Memoirs of Madame de la Tour du Pin: Laughing and Dancing Our Way to the Precipice - Softcover

Henrietta-Lucy Dillon De La Tour Du Pin Gouvernet; Harcourt, Felice; Madame De La Tour Du Pin

Softcover

ISBN 10: 186046548X ISBN 13: 9781860465482

Publisher: Harvill Pr, 1999

Synopsis

An aristocratic autobiography from the time of the French Revolution.

"From my earliest days I had a feeling that adventures lay in store for me." Madame de La Tour du Pin offers the reader a "faithful picture of myself as I am and as I have been." Written for her son, this intimate document records the changes that befell her family and all those who attended the court of Louis XVI at the time of the French Revolution. A royalist, but also a realist, she concludes that "the rot started at the top and spread downwards." She came back to France after a three-year exile and became involved with the royalist cause, but her hopes were frequently dashed. This selection ends with the return of Napoleon to Paris from Elba. Despite her considerable hardships, Madame de La Tour du Pin writes with great intelligence, compassion, and wit.

Memoirs: Laughing and Dancing Our Way to the Precipice is among the first of a new list of nonfiction paperbacks published as Harvill Press Editions.

About this title

Review:

Henrietta-Lucy Dillon was born in 1770 to an aristocratic French family, in the heyday of the glittering ancien régime. She was witty, beautiful, and brilliant; her parents soon had her married off to the Marquis de la Tour du Pin. She had been told before she met him that he was short and ugly, but upon their first meeting, as she politely says, "I did not find him so."

Such restraint and simplicity is typical of Madame de la Tour du Pin's memoirs. Living through the most turbulent period in modern history, she frankly and unaffectedly records what went on around her--the execution of many of her aristocratic friends; her own flight to Holland, England, America; her last years in Italy; the deaths of her husband and her daughter before her own at the great age of 83. She has few opinions and no resentments, and one quickly warms to her simply as a woman, wife, and mother struggling to survive in a hostile world. And her observations on some of the great figures of history are priceless. Take "I also met a very famous man, Mr Gibbon, whose appearance was so ridiculous it was difficult not to laugh," her sole comment upon the author of The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. --Christopher Hart, Amazon.co.uk

About the Author:

Madame de La Tour du Pin (ne Henrietta-Lucy Dillon, 1770-1853) was born in Paris. In 1787 she married the Marquis de La Tour du Pin. Her memoirs were written between 1820 and 1853.

About this edition

• Publisher: Harvill Pr
• Publication date: 1999
• ISBN 10: 186046548X
• ISBN 13: 9781860465482
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 468