Dancing to the Precipice

by Caroline Moorehead

  Frédéric, quickly detecting an undercurrent of rebellion, forwarded to Paris a recently published pamphlet in which the people of Piedmont ‘supplicate their King not to…treat them as the people least worthy of liberty of all the nations of Europe’. Frédéric wrote often and at great length, letters that were frequently full of passion and seldom very diplomatic. France, he insisted, needed to take a leading role in Italian affairs, and not stand by while others did so.

  The idea of a united Italy, free of foreign interference, had been around for a long time; both Dante and Machiavelli had visions of what a liberated Italy might look like. Yet foreign rule had not always been unpopular, not least because it checked the absolute power of local tyrants. There were many Italians who had welcomed Napoleon’s invasions, seeing in him a force against the Church and feudalism, and the harbinger of a new age of equality. The Congress of Vienna, which left Austria powerfully entrenched all over Italy, had by contrast pleased some of these absolutist rulers, whose ancient privileges the Austrians upheld. But as the tensions triggered by the suppression of Napoleon’s more liberal policies began to spread among the existing secret revolutionary societies, the Carbonari, so the Austrians became more repressive in those parts of the country where they held sway: Tuscany, Parma, Modena and the Italian kingdom, which ran from Venice to Ancona.

  Early in 1820, some six months before Frédéric’s arrival in Italy, a revolution had broken out in Spain and a liberal Constitution had been successfully imposed on the King, the Bourbon Ferdinand VII. Inspired by this, the Neapolitan Carbonari unleashed a similar insurrection against the Bourbon Kingdom of the Two Sicilies; the people of Naples rose up and joined them. ‘Will they defend themselves or not?’ wrote Lucie to her goddaughter Félicie who, since Cécile’s death and Charlotte’s marriage, had become like a daughter to her. ‘For my part I believe that they will be subjugated but they will not be submissive.’ A Constitution, on the Spanish model, was proposed. But Ferdinand, while publicly accepting the Constitution, privately called on Metternich and the Austrians to come to his assistance. With the help of Austrian troops, the rebellion was quickly crushed, the Constitution was abandoned and absolutist rule restored.

  Frédéric, keeping a close eye on these events from Turin, continued to insist, in sometimes intemperate language, that the French should take a stronger position. To the fever of liberalism abroad in Europe, the Russians and the Austrians proposed military crackdowns. The French, pushed this way and that by the ultras and the liberals, vacillated. France, observed the Tsar, now inspired ‘neither fear in her enemies nor confidence in her friends’. After Naples, Frédéric warned his superiors in Paris, there was a very real danger that revolt would spread to other parts of Italy, and particularly to Piedmont where, he said, the Austrians were much hated. ‘A volcano has been lit,’ Lucie remarked, and it would not be easy to put out. In his reports, Frédéric continued to complain bitterly that he was receiving no orders from Paris.

  In Piedmont, as Frédéric was discovering, secret societies had become fashionable, not only among students, but among some members of the Savoy aristocracy and the army. On 10 March 1821, students in Alessandria, some 40 miles east of Turin, joined forces with young soldiers and rose up against the King. Victor Emmanuel put up little resistance. Very late on the night of 13 March, Frédéric was summoned, together with the entire diplomatic corps, to the palace, to be told that the King had decided to abdicate. By five next morning Victor Emmanuel was already on his way to Nice, having handed the crown to his brother, Charles-Felix, Duke of Genoa, and the temporary regency to his 22-year-old nephew, Prince Charles-Albert, Duc de Carrignan. Frédéric liked the young prince and knew that his sympathies lay partly with the Carbonari. He requested, and was granted, an audience with Carrignan; the young man assured him that he would do nothing to disgrace his ancestors, and that he was ready, if need be, to die. ‘It is not a question of dying,’ Frédéric told him, ‘but of living and ruling.’ In his letters to Paris, Frédéric boldly recommended taking the initiative in promoting a united Italy. If France played its cards right, he added, it might even gain Savoy and Nice for itself. Was it conceivable, he asked, that France was really prepared to sit by and see Austria reign all the way from Vesuvius to Mont Cenis?

  It seemed that France was. Frédéric continued to receive no orders. Carrignan, leant on heavily by the Russian minister, resigned the regency and left Turin. Charles-Felix followed the example set by the Bourbon King of Naples and called on the Austrians to suppress the revolt. A skirmish at Novaro gave an easy victory to royalist and Austrian troops. Frédéric, saying that he was witness to much bad faith and many intrigues, wrote that he feared that the Austrians and Russians between them would ‘devour this admirable and unhappy country’. Three hundred students continued to hold out in a citadel, and a regiment which had gone over to them still held 37 pieces of artillery. It would indeed all be laughable, he wrote, were it not for the fact that it was bound to end in bloodshed. As, indeed, it did: Austrian and Italian troops loyal to Charles-Felix attacked, the students were routed and a number of ringleaders were executed. A company of Grenadiers, noted Frédéric sourly, had marched ‘against a fistful of children’.

  At some risk to himself, and disregarding the orders of the Foreign Ministry in Paris, Frédéric provided a number of the rebels with French passports, enabling them to escape. Charles-Felix arrived in Turin to assume his throne, having become more than ever a devoted ally of Austria, which announced that it would leave a garrison of 10,000 men in Piedmont. When the French Foreign Ministry finally pronounced on the uprising, it was to uphold Austria. Frédéric’s role, he was instructed by Paris, was simply to convey to Charles-Felix that Louis XVIII would support no one ‘who defies the authority of the legitimate sovereign’. All that was left to Frédéric was to snipe against the Austrian Ambassador, Baron Franz von Binder, referring to him as a ‘real madman’; for his part, von Binder wrote to his own superiors that Frédéric was a man of ‘well below average abilities’. Walpole’s friend Miss Berry, passing through Turin on her travels, went to lunch with Lucie and Frédéric, and heard accounts of the revolt and the return to feudalism. ‘To hear many persons talk here,’ she observed, ‘one would suppose oneself in the 13th century.’ For her part, Lucie wrote sadly to Félicie that she was exhausted by all the ‘acts of cruelty and vengeance’ that she had been forced to witness. ‘Most men are ugly creatures. I much prefer outright villains to sly traitors: the former horrify me but the latter disgust me.’

  Frédéric’s original appointment to Turin had come as something of a surprise to those who knew how much he was mistrusted by Metternich–now Chancellor of Austria–and the French ultras. After his outspokenness over the insurrection, it was widely thought that he would be recalled to Paris. Metternich lost no chance to run him down. Reports sent back by the Austrian officials in Piedmont described Frédéric as ‘lacking in character’ and much influenced by his domineering wife. But Frédéric held on; when it was suggested to him that he would do well to request a transfer, he did nothing.

  Paris now appeared to lose all interest in Piedmont, leaving Frédéric for weeks on end without replies to his letters. His position was made all the weaker by the fact that both the court in Piedmont and the ministers had turned against him. Even so, he continued to speak out, to complain, to criticise and to send back reports full of disquisitions on the nature of diplomacy and the wickedness of the Austrians. There was an admirable stubbornness in him, a refusal to be silenced. ‘The state needs the truth,’ he declared, ‘it is for this that we have been appointed to our posts.’ But it did not make either his or Lucie’s life easy. And it was perfectly true that Lucie seldom held back from voicing her own opinions, strongly held and forcefully expressed. Neither one of them was diplomatic by nature; whether in Brussels, Amiens or Turin, they stood apart for the reckless ease with which they challenged political decisions they considered to be lacking in morality or co
mmon sense. And neither minded greatly what anyone said about them.

  Once the novelty of Piedmont wore off, Lucie found Turin extremely dull. ‘There is very little wit and very few ideas in this country, as far as I can see,’ she wrote to Félicie, telling her that all the Savoyards did was to moan about their health and warn each other to avoid sun and wind and to keep the windows shut. It was, she said, the ‘nec plus ultra of monotony and boredom’. Though French remained the one common language of Piedmont, and all visitors were struck by the French tone of the court, where women dressed in French fashions, danced French quadrilles, ate French food and had salons where they discussed poetry, the city soon seemed to her stultifying.

  After the carnival, when boxes at the Teatro Regio were furiously fought over, the city slumbered under a stifling routine of strolls or rides up and down the Via del Po, the ambassadors and courtiers bowing to each other from their carriages. There were starchy visits and games of whist. Lady Morgan noted that while the ladies of Turin engaged in the ‘pleasant persiflage’ of the French, the older women had a disagreeable tendency to show off too much of their ‘tanned and prematurely withered necks’. Houses, magnificent on the outside, were chilly and sombre within; floors were made of stone or marble and there was seldom any heating. Lucie begged Félicie to send her large, cheerful lamps, and wall brackets for candles, in order to bring some proper light into the gloomy rooms of her house, made darker by their heavy damask curtains and mahogany furniture.

  In June 1821, came the news that Napoleon had died. The Emperor had lived for five and a half years on St Helena, with the same etiquette and formality as on Elba, telling his secretary Emmanuel Las Cases, to whom he was dictating his memoirs, ‘I closed the gaping abyss of anarchy, and I unscrambled chaos.’ Las Cases, forced to leave St Helena and return to France, had been spreading word of Napoleon’s martyrdom around a France already somewhat nostalgic for their heroic Emperor. On St Helena, Napoleon had become increasingly unwell, apparently suffering from stomach ulcers and a liver complaint. He had seen very little of Lucie’s half-sister in recent months, but Fanny was with him, with her children and all his courtiers, when he died on the afternoon of 5 May, and she kissed his hand. There was some talk of poison, but a malignant tumour was more widely thought to have been the cause of death. His heart was removed and placed in a silver box; Napoleon had requested that it be sent to his wife, Marie-Louise, but Sir Hudson Lowe, dogmatic to the last, refused. Fanny’s 13-year-old son Napoleon walked in the funeral cortège with his father Bertrand, holding one corner of the cloth draped over the coffin.

  Bertrand, constantly nagged by Fanny to leave St Helena, where, she said, the children were growing up wild and uneducated among the soldiers, had managed to stay there until the end. With Napoleon dead, the family hastened back to Europe, arriving in Portsmouth to be welcomed by Lady Jerningham, who found her niece very thin in her dark mourning clothes, and somewhat stooped. But Fanny, as she told her daughter Charlotte, had an ‘air distingué and is very agreeable, both in French and English’. The devoted Bertrand was clearly much upset by Napoleon’s death. The Bertrands rented a house in the Edgware Road, while overtures were made to the Duc de Fitz-James, Fanny’s brother-in-law and a man with some influence at the French court, to get the sentence of death imposed on him after Waterloo lifted, so that they could return to France. Lucie’s sister brought back with them from St Helena an exquisite bird cage, built for Napoleon by Chinese artisans, without nails, each wooden piece fitting perfectly into the next, and constructed with three separate floors, one for each of three kinds of bird. The cage had originally been delivered with an eagle perched on the top, but Napoleon had asked for this to be removed, saying that it looked absurd.

  The fourth anniversary of Cécile’s death fell on 20 March 1821. Charles de Mercy-Argenteau, the young man she was to have married, came to Turin to stay with Frédéric and Lucie, who were both devoted to him. Like Lucie, Charles loved music, and together they went to hear Velutti sing. In July Charlotte arrived from Switzerland to join them, bringing with her Hadelin, now 5, and 3-year-old Cécile. For a while, Lucie again felt herself to be surrounded by all the pleasures of family life she so enjoyed. They rode out in the cool of the evenings, with Charles and Charlotte on horseback, and Lucie and the children in her barouche. At night, the young people played whist with Frédéric while Lucie did her petit-point. ‘I revel in being loved by you, by my excellent husband, by my daughter and by my dear Charles,’ she wrote to Félicie, adding that Charles was like a ‘tender and devoted son’ to her.

  But soon, Lucie detected a change in her only remaining daughter. The once lively and irreverent Charlotte was becoming thin and listless. She and the children stayed on in Turin all through the winter of 1821. She was often feverish and shivery, and to Lucie she seemed to be growing weaker. ‘I find her terrifyingly pale and extremely frail,’ she told Félicie, saying that she was now being ‘devoured by a mortal despair’, and that no two days passed without ‘worry and torment’. She had once again forgotten what it was like to feel safe. Fretting constantly about the cold damp air, Lucie longed for the spring to come, so that she could take Charlotte up into the mountains; when the weather became warmer, she was sure, Charlotte would get better.

  However, Charlotte, like Cécile before her, grew weaker. In the summer of 1822, she returned to Switzerland, accompanied by Lucie and the children. It was there, in the Château de Farblanc near Evian, that she died, on 1 September. She was 26. Not long before, Charlotte had written in her diary:

  I have often felt the desire to write, as if I were being pushed by some unknown force. I have started twenty novels in my head, but I hate novels, apart from a few exceptions, so how could I possibly write books of the kind that I usually find so reprehensible and miserable? At other times, I think I would have liked to discuss morality, but what a ridiculous idea at my age! I don’t believe that one should tackle such a subject until the age of passions has passed and one can be the proof of what one wants to say.

  She did not have the chance to find out.

  With Charlotte’s death, Lucie and Frédéric had lost five of their six surviving children; only Aymar was left. Even for the age, it was an exceptionally cruel number of losses. For the rest of that year, Lucie was extremely low. She seemed to shrink into herself, silent and enduring. Her letters to Félicie ceased. When she did at last write it was to say that she now clung to her goddaughter as her ‘dearest confidante’ on whom she would depend ‘all the days left to me in this sad life’. She did her tapestry and struggled on, so depressed that she felt unable to help anyone around her, even those she loved.

  But then, early in 1823, Charlotte’s husband Auguste came to stay, bringing with him Hadelin and little Cécile, and Lucie, who in the past had often found her son-in-law remote and difficult, drew closer to him. When he set off back for Switzerland, he took Hadelin with him, but asked if he might leave Cécile for Lucie to bring up. Very slowly, warmed by the presence of the little girl, she began to revive, telling Félicie that Cécile was almost too intelligent but that she could be sulky when crossed. Even with the child by her, Lucie still never left the house without seeing the world through Charlotte’s eyes. ‘There is a deep layer of grief in my heart,’ she wrote, ‘which colours everything.’

  When, not very long afterwards, the Princesse d’Hénin died, she left Le Bouilh–which she had earlier bought in order to help Frédéric and Lucie with some of their financial difficulties–and all her money to Aymar. Even if the older woman had never liked her, Lucie felt that she would now miss her. For Frédéric, his aunt’s death had severed the last surviving link with his childhood.

  For a while, the family’s finances seemed to improve, and both she and Frédéric felt intense relief that at least Aymar’s future was assured. But the Princesse’s lawyer fled to England, taking with him all Mme d’Hénin’s fortune, and leaving debts and legacies that could be paid only by selling Le Bouilh. H
is elderly cousin, Mme de Maurville, to whom Mme d’Hénin had left some money, was again penniless, and Cécile’s legacy of 50,000 francs had disappeared. Lucie and Frédéric would now face ever-increasing financial anxieties, made worse by Frédéric’s extreme impracticality when it came to money. Nor were their worries lessened by the fact that constant attempts were being made to remove him from his post, most of them not by the Ministry for Foreign Affairs, but by envious and scheming people in Paris, anxious to secure the Turin embassy for relatives or friends.

  In May 1824, Lucie and Frédéric celebrated their 37th wedding anniversary. ‘I never stop to wonder whether my husband is more or less intelligent, knowledgeable or capable,’ Lucie wrote to Félicie. ‘But not a single day goes by when I do not detect, by some word or glance, how much goodness, greatness of character and nobility there is in him; and I hope that he can say the same for me.’ It had been, and remained, an exceptionally happy marriage.

  By early 1824, it was clear that Louis XVIII was dying. He had gangrene in his right foot and up his spine and he fell asleep in public, his head lolling, his clothes hanging loose over his shrinking bulk. ‘The King,’ wrote Heine later, ‘rotted on his throne.’ Soon he no longer left the Tuileries. ‘A King is permitted to die,’ he told his courtiers, ‘but he is never permitted to be ill.’ During the summer he struggled on, receiving his ministers with his head propped up on a cushion on his desk. On 12 September, orders were given to close the stock exchange and the theatres. It was his companion, Mme de Cayla, who managed to persuade the dying King to take the last sacraments. A large, silent crowd collected outside the Tuileries. On the afternoon of 16 September, in the presence of ministers, ambassadors, courtiers and deputies, Louis XVIII died, his body decomposed and smelling strongly. Dressed in a coat of mail, with gauntlets and spurs, his embalmed corpse was displayed for a month before being lowered into its tomb at Saint-Denis.