At Clichy, Sophie lived a very quiet life, though she seems to have been fond of entertaining her humble neighbours. “I went sometimes to see Mlle. Arnould, at Clichy,” writes Millin. “One day, I found her in the midst of a large circle. There were twenty persons at table. I was on the point of retiring, when she called me back and said to me: ‘Come in! I am marrying the son of my cook to the daughter of my gardener. Both families are my guests; we are celebrating the pleasures of Love and Equality.’ In the evening, her two sons arrived. They wanted money. She had none to give them. ‘Ah, well!’ said she, ‘each of you take a horse from the stable.’ And they went away with the two horses.”[62]
The expenses of her family—she had now to support Alexandrine and her two children, in addition to her sons—pressed heavily upon poor Sophie, and, in January 1788, we find her writing to one of her old friends, a financier of the name of Boutin, begging him to arrange for her a loan of 24,000 livres, which she proposes to repay by four yearly instalments of 6000 livres. As security, she offers a mortgage on her house at Clichy, which, she declares, is worth 20,000 francs, and another on the furniture of a house belonging to her in the Rue Caumartin, and assures him that she will keep her promise to repay the money “with certainty, honour, and probity.”
She appears to have obtained the accommodation she sought, but was speedily in difficulties again, and compelled to apply for assistance to some of her old friends, whom, when they sent her money, or even “evinced an intention to oblige her,” she overwhelms with gratitude, declaring that, if it be true, as learned men assert, that the soul never perishes, her own will remember the obligation, even after death.
Yet, harassed though she was, she could sympathise with the distress of others. On January 21, 1789, a young man of the name of Bompas was arrested at the Barrière de Clichy, with three parcels in his possession, containing a large quantity of lady’s underwear, “marked with the letters S.A. in red cotton,” a porcelain mustard-pot, a green morocco case holding two decanters and a crystal goblet, two pairs of candlesticks, and various other articles. On being brought before a commissary of police, he confessed that the above-mentioned articles were the property of Mlle. Arnould, whose residence he had burglariously entered the previous evening. Sophie caused inquiries to be made and, finding that Bompas was a journeyman carpenter of hitherto irreproachable character, who had been out of work for several weeks and had been driven to the theft by necessity, generously declined to prosecute, and the prisoner was accordingly released.
Several writers have stated that, in the early days of the Revolution, Sophie’s salon became a political club and that she herself was an enthusiastic advocate of republican doctrines. “There are beings,” wrote Champcenetz, in the course of a brutal attack on the ex-singer which he published in the royalist organ, La Chronique scandaleuse, “who would not die content unless they had degraded themselves in every conceivable way. Of this the aged Sophie Arnould is an example. After delivering herself for forty years to every scoundrel of bad taste, she has now turned demagogue, that she may receive at her house the dregs of the human race. She has sent to study at the Jacobins the two children, with whom a man of gallantry once presented her, through inadvertence.”[63]
That Sophie, in common with her old lover Lauraguais and others of her aristocratic and literary friends, sympathised to a certain extent with the Revolution—that is to say, with the Revolution in its earlier phases—is probable enough. That, crippled as she was with debts, she kept open house for all the turbulent spirits of her time, or carried her partisanship so far as to endeavour to influence the opinions of her sons, who were quite old enough to form them without any assistance from their mother, as Champcenetz—an old enemy, by the way, of both Sophie and Lauraguais—asserts, we beg leave to doubt. Any way, her enthusiasm for the new order of things must have been very short-lived, for, in 1789, her pension of 4000 livres was reduced to 2000, and from 1793 not paid at all, but, according to an entry in the Archives, “left owing.”
In 1790, Sophie sold her house at Clichy-la-Garenne and purchased, “for a mere song,” an old disused priory at Luzarches. Her new residence she christened Le Paraclet, though whether she derived much comfort from the house itself is open to question, as it was in the last stage of dilapidation, and she had no money to spare for even the most urgent repairs. In an amusing letter, written in 1794 to Belanger, she describes it as “only the carcase of a house, which waits for doors and windows until it shall please God to send me the means,” and adds that she is “camping provisionally in the dovecot of the ancient monks.”
Her surroundings, however, appear to have afforded her some compensation for the ruinous condition of the building. “I have a beautiful park, containing all that it is possible to desire whether for ornament or use; superb kitchen-garden; a vineyard, which has yielded me this year six hogsheads of wine; a forest, a wood, an orchard, a pond well stocked with fish, fresh air, beautiful scenery, good land. This is the fourth year that I have been here, and I remain in the greatest solitude. But well! I have not felt one moment’s ennui since I came.”
While at Luzarches, Sophie received a domiciliary visit from the local revolutionary committee. She received them with a smiling face, though she must have been quaking with fear, since her intimacy with the Prince de Condé and other distinguished émigrés was sufficient to have sent her to the guillotine a dozen times over.
“I have always been a very active citizen,” said she; “I know the Rights of Man by heart” (a remark which was certainly true), “and I have sung twenty years at the Opéra-National for the pleasure of the Sovereign People.”