pauline de la tour du pin

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By Brenda Wineapple

• July 29, 2009

“They have learned nothing and forgotten nothing,” the crafty Charles-Maurice de Talleyrand said of the French Bourbons. He might have exempted Lucie de la Tour du Pin, who possessed survival skills that matched his own and whose vivid memoirs, begun when she was 50, have never been out of print. Born in the fashionable Faubourg St.-Germain quarter of Paris in 1770, the same year that more than 6,000 lice-ridden babies were abandoned in doorways and royal pastry chefs were spinning rococo scenes in powdered sugar, she realized by the age of 19 that “we were laughing and dancing our way to the precipice.” This was a woman who would learn a great deal more.

That remark gives Caroline Moorehead the title of her absorbing new book, which documents with stylistic élan and meticulous detail a reeling period of French history, from the ludicrous court of Louis XVI to the Revolution of 1789 and the dictatorship of Napoleon, itself followed by the speedy restoration and deposition of Bourbon kings. Drawing on de la Tour du Pin’s memoirs and previously unseen family papers, the author narrates this wrenching history mostly from the perspective of its central figure, who was an “eyewitness to an era.”

“I had no real childhood,” de la Tour du Pin, who was descended from Irish-French nobility, noted with characteristic understatement. Her soldier father was away much of the time (fighting, for instance, on the side of the Americans during their revolution), and her ineffectual mother, a lady-in-waiting to Marie Antoinette, was no match for Madame de Rothe, Lucie’s domineering and grasping grandmother. De Rothe, whom Lucie hated, presided over the household on behalf of her presumed lover, the Archbishop of Toulouse and Narbonne, who was also Lucie’s great-uncle.

If unhappy in youth, de la Tour du Pin was lucky when it came time to establish a life of her own. In 1787, she married Frédéric-­Séraphim de Gouvernet, a nobleman and soldier whom she had never met before their official engagement, but who had known her father during the American war. Eventually he stayed closer to home, in what turned out to be an unusually good marriage, lasting almost 50 years. Of course, home was no longer fixed. A constitutional monarchist and aristocratic liberal, Frédéric was in the odd position, as Moorehead observes, of helping to incite the revolution that led to his family’s peripatetic life of exile, not to mention the guillotining of countless friends and relatives.

Though there is no shortage of chroniclers of the French Revolution — Edmund Burke, Gouverneur Morris, Hippolyte Taine, Jules Michelet, all quoted by Moorehead to great effect — “Dancing to the Precipice” brings to the story a gruesome immediacy and an elegant sense of the absurd. Both are evident in Moorehead’s description of Lucie de la Tour du Pin’s clandestine life in Bordeaux at the height of the Terror, when the sticky-sweet smell of blood clung to the paving stones as a parade of victims climbed to the scaffold, some executed for treasonous crimes like a “weak nature” or “nostalgia for the ancien régime.” With a strong narrative voice that neither vamps nor moralizes, she also describes the profligacy of the royal court with deadpan precision: the huge wigs stuffed with horsehair, favored by Marie Antoinette, which were so tall that women had to keep their heads jutting out of their carriage windows, or the exotic animals dragged to Versailles for Rousseau-­inspired “arrangements of plants, and lakes and rivers created, artificially,” Moorehead dryly remarks, “to convey the simple, artless life.”

By 1794, with the Terror in full force, de la Tour du Pin managed to secure passports for herself and her family (by then she had two children). In March, they all boarded the Boston-bound ship Diana, hauling with them 50 bottles of Burgundy, jars of potted goose and jam, and a piano — since no one imagined such an instrument could be procured on the other side of the Atlantic. Settling in upstate New York among Schuylers and van Rensselaers — America’s Dutch aristocracy, made rich through farming and the appropriation of Iroquois hunting grounds — de la Tour du Pin adjusted to her new life with surprising ease, acquiring five slaves, albeit with some hesitation, to help with the 150 acres of crops, the large apple orchard and the dairy she and Frédéric bought after selling off her possessions, among them the piano.

Following Robespierre’s death, when the property confiscated from French émigrés was handed back to its former owners, she reluctantly gave up the farm, where she had felt far safer than in France. After freeing their slaves, she and her husband sailed home to reclaim their estate. In less than two years, however, an attempted right-wing coup again sent them packing, this time to England, where they stayed until Napoleon assumed power and wigs were back in vogue. Although de la Tour du Pin declined an invitation to be lady-in-waiting to the Empress Josephine, she spent evenings in her company in Bordeaux at the express order of Napoleon, whom she had always found charming. In 1808, Frédéric was appointed Prefect of Brussels, and in 1813 of Amiens. But much as she had admired Napoleon, after his defeat at Waterloo, de la Tour du Pin threw her support to the restored Bourbon monarch. After all, Frédéric had already landed on his feet as ambassador to The Hague — with a peerage. Moorehead makes little of this volte-face except to say that de la Tour du Pin and her husband were “constitutional monarchists at heart.”

Breathlessly crowded (sometimes cluttered) with event, character and sly social history (as well as a running commentary on French fashion), “Dancing to the Precipice” reveals little of its subject’s inner life. Her keen powers of observation were not turned on herself, as far as we know, and Moorehead, to her credit, is no biographical busybody. Quite the opposite. Her restraint is not unlike her subject’s, and for the most part she lets de la Tour du Pin speak for herself. She who consorted with Germaine de Staël, Talleyrand and Chateaubriand thus comes across as slightly snobbish and without a gift for introspection, but hard-working and basically decent. Well trained in the art of subterfuge, though she liked to affect the opposite, she was, in sum, a likable opportunist with remarkable staying power.

Pregnant 10 times, she bore six children, only one of whom survived her. “I feel myself to be an old tree,” de la Tour du Pin said after her beloved Frédéric’s death, “from which every day someone cuts off a branch.” Deftly rendering these blows, Moorehead empathetically suggests why Lucie de la Tour du Pin did not look inward or give up or perish. She had lost family and friends, kings and courts, possessions and place. “There are things in life that one should neither analyze nor go on and on about,” Moorehead quotes her as saying. “Absence is one of these.” Copying out her cleareyed memoirs into red leather notebooks as France convulsed once again, with Louis-Philippe deposed and Louis-Napoleon crowned as Emperor Napoleon III, de la Tour du Pin did what she did best: she endured.

DANCING TO THE PRECIPICE

The life of lucie de la tour du pin, eyewitness to an era.

By Caroline Moorehead

Illustrated. 480 pp. Harper/HarperCollins Publishers. $27.99

Brenda Wineapple is the author, most recently, of “White Heat: The Friendship of Emily Dickinson and Thomas Wentworth Higginson.”

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Memoirs of Madame de La Tour du Pin

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Dancing to the Precipice: Lucie De La Tour Du Pin and the French Revolution

  From the publishers : Born Lucie Dillon, to a half-French mother and an Anglo-Irish father, her world was Versailles and the court of Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette. She married a French aristocrat, and narrowly survived the French Revolution, escaping to America at the time of Washington and Jefferson. Here, she lived a life of milking cows and chopping wood, having previously been accustomed to the lavish life of the French court. Returning to France prematurely, Lucie had to flee again, this time to England, where she took up sewing in order to support herself and her family. Repeatedly in the right place at the right time, Lucie saw the Battle of Waterloo, the fall of Napoleon and the return of Louis XVIII, and the Restoration. She was an outstanding diarist and a remarkable woman, who witnessed one of the most dramatic and brutal periods of history, playing the part of observer, commentator and, often, participant. For the last years of her life she was ambassadress to Holland and the Kingdom of Sardinia. Her friends included Wellington, Lafayette, Alexander Hamilton, Talleyrand and Madame de Stael. She died, aged 83, in Pisa. Mixing politics and court intrigue, social observation and everyday details about food, work, illness, children, manners and clothes, Caroline Moorehead paints a vivid portrait of an era – lasting three-quarters of a century – that saw the fortunes of France, as well as those of Lucie herself, rise and fall and rise again. This book has been shortlisted for the Fondation Napoléon Grand Prix history prizes .   Click here for a review of the book on the Guardian website (UK) (external link).

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• Published: 1 December 2010
• ISBN: 9781409088929
• Imprint: Vintage Digital
• Format: EBook

Dancing to the Precipice

Lucie de la Tour du Pin and the French Revolution

Caroline Moorehead

Lucie de la Tour du Pin was the Pepys of her generation: her diaries provide a vivid picture of Versailles, the French Revolution and Napoleon. This richly textured, highly enjoyable and evocative biography shows us an extraordinary woman in the midst of her extraordinary times.

Lucie de la Tour du Pin was the Pepys of her generation. She witnessed, participated in, and wrote diaries detailing one of the most tumultuous periods of history. From life in the Court of Versailles, through the French Revolution to Napoleon's rule, Lucie survived extraordinary times with great spirit. She recorded people, politics and intrigue, alongside the intriguing minutia of everyday life: food, work, illness, children, manners and clothes.

Caroline Moorehead's richly novelistic biography sets Lucy and her dairies in their wider context, illuminating a remarkable period of history.

Dancing to the Precipice was shortlisted for the Costa Biography Award 2009.

About the author

Caroline Moorehead is the biographer of Bertrand Russell, Freya Stark, Iris Origo and Martha Gellhorn. Her book on the French Resistance, Village of Secrets, was a Sunday Times bestseller and was shortlisted for the Samuel Johnson Prize in 2014. Her most recent book, A Bold and Dangerous Family , was shortlisted for the Costa Biography Award. She lives in London.

Also by Caroline Moorehead

Praise for Dancing to the Precipice

A rich and satisfying book which not only adds to our appreciation of Madame de la Tour du Pin's story but brings the whole tumultuous period and its characters to life Spectator

A scintillating biography...Moorehead succeeds triumphantly [and] brings an assured grip on contemporary politics and a colourful sense of place Daily Telegraph

An excellent, lively biography, full of background detail Standpoint

comprehensive and absorbing biography Clare Colvin, Independent

Enthralling look at the sharp-eyed 19th-century memoirist Lucie de la Tour du Pin. Sunday Times Summer Reading

Here is the latest from Caroline Moorhead whose work is never less than rigorously and beautifully composed Daily Express

It is in describing Lucie's world in this biography so admirably succeeds Contemporary Reviews

It's not uncommon to enjoy a novel and want to read more novels by that author; it's less common to think the same about a biography, but after reading Dancing to the Precipice , I definitely want to read more biographies by Moorhead Brandon Robshaw, Independent on Sunday

Lucie de la Tour de Pin has found a biographer worthy of her own storytelling skills. With a light-handed touch, Moorehead sets Lucie's story in its wider social and historical context, sketching the complicated political twists and turns in a way that makes them memorable without ever dumbing down Kathryn Hughes, Mail on Sunday

Moorehead has an eye for the detail... The book sparkles with gems about life at the court of Marie-Antoinette Hugh MacDonald, The Herald

Moorehead's biography, drawing on a trove of previously unpublished correspondence, captures the rhythm of the radical contrasts in her subject's like The New Yorker

Never less than a gripping story of an extraordinary life Literary Review

romantic adventure, staged in colourful historical settings...moral tale Biancamaria Fontana, Times Literary Supplement

The attraction of Moorehead's biography lies in her seamless fusion of Lucie's warm subjectivity with a broad historical canvas of bitter turmoil. Siofra Pierse, Irish Times

This utterly captivating biography brings to life, with novelistic vividness, both Lucie [de la Tour du Pin] and the glorious and terrible years through which she lived Christopher Hart, The Sunday Times

Utterly captivating... brings to life both Lucie and the glorious and terrible years through which she lived with a novelistic vividness, full of sights and sounds and flavours Sunday Times

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Patrice de La Tour du Pin

Patrice de La Tour du Pin (1911-1975) spent his childhood in the Gatinais region of central France, a psycho-geography which has infiltrated much of his poetry. His father was killed at the Battle of the Marne. Brought up by his mother, the great grand-daughter of the Irish parliamentarian General Arthur O’ Connor, La Tour du Pin published ‘Les Enfants de Septembre’ in La Nouvelle Revue Française when he was just nineteen. La Quête de joie (1933) established his reputation. Imprisoned in Germany during the Second World War, he evolved a mystical-religious cycle, Catholic, noble and Celtic in tone, stretching over fifty years, and published definitively as Somme de poésie (1981).

– from Padraig Rooney’s introduction in MPT 3/12 Freed Speech

Patrice de La Tour du Pin

PATRICE DE LA TOUR DU PIN  (1911-1975) was best known in France for the three-volume multi-genred work entitled Une somme de poésie , and several shorter books of poetry, including Psaumes de tous mes temps , which collects the psalms he wrote and revised throughout his life.

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