Not
everything worth reading is hot off the press. In this section, we recommend "something old" that is still well worth
reading. "Something old" can mean anything from a venerable and antique
classic to a good book first published four or more years ago.
“MEMOIRS OF MADAME DE LA TOUR DU PIN” (“Le Journal d’une femme de cinquante ans”,
written between 1820 and 1840; edited and translated into English by Felice
Harcourt - English translation first published 1969)
Sometimes people
of no particular achievement and no notable intellectual attainment can write
memoirs that are very revealing about the times in which they lived. One such
specimen was Madame de la Tour du Pin. I first came across the English
translation of her memoirs about twenty years ago, and read them with great
delight – not because I endorsed or shared her worldview, but because she
expressed so perfectly the attitudes and values of her social class. The
historian in me was constantly interested in how she (and implicitly others of
her social standing) saw the events of the French revolution and much that
followed it.
The Marquise de
la Tour du Pin (1770-1853) was born Henriette-Lucy Dillon, the Irish surname
coming from the fact that she was descended from an Irish family who had
supported King James II in 1688 and therefore had fled to France when William
of Orange usurped the British throne. In France the family were ennobled by
Louis XIV. Henriette-Lucy was largely brought up by her grandmother in the
house of her great-uncle the Archbishop of Narbonne.
In her teens Henriette-Lucy
Dillon became a lady-in-waiting to Queen Marie-Antoinette in her last troubled
days at Versailles. She married the Comte de Gouvernet, who later inherited the
title de la Tour du Pin and who held a diplomatic post in The Hague early in
the revolution. Henriette-Lucy and her husband were in Paris in 1793, at the time
Louis XVI was executed. They managed to escape imprisonment and execution in
the Terror by retiring to the de la Tour du Pin estate, Chateau du Bouilh, near
Bordeaux. Still under threat from the Jacobins (the radical faction in the
revolution), the couple managed to escape to America with the surprising help
of Madame de Fontenay, the wife of the notorious Tallien, one of the most
zealous of the “Terrorists”.
Husband and wife
lived as amateur farmers in Albany, in upstate New York, for some of the
mid-1790s. Because the Comte de la Tour du Pin was a diplomat, they were
acquainted with the wily ex-bishop and diplomat Talleyrand, who was also at
this time sitting out the revolution in America and who was later to become an
important figure in the couple’s life. All three returned to France in the
Directory period, when the Terror was over, but then fled into exile again, this
time to England, when the Fructidor coup of 1798 purged possible royalist
sympathisers. As French émigrés in England, they had some blood relatives among
the English gentry. They welcomed the advent of Napoleon as a stabilising
influence, and returned to France in 1800. The Comte de la Tour du Pin worked
in Napoleon’s diplomatic service, but accepted the restoration of the Bourbons
in 1814, did not support Napoleon’s return in 1815 (the “Hundred Days”), and therefore
was part of the French contingent negotiating at the Congress of Vienna.
The Marquise de
la Tour du Pin lived to the ripe old age of 83. She wrote her memoirs mainly in
the 1820s (although she was still tinkering with them by the late 1830s),
addressing them to her sole surviving son Aymar. She was in her fifties in the
1820s, hence the title her memoirs were given when they were published years
later, Le Journal d’une Femme de
Cinquante Ans. She stops her narrative in 1815.
From this brief
summary of her life, you can see that how she lived was mainly dictated by the
changing historical situation in France – the end of the Bourbon monarchy, the
revolution, the Terror, the Directory, Fructidor, Napoleon, the end of Napoleon
and the restoration of the Bourbons.
How do we assess
her memoirs? They are the memoirs of a minor French aristocrat, often limited
in her judgments by her education and class. Her memoirs are very gossipy –
naturally filled with family details of limited historical interest. She is
frequently, and quite un-self-consciously, vain about her own good looks, wit
and superiority. Often they read as the memoirs of a supernumerary or hanger-on
who, quite falsely, sees herself as being at the centre of events.
Husband and wife
are (naturally and understandably) often trimmers in dangerous historical
times. (I recently reviewed for Landfall
an excellent new biography of the great French explorer Dumont D’Urville, and I
realise how much being a trimmer was the natural condition of most educated
French people in revolutionary and Napoleonic times.) Basically they belong to the ancien regime – Madame de la Tour du Pin
is often snobbish in her judgments upon later upstarts who did not manage the
effortless style of her own aristocratic generation – such as the ladies of
Napoleon’s court. And yet the couple’s attitudes are not inflexible. The
weaknesses and inadequacies of the ancien
regime are duly noted. Napoleon is admired as the restorer of French
honour. And the Restoration of 1814 is seen as faintly ridiculous. (Bear in
mind that France had undergone yet another revolution and regime change in
1830, before these memoirs were first published in France).
There is, I
repeat, absolutely nothing remarkable in the mind that produced these memoirs.
Perhaps this is the real reason that they are historically interesting. They
show the judgments and reaction and prejudices that were typical of
Madame de la Tour du Pin’s minor aristocratic class.
And yet… and
yet…. I do not wish to underestimate Madame de la Tour du Pin any more than I
want to build her up as a major literary figure. Sometimes her observations and
judgments are quite shrewd – even witty – and she has seen enough not to
romanticise “the good old days”. She knows full well that the revolution was
not causeless and did not come out of nowhere.
To illustrate
the quality of this book, I can do no better than to quote some of the passages
that found their way into my reading diary. [All page numbers are according to
the Harvill Press edition of 1969.]
Here is Madame
de la Tour du Pin on the destructive laxity and scepticism of the old regime:
“In my earliest years, I saw things which
might have been expected to warp my mind, pervert my affections, deprave my
character and destroy in me every notion of religion and morality. From the age
of ten I heard around me the freest conversations and the expression of the
most ungodly principles. Brought up, as I was, in an Archbishop’s house where
every rule of religion was broken daily, I was fully aware that my lessons in
dogma and doctrine were given no more importance than those in history and
geography.” (pp.13-24)
She notes that
in this archbishop’s household, there was not even a chaplain to serve daily
devotional needs. She goes on to speak of the general breakdown of public
morality:
“The profligate reign of Louis XV had
corrupted the nobility and among the Court Nobles could be found instances of
every form of vice. Gaming, debauchery, immorality, irreligion, were all
flaunted openly. The hierarchy of the Church, summoned to Paris for those congresses
of the clergy which the King… was obliged to call every year… had also been
corrupted by contact with the dissolute habits of the Court… The older I grew…
the more sure I became that the revolution of 1789 was only the inevitable
consequence and, I might almost say, the just punishment of the vices of the
upper classes, vices carried to such excess that if people had not been
stricken with a mortal blindness, they must have seen that they would
inevitably have been consumed by the very fire they themselves were lighting.”
(pp.26-27)
Having been a
young courtier, she paints an affectionate enough portrait of Louis XVI, but
she is not dazzled by him:
“He was stout, about five feet six or seven
inches tall, square-shouldered and with the worst possible bearing. He looked
like some peasant shambling along behind his plough; there was nothing proud or
regal about him. His sword was a continual embarrassment to him and he never
knew what to do with his hat, yet in court dress he looked really magnificent”
(pp.71-72)
As she deals
with the events that led up to the revolution, she is highly critical of the
king’s inactivity and sequestration at Versailles, but she is even more
critical of what she sees as the devious behaviour of the leader of the rival
branch of the royal family, the Duc d’Orleans. She interprets his actions as
undermining real royal authority in his own interests. As for the abolition of
feudal dues and rights, she is livid as one would expect a minor aristocrat to
be, declaring of this early revolutionary event:
“… the happenings of the night of the 4th
of August when, on the motion of the Vicomte de Noailles, it was decreed that
feudal rights should be abolished, ought to have convinced even the most
incredulous that the National Assembly was unlikely to stop at this first
measure of dispossession. The decree ruined my father-in-law and our family
never recovered from the effect of that night’s session. It was a veritable
orgy of iniquities.” (pp.116-117)
Lafayette is depicted as an
honest but theatrical fool who did not realize how much he was being
manipulated by Orleans. The story that royal troops donned the white cockade
and cursed the people is discounted as a fiction. And we get this unflattering
description of Marie-Antoinette:
“She was gifted with very great courage, but very little intelligence,
absolutely no tact and, worst of all, a mistrust – always misplaced – of those
most willing to serve her. She refused to recognise that the terrible danger
which had threatened her on the night of the 6th of October was the
result of a plot by the Duc d’Orleans, and from then on vented her resentment
on all the people of Paris and avoided appearing in public.” (p.139)
While she is largely
contemptuous of the feast of federation on 14 July 1790 (the first official
celebration of “Bastille Day”, at a time when the king was still on the throne)
she is generous enough in spirit to acknowledge the high ideals that motivated
it:
“Laundresses and knights of St.Louis worked side by side in that great gathering
of all the people; there was not the slightest disorder or the smallest
dispute. Everyone was moved by the same impulse: fellowship.” (pp.142-143)
She is scandalised by army
officers who fled abroad early in the revolution, leaving the armed forces to
more radical “other ranks” and hence hastening the breakdown of order and violence
against the royal state. She quotes with approval (p.160) Napoleon’s later
observation that “Had I been in
Lafayette’s place, the king would still be sitting on his throne.” She also gives a chilling account of the
silence that fell on the city of Paris (p.177) on the morning that the king was
executed, while she and her husband, in their house outside the old city walls,
awaited evidence of popular revulsion against the act of regicide.
Some of her portraits of individuals
are waspish and backhanded. Here she is on the revolutionary era’s supreme
trimmer Talleyrand:
“M. de Talleyrand was amiable, as he unvaryingly was to me, and his
conversation had a grace and ease which has never been surpassed. He had known
me since my childhood and always talked to me with an almost paternal
politeness which was delightful. One might, in one’s inmost mind, regret having
so many reasons for not holding him in respect, but memories of his wrong-doing
were always dispelled by an hour of his conversation. Worthless himself, he
had, oddly enough, a horror of wrong-doing in others. Listening to him, and not
knowing him, one thought him a virtuous man. Only his exquisite sense of
propriety prevented him from saying things to me which would have displeased
me, and if, as sometimes happened, they did escape him, he would recollect
himself immediately, and say: ‘Ah yes, but you don’t like that.’ ” (p.246)
Later she remarks that “It was impossible to feel surprise at
anything M. de Talleyrand did, unless, perhaps, it should be something lacking
in taste. Although he served a government drawn from the dregs of the gutter,
he himself remained a very great gentleman.” (p.304)
The sniffy ancien regime aristocrat comes out in Madame de la Tour du Pin when she describes Napoleon’s wife
Josephine (pp.341-342) as “gracious,
amiable and kindly…not outstandingly intelligent” and obviously not the
sort of upper crust lady who would once have been received at royal Versailles.
In the closing
pages of her memoirs, there is a continuous ambiguity in Madame de la Tour du
Pin’s attitude towards the restored Bourbon monarchy. She openly expresses the
opinion that the Bourbons had learned nothing in their years of exile, that
they were weak and indecisive and that they shamed France in comparison with
the military glories of Napoleon. But her sense of loyalty still makes her see
Bonapartists as upstarts and she presents her husband as having made the right
decision in standing by Louis XVIII and not joining the Hundred Days.
If you feel that
I (and Madame de la Tour du Pin) have been boring you with the minutiae of
French history, allow me to add that Madame de la Tour du Pin does tell some
quite delightful anecdotes that have little to do with historical circumstances.
She relates the tale (p.145) of a highly intelligent convent-educated girl who
read the Classics in the original and who, when finally coming out of the
convent in 1790, was bewildered to find that modern France was nothing like the
world described in Caesar’s commentaries. Then there is this little gem, with
which I will close:
“We received a visit from the father of M.
d’Aix, a gentleman of the old school, without a vestige of intelligence or
learning. It used to be said of him that he had, quite literally, bored his
wife to death. Nonetheless, he enjoyed an income of sixty thousand francs or
more a year…” (p.357)
Ah yes – boring,
wealthy idiots. They are always with us.
Egotistical
footnote:
If the general subject of this “Something Old” interests you, you might be
interested to look up, via on the index at right, my takes on Thomas Carlyle’s The French Revolution (the dyspeptic Scot’s version of the
whole sequence of events); Frances
Mossiker’s The Queen’s Necklace (about
a great pre-revolutionary scandal) and Benjamin
Constant’s Adolphe (his novel
which gives a fictionalised version of his affair with Madame de Stael, whom Madame de la Tour du Pin credits in her memoirs with influencing
appointments to the French Foreign Office in the Napoleonic era, when her
husband was a diplomat). You might also look up my take on Honore de Balzac’s wonderful novel La Rabouilleuse / The Black Sheep,
which concerns in part the discontents of former Bonapartists. You might have
noticed that French history and literature are things that interest me.
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