Memoirs of Madame de la Tour du Pin: Laughing and Dancing Our Way to the Precipice

by Henriette-Lucy de La Tour du Pin Gouvernet

An aristocratic autobiography from the time of the French Revolution. "From my earliest days I had a feeling that adventures lay in store for me." Madame de La Tour du Pin offers the reader a "faithful picture of myself as I am and as I have been." Written for her son, this intimate document records the changes that befell her family and all those who attended the court of Louis XVI at the time of the French Revolution. A royalist, but also a realist, she concludes that "the rot started at the top and spread downwards." She came back to France after a three-year exile and became involved with the royalist cause, but her hopes were frequently dashed. This selection ends with the return of Napoleon to Paris from Elba. Despite her considerable hardships, Madame de La Tour du Pin writes with great intelligence, compassion, and wit. Laughing and Dancing Our Way to the Precipice is among the first of a new list of nonfiction paperbacks published as Harvill Press Editions.

Genres: Nonfiction, Memoir

468 pages, Paperback

First published July 1, 1999

About the author

Henriette-Lucy, Marquise de La Tour du Pin-Gouvernet, (also known as Lucie), was a French aristocrat famous for her memoirs entitled Journal d'une femme de 50 ans. The memoirs are a first-hand account of her life through the Ancien Regime, the French Revolution, and the Imperial court of Napoleon, ending in March 1815 with Napoleon’s return from exile on Elba. Madame de la Tour du Pin, as she is frequently called, was a witness to the private lives of the royals, and her memoirs serve as unique testimony to much unchronicled history.

Reviews

[Camelama · Rating 5 out of 5]

Wonderful memoirs of a woman who lived through some of the most turbulent, frightening, fascinating, and fantastic times in world history. Going from the Queen's lady in waiting, to hiding from the revolutionaries and sewing peasant clothes, immigrating to America, and then all the rest of her topsy turvy life ... it's a book I thought about when I wasn't reading it. I wanted to stop whatever I was doing and go back to reading it. I went without sleep to finish it - and wanted more more more.

[Jim Loughran · Rating 5 out of 5]

Lucy Dillon known to history as Madame la Comtesse de la Tour du Pin, was Irish, a daughter of Arthur Dillon, commander/owner of the Dillon regiment and a niece of Viscount Dillon. Lucy Dillon was smart, observant, intelligent and above everything she had the gift of being in the right place at the right time. She was the lady-in-waiting to Marie Antoinette on the night the mob stormed Versailles; her stepmother was a cousin of the Empress Josephine and she was an eye witness to some of the most important events of the period. Her father and father-in-law went to the guillotine and she had to go into hiding in Bordeaux before seeking refuge in America. While Caroline Moorehead's biography, ''Dancing to the Precipice, is excellent nothing can compare to the immediacy and interest of these first-hand accounts of a turning point in history. I have read it multiple times - a sure sign of excellence.

[Whit · Rating 4 out of 5]

Inside view of Versaille and the indignities of the fallen aristocrat. The horror!