Liberty: The Lives and Times of Six Women in Revolutionary France (49 page)

On 10 December a reception was held for Napoléon in the courtyard of the Luxembourg palace. When his distinctively simple carriage drew up, the crowds outside cried, ‘
Vive la République!
’ and ‘
Vive Napoléon!
’ Talleyrand introduced the victor of Austria and Italy to the audience of dignitaries gathered in the courtyard as the ‘son and hero of the Revolution…Far from fearing what some would call his ambition, I feel that the time will come perhaps when we must tear him away from his studious retreat.’ After Talleyrand’s hymn of praise, Napoléon allowed himself to be persuaded, with a great show of modesty, to speak a few terse words.

Talleyrand also gave a magnificent, old-fashioned ball in Joséphine’s honour on 3 January that heralded the return to Parisian society of the spirit of the ancien régime. As at Versailles, only the ladies were seated at dinner; they were personally served by the male guests, who stood behind their chairs. The treasures Napoléon had looted in Italy were on prominent display. A daring, delicious new dance imported
from Germany, the waltz, was danced in Paris for the first time that night.

After dinner Germaine, undeterred as ever, accosted Napoléon and asked him which woman he loved most. ‘Madame, I love my own,’ he replied stiffly. But which did he most admire? she persisted. ‘The one best able to look after her household,’ he said. Well, who was the greatest woman in history? ‘The one, Madame, who has had the greatest number of children,’ he replied, turning on his heel and leaving her, taken aback, to gasp, ‘Extraordinary man!’ at the small crowd of onlookers who had gathered to gape at the encounter.

It is unlikely that Thérésia attended Talleyrand’s ball because she had recently given birth to a stillborn baby, probably Barras’s, and had retreated at his suggestion to Grosbois to recuperate. An English visitor saw her at another party later in the month, looking, despite the pearls and diamonds in her hair, embattled, tired and preoccupied. Even republican wives disdained to visit her, he reported, and she was frequently exposed to unpleasant scenes and confrontations.

Recognizing that the time was not yet ripe for a seizure of power, Napoléon kicked his heels in Paris in the early months of 1798. When Talleyrand suggested that he invade Egypt, cutting off British routes to India and establishing a base from which to harry them in the Mediterranean, he adopted the idea enthusiastically. Between them, in March, they convinced a reluctant Directory to approve their notion, and secret plans were put in place for the campaign. The ambitious expedition was to be funded by annexing Switzerland and its rich resources of gold. Germaine managed to get an appointment with Napoléon to try to dissuade him from invading, but as ever with him her impassioned appeals fell on deaf ears. He would only repeat to her that the Swiss–who had been the happy citizens of a thriving republic for centuries–needed ‘political rights’.

Germaine returned to Coppet in time to be by her father’s side as they watched the French troops marching into Switzerland, listening to the army’s drums sounding out along the tranquil shores of Lake Geneva. By special order of the Directory, Necker was left undisturbed. For Germaine, the only positive consequence of the invasion was that Swiss citizens were automatically granted French citizenship. Against
her better judgement, her dreams of officially belonging to France had finally been realized.

Napoléon left France in May, mystery swirling around him like dust. Jean-Lambert Tallien followed a few weeks later. Tallien had lost his seat in the Council of Five Hundred and hoped, on foreign fields, to rebuild his career. The night before his departure, Victorine de Chastenay saw him at Barras’s, where he still came, she said, ‘with an appearance of friendship–but bitterness in his soul’. She had few hopes for her friend’s future; life in a camp ‘
sans épaulettes
’ would not be easy.

Tallien wanted a fresh start. The six years he had spent in the service of his country, he told his mother before leaving, had brought him nothing but ingratitude. Intriguers and rogues were the only people who flourished in times such as theirs, but he would never be either. He assured her that he would find friends among Napoléon’s companions; he intended to establish himself in the world not only for his own sake but also for his children’s. Circumstances demanded this heart-breaking separation from all he held dear, he said, but he was resolved to bear it and return to the bosom of his family a changed man in two years’ time.

As his letter to his mother showed, Tallien still hoped that he and Thérésia had a future together. After the catastrophic French defeat by the British under Nelson at the battle of the Nile on 1 August, which he watched from the shore, Tallien wrote to his wife. He did not know, he said, whether she had yet received his previous four letters. Life in Egypt was hard, he told her: far from home, deprived of water, food and sleep, tormented by insects of all descriptions, of the forty thousand Frenchmen there were not four who did not wish themselves elsewhere. As for him, he wrote, although he had their little dog Minerve with him, he missed ‘
notre charmante Chaumière
’ twenty times a day. ‘Farewell, my good Thérésia, the tears drench my letter,’ he concluded. ‘The memories of your goodness, of your love, the
hopes of finding you again still affectionate and faithful, of embracing my dear daughter, are the only things that sustain the unfortunate Tallien.’

The letter never reached Thérésia; it was intercepted by the British fleet. The following spring she began an affair with the young banker Gabriel Ouvrard, who had made his fortune in paper and then in supplying the French army and navy. They had known each other since the first careless days at La Chaumiére. Barras stood aside with no ill-will, having them to stay at Grosbois together. In Feburary 1799, according to Thérésia, Ouvrard took her to a beautifully fitted house on the rue de Babylone and handed her the keys; she said that he had bought it for her because she had helped him so much in his work. In fact it was Barras who had paid for the house. Apparently unaware of his wife’s new domestic arrangements, Tallien would remain in Egypt for three years.

He was away almost as long as Germaine, who stayed at Coppet with her father throughout the spring of 1798, to the delight of the republican press. ‘The baroness among baronesses, the pearl of her sex, the divinity of oligarchs, the favourite of the God of Constancy, the protectress of the
émigrés
, in a word, the universal woman has at last left France,’ hissed the journal
Amis des Lois
. ‘Hapless Frenchmen, you will not see her again.’

Over the next eighteen months Germaine made regular experimental forays back to Paris, retreating at hints from the police or warnings from friends, and never able to re-establish herself securely in France because the government made it clear to her that she was not welcome there. Her ‘intriguing’ was seen as perfidious and her writings incendiary. Hell, she wrote, began to appear to her ‘in the shape of exile’.

18

ICÔNE

Juliette Récamier

APRIL 1797–APRIL 1811

A serene light on a stormy scene.

F
RANÇOIS
-R
ENÉ DE
C
HATEAUBRIAND

I
N
J
UNE
1796, Benjamin Constant’s cousin Charles met Thérésia Tallien for the first time. Excitedly, he reported back that the most celebrated woman in Paris was ‘brilliant with youth and health’. She was wearing a dress tied beneath the breasts with a green and orange ribbon, and her necklace of enormous amber beads made it look as if she really had ‘a huge heart of gold’. In a clear voice vibrating with emotion, she regaled the gathering with what had clearly become her party piece, recounting her dreadful experiences during the Terror: her arrest at Versailles, being held for a day with nothing to eat or drink, forced to strip in front of eight Guardsmen and locked for twenty-five days in solitary confinement.

Two months later, as their friendship deepened, Thérésia showed Charles the letters she had written Tallien from prison. Constant, who found her beautiful and charming in person, was amazed to discover, on reading the letters, that they were vulgar, written in bad style and taste: ‘she speaks of her
caboche
[thick skull, noddle], her
carcasse
, she says
gibier de guillotine
[guillotine fodder], she describes her guards, she remembers so crudely the moments spent in Tallien’s arms.’ Seductive but unestimable, Constant said, Thérésia reminded him of Mme du Barry; but asked how she could have been otherwise, given the course her life had taken and the adulation that had been lavished upon her since her teens. He reported that she had been supplanted as the uncrowned queen of Directory society by the eighteen-year-old Juliette Récamier. Thérésia had, he said in November 1796, ‘reigned in peace until Juliette appeared’.

Thérésia’s successor was the chaste beauty who had been married at fifteen, at the height of the Terror, to the forty-one-year-old financier
Jacques-Rose Récamier. Nothing in their conduct towards one another indicated that their relationship was anything but filial. While Juliette and her mother lived just outside Paris in the château de Clichy and her husband dined with them every day, he spent every night in town; his morals were said to be old-fashioned, probably a euphemism for keeping a mistress. Their classical hunting-lodge at Clichy, on the banks of the Seine near Neuilly, was said to have been built by Louis XV for one of his mistresses.

From the moment she emerged on to the Parisian scene, Juliette was adored. Joséphine, in particular, seems to have made a point of including her in the round of parties and gossip that fuelled Directory society. Writing to Talleyrand in the spring of 1796 about the dashing hussar Hippolyte Charles, with whom she was falling in love, Joséphine declared that Thérésia, Fortunée Hamelin and Juliette had all lost heir heads over him. The following month Juliette formed part of a tableau alongside Joséphine and Thérésia at a reception at the Luxembourg celebrating Napoléon’s victories in Italy. She was seen during this period going up to Barras’s apartments with Joséphine and Thérésia.

Afterwards, Juliette and Thérésia both played down their friendship but a portrait of the two women, Juliette leaning her head on Thérésia’s shoulder, reveals their early intimacy. Certainly in 1796 and 1797 they moved in the same circles, attended the same balls, watched the same plays, were dressed by the same couturiers and admired by the same men.

Their subsequent rift, if rift there was, may have been caused by Thérésia’s resentment of her younger rival’s success. Charles Constant describes her on one occasion, threatened by Juliette’s presence, throwing off her cashmere shawl and standing up to display ‘her fine figure, her bare arms, her grace, the beauties of every kind which so few other women possess in so perfect a degree’. Juliette, ‘with her quiet dress and simple grace’, praised Thérésia and made no attempt to cast her ‘splendours in the shade’–a response potentially more galling than any other.

Gossip columns pictured Thérésia criticizing the young woman. ‘Are not her shoulders very large, her head too long, and her neck too
short? Who does not remark that her lips are too thin, her teeth uneven, her fingers too small, and her feet too broad? Does not she walk as if she were running errands? And does she not still look like a mantua-maker?’ she was imagined to have said. ‘Her eyelids are surely painted, and the colour of her cheeks artificial; and when she speaks, what a disagreeable accent, what antiquated words, and what common and ridiculous expressions!’

Thérésia’s defenders held that the fault was Juliette’s. Many years later, when both women had died, Juliette’s niece Amélie Lenormant published a memoir of her life. Soon afterwards, a friend of Thérésia’s sent some of her letters to the author Arsène Houssaye, proposing her as a suitable subject with the words: ‘Avenge thus the arrogance of this scornful beauty’. Apparently Juliette had lorded it over Thérésia and, when Thérésia was rejected by imperial society, pretended that they had never known one another. No record of Juliette’s behaviour elsewhere makes this self-serving meanness sound likely, although her niece, in an effort to erase any hint of scandal from Juliette’s life–not that there was much–insisted that she had never been a
merveilleuse
and specifically denied any acquaintance with Mme Tallien and her friends.

By late 1797, the careless gaiety that had characterized the first years following Robespierre’s fall–and characterized Thérésia herself, the symbol of that period–had faded, although its mood of decadent extravagance was more pervasive than ever. The French needed a new idol, free from any taint of revolutionary violence, cynicism or exploitation. The virginal Juliette Récamier, whose burgeoning celebrity was almost a reproach to Thérésia, seemed created to fill this role.

Where Juliette differentiated herself from the
merveilleuses
was her real but deliberately nurtured image of modest chastity. She may have formed part of Thérésia’s circle, but she remained untouched by the air of corruption and debauchery that clung to her friends. She was, said Mme de Boigne, ‘the perfect woman’, with all the charms, virtues and frailties that implied. Sweet-natured and high-minded, her appeal lay more in the passive qualities of reflecting her friends’ interests and talents than in demonstrating her own. Her detractors thought her coquettish, indolent and proud, with the air of a convent girl; her
admirers praised her quiet piety, her charitable works, her loyalty to her friends, her generosity and flair as a hostess and her overwhelming desire to please, which grew not out of the wish to be admired (perhaps another tacit reproach to Thérésia) but out of the wish to be loved.

Juliette’s beauty, according to Récamier’s nephew, ‘was the least of her gifts’ but it was no insignificant thing. Having heard of this paragon, Mme de Boigne was surprised that she hardly noticed her when she first saw her; then she looked again and found that she was ‘wholly beautiful’, with looks that appeared ‘to greater and greater advantage every time she was seen’.