Louisa (23 page)

1

T
HROUGH
THE
CARRIAGE
'
S
WINDOWS
,
the daylight was dim. Snow hushed and shrouded the late February afternoon. Louisa had timed her departure for this hour, five o'clock, on purpose, the time her friends would be sitting down to dinner. She wanted to avoid the familiar pain of saying goodbye.

She was joined for the long journey by a group of strangers. Traveling with her inside the carriage was a nurse for her son, a Madame Babet, an old woman who had fled France with the Countess Colombi thirty years before, and whom Louisa had hired only that day. The sled that would accompany the carriage, the
kibitka
, held two manservants. She could trust the one she called John Fulling, because he had worked for William Smith. She was uncertain about the other, a man identified as Baptiste. He had been a prisoner in Russia from Napoleon's army, and at the last second Louisa agreed to take him to France. Baptiste could use a gun and wield a knife, which meant in theory that he could provide some protection against bandits. But there was something about him that unnerved her, something that made her think she would need protection not by him but from him. There was, of course, also Charles, with his toy soldier's hat and toy sword, which he
claimed to know how to use because Baptiste had drilled him. The postilions readied the horses. The carriage, mounted on runners, began to slide across the snow. The soft sound of harness bells carried through the air as the carriage crossed the canal, passed through the great triumphal arch, and left the magnificent city.

She would later say that she did not watch the city recede from view with regret, except to send a sigh to her daughter's grave. Instead, her thoughts had sped ahead to the end of her journey and to the man who was waiting for her there.

It was February 12, 1815—as it happened, her fortieth birthday. “I could not celebrate my birthday in manner more delightful than in making the first step towards that meeting for which my Soul pants,” she wrote to John Quincy just before she was about to depart, “and for which I have hitherto hardly dared to express my desire.”

 • • • 

S
HE
TRAVELED
through
the night, stopping only to change horses and pay the required tolls. Her carriage moved steadily through the flat snow-covered countryside, passing here and there dark clumps of trees, scattered dwellings, and small Russian Orthodox churches, distinctive with their swollen domes. Long stretches of the road were empty except for the wolves, which darted in the snow unafraid. It was so cold that the wine she had brought froze in the bottles. The carriage veered toward the coast, close enough that she could hear the sibilant sea. In her later account of her journey and in her letters to John Quincy from the road, though, she did not indulge in descriptions of the landscape. There was not much to captivate her, since fields did not flower in wintertime, and she had seen enough of snow. Outside Riga, the frozen land began to thaw; the sled became useless, and the runners of the carriage had to be replaced by wheels that constantly stuck in the mud. When the snow returned outside the city, it became even harder to move; and the passengers had to ring a bell, the
sound of which summoned anyone nearby to appear with a shovel and a pickaxe to dig the heavy berline out. At the time, there was nothing romantic to her about this mode of travel, driven, as she was, by “that restless anxiety for the future, which pervades all mankind.”

For the most part, the trip was easy enough at the start. By now she knew to expect every manner of innkeeper, every quality of mattress; she was no longer a novice to surviving the lurches and bumps of a difficult road. And in fact, she was traveling in some style. Her large and expensive carriage and her impressive stack of official papers marked her as an important person, and so her arrival in town was often treated as an event. Officials were courteous, even deferential. Invitations from the local aristocrats to dinner or the theater would quickly follow. There were also often invitations to extend her stay, but these were invariably declined—to the surprise, sometimes, of personages who were unused to being denied. But impatience made her stubborn. She would not slow down.

When she reached
Mitau, in Latvia, 375 miles southwest of St. Petersburg, she ran into a problem. She had stopped for a night at a cheerful, tidy public house, the best in town, for an excellent meal—the innkeeper, a French émigré named Jean Louis Morel, had once been Louis XVIII's chef—and to rest for a few hours before pressing on. After dinner, Morel entered the private dining room, said he wished to speak with her, and nervously looked for eavesdroppers as he closed the door. He told her that a “dreadful murder” had taken place upon the road, that it was much too dangerous to leave now, and that she must absolutely stay the night. Because she had heard this kind of bald ploy for business before, she coolly said that she would be safe, that her servants were armed, and that she was determined to continue onward. At this, Morel interrupted. Her servant Baptiste, he said, was known to him. He had been in town before, as one of Napoleon's soldiers. Morel said that he was “a desperate villain, of the very worst character; and that he did not consider my life safe with him.” At the
same time, Morel begged her not to dismiss Baptiste in Mitau, because he was afraid Baptiste would guess where she had heard of his past and would burn Morel's house down. Louisa was inclined to believe the innkeeper. She already suspected Baptiste of stealing her son's silver cup, the gift from the Westphalian minister, which had gone missing. But as she had no proof of any wrongdoing, and as Baptiste had behaved well, she had no grounds to end his service. So she said goodbye to Morel, climbed into the carriage, and the group traveled on.

A short time later, the carriage stopped and a postilion climbed down to tell her they had lost the road. In vain, they tried to find it, bumping over swampy land, through ditches and over hills, looking for any signs of a path. Midnight approached, and Morel's warnings rang in her ears. But she watched Baptiste closely, consulted with him frequently, and was impressed by his careful attention and steady hand. The dangers in the unmarked land—and even on well-maintained roads—were serious. Carriages broke apart, overturned, and bogged down regularly. Injuries and deaths were not unheard of. Finally, at midnight, Louisa consulted with the servants and decided that Baptiste should ride out and search for the road or for help in finding it. As he rode away, she wondered if he would abandon them, but he returned quickly with a Russian officer who lived nearby. Louisa described their situation to the officer “in the most execrable German,” and they found the road and soon reached an inn. She felt stronger, more assured, and resolved “not to listen to any more bugbears” who might “weaken my understanding.” She trusted herself.

Louisa would need confidence. Repeatedly on the voyage, she would have to disregard the stern warnings of men, men who told her to wait, to get help, to turn back. She would have to decide whether to order the carriage across a river's thinning ice. She would have to spend nights upright in the carriage or in dirty hovels. She would have to stand up to innkeepers who tried to take advantage of her sex and small size. She would remember ghost stories and gothic tales, and see
long shadows all around her. She would have to pass through desolate scenes and evidence of brutal destruction, rape, and plunder. She would have to deal with suspicious guards and drunken soldiers. She would have to overcome her fears. And she did.

 • • • 

A
S
SHE
TURNED
AWAY
from the coast and toward Prussia, she began to follow the path of French and Russian soldiers, moving over battlefields where Napoleon had fought and through towns terrorized by armies advancing and retreating. The ravages were still fresh: “houses half burnt, a very thin population; women unprotected, and that dreary look of forlorn desertion, which sheds its gloom around on all the objects, announcing devastation and despair.” She saw too clearly, too painfully, what the great accounts of the battles left out: “the graphic delineations of war's unhallowed march—that speak in thrilling language to the heart, where the tongues of men are silent.” More chilling, perhaps, than the half-burned houses was the way the survivors spoke of the soldiers. To her surprise, they praised the invader Napoleon and his forces. The Russian soldiers who had pursued the French back were more hated and feared, famous for raping—a reputation earned from atrocities both real and rumored. When “the Cossacks! The dire Cossacks!” were mentioned, Louisa saw the blood drain from women's faces.

She did not think, though, that she had to worry about such a fate herself. Europe was at peace. The leaders at the Congress at Vienna had shipped Napoleon off to a small island in the Mediterranean, Elba, where he was made king of his own prison. She had the contacts to appeal to a king or two, if needed. She saw the ruins of war mostly through a glass carriage window. She was able to say, later, that the sights were “deeply interesting.” And soon, she would be able to step out of the carriage, and when she did, she would smile.

The carriage's runners came off, the wheels on. The Russian ice was behind her. She was a thousand miles from St. Petersburg. On
Saturday, March 4, after nineteen days on the road, Louisa crossed the river Spree in Berlin. As she remembered it, if not in the moment itself, memories of her life in the first years of her marriage flooded through her. “Youth seemed again to be decked with rosy smiles, and glad anticipations—and I wandered in the bright mazes of vivid recollections which every object called forth in fresher bloom,” she wrote in “Narrative of a Journey.”

“There I had felt at home,” she said; “all the sweet sympathies of humanity had been re-awakened.” With far Russia behind her, her heart “was thawed into life and animation.”

2

S
HE
WENT
STRAIGHT
to the Hotel de Russie, the same hotel where she had stayed when she had first arrived in Berlin in 1797. She could still look around and see much that was familiar: the palaces, the parks, the long avenue of lime trees. Here she had danced; there she had sung; around that corner had been her apartment. Her old friend Pauline Neale “flew” to greet her. Plans were quickly made, and soon she was with Princess Ferdinand, Princess Radziwill, “the Brulhs; the de Néales; the Golofkins; the Zeinerts; the De Bergs; the Hardenbergs; the Hadzfeldts; the Bishoffswerder, and many more.” Everyone met her “with the most unaffected warmth.” She felt among family, as if her old acquaintances were “long separated and beloved sisters.”

But little else
in Berlin was untouched by time. The palaces were half empty, absent of many of the country's leaders, who were in Vienna as part of the deliberations that would reshape the political and geographical balance of the continent, providing a framework that would hold, more or less intact, for the next hundred years. And some were dead. The Prussian army had been demolished by Napoleon in 1806; the city had been conquered; many of her friends had been forced
to flee. Now, Louisa listened to the harrowing stories of how they had survived, and how some had not.

So the welcoming warmth with which Louisa was received by her friends in Berlin had a tempering melancholy beneath it. They lived with “no pretension of style among them,” because so much had been taken from them. They were mellowed by hardship, more apt to find pleasure in small indulgences than satisfaction in ceremony. When she visited Princess Radziwill, she noticed how the princess had aged, how there was “a softer shade of character on her face.” Princess Radziwill had lost her brother, her daughter, and her father; she had seen battlefields and cities on fire; she had been at Tilsit and witnessed the king and queen's humiliations, as they were forced to capitulate and beg for mercy. Napoleon's approach had been especially frightening for Pauline Neale, because Napoleon had a special desire to hurt her. After Louisa departed Berlin, Pauline had visited Paris, befriended Empress Josephine, and written a letter to her mother about Napoleon's plans, which was intercepted. Princess Radziwill read aloud to Pauline what a newspaper reported Napoleon had said when he reached Berlin and found her gone. “Well, if I had caught her here,” Bonaparte had told Count von Neale, “I should have had her hair cropped and sent her to Bicetre”—the lunatic asylum near Paris—“for her interference in having political opinions and expressing them publicly.”

Berlin, then, was bathed in the stained light of Louisa's nostalgia, but also strange. There was a “perfect stillness” that unnerved her, a “foreign air” to the city, unsettling reminders of the degradation that had come with French control—first in the battles that had brought Prussia to its knees, then with the humiliation of being forced to supply and quarter Napoleon's army as it marched on Russia. Berlin's native attributes were less apparent, yet to revive in force; more people spoke French and wore French clothes than she remembered. There was less attention to protocol than there had been; there was more talk of resilience and freedom. The biggest change was the most alarming,
a shadow cast over the entire population—affecting, Louisa thought, every inhabitant. It was the absence of the queen, killed by typhus in 1810. The queen's mere presence had “gladdened” the city, and without it, Louisa felt the chill of the gloom.

And so Louisa went out to the palace in Charlottenburg, where she had once spent happy summer days, and found her way to the marble mausoleum in a small grove by the gardens. It was built as a neoclassical temple, with Doric columns supporting a portico; on the pediment were inscribed the Greek letters alpha and omega. And there, she mourned the loss of her Queen of Queens.

 • • • 

S
HE
HAD
H
OPED
that a letter from John Quincy would be waiting for her to tell her which route to take out of Berlin. She waited and nothing came. She delayed her departure, uncertain what to do, certain that her husband would instruct her. Finally, with advice from others, she looked at the map herself and set her course. On Saturday morning, March 11, she set out and traveled southwest toward Potsdam and then Leipzig. She knew this land, these sandy roads; she had been here before. But as they continued west, she began to see something that unnerved her: small groups of disbanded soldiers, hungry and ragged, who were in no hurry to go home, and who made their living off the road. At another time in her life, Louisa might have fainted or fallen ill. Now, she made her small son lie flat upon the carriage floor, while she put on his military cap and held his toy sword so that the silhouette would show through the window. The two male servants rode on the roof; they were armed.

They drove toward Leipzig, which she would have preferred to bypass, and which, in “Narrative of a Journey,” she would say she avoided, because the battlefield that she would have to cross there was famously grim. But she was either repressing the memory of the carnage or rewriting it, because in fact she posted a letter from the city.

She would have had good reasons for wanting to forget the place. The battle at Leipzig in October 1813 had produced more than a hundred thousand casualties—an average of thirty thousand a day. Tens of thousands of men were taken prisoner, all the farm animals killed for ten miles around, the houses in sixty villages destroyed. Even now, in 1815—more than a year after the battle—the fields remained littered with random wreckage: straw, rags, harnesses, guns, carts, the decomposed bodies of animals and men. No one had cleared the land since the fight, except scavengers looking for scraps of leather or iron, something to melt down, stitch, sell, or eat.

She passed quickly
through the devastation. The carriage entered the Thuringian Forest, the land of Goethe and
Sturm und Drang
. The forest was now as famous for its real horrors as its literary ones. She was on a path that Napoleon and his army had crossed not once but three times, looting, raping, and burning. She could calm herself by saying the path was now safe, Napoleon a prisoner in Elba, and the wars over. But one night, in a town “once probably strong, but now in ruins, miserably conditioned,” an innkeeper told her of a rumor: Napoleon had escaped Elba and had landed on the southeastern coast of France. When she stopped at another post station, the rumor was repeated. And every time the carriage stopped for fresh horses, the news grew more detailed and wilder. It was said he had an army of a thousand men with him. Disbanded troops were answering his call. He was traveling north, toward her destination—toward Paris.

A mile outside of Hanau, on Thursday, March 16, Louisa passed ditches and “mounds like graves,” and then came upon a plain “over which was scattered remnants of clothes; old boots in pieces; and an immense quantity of bones, laying in this ploughed field.” This battlefield, perhaps seen in the light of Napoleon's return, affected her as other battlefields had not. She struggled not to faint. She did not have time to collapse, though. She had to keep going, because now there was no doubt about the truth of the rumors about Napoleon. The former
emperor was back. On March 12, when Louisa reached Leipzig, Napoleon was in Lyons with thousands of troops. When she was in Hanau, he was nearing Auxerre, fewer than a hundred miles from Paris.

As Louisa advanced
toward Frankfurt am Main—traveling faster and faster, the postilions pushing the horses—she saw evidence of soldiers mustering. Towns were busy with activity. She stopped in Frankfurt and visited her banker. Yet again she had hoped to find letters from John Quincy that would guide her, but yet again there were none. She was more dismayed by the silence now, because she was faced with a crisis. Her two male servants, John Fulling and Baptiste, came to her in Frankfurt and told her they were resigning, afraid that if they returned to France, they would be conscripted into Napoleon's army. She tried to bribe them to stay, but their fears were bigger than her inducements.

She asked her banker, Simon Moritz von Bethmann, to find her new servants. Bethmann was in a good position to help. “
Le roi de Frankfurt
” was among the richest men in Europe and the most well connected. The Prussian king Frederick William III had first laid eyes on Luise at a ball at Bethmann's; Tsar Alexander, while Bethmann's guest, had slept with Bethmann's wife. But when Louisa asked him for help hiring manservants, he shook his head. It was much too dangerous for a lady to be on the road now, he told her. He could arrange for her to stay in Frankfurt, he went on, and he would offer her his protection—an offer that was rarely refused, no doubt. But she was becoming accustomed to expressing her determination. “I insisted that it would be better for me to get into France as soon as possible,” she told him, and added that if events were indeed so dangerous, she was sure her husband would ride out to meet her. She reasoned that the disorder around Paris might actually be an advantage. She could slip through before any barricades were set.

Bethmann was grave, but he could not stop her. He urged her, at least, to take a more circuitous path to Paris, in order to bypass the
troops massing on the city's frontier. He promised to find a servant who might help protect her. In the end, the only male Bethmann could find who would agree to travel to Paris was a fourteen-year-old boy. So at four p.m. on Friday, March 17, the new group started—Louisa, Madame Babet, Charles, and the boy, whose name she never gave. He was such an unlikely protector that she had him ride inside of the carriage instead of on the roof, as the older men had done, because he was vulnerable and made the carriage seem more so. And probably, she wanted to talk to him, because she liked people's stories, and this boy had a good one. As a young aide to a Prussian officer during Napoleon's Russian campaign in 1812, he had seen the emperor up close. He talked of Napoleon's “sitting among his soldiers to warm himself! of his partaking of their soup, when they had any! His kindness to them in the midst of their misery &ce &ce.” Yet the boy had seen the devastation that Napoleon's campaigns had caused. So “at the same time” as the boy spoke of Napoleon with reverence, “he expressed great hatred of the man, with all the petulance of boyish passion.” She, who knew something about a conflicted heart, was fascinated “to watch the workings of this young mind, swayed equally by admiration and detestation.”

As she moved through
the post stations, changing horses and postilions, the number of troops on the roads increased. Their songs grew louder and their shouts more buoyant and aggressive. She crossed from Germany into France, and arrived at a hotel in Strasbourg, where the master of the house advised her that the situation was unsettled and “very
critical.
” To her relief, he was able to find her a manservant, named Dupin, whom she could trust. At Épernay, she stopped for “a capital dinner” and the best bottle of champagne she had ever tasted. She assumed that she could afford the break, having received assurances that the troops would not pass through the town until the next day.

But then, a mile and a half outside of town, she heard women hurling vicious curses at soldiers nearby. Then she heard the voices of the soldiers themselves, who had spotted the distinctive shape of the
Russian carriage. “Tear them out of the carriage!” the soldiers cried. “Kill them!” It was the Imperial Guard, in their blue uniforms and feathered caps. Louis XVIII had fled, and Napoleon had reached the Tuileries, where among those to greet him was a man Louisa was well acquainted with, the former French ambassador to Russia, Armand de Caulaincourt. Napoleon's elite unit was now on its way to meet the former emperor in Paris.

Louisa's carriage was surrounded; soldiers held the horses and turned their guns against the drivers. After seeing her passport, a general cried out that she was an American. “
Vive les Américains!
” the men cried.