Lucia (34 page)

The contrast with the tattered French army that had left town on its way to Fontainebleau could not have been sharper.

Foreign soldiers marched to Place Vendôme and then gradually filled the Champs Elysées. Thousands of Parisians lined the avenues to watch the spectacle. “Many shouted ‘Bravo! Long live the Bourbons!’ and waved their white handkerchiefs.” Lucia noticed that the same men were inciting the crowd at different points in the streets. They were most certainly Bourbon agents “still gauging the size of royalist support.” Someone in the swelling crowd attracted Lucia’s attention to the long rope that was being passed down the line towards Place Vendôme, where Napoleon’s statue stood atop the great bronze column. “Everyone started to follow the rope with their eyes. After a while, word came back that the noose had already been placed around Napoleon’s neck, and the statue was going to be pulled down.”
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Lucia was suddenly afraid of being caught in a wave of street violence. She took Alvisetto’s hand and turned around to go home.

The allied troops were still filling the Champs Elysées. Lucia and Alvisetto walked against the flow, stopping briefly in front of the Palais des Tuileries, where a small crowd was waiting for something to happen: rumour had it that one of the allied leaders might come out to salute the Parisians. But no one came out, and after a short rest, mother and son moved on, their slow trek home occasionally interrupted by the nervous canter of a stray horse on the cobblestones.

N
apoleon was in Fontainebleau when he learnt that Paris had capitulated. It was too late to outmanoeuvre the enemy. There was nothing more to be done. The emperor handed himself over to the French Provisional Government. It fell to its president, Talleyrand, to proclaim the deposition of Napoleon and the end of the Empire, and to ensure a smooth transition of power. The next day, 31 March, Lucia transcribed in her diary the announcement made by Baron Pasquier, chief of the Paris Police:

The events of the war have brought to your doorstep the armies of the coalition. Their number and their strength made it impossible for our troops to continue defending the capital, and the commanding officer was forced to capitulate. It has been a very honourable capitulation. A longer resistance would have endangered the safety of people and properties. At this momentous time, I beseech you to remain calm and peaceful…
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Lucia, however, continued to be restless; she felt the pull of the street, the need to witness the extraordinary metamorphosis taking place in Paris. On 1 April, two days after the final allied victory, she ventured with Checco past the eastern Barrière Saint Martin, on the road to Meaux. They reached Belleville Heights, left the carriage on the road and clambered up the hill until they came upon a wide-open plain. Clusters of curious onlookers were picking their way among the charred and still smoking remains of the battle. The bulky carcasses of dead horses were scattered in the field and the air was filled with the stench of rotting flesh. Mercifully, dead and wounded soldiers had been carried away, but a band of Cossacks was still guarding a group of disgruntled, worn-out French prisoners who had been crammed into a makeshift corral.

Lucia saw a sudden commotion near the prisoners’ camp. A woman had been looking for her husband; she had brought a bundle of civilian clothes she hoped to pass on to him so that he might try to escape. The other prisoners started pulling and tearing at the bundle, and eventually they grabbed the poor woman and manhandled her savagely until the guards intervened. Frightened by the violence, Lucia backed off and hurried down the hill with Checco.

On the way back to town, hundreds of carriages and carts were caught in an endless traffic jam. In the noisy, dusty confusion, Lucia saw “white cockades and kerchiefs everywhere.” To avoid being stuck in traffic all the way into Faubourg Saint Germain, she and Checco made a wide detour passing by Place Vendôme. “The statue [of Napoleon] was still standing and there were no ropes dangling from its sides,”
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she jotted down in her diary when she got home.

The energy released by the sudden collapse of the Empire spent itself peacefully in the streets of Paris. Except for isolated incidents, the city remained relatively calm. There were few excesses on the part of the occupation forces, and no major outbreaks on the part of the Parisian crowd. The initial surge of vindictive feelings against Napoleon had subsided fairly quickly. Indeed, not only was the emperor’s statue still standing on the bronze column in Place Vendôme when Lucia drove by, but “many people had climbed up the spiral staircase inside the column and had stepped out on to the capital to enjoy the view.”
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The Lycée reopened after a two-day interruption. Every reference to Napoleon had been taken down and replaced by the words “Public School.” “In times of Revolution we can do no better than to get back to our studies,”
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one of Alvisetto’s teachers, Monsieur Leclerc, told Lucia as he welcomed her son back to class. She followed his dictum, and resumed her own courses at the Jardin des Plantes, happy to be back in the company of her erudite professors.

I
n the days immediately following the armistice, Emperor Alexander was the principal guarantor of peace and security in Paris. As Baron Pasquier, the chief of police, confirmed in his proclamation of 31 March, “[the emperor of Russia] has given the municipal authorities every assurance of his benevolent protection of the people of this capital city.” It could not have been otherwise: the city teemed with Russians. Hundreds of officers were put up in private houses, many in the elegant streets of Faubourg Saint Germain. They were flush with cash; indeed, Lucia was still unable to retrieve money from the bank because all the money available went to pay the salaries of Alexander’s officers. In those early spring days, as Paris regained its colours, Russian soldiers filled the cafés and restaurants and theatres. The proprietor of the fashionable Restaurant Véry boasted to Lucia he was making “10,000 francs a night off General Platow’s Cossacks.”
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Emperor Alexander, the “benevolent protector,” was a popular attraction in Paris. Among the victorious allied leaders, Frederick William of Prussia was only a king, while the other emperor, the dour Emperor Francis of Austria, reached the capital long after every one else. But Alexander’s stardom was not merely a question of rank. There was a genuine curiosity among Parisians for the liberal emperor who had conquered Napoleon. Lucia was not immune to it, and on the way home from class, she often mingled with the ogling crowd stationed under the emperor’s windows. “Today I saw him come home on horseback, dressed in a simple green uniform, with only a small escort,”
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she wrote in her diary, quite taken by the emperor’s simple ways. She was even more impressed when Alexander put an end to his soldiers’ high-flying lifestyle with the start of Holy Week. Easter and Orthodox Easter happened to coincide in 1814. According to Lucia, the Russian emperor was “a model of piety.” He abstained from eating “not just meat but also eggs, milk and butter, out of respect for Catholics.”
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After having indulged their palates at Véry’s, his officers were limited to a diet of “potatoes, beans, dried prunes, etc…” and were forbidden to go to the theatre.

At first, Alexander lived with his retinue on the top floors of Talleyrand’s large mansion on Place de la Concorde because the palace of the Elysée, which he would eventually occupy, was still being refurbished. Talleyrand was quite happy to move down to the mezzanine floor with his staff in exchange for the privilege of having the emperor and his principal advisers at such close quarters. He and Alexander dined together most evenings. Their associates collaborated closely.

With one eye on France’s best interests and the other on his own political survival, Talleyrand had quickly concluded that the preferable outcome of Napoleon’s debacle was a return to Bourbon authority, this time held in check by a parliamentary constitution which he immediately set about drafting. Alexander was not at all keen to see a Bourbon back on the throne in France, and especially not the arch-conservative pretender Louis XVIII, younger brother of the decapitated Louis XVI, who was on his way to Paris and making large claims already. It was only because Talleyrand waved before Alexander the draft of his liberal constitution that the Russian emperor finally resigned himself to a Bourbon restoration.

On 12 April, two days after Easter, Lucia was again in Place Vendôme to see the Comte d’Artois, Louis XVIII’s brother, make a triumphant entry in Paris. He was “dressed up” as a National Guard, Lucia pointedly wrote, with the royal blue cordons as the only embellishment. From Place Vendôme, the Bourbon vanguard moved directly to the Palais des Tuileries, and soon the Comte d’Artois came out to greet the very large crowd from deposed empress Marie Louise’s balcony. The crowd refused to go away after he had gone back inside, but continued to clap and cheer, demanding that he come out again. Lucia found the scene rather distasteful: “It reminded me of the theatre.”
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Talleyrand had accurately read the mood of the people, who seemed to welcome the idea of a return to the monarchy. Lucia was never a royalist, let alone a Bourbon sympathiser, yet she had always felt a deep sorrow for the fate of Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette. She went looking for the common grave at the old Cimetière de la Madeleine where the decapitated bodies of the king and queen had been dumped twenty-one years earlier. The cemetery had long been abandoned, but some years previously the owner of the house next door had managed to purchase a plot of land which included the burial ground. Since then, he had tended the two graves, pulling out weeds, planting flowers and growing a protective hedge. “The owners are a very nice family, and they gladly take around those who ask to see the enclosure,” Lucia wrote to Paolina. “The proprietor also showed me the diamond-studded box the King of Prussia gave him as a token of his esteem and appreciation for what he had done.”
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At the time of the burial, two young weeping willows had been planted over the graves as markers. Over the years, the trees had grown considerably, one towards the other, until their upper branches had joined. But now the willow on top of Marie Antoinette’s grave was losing its leaves. As the proprietor explained to Lucia, the roots, having grown eight feet deep, had reached the lime in which her body was thrown.

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ouis XVIII arrived in Paris on 3 May. He was a supercilious sixty-year-old, overweight and overbearing; but he was also a stubborn negotiator, and not at all inclined to wear the constitutional straitjacket Talleyrand was fashioning for him. The draft constitution went back and forth between the new monarch and the president of the provisional government. By the time Louis XVIII installed himself at the Tuileries, he had curtailed the powers of Parliament and individual freedoms considerably. Talleyrand lamented the changes to his original draft, but in the end he was satisfied that sufficient guarantees ensured that France would not see a return to absolute monarchy. On the other hand, Emperor Alexander, who had moved from Talleyrand’s mansion to the Elysée palace, did not take the changes at all well, and thereafter refused to speak to his former host.

On 16 May Lucia went to court for a formal presentation to Louis XVIII. The point of this otherwise futile exercise was to attract the king’s attention during the brief moment when one was face to face with him—not always an easy task given the soporific atmosphere that usually hung over this ceremony. She described herself on her card as the wife of the former captain of Verona, remembering that Alvise, despite the Directoire’s vociferous protests, had treated the future king well back in 1795, when he was living in exile in Italy as the Comte de Lille. “The King receives like our dear old uncle Lorenzo, sprawled in his throne,” Lucia wrote to her sister. “The ladies shuffle by him in a long line; they are only allowed a curtsey. The King nods without saying a word, except to those whom he knows personally.” It turned out Lucia’s little trick with her card worked beyond her expectations. She could not resist showing off a bit to her younger sister:

The King saw me, examined me for a short while, and then exclaimed “Ah Lucietta! How are you! It’s been so long!” The tone of his voice was so cordial and his expression so friendly that he seemed genuinely pleased to see me after nineteen years. And fancy him remembering my Venetian nickname!
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In reality, the atmosphere at the new court was anything but cheerful. The king and his royal siblings were rather advanced in age, and soured by many years of exile. The haughty Duchess of Angoulème, daughter of Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette and the king’s sister, restored stuffy rules of etiquette at the Tuileries that were a throwback to the ancien régime. “I really do not like the way we get pushed out of the room by the ushers after we have presented ourselves,”
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Lucia grumbled. There was no place to mingle, and the ladies were left to mill about with the servants outside the receiving chamber until their carriage appeared.

Leaving court one evening she overheard a lady say that Joséphine had died. “I could not bring myself to believe it,” she wrote in her diary. “I left in a hurry and came home immediately.”
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She could not sleep at all that night. The next morning, she sent word to Queen Hortense “to learn whether the Empress had in fact passed away.” When the news was confirmed Lucia was overcome with sorrow. An air of mystery had surrounded Joséphine’s illness from the beginning. Lucia had seen the empress fade but the topic of her health was always left untouched, and now suddenly she was dead—apparently after taking a chill during a walk in the garden with Emperor Alexander. When Lucia arrived at court in the evening, she was late and the doors to the king’s apartments were closed. Other ladies were waiting outside. She joined two old friends of Joséphine, both in tears. The three of them wondered whether Napoleon, who was living in exile on Elba, had been informed.
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