Frivolity, Filth and Fortitude

Among the excesses marking the dying days of the Bourbon ancien régime before it was swept away by the French Revolution was a craze for ridiculous hats. These structures elevated already flamboyant society coiffures to a level bordering on lunacy. Constructed from materials such as papier-mâché́, feathers and silk, they were worn to mark con- temporary events, from the death of a fêted individual to innovations such as ballooning. However, in a crowded field of eccentricity none could match the Duchesse de Lauzun who entered Mme du Deffand’s salon sporting an ‘entire tableau consisting of a stormy sea, ducks swimming near the shore and a man with a gun sprouting from her head. Above, on the crown, stood a mill with the miller’s wife being seduced by a priest, while over one ear the miller could be seen leading his donkey.’

Away from Mme du Deffand’s salon, in the Saint-Joseph convent on Paris’s Rue Saint- Dominique, lay a world of unremitting squalor. Cramped streets ran with mephitic rivers of rainwater, sewage and acid mud; dead animals festered in stagnant pools; the stench of urine, faeces and putrefying decay oozing from broken graves and filthy basements was overpowering; typhus, typhoid and smallpox were rampant. In the countryside, where peasant families shackled to a feudal system could live in a single room subsisting on bread and watery soup, children were sometimes smothered as they could not be fed. In 1770 alone more than 6,000 babies were abandoned in doorways and church porches. Frivolity and filth lay behind the French Revolution. It is estimated that almost a thousand books have been written about this extraordinary historical spasm. However, few can be so personal and revealing as the record left by the French aristocrat Lucie de La Tour du Pin who, in 1850, began to write for her only surviving child a memoir of her ‘troubled and restless life’. Troubled and restless indeed: as an apprentice lady-in-waiting to Marie Antoinette, Lucie witnessed defining moments of the Revolution, saw family and friends perish in the Jacobin Terror and grievously suffered, after ten pregnancies, from the deaths of five of six children who survived birth. She fled the Terror to forge a new life farming in the backwoods of newly independent America, then to England, before returning to France to join the court of Napoleon. Her friends ranged from Lafayette to Talleyrand and Wellington, and she lived through the succeeding reigns of Louis XVIII, Charles X and Louis-Philippe before dying in 1853, aged 83, at the dawn of Louis-Napoléon’s Second Empire. By nature, Lucie was reserved and level-headed. She did not hide behind her memoir but she did contain herself. Happily, in Caroline Moorehead’s biography, Dancing to the Precipice (2009), the observer returns to us observed. Her character is given form and her experiences context, enabling us to meet a shrewd chronicler of momentous times and a resilient survivor of public and private tragedy. Along the way, Moorehead portrays a nation in violent transition – its enthusiasms, intrigues, personalities and politics. It is a terrific read, told with the insight of a historian and the flair of a novelist. Born in February 1770, in the fashionable Faubourg Saint- Germain district of Paris, Lucie was descended from the Irish Dillons of Roscommon. Although her mother Thérèse-Lucy was ‘as sweet tempered as an angel’, she recalled ‘I had no real childhood.’ Her soldier father Arthur was frequently away and Thérèse was in thrall to her own mother, Lucy de Rothe, a termagant incapable of displaying affection. But however cheerless life was at home, the family enjoyed a privileged existence. Thérèse was a lady-in-waiting to Marie Antoinette and, with her husband and mother, a guest at intellectual salons run by forward-thinking women such as Mme du Duffand. Lucie herself flourished under the guidance of her inspirational tutor, M. Combes, and a curiosity for the world, a love of conversation and an appreciation of taste and decorum never left her. Lucie was 12 when her mother died at 29. For the next five years, she stoically endured life with Mme de Rothe. ‘Not one day passed without my shedding bitter tears,’ she wrote. Release came at 17 when she married Frédéric de Gouvernet, a wealthy young aristocrat officer suggested as a match by her caring but absent father. Although they had not met, Lucie had no hesitation in accepting Frédéric’s proposal. ‘It was an instinct, a guidance from above,’ she said. ‘I felt that I belonged to him, that my whole life was his.’ From this improbable start emerged a loving relationship that lasted for half a century. As the new Comtesse de Gouvernet, Lucie was admitted into Marie Antoinette’s household at Versailles, so allowing us an entertaining glimpse of the court’s stifling etiquette and preposterous fashions. Despite miscarrying one baby and giving birth to another stillborn, Lucie threw herself into court and diplomatic life, enjoying a last heedless year of agreeable society when Frédéric was briefly appointed Minister for Holland. She was young, confident and in love. Years later, the Vicomtesse de Noailles would recall: ‘While we waited for catastrophe society, social life, was delicious.’ Lucie put it more shrewdly: ‘Amid all these pleasures, we were laughing and dancing our way to the precipice.’ Moorehead leads us over that precipice and into the chasm from the fall of the Bastille in 1789 to the end of the Terror in 1794, negotiating the complexities of the Revolution and giving us portraits of leading protagonists. Terrified, Lucie faced the mob of drunken fishwives who stormed Versailles (‘the cries of people being murdered rang in my head’). Meanwhile, her family was dispossessed of property while friends and relations prepared to leave the country as the ancien régime crumbled. In January 1792, Louis XVI was led to the guillotine. Lucie recalled that ‘the deepest silence lay like a pall over the city’. Marie Antoinette stumbled to the scaffold in August the following year, by which time some thirty citizens a day were being executed. With the Revolution ‘now all about me, dark, menacing, laden with danger’, Lucie, Frédéric and their 2-year-old son Humbert escaped to Bordeaux. But there was no sanctuary from the Terror. On 23 October, the city erected its own guillotine while revolutionary soldiers descended on homes in surprise swoops. Lucie, who had just given birth to baby Séraphine, was so fearful her milk dried up. With her father and father-in-law imprisoned in Paris and Frédéric in hiding after a warrant had been issued for his arrest, she lodged in a rundown apartment, dressing as a peasant woman. From her room, she could hear the crash of the plunging blade and, as the net tightened, flight again became imperative. In early March, Lucie and family boarded the Diana and sailed for Boston, taking with them – as you do – fifty bottles of Burgundy and a piano. On the crossing, in a symbolic gesture, Lucie cut off her long hair and threw it overboard, along with ‘all the frivolous ideas which my pretty fair curls had encouraged’. Unlike many of the 20,000 French exiles accustomed to elegant society, Lucie embraced the rough vigour of youthful America. Moving to a 150-acre farm outside Boston, she dressed simply, rose before sunrise and made her own clothes, butter and cream. Though an abolitionist, she was helped on the farm by four slaves whom she later freed. She socialized with the wealthy Schuyler and Rensselaer families while a surprise visitor from her past was the exiled Talleyrand, who came bearing a gift of Stilton. The horror she had fled resurfaced with the news that her father and her father-in-law had been executed. There was no escape either from further private tragedy: one morning 2-year-old Séraphine woke with a ‘paralysis’ of stomach and intestines. Hours later, she was dead, ‘the most unexpected . . . and most cruel blow that any mortal could endure’. With the death of Robespierre in July 1794, the Terror in Paris ended and word reached Lucie that sequestrated property was to be restored. Her American odyssey was over, but she left the country with deep foreboding. She had good reason: the countryside round Le Bouilh, her family home in the Gironde, was plagued by brigand- age and nowhere was safe. After less than two years, the family was again forced to flee the country following an attempted coup by monarchists with whom, as ci-devant nobility, they could be seen to be associated. They found sanctuary with Lucie’s aunt, Lady Jerningham, at her estate in Costessey, Norfolk. It was only with the fall of the Directory and the rise of Napoleon that Lucie and Frédéric felt safe enough to return once more to their homeland. Distantly related to the Empress Joséphine, Lucie slipped easily into the court of Napoleon which increasingly resembled that of Versailles in its absurd ritual. Napoleon appreciated both Lucie’s intrepid nature and her aristocratic background. In turn, she confessed that every time she saw him ‘my heart beat fast’. She would never again endure such horrors as those inflicted by the Revolution, and her memoir ends in 1815 with Napoleon’s exile to St Helena. But using unpublished correspondence, Moorehead charts the remaining years of this indomitable woman’s life which still danced between privilege and further heartbreak. Within just fourteen months, Humbert was killed in a duel and Lucie’s 17-year-old daughter Cécile died. Five years later, a second daughter, Charlotte, died at 26. Only Lucie’s last child, her son Aymar, was left and yet he, too, was a source of pain. After the impetuous young man joined the Vendée uprising in 1830, Frédéric leapt to his support and was jailed for three months in Bordeaux’s notorious prison, the Fort du Hâ. There, he was voluntarily joined by loyal Lucie. In her latter years, Lucie dressed only in black. Her children had always come first, at the expense of any close friendship, and the loss of so many was a secret grief she endured only through self-discipline and Frédéric’s support. When Frédéric died in 1837 after almost half a century of marriage, the hole in her heart was irreparable, leaving her ‘fighting as hard as I can against despair and hopelessness’. Lucie died soon after her eighty-third birthday in Pisa in 1853, by which time there was nothing left of the world that she had recorded. In a life studded with tragedy, uncertainty and danger she stayed faithful to the moral values of the Enlightenment. If, at heart, she remained an aristocrat, she was sympathetic to the idea of a reordered society, although deploring revolutionary excesses. Her bravery at a time when it seemed humanity had lost its reason was matched by her compassionate nature, her stoic endurance and her love of family. Moorehead brilliantly returns her to us not just as a witness to terrible times but as a woman of principle, morality and, above all, fortitude.  

Extract from Slightly Foxed Issue 80 © Patrick Welland 2023