashionable in France, was at Coppet, at work on her study of German culture, De l’Allemagne. She continued to long to return to Paris, telling Mme Récamier, herself out of favour with Napoleon on account of their friendship, that ‘one is dead when one is exiled. It is merely a tomb where the post arrives.’ But she remained extremely indiscreet about her opinion of the Emperor, referring to him as ‘Robespierre on horseback’.

  Before returning to Brussels Lucie again met Claire de Duras, who wrote to a cousin that her friendship with the ‘beautiful and affectionate’ Lucie was one of the most ‘delightful things’ in her life. After Mme de Montesson’s death, Napoleon had turned to Claire to advise him over matters of etiquette at court. The two women now became close again and when Lucie returned home, relieved to have escaped the ‘tedium’ of Paris, they wrote to each other frequently, Lucie sending presents of lace from Brussels, Claire red and blue bonnets from Paris. Amédée’s name had remained on the proscribed list until 1807, and he still preferred to spend most of his time at Ussé. Claire remained Lucie’s closest friend, perhaps the nearest she had ever come to intimacy with another woman. But their friendship was about to be tested in ways that revealed more of Lucie’s nature than of Claire’s frailties.

  Not long after Lucie returned to Brussels, she heard from Claire that she had at last been introduced to Chateaubriand, whom she had been angling to meet for some time. Appointed Minister to the Valais in Switzerland by Napoleon in recognition of his support for the restored Catholic Church, Chateaubriand had resigned his post after the murder of the Duc d’Enghien. He had since given serious offence to the Emperor with an article comparing him to Nero. Like Mme de Staël and Mme Récamier, he spent much of his time banished from Paris.

  An ‘amitié profonde’, a deep friendship, quickly sprang up between him and Claire; within days, as she wrote to Lucie, they were addressing each other as ‘dear brother, dear sister’. The trouble was that Claire’s feelings for Chateaubriand were far from sisterly, and she was soon complaining bitterly that it was clear that ‘he cares only for qualities of the mind’. With Amédée at Ussé, and the self-effacing Mme de Chateaubriand seldom in Paris, they went for long walks around the city. In the Plaine de Grenelle, where Chateaubriand’s cousin had been executed by revolutionary guards, Claire knelt on the edge of the ditch where the ‘blood of martyrs’ had flowed, prayed, and picked a primrose. To Lucie, she wrote that had it not been for ‘other commitments’, she would simply have devoted her life to ‘trying to please him’. She sent Lucie Chateaubriand�
��s letters to read.

  Lucie was appalled. ‘Good God!’ she wrote quickly and anxiously back. ‘My dear Claire, how long must go by before you learn to be reasonable!’ What shocked her was her friend’s tone of self-abasement. Chateaubriand was not Socrates; if he sought adulation, that was because of his pride, and Claire would think more of herself if she kept company with good and serious people who recognised her true worth. ‘I am devoted to you, my dear,’ she wrote, ‘devoted enough to be able to tell you the truth, even when you doubt my motives…’ Such frankness was perilous.

  When, soon afterwards, she learnt that after their third meeting, Claire had written a love letter to Chateaubriand, Lucie, who like many of their mutual friends considered Claire excitable and impetuous, returned to the attack. Letters went back and forth between Paris and Brussels, Lucie adopting an ever more disapproving tone. But Claire, by now fully embarked on a romantic passion, was unwilling to be deflected. It was not simply that the moral, faithful, sometimes prudish Lucie found her friend’s excesses distasteful: it was about the responsibilities of friendship, the necessary compromises in love, as in life, the importance of holding steady in a world buffeted by vanity and fashion, of keeping faith with some inner certainty. Even the women who ran the 18th-century salons and believed in the ultimate power of language had seldom sounded so blunt. The effect was to give Lucie a vulnerability that she otherwise seldom permitted herself. So straight herself, she found moral confusion in others both disturbing and distasteful.

  In reply to Claire’s exaggerated outpourings about her devotion to Chateaubriand, Lucie urged restraint, caution, seemliness. ‘Why do you say I detest him? I hate him only in that he is dangerous for you. Until you tell me that I am wrong or reassure me, I shall go on disliking him.’ Lucie did not, in fact, much care for the brooding Chateaubriand, from whose vanity and self-indulgence she instinctively recoiled. She warned her friend that she was ‘making a spectacle of herself before the whole of Paris’. She told her that it was a fantasy, that she should ‘flee to Ussé…Calm your heart…Stop dwelling on this man who torments you…You must not think, my dear, that love at 40 is the same as that at 20…Stop reading this eternal Génie du Christianisme, which you know by heart…’ Urging Claire to take exercise, to study, but not poetry or metaphysics, ‘a dangerous topic for women’, she wrote: ‘To look inside your heart, see what needs destroying and then not have the strength to do it: that is more dangerous than useful; one grows accustomed to one’s enemy, and by making it familiar one loses the desire to get rid of it…I want to persuade you that there are a number of things in life that one must pass by without looking at.’

  There were several occasions every day, admitted Lucie, when even she had to stop and say sharply to herself: ‘No, don’t think this way.’ She begged her friend not to agonise over a man for whom she was not the most important person. ‘M. de Chateaubriand seems to me like a flirtatious woman who wants many different men to pay attention to her; he has a little harem in which he seeks to bestow his favours equally in order to reign as Emperor.’ Recommending patience and greater efforts not to neglect her young daughters, she wrote, as she had once written in Richmond, many years before, urging the then just married Claire to make fewer scenes about the faithless Amédée: ‘You must not brood, nor look dissatisfied.’ These were manners of the heart that for Lucie could never be neglected.

  Though she made little progress with Chateaubriand, who remained firmly committed to their ‘amitié profonde’ and nothing more, and was in any case pursuing other women, Claire eventually tired of Lucie’s scolding. Her replies became distant, formal. Lucie’s final words were bleak.

  Your last letter was so dry, so glacial that it crushed my heart. I saw in it something that has been threatening me for a long time: it is that M. de Chateaubriand will get what he wants, and that you will no longer love me. I am convinced that this is exactly what he wants; and he is right. He doesn’t like me and he knows why. It doesn’t matter to him that you are in fact fond of me: we are fighting over your heart. He is more skilled than I am…and you have begun to listen to him; if once you give way to him, then I am lost. When he tries to persuade you that you no longer love me, dear friend, do not believe him…But what is certain is that if I lose your love (your real love, for I want nothing else), then I do not know what will be left for me.

  Lucie was right to fear Chateaubriand’s influence: Claire did not reply. The correspondence ceased. It had, while it lasted, been intimate and loving, and it had exposed Lucie’s own feelings in ways not apparent before. The woman glimpsed from behind the daily round of efficiency and self-abnegation was both softer and more self-reflective than the picture she would later draw of herself.

  In Brussels, even if she complained about the rain and the grey skies, and the ignorance of the Bruxellois who were perfectly capable of ‘thinking that Racine’s Hector was slain in the Seven Years War’, Lucie was in fact content. In the mornings, she taught Cécile history and Charlotte physics. She was devoted to her daughters. At 12, Charlotte was a modest, pious girl, ‘level-headed, mature and confident’; there was nothing she could not talk to her about. Cécile, nearly 9, had a good singing voice. ‘I take care to please my daughters,’ Lucie wrote to a friend. ‘I want them to think that theirs is the company I prefer to all other, and that I am never as happy as I am when I am with them.’ Humbert was a studious 18-year-old, reading nothing but Italian and Latin. Aymar, not yet 3, was seldom mentioned. While the girls studied, Lucie painted miniature scenes of castles and landscapes on to plates and sugar bowls, or did her tapestry.

  The side of her life in Brussels she least enjoyed were the receptions and balls she was obliged, as the prefect’s wife, to give. The people who came to them, she wrote to a friend, ‘bore me to death, but I try not to let it show…the human beings who pass before my eyes are like a magic lantern which I have forgotten as soon as I see it’. Meeting so many different people made her feel ‘disgusted’ with the human race. ‘Every day I draw a little more into myself and I shall finish my days in a Trappist convent.’ Sometimes, her own detachment from all but her immediate family worried her. When her friend Pauline de Bérenger gave birth to a first child at the age of 36, and Lucie found herself unexpectedly anxious about her, she wrote: ‘I never realised that I was so interested in her, but it goes to show that I really do care. This makes me relieved: I worry that, like Mme du Deffant, I am not capable of loving anyone.’ Since her love for Frédéric and the children was so deep, it is hard to believe that she meant the words in any but the lightest sense; but it revealed a concern that the incessant public life was taking a toll on her nature that she did not much care for. Even so, it did not stop her adding that she found Mme de Bérenger’s refusal to read any novel she deemed ‘inferior’ lest it corrupt her own perfect taste ‘totally absurd’. Even when meek, Lucie remained sharp.

  In the spring of 1809, Austria, defeated three times in 12 years by Napoleon, rose up against the French; it took Napoleon a month to fight his way to Vienna, with heavy casualties on both sides. Austria was obliged to pay vast indemnities; it also lost 3 million subjects in lands ceded to the French. But Napoleon needed an heir, to carry on his empire, and the boy he had designated, his stepdaughter Hortense’s son Louis, had died in 1807, at the age of 4. After months of rumours and uncertainty, the Emperor finally announced that he would divorce Josephine and marry the blue-eyed, blonde-haired, somewhat stolid 19-year-old daughter of Emperor Francis of Austria, Marie-Louise, whose aunt happened to have been Marie Antoinette.

  The French court was fond of Josephine, who, while frivolous and spendthrift was also good-natured and very generous; she had put on weight and her face was more round than oval, but her voice remained warm and pleasing. With regret, they saw her retire to Malmaison, to cultivate the peonies, roses and dahlias that grew in profusion in the hothouses that had been built behind the house, to enjoy her collection of mostly looted Titians and Raphaels, and
to sleep in her red tent bed, under the squatting gold eagle. As Louis-Antoine Bourrienne, Napoleon’s secretary, remarked, for Josephine it was acquisition and not possession that gave her the most pleasure. She was sad, but not lonely. Her agreeable nature continued to attract many visitors, and the handsome settlement after the divorce enabled her to acquire ever more shrubs and flowers. Josephine, as Claire de Rémusat had noted, was not much of a reader; but she was passionate about horticulture, and about the scents and colours of her plants. Many years later at St Helena, Napoleon would say that Josephine had been ‘une vraie femme’, a real woman.

  The proxy marriage ceremony with Marie-Louise was held in Vienna. Napoleon awaited his bride at Compiègne, where 10 pages of instructions for the ceremonial of her reception had been circulated. It was from Fanny and Bertrand, who, together with the entire court, had been ordered to Compiègne, that Lucie heard the details of Marie-Louise’s arrival. In the castle courtyard, a barouche stood ready, the horses already harnessed, waiting for word of the approaching convoy of carriages from Vienna. When it came, Napoleon set out to meet his bride. Not giving her time to alight, he jumped into Marie-Louise’s coach, pushed his sister Caroline, Queen of Naples, who had been sent to greet her new sister-in-law, into the front and rode back by Marie-Louise’s side to Compiègne. Flares and an orchestra of wind instruments awaited them. By the time the many formal presentations had been made, it was dark. Napoleon led his bride to her apartments.