Lucia - Andrea Di Robilant [130]
The Lycée was closed that morning. Instead of returning home, Lucia and Alvisetto joined the stunned crowd that was gathering silently in the street and followed the aimless flow. The stores were bolted and shop-signs were erased or painted over to mislead looters on the prowl. Lucia spotted a few bedraggled soldiers making their way home from the battlefield near Vincennes. There was great confusion but not chaos. Well-organised police patrols maintained order. The women wore little black hats as a sign of mourning and several frowned at the flowery headgear Lucia had put on unthinkingly when she had left the house early in the morning. Alvisetto was too embarrassed to continue, and insisted they go home.
Cannon-fire boomed all day in the distance and subsided in the evening. Lucia stayed up all night, too anxious to fall asleep. Next morning, she learnt the French authorities had signed the capitulation of Paris. By midday the allied vanguard entered the city. Lucia went back to the street with Alvisetto. The atmosphere had changed overnight, and a new, unbridled energy was spreading very fast. Within minutes she spotted “at least twenty men and women wearing the white cockade,” the symbol of the royalists. “Excited young men on horseback shouted, ‘Long live the Bourbons!’”
As soon as the allied vanguard had taken control of the city, the high command marched into Paris at the head of a well-disciplined army. Emperor Alexander of Russia led the convoy, with King Frederick William of Prussia and Prince Schwartzenberg, who was standing in for Emperor Francis of Austria, still several days away from Paris. “Ninety thousand soldiers marched in perfect order,” Lucia reported in her diary, frankly impressed by the glittering parade. “The cavalry looked superb, the horsemen in high uniform riding beautiful steeds. They wore a green sprig in their helmet and a white band around their arm. The mighty Cossacks came next, and then an endless column of carriages and carts carrying weapons and munitions.”
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.”33 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.
Napoleon was in Fontainebleau when he learnt that Paris had capitulated. It was too