John Adamson
EYEWITNESS TO AN ERA
Dancing to the Precipice: Lucie de La Tour du Pin and the French Revolution
By Caroline Moorehead (Chatto & Windus 480pp £20)

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In a book replete with vivid moments, none is more cinematic than its heroine's homecoming to Le Bouilh, her family's vast and still unfinished château in the Gironde, in the aftermath of the Terror. When she had left it, three years earlier, just as the French Revolution was revving up into its most murderous and hyperactive phase, the palatial house had embodied all that was most modern, magnificent and forward-looking in the aristocratic haut monde: the chaste neo-Classicism of le style Louis XVI; the fine furnishings, pictures, Gobelins tapestries and rock-crystal chandeliers; the extensive library stocked with the morocco-bound wisdom of the philosophes. Now, systematically pillaged by the functionaries of the Revolution, the great house

appeared vast, gaunt, unwelcoming. The garden was overgrown, the outbuildings derelict; the immense high-ceilinged drawing rooms with their tile and stone floors echoed at every step. [Shortly after its owners' departure, three years earlier], men from the local municipality had arrived to conduct a sale of the château's entire contents, moving from room to room like locusts until it was stripped bare ... The last object to go, Lot 359, had been an orange tree in a pot.

For the house's returning châtelaine, Lucie de La Tour du Pin, the sight brought home with bludgeon force how a former world - with all its optimism, inequity and misplaced confidence - had been swept away irrevocably by the Revolution.

Of course, such moments must have been replicated many thousand times across France in the 1790s, as newly impoverished aristocrats returned to the scenes of their erstwhile pomp - and it is not always possible to muster unalloyed sympathy for their predicament. But the passage quoted above also exemplifies one of the great virtues of Caroline Moorehead's fine new book: its ability to particularise, in the experience and reactions of a single individual, the human consequences of an entire age of revolutionary, and correspondingly violent, historical change. Time and again, her biography takes us, with equal immediacy, into the very centre of some of the most tumultuous events during the decades of France's Revolutionary Wars.

Credit for this must go, in part, to the heroine herself. For by any standards, Lucie-Henriette Dillon - better known by her married title, the Marquise (Marchioness) de La Tour du Pin - had a career exceptionally crowded with incident. During a life that extended from the final years of Louis XV to the rise of Napoleon III, she had an almost Flashmanesque ability to find herself at the centre of nearly every political convulsion that happened to be going. (Entirely characteristic of this black good fortune, for instance, is that she chose 1789 as the year to move into a house in the grounds of Versailles.)

Moreover, her circle of acquaintance ranged from the grand old Maréchal de Biron, an octogenarian survivor of the court of Louis XIV who befriended her as a child, to Benjamin Franklin, Louis XVI, Marie-Antoinette (in whose household she served), Talleyrand, the American 'Founding Father' Alexander Hamilton, Napoleon and Madame de Staël - and on to people, met in her dotage in Italy in the 1850s, who would live on into the twentieth century.

Our heroine's access to this extraordinarily extensive and varied galère was conferred, initially at least, by the luck of her birth. Her family, the Dillons, were part of the Anglo-Irish aristocracy that had accompanied the dethroned James II into exile in France in the 1690s, and prospered subsequently in the service of the Bourbons, producing a string of generals and prelates, including the portly and libidinous Archbishop of Narbonne - the lover of her equally frisky, but bullying and tyrannical, grandmother.

Born in 1770, Lucie-Henriette was the near exact contemporary of Beethoven (whom she was to outlive by a further quarter-century), and she was brought up as an aristocratic child of the Enlightenment - religiously sceptical, intellectually open, admiring of English and American 'freedoms' - and with all the contradictions that this entailed. (Under the ancien régime, her lifestyle, like the Rousseau-admiring salons she frequented, was almost exclusively funded by an impoverished peasantry paying feudal dues.) True to this high-minded if somewhat inconsistent liberal form, her marriage gifts from her husband included, not diamonds, but seventy elegantly bound volumes of English poetry.

It was this marriage, contracted while she was still a teenager, that ensured that she was in the cockpit of events during the Revolution. Her husband, Frédéric - heir to one of Louis XVI's last Ministers of War, the Marquis de La Tour du Pin - further extended her already large number of contacts at court. (Likewise, the later marriage of her half-sister, Fanny, to Napoleon's favourite aide-de-camp, General Henri Bertrand, was to provide a useful source of influence under the Empire.)

Her young husband was the ill-starred commander of the palace guard at Versailles when, during one of the decisive confrontations of the Revolution, the poissardes - the market women and fishwives of Les Halles - descended on the palace on the evening of 5 October 1789, murdered a number of the soldiers, and forced the return of the royal family to Paris. Further adventures follow in seemingly improbable profusion. Once the Revolution is in full spate and the Terror has begun in Paris, Lucie and her husband retreat to their country estates, only to flee for America as the first guillotine is set up in nearby Bordeaux's main square, and dozens of their less nimble relations are rounded up for imprisonment or execution.

In America, the new émigrée dines with George Washington; establishes a farm with her husband in upstate New York; learns to milk a cow; trades with the Mohawk Indians; has Talleyrand, another émigré, to stay; and contrives to make and sell butter (daintily impressed with the coronet of a French marquis). Robespierre's fall and the end of the Terror induces them to return to France - only to have to go into exile again (this time in England) during the coup d'état of 1799 that first brought Bonaparte to power.

But Bonaparte generally smiled on the 'old nobility'. And like many of the pre-Revolution aristocracy, the de La Tour du Pins returned to political life and courtly favour once the Corsican general had metamorphosed into the Emperor Napoleon I. The Marquis was appointed ambassador in Brussels, serving the new Emperor with the same efficiency which, with only a change of the heraldry over his door, he was to show in turn to the restored Bourbon monarchs, after Napoleon's fall. (Lucie found herself obliged to entertain the Empress Marie-Louise - the replacement for the divorced Empress Josephine - while her husband took the Emperor to inspect the defences of Flanders.)

Not that the vicissitudes of Mme de La Tour du Pin ended there. After Louis XVIII's successor, the pious and reactionary Charles X, was removed in 1830 (in yet another coup d'état), her husband was once again in the thick of political plotting. Implicated in a planned insurrection against the 'usurper' king, Louis-Philippe, the Marquis de La Tour du Pin, now in his seventies, was imprisoned in Bordeaux's notorious medieval prison, the Fort du Hâ, where the plucky Lucie insisted on joining him. Only after the death of her husband in 1837, after fifty years of married life together, did she move into a less incident-prone phase of life, eking out an impecunious retirement first in Lausanne, and then in Pisa (Italy was cheaper).

Ironically, it was the relative calm of her later years that have assured her posthumous fame. For in 1820, at the age of fifty, she began to write a memoir, a work that was to occupy her intermittently for the next thirty years. Recounting her childhood and life up to the accession of Louis XVIII in 1814, this work not only provides eyewitness accounts of some of the most dramatic moments of the Revolution, but also reveals its author as a woman of rare charm, heroism and candour. When it was first published in 1907, fifty-four years after its author's death, it was immediately recognised as one of the finest such accounts of the period to have survived; since then it has rarely been out of print.

Caroline Moorehead, no less than her subject, has a keen eye for the points of detail that can encapsulate the mores (and absurdities) of an age: the women in Marie-Antoinette's entourage rising before dawn before major court festivities so their hair could be dressed (into teetering, three-foot-high confections of horsehair, powder and pins) by Léonard, the most sought-after coiffeur of the age; the fashionable Paris salon of Mme Helvétius, 'in whose drawing room prowled eighteen angora cats dressed in satin' (two of which eventually departed for America in the luggage of Benjamin Franklin). Likewise, the convolutions of the contemporary political worlds through which Mme de La Tour du Pin navigated are deftly and succinctly delineated.

Not content with reliance on the Memoirs, Moorehead is the first biographer to use Lucie de La Tour du Pin's extensive unpublished correspondence, now in the possession of the Comte de Liederkerke-Beaufort in the Château de Noisy, in Belgium, as well as a series of other related private papers. This archival industry has paid handsome dividends. Dancing to the Precipice is never less than a gripping story of an extraordinary life, knowable with extraordinary intimacy because of the rich sources Caroline Moorehead has brought to its elucidation. Her biography will not supplant Mme de La Tour du Pin's own Memoirs. But there is no greater commendation for this book than that henceforth no one will want to read the one without having read the other.

John Adamson is a Fellow of Peterhouse, Cambridge.