Dancing to the Precipice

by Caroline Moorehead

  However, as Lucie quickly pointed out, Claire was not really writing fiction at all. Ourika was the ‘little captive’ brought home from Senegal before the revolution by the Chevalier de Boufflers for his aunt, Mme de Beauvau. And in Ourika’s mournful lament–‘I no longer felt pity for anyone but myself’–Claire was really writing about herself and Chateaubriand.

  Claire’s next novel, Édouard, another tale of love and unhappiness, was a similar success. This time, Lucie herself appeared as a character, in an unexpectedly sympathetic light, so thinly disguised that she might as well have been named. In the novel, a group of people are sitting together one evening talking. A Mme de Nevers is asked why she has no intimate friend. I had a friend, she replies,

  one who was very dear to me…We had been friends since childhood, but I fear that we have now been estranged for many years…The Marquis of C., her husband, is Minister in Holland. I feel her loss keenly. No one else has ever been as necessary to me…She is my conscience, and I have never sought to find another to replace her; now that I am alone, I can never make up my mind to anything.

  Mme de C., Mme de Nevers goes on, had once tried very hard to persuade her to struggle against certain feelings that she believed to be wrong and misplaced; she had indeed tried to flee from them, but had failed, and Mme de C. had travelled all the way from Holland ‘to pull me back from the abyss into which I was about to fall’. The words were the very ones written by Lucie to Claire in 1812 about Chateaubriand. But what was striking was Claire’s evident sadness about their lost friendship. This barely disguised account of their estrangement touched Lucie.

  All through the spring of 1826, Claire was ill. She had rheumatism in her neck, was short of breath and slept badly. There were days when she could neither read nor write. ‘Death terrifies me,’ she wrote to a friend, ‘but I must accustom myself to the idea of it, because I feel it to be approaching with great strides.’ She became depressed and dreaded seeing her friends; like a child, she wept. She begged for news of Chateaubriand.

  Lucie had gone to Le Bouilh–still looking for a buyer–taking with her Aymar. Though angry that the tenants who had been living in the château had left it in a terrible mess, she was pleased to find herself back in France and among people she was fond of. The house reminded her poignantly of happier days when Claire ‘used to be so fond of me’. Félicie was to have visited her, but instead went to Paris to her mother, whose health seemed to be growing worse. Lucie, telling Félicie that she should not be too upset if her mother rebuffed her, wrote: ‘You must fill your heart with charitable thoughts. Just because she was not a good mother, that is no reason for you not to be a good daughter.’ Then she added, again revealing more about herself than about Claire: ‘How she must feel the emptiness of all that worldly success…all that noise that prevented her from hearing the true voice of her own heart or enjoying those natural and gentle feelings which should be enough in the life of any woman.’

  In August, Claire lost the sight in one eye; half her face became paralysed. Moods of silence and self-obsession alternated with periods of tenderness and generosity. She told a friend that she felt herself to be somewhere between life and death and that she was determined to face the end with courage. ‘In vain I seek to be happy: but I can no longer do it; I have suffered too much.’ Now that she was clearly dying, Chateaubriand came often to see her (but was unable to refrain from writing to a friend: ‘I am menaced by great unhappiness. Mme de Duras is dying.’). From Turin, Lucie offered to send packets of grissini, particularly good, she said, for invalids, in with the weekly consignment of truffles that travelled regularly from Piedmont to the King’s table in Paris.

  Still Claire hung on. There was a rapprochement with Félicie, which pleased Lucie though she felt sad on her own behalf. ‘If I were with her,’ she wrote, ‘I would look after her night and day…But friendship is something else. Friendship, once lost, cannot be recovered.’ But then the day came when Claire seemed well enough to travel south. Lucie decided to make one last effort. She went to Switzerland and, on Lake Maggiore, the two old friends met. But the encounter did not go well. Claire was silent, cold and tearful and Lucie returned early to Turin. ‘I was appalled, crushed,’ she wrote to Félicie.

  At the end of September 1827, Claire went to stay in Nice, taking Félicie and Clara with her. The weather was wet and very windy. Frédéric and Lucie crossed the Col de Tende to see her and this time, the meeting went very well. Claire seemed extremely touched that they had made the journey, and said to Lucie: ‘My dear friend, it is as it once was between us.’ It was life imitating art: in Édouard, Claire had written that when Mme de Nevers was ill, her friend had arrived and held her in her arms. Lucie returned exuberant to Turin. She had, she said, ‘refound’ her friend at last. On the evening of 16 January 1828, Claire told her two daughters that she felt grateful to God for allowing her to die slowly, for she had always feared sudden death. Barely able to speak for ulcers on her tongue, she asked for the last rites; and then she died, smiling and holding their hands.

  With Claire’s death disappeared one of Lucie’s last links with the past, and what had been, for all its flaws and estrangements, a true friendship. Increasingly now she would devote herself to Félicie, telling her again and again, in letter after letter, that she felt for her all the love she had felt for her own daughters. ‘Your friendship,’ she wrote, ‘is necessary for my heart.’ In return, Félicie, whose nature was elusive and adventurous, was affectionate; but she kept her distance, letting months pass without replying to Lucie’s many letters and very seldom making plans to visit her.

  By the summer of 1827, Villèle’s government in Paris was in trouble. Under siege from both the right and the left, Charles X decided to create 76 new peers and to dissolve the Chamber of Deputies. Frédéric, as outspoken as ever, wrote furiously to the ministry to say that he personally felt that nothing since the revolution had done more harm to the French aristocracy, to France itself or to the monarchy: ‘You have gone against all that is natural, shaken everything up, made compromises.’ Villèle’s government fell. A new government was sworn in, and an attractive and likeable man, M. de Martignac, an ultra, but not a fanatic, was invited to become Minister of the Interior. To Frédéric’s relief, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs went to an old friend and colleague, the Comte de la Ferronays, former Ambassador to Denmark and Russia.

  The new government had no real leader, though Martignac was regarded as more or less in charge. Charles X and his close friends, it was clear, were really looking to the day when the governance of France might be returned into the hands of men of the far right, ‘ultras exaltés’, who believed that France’s future lay in a strong aristocracy and a powerful Church. Even Lucie, in her own way, was dismissive of the middle class that had risen to positions of power since the Restoration, saying that she would like to see noble families restored to their ancestral seats, and that it was a shame that only men she called ‘industrialists’ could afford them now. ‘It will take more than steam engines,’ she wrote, ‘to create a genealogy.’ When it came to leadership, all Lucie’s years in America, her very real commitment to political reform, had not shaken her fundamental belief in the superiority of the aristocracy.

  In 1829, Frédéric turned 70. He was now the doyen of Turin’s diplomatic corps. With de la Ferronays in the Foreign Ministry, he was no longer talking of retiring, but planned to ask for six months’ leave to accompany Aymar to Paris, where he hoped to find him a wife. Lucie had not been well and had been bled copiously, then had leeches applied to her head which made her look, she said, like a ‘gorgon’. That summer, they went to Rivalta, not far from Turin, to a château with a moat and battlements covered in ivy; there was a river nearby, its banks lined with willow trees, and views of the Alps. Lucie had thought of letting Frédéric and Aymar go alone to Paris, while she and Cécile stayed at Le Bouilh, and she wrote to Auguste’s mother, the Comtesse de Liederkerke Beaufort, urging her to visit her gran
ddaughter ‘whose upbringing is the whole purpose and consolation of our lives’.

  In the event, reflecting on Frédéric’s age, she consented to accompany them to Paris, stipulating only that they should take rooms, not in Saint-Germain, which Cécile might find deserted and sad, but somewhere more cheerful near the Tuileries or by the Seine. ‘I want to be able to see something from my windows,’ she wrote, ‘I like the quays, the squares, somewhere I can walk.’ Félicie was asked to find them something suitable, with rooms for the family, a maid and a valet, with an open fire over which Lucie could cook, and a good supply of wood nearby. It should also have lieux à l’anglaise, an English bathroom. But, she announced, she had no intention whatsoever of going out into society, to hear people exclaim, ‘Ah! how she has aged!’

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  A Warm Heart

  Frédéric, Lucie, Aymar and Cécile reached Paris soon after Lucie’s 60th birthday. It was their first visit for almost ten years. The winter was exceptionally cold; the Seine had frozen over at the end of November, and the thaw did not start until late in February. Sledges sped along the streets, with women dressed in thick furs. At balls and receptions, bare shoulders and arms were enveloped in shawls. There was an acute shortage of bread and at the Bal des Indigents, referred to by some as ‘the ball of the rich for the poor’, held at the Opéra in aid of those starving on the streets, ticket holders remarked on the brilliance of the light cast by the new gas lamps. ‘La vie élégante’, with its new aristocracy of money, journalism and politics, had taken over, said visitors to France, from the old ‘vie aristocratique’ of the ancien régime.

  Spring was starting as they arrived. On the first fine days, Paris was as crowded, noisy, busy and foul-smelling from the ‘malodorous muck’ of the streets as it had been during Lucie’s childhood. The Seine had almost disappeared beneath the number of boats transporting food, wine and charcoal to the city; along the quays were anchored bathing establishments, offering every variety of bath, from Russian to Turkish or Chinese, hot or cold, scented, with or without a massage or attendants. In the Jardin des Plantes, a giraffe, sent as a gift to the King by the Pacha of Egypt, was taken from its enclosure by its African keeper for a walk around the gardens, dressed in a wool coat. It was said to be very partial to rose petals. In Le Rocher de Cancale, Paris’s ‘supreme temple of gastronomy’ on the corner of the rue Mandar and the rue Montorgueil, there were 112 fish dishes on the menu. Brillat-Savarin had inadvertently invented steaming, when the enormous turbot he was cooking proved too big for his largest pot and he borrowed a cauldron from a laundress, placing his fish surrounded by shallots and herbs in a wicker hamper above the boiling water.

  Talma, the great heroic actor, was dead, but Mlle Mars, ‘young under the Directoire, beautiful under the Empire, glorious under the Restoration’, continued to draw crowds to the Comédie-Française, even if a marked taste for the ghoulish drew crowds to watch the guillotine at work, beheading dogs, at 20 francs a ticket. A ‘Combustible Spaniard’ was entertaining Parisians by sitting for 14 minutes in a hot oven, alongside a chicken, which cooked, after which he ate it. ‘Here pleasure is a luxury, a delight,’ noted one traveller, ‘and not a laborious affair, as in England…not a slow moving canal, but a wild and bubbling brook in which the French, like corks, dance for joy.’

  At court, Charles X continued to pass his days hunting, travelling between Saint-Cloud and Paris in a cloud of soldiers, bodyguards and liveried attendants, while his courtiers went about their duties, impeccably uniformed. Their wives spent a great deal of time in church. ‘The good Lord,’ remarked a visitor, ‘is much in fashion these days.’ The Duchesse de Maille, who refused to attend court on the grounds that it was too dull, maintained that to please the King one had to be ‘ultra and stupid’, and to please the Duchesse d’Angoulême, ‘ultra and devout’. It was only the young Duchesse de Berri who brought life to the Tuileries, with her costume balls on Turkish, Persian and Scottish themes, and her new passion for swimming in the sea at Dieppe, something that few people had thought to do before. In mid-July, the Duchess, swathed in a long dark wool shift, wool trousers and a waxed taffeta cap, with boots to keep the crabs at bay, was escorted to the water’s edge by a doctor. She was then led into the sea by a ‘guide baigneur’ in a special uniform, watched by spectators with opera glasses from the sea front. A cannon was fired to herald the first swim of the year. In this outfit, observed one of her ladies-in-waiting sourly, even the most beautiful woman in the world looked like a ‘monstrosity’ as she emerged from the water enveloped in clinging, sagging wool.

  There was, however, a rival court in the Palais-Royal, home once again to the Duc d’Orléans after his return from exile in 1817. Louis-Philippe was now 56, a portly, courteous figure, married to Marie-Amélie, one of Ferdinand IV’s 18 children, a tall, blue-eyed woman with a long face and a long neck, who described herself as having an ‘air of modest but imposing nobility’. Together, they had cleared the Palais-Royal of the rubbish that had accumulated during the Duke’s exile, and turned it into a salon for writers and intellectuals. ‘The Duc d’Orléans,’ his cousin Louis XVIII shrewdly once remarked, ‘remains absolutely still, but nevertheless I notice that he is moving forwards. What does one do to stop a man who does not move?’ To the Parisians, Louis-Philippe seemed not just appealing, with his open, easygoing manner, but approachable, and he was said to play with his children even when people came to dinner.

  Lucie and Frédéric reached Paris too late for Mme de Genlis’s 85th birthday, a musical reception held by her niece Pulchérie de Valance, but, given Lucie’s feelings about fashionable society, this was not a hardship. As she said, ‘I love “home”’–using the word in English–‘wherever I find it…and I have no need of strangers in my life.’ During the ten years of Frédéric’s absence in Turin, the foreign embassies had turned into showcases for the countries they represented, the Austrians vying with the British for grandeur. ‘What,’ asked Lady Granville, wife of the British Ambassador, ‘would the parlez-vous do without us?’ Lady Granville, whose sharp tongue enlivened many gatherings, said that the American Ambassadress, Mrs Brown, when asked how she was, replied that she was in ‘foine spirits and very hoppy’.

  It was soon after their return that Victor Hugo’s Ernani, which had been rehearsing in the arctic cold of the winter, opened in Paris. Its first night had been sold out for many months. Ernani, a tale of youthful love, fidelity and self-sacrifice, was not a particularly fine play but it hit a chord with the largely young audience who had queued for tickets. The Romantic school seemed to come of age; the day of the perfect meter and classical austerity was over. Voltaire and the subtle ironies of the 18th century were ‘so much debris and ancient ruins’. ‘Writers,’ announced Hugo, ‘have the right to take risks, to become daring, to create, to invent their style and not cling too hard to grammar.’ Ernani ran, to enormous excitement and much popular debate, for 45 performances, during which the Classicists and the Romantics in the audience came to blows. And it was not only in literature that Romanticism flourished. The ‘beau idéal’ that had inspired David and his disciples, with their heroes and their scenes from classical mythology, had been replaced by Delacroix’s taste for colour and the exotic, and soon by Corot and the new landscape painters. In music, Berlioz’s Symphonie fantastique was welcomed with delight. The composers who became popular after 1830–Chopin, Bellini, Meyerbeer–would have practically nothing in common with pre-revolutionary France. After 15 largely stagnant years, Paris was once again becoming the cultural heart of Europe.

  Uneasy in Paris, profoundly disliking what they saw of the ultra government, Frédéric and Lucie had moved to Versailles. Frédéric decided that the moment had come for him to retire from the diplomatic service and settle at Le Bouilh–still unsold and heavily in debt. He was 71, and he was tired of intrigues. Versailles, they discovered, had become a melancholy and deserted town, the great palace given over to workmen preparing to turn its imme
nse rooms into a museum. Lucie attended Mass in the Royal Chapel, remembering the last time she had been there, 42 years earlier. ‘Then,’ she wrote, ‘people found me beautiful and very fair-skinned, in my pink dress, wearing diamonds worth six million francs.’ They were invited to a reception at which Charles X–whom Lucie had known since he was a child–was present, but she insisted on remaining hidden in the background, saying that she preferred now to leave the bustle of society to others. They spent their days showing Cécile the sights and visiting a cousin of Lucie’s who had settled in France; she had nine children with whom Cécile played. In the evenings, in their lodgings, they read aloud from the diaries of Saint-Simon: they had reached the 12th volume. Lucie was content, saying that she felt fortunate in that she did not fret for the things she no longer had. ‘I am happy at heart,’ she noted, ‘and my peace of mind allows me to enjoy what I have left.’ It was an aspect of her nature that had served her well all her life.

  Villèle’s cautious, repressive leadership had, by 1830, alienated even the right-wing Catholics. At court, Charles X, surrounded by complacent ultras, continuing to believe that the future for France lay in autocratic religious government, had become ever more remote, not only from the audiences who cheered Victor Hugo, but from the Chamber of Deputies. On 16 May 1830, fearing the winds of insurrection, the King abruptly dissolved Parliament; the Chambers were prorogued. The new electoral laws, it was announced, would effectively limit franchise still further. In the Palais-Royal, Louis-Philippe gave a magnificent ball for his brother-in-law, the King of Naples. ‘A Neapolitan night,’ remarked a deputy, listening to the shouts of ‘à bas les aristocrats’ coming from the street, ‘and as at Naples, we are dancing on a volcano.’ The words were almost exactly those used by Gouverneur Morris in 1792. On 26 July, Paris woke to learn that freedom of the press had been suppressed.