He could tolerate the idea of discreet liaisons being formed at a Court like his own, where the men sought to shine and the women to attract. He was well aware, for instance, that Louis de Narbonne was living with the former Vicomtesse de Laval; that Caulaincourt was Mme de Colberts lover; that Berthier, even after his marriage, was still faithful to Mme de Visconti. He was the first to smile at these old romances. He only began to frown when the affair appeared to be turning into a scandal; when Chaptal was seen everywhere in public with Mile Bourgoin, or when Talleyrand made his English mistress preside at his official dinners. Then he did not spare his thrusts: he led his Minister of Interior to believe, rather cruelly, that the actress had granted favours to himself. 1 He ordered Talleyrand to marry Mme Grand; but the matter was not so simple as all that. For one thing, Talleyrand, as a former Bishop of Autun, might be considered as still belonging to the priesthood, besides which, his mistress was already married. The drawing-rooms buzzed with discussions of this doubly litigious problem.
*One evening when he was working with Chaptal, Bonaparte sent for Mile Bourgoin. She arrived, and was openly announced. Chaptal, in a furious temper put his papers away and left. When he got home he sent in his resignation.
In a letter to Benjamin Constant, Julie Talma sums up the affair after her own manner. "The pure priests', she says, 'are greatly scandalized by the marriage of the Foreign Minister. But since the Pope has released him from the priesthood, what are they fussing about? Either one is a Pope or one isn't: what one has done one can undo. They say too that the woman hasn't been able to get a divorce from her husband. These are all miserable quibbles. What if one did have two husbands? If it's a misfortune to have none, it can't be so bad to have two!'
How difficult it was to speak seriously of marriage in this country, on the eve of the Code Civill One had to be a Napoleon, to attempt to endue the French of 1802 with respect for institutions.
Imagine the astonishment of a young civil servant, Maine de Biran, sub-prefect of Bergerac, on finding one day in his mail a note from the prefect of Dordogne enjoining him to draw up a table of the young ladies of the arrondissement of the age of fourteen years and over, belonging to distinguished families, that is to say, to rich ones. The order came from the Minister of Interior, and had been received by all the prefects of France, with printed tables prepared for the purpose. There was a column for the names, another for the probable dowries, another for future inheritance, etc.
Only families with an income of at least 50,000 livres were to be listed. But the Government, laying claim to good taste, wished to devote some attention to the prepossessing appearance and good education of the girls it was inventorying. In a final column reserved for the purpose there must also be entered 'the physical attractions or defects, the talents, behaviour and religious principles of each of the young ladies*. Was she as fresh as the dawn or pitted with smallpox? Did she thrum the harp? Or the pianoforte? Did she paint in watercolours? And what of her Easter devotions? The Due de Rovigo, Minister of Interior, was anxious to be informed on these various points. It was a wonder he didn't ask to have a lock of her hair included in the dossier.
Once the central power had all these lists in its hands, it could make use of them to marry the candidates of its choice to rich provincial heiresses and therewith strengthen the regime. It was not a bad idea.
Perhaps Napoleon was also hoping that this matrimonial propaganda would provide the country with a higher birthrate. Nothing interested him more - witness his conversation with Mme Fabre de FAude, already mother of twenty-four children.
'And when will you have the twenty-fifth?'
'Sire, whenever Your Majesty likes/
Why not ask her to bring a whole regiment into the world?
The Government was not the only matchmaker. The press took a hand in it too, and its Personal Columns had long been open to the enemies of celibacy. Kotzebue made a note of the following insertions in the newspapers of 1804: 'A young lady aged thirty, well-born, with one thousand six hundred francs and some nice furniture, wishes to enter into a legal union with a man of good morals, having a situation in an office or something to look forward to/
Let us hasten to put the young lady with the nice furniture in touch with the author of the following: 'A widower with one thousand four hundred francs per annum, resident for the last ten years in a pleasant apartment near the Tuileries, seeks a lady of suitable age, good-tempered, with some means of her own, to offer her suggestions that may suit her, or listen to her own/
A less serious offer, no doubt, is that of the sly old fox who leaves the lady the choice between his right hand and his left:
'A man of sixty-three, in good health, widowed, without children, would like to meet a lady possessing all the qualities usually desired, for the purpose of perhaps offering her his hand on better acquaintance, or, if she prefers, of combining their interests without other tie than that of friendship, to which, for his own part, he promises to be entirely faithful/
For those to whom this sort of thing did not sound convincing, there was another means of finding a sister soul, which was to go to the Agence Universelle, No. 46 Rue Neuve-Saint-Eustache, and lay their case before M. Vuil-laume, manager of the establishment. This extraordinary man, who fondly believed he had seen brilliant service in the armies, had, like Napoleon, a passion for marrying off his fellow creatures. He had only to see in the papers that General X or Colonel Z had just been killed in battle, to rush to the domicile of the glorious deceased, to find out if he had left a wife, and whether the marriage had been a happy one or not. If the widow appeared inconsolable, he left her three weeks to weep. If her grief did not seem so great, he behaved more expeditiously, organized a grand dinner-party to which a substitute-candidate would be invited as if by chance, and unmasked his batteries at dessert.
The schemes of the Agence Universelle did not always succeed, of course. Richard Lenoir., for instance, refused to give his daughter to the Marquis de Maubreuil, who had been suggested to him as a son-in-law. But for one failure, how many brilliant successes! M. Vuillaume was a past master in the art of contriving matches and making a comfortable income for himself.
But after a time, sad to say, he became exhausted by all this diplomacy; his nerves gave way, and in 1814 he ended up where many of his clients ought to have begun: in the asylum at Charenton. Yet another victim of marriage!
CHAPTER XVI. AN OLD MARRIED COUPLE
A home on the Quai Malaquais — Family celebrations and domestic quarrels - The hypochondriac — Too facile tears — The servant problem - Romance of a tender-hearted girl - An ancestress of Mme Montaudoin
FEW middle-class people of the First Empire thought of writing their memoirs. Historians of everyday life owe all the greater debt of gratitude, therefore, to a charitable person who took the trouble to write down, evening after evening, every trifling detail of her day. Let us open Mme Moitte's notebook: there could be no description more minute, nor at times more comical, of a modest Parisian home round about 1805.
Although a pencil portrait by David gives him the air of a provincial churchwarden, Moitte was far from being a nonentity. A Grand Prix de Rome, a member of the Institute, he occupies an honourable place among the sculptors of his generation. But neither his Mausoleum for Desaix nor his statue of General Custine seems to have brought him wealth. A few official commissions, often paid for in driblets, a few insignificant honorariums - a job at the Musee Napoleon, the vouchers of the Academy, the pension of the Legion of Honour-these were the whole of the artist's income. The couple made ends meet, however; they even managed to save, thanks to the estimable Mme Moitte, who was a paragon of domestic virtues.