The duc d’Orléans’s expectations, and my brother’s with them, were doomed to disappointment. The trouble in the Pays-Bas was short-lived, and the Austrians reentered Brussels at the end of February.
Once again Robert presented his card in Chapel Street, and once again he was told that his prince and patron was at the races. The loss of a possible crown did not appear to have interfered with the duc d’Orléans’s routine. The big shock came when, just as suddenly as he had left Paris for London in October the preceding year, so without warning, on the 8th of July, 1790, the duc d’Orléans quitted London for Paris, with, it would seem, nothing achieved politically between the two countries and little to show for his nine months’ sojourn but plenty of entertainment and the sale of a number of racehorses. My brother was not even aware of the prince’s decision to return home until he saw the news in a London newspaper.
He rushed to Chapel Street forthwith, and found the usual aftermath of departure—sheets already on the furniture, and the servants who had not already been paid off sweeping away the straw from packing cases and grumbling at the master and mistress whom they had so lately served.
No, he learned, there was no question of their return. The duc d’Orléans had left London for good.
This sudden departure had a profound effect upon my brother. He now realized, with a sense of finality, that neither the duc d’Orléans, nor any of his close associates, had any influence out of France, and that even in his own country the likelihood of the prince being appointed Regent or holding high office in the National Assembly was now remote. The temperament of the duc d’Orléans himself lacked fire and energy. He was not “cut out,” as the English put it, to become a true leader of the French people.
Robert’s adulation, almost idolatry, for his so-called patron turned to contempt. The qualities of amiability and generosity, so praised before, were now despised. The duc d’Orléans was a weakling, flattered by a self-seeking entourage, and those men he should have depended upon—among whom my brother included himself—had been spurned, their faith abused.
Robert, a confessed bankrupt in Paris, and likely to be imprisoned for debt if he set foot in the capital again, could not return to his own country. He must continue to build up what reputation he could for himself in London, and stay content as an engraver in crystal to his employers in Whitefriars.
As the months passed, and his young wife became pregnant, London no longer seemed an enchanted city full of promise. Promotion might come to his English fellow craftsmen, but as a foreigner Robert must count himself lucky to be employed at all.
The first-born of his second marriage, a son whom they named Robert, was born in the late spring of ’91, shortly before the flight of Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette to Varennes which shocked and outraged us all so much at home. In London, Robert said, the people were equally shocked, but for a different reason. Sympathy was for the injured French monarch and his Queen, forced to seek asylum beyond the frontier; and when they were apprehended and brought back to Paris there was scarcely a man in London who did not praise the dignity and resignation of the royal family, and hurl abuse against the French Assembly.
“It was impossible,” Robert told me, “not to see the venture with their eyes. The account of the flight was in all their newspapers. People talked of nothing else in the alehouses and at work, and, knowing where I came from, they accused all Frenchmen of treating their King like a common criminal. I knew nothing of the true circumstances. What could I do but agree? The Assembly, I explained, had got into the hands of hotheads and irresponsibles who were only seeking their own advantage, to which the cockneys countered, ‘The more fools the French people to allow themselves to be so led. Such a state of affairs would never be permitted in England.’ In England there was too much common sense. The French were a nation of hysterics. This was the attitude.”
Almost immediately after the flight to Varennes came the flood of émigrés to England, all telling the same tale of goods sequestered, châteaux seized, clergy and aristocracy molested, a general persecution of all who had held any sort of position under the old régime. The English, always eager to hear anything to the detriment of their old enemy across the Channel, magnified each story of distress into wholesale condemnation of the revolution that had apparently convulsed all France.
“You must understand,” said Robert, “that already in ’91 the émigrés were painting a picture of desolation. It was not just Paris that had become impossible, but the entire country. There was no law, no order, no food; false money was floated to disguise economic failure, and the peasants were setting fire to every village. When you were peacefully giving birth to your daughter at le Chesne-Bidault, the one you have told me later died, and François and Michel were buying Church lands and enriching themselves for the future, I saw the foundry in flames, and all of you in prison. My country, and you with it, had been seized by bandits. That was how we learned to look at it from London.”
These first émigrés, during the summer and autumn of ’91, and on into the winter of ’92, were mostly members of the former aristocracy and the clergy who could not, or would not, adapt themselves to the new régime. Fresh from his rebuff by Laclos and the Orléans faction, my brother hastened to make himself agreeable to the enemies of his former patron—persons close to Court circles, devoted to the King and Queen and to the King’s two brothers, the comte de Provence and the comte d’Artois. As an émigré himself of more than two years’ standing, Robert had some advantage over the newcomers. He could speak English, he knew the ways and customs, he was adept at acting as intermediary in negotiations between his bewildered compatriots on the one hand and the jocular cockneys on the other.
As courier, as inspector of furnished houses and apartments, as the friend-in-need who could arrange purchases at low prices without any difficulty, my brother was in his element. Marquises, countesses, and duchesses, exhausted from fearful Channel crossings by way of Brittany or Jersey, would be enchanted to find a fellow countryman who could so swiftly put them at their ease after their trials. His sympathy, his charm, and his delightful manner made the ordeal of arriving in a strange country far easier to bear. Some small recompense might be forthcoming, of course, after they had settled down; meanwhile, possibly the people at the Embassy would take care of it. As to private arrangements, matters of percentages and so on, between the courier and the various London tradesmen and the vendors of furnished apartments, that was a matter with which the new émigrés need not concern themselves.
It soon became evident that to combine the work of an engraver in crystal at Whitefriars with his new status as courier to the élite of the former Parisian society would be a difficult, if not an impossible, task. My brother, with his gambler’s instinct, chose to sever his connection with the Whitefriars foundry and throw in his lot entirely with the newcomers, or, as he put it to his employers, with his distressed fellow countrymen. This was, like almost all Robert’s ventures, a mistake, and one which—within a few years—he was profoundly to regret.
“I chanced my luck,” he said, “and my luck lasted just as long as the funds the émigrés brought with them. When, instead of finding themselves in London for six months or a year, fêted by the English and treated as heroes and heroines, they discovered that they were paupers forced to accept English charity without any prospect of returning to their own country, their luck ran out, and so did mine. I was not to know in ’91 that in January ’93 the Assembly in Paris would give place to the Convention, that the King would be condemned to death, and that the Allies, in whom all of us in England had put our faith, would be repulsed by that citizen army we had been laughing at for months.”
The émigrés, my brother among them, who had lived in almost daily expectation of a triumphant Allied invasion—the entry of the duke of Brunswick’s forces into Paris, followed by the overthrow of the Convention, the restoration of Louis, and the mass punishment of every revolutionary leader—found, to their horror and co
nsternation, that none of this came about. The Republic, threatened on all sides, stood firm. The King went to the guillotine. Any émigré who dared to set foot in France would suffer the same fate, as a traitor to his country; and unless they chose to join their fellow royalists in the Prince de Condé’s army, the émigrés must accept their status as refugees in a country that, by the spring of ’93, was actively at war with their own.
“The honeymoon was over,” said Robert. “Not my own—that had ended after the first year—but the honeymoon of the French émigrés with the English people. We had not only killed our King—we were accused of this just as though we had voted for his death in the Convention—but we were members of the enemy. Any one among us might have been a spy. The favors, the generosity, the courtesy, the welcome, all this went after the declaration of war. We were no longer part of London society, except those notables who really had a foothold among the first English families. The rest of us, as I have said, were refugees, with little money left, no prospect of employment, obliged to give an account of ourselves whenever questioned, and treated as a general nuisance by all concerned.”
The manufacturers of Whitefriars Glass regretted that they already had more than enough engravers in crystal on their books, and Robert’s place had long ago been filled. In any event, times had changed. French craftsmen were no longer popular with the English workmen.
“I walked the streets as many of us did, looking for work,” confessed Robert. “My English helped, and after several weeks I managed to obtain a place as packer in a glass and china warehouse, in Long Acre—the sort of work I used to give to porters when I had my laboratory in the rue Traversière. In the evenings I taught English at a school in Sommerstown, Pancras, founded by one of our émigré priests, the Abbé Carron. We had moved lodgings several times, and were by this time housed at 24 Cleveland Street, with a crowd of other émigrés. The parish of Pancras was full of French families; it was almost like living in the Bonne-Nouvelle or the Poissonnière, and we had our own schools, and our own chapel in Conway Street, off Fitzroy Square.”
Marie-Françoise, despite her lack of education—she still could not sign her own name—adapted herself to changing circumstances as gallantly as Cathie would have done, perhaps more so, for her upbringing in an orphanage had made her hardy, and used to restrictions.
“She kept reminding me of Cathie,” Robert admitted, “not only in her looks but in her ways as well. Sometimes—and you won’t understand this, Sophie—I would find myself living a fantasy, a recreation of the past, and Cleveland Street became St. Cloud at the time when Cathie and I were living there together. In ’93, when our second son was born, we called him Jacques. It made the fantasy more real.”
He never told Marie-Françoise about her predecessor, nor of the other Jacques, some twelve years old by now, living with his grandmother at St. Christophe. The lie that Robert was a bachelor, without ties, started as a jest, had developed into a supreme deception, and along with it grew a mounting fabrication of untruths, with so many devious strings that they could not be unraveled.
“I myself began to believe what I had told her,” Robert said, “and those fantasies were a consolation in times of trouble. The château between Le Mans and Angers to which I was heir, owned by an elder brother who detested me, became as real to me, and to her, and presently to our growing children, as if it had existed in reality. It was a mixture of Chérigny and la Pierre, the places where I was happiest as a boy, and of course had its glass-house beside it, for otherwise I could not explain my work as an engraver.”
As the tide of emigration increased, with not only the aristocracy and the clergy seeking the safety of the English shores, but merchants and traders and members of the bourgeoisie as well, so my brother’s fantasy took shape. In their parish of Pancras, or “Little Paris,” as they called it, it seemed imperative to him, as one of the firstcomers, to hold his status as a fervent loyalist to the King who had been dethroned, and later to the comte de Provence, whom the émigrés called Louis XVIII. His old patron the duc d’Orléans, self-styled Philippe-Egalité when he took his seat in the Convention, and one of the deputies who voted for his cousin’s death, was perhaps the most hated man in Pancras. Robert was careful to impress upon his wife that she must never mention his earlier connection with the Orléans entourage and the Palais-Royal.
“In any event,” he told her, “I only moved on the fringe of that society. I was not deeply involved. Their politics were suspect from the start.”
This was a volte-face which must have surprised even Marie-Françoise, and to make up for it he would embroider afresh upon his own past, dwelling upon the beauty of his birthplace, the tranquility, the peace, all of which had been denied him so long because of the hostility of the mythical brother.
It was providential that nobody with any knowledge of Busson l’Aîné, the bankrupt of Villeneuve-St.-Georges and the debtor and fraud of La Force prison, should be among those who had fled from France to England. As it was, Busson l’Aîné was no sort of designation for one who declared himself a member of the aristocracy, and Robert, following the example of his true brothers, Pierre and Michel, who had many years before taken the names of du Charme and Challoir to distinguish themselves from him, decided that it would increase his stature in the eyes of his fellow émigrés, and among the Londoners as well, if he too took a suffix.
He chose the name of his birthplace, the farmhouse Maurier, and on moving to 24 Cleveland Street at the end of ’93 signed himself thus—Busson du Maurier. His wife, and his neighbors also, understood “le Maurier” to be a château. As the months passed, and tales of “Robespierre’s Terror” were wafted by spies across the Channel, with all the exaggerated horrors of innocents mounting the guillotine in thousands not only in Paris but in the provinces as well, my brother suited his fantasy to the times, and suddenly declared to his wife, and an admiring audience of horrified émigrés, that the château had been attacked by an army of peasants, all within it murdered, and the château itself burned to the ground.
“I had to do it,” Robert said. “It was becoming an encumbrance. And a danger too. I had not realized there was a real château Maurier in the parish of la Fontaine-St.-Martin, near la Flèche, belonging to the family d’Orveaux. One of this family, an officer who late joined the Prince de Condé’s army at Coblenz, appeared in London, and on hearing my name called to claim relationship. I had the greatest difficulty in shaking him off. He might have exposed me. Luckily, we moved in different circles, and a few weeks later I heard that he had left the country.”
The myth of belonging to the former aristocracy, the fantasy of the burned-down château, these extravagances may have flattered my brother’s egoism during the early wartime years when the émigrés of Pancras saw themselves doomed to many months of exile. But as one year passed and then another, with no sign of a break in hostilities, and the French armies winning victory after victory, the plight of the refugees in London worsened, and their sufferings became very real indeed.
“Our daughter Louise was born in ’95,” said Robert, “and another boy, Louis-Mathurin, in November of ’97. That made four young mouths to feed, six counting ourselves, and seven with the young servant that Marie-Françoise had to help her with the children. We had the whole of the second floor of our lodging house, and the old couple below us, the Dumants, used to complain of the children’s noise. I would leave the house early, to go to my work in Carter’s warehouse in Long Acre. I was away all day, and—as I told you—would teach in the Abbé Carron’s school in the evenings. Even so, I did not earn enough to keep us all or pay the rent. We had to accept assistance. There was a fund, an allocation for us émigrés, arranged between the English Treasury and our own officials. I was given seven pounds a month, starting in September of ’97, just two months before young Louis-Mathurin was born. But it did not go far, and at times I was almost desperate.”
My brother had an advantage over many of his fellow émigrés in t
hat he had been born to a trade, and had worked in glass from the age of fourteen. As foreman in the warehouse in Long Acre his talents were wasted, but at least he knew what he was about. Others were less fortunate. Counts and countesses, who had never worked in their lives, were now glad to pick up a few extra shillings by tailoring and dressmaking, and one of the most popular “trades” in Pancras and Holborn was the fashioning of straw hats by the émigrés for those Londoners who cared to patronize them.
“It became quite the thing,” Robert said, “to walk from Oxford Street to Holborn to see where straw was cheapest. The pavements would be crowded by the marquis de this and the baron de that, all with bundles of straw under their arms to take back to their wives, who waited with bunches of ribbons and velvet flowers to decorate the finished article, after their husbands had twisted the straw into shape.
“Marie-Françoise was no modiste. Her talent lay in laundering, something she had learned at the orphanage in St. Cloud. There was a wealthy middle-aged spinster called Miss Black, who lived round the corner from us in Fitzroy Square—she stood as godmother to Louis-Mathurin—and all her finery came to Cleveland Street to be washed and pressed and mended. Marie-Françoise did it herself, and then sent it back in a basket by the maidservant—it did not do for Madame Busson du Maurier to be seen carrying laundry in the street. The worst of it was, when I came to be away from her and the children for seven months, from July ’98 to February ’99, she had to arrange for friends to collect our allowance from the authorities, as she understood nothing of finance, and still could not sign her name. This added to her troubles.”
When my brother reached thus far in his story he became purposely vague. He talked of “other business” that had concerned him during these months of absence, and avoided questions. No, he had not left the country, he had remained in London, although at another address. It had nothing to do with the war or with espionage or with any matter concerning the émigrés. I let it go, trusting he would tell me in his own good time. It was not until one evening a few days later, after he had shown the family goblet to my daughter Zoë and the boys, and I had put it away in a cabinet for safekeeping, that I learned the truth.