La Maréchale d’Aubemer, Nouvelle du XVIIIème Siècle, or The Widow of Field Marshal d’Aubemer: A Novella of the 18th Century, posthumously published in 1867, is a novel by the author and memoirist Madame de Boigne, born Adélaïde d’Osmond (1781-1866).   Mine is the first English translation, available here for the first time anywhere.

In Chapter 7,  the Saveuses join the Maréchale and the Montfords — including Henri d’Estouteville, of course — in the country for Easter.

THE WIDOW OF FIELD MARSHAL D’AUBEMER: A NOVELLA OF THE 18TH CENTURY

CHAPTER SEVEN

Easter in the Country

It was the Duchesse de Montford’s custom to spend the Easter fortnight in a chateau belonging to the Crown; her husband’s position as its Keeper¹ gave her the use of it, not, perhaps, the better to fulfill her obligations to the Church, but the better to avoid them conveniently.  Spring came early that year, and the doctors having recommended a change of air, the Maréchale allowed herself to be talked into following her friend.  The Saveuses were invited to join her.  Henri d’Estouteville was there almost as a resident and visitors did not lack, as many from Paris as from the neighbourhood, which promised some very agreeable holidays.  Mme de Rieux had eagerly supported her mother’s invitation to Mme de Saveuse.  Like all mediocre people, she was subject to infatuations, and her passion for the Comtesse Lionel knew no bounds since, in addition to the advantage of displeasing the Princesse Simon, the Comtesse had by her kindness won the endorsement of the little Rieux.

The chateau’s company was assembled for lunch when the sound of a carriage announced new guests, and M and Mme de Saveuse were shown in.  The Princesse Simon could not restrain a gesture of impatience, but after a quick appraisal of the new feminine arrival, she cast a satisfied glance at the mirror in which her elegant silhouette was reflected and recovered her good humour.

The Basilica da Estrela with its elegant white façade is my favourite church in Lisbon — no small compliment in a city that fancies itself a second Rome.

The façade of the Basilica da Estrela in western Lisbon with tram #28 at bottom right.

If you’re starting from central Lisbon, it’s quite easy to find.  Just get on the famous #28 tram, heading westwards.  The terminal stop is right in front of the Basilica, as you can see in the photo above.

La Maréchale d’Aubemer, Nouvelle du XVIIIème Siècle, or The Widow of Field Marshal d’Aubemer: A Novella of the 18th Century, posthumously published in 1867, is a novel by the author and memoirist Madame de Boigne, born Adélaïde d’Osmond (1781-1866).   Mine is the first English translation, available here for the first time anywhere.

In Chapter 6,  the shortest of all the chapters, Henri d’Estouteville becomes a regular visitor to Mme d’Aubemer’s salon.

THE WIDOW OF FIELD MARSHAL D’AUBEMER: A NOVELLA OF THE 18TH CENTURY

CHAPTER 6

Regrets and Hopes

“When are we leaving, Lionel?” said Mme de Saveuse before finishing her letter to her mother.

“I can’t really say.  My affairs are well in hand…but they require my presence.”

He smiled indulgently to himself at the fatuity of his words.  Mme de Saveuse sighed and finished her letter without naming the date¹ that she wished for with all her might.

In the account she had given the Maréchale of the previous night’s ball, she had not omitted to speak of the goodness with which M d’Estouteville had come to her aid in the moment of her greatest isolation and shared out the expressions of her gratitude between him and Mme de Rieux.  Though less struck by Henri’s generosity in looking after such a lovely person, Mme d’Aubemer was grateful to him for his conduct towards her favourite at a moment when he had evidently been useful, and when he appeared at her evening party, she welcomed him benevolently and reproached him for having neglected her.  He hadn’t known, he said, that her door was open to the vulgar herd.  Mme d’Aubemer joked about that expression being applied to the marvellous Henri d’Estouteville; he defended himself wittily, and the conversation was gay and animated when Mme de Saveuse entered.  She thanked M d’Estouteville simply and openly for the assistance he had given her.  He seemed a little embarrassed by this frankness and withdrew almost immediately.

The Place des Vosges does not strictly speaking fall within the Versailles Century time period (1682-1789), as it was built between 1605 and 1612.  In other words, construction started in the reign of Henri IV and finished early in the reign of Louis XIII.  The connection to the latter king, however, is enough of a justification to write about it here, I feel, since Louis XIII actually built the original chateau at Versailles.

In fact, according to French Wikipedia (from which I get most of my information for posts of this type), the square was inaugurated with a carrousel (ie. a large-scale equestrian performance) in honour of Louis XIII’s wedding to Anne of Austria, who, despite her name, was a Spanish princess.  In 1639, a statue of Louis XIII was put up in the centre of the square.  It was pulled down during the Revolution, but a new one by the sculptors Dupaty and Cortot was erected in 1825.  It’s still there.

Monument to Louis XIII in the Place des Vosges.

La Maréchale d’Aubemer, Nouvelle du XVIIIème Siècle, or The Widow of Field Marshal d’Aubemer: A Novella of the 18th Century, posthumously published in 1867, is a novel by the author and memoirist Madame de Boigne, born Adélaïde d’Osmond (1781-1866).   Mine is the first English translation, available here for the first time anywhere.

In Chapter 5,  we meet the amoral Marquis d’Estouteville and his son Henri. 

THE WIDOW OF FIELD MARSHAL D’AUBEMER: A NOVELLA OF THE 18TH CENTURY

CHAPTER FIVE

A Courtier

The Marquis d’Estouteville, a grand but fiscally embarrassed lord, and a very skillful courtier, concealed a profound immorality behind exquisite good breeding, and dissimulated his egoism behind the appearance of obligingness and flightiness.  He seemed to have ruined himself carelessly and to provide pleasure to others, but he kept a better reckoning than one would have imagined and made no sacrifices except for his vices.  He had sometimes been able to exploit those of princes and people in power in a way that was quite useful to himself, but with such a skillful, light hand and from such a lofty distance that one would have had to be privy to the details of his life to attribute to him the contempt that his conduct merited.  Otherwise, his manners were charming, and of the sort of breeziness, due to his indifference to everything, that made him eminently sociable.  He showed great regard for his wife, whose angelic virtues he vaunted to the world, but which he himself did not appreciate.

As long as she lived, she remained exclusively in charge of the education of their only son, and though Henri was only seventeen at the time of the Marquise d’Estouteville’s death, she had already succeeded in planting and germinating the seeds of all the best and most noble sentiments in his heart.  For his part, M d’Estouteville had never tried to counteract her in this pious duty.  He had grasped that he would encounter an invincible resistance and had no intention of hazarding his peace of mind.  She was useful to him and it cost him very little to keep her.  Never a word nor even a smile from his father could ever have led Henri to suppose that his father did not share the maxims of high morality professed by his mother, and if his love for her was more tender, more exclusive, his regard for the Marquis was equally great.  Mme d’Estouteville refrained from disturbing this regard, and limited herself to fighting those influences that could have operated to seduce him at the time of his entry into society.  Fate, however, decided otherwise, and a violent fever carried the Marquise off so rapidly that Henri, then with his regiment, was not able to arrive in time to receive her last words.  Perhaps at this supreme moment she would have warned him against the fallacious doctrines of the Marquis.  They were only too well known to her, for, before posing as an admirer of her virtues, he had tried to make her an accomplice to his intrigues.  However, death did not accord her an instant, and his cruel work was completed several hours before the devastated Henri arrived.

The Chapel was the last major component of the Château to be completed.

Louis XIV had been planning a grand new chapel in the late 1680s when the War of the League of Augsburg (1688-1697), also known as the Nine Years’ War, broke out.  The plans for the Chapel were then shelved.

The Chapel of the Château de Versailles as seen from a street in the town.

When the planning resumed after the end of the war, the King had changed his mind about a crucial point of the design: instead of marble, the white stone known as banc royal would be used for the interior.

La Maréchale d’Aubemer, Nouvelle du XVIIIème Siècle, or The Widow of Field Marshal d’Aubemer: A Novella of the 18th Century, posthumously published in 1867, is a novel by the author and memoirist Madame de Boigne, born Adélaïde d’Osmond (1781-1866).   Mine is the first English translation, available here for the first time anywhere.

In Chapter 4, the Maréchale d’Aubemer’s niece attends her first ball in Paris. 

THE WIDOW OF FIELD MARSHAL D’AUBEMER: A NOVELLA OF THE 18TH CENTURY

CHAPTER FOUR

A Ball

The end of Carnival brought the day destined for the English ambassadress’s ball.  It was to be the last as well as the most splendid one of the season, and the ladies set to work so as to be able to shine at it.

First thing in the morning, a young woman from Mademoiselle Augustine, the renowned couturiere, had brought an exquisite ball gown to Mme de Saveuse’s, wishing to be informed at what hour she should come back to dress her.  Mademoiselle herself would personally put the finishing touches on Madame la Comtesse’s ensemble.  The latter would gladly have declined these services had she not recognized in them her aunt’s solicitude.  She thus accepted, indicating an hour that very much surprised Mlle Augustine’s young woman, who was accustomed to seeing ladies wearing such elegant gowns not arrive at a ball until such time as their entrance would create the greatest sensation.  Mme de Saveuse, however, intended to go and wait at the Hôtel d’Aubemer until Mme de Montford came to take her to the English ambassador’s residence, not thinking of the danger of mussing her dress.  The Duchesse had fixed a time that was rather earlier than the Maréchale would have liked, for despite having a great store of good sense, she was too much a woman of the world not to wish for what she called “a brilliant debut” for her niece.  She knew that to obtain one it was necessary to display some slight nuance of originality, and, to this end, she desired that with Mlle Augustine’s dress, executed in the purest taste of the fashion of the day and adjusted by that inimitable person herself so as to defy any feminine criticism, the Comtesse Lionel should keep her customary hair style in order to be more beautiful and also to attract attention.   This hair style, consisting of loose plaits and large ringlets, which could not be imitated without such magnificent hair as her niece’s, would have to be nearly unique to Mme de Saveuse and would assure a lasting impact.  The difficulty, which the Maréchale felt keenly, was in getting her niece to enlist in the plan, and she manoeuvred with requisite skill.  She had managed to recount in front of her niece several instances of the tardiness of the hairdressers of Paris, and when the latter came in the morning to thank her for her charming gown, Mme d’Aubemer said to her with an air of indifference, “I thought, my child, that since she’s having the goodness to escort you, it wouldn’t be polite to keep Mme de Montford waiting because of some hairdresser’s lateness of the kind we’ve been talking about recently, and in the event that yours doesn’t turn up, there would be no inconvenience in putting up your hair the way you do it every day, only, in order to look sufficiently dressed up, you would replace your tortoise-shell comb with this one; that way, you would look very presentable.”  She handed Mme de Saveuse a superb diamond hair-comb and said no more about her hair-do.

Jean Baptiste Claude Séné (1748-1803) was a master chair maker in Paris who was active from the later years of Louis XV’s reign through to the Revolution.

I photographed these chairs of his in the museum of the Gulbenkian Foundation in Lisbon last year.

Pair of fauteuils by J.B.C. Séné in the Gulbenkian Foundation museum in Lisbon.

Lisbon is a surprisingly good place to see French fine and decorative arts of the Versailles Century (1682-1789) period.  Apart from the Gulbenkian Foundation, there’s also the Museu Nacional de Arte Antiga (MNAA) and various palace museums.  The Portuguese elite were such francophiles that many high quality pieces make their home in the city by the Tagus.  Apart from the chairs pictured above, there are many other items of French furniture in the Gulbenkian’s collection that I’ll share in future posts.

Antonio Vivaldi was born on 4 March, 1678, precisely 339 years ago today.  He has always been one of my favourite composers.  Like just about any Baroque music fancier alive, I never tire of The Four Seasons.

The great man was born in Venice, the day after an earthquake.  He was sickly as a child.  It’s possible that he was asthmatic.  Given both a musical and a religious education, he became a violin virtuoso and an ordained priest.  By age 24, he was engaged to teach and compose for the Ospedale della Pietà in Venice, an institution for foundlings and other impoverished children.  The orchestra there was made up entirely of girls.  It was for them that he wrote most of his early compositions, including the The Four Seasons (1725).

Vivaldi. Credit: Wikipedia. 

La Maréchale d’Aubemer, Nouvelle du XVIIIème Siècle, or The Widow of Field Marshal d’Aubemer: A Novella of the 18th Century, posthumously published in 1867, is a novel by the author and memoirist Madame de Boigne, born Adélaïde d’Osmond (1781-1866).   Mine is the first English translation, available here for the first time anywhere.

In Chapter 3, the Maréchale d’Aubemer sees an apparition from her sickbed…

THE WIDOW OF FIELD MARSHAL D’AUBEMER: A NOVELLA OF THE 18TH CENTURY

CHAPTER THREE

An Apparition

Almost two weeks after the day of the ball, Madame d’Aubemer, who had been nearly at death’s door and in a state of constant delirium, opened her eyes after a heavy sleep procured by opium and gave a little sigh.  Mlle Julie, who had been watching over her day and night, leaned towards her.  The Maréchale recognized her, smiled wanly, and tried to turn her head.  She thought she saw an angelic figure standing behind her faithful maid and heard a silvery voice say, “Let’s take advantage of this moment.  It’s time for her medicine.”  She felt herself being gently lifted.  Mlle Julie fed her a spoonful of some bitter drug, and she was carefully settled back onto her freshly plumped pillows.  It was not long before she fell back into a fairly calm sleep.  Without realizing quite what had happened, she had a confused notion of having seen her guardian angel, who was calling her back to health.