Napoleon’s only son had died in 1832 of tuberculosis at the age of 21. His nephew, Louis-Napoleon, who had been in prison for his part in two attempted coups, returned from exile to run against General Cavaignac, former Minister for War, winning a landslide as the first elected President of France. In 1852, after a coup d’état, he became Emperor Napoleon III; liberals were banished, sent to penal colonies or fled, Victor Hugo among them. Napoleon I had never quite carried out all his plans to make Paris the most magnificent city in Europe: his nephew and Baron Haussmann would now sweep away narrow, dark streets and bring lighting, pavements and space. The Champs-Elysées were still green fields; but they would not be so for long.
The France into which Lucie was born, in the spring of 1770, was no more. Versailles had become a museum. Steam, the telegraph, trains, gas lighting, the smokestacks of industry had between them transformed the landscape of her childhood into a world she would no longer recognise. Charles Darwin was soon to publish his work on the origin of the species. Queen Victoria had been on the throne for 16 years, and a million people had died in the Irish potato famine and a million more had emigrated, many of them to the United States. Slavery had finally been abolished, though in France it had taken a revolution, an empire, two restorations, a bourgeois monarchy and a republic to end it. The word ‘tourist’ had entered the vocabulary, and some said that it was invented by Stendhal. The people who had filled Lucie’s world, the friends, the statesmen, the soldiers, the famous women who had opened their salons to all the most brilliant people of their age, had gone, and it would never again be possible to believe in the divine right of kings. Even Bertrand was dead, buried in the Invalides near the man he had served so faithfully, and Mme Récamier, who had in her lifetime been painted by David, Gérard and Isabey. The graves of Lucie’s children lay scattered, Humbert in Paris, Charlotte–with Frédéric–in Lausanne, Séraphine in Albany, Edward in Richmond, Cécile in Nice.
Pisa remained untroubled, a quiet, peaceful backwater, the news of Europe’s turbulence only distant sounds. On 2 April 1853, soon after her 83rd birthday, Lucie died. She was buried, not in the Campo Santo as she had hoped, but in a cemetery on the outskirts of Pisa, in the walls of a vaulted grey arcade, among the cypresses. In an age when rivers mattered, when life unfolded along their waterways and banks, she had lived on the Seine, the Hudson, the Thames and the Garonne, and she died by the Arno. ‘The days pass by like instants,’ she had written not long before. ‘I miss nothing that vanity once might have caused me to regret. I no longer dream of all those footmen in livery, those horses, those carriages, that excellent cook…All that is now so far from me that it is as if I had never known it.’
Afterword
The year after Lucie’s death, Aymar married and had a son; but he in turn had no male descendants. The Gouvernet de la Tour du Pin branch of the family died out. Félicie de la Rochejacquelein lived another 30 years. Cécile, Lucie’s much-loved granddaughter, died in 1893, having had three sons; Hadelin, who predeceased her, had four.
Lucie’s papers and her red leather notebooks made their way to the Château de Vêves in Belgium, home to the Liederkerke-Beaufort family, where she had spent several unhappy months after Cécile’s marriage. They included the many volumes of memoirs, covering the years 1770 to 1814, but stopping with Louis XVIII’s accession to the throne; though she never explained her decision to write nothing about the 40 years that followed. What made it possible to document those years were the seven boxes of letters between Lucie and Félicie, starting in 1821 when Lucie was 51 and her goddaughter 23, and continuing until not long before Lucie’s death. Only a very few of these many hundreds of letters, as full and as detailed as her memoirs, have ever been published. There were also her letters to Hadelin, to his father Auguste, to Mme de Staël and to various friends, and Frédéric’s own papers and letters.
Hanging on the walls of the château at Vêves are also portraits of Lucie’s grandchildren and of the Princesse d’Hénin; and at Le Bouilh, still in the hands of the family who bought the château from Frédéric, are pictures of Lucie, Frédéric and their children.
In 1907, 54 years after Lucie’s death, Hadelin’s son Aymar-Marie-Ferdinand decided to edit his great-grandmother’s memoirs. They were published under the title Le Journal d’une femme de cinquante ans. Quickly recognised as one of the most exceptional portraits of an exceptional age, it was soon translated into English and German. It has seldom been out of print since then, and it has provided scholars and readers with a rich fund of detail on France during a long and uniquely troubled period of its history.
Acknowledgements
My first thanks go to M. le Comte de Liederkerke-Beaufort for allowing me to read in the family archives in the Château de Vêves, near Dinant, in Belgium. While working there, I was greatly helped by Mme Rouard, and M. Frédéric Rouard. Beatrix de Blacas, descendant of Mme de Duras’s daughter Clara, kindly arranged for me to visit the Château of Ussé in the Loire, and provided me with a family picture of Lucie de la Tour du Pin.
In Bordeaux, I was able to visit Le Bouilh with the kind assistance of Charles Pelletier-Doisy and Guy de Feuilhade. I thank them both. Julien and Michelle Sapori took time to show me around Hautefontaine and provided me with information about the early life of the house.
The descendants from Lucie de la Tour du Pin’s English family, Isabel and Alec Cobbe, generously allowed me to see their family papers, as did Teresa Waugh, whose own work on her great-great-uncle, Archbishop Dillon, was invaluable. I thank them all very much.
For documents and papers, and in some cases permission to quote from them, I would like to thank the following institutions and their staffs: the Bibliothèque Nationale; the Service des Archives, Ministère des Affaires Étrangères; the Bibliothèque Historique de la Ville de Paris; the Archives Nationales de France; the Bibliothèque Municipale de Bordeaux; the Bibliothèque Municipale d’Amiens; the Musée Carnavalet; the National Archives of Brussels; the British Library; the London Library; the National Archives at Kew; the Library of Congress; the New York Public Library; the manuscript division of Albany State Library; the Massachusetts Historical Society.
I am greatly indebted to Colin Jones and Anne Chisholm for reading the manuscript, to Philip Mansel for his kind help and advice, and to Elfrieda Pownall, with whom I talked over the idea for the book. The Wingate Foundation very generously gave me a scholarship, which allowed me to travel to the many places in which Lucie lived at some point in her long life. Without its support I should not have been able to explore them all.
And I should like to thank the companions of my many journeys: Christopher Balfour, David Bernstein, Anne Chisholm, Monnie Curzon, Virginia Duigan, the late Alfred Gellhorn, Miles Morland, and my son, Daniel Swift. The trips were made all the more pleasurable through their company.
Once again, I would like warmly to thank my editors, Jennifer Barth and Penelope Hoare, my agent, Clare Alexander, and Douglas Matthews, for his index.
C. M.
London
October 2008
Bibliography
Primary Sources
The most important sources for this book are to be found in the published and unpublished papers, letters and journals of Lucie Dillon, Marquise de la Tour du Pin, and of her husband, Frédéric de Gouvernet, Marquis de la Tour du Pin. The unpublished letters and manuscripts are in the Château de Vêves, near Dinant in Belgium, in the possession of M. le Comte de Liedekerke-Beaufort. These files include:
Dossier 316. Diplomatic dispatches from M. de la Tour du Pin from The Hague (1792 and 1818–19) and from Turin (1820–8).
Dossiers 324–39: Correspondence between Lucie Dillon and Félicie de la Rochejacquelein.
Aymar de la Tour du Pin: Unpublished memoir.
Various letters to and from Mme de Staël and Lady Bedingfield.
Manuscript Sources
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I translated the quotations from the French and Italian myself.
Select Bibliography
The 18th century in France, the revolution, the Directoire, the Consulat, the Empire and the two Restorations are periods of history that have been extensively written about: in memoirs, novels, scholarly histories and academic journals. The following is a brief selection of some of those most frequently consulted for this book.
1) France in the 18th and 19th centuries
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Darnton, Robert, The Great Cat Massacre and Other Episodes in French Cultural History. New York 1984.
Darnton, Robert and Roche, Daniel (eds), Revolution in Print: the Press in France: 1775–1800. Berkeley 1989.
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Mansel, Philip, Dressed to Rule. Yale 2005.
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2) Memoirs
Agoult, Comtesse de, Mémoires, souvenirs et journaux, 2 vols. Paris 1990.
Boigne, Adèle de, Mémoires: Souvenirs d’une tante, 4 vols. Paris 1908.
Chastenay, Mme de, Mémoires: 1771–1815. Paris 1987.
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3) The Dillon and de la Tour du Pin families
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Source notes
Chapter 1
‘Of all the faubourg’s…’: see Charles Lefeuve, Histoire de Paris rue par rue, maison par maison (Paris 1875).
‘The Marquis de Bombelles…’: Journal (Geneva 1977), p. 143.
‘On 16 May…’: see Antonia Fraser, Marie Antoinette (London 2001).
‘In 1770…’: see Richard Cobb, Paris and Its Provinces (London 1975); Louis-Sebastien Mercier, Tableau de Paris (Paris 1979).
‘Unwanted children…’: see Claude Delasselle, ‘Les Enfants abandonnés au XVIIIième siècle’, Annales, Économies, Sociétés, Civilisations, Jan./Feb. 1975.
‘Much of the life of the capital…’: see Isabelle Backouche, La Trace du fleuve, la Seine et Paris 1750–1850 (Paris 2000).
‘To the west…’: see William Howard Adams, The French Garden 1500–1800 (London 1979).
‘Approaching the city…’: Stacy Schieff, A Great Improvisation: Franklin, France and the Birth of America (New York 2005), p. 45.
‘Food was glorious…’: Philip Mansel, Prince of Europe: The Life of Charles-Joseph de Ligne: 1735–1814 (London 2003), p. 53.
‘the Encyclopédistes…’: see Robert Darnton, The Great Cat Massacre and Other Episodes in French Cultural History (New York 1984); Roy Porter and Marie Mulvey Roberts (eds), Pleasure in the 18th Century (London 1966).
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