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.