496 pages,
HarperCollins, ISBN-13: 978-0061684418
Normally,
if there is a selection of memoirs from a famous-or-not person available, I say
why bother with a biography: get your info from the horse’s mouth, as it were. In
the case of Henriette-Lucy Dillon (later known as Henriette-Lucy, Marquise de
La Tour-du-Pin-Gouvernet, or to her friends and family as just plain Lucie), we
have Journal d’une femme de 50 ans –
literally, Diary of a 50 year old woman,
but available in English as Memoirs,
laughing and dancing our way to the precipice (hence Caroline Moorehead’s
title) – which is the first-hand account of her life through the Ancien Régime, the French Revolution and
the Imperial court of Napoleon, ending in March 1815 with Napoleon’s return
from exile on Elba. However, while full of interesting character sketches and
details of France during the most tumultuous phase in its history, Lucie’s
memoirs are incomplete, not only because they end at the beginning of the
Hundred Days, but because they leave out so much personal details about Lucie,
like the heartache over losing so many children, to name but one example. Which
makes Dancing to the Precipice: The Life
of Lucie de la Tour du Pin, Eyewitness to an Era so important, as it fills
in many details, both good and ill, that Lucie simply hadn’t the heart to put
in.
It
is biographies like Moorehead’s that make history so interesting. It is easy to
forget that the past is not parceled neatly into tidy little bundles that fit
into an overarching scheme the way historians like to think; it is quite
messier than that, as anyone living through Interesting Times will tell you (I
wonder if, when the history of our times are written, some of us will be
shocked to learn that we were all living through the So-And-So Era and had no
idea, busy as we were with living). Reading about a person who was doing their
best just to get by under the most trying of circumstances reminds us all that
history is the study of people, first and foremost. People like Lucie, a
resilient survivor who struggles with the loss of children, family wealth, the
execution of many of her friends and family; who was forced to emigrate from
France several times during the Revolution, living both in America and England;
who, during the Napoleonic period, prospered when her husband, Frédéric, was appointed
to a variety of Imperial posts and yet, when the Bourbons were returned to the
throne, managed to serve that government, as well; who prospered and failed and
gained it all and lost it all; and who, through it all, retained a strong sense
of her own values and remained true to the same.
Dancing to the
Precipice is
pretty straightforward as biographies go, but it manages to hold ones’ interest
throughout. Lucie lived through traumatic times and seemed to have an opinion
about everyone and everything, but the fact that this was my first exposure to
this person made the story that much more interesting; for every important
person she met and interacted with – Napoleon, Talleyrand, revolutionaries and
reactionaries left and right – there was an ordinary person whom she treated in
just the same fashion. For all her being an aristocrat, born to wealth and
prestige, she seemed just to be a good person to boot who thrived and suffered
more than most, and I’m very glad to have gotten to know Lucie.
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