The question, too, was just what kind of a monarchy it would turn out to be. By education, instinct and experience, Louis XVIII belonged to the 18th century, to a world in which an elite of aristocrats and churchmen ruled from de haut en bas. In exile he had often spoken of the necessity of not taking revenge, and of moderation, not out of laziness but as the best policy. But behind his benign air of fatherly concern lay an ‘olympian egoism’. He knew that he would have to make concessions, and had in fact no desire for authoritarian rule; but what he understood in his bones was the ancien régime.
Those closest to him shared his certitudes. There was his head-strong younger brother, the Comte d’Artois, now known as Monsieur, who made very little effort to conceal his distaste for anything that touched on revolution. There was d’Artois’s elder son, the Duc d’Angoulême, who though honest and sensible was handicapped by feelings of inferiority caused by his small size, poor sight, nervous tics, stutter and reported impotence. The Duchess, only surviving child of a queen many now chose to recall with nostalgia, could have won considerable sympathy and understanding. But the pale, trembling orphan of the Temple had become stiff and overbearing, with a grating voice and hard features, having inherited her father’s brusqueness but not his bonhomie, and Marie Antoinette’s pride but not her gracefulness. To charm the French, that left only the Duc de Berri, d’Artois’s second son, another red-faced small man with short legs and no neck, but witty, generous and physically brave, if irascible.
For the moment, the imperfections of the restored Bourbons did not matter. Having refused to accept a Constitution proposed by the French Senate, Louis set about drafting a Charter of his own, coming up with 74 articles which promised equality before the law, freedom from arbitrary arrest, and reasonable liberty for the press, while retaining for the Crown the power to declare war or make peace. The King would be able neither to suspend laws nor dispense with them. A Chamber of Peers was set up, the revolution and the English system suggesting the need for one. All this was welcome to Lucie and Frédéric and allayed some of their fears about a restored autocratic monarchy. To Lucie’s added pleasure, Frédéric, far from being punished for his years as Prefect, was rewarded with a peerage, for the wholehearted welcome he had extended to the new King. He now became the Marquis de la Tour du Pin Gouvernet. The second Chamber, that of the Deputies, was severely limited from the beginning by making only the 1 per cent of Frenchmen who paid over 300 francs a year in taxes eligible to vote.
The moderate tone of the Restoration was apparent in Louis XVIII’s choice of ministers: Frédéric’s friend, the elderly Malouet at the Ministry of the Marine, the Abbé de Montesquiou at the Ministry of the Interior, and Talleyrand back in Foreign Affairs, a post he had held, at various times, under the Directoire, the Consulat and the Empire. The Abbé de Montesquiou had resumed his ecclesiastical title, dress and manner, which Lucie, who could remember him in his defrocked days in a rose-coloured waistcoat laughing heartily at the theatre, found absurd. ‘We must thank Providence,’ remarked the new Director General of the Police, ‘that we have a King made of dough of the finest constitutional flour’, which sounded flattering until he added that it was all rather like a ‘trompe l’oeil of divine right masquerading as a constitutional monarchy’. Frédéric and Lucie were not alone in feeling wary about the shape of things to come. With the end of ten years of Empire, and the very real changes brought about by the revolution, there was a profound question about how exactly the new France would be governed.
Fearing that any post in the new administration would be inferior to his two prefectships, Frédéric decided to return to diplomacy. He went to see Talleyrand, who rather to his disappointment offered him the embassy at The Hague. But he took comfort from the fact that as he left, Talleyrand added, ‘Take that post for the time being.’ When he talked it over with Lucie, they agreed that this undoubtedly meant that something better would be forthcoming.
The Allies had been most circumspect with the conquered French, their officers enforcing on their soldiers courtesy and respect for property. Though the 5,000 or so people whom Napoleon had rewarded with lands or revenues on foreign soil saw them confiscated, France was allowed to revert to the borders of 1792. Nor did it have to pay indemnities. It was also allowed to hold on to the stolen art in the Louvre.
Lucie arrived back in Paris, to an apartment in the Princesse d’Hénin’s house in the rue de Varennes, to find Wellington preparing to take the job of British Ambassador. Claire, as wife to a senior courtier, was happily ensconced in the Tuileries, where the Duchesse d’Angoulême, now known as Madame, cast a chill over court life. The Duchess had barely been stopped from insisting that women return to the hoops of the 1780s. Just the same, only the chosen few were allowed to enter the throne room, the rest simply filing past the door, and Amédée de Duras, ‘more duke than the late M. de Saint-Simon…graceless and scarcely polite’, was busy concocting rules for precedence and hierarchy. For his part, the King appeared wrapped up in his own thoughts, eating gargantuan meals–he thought nothing of putting away a plate of cutlets as an hors d’oeuvre–before being wheeled back to his rooms to entertain his favourites with his erudite and elegant Latin quotations, aphorisms and metaphors. No restored monarch, it would be said, had ever treated those who restored him with such disdain: even the Tsar, arguably the most powerful ruler in Europe, had to present himself twice before he was received.
One evening Lucie was invited to a ball given by Prince Schwartzenberg. It was, she wrote later, not only ‘the oddest spectacle to anyone given to reflection’ to find herself surrounded by all the people, furniture and food that had so recently been those of Napoleon’s court; it was also sad. Looking around her, listening to Claire talk about her good fortune, she reflected that ‘not one of all the people there’ was worthy to be Napoleon’s conqueror, and that she was probably the only guest to feel shame at the speed with which Parisian society had gone over to the victors. Lucie’s perception of events and people was unusually candid; never swayed by fashion or intrigue, it was as if she brought to her surroundings a curiously pure eye.
Even Josephine, despite her years as Empress, lost none of her friends and admirers with Napoleon’s abdication. Malmaison continued to attract foreign visitors, come to look at the pictures and sculptures that made it more a museum than a house, and to stroll in the now famous hothouses where 184 new species had flowered for the first time in France. But late in May Josephine went riding with the Tsar and caught a cold, which turned into pneumonia. She died on the 29th, at the age of 50, just as the Allies were preparing to pull their soldiers out of Paris. She left no will, and her remarkable collections, divided by her children Hortense and Eugène, soon disappeared in sales and restitutions around the world.
Europe had been at war for more than 20 years. In those two decades, territories had changed hands, frontiers had vanished, dynasties had been overthrown and new monarchs brought to the throne. In September 1814, preparing for the Congress in Vienna which was to settle the affairs of Europe, Talleyrand wrote an analysis of what he hoped to achieve for France. Frédéric had been correct in suspecting that Talleyrand had plans for him: Lucie, calling on him one day, was informed that her husband was to prepare himself to leave immediately for Vienna as one of the plenipotentiaries at the talks. Talleyrand’s own entourage included, not his wife, judged too blowsy and undistinguished, but his 21-year-old niece by marriage, the beautiful and accomplished Comtesse Dorothée de Périgord, who was to act as his hostess. Lucie longed to accompany them, but Humbert had joined the King’s military Household, becoming a lieutenant in the Black Musketeers–so called after their black horses–and was looking for a wife. It was decided that she would remain in Paris with him, and that Auguste de Liederkerke would go with Frédéric to Vienna as his private secretary. Charlotte had given birth to a baby girl, Marie, and Lucie did not wish to be too far from them.
There had been considerable jealousy at the news of Frédér
ic’s appointment, particularly when it became known that he would also retain his job as ambassador to Holland; Claire, in particular, was furious, having gone to great lengths to secure for Chateaubriand one of the postings to Vienna, and failed to do so. ‘Can one love without suffering?’ she wrote mournfully to a friend, fretting about Chateaubriand’s future. ‘To live is always to suffer.’ Yet again, as in Brussels, there was something in Frédéric’s uncompromising honesty that seemed to invite attack. At every turn Frédéric, like Lucie, was emerging as a figure strangely out of tune with the evasions and scheming of his age.
Vienna, in September 1814, was full not only of statesmen and their entourages, but of reigning royal families and courtiers from all over Europe. The German principalities, Italian states, Swiss cantons and the Catholic Church were all represented. At one moment, two emperors and two empresses, four kings, one queen, two heirs to the throne and three princes were all staying in the Royal Palace at the same time. Of the 100,000 foreigners gathered in Vienna for the Congress, it was said that 95,000 had come not to work but to be reminded of the grandeur and pleasures of 18th-century society. There were balls, banquets, hunting parties and even a medieval tournament held in the baroque hall of the Imperial Riding School. The Congress, remarked the 80-year-old Prince de Ligne, who better than anyone could remember the splendour of Versailles, ‘ne marche pas, mais il danse’.*
Even so, the work done by Frédéric and his colleagues was both important and tricky, not least because of the real differences between the major powers, who in any case all wanted to exclude France from the preliminary talks. The Tsar wanted to emerge from the Congress with a kingdom taken from Poland; Prussia wished to swallow up Saxony; Metternich, the Austrian Minister for Foreign Affairs and the dominant statesman at the Congress, had no intention of allowing French soldiers to remain on Italian soil. Talleyrand, for his part, wanted to promote European equilibrium based not solely on military parity, but on principles of law and justice. As the soirées and receptions grew ever more fanciful and splendid, the relations between the powers grew steadily more tense. Out of the disagreements, Talleyrand soon drew a triumph for France, a secret treaty of mutual support with Austria and Britain, backed by some of the smaller states.
Lucie, having settled 8-year-old Aymar in Paris with a tutor in rue Notre-Dame-des-Champs, went to collect Charlotte and her baby daughter from Brussels, and installed them with her in the rue de Varennes. In the evenings they went out to call on the Princesse de Poix, who was once again drawing together the friends of her youth to talk about Voltaire and Montesquieu. They visited Claire in the Tuileries, and Lucie’s stepmother Mme Dillon in the Faubourg Saint-Germain. In all these salons, Lucie was becoming uncomfortably conscious of undercurrents of intrigue running through Parisian social life. It reminded her of the uneasy months before Napoleon’s coup of 18 brumaire.
Though Louis XVIII was personally popular–and showed Lucie particular marks of favour when she attended the court receptions–the rest of the royal family were already much disliked. The Duc de Berri’s temper was offensive to many of his former supporters, while the Duchesse d’Angoulême’s grim and despondent expression soured life at court. The excessive formality and etiquette, claimed the younger courtiers, were out of tune with the realities of the new France. It was no secret that discontent with the Bourbons was building up among Napoleon’s former maréchals such as Ney, nor that his stepdaughter Queen Hortense’s salon was often filled with soldiers openly regretting Napoleon’s departure. What alarmed Lucie was the way that at court and in most royalist circles it had become fashionable to ridicule all talk of conspiracy. She was increasingly aware of whispering on all sides, odd glances, secret meetings.
Lucie might have worried more had she not been overwhelmed by more personal troubles. Her granddaughter Marie was nearly a year old and teething. One day she caught a fever: her temperature kept rising. There was nothing anyone could do. The baby died, while in Lucie’s arms. ‘I wept for her,’ she wrote later, ‘as if she had been my own child.’ It was Humbert who attended to the funeral, while Lucie took the inconsolable Charlotte away to stay with the Princesse d’Hénin, then arranged for her to join Frédéric in Vienna. Lucie had now seen three infants–two of her own and a grandchild–die in the first few years of life.
Then came another crisis. Going to visit Aymar in his tutor’s house, she discovered him in bed with a high temperature in the infirmary, a gloomy, north-facing room. Discovering that no doctor was due to call, she took her carriage in search of her own, a young man called Dr Auvily. They returned to find that Aymar was worse. Dr Auvily diagnosed pleurisy and told Lucie that if she wished to save his life, she should remove him instantly from the icy room. Aymar was wrapped in blankets and taken back to the rue de Varennes. On the sixth day, it was thought that he would not pull through and Humbert was told to prepare Lucie for his death.
But Dr Auvily refused to give up hope. Resorting to one of the more drastic remedies of early medicine, he had the little boy swaddled in a plaster jacket impregnated with cantharidin, used to raise blisters, leaving only his arms and feet bare, to which were applied mustard poultices. Every two minutes, Aymar was forced to swallow a teaspoon of warm liquid. Remarkably, he survived. Though the cantharidin had reduced his body to one large sore, his temperature fell. When he was able to leave the house again, Lucie asked Amédée to get her a special pass for the Louvre, and there, for the next six weeks, Aymar ran around in the warmth among the stolen Raphaels and Titians.
Even at the height of the Empire, Paris had not seen balls and receptions of such brilliance as those given in Paris during the winter of 1814. Lucie and Claire had decided to take Mme de Staël’s 19-year-old daughter, Albertine, into society and to wean her off her mother’s inelegant dresses and odd costumes in time for her marriage to the Duc de Broglie. Mme de Staël had been one of the first of Napoleon’s exiled opponents to return to Paris, and was now making up for the wasted years of banishment with gatherings at which she drew together victors and vanquished, Bourbons and Bonapartistes. Somewhat stouter, but no less passionate, she continued to hold forth to admiring audiences on politics and literature. Her epitaph on Napoleon was unforgiving: a ‘Condottiere without manners, without fatherland, without morality, an oriental despot, a new Attila, a warrior who knew only how to corrupt and annihilate’.
Lucie, who had continued to meet her from time to time during her ten years of exile, was in her drawing room in Paris one day when Wellington came to call. He had recently bought Pauline Borghese’s house in the Faubourg Saint-Honoré for 820,000 francs. Wellington was not an altogether popular choice as British Ambassador, some of the French feeling that it had been tactless to appoint a man who had spent the previous six years engaged in defeating the French armies in Spain. Others complained that his dress was too casual and his open affair with a former mistress of Napoleon’s too scandalous. But Lucie, who had known him as Arthur Wellesley since she was a child, met him again with pleasure.
With the Restoration, the English had once again poured across the Channel, delighted after a ten-year break to resume their grand tours of Europe, and to start them, as they had in the past, in Paris. Some 23,000 people crossed the Channel in 1815, to be charmed by the many new restaurants and cafés–there were said to be over 3,000 of each–by the new paintings by David’s pupil Gros, by the ageing Talma, still playing his heroic roles, and by the wide tree-lined boulevards down which they wandered on fine afternoons. There was a new rhinoceros in the Jardin des Plantes, and at 188 rue Saint-Honoré could be seen the ‘Venus Hottentote’, a Botswana bushwoman with vast buttocks. The visitors gambled and danced–the cotillon, the polka, the waltz–at afternoon thé dansants.
The reaction of French society to their English visitors was somewhat disdainful. Deprived of French elegance for a decade, the English were said to have ‘acquired the easy-going manners and customs of the tropics’. Cartoons in France portrayed the taller, plu
mper English girls as insipid, gawky and stiff. For their part, Englishwomen criticised their hosts for being ‘pedantic and frivolous’, overly conscious of social rank, and no better than ‘amiable but thoughtless children’ over matters of money. Lady Granville, soon to become British Ambassadress to Paris, admitted to feeling grudging admiration for the ‘aplomb’ of many French-women, but seriously doubted whether they were capable of the deep thoughts and feelings of Englishwomen.
Very quickly, salon life resumed; Parisian society, as Benjamin Constant observed, had no trouble jumping from ‘one branch to another’. In the Tuileries, Claire de Duras vacillated between inviting ardent monarchists or liberal intellectuals, and allowed her salon to be dominated by the mournful Chateaubriand, who insisted on imposing his ‘irritating, bitter and morose vanity’ on all around. Mme de Récamier was also back in Paris, and it was in her salon that a new fashion was being tried out, that of putting out four or five little circles of chairs for female guests, between which were left corridors for the men–and herself–to circulate. To Claire’s despair, Chateaubriand was beginning to show a marked interest in Mme Récamier.
Mme de Genlis had also weathered the jump from revolution through Directoire, Consulat and Empire to Restoration with exceptional ease. She had retired to the Convent of the Carmelites, ‘disenchanted with the vanities of the world and the chimeras of celebrity’. Thin and pale but having lost none of her verve, she spent her days playing the harp and painting pictures of flowers. She was at work on a Dictionnaire Critique et Raisonné of etiquette and manners, in which she was trying to explain, to a generation who had never known it, the pleasures of délicatesse, bon ton, politesse and douceur. Before the revolution, she wrote, young women had been gentle and reserved, which was what they should be. They had since become bold and assertive, which made them seem prematurely aged. ‘Gentleness’ and ‘submission’, as prescribed by the evangelists, was what women should aim for. Not everyone agreed: in the Journal des Dames et des Modes, women, portrayed sometimes as weak, sometimes as strong, but always as charming, were urged to heed the Comte de Saint-Simon’s words: ‘Rise up, Monsieur le Comte, you have great things to accomplish.’ New manuals were appearing, on how to live, behave, dress and run a house, stressing thrift and orderliness, so that men could return in the evenings from public life into havens of domestic happiness.
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