Madame de la Tour du Pin’s Journal d’une Femme de Cinquante Ans, with its vivid descriptions of her experiences during the French Revolution and the Napoleonic Empire, is one of the most enthralling memoirs of the age: a hard act, one would think, for a biographer to follow. Caroline Moorehead succeeds in doing so triumphantly in a rich and satisfying book which not only adds to our appreciation of her story but brings the whole tumultuous period and its characters to life.
Born in 1770 into the highest reaches of the French nobility, Lucie-Henriette Dillon spent a lonely and unhappy childhood, brought up by a tyrannical grandmother after her mother’s death when she was 12. Although she was heiress to a great fortune, she knew she faced banishment to a convent if she displeased her grandmother; forced to dissimulate, she learnt the importance of keeping her own counsel very early. Later, as a lady-in-waiting to Marie Antoinette, she observed the corruption of the court with the same privately judgemental eye. Not beautiful — her nose was too long, she noted — but lively and attractive, she was saved from amourous intrigues by her devotion to her husband, Frédéric de Gourvernet, later Marquis de la Tour du Pin. It was a marriage ‘made in heaven’, unshaken through all the trials to come.
Caroline Moorehead brilliantly evokes the douceur de vivre of aristocratic life before the Revolution, the ferment of new ideas, the hopes for reform sparked off by the example of America. But she also shows the fissures beneath the surface, the poverty, unemployment and rising groundswell of unrest. Nineteen years old, and caught up in the pleasures of Versailles, Lucie felt no concern about the future.
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