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Barbe-Nicole had reason to be optimistic. François was an energetic young man, and he played the violin beautifully. He had been given a liberal and expensive education, and he could boast many accomplishments. Not only did he know the sums and figures of a businessman’s son, he could also quote from the great works of French literature and had read the famous philosophers of the Enlightenment, men like Diderot, Voltaire, and Rousseau. Barbe-Nicole’s private passion was reading, and it was common ground. François’s spelling, however, was dismal, and his command of the foreign languages necessary to the family business was not quite what his father wished. Still, he had big ideas and great enthusiasm, and unlike many husbands, he was willing to share both with her.
    Compared with Barbe-Nicole, however, it seems François was sensitive and moody, and she must also have noticed immediately the way in which his mother and father coddled him. She soon understood why. He could be cheerful and energized one moment and apparently turn melancholy and despairing the next. This was a side of her husband she would not have expected. Despite the close connections between their families, she had not seen much of him for several years. François had finished his education abroad, working as a business apprentice in the firm of a banker and merchant in Switzerland who was one of his father’s friends. This sort of hands-on business training was the norm for the sons of successful entrepreneurs, and he had returned to Reims only the year before their wedding.
    She heard, of course, the stories of his time in Switzerland. His parents had been anxious to help him avoid the military when the Revolution spiraled into war. The whole point of sending François to complete his education in Switzerland in 1792, just as conscriptions into the army were becoming inevitable, was to dodge the draft. Young men in France were being forcibly rounded up to serve in the military, and Philippe was anxious to get François out of the country. Like Barbe-Nicole’s father, Philippe put on a show of being a radical patriot. His revolutionary politics, however, did not go so far as having his son on the front lines. Having lived a double life as a Catholic and royalist during a decade of republican purges, Barbe-Nicole had learned to expect a different reality behind any public facade. It made her something of a cynic.
    She could also understand that with François as their only son, his parents had staked their financial future on the day when he could take over the family business. They would face an uncertain old age if he died in the muddy fields of Austria, and it was clearly in their best interests to keep him safe. What she could not have known and would have found less reassuring were the other reasons Philippe and Catherine-Françoise must have had for wanting to keep François out of the army.
    François’s letters home from 1792 to 1794 are filled with patriotic zeal. He had a romantic view of war and was naturally an idealist. He was also apparently prone to illness and—more worryingly—to depression. Philippe wrote urgent letters to his son in Switzerland, reminding François of his “weak temperament” and history of hernias. In other letters, he begged his son to fight melancholy and eat well. There was a darker side to François’s ebullient personality that his parents knew only too well.
    The result of it all was that the idea of their son facing the rigors of war sent them into a panic. Philippe was desperate to find a way out of the military for François, and his son’s enthusiasm for the service only worried him more. Soon they were caught up in the power struggle that seems to have defined their relationship. His father was a coolly rational man who, with the best of intentions, must have undermined his son’s confidence by questioning François’s characteristic zeal for every new plan. Doubting himself and seeking