Liberty: The Lives and Times of Six Women in Revolutionary France (50 page)

Tall and slim, radiantly pale, Juliette had a delicate, open face bare of makeup. Her looks were enhanced by her self-consciously austere style, an intentional reflection of her gentle serenity. She wore only white dresses–adding fuel to the rumours of her virginity–gathered beneath the bosom with plain blue, black or gold belts, no jewels except pearls–more symbols of purity–and her hair was simply drawn up with a thin ribbon in a tumble of chestnut curls.

One visitor, arriving in Paris at the height of Juliette’s fame, expected to encounter ‘a vain coquet, enveloped in clouds of incense, hardened by wealth, seeing and loving nothing in the world but herself; receiving homage as a duty with chilling pride’. Instead, he found her, in her unembellished white dress, ‘like a violet in the grass’: ‘she seemed to blush at being so beauteous’. Other observers confirm that she ‘seemed anxious to conceal her own attractions to enhance those of others’.

Despite her undoubted modesty, Juliette was very conscious of her powers of seduction. ‘You intoxicate yourself with the perfumes that are burnt at your feet,’ said one disconsolate devotee. Admirer after admirer, excited rather than discouraged by her notorious chastity, pursued her, and all were rejected with such warmth and graceful tact that they continued to adore her even when they knew there was no hope. She was made, said another, ‘to electrify the world’.

Juliette both enjoyed and despised her celebrity, accepting the adulation with which she was showered as her due, somehow managing to encourage it without seeming to. She was fully aware of the effect
she created, of ‘the enthusiasm that I excited, the approval that my face obtained, the murmur of praise to be heard through the crowd’ when she appeared. Her niece described Juliette standing up to get a better view of Napoléon as he finished his speech at the reception given in his honour at the Luxembourg in December 1797. Every head turned to look back at her; a rumble of appreciation swelled through the audience. For a moment it was she and not Napoléon on whom all eyes rested. He ‘threw her a look of intolerable harshness’ and Juliette sat back down.

Mme Lenormant makes out that this was the innocent Juliette’s first foray into society, that no one in the audience would have known who she was; in fact, given the intimacy of Directory high society, she would have been familiar to most people there. Her standing up at such a crucial moment can only have been designed to draw attention to herself. This tension between reserve and display, between chastity and sensuality, was the essence of her appeal.

One of Juliette’s first conquests was the ambitious, arrogant Lucien Bonaparte, six years Napoléon’s junior. Tall and lanky, not handsome but appealing because of his classical republican idealism and his passion for government, Lucien had arrived in Paris on Napoléon’s coattails, hoping to build a career and a fortune on the foundation of his brother’s. Meeting Juliette in the summer of 1797, he fell deeply in love with her.

He began writing her poetic letters from ‘Romeo’, describing her arrival at a party with everyone clustering round her exclaiming at her beauty. All glances, he said, were her property when she appeared. ‘At each of your movements, with each fold of your gown, it seemed as though flowers were opening.’ Outwardly, Juliette met his passion with her usual cool serenity. Lucien told her that her immovable tranquillity was killing him, complaining that she could even make indifference charming. Inside, the sheltered girl was stirred. The ‘idea of a man, entirely engrossed with me’ had touched her; his agitation and
despair had stimulated her imagination and excited her compassion.

Unmoved by her superficial life and her relationship with her husband, Juliette felt that her ‘heart was made to love and to suffer…As I loved nothing and only suffered from indifference, I considered that I was forgoing my destiny’. The ardent, romantic Lucien seemed to offer her a chance, for the first time, to feel. But when she discovered the scale of his ambition and the way he consoled himself for her lack with ‘vulgar pleasures’–actresses and whores–she closed her heart to him and returned to her usual state of dreamy melancholy.

Juliette dealt with Lucien’s unrequited adoration as she would deal with so many men in the coming years, with a combination of sympathy and negligence. ‘Touched by the pain she had caused, sorry for the man’s emotion,’ she restored ‘hope without being aware of it, merely by her pity, and [destroyed] it by her carelessness as soon as she had calmed the grief which had called forth this fleeting pity’. According to the critic Charles-Augustin de Sainte-Beuve, a friend, Juliette was a sorceress whose great talent lay in converting love into friendship, while leaving in the new association all the ‘perfume’ of the old.

It would take a woman, rather than a man, to raise her out of her apathy. In the autumn of 1798, Récamier arrived at Clichy with a woman unknown to Juliette and left them alone without introducing them, saying only that she had come to talk about the sale of a house. Her guest was eccentrically dressed, in a morning gown and a tiny hat laden with flowers; Juliette was ‘struck by the beauty of her eyes and her expression’. When she began talking, saying how delighted she was finally to meet Juliette and mentioning her father, Necker, Juliette realized that the visitor was Germaine de Staël, who, despite her fear of exile, had ventured as close to Paris as her father’s house at Saint-Ouen. Récamier had contacted her about buying one of Necker’s properties, a house on the rue du Mont Blanc (now the rue de la Chaussée d’Antin) near where Thérésia had lived when she first came out of prison in the summer of 1794.

Juliette had read Germaine’s
Letters on Jean-Jacques Rousseau
, and blushed to find herself in the presence of an author she admired so passionately. She was both intimidated and attracted by her, and shyly
stammered out some compliments. Germaine, looking at her with friendly curiosity in her large eyes, began showering her with frank praise that Juliette confessed she found irresistible, and asked her to come often to see her before she left France for Coppet the following month.

This was the start of a friendship that would define both women and endure for the rest of their lives. Germaine, who had few female friends, saw Juliette as a vision of perfection, the embodiment of all the exquisitely feminine qualities of reserve, serenity and physical delicacy she was so conscious of lacking. ‘An expression at one and the same time naïve and passionate gave her person an indescribable voluptuousness and a singularly likeable innocence,’ Germaine wrote of her in her novel
Delphine
(interestingly, she called the character based on Juliette ‘Thérèse’). If she wanted ‘to portray a celestial being’, she told Juliette, ‘it would be your expressions I should use’.

It was fashionable for women of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries to develop intense, almost romantic friendships like those between Germaine and Juliette and between Thérésia and Joséphine. Inspired by the intimacy between fictional heroines like Julie and Claire in
La Nouvelle Héloïse
, women looked to each other to provide them with companionship and emotional (and perhaps physical) solace and comfort, especially when the men in their lives were remote or unloving. Germaine cast herself in the role of adoring and sometimes jealous swain in her letters to Juliette. ‘Do not have a greater friendship for any other woman than you have for me,’ she pleaded in one. ‘Say to me
I love you
,’ she wrote in another, addressing Juliette as her angel. ‘The emotion I will feel at those words will make me believe I am holding you to my heart.’

Juliette, timid and more used to receiving affection than giving it, was less forthcoming, earning frequent reproaches from Germaine. ‘Why, whether in love or in friendship, is one never necessary to you?’ she complained. But Juliette, rescued by Germaine from her life of banal frivolity, was equally committed to her. After their meeting, she wrote, ‘I thought of nothing but Mme de Staël’.

Their friendship gave Juliette the chance to become something more than a simpering, affected
merveilleuse
. Through Germaine she
was introduced to a sparkling circle of intellectuals where her own intuitive intelligence and interests could shine. Nothing was more engaging than watching Germaine and Juliette converse, wrote an enthralled Benjamin Constant, who saw them as beautifully complementary forces.

The speed with which one was able to express a thousand new thoughts, the speed with which the other was able to grasp and judge them; there was that strong male intelligence which unveiled everything, and the delicate feminine one which understood everything; all this was united in a way impossible to describe if one had not had the happiness of witnessing it for oneself.

Imposing without being large, elegant without being ostentatious, the house Jacques Récamier bought from Necker at 7 rue du Mont Blanc became one of the most celebrated in Paris. The interior was a masterpiece of Directory style, designed by Louis Berthaut and assembled by the Jacob brothers, who had fitted out the newly-wed Bonapartes’ house the previous year. Its bold modernity did not appeal to everyone. Laure d’Abrantes’s old-fashioned mother thought it looked empty and uncomfortable.

Funded by her immensely rich and generous husband, Juliette entertained lavishly. This was the era of the nouveaux riches, before, as Hortense de Beauharnais noted, ‘good society’ had been revived: ‘The wealth of France had passed into the pockets of the tradespeople, and it was they who entertained, and who squandered in a single night’s entertainment a fortune they had acquired too easily.’ Juliette’s guests would arrive to find all the doors thrown open and the house blazing with expensive candlelight. Lamps illuminated the courtyard and rare shrubs stood in pots on the steps, which were covered with Turkish carpets. Like Joséphine Bonaparte, Juliette loved flowers. Her garden at Clichy was exquisite and her houses overflowed with blooms.

Dancing carried on through the night; supper was served at two in the morning. All the new dances were introduced at Juliette’s balls, where Fortunée Hamelin’s dancing was outshone only by her hostess’s. Sometimes, with a show of reluctance, Juliette would allow herself to
be persuaded to perform a solo shawl dance. In
Corinne
, Germaine ascribed Juliette’s dancing to her heroine, a fictionalized, idealized self-portrait. She described her as a poet in her dancing, imaginative and emotional. ‘In all her movements there was a graceful litheness, a modesty mingled with sensual delight,’ she wrote. ‘She appeared animated by an enthusiasm for life, youth and beauty which seemed to give an assurance that to be happy she needed no one else.’ Crowds massed to watch Juliette; men kicked off their shoes and stood on the Jacob chairs to get a better view.

Juliette would invite her female guests to come and look at her gold and violet bedroom, reckoned to be the most beautiful in Paris; the men would rush to follow. Echoing the boudoirs of both Thérésia and Joséphine, the walls of her bedroom and bathroom were panelled in mirrors, recalling the legend of Psyche as told by La Fontaine, a story very much in vogue during the Directory. La Fontaine’s Psyche lived in an enchanted palace filled with portraits of herself, before which she wallowed in ecstasies of narcissism while her invisible lover looked on.

The mahogany and ormolu bed was raised as if on an altar, with large gilded bronze swans at either end. It was draped in muslin edged with gold lace and canopied with gold damask. The mirror at its head was framed in violet damask; on the ceiling violet gryphons clutched gold garlands. Like Thérésia, Juliette was rumoured to have posed for the statue in her bedroom, but, typically, hers represented Silence. On one occasion she retired to bed during a party, while her room was still full of people. With her ‘beautiful white shoulders expos’d perfectly uncover’d to view’, wrote the shocked Lady Bessborough, visiting Paris at the time, Juliette was ‘completely undress’d and in bed. The room was full of men.’

Her adjoining dressing-room was tented in eau-de-nil silk and had a recessed red leather sofa which turned into a bath. A day-bed standing in the dressing-room was very similar to the one on which Juliette was painted by Jacques-Louis David in 1800. Juliette had commissioned the painting, but she disliked it; perhaps she did not like to think of herself, as David’s biographer Anita Brookner describes the image, as a child-bride, ‘bewildered by her isolation’ in an austere room tense
with sexual fear and inhibition. David portrayed a bare-foot Juliette reclining seductively, but turned away from the viewer, her gaze opaque; he encapsulated the uneasy balance she maintained between passivity and provocation. She asked him to change it but he refused, telling her how hard he was finding it to do her justice. He kept the unfinished canvas in his studio. François Gérard’s 1805 portrait was more to Juliette’s taste, showing her rosy-cheeked and limpid-eyed, demure but approachable.

Juliette also frequented the subscription balls that continued to inflame Paris. In 1797, 644 public balls were held there. At the Jardins de Bagatelle in the Bois de Boulogne, hundreds of coloured lamps, suspended from trees and bushes, turned the gardens ‘into a palace of rubies, emeralds, topazes and diamonds’. Tivoli, with its gilded and mirrored ballrooms and its landscaped gardens, was a ‘perpetual circle of pleasures’, wrote Henry Fox, staying in Paris in 1802. Entrance was three francs for a man and one for his female companion. Tivoli’s gardens were illuminated apparently ‘by the hands of fairies’; music played; fireworks exploded overhead; exotic fruit, ices of every colour, cake, lemonade and liqueurs were served.

Fox noticed ‘dangerously fascinating’ female figures gliding about. Women dressed as nymphs, oriental princesses or savages waltzed wildly with morose, expressionless men. Costumes were still daringly transgressive: there were men who came dressed as women, and women as men. Most ladies at ‘these enchanting places’ resembled goddesses in their Athenian robes, crowned with flowers, but many other styles were also popular. Egyptomania hit Paris, courtesy of Napoléon’s expedition; the Turkish ambassador’s arrival there in 1797 stimulated a craze for all things oriental, such as the turbans favoured by Germaine; Joséphine’s admiration for the arts of the medieval period inspired
le style troubadour
.