The Age of Elegance

by Arthur Bryant

  Such was the crucible from which the statesmen of Europe had to distil the alembic of peace. Their first problem was with the country that had caused all this misery, unrest and insecurity. For a quarter of a century the great amorphous mass of Revolutionary France, its components formerly quiet peasants and industrious artisans, had spread like a destroying lava across the patina of civilisation. The business of the peacemakers was to restore quiet to the Continent, and enable habits of peace and productive industry to return to the most civilised and fruitful part of the earth's surface. To do so it was essential to clip France's wings.

  Yet those who had defeated Napoleon were just and moderate men. Like their dead prophet, Burke, they did not wish to indict a whole people for the crimes of their leaders nor to impose punishments which would provoke worse iniquities. In the peace treaty, which less than a month after Napoleon's abdication they signed with the new government of France, they contented themselves with reducing her to the historic frontiers she had enjoyed before her armies had begun their career of conquest. Asked only to renounce

  1 Stanley, 180; Simpson, III; Lord Coleridge, 226-7; Mercer, 231-2.

  2 Stanley, 107,147-8, 153-4, 157.164,196, 287; Mercer, II, 38, 215; Simpson, 86-7,156; Lady Shelley, I, 94; Danilewsky, 242-3; Kausler, 408-9; Koch, I, 419, 423; Fain, 164-5; cit. Alison,

  her lawless claims to the Low Countries, Switzerland, Germany, Italy and Malta, she was still left with territories greater than those of Louis XIV. Through an unparalleled act of magnanimity on the part of Great Britain she was given back all but one of the overseas colonies won from her in the past eleven years.1 Despite Prussian protests she was not even asked for an indemnity or made to disgorge the stolen art-treasures with which she had filled her galleries.

  This forbearance by the rulers of monarchical Europe was not popular with their subjects. Even the easy-going British found it hard at times to stomach. Ever since most of them could remember, mankind had been tormented by this warlike race whom they had come to regard as a set of bloody-minded, thieving monkeys. The saintly Wilberforce himself thought the French should be made to pay an indemnity and suffer a little of what they had inflicted on others. But, like all the victors, Britain was governed by rulers bred from birth to great affairs and answerable only to those with their own advantages of education and independent property. They had been trained to take the long view and could afford to do so. Aware from experience of the follies of the past, they carefully refrained from rousing the French, as a generation earlier, by threats to dismember their territory. Their prescription for peace was a regimen not of punishment but of quietude.

  For this they turned to the old monarchy which the French had repudiated. Nothing could be more pacific than the Bourbons who during the war had been sheltering in England. Wellington complained that the only field in which they seemed to wish to appear was in a good house in London. When the Due d'Angouleme arrived in Bordeaux his first request was for a British guard to protect him from his countrymen. Such princes were scarcely likely, the rulers of Britain reflected, to lead France in a new crusade for military glory.

  The difficulty was to make them acceptable to a people who, after so much upheaval and glory, had almost forgotten their existence. The head of the family was a stout, gouty and prematurely aged man, Louis-Stanislas-Xavier, the brother of the guillotined Louis XVI. His ruling passion was gastronomy, of which he was almost as fine a connoisseur as Napoleon of war. It was his lament—though a

  1 Of all her many conquests from France since 1793 Britain retained only Tobago, St. Lucia and Mauritius, the first two already ceded by the Peace of Amiens.

  needless one—that its practice had died with the Revolution, his pride that, amid the penury and shifts of exile, he had managed to keep it alive. His devotion to this civilised art had cost him the use of his legs: though still under sixty, he was so fat that he could not stand without swaying, while equitation, the traditional exercise of kings, had ceased to be possible for him except with the help of a crane. "A perfect walking sore," Wellington described him, "not a part of his body sound; even his head let out a sort of humour."1 Under this enormous and feeble exterior, he concealed a kindly nature, a scholarly intelligence, much good humour, and a shrewd, cool judgment—virtues not unsuited to the role he was called upon to play. But as a symbol of loyalty for a warlike people, wedded to military glory, he lacked appeal. After Napoleon le Grand, a Louis le Gros was too much.

  A few years earlier, the Comte de Lille, as he then styled himself, driven from his last refuge on the Continent, had seemed without a friend in the world. Then in 1811, after Wellington's expulsion of the French from Portugal, the Prince Regent, challenging the parvenu splendour of Erfurt with his own revivalist version of the ancien regime, had toasted him at a fete at Carlton House where more than two thousand hereditary princes and nobles sat down at tables ornamented with rivers bridged by jewelled pagodas. This symbolic breach with the policy of Pitt, who had always insisted that, in resisting Revolutionary aggression, Britain should support no government unacceptable to the French people, was partly inspired by the Regent's romantic wish to play the grand seigneur and pose as a patron of the legitimist conception. But it expressed also the growing conviction of Pitt's successors and of thinking Englishmen generally that there could be no peace while Napoleon remained on the French throne.

  Yet, with their enemy controlling almost the entire Continent, anything more than a gesture would have been quixotic; whatever the Regent's chivalrous impulses, his Ministers were realists. The Comte de Lille and his suite of needy exiles withdrew for the next three years to a mansion in the Vale of Aylesbury where they lived a caricature of the vanished life of Versailles in a vast number of minute cubicles, erected to maintain the etiquette of court life. Here

  1 Stanhope, 32. See Auckland, IV, 405; Ncvill, 179-80; Bonapartism, 64; Havelock, 273; Greville, I, 179-80; Gronow, II, 38; Harriet Granville, I, 103; Wansey, 104; Lady Shelley, I, 54; Dudley, 255; Farington, VII, 243.

  they shivered in the winter mists, hobnobbed with the local gentry and consoled themselves with rumours.1

  No one was more astonished than Louis le Desire, as his more romantic supporters called him, when he learnt that Napoleon's Senate of wealthy profiteers and regicides had proclaimed him King. At the time of this apotheosis he was suffering from an attack of gout brought on by the consumption of a turkey stuffed with chestnuts. As soon as his legs permitted him to move he left

  "calm Hartwell's green abode,

  Apician table and Horatian ode"

  on the first stage of his journey to his capital. After an uproarious yeoman welcome in Aylesbury market-place and a halt at the King's Arms, Berkhamsted, to pay his respect to his old wayside flirt, Polly Page, the landlord's daughter, he reached the Abercorn Arms at Stanmore just as Napoleon, bidding a histrionic farewell to the Eagles, began his journey to Elba. Here the Prince Regent in full and florid wig, with postilions in white, was waiting to feast him with his chefs' choicest culinary. Then, with horse-trumpeters in gold lace and a troop of the Blues riding before and half the gentry of Middlesex behind, the stout royal pair drove together into the victorious British capital. Everyone in Hyde Park was wearing white cockades, the good-humoured Cockneys, as the disgusted Byron wrote, acclaiming Louis the Gouty as he wheeled into Piccadilly "with all the pomp and rabblement of royalty." At Grillon's Hotel in Albemarle Street he was lifted out of his coach, and, when he had recovered, received his principal sympathisers, dragging his vast body down the centre of a respectful avenue and sinking into a golden chair decorated with fleurs de lys. Fanny Burney, who was presented to him, was struck by the sweetness and dignity of his expression and the grateful way in which he signalled out the English before the French. He even made a little speech in which he declared that he owed his restoration to the throne of his ancestors solely to their victories.2 A fortnight later he entered his capital. The ceremony took so

  1 When Greville visite
d Hartwell in the summer of Salamanca he noted with a titter that after dinner every princess and duchess frugally tied up her napkin with a bit of ribbon and bore it away. See Auckland, IV, 418; Fowler, 107.

  8 Ashton, I, 251-5; D'Arblay, III, 276-87; Fowler, 107-8; Havelock, 272-3; Moore, Byron, 248; Farington, VII, 240, 244; Nicolson, 106-7; Creevey Papers, I, 190; Berry, III, 11; Lady Shelley, I, 54; Gomm, 366.

  long that one spectator fell asleep in the middle of it. There was a great deal of embroidery and sheeting hung from the windows, the imperial eagles—now styled "vile cuckoos"—were disguised in white silk cravats, and the streets were lined by the bourgeois National Guard. The cortege, which was led by the city fathers and a troop of young ladies in white ball-dresses strewing lilies, moved at a snail's pace and consisted mostly of returning Emigres in National Guard uniform. It was all a little marred by the unfeeling behaviour of a picket of Russian grenadiers who marched across the processional route changing guard, and by the sullen looks of Napoleon's veterans who presented arms with such ferocious emphasis that they almost caused a panic. After attending High Mass at Notre Dame, the King, bareheaded, drove past the spot on which his brother had been executed. In the courtyard of the Tuileries, where Napoleon had been wont to review his troops, he was laboriously lifted on to the saddle of a quiet horse from which he bowed—to the crowd— "very gracefully for a personage of his size." During the ceremony his niece, the Duchess of Angouleme, daughter of the murdered King, wept continuously.

  For there was so much that this unexpected restoration could not restore. It could not restore the dead from the guillotine. It could not restore the estates of exiled nobles confiscated or sold for a song to land-hungry peasants. It could not efface the spectacle of traitors and regicides in high places. It had been negotiated under protection of foreign bayonets by the legal representatives of those who had murdered the King's predecessor. Its chief architect was Napoleon's Chancellor, the renegade bishop, Talleyrand-Perigord.

  It was a constitutional restoration on conditions—a return not to 1789 but to some elusive hour in 1791 when the responsible bourgeois leaders of reform and a humanitarian King were to have made a bloodless marriage between the old age and the new. This was not congenial to Emigres, who, having lost everything, had looked to the restoration of their properties and requital for their dead—satisfactions which such a compromise rendered impossible. "This Senate of regicides is a bitter pass," wrote one of them; "if it was composed of honest people it might go down, but murderers and rogues are too much." Still less was it palatable to those royalists, disciples of the great Chateaubriand, who in their imaginations had transmuted the sordid shifts and privations of exile into a glorious martyrdom and the dream of restoration into a second Redemption.

  For the restoration was unreal. It was an attempt to restore a past no longer capable of restoration. After the Marseillaise there could be no going back to the gavotte. Elsewhere, now that the invader had been expelled, the embers of the eighteenth century could be fanned into new, if not enduring life. But in France the gulf between 1789 and 1814 was too wide. The pride and absurdity of the returning nobles could not be tolerated by a people who had proved the equality of birth in the bloodstained Paris streets and on a hundred battlefields. When Gaston de Montmorency declared that he would never marry in an age unworthy of Montmorencys, the French people merely laughed.1 The great houses and salons of the Faubourg St. Germain were based on dying memories; the broad acres on which they had rested had been for a quarter of a century in the hands of a sturdy peasantry and could only be recovered by civil war. The glance of unutterable disdain cast by some old Duchesse of the Restoration upon the youthful belles of the Chaussee d’ Antin or the widows of Napoleon's army of heroes, wrote Stendhal, was returned with amused contempt. It was an aristocracy, not of the living but of the grave. It could not even pay its way. Being needy, the returning emigres were stingy. For a generation they had pinched in foreign lodgings; they went on doing so when they returned to the noble faubourg. A nation of materialists was not impressed.

  Nor had it much use for the restoration of religion. There were plenty of pious folk, especially among the elderly, to hang their houses with tapestry when the Host was carried through the sanded streets; in the remoter provinces there was even a revival of religious intolerance, and in the hot south a few Protestants were beaten up. But in most places the churches—some of them still bearing imperfectly effaced inscriptions of the Terror—were attended only by old women. The male population seemed to have grown indifferent to religion. The shops, after an attempt by the authorities to close them, continued open on Sundays; so far as the Sabbath was kept at all by the new generation of Frenchmen, it was merely as a holiday. When the King passed under the imperial frescoes of Austerlitz on his. way to the Tuileries chapel, his tails upheld by

  1 The King's nephew, the Due de Berry, even spoke of Wellington as an upstart. Dudley, 290, Gronow, I, 111-12; II, 42-3, 286; Brownlow, 136; Festing, 196; Lord Coleridge, 253-4,

  Napoleon's time-serving Marshals and his broad stern and waistband string exposed to the public gaze, the French people greeted the devout spectacle with a snicker. It was not the meek Galilean that they worshipped now.1

  Many English folk, sallying across the Channel for the first time for eleven years, saw France in that summer of 1814. It was a strange sensation to land on a soil so long forbidden. Here were the voluble people the cartoonists had pictured; the little, bony, brigand-like soldiers in their ragged uniforms, patched breeches and big cocked-hats; the screaming, chattering boatmen making more noise in five minutes than the crew of a British man-of-war in a year; the witch-like old fishwives, hook-nosed, snuffy and wrinkled, with their short petticoats and wooden shoes—a species, Hay don thought, neither born of woman nor made for man, but adapted for no other purpose but to pull boats, drag wheelbarrows, and abuse Napoleon.

  Much to English eyes seemed curiously old-fashioned, as though time had slipped back a generation. While in England social life had been forging ahead under the stimulus of an unparalleled individual energy, in so-called revolutionary France provincial society, dominated first by the Terror and then by a centralised military despotism, seemed to have stagnated. In contrast to the new Brighton with its elegant residences facing the ocean, its smart bathing-boxes, libraries, shops, assembly rooms, dashing tandems and graceful terraces, Dieppe was an ancient, fishy, smelly, medieval town with its back to the sea and sewers flowing down its ditch-like streets. Visitors were assailed by packs of beggars with open sores and whining children who followed their carriages, throwing somersaults and screeching out what they regarded as acceptable anti-Bonapartist sentiments. The inns on the road were smelly hovels crawling with vermin, and even the grander establishments, though their furniture was gilded, had greasy floors, unswept hearths and piles of horse-dung at the doors. There was little privacy and no sanitation, no basin-stands, no coffee, tea or sugar. And though the main roads, straight as spears and lined with fruit-trees, had been improved out

  1 Mercer, II, 191, 232; Haydon, I, 269-72: Simpson, 160; Marlay Letters, 226-7; Wansey, 95-7; Alsop, 26; Stanley, 102, 139,188; Lord Coleridge, 228; Farington, VIII, 206; De Selincburt, II, 902; Lady Shelley. I. 89.

  of recognition by Napoleon's military engineers, the means of private travel was antediluvian. Clumsy, ill-sprung voitures jolted over the pave behind wretched cattle bestridden by dirty postilions cracking enormous whips, and the diligences, lumbering along like Noah's Arks at four miles an hour, took two days to reach the capital from Calais.

  The countryside seemed to have been depopulated by the wars: one traveller calculated that there were twelve women working by the roadside to every man. In their high, white, conical, flapping bonnets, wooden shoes and scarlet petticoats these made a picturesque appearance, apt to be dispelled on a closer view by their wizened faces and moustaches. Their homes were mud hovels, and their methods of cultivating the interminable, hedgeless fields, wi
th their horizons of straggling apple-trees, were by English notions primitive.1

  As travellers approached Paris everything wore a deserted, forlorn look. Compared with the elegant environs of London there was no bustle of trade, little to indicate the neighbourhood of a great city. Even the luxurious chateaux of the Napoleonic contractors were in ruins with shuttered windows and broken gates. The northern entrance was as sudden as it was dismal: a rough, wooden palisade to keep out straggling Cossacks, a tall, ominous gateway guarded by soldiers, an idle knot of red-capped blackguards with enormous earrings glaring from a doorway, and then a labyrinth of high, crazy, crumbling, medieval houses with pointed roofs and fantastic gables shutting out the sky. Down the centre of the narrow, villainously-paved roadways trickled streams of stinking water. Overhead ancient lanterns, slung from ropes, swayed in the wind.

  In these dark streets, ankle-deep in mud, swarmed the fiery, excitable, braggart race which had conquered Europe. The babel of the crowds and the shaking of the carts was deafening. The men, with their tails dragging behind them, looked like monkeys: the women, ogling through their veils beneath gigantic casques of straw and flowers, were lappeted like Friesland hens. Nobody dressed for the filthy theatres: even the rich spat on the floor and used the points of their knives as toothpicks. A city of grimacing, posturing blackguards, it seemed to the English upper classes, in which no one had