Dancing to the precipice

Lucie de la Tour du Pin and the French Revolution

480 pages

English language

Published Jan. 22, 2009 by Chatto & Windus.

ISBN:
978-0-7011-7904-5
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OCLC Number:
288985697

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Her canvases were the court of Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette; the Great Terror; America at the time of Washington and Jefferson; Paris under the Directoire and then under Napoleon; Regency London; the battle of Waterloo; and, for the last years of her life, the Italian ducal courts. Like Saint-Simon at Versailles, Samuel Pepys during the Great Fire of London, or the Goncourt brothers in nineteenth-century France, Lucie Dillon—a daughter of French and British nobility known in France by her married name, Lucie de la Tour du Pin—was the chronicler of her age.La Rochefoucauld called her "a cultural jewel." The Sultan of the Ottoman Empire favored her for his dinner companion in Paris. Napoleon requested she attend Josephine. Her friends included Talleyrand, Madame de Stael, Chateaubriand, Lafayette, and the Duke of Wellington, with whom she played as a child. She witnessed firsthand the demise of the French monarchy, the wave …

3 editions

Subjects

  • La Tour du Pin Gouvernet, Henriette Lucie Dillon, -- marquise de, -- 1770-1853
  • Tour-du-Pin family
  • Nobility -- France -- Biography
  • France -- Social life and customs -- 1789-1815
  • United States -- Social life and customs -- 1783-1865