Dancing to the Precipice Read online

  Old procedures and old assumptions were unravelling, one after the other. Nobility, clergy, bourgeoisie and the people were all indignant and angry; together, they were discovering a vocabulary of protest in the Enlightenment’s ideas about social contracts and the rights of man. While a new constitution was being drafted, the King, influenced by the Queen and some of the court, summoned troops under the Duc de Broglie to gather round Paris and Versailles. Frédéric, garrisoned at Valenciennes 200 kilometres away, was not among them. Mirabeau and Necker, warning that this would send a very threatening message to the Third Estate, urged the King to show more restraint. Instead, he took the dangerous step of dismissing Necker, with orders that he should leave France in secret.

  When the news of his disgrace was confirmed, the theatres in Paris, as if after a national disaster, closed. Two hundred thousand people took to the streets, shouting his name. Lucie, who was staying at a country house just outside Paris with the princesses combinées, had lived through Frédéric’s many discussions about the perils facing France, through the bread riots and the attack on the wallpaper factory, all without great fear of the future. Now she was suddenly struck with a sense of foreboding. It was not simply Necker’s resignation, but the speed with which he had fled the country and the volatile mood of the crowd who called for his return, that seemed to her so ominous.

  Paris was full of rumours. In the coffee houses, in the streets, orators were making speeches about liberty. With every twist and turn, every rumour and conjecture, there was more talk, more ill temper. In the Palais-Royal, the shops selling political pamphlets were mobbed. Home to the defiantly hostile Duc d’Orléans, who seemed to have distanced himself from the rest of the royal family, the Palais-Royal had become the centre for much of the growing disorder. The Duke had provided food and shelter to those driven on to the streets by hunger, but both Lucie and Frédéric suspected that his real aim was to increase his own popularity with the people by ostentatious shows of generosity. The King, by contrast, Lucie observed, was ‘hidden away at Versailles, or busy out hunting in the nearby forests’, suspecting nothing, foreseeing nothing, and believing nothing that he was told. ‘The court,’ noted Lucie, ‘stricken sublimely blind, could not see disaster approaching.’

  On 12 July, in the celebrated Café Foy in the Palais-Royal, with the crowds clamouring for Necker’s return, Camille Desmoulins, a fiery 26-year-old journalist from Picardy, jumped on to a table and shouted: ‘To arms, to arms’, and, seizing up some leaves from one of the Palais-Royal’s chestnut trees, called out, ‘Let us all take a green cockade, the colour of hope.’

  The following day, Lucie, who had been invited by Mme de Montesson to her country house at Berny, two hours from Versailles, decided to send her saddle horses with her English groom on ahead, by way of Paris. Next day, leaving the Princesse d’Hénin at the Ménagerie, and taking with her just a maid and a manservant, she set out by carriage for Berny through the forest of Verrières, a long, lonely drive. There had been a violent storm, and there were fallen trees along the way. So calm was Versailles, so sure that the King’s troops were in control in the plain of Paris and its surroundings, that there was no anxiety about her journey. ‘That fact alone,’ Lucie wrote, ‘shows the degree of our extraordinary unawareness.’ Frédéric was still at Valenciennes with his regiment.

  Lucie was surprised when she arrived at Berny to find the château deserted and the doors locked. Eventually a doorkeeper appeared, in a state of great agitation. Mme de Montesson, he told her, had sent word to say that she had been unable to leave Paris, that the city was in a state of turmoil, and that the gates had been barricaded. The Guardsmen, far from standing up to the rioters, had gone over to the mob. Lucie, overriding the fears and objections of the grooms and servants, ordered her carriage to put back to Versailles ‘at a fast gallop’. Along the way, she heard more stories about an uprising on the streets of Paris, with the rebellious Gardes apparently now all sporting Desmoulins’s green cockades. At the Ménagerie, she found the Princesse d’Hénin still in bed, unaware that anything had happened. What worried Lucie most, at this stage, was the fate of the English groom she had despatched to Paris, of whom there was no news.

  It was only the next morning, 15 July, that Lucie and the Princesse went to the palace and found Frédéric’s father, M. de la Tour du Pin. He told them that the Bastille, the fortress that had become the symbol of despotism and the hated secret du roi, had been stormed by local people, disaffected soldiers and members of the Gardes, with weapons and two cannons seized from the royal storehouse. Its seven prisoners had been freed, but 83 people had died in the fighting. The prison governor, Bernard-René de Launey, had been spat on, knocked down, then murdered with knives and bayonets. His head, hacked off with a pocket-knife, was being paraded through the streets on a pike by a crowd of chanting, drunken men and women. Calonne’s 10-feet walls and customs houses, encircling the city, had also been attacked. Paris was now in the hands of the insurgents. The Gardes had been disbanded and the disaffected soldiers sent to garrisons in the provinces where, Lucie would write, ‘they spread that same fatal spirit of insubordination that they had learned in Paris and which thereafter could not be stamped out’. Next day, Lafayette, hero of the American wars, was put at the head of a newly formed Garde Nationale, in order to try to restore order to the city.

  Two days earlier, the Duc de Liancourt, one of the more liberal members of the nobility, a friend of Frédéric’s and a founder of the Society of Thirty, had come to Versailles to report to the King on the disturbances in Paris. ‘Is this a revolt?’ the King had asked. ‘No, sire,’ the Duke had replied, ‘this is a revolution.’

  CHAPTER FIVE

  The Dismantling of Paris

  Even as the revolution was unfolding, most Frenchmen still believed that nothing drastic or fundamental would befall France. In the eerie but brief calm that immediately followed the fall of the Bastille, Frédéric obtained leave from his regiment to take Lucie to the waters at Forges-les-Eaux, in Normandy. She had never fully recovered from the birth of her stillborn second baby and the doctors, fearing that damage to her kidneys might mean that she would not be able to have more children–‘a possibility that reduced me to despair’–had recommended a month in the countryside. Later, Lucie would remember these days as some of the happiest of her life. Forges was surrounded by forests. They spent their days riding through sunlit clearings and along grassy tracks; in the evenings, while Lucie sewed, Frédéric read aloud, setting a pattern they would follow all their lives. She was always eager to learn; Frédéric, who was an ‘indefatigable reader’, was a good teacher.

  Their tranquillity did not last long. In the countryside, a sense of panic was catching fire. It was prompted by anxiety about the forthcoming harvest, by the expectations raised by the Estates General, and by a spirit of simmering hostility against the nobility and the clergy that had found expression and legitimacy in the cahiers de doléances. Towards the end of July, these grievances burst out into what became known as the Great Fear. It was grounded not in facts but in rumours and fantasy–that the Austrians were attacking from the Netherlands, that Spaniards were marching on Bordeaux, that brigands had been recruited by the nobility to destroy the livelihoods of those calling for reform. But while it lasted it was unpredictable and terrifying. A sudden dust storm, an unfamiliar rider, a deranged beggar, all were enough to cause women and children to hide in cellars and attics, and men to arm themselves with pitchforks and sickles. At one village in Champagne, men mobilised to confront a reported gang of bandits: it turned out to be a herd of cows.

  In Forges, Lucy and Frédéric had taken rooms on the first floor of a house on the main road between Dieppe and Neufchâtel. At seven o’clock on the morning of 28 July, precisely two weeks after the attack on the Bastille, Lucie was standing at the window waiting for Frédéric, who had gone to the waters, when a crowd burst into the square below, the women wailing, the men shouting and gesticulating. In their
midst was a dishevelled rider, on a lathered, dappled horse. The man began to harangue the crowd, saying that the Austrians were advancing on the nearby town of Gaillefontaine, and would soon reach Forges; then he galloped away to spread the news.

  By temperament not given to panic, Lucie hurried outside and tried to reason with the crowd, pointing out that France was not at war with Austria. At the church door, she encountered the local priest, about to ring the tocsin, and she was still there clutching his cassock, trying to prevent his getting to the bells, when Frédéric, alerted by Lucie’s English groom, arrived and took charge. Telling the assembled people that they would ride to Gaillefontaine themselves to find out what was happening, Frédéric, Lucie and the groom, who complained that the French had clearly gone mad, set off at a canter.

  It took them an hour to reach Gaillefontaine. As they entered the town, they were challenged by a man with a rusty pistol who demanded to know whether the Austrians were at Forges. On being assured that they were not, he led them to the main square, where another agitated crowd awaited. At this moment, a prosperous-looking villager, pointing at Lucie, set up a cry: ‘It’s the Queen!’ Immediately, Lucie’s horse was surrounded by angry, menacing women. Fortunately, a young locksmith’s apprentice had recently been in Versailles and explained, as Lucie wrote later, that Marie Antoinette was at least ‘twice as old and twice as large’. Lucie and Frédéric were released and hastened back to Forges, where the worried inhabitants were still waiting for news of the Austrian advance.

  They had escaped very lightly. Others were not as fortunate, though how true the stories of violence were no one could be sure. All over France, the politics of paranoia were feeding into the settling of old scores. Châteaux were set on fire and their contents looted; the symbols of the ancien régime had become targets, and none more so than the nobility and their possessions. It was rumoured that a 94-year-old marchioness was thrown on to a smoking stack and died watching her servants distributing her linen, furniture and porcelain. One countess was said to have been strangled; another to have had her teeth broken. A princess and her two young daughters were reported to have been tied naked to trees. When Mme de Montesu, held and tormented all day by men and women she had known all her life, and whom she believed liked her, begged for a drink of water, she was–so it was said–dragged across the courtyard and drowned in the pond. A collective frenzy gripped France. Even in normal times, the 4,000 men of the provincial constabulary, the maréchaussée, would have been totally inadequate. As it was, they did almost nothing.

  At Versailles, M. de la Tour du Pin, Frédéric’s father, had been appointed Minister for War. Regarded by the liberal aristocrats as loyal and level-headed, he was pleased to be offered the position because he had long been a critic of corruption in government and genuinely believed that aspects of the ancien régime, if reformed, might yet prove the basis of a legimate, functioning monarchy. A portrait of him, painted around this time by Greuze, showed a genial-looking man, with an oval face, heavy dark eyebrows and a small, neat wig. Her father-in-law’s appointment was the beginning of Lucie’s own public life. Still only 19, but accustomed to the Archbishop’s large and sumptuous receptions, she was put in charge, together with her sister-in-law Cécile de Lameth, of the household in the ministry on the first floor of the south wing of the Court of Ministers. Every week, the two young women, seated at either end of a long table, played hostess to members of the rechristened Constituent Assembly, taking care to place the most important guests on either side of them. Wives were not invited.

  Versailles was emptying. The first to go, encouraged by the King and Queen, who felt it prudent for the objects of public hatred to distance themselves from France, were the much-loathed Polignac family, who left for Switzerland. Soon after, to Koblenz, went the King’s brother, the Comte d’Artois, and his wife, and after them the Princes of the Blood, Conti and Condé, and their families. ‘Emigration,’ noted Lucie drily, ‘became all the vogue.’ Carriages were seen trundling out of the palace, full of retainers and servants, laden high with baggage. ‘The Queen’s entourage have dispersed and become fugitives,’ wrote a diplomat in a despatch. ‘Several of her women have abandoned her, in the cruellest manner.’ There would certainly be misery in the capital before long, he went on, with so many rich customers departed. ‘I do not believe that the winter will pass without bitter scenes.’ Paris, he added, looked deserted, with an air of having been ‘dismantled’. Terror ‘is painted on every face’.

  Among the nobles who had, for the moment, no intention of emigrating, were many who, like Frédéric and his father, were genuinely liberal in their aspirations for France, and believed in the possibility of a constitutional monarchy, along English lines, in which the king would govern, rather than rule, under a new constitution respectful of all people’s rights. These ‘gentilhommes démocrates’ included not only the de Lameth brothers, but Lafayette and Mirabeau, and many of the young officers who had served in America with Arthur Dillon and Frédéric. ‘Never had the aristocracy,’ the historian Hippolyte Taine would write in his history of the revolution, ‘been more liberal, more humane, more in sympathy with useful reform.’

  Lafayette, still only 32, a youthful figure on his white charger and with his large military epaulettes, had been the first, even before the fall of the Bastille, to propose a Declaration of Rights, on the American model. All through July and August 1789 the new Constituent Assembly haggled over the question of how you could invest a nation, rather than its ruler, with political sovereignty, and how dismantle the ancient privileged fabric of Bourbon polity and put in its place a set of laws based on liberty and equality.

  But the nobles, too, were now carried away by the flood of their own rhetoric. On 4 August, in what the Comte de Ferrièrres would later describe as a ‘moment of patriotic drunkenness’, dukes, marquises, counts and bishops voted to give up tithes, dues, benefices and proprietary regiments. In the Assembly, Trophime-Gérard de Lally-Tollendal, the Princesse d’Hénin’s new lover, sent a note across to the President. ‘They are not in their right minds, adjourn the session.’ But there was no halting the drive to collective abnegation. The deputies would never forget the night on which they gave away their patrimony. By mid-August, France’s feudal ancien régime was in pieces. It had been manifestly unfair; but the speed with which it was dismantled was terrifying.

  The frenzy of dispossession hit Lucie hard. ‘It was,’ she said later, ‘a veritable orgy of iniquity.’ Much of the considerable de la Tour du Pin fortune lay in its seigneurial dues. ‘Everything,’ Lucie would write, ‘was swept away’, though for the time being neither she nor Frédéric realised the extent of their loss, not least because they were both convinced that a fairer France would emerge. As Minister for War, M. de la Tour du Pin still received a handsome salary; Lucie’s receptions at Versailles continued, to which she added smaller dinner parties on two other nights each week. Despite her young age, Lucie was treated kindly by the wives and daughters of the other ministers.

  Since the recall of Necker in response to public pressure, Mme Necker was again presiding over a political salon, at which her daughter Germaine de Staël was the rising star. Lucie found her a curious mixture of ‘virtue and vice’ and noted shrewdly that Mme de Staël, though genuinely intellectual in her interests, was far more pleased by attention to the ‘beauty of her embrace’ and would abandon herself, instantly and without a struggle, to passion. At their frequent meetings, Mme de Staël repeatedly asked Lucie why she did not take more pleasure in her excellent figure and her unblemished complexion, saying that had she possessed them she would ‘have wanted to rouse the world’. Lucie replied with characteristic directness that she could see no point in dwelling on them, since they would so soon disappear with age. What Mme de Staël found hardest to understand, she told Lucie, was the younger woman’s excessive love for Frédéric and her willingness to ‘act in accordance with the ideals of devotion, self-sacrifice, abnegation and courage’, i
n short, to sacrifice herself to his every wish. ‘It seems to me,’ she said to the younger girl, ‘that you love him as a lover.’ Even now, with the revolution turning upside down all ideas about society, the nuances of 18th-century fidelity hung on. To show such evident love for one’s husband was unusual, even a little absurd; but among her contemporaries Lucie was unusual, sometimes disconcertingly so.

  Lucie was, to her immense pleasure, pregnant for the third time. Feeling well and healthy, refusing to dwell on her two lost babies, she pronounced herself confident that this one would survive. M. de la Tour du Pin had been given a stable of 12 horses, which he seldom took out himself, and she and Cécile spent the fine afternoons of late summer driving out in the forests of Versailles. It was sometimes as if the Bastille had never fallen. One day she was asked to take the collection at a ceremony for the blessing of the standards belonging to the newly formed Garde Nationale of Versailles. It was, she noted, a ‘very magnificent and solemn ceremony’ and it was attended by the entire military corps of Versailles, but it left her uneasy. Though she put on a ‘pretty toilette’ and was much complimented at the dinner she gave afterwards, she was deeply mistrustful of the Gardes, drawn from among the messengers and staff of the various ministries, now armed to the teeth and clearly averse to any kind of discipline. Even musicians were in uniform. One night a well-known singer came to perform a motet at court in the uniform of a captain. There was also a children’s battalion, nominally commanded by the Dauphin; they wore tiny grenadier bearskin caps and manoeuvred light 1-pound cannons around the park.

  From Paris, while the Assembly in Versailles was struggling to fashion a constitution of rights ‘for all times and all nations’, there came daily news of small riots, sparked by hunger and the growing shortage of flour, and fanned by an outpouring of pamphlets, papers and journals. With the proclamation on 24 August of the Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen, and its assertion that men were born and remained ‘free and equal in rights’, the old system of censorship was breaking apart. The subculture of Enlightenment publishing, so long underground, was surfacing into the light of day from back alleys, prison cells and hidden attics, and from across foreign borders. Pamphlets and news-sheets, so ephemeral that many lasted no longer than a couple of issues, were produced by printers on hand-presses working all day and long into the night by candlelight. They were read, handed around and discussed, noisily and with passion, in the hundreds of cafés opening all over the city, visited, for the first time, by women as well as men. As Jacques-Pierre Brissot, editor of the Patriote Français, put it, ‘it was necessary to enlighten ceaselessly the minds of the people, not through voluminous and well-reasoned works, because people do not read them, but through little works…’. In 1789 alone, 184 new journals appeared. They would serve, said Brissot, to ‘teach the truth at the same moment to millions of men’, something that had never happened in such a way before, and they would lead men to discuss them ‘without tumult’ and to reach calm decisions. The lack of tumult would soon prove little more than an illusion.