The Duchesse de Berri, Félicie, Mlle de Fauveau and Aymar were among those who managed to escape capture. They made their way into Nantes, where some 400 of them were hidden in the cellars and attics of loyalists, while the soldiers searched the town and its surroundings. For almost four months, Aymar lived in hiding with two elderly sisters; under Mlle de Fauveau’s tuition, he began to paint a Gothic missal.
On the night of 6 November, the Duchesse de Berri was betrayed by one of her followers. The house in which she was hiding was surrounded by soldiers; she had just enough time to slip into a secret chamber behind the chimney. All that night, the men ransacked the house, finding nothing. Next morning, two young soldiers, left on guard and feeling cold, decided to light a fire in the chimney. The Duchess held out as long as she could, then burst out, her dress smouldering, into the room. She was taken off to prison at Blaye.
Her followers, meanwhile, were rounded up. Young men who had never set eyes on the Duc de Bordeaux now went to the scaffold in his name. In some parts of France the feelings against the rebels, inflamed by the liberal press, were so violent that the carts bearing them to trial were stoned. Aymar was lucky. On 26 November, disguised as an artisan and travelling on false papers, he managed to board a boat at Nantes bound for Jersey. Félicie, too, was lucky. She came out of hiding, caught a diligence for Paris, lay low for several months, then got out to Switzerland.
But for Lucie and Frédéric, the story of the Duchesse de Berri’s uprising was only just beginning. When an article had appeared in the government paper, L’Indicateur, about a ‘Carlist brigand, Aymar La Tour du Pin’ and the armed thefts he was carrying out in the countryside, Frédéric, with his customary impetuousness, had written a sharp letter of protest. Whatever else, he wrote, posterity would regard his son and the other young rebels as victims of their great ‘loyalty and devotion’. L’Indicateur refused to carry the letter, but the legitimist Journal de Guyenne agreed to run it. Frédéric was arrested, charged with incitation to civil war and sent for trial before the assizes of the Gironde, together with the editor of the paper.
In court, on 15 December 1832, Frédéric insisted on reading out a statement. His one regret, he said, was that, on account of his age, which was 73, he had been unable to stand at his son’s side among the insurgents. He felt nothing but shame, he declared, that he was not one of the ‘sainted victims’. Though Maître Saint-Marc, his highly regarded lawyer, put up an eloquent defence, pointing out that four members of Frédéric’s family had gone to the guillotine for the French monarchy, Frédéric was given three months in jail and a fine of 1,000 francs. It was considered very lenient, out of respect for Frédéric’s evident anguish and his long years of service to his country.
On 19 December, 1832, Frédéric entered Bordeaux’s notorious prison, the Fort du Hâ, where their friend M. de Chambeau had spent several months during the Terror. Lucie insisted on going with him.
The Fort du Hâ, built in 1456 as the residence of the King’s representative in the south, was a forbidding rectangular fortress, with towers, a moat and a dungeon. Used during the revolution of 1789 to house suspects, it was damp and semi-derelict. It had underground cells 6 inches deep in water, and child prisoners were said to be enclosed in its dark, airless dormitories. When, during the Directoire, Thérésia Tallien was asked why she wore rings on her toes, she replied that they helped conceal the scars of the rat bites she had received as a prisoner there.
Lucie and Frédéric, however, were not unhappy. Frédéric was always cheerful when he believed that what he was doing was right, and it was in Lucie’s nature to make the best of everything. Soon after their arrival, Frédéric wrote to Aymar that they had been given an airy room, overlooking the courtyard where the ‘criminals’ took their exercise. Though it saddened him to see them, he said that he greatly preferred the spectacle of men who had committed crimes through necessity, rather than that of many men in society, whose corruption and cowardice revolted him. Frédéric, who referred to Lucie as ‘your incomparable mother’, was already making plans for his release, when they would spend a few days putting order into their affairs, before meeting Aymar somewhere in Switzerland.
At the bottom of the letter, Lucie added a few words. ‘I feel myself to be in a palace,’ she wrote, ‘and the thought that I can be really helpful and agreeable to your father is unquestionably the nicest thing that has ever filled my heart.’ Since the weather outside was so wretched, she said that she did not mind not going out. It was carrying selflessness to an extreme degree. Neither she nor Frédéric uttered a single note of reproach. On the contrary, Frédéric insisted that Aymar had brought nothing but ‘honour to my white hair’. More surprising, perhaps, Aymar seemed to feel no remorse for where his escapade had led them; later, he would write that the insurrection and his part in it had transformed his life, which might otherwise have been spent in idleness and indecision.
Lucie, who was not a prisoner, was allowed to come and go. To Hadelin, Cécile’s brother, living in Rome with Auguste, who had been appointed Minister to the Vatican, she described their cell. It was sunny, she wrote, with two clean beds, several tables, a dresser with plates, a small cupboard for Frédéric and another for herself. In one corner, which they called the kitchen, there was a basket for wood, two pitchers of water, and several brooms ‘because I like it all to be clean’. In the ‘sitting room’ there was a comfortable chair for Frédéric and a wicker one for herself by the window, where she could see to sew. On the floor, there was a fox-fur carpet given to her by Frédéric. Lucie rose at 6.30, lit the fire, got dressed, helped Frédéric to get up, then made him a cup of hot chocolate that she had left melting by the fire. At nine o’clock arrived a maid, with the Gazette, who spent two hours cleaning and making lunch. At 5, Lucie lit the lamp and prepared supper: either two meat dishes, or one of meat and one of fish, stewed fruit, and a small glass of Médoc. A second daily paper was delivered between 7 and 8; after reading it and discussing the news, Frédéric went to bed. Lucie herself stayed up later. As prison, it was not harsh.
Five afternoons a week, between 1 and 2.30, Lucie went to visit her granddaughter Cécile, whom they had placed in a convent, walking the half-hour to the Sacré-Cœur and back for exercise, except if it was raining, when she took a carriage. On Wednesdays and Saturdays, Cécile came to spend the day in their cell. The one drawback that Lucie would admit to was the noise, both from the ‘common criminals’, some of them small children, sleeping on straw in rooms off the courtyard, and from what she referred to as ‘les prisonniers un peu messieurs’, the better class of prisoner, who argued loudly over their meals at a communal table. In her letters, she sought constantly for humorous details.
Under the terms of his sentence, Frédéric was permitted six regular visitors, who did not need passes, and occasional additional ones, who were vetted by the obliging prison governor. Two old friends, both of them lawyers and peers who, like Frédéric had resigned after the July revolution, came every day. When, towards the end of February, word came that the Duchesse de Berri was pregnant, as the result, she claimed, of a secret marriage that had taken place while in Italy on her way back to France, Lucie was outraged. She wrote to Aymar that there had never been a ‘more dishonourable act in the history of the world. It’s appalling! Miserable woman! How she deceived everyone!’ And when, shortly afterwards, word came the Duchess had announced that she had given up all pretensions to the throne for her son and that she was retiring to Sicily, the little group sitting around the fire in the cell during visiting hours in the Fort du Hâ agreed that she was ‘the most despicable of people’. What puzzled them was the identity of the child’s father, since the Duchess had been in the Vendée, and not in Italy, at the time of the supposed conception. For a while, they talked of little else.
Aymar was still in Jersey. At the beginning of March came the news that he had been condemned to death in absentia. Félicie was reported to be in Portugal, where she and Auguste were emb
roiled in trying to restore another dethroned legitimist ruler. What preoccupied Frédéric and Lucie most was not only where they would live, given that Aymar could not return to France, but what money they would have to live on. ‘We must resign ourselves, devote ourselves, to uncertainty,’ Frédéric told Aymar. They talked of Savoy, but agreed that it would have to be in a village or small town, since cities and spas were beyond their means. A cousin, Louis de la Tour du Pin, offered financial help, but they both found it very hard to think of accepting charity. Advertisements for the sale of Le Bouilh and Tesson had gone into the Paris papers. They were haunted by the thought that they might die leaving Aymar destitute. Frédéric came down with a chest infection and worried Lucie intensely by spitting blood. Leeches were applied; slowly, he recovered.
On 20 March 1833, Frédéric was released from the Fort du Hâ. By June they were in Nice–still part of Italy–reunited with Aymar; Auguste brought Hadelin to stay with them. Lucie noted that Auguste had lost his hair and that his sight was poor and she was irritated by the way he took so little notice of his daughter Cécile, whom he had not seen for four years. At 18, Hadelin, she wrote to Félicie, was tall, with a weak chest, and a rather unfeeling manner, probably ‘because he had been brought up by a father who hated intimacy’. She thought constantly and with longing of her tender, loving Charlotte. Life in Nice was cheap, but they soon realised that they would have to move to a smaller apartment and get rid of their cook. She saw her life, Lucie told Félicie, as a series of drawers, in which she placed what talents she possessed. ‘When those of a lady and an ambassadress were called for, I closed that of the housewife; now I know exactly where to look for what I shall need in my new situation, and I have completely forgotten all the other drawers, without experiencing the least vestiges of regret or complaint.’ She felt, she said, not just resigned but cheerful.
For a while, Lucie, Frédéric, Aymar and Cécile wandered, spending a few months here and there, usually in hotels, settling for a few months in Pinerolo, not too far from Turin, where Frédéric was obliged to go every three months to renew the certificate for his small pension. Wherever they were, they saw few people, spending their days reading, drawing, playing music; Cécile did her lessons, Lucie her tapestry. She had taken to writing stern letters to Hadelin, who was to study law in Paris. ‘I consider it important,’ she instructed him, ‘for you to move in a “high circle”’, adding, interestingly, ‘because I am not a liberal’, a reflection of her unchanging belief in the values of the aristocracy. It was also essential that he improve his spelling, grammar and handwriting. ‘A sales assistant would be embarrassed to write so badly…Beware of sentences that everyone uses without realising what they are saying.’
In the autumn of 1834, leaving Aymar in Italy, they returned to Le Bouilh, where the house remained unsold and their debts unpaid. While Cécile went on with her lessons and her drawing, Lucie embroidered a pair of slippers for Félicie. She missed her goddaughter, and she wrote to tell her so repeatedly, begging her to pay them a visit. From now until the end of her life, her longings for Félicie’s company would be a refrain that would run through all her letters.
In May 1833, Auguste, like Aymar, had been condemned to death in absentia for his part in the insurrection, but he had insisted on returning to France for an appeal, arguing that he personally had not been in the Vendée at the time, and he was acquitted. Félicie, who had been banished, also decided to appeal and returned for her hearing. Receiving no news, Lucie became frantic with worry, until she read in the Gazette that Félicie had conducted herself magnificently and quoted Joan of Arc. She, too, was acquitted. By contrast with her clever and imaginative goddaughter, Lucie herself, she wrote, using the words in English, was a ‘matter-of-fact person’, and incapable of being other than she was. And, she added ruefully, she suspected that she was losing, day by day, what little intelligence she had ever possessed. ‘Poverty shrinks the mind, I know this only too well.’ They were planning to spend a few days in Paris, but Lucie was adamant that this time she would see no one. ‘I know what it is to be old and poor,’ she wrote, ‘and to hear people whisper: “Who is that old woman over there?”’ But with Félicie, she added wistfully, she would not mind being poor. Félicie wrote, from time to time; but she did not come.
Somewhat to her surprise, Lucie enjoyed Paris. They took rooms in a hotel in the rue de Tournon and were immediately called on by old friends, even if Lucie remarked that they had only come to inspect what prison had done to them. She herself refused to pay visits, announcing that she did not intend to ‘show my old nose in society’. Amédée de Duras, who had since remarried, told her that he was astonished to see that she still had her teeth and that she had not become ‘decrepit’. She was touched by his words, but also a little impatient. ‘I suffer only in my heart, from not being able to see those whom I love,’ she wrote, ‘and not on account of worldly losses.’
The walls of Paris were covered in cartoons and caricatures of Louis-Philippe, whom Lucie continued to refer to as an ‘animal’. Thérésia Tallien had just died, at the age of 62, after a long and happy marriage to the Prince de Chimay, having had 11 children by four different men. Pulchérie de Valance brought them the gossip of Paris, Lucie observing that she would have preferred to talk politics, even if hers were of the wrong kind, and that she was no longer used to such egotistical, hypocritical chatter. Just the same, she was flattered to find herself ‘en vogue’ among fashionable Parisians. After a brief pause to digest the political tone of the new monarchy, some of the salons had opened again. Her cousin, Mme de Boigne, whom Lucie had never cared for, received politicians; Clara, Félicie’s sister, whom she did not care for much either, writers. On all sides, Lucie heard complaints that the court of Louis-Philippe was full of greedy shopkeepers. Mme Récamier was still receiving, and still wearing white, entertaining her guests in her rooms at L’Abbaye-aux-Blois, where she gave readings from Chateaubriand’s unpublished memoirs. In some ways, Paris had changed astonishingly little; as Talleyrand had once said, talking about the émigrés: ‘They have learnt nothing and forgotten nothing.’
Frédéric and Lucie returned to Le Bouilh in time to complete the sale on the property to a merchant from L’Isle de France for 160,000 francs, all of which would have to go towards paying off their debts. Lucie hated having to show the new owner around the château, discussing what they would leave and what they would take. ‘It’s rather like a foretaste of death,’ she wrote, ‘to see your ancestral roof taken from you.’ She had been happy at Le Bouilh. Many of her best years, when Humbert, Charlotte and Cécile were all alive, had been spent in those cavernous rooms. Its loss struck her like a blow to the heart with a double-edged sword, from whose wounds ‘one recovers only through perfect resignation to the will of God’. She had struggled for perfect resignation all her life.
There was one more visit to Paris, late that summer, a far easier journey than in her childhood: 72 hours, in a large diligence with separate compartments, drawn by eight horses, with stops at post-houses along the way. Even Bordeaux now had its first horse-drawn omnibus. Louis-Philippe had weathered five years of submerged plotting, revolutionary unrest and several attempts on his life, aided by France’s growing prosperity and his own tolerant and domestic nature. The King, said Victor Hugo, combined something of Charlemagne and something of a country solicitor. Mme d’Agoult, a leading society hostess and historian, complained that ‘Anglo-American habits…le club, le sport, le cigare’ had dealt the old salons a death blow and that ‘that innate gift which for two centuries made the Frenchwoman queen of everything most elegant in Europe’ had finally disappeared. The women who had taken her place, she said, were coarse, shrill and over-familiar, and knew nothing of the ‘discreet intimacies and delicate gallantry’ of the past.
Lucie was still in Paris when, on 28 July 1835, a ‘machine infernale’ exploded as the King rode out to review his troops on the Boulevard du Temple. He was unhurt, but 41 people were killed.
From her hotel window, Lucie watched the funerals, a vast, silent crowd filing slowly past. The cartoons and caricatures disappeared from the streets. There were soldiers everywhere and much talk of press censorship. ‘Laws,’ she wrote, ‘will now slip through like honey.’ Before leaving Paris, she dined one last time with Amédée in Versailles. ‘We philosophised,’ she wrote, ‘on human affairs in this town of so many misfortunes.’
That summer they received word that Aymar was to be banned not only from France but from Piedmont. Lucie was worried chiefly about Cécile, whom she had come to love as her own daughter, and who was growing up to be charming, affectionate and strong-minded, and appeared determined to accept no husband other than one she chose herself. ‘I am a completely hopeless grandmother,’ she wrote sadly, ‘good for nothing at all, without money, position or contacts. I have nothing left to offer in this business of life.’ It was not, she added, that she felt cowardly or despairing; simply that ‘I no longer wish to swim against the current, because the world does not seem to me to be worth it’. She dreaded that a day might come when Auguste took her granddaughter to Brussels, in order to find her a husband.
So tender with those she loved, Lucie had lost none of her sharpness towards those she did not. She had met Fanny again briefly in 1827, but recorded nothing then about her feelings for the half-sister she had not seen for 16 years. In March 1836, she heard that Fanny had died of cancer, at the age of 51, and had been buried alongside her mother in the cemetery of Père Lachaise in Paris, leaving four sons and a daughter. Lucie’s first reaction was to worry for the children, for, she said, Bertrand was ‘three quarters mad and a fool’. But then she felt guilty that she seemed to feel so little affection for them, because it was against nature not to love the grandchildren of a father she herself had loved so much.
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