That night, she heard salvoes announcing Napoleon’s return into the city. Next evening, Talleyrand failed to appear. Lucie had spent the day visiting her half-sister Fanny, living in splendour in the Tuileries since Bertrand had been appointed Grand Maréchal du Palais. When Talleyrand finally appeared, at eleven o’clock at night, he said nothing but wandered idly around Lally-Tollendal’s rooms, admiring the portraits of English kings that hung on the walls. Lucie asked him about Napoleon. ‘Don’t talk to me about your Emperor,’ Talleyrand replied. ‘He’s finished.’ Pressed further, he added: ‘He has lost all his stores and equipment…It’s all over.’ It was, as Lucie knew, a long time since Talleyrand’s complicated relationship with Napoleon, which had started out with mutual attraction, had turned to hatred and contempt. Plotting with Austria and Russia in 1808, and Britain in 1810, Talleyrand had remained committed to the goal of a peaceful and equally balanced Europe rather than a supreme and conquering France. His treachery, a historian would later write, was ‘sustained and remorseless, occupying all his waking hours’.
Then Talleyrand handed Lucie a cutting from an English newspaper, giving an account of a dinner in London held by the Prince Regent for Louis XVI’s daughter, the Duchesse d’Angoulême. Lucie, puzzled, asked him to explain. ‘Ah, how stupid you are,’ exclaimed Talleyrand, putting on his coat and disappearing into the night. ‘Give Gouvernet my good wishes. I am sending him this news for lunch.’ When, next morning, Lucie repeated the conversation to Frédéric, he found it just as perplexing, saying only that if it was by such means that the Bourbons hoped to recover their throne, then ‘they would not remain on it for long’. For the moment, Lucie and Frédéric remained loyal to the Emperor, and in any case both were extremely nervous of Talleyrand’s intrigues, Lucie noting that they felt that he ‘would stop at nothing and had no scruple whatsoever in leading people into danger and then abandoning them in order to save himself’.
It was towards the middle of the autumn of 1813, wrote Lucie, that ‘the first real rumbles of the approaching storm were heard’. News began to reach Amiens of French military defeats. Since the summer, when the Emperor Francis had declared war on Napoleon–his son-in-law–over half a million Allied troops had been pouring into central Europe, pledged to impose peace through a coalition masterminded by the British Foreign Minister, Viscount Castlereagh, and using military tactics successfully learnt from Napoleon. In Spain, Wellington was routing the French troops. Bavaria had joined the coalition; Germany was now largely liberated. With the Battle of Leipzig on 16 October, against a combined force of Russians, Austrians, Prussians and Swedes, in which the French forces were outnumbered by two to one, much of what remained of the Grande Armée was lost, though the news sent back to France continued to cast defeats as victories. On 22 December, the Allied armies crossed the Rhine; offers of peace–and even the throne–in exchange for a return to the borders of 1791, were rejected by Napoleon. By January 1814, Allied soldiers, fighting for the first time on French soil, occupied a long line stretching from Langres to Namur.
On 17 February, Amiens woke to learn that there was fighting not far away, at Montdidier. A week later, Allied troops reached nearby Troyes. Then came news that a party of Cossacks had broken away from the main cavalry and were looting the surrounding countryside, carrying away pigs, cows, wine, wheat and sugar and raping any women they could find. In the town people began to bury and hide their most valuable possessions; wine merchants and jewellers removed the signs from their doors. Charlotte was nearing the end of her pregnancy. Lucie and Frédéric moved her, Cécile and Aymar, together with many of their own belongings, into a safer apartment in the centre of the town, but remained themselves in the prefecture to await developments. Men started to fortify the ramparts and chop down trees for a palisade, while a squadron of Chasseurs was despatched to confront the marauding Cossacks, who eventually galloped away, terrifying villagers by their strange uniforms and wild appearance.
Würtemberg had already been taken by the Allies, and Humbert, ill with pleurisy, had only just managed to escape in time to Paris. Having recovered, he made his way to Amiens, where Frédéric soon sent him back to Paris to find Talleyrand and try to discover what was happening. By now Paris was full of royalists, watching and scheming, men who had never abandoned their preference for a restored Bourbon monarchy and who had hated Napoleon and now wished to place Louis XVIII on the throne of France. In the rue Saint-Florentin, Talleyrand told Humbert to wait in an anteroom. At six o’clock next morning, while Humbert was still asleep on a bench, Talleyrand emerged, fully dressed and in his wig, tapped him on his shoulder and said: ‘Go now. Wear a white cockade and shout: Long live the King!’
For Frédéric and Lucie, constitutional monarchists at heart and loyal servants to Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette, but who had agreed to serve Napoleon, the return of the Bourbons was at once a solution to France’s current ills, and personally unsettling. They were not alone in their fears that retribution might follow against those who had supported Napoleon, nor in their deep misgivings about what kind of a King Louis XVIII would turn out to be.
As a young man, long before the revolution, Louis XVIII had been very fond of his food. Descriptions of him at 20 invariably included the word ‘stout’. By 1814, when he was 59, he was enormous, a short, waddling, cold, calculating man who believed, with total certainty, in the divine right of kings. When Louis moved, observed Grenville, it was like watching ‘the heavings of a ship’. But he was also witty, clever and extremely well read, with a particular liking for the worldly Horace; unlike his brother, Louis XVI, he preferred literature and the arts to machinery and the sciences. He had, with a great deal of patience, endured 22 years of exile, moved on from state to state by rulers embarrassed by his presence, kept afloat by the fluctuating generosity of foreign governments. And all the time he had held on to his conviction that the throne of France belonged to the descendants of St Louis. The long years of tedious and impoverished exile had somewhat softened his earlier inflexibility. While continuing to maintain that the revolution had been an aberration, perpetrated by murderous usurpers, he had become more moderate, accepting that there could be no total return to the ancien régime, but only to some kind of constitutional monarchy. Pacifist by conviction, willing to recognise the errors of the past and retain whatever sensible gains had emerged with the Consulate and the Empire, he would say about himself: ‘I may not have much strength of character, but I believe myself to be more timid and easy-going than weak.’
For the last years of his exile, Louis XVIII had lived in England, at Hartwell House in Buckinghamshire, where he was wheeled around the gardens in a rolling chair, surrounded by elderly aristocrats, setting policies for his government in exile. On 1 February 1813, he had issued a proclamation: if he were returned to France, there would be no vengeance and no conscription. France would again become a country of peace, happiness and unity, and a country of manners, for Louis knew about manners and the way that kings should behave.
In 1799, his niece Madame Royale–the only surviving child of Marie Antoinette and Louis XVI, who had lived in exile in Vienna after her cousin, Emperor Francis of Austria, exchanged her against French prisoners–had married another cousin, the Duc d’Angoulême, elder son of the Comte d’Artois. During her years of seclusion, locked up alone in the Temple from the age of 14, and told of the death of her mother, aunt and brother only later, the Duchess had learnt to appear at all times impassive. She had a long, somewhat large nose and her eyes, which tended to look red as if she had been crying, had an enquiring, wary look. Her failure to have children was said to have ‘dried her heart’ and made her gloomy and pious. Louis XVIII’s wife, Marie-Josephine of Savoy, had died in 1810, at which time the Duchess had taken her aunt’s place as royal hostess. Like her uncle, she had been in England, waiting for the day when she would return to the court of France.
This campaign’s last battle between Napoleon’s troops and the Allied forces was fough
t on 30 March 1814, just below the heights of Montmartre. Next day, in bright sunshine, the King of Prussia, together with Tsar Alexander of Russia, wearing a coat trimmed with fur and gold epaulettes, and Prince Schwartzenberg, representing the Emperor of Austria, rode down the Champs-Elysées. It was the first time since the Hundred Years War that a foreign army had entered Paris. Watching the long lines of soldiers in their different coloured uniforms, the Parisians who lined the streets were at first silent, filled, noted a diplomat called André Delrieu, with ‘passive and lugubrious consternation’; but then, bit by bit, the crowds came alive, women climbing out of their carriages to walk with the soldiers.
The Allies had somewhat conflicting views as to what should become of France and its fallen Emperor. The Tsar wanted to see General Bernadotte, Crown Prince of Sweden and former French Maréchal, on the French throne; the English favoured Louis XVIII; while the Emperor Francis would have liked to see his grandson, Napoleon and Marie-Louise’s son, eventually become King. And there was still the question of a possible settlement with Napoleon. In the event, a bandwagon began to roll for the Bourbons, the Allied leaders declared themselves for Louis XVIII, and on 1 April a provisional government for France was appointed, with Talleyrand at its head. The return of a Bourbon king to the throne of France had become, as Tsar Alexander remarked, a ‘necessary consequence imposed by the weight of circumstances’.
Next day, the Senate voted to depose Napoleon. In return for abdicating not only his own rights but those of his family, the former Emperor was offered Elba as a sovereign principality; for the Empress Marie-Louise, who soon left Paris for Austria with her son in a convoy of carriages, weighed down with treasure, there would be the duchies of Parma, Piacenza and Guastalla. Just before signing, Napoleon swallowed a dose of poison he had carried around with him for years. But he recovered, and on 13 April signed an Act of Abdication, before leaving for the south, in 14 carriages. He was accompanied by four Allied commissioners, 400 soldiers, a number of courtiers and servants, and a large library of books, including a complete edition of Le Moniteur Universel and the works of Rousseau, Voltaire, Plutarch, Cervantes and Fénelon.
At Saint-Raphael, having been jeered and threatened along the way, he boarded a British warship, the Undaunted, which took him to Elba. The faithful Bertrand had opted to stay by Napoleon’s side. Fanny, to her great despair, joined them soon after, taking with her to Elba the three children, aged 6, 5 and 4. She was again pregnant. A boy, Alexandre, born at the end of August, lived only 3 months. Fanny hated Elba, spending most of her time with Madame Mère. Her extreme lack of punctuality was soon reported to be exasperating Napoleon.
Because of Louis XVIII’s gout, which he spoke of as ‘an enemy with whom I must live and die’, it was his elegant, ambitious younger brother, the Comte d’Artois, who rode into Paris first, to install himself in the Tuileries. Over the next few days, Talleyrand, Maréchal Ney and the Duchesse de Courlande all gave balls, at which victors and vanquished mixed. At the Opéra, ladies wore the white lilies of the Bourbons in their hair and carried them in bouquets and as garlands. Napoleon’s bees and eagles were scrubbed and scratched away, his portraits, which hung on innumerable walls all over France, were taken down; the white cockade and the fleurs de lys were back in evidence. ‘Once again,’ wrote the Vicomtesse de Noailles, granddaughter of the Princesse de Poix, ‘we climbed back on to the throne with the Bourbons.’ The Vicomtesse was one of the many aristocratic ladies who had longed for the fall of Napoleon, saying that his ambitions had hung over her ‘like a guillotine permanently in place’. The Cossacks, with their small horses and high saddles, which they mounted even to cross a square, had set up their bivouacs in the Champs-Elysées, and here, as night fell, they could be heard singing mournful airs round their camp fires.
Four days before the Undaunted pulled out of Saint-Raphael, Louis XVIII had been helped on to an English ship to bear him across the Channel, accompanied by the Duchesse d’Angoulême in her prim, old-fashioned clothes, and the 80-year-old Prince de Condé. With them went the Duc de Blacas, Louis’s taciturn confidant, a man with very short legs and a long body, bald under his blond wig. As the boat neared Calais, cannons were fired to salute their return; from afar the beach looked black with people, who cheered and wept. The royal party proceeded slowly towards Paris, every step of the way marked by triumphal arches, speeches and choirs singing Te Deums.
In Amiens, Humbert’s words from Talleyrand had been greeted with uncertainty, no one sure as to their exact meaning. But once it became known that Napoleon had abdicated, and that he had accepted a large settlement, there was widespread anger that so many young men had died apparently in vain. People came to the prefecture, shouting ‘Vive le roi’, and Lucie handed out white cockades, brought back from Paris by Humbert in his barouche. By the light of flares, and to the sound of ringing bells, Amiens declared for Talleyrand’s provisional government. In the theatre, players hastily staged a production of The Hunting Party of Henri IV, which had been censored by Napoleon, and when the actor reached the line ‘Vive Henri IV’ the entire audience rose to its feet and cheered. On 14 April, a Prussian troop of 2,000 men clattered through the town to much applause. The ten years of Napoleon’s rule were shed with surprising ease.
Having been informed that the King intended to spend a night at the prefecture in Amiens, Frédéric set off for Nampont-Saint-Martin, where the royal party would first enter the Department of the Somme. Lucie was visited in the prefecture by people offering pictures, flowers, shrubs and ornaments to decorate her rooms for the great occasion. Next came a number of elderly courtiers, anxious to find favour with Louis XVIII and put behind them any service rendered to Napoleon. Though fond of these old friends, whom Lucie had known since childhood, she was exasperated by their display of ‘prejudice, hatred, pettiness and bitterness’ towards the fallen Emperor. Her first glimpses of the Restoration did not impress her.
On 28 April, the carriage drawn by eight magnificent white horses and bearing Louis XVIII, the Duchesse d’Angoulême and the Prince de Condé rumbled into Amiens, where the streets had been hung with white sheets and scattered with flowers. As it entered the town, the millers of Amiens, according to an ancient tradition, asked to be allowed to unhitch the horses and draw the coach themselves, in their new grey suits and white felt hats, bought specifically for the task. Twelve young girls, led by Cécile, presented bouquets to the Duchess. In the cathedral, where the Te Deum was sung, people cried with joy. The doors were kept shut until the King was seated: when they were swung open, a great roar was heard ‘as of a flood breaking its banks’ as people surged inside.
That evening, Lucie was seated next to the King, who pleased her with the courtesy and charm he showed the ordinary people of Amiens. They were 25 at table. Louis XVIII declared that, like his brother, he would eat in public, those waiting to be presented standing around the room at a little distance from the table. Angélique de Maussion, who was an accomplished painter, was allowed to sit nearby and sketch the King. Lucie was considerably less taken with the Duchesse d’Angoulême, who chose to ignore Angélique, even after learning that Angélique had offered to help Marie Antoinette escape when they were prisoners together during the Terror.
Lucie’s much-loved cousin, Edward Jerningham and his new wife Emily had accompanied the royal party to France, Edward having pleased the King by articles he had written in English newspapers praising the Bourbons. She had not seen him since she had left England 15 years earlier. Together, they discussed how the Duchess might be helped to take more trouble with her appearance, abandon the heavy style of an earlier age in order to create a more elegant first impression on Paris, a city for which elegance remained essential. ‘The obstinacy of the Princess,’ noted Lucie, ‘was immovable.’ In the cathedral, observing Louis XVIII and the Duchess, brother-in-law and daughter to Marie Antoinette, Lucie had been filled with emotion. Now she felt only foreboding. ‘Alas,’ she wrote, ‘my illusions were to last less
than twenty-four hours.’
Next morning, leaving 600 men wounded in fighting in the north to recover in Amiens’s hospital, the royal cortège set off for Compiègne, where Claire de Duras, Chateaubriand, Talleyrand, Maréchal Ney and many other of Napoleon’s generals and courtiers were waiting to greet them. Most had quickly and conveniently forgotten their years of service to Napoleon. Compiègne itself was in some chaos, its fine library of books partly destroyed by cannon fire. After discussions with senators come out from Paris to greet him, Louis XVIII issued a first proclamation, promising to adopt a liberal Constitution, to preserve liberty and to honour existing pensions, titles and decorations.
The château was seething with anxious people, come to press their suit with the restored Bourbons, scrambling over each other for preferment, for rewards, for places at court. Those who had held positions under Napoleon were desperate to hold on to them, those who had lost out by remaining monarchist now hoped for recognition and restitution. When, on 4 May, Louis at last entered Paris, to a Te Deum in Notre Dame and the obligatory balloon ascension by Mme Garnerin, Mme de Boigne remarked that it was so ‘like a party that it is a pity it is a conquest’. That evening, such were the fireworks that the Seine looked like a river of fire. ‘These excellent princes delight us all,’ Claire wrote to her daughter Clara. ‘We are very happy. It all seems like a dream.’ For Claire and Amédée, the return of the Bourbons was all they desired; for Lucie and Frédéric, it was all rather more complicated. Leaving aside their own personal feelings about any restoration of the Bourbons, there was still the question of how the new King would view those who had held prominent posts under Napoleon.
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