Dancing to the Precipice: Lucie de la Tour du Pin and the French Revolution

DANCING TO THE PRECIPICE: LUCIE DE LA TOUR DU PIN AND THE FRENCH REVOLUTION Caroline Moorehead London, Chatto & Windus, 2009 Caroline Moorehead's biography of Lucie de la Tour du Pin (nee Dillon) elaborates her subject's own memoirs, which were published by her great-grandson as Le Journal d'une femme de cinquante ans in 1907 and soon translated. The memoirs have never been out of print. For the years after the conclusion of the memoirs with the Congress of Vienna Moorehead relies on de la Tour's unpublished correspondence and other archival sources. A biographer of several prominent figures and a human rights advocate, Moorehead has for her subject here a woman of whose bottomless reserves of courage her husband could justly write, in a letter to Lucie's goddaughter: Ah, how admirable it is to be so completely buffeted by storms, yet to remain so fundamentally unbroken. Moorehead's portrait of the French Revolution and its aftermath focuses on the perspective and experiences of a woman born in Paris in 1770 as an aristocratic heiress close to the French court, who died in 1853 as an impoverished widowed marquise in Nice, having survived as daughter and wife of liberal monarchists the Revolution, the Directoire, the Consulate, the Empire and the two Restorations. Intervening stages included high office, exile in England and America and imprisonment. Moorehead takes her title from Lucie de la Tour's own metaphor. De la Tour began writing the memoirs when she was fifty; she addressed them to her only surviving child, to recall for him the family's manner of life before the great political and social changes. Implicitly for a larger audience, she repeatedly rejects the role of a historian while stressing her authority in contrast to other memoirists as an eyewitness of events and their causes and effects and of personalities and their character and motivations. Moorehead closely follows the memoir's chronological order and quotes de la Tour copiously, besides quoting many other witnesses. Like de la Tour, she moves abruptly from private to public conditions, accounts of social customs, court protocol, household economy and fashion. Lucie was born into the two powerful elites of the ancien regime, the nobility and the clergy. Her Irish paternal ancestor had come to France with James II and stayed. She attributed her character to her unhappy childhood. The household was despotically and viciously ruled by her grandmother and her grandmother's uncle and lover, Archbishop Dillon, who was believed to be the father of Lucie's mother. Lucie's mother being too weak to protect her and her father mostly absent on military campaigns in the American Revolutionary War, Lucie's only ally against the openly libertine household was her maid and lasting friend, under whose tutelage she developed 'reserve and discretion' with a strong moralistic, even prudish, streak. As an escape from her misery two areas of useful knowledge became available to her. Her escape into the world of the mind was aided when the family decided against the normal convent education. (The convent and disinheritance would become a threat that ensured compliance once her mother had died, when Lucie herself was twelve.) Instead, a tutor taught her comprehensively, and she eagerly learned from the many experts who visited as the Archbishop's guests. Education continued in the salons where she met the surviving encyclopedistes. Trained in music she also participated as a contralto at musical soirees, when Paris had become the European centre of music. On her own initiative she arranged to learn from the servants and their rural families many of the practical skills and handicrafts that she feared she might need one day. Her prophetic instinct was to prove only too right. After her mother's death Lucie took up her mother's place as one of the twelve ladies-in-waiting to Marie Antoinette, with her characteristic revulsion from immorality. …

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