BIOGRAPHY: Dancing to the Precipice: Lucie de la Tour du Pin and the French RevolutionBy Caroline Moorehead,Chatto Windus, 480pp. £20
VISITORS TO the National Library of Ireland's current exhibition, Strangers to Citizens: the Irish in Europe, 1600-1800,will be struck by a video documentary featuring an excerpt from the French memoirs of one Henrietta-Lucy Dillon. As the name suggests, Dillon is of Irish descent. Her memoirs reveal the assertive voice of a highly observant 18th-century female aristocrat. By happy coincidence, Caroline Moorehead has just written a superb new biography of that very same Lucie Dillon, who later became the Marquise de la Tour du Pin.
The attraction of Moorehead's biography lies in her seamless fusion of Lucie's warm subjectivity with a broad historical canvas of bitter turmoil. Because Lucie is born into the highest French aristocratic circles, she quite inadvertently becomes a first-hand witness to, and survivor of, the French Revolution, the rise and fall of Napoleon, the Restoration of three French kings and the ascent of Napoleon III. It may be the luck of the Irish, but Lucie narrowly cheats death on numerous occasions. She happens to be at Versailles to witness the moment when the poissardesinvade the palace and capture Marie-Antoinette and Louis XVI. Years later, a fortuitous cloud of sea fog permits herself and her family to escape from a coastguard police escort and the guillotine.
Lucie is an extraordinary first-hand witness to the dramatic times in which she lives. She crosses paths with many of the greatest names of her era, including Wellington, Lafayette, Mme de Staël, Talleyrand and Louis XVIII. All who meet her admire Lucie’s feisty determination. Curiously, it is Napoleon who makes the greatest impression on the marquise, for reasons of a striking mutual approval and a remarkably deep empathy.
Yet to focus on political history is to betray the warmth and personality of Lucie’s own memoirs and correspondence so faithfully rendered in this modern biography. As a seasoned biographer, Moorehead has identified the perfect subject in Lucie. At times, the Marquise’s fall from luxury to penury twice over is so utterly astonishing that it reads more like a historical novel than a biography. Who else was privy to so many inner circles of so many régimes and yet survived to tell the tale, and so articulately?
The Dillon family, originally from Roscommon, were Jacobite supporters whose Dillon regiment served with the French army. Lucie was an orphaned only child who grew to be self-sufficient under a tyrannical grandmother. Her charming adaptability and fluent English would stand her in good stead throughout 83 long years. But it is her incredibly detailed accounts of everyday life in 18th-century Paris, London, Amsterdam, Brussels, Italy and America, that capture her biographer’s imagination. Lucie’s unrelenting love for her family and her positive approach to life permeate every inch of this biography and will certainly win over the heart of many a modern reader.
While growing up, Lucie relishes concomitant worlds of great luxury and of political debate. Like her mother, she is appointed lady-in-waiting to Marie-Antoinette. Her father talks politics with Thomas Jefferson and Benjamin Franklin in Mme Helvétius's salon, as 18 angora cats prowl around, each dressed in satin. Rather like Dickens's A Tale of Two Cities, the revolutionary section of this biography offers a human perspective on such an inhuman moment in history. From the midst of Parisian revolutionary turmoil and uncertainty, Lucie observes the oddly innocent scene of Voltaire's remains being transferred to the Panthéon. From exile in London, her pen sketches of roller skates, toothbrushes and fountain pens are typical of her avid curiosity for life's myriad possibilities.
When in exile in America, Lucie refuses to wallow in the self-pity so rampant within French émigrécircles, and instead tucks into farming with gusto, befriending the local Indians and priding herself on her immaculate dairy. She soon makes excellent yellow butter, on which she stamps the de La Tour du Pin crest. Some years later, when she becomes French ambassadress in Brussels, she is privately thrilled to find she has been immortalised as an émigréAmerican cow-milker in Abbé Delille's poem La Pitié.
Moorehead gracefully channels the chatty, confiding voice that emanates from Lucie’s memoirs. Through 50 years of marriage, Lucie’s core devotion is to her children and her husband. Despite her fundamental belief in the superiority of aristocracy, it is her down-to-earth practicality that permits her to survive. In depicting the ebb and flow of her life and its fortunes, Lucie herself uses the analogy of life as a chest of drawers. If she suddenly requires a skill acquired in some former existence, she simply re-opens a drawer of old and reacquaints herself with its contents.
Lucie’s story is a tale of sheer resilience. Moorehead covers eight decades of French history in tracing the life and times of the quirky and indomitable Lucie. Her story is an inspirational record of the cyclical rises and falls in fortune of one aristocratic family through notoriously difficult times. Her adoring husband, Frédéric, once describes Lucie as being like a ship that is completely buffeted by storms, but that remains unbroken. In current rocky waters, such a tale of triumph over adversity is nothing short of uplifting.
Síofra Pierse is Lecturer in French and Francophone Studies in the School of Languages and Literatures, UCD. Her monograph
Voltaire Historiographer: Narrative Paradigms
was published by the Voltaire Foundation, University of Oxford, last year