Moorehead - Dancing to the Precipice: Lucie Dillon, Marquise de la Tour du Pin and the French Revolution

The year after Lucies 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. Flicie de la Rochejacquelein lived another 30 years. Ccile, Lucies much-loved granddaughter, died in 1893, having had three sons; Hadelin, who predeceased her, had four.

Lucies papers and her red leather notebooks made their way to the Chteau de Vves in Belgium, home to the Liederkerke-Beaufort family, where she had spent several unhappy months after Cciles marriage. They included the many volumes of memoirs, covering the years 1770 to 1814, but stopping with Louis XVIIIs 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 Flicie, starting in 1821 when Lucie was 51 and her goddaughter 23, and continuing until not long before Lucies 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 Stal and to various friends, and Frdrics own papers and letters.

Hanging on the walls of the chteau at Vves are also portraits of Lucies grandchildren and of the Princesse dHnin; and at Le Bouilh, still in the hands of the family who bought the chteau from Frdric, are pictures of Lucie, Frdric and their children.

In 1907, 54 years after Lucies death, Hadelins son Aymar-Marie-Ferdinand decided to edit his great-grandmothers memoirs. They were published under the title Le Journal dune 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.

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The most important sources for this book are to be found in the published and unpublished papers, letters and journals of Lucie Dillon, Marquise de la Tour du Pin, and of her husband, Frdric de Gouvernet, Marquis de la Tour du Pin. The unpublished letters and manuscripts are in the Chteau de Vves, near Dinant in Belgium, in the possession of M. le Comte de Liedekerke-Beaufort.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 181819) and from Turin (18208).

Dossiers 32439: Correspondence between Lucie Dillon and Flicie de la Rochejacquelein.

Aymar de la Tour du Pin: Unpublished memoir.

Various letters to and from Mme de Stal and Lady Bedingfield.

Manuscript Sources

Important manuscript sources are to be found in the Archives Nationales in Paris (Series F1, F2 and F3); in the Ministre des Affaires Etrangres in Paris (files on The Hague and Sardinia); in the Archives Municipales in Bordeaux (files on La Tour du Pin and Le Bouilh); in the National Archives in London (files on refugees from the French Revolution 17891800). Contemporary news papers are to be found in the State Library of New York State in Albany; in the Library of Congress, Washington; in the Archives Municipales at Amiens; in the British Librarys Newspaper Library, Colindale Avenue, London; and in the Bibliothque Nationale in Paris.

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.