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From this union came Anne Caroline Cambremer's mother, Anne Charlotte. Born in 1762, Anne Charlotte did not marry until age thirty, a spinsterish age, owing perhaps to the dearth of eligible males in Pont l'Évêque, or of suitors bold enough to apply for her hand. The Hôtel Montpensier may have been seen as a perilous labyrinth, with Nicolas the Minotaur devouring intruders. Certainly locals knew Anne Charlotte's father to be a high-handed, surly man despised by those who farmed his land outside the village of Torquesne and by domestics who served him at home. On one occasion, two laborers attacked him in the fields and beat him bloody. Several years after his marriage, the king's counselor found himself shamed in a paternity suit brought by a former servant whom he had flagrantly abused. Perhaps because time had mellowed him, he gave the decidedly unaristocratic Jean-Baptiste Fleuriot his blessings.

Anne Charlotte's marriage took place in November 1792. Ten months later she died of puerperal fever, the scourge that killed more women in childbirth than all other infections combined. Her husband was left to raise their daughter, Caroline, alone under Nicolas Cambremer's roof, with the octogenarian for company. They made a sad little group in a dwelling whose noble proportions called unwanted attention to them, most unwanted in 1793 when old scores were being settled by patriotic vigilantes. Terror, which the Revolutionary government employed as an official instrument for rooting out "foreign agents," cast its shadow on the mansion and deepened the gloom of a grief-stricken household. Growing up motherless in large, drafty, wood-paneled rooms that two centuries of damp Norman weather had turned green with mold and stripped of gilt hardly fostered girlish exuberance. To be sure, the Terror would end after Thermidor, but not so Caroline's tribulations. In 1796 the child lost her grandfather, and on a January day in 1803, Jean-Baptiste, at age thirty-nine, followed his wife to the grave, making Caroline an orphan before her tenth birthday.

Nicolas Cambremer's first cousin, a solicitor from Pont l'Évêque named Guillaume Thouret (whose sons made their mark in the world, one as director of the Paris Medical School, another - guillotined during the Terror - as president of the National Constituent Assembly), became Caroline's de facto guardian. He placed her in a very proper boarding school in Honfleur run by two dames who had formerly been mistresses at Saint-Cyr, the institution that Madame de Maintenon, Louis XIV's devout companion, had founded for poor girls of good family. There she acquired a lifelong friend in Mlle Marie Victoire Thurin, the future mother of Laure and Alfred Le Poittevin, with whom Caroline's own children would form lasting bonds. But death, that of her schoolmistresses, soon evicted her from yet another home. Leaving Honfleur behind, she moved to Rouen at the behest of her cousin and godmother, Marie Thouret, daughter of Guillaume, who had married Jean-Baptiste Laumonier some years earlier.

How her adolescence was spent can only be imagined. Having offered her safe haven at the Hôtel-Dieu (renamed Hospice d'Humanité during the Revolution), her guardians also agreed that she should receive further instruction, although, surrounded as she now found herself by people inclined to read Voltaire's philosophical fables rather than Bishop Bossuet's sermons, Catholicism played a diminished role in her life. For entertainment, apart from the high jinks of the Saint-Romain fair, which lasted most of every autumn, Rouennais went to the Théâtre des Arts, and it seems quite likely that the Laumoniers occasionally attended plays, concerts, and the opera with their ward, who would not have gone unnoticed. One friend remembered that her dusky good looks gave her the air of a Gypsy.

She was apparently spotted very early along by Achille-Cléophas Flaubert, himself an attractive man, dark and almond-eyed, with brows sweeping out like wings and a long, thin nose making an imperious statement in the ovals of a full-cheeked face. Caroline knew him as her guardian Laumonier's protégé and must have been told, when courtship became possible, that her surrogate parents favored his suit. The age difference of nine years was no impediment. Nor did the disparity of social background speak against them, given his excellent prospects and her orphanhood. But it behooved her kin to approve the marriage officially and scrutinize articles of a contract. Thus, a family council convened in January 1812, including surgeons, lawyers, landowners, and a member of the electoral college of Calvados. Caroline's dowry, which a husband could manage but not inherit under the régime dotale to which the future spouses pledged themselves, comprised a trousseau worth six thousand francs, bedroom furniture worth another two thousand, and a farm situated between Pont l'Évêque and Trouville. Achille in turn brought chattels estimated to be worth seven thousand francs, a not inconsiderable estate considering that few workers outside Paris earned as much as eight hundred francs a year. By an arrangement commonplace in Normandy, the contract provided for joint ownership of everything acquired during the marriage. When one spouse died, the survivor would inherit outright half the spouse's holdings and enjoy the usufruct of the rest.

Their marriage took place at City Hall on February 10, 1812, in a civil ceremony witnessed by Laumonier, the pharmacist of the Hôtel-Dieu, a banker friend, and several others, but not by Nicolas Flaubert, who, with only two more years to live, may have been ailing. The couple set up house on the rue du Petit Salut, a quiet street near the cathedral.

To most young people assessing their chances in February 1812, the future could not have looked bleaker. Bad harvests combined with massive unemployment among textile workers wrought havoc throughout Normandy. The famished queued up at street corners for Rumford soup, which was often all that saved them from starvation. In some of the larger cities rioters took to pillaging. "On approaching Lisieux," wrote the commissioner of police for Caen, "one sees ghastly pale faces and wasted bodies; miserable people are everywhere, sitting on the side of the roads, awaiting evidence of the travelers' sympathy. Milk, cooked herbs, cheese and coarse bran are the food of the peasant who cannot even afford oat bread."

Copyright © 2006 by Frederick Brown

Tags: Biographies & Memoirs

About the Author

Frederick Brown is the author of An Impersonation of Angels: A Biography of Jean Cocteau; Père-Lachaise, Theater and Revolution; and Zola: A Life. Twice the recipient of both Guggenheim and National Endowment for the Humanities fellowships, he lives in New York City.