On 1 January 1820, shortly before her 50th birthday, Lucie Dillon, Marquise de la Tour du Pin, decided that the moment had come to write her memoirs. Until that day, she had never written anything but letters ‘to those I love’. ‘Let me take advantage,’ she wrote, ‘of the warmth that is still in me to tell something of a troubled and restless life, in which the unhappinesses were caused less, perhaps, by the events known to all the world, than by secret griefs known only to God.’
So saying, Lucie sat down and began writing what would be one of the finest memoirs of the age, full of humour and shrewdness and affection. She wrote boldly and dispassionately, for there was nothing retiring or falsely modest in her character and she had much to say. It was, she had decided, to be a diary, for her son and grandchildren, for she had no plans for publication, either before or after her death. And it was as a diary that she wrote it, simply and without artifice, describing precisely what she saw and heard, not only of her own extraordinary life, but the exceptionally turbulent period of French history that she lived through. She wrote about domestic matters and affairs of state, about personal tragedies and public mayhem, with optimism and robustness–despite the secret griefs–and a mixture of innocence and knowingness, which makes her voice very much her own.
When her memoir was finally published, 50 years after her death, it was immediately recognised as a faithful testimony to a lost age. Never out of print since then, it has provided countless scholars with detailed, vivid information, made all the more remarkable by the fact that, for most of her very long life, she happened to be precisely where the transforming events of her time were taking place. But her many letters–which have never been published, and which cover the 40 years of her life that followed the events described in the memoirs–are just as remarkable. In some ways, they are even more so, for they show a woman without guile or malice yet possessed of considerable shrewdness about the workings of the world.
Born in Paris in 1770 in the dying days of the ancien régime, into a family of liberal aristocrats with many links to Versailles and the court of Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette, she survived the French Revolution, which saw many of her family and friends die or lose all they possessed. Escaping to America, she and her husband bought a farm and became increasingly concerned about the injustices of slavery. Later she lived through the eras of Napoleon and the restoration of the French kings, Louis XVIII, Charles X and Louis-Philippe. At the time of her death in 1853 Napoleon III had just ascended the throne. Almost nothing of the world into which she was born remained, neither the grandeur, nor the idea of absolute monarchy, nor the privileges; but she herself was singularly unchanged.
Because of her parents, she grew up at the court of Marie Antoinette, but it was a court riven by corruption, vendettas and profligacy. Because of who she became, her friends included Talleyrand, Wellington, Mme de Staël, Lafayette and Josephine Bonaparte–many of whom left descriptions of her. Because of who she married–Frédéric de la Tour du Pin was a soldier, administrator and diplomat–she saw the Terror unfold in Paris and Bordeaux, attended on Napoleon and Josephine, was in Brussels during the Battle of Waterloo and observed the early days of Italy’s unification. Along with a taste for hard work, she possessed a natural curiosity, an enormous need to understand and to remember, not only the grandeur and the politics, but the ordinary everyday events, the food, the clothes, the expressions on people’s faces. It made her a formidable witness.
Unremittingly tough on herself, she was extremely demanding of others; but she had a shrewd and self-mocking sense of humour and she possessed a generous and loving heart. When one personal tragedy followed another–the ‘secret griefs’ of her life–she did not complain. On the contrary, they made her more determined than ever to show fortitude. The memoirs are a portrait in resilience, the way that great pain can be endured and overcome. Lucie was not merely courageous: she was resourceful and imaginative.
Because Lucie’s own life and character were so remarkable, her story offers a fascinating portrait of an 18th-century woman. But it is more than that. The times she lived through were indeed exceptional, and it is in that context that she has to be seen, against a constantly changing, frightening and troubled background, broken by periods of domestic happiness and public prosperity, with her life running like a thread through her times. It is impossible to understand why she was so admirable without understanding the world that she looked out on; and which she survived.
What she witnessed was not just the end of an era both of extremes of privilege and extremes of poverty and backwardness, but the birth of a recognisably modern world, a new ordering of society. She saw and recognised the changes and the need for them, and most she approved of. Given her intense self-awareness and her experiences of loss and tragedy–universal experiences she shares with women at all moments of history–it is sometimes tempting to think of her as a modern woman. But Lucie belonged firmly in her times, and she dealt with her life in the ways that her 18th-century upbringing had taught her; which is why it is so important to set her clearly in her background and the age she lived through.
What Lucie discovered, as she started writing, was that she had a natural talent for description, a canny eye for the telling detail and strong feelings about right and wrong. She had feared that her memory might be poor: on the contrary, it was precise and deep. And as she wrote, so the age that she had lived through and survived came alive under her pen. Others had endured the same hardships and recorded the turmoil that consumed France in the closing years of the 18th century and the first decades of the 19th. What gave Lucie’s memoirs and her letters their edge was something quite different. It was to do with a kind of purity. In an era of licentiousness and expediency, when the world of seduction and deceit depicted by Choderlos de Laclos in Les Liaisons dangereuses offered a mirror to the aristocratic life around her, when Catholic prelates thought nothing of fathering children, and preferment owed more to intrigue than to natural talent, Lucie retained all her life a moral clarity and simplicity. It might have made her dull and priggish. Instead, it turned her into an impressive reporter who observed and recorded a lost age with candour and humour. It made her a loving and faithful wife and a devoted mother. And it made her brave, which was fortunate, for the events that befell her would have broken a frailer spirit.