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 2, we go back in time to learn how the Maréchale d’Aubemer and her sister became estranged.  

La Maréchale d’Aubemer

Chapter 2

A Retrospective Chapter

It’s no doubt tedious to go backwards, but the writer and the reader must have the fortitude to bear a few retrospective pages in order to explain and understand Mme d’Aubemer’s past, which is already rather a long one for the heroine of a novel.  For we do not wish to take anyone by surprise, and we admit, at the risk of the reader throwing these pages aside with disdain, that the Maréchale is indeed the object of our attentions.

Her father, the Baron d’Élancourt, a widower retired from military service, lived on his lands far away from the capital.  He believed he had committed an act of high wisdom in appointing a man of business, whose integrity he never doubted, as guardian of his two daughters.  Charging Monsieur Duparc with the administration of their fortune and the settling of their futures, he stipulated that they should remain at their convent¹ until the day of their marriage.   The Mesdemoiselles² d’Élancourt had been orphaned for five years and the elder had reached the nineteenth year of her age when M Duparc presented a Monsieur Dermonville to her as a suitor.  The boredom of life in the convent brooked no hesitation, and she accepted her guardian’s offer with satisfaction.  A few weeks later she married M Dermonville, to the great dissatisfaction of her family, who had not been consulted.  The public in general decried this marriage.  It was thought that Mlle d’Élancourt, a young woman of quality, allied to the greatest houses of France, having thirty thousand livres in income, and being quite a remarkable beauty, should not have married a 45-year-old man whose only distinction was a large fortune.  One could have added good sense and a happy disposition, but these are the sort of advantages that count for little in the world, and the rumour spread that M Duparc had sold the charming young Émilie d’Élancourt to the highest bidder.  M Dermonville enveloped his wife in great luxury, setting up her household on a very elegant footing, and she became an arbiter of fashion, the kind of importance which is absorbing at the beginning of life and leaves no time for regrets to take shape. Émilie therefore seemed quite satisfied in the bonds of a union so disproportionate in age and birth.

Madame Adélaïde (1732-1800) was one of Louis XV’s children.  As such, she was a “Daughter of France,” and was accorded a truly royal apartment in the main block of the Château.

Portrait of Mme Adélaïde in 1787 by Adélaïde Labille-Guiard. It hangs in her sister’s apartment at Versailles.

Her apartment adjoins that of her younger sister, Mme Victoire (1733-1799).  I previously described Mme Victoire’s apartment in an early post on this blog: http://versaillescentury.com/2016/09/22/versailles-mme-victoires-apartment/#more-304

The 2 sisters were the last of Louis XV’s offspring still alive and living in the Château towards the end of the reign of their nephew, Louis XVI. The latter also gave them the Château de Bellevue, and, unprecedentedly, the joint dukedom of Lauzun.  The layout of the rooms today is as it was arranged for the sisters in the 1780s.

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 1, the Maréchale d’Aubemer, a wealthy, worldly-wise widow of a certain age, weary of the social round, gives a ball and receives an unexpected letter.  

THE WIDOW OF FIELD MARSHAL D’AUBEMER

CHAPTER ONE 

The Pleasures of Being a Hostess

“My God, this noise is annoying!” said the Maréchale¹ d’Aubemer rising out of the armchair in which she’d been reading, rather inattentively, the latest speech given at the Academy. She placed it on a gold-ornamented Boulle etagere, the various shelves of which were already filled with a history book, a new novel, several pamphlets, needlework, and a voluminous knitted vest.

“Who is making all this racket?” she asked one of the servants who answered her bell. “I’ve been deafened for an hour already.”

“It’s the workmen taking up the carpet of the big salon, Madame la Maréchale, and taking down the doors that open into the gallery.”

“Will they be finished soon?”

“I don’t think so, Madame la Maréchale, they’ve only just started.”

The Maréchale sank back into her armchair with an air of melancholy resignation.

For several years I’ve been looking for a French work from or about the Versailles Century (1682-1789) to translate, preferably one that has never been translated into English before.  It also needs to be in the public domain.  It’s been a slow search because every time I found an interesting property it turned out to have been done already or under copyright.  I’m pleased to say that the search is now over.

Beginning this week, I will be serializing for you, dear readers, a French novel about the 18th century that has never before been published in English: Madame de Boigne’s La Maréchale d’Aubemer (The Widow of Field Marshal d’Aubemer).  It’s original subtitle is right up our alley, so to speak: Nouvelle du XVIIIème (A Novella of the 18th Century).

Now, who is this Mme de Boigne, you may wonder?  Though she lived most of her life in the 19th century, Éléonore-Adèle d’Osmond, Comtesse de Boigne, has unassailable Versailles Century credentials: she was born at the Château de Versailles in 1781.  Her parents, the Marquis and Marquise d’Osmond, were courtiers.  Her half-Irish mother had the more prestigious position: she was a lady-in-waiting to Mme Adélaïde, one of Louis XVI’s aunts.  Little Éléonore-Adèle was chosen to be one of the playmates of Louis XVI and Marie-Antoinette’s eldest son, Louis-Joseph, the first dauphin, who died a month before the fall of the Bastille.  After the Revolution broke out, the Osmond family fled to England.

Mme de Boigne in her youth. Credit: Wikipedia.

The Rue du Bac is a narrow but fascinating street in Paris to wander along.  Lined with antique shops, boutiques, restaurants, and cafes, it stretches from the quai opposite the Louvre deep into the heart of the Left Bank.

Rue du Bac in Paris.

It’s also home to the Paris Foreign Missions Society, usually abbreviated as MEP using the French initials (Missions Étrangères de Paris).  The unassuming street entrance to the MEP complex is shown below.

The entrance to the MEP complex at 128 Rue du Bac.

This venerable organization, still active today, was responsible for the Catholic evangelization of North America and much of East and Southeast Asia.

The Cour de Marbre is part of the footprint of Louis XIII’s original chateau, which was intended to be nothing more than a hunting lodge and a place of quiet refuge from court life.

The Cour de Marbre facade of the Chateau de Versailles.

Louis XIV, of course, had very different ideas for his father’s hunting lodge.  Still, he respected his father’s memory to such an extent that he planned his expansion of the Chateau around the original building instead of knocking it down and starting fresh.   Thus was born the Enveloppe, literally the “envelope” of new construction that enclosed Louis XIII’s hunting lodge.

The work of Francesco Guardi, the last of the great Venetian view painters, is well represented in Lisbon’s Fundaçao Calouste Gulbenkian.

The foundation actually has 2 museums on its campus, as well as extensive gardens. One of the museums is dedicated to modern art.  It’s in the other one, the larger and older of the two, that you’ll find Guardi’s works.  In fact, there’s a whole room dedicated to them, with a number of paintings hung on each of the 4 walls.

One wall in the Guardi room at the Gulbenkian.

Another wall in the Guardi room at the Gulbenkian.

A third wall in the Guardi room at the Gulbenkian.

The final wall of the Guardi room in the Gulbenkian.

Tiepolo was the last great Venetian master, apart from the view painters Canaletto, Bellotto, and Guardi.  I was delighted to find 3 of Tiepolo’s smaller works in the collection of the Museu Nacional de Arte Antiga (MNAA) in Lisbon when I visited there last April (2016).

Born in 1696, Giambattista Tiepolo trained in the studio of Lazzarini before being accepted into the Venetian painters guild in 1717.  He was also influenced by his study of the great Venetian masters of the past, such as Veronese and Tintoretto.  His success seems to have been almost immediate.  Eventually, his renown spread across Europe and he accepted commissions in Germany, notably in the Residenz at Würzburg, and later in Spain.  He died in Madrid in 1770.

Here is a view of the Tiepolo wall at the MNAA.

A trio of small Tiepolo works in the MNAA.

On this day, 24 January, occurred the birth of the future Frederick II, called the Great, King of Prussia from 1740 to 1786.  The year was 1712, the last full year of the reign of his grandfather, Frederick I, the first king not only of his name, but of the kingdom of Prussia, which until a decade before had been only a duchy.

Two baby princes had already been born to Frederick I’s heir, Frederick William, and his consort, Sophia Dorothea of Hannover, whose own father would soon become king of England.  Both of the little princes had been sickly and died in infancy.  Only baby Frederick’s elder sister, Wilhelmina, had survived of the the crown princely couple’s early brood.  This pair of children would be close for their rest of their lives.

The newly born Frederick was puny, but proved to be quite hardy.  In the end, he lived to be 74, which was a very respectable age in the Versailles Century.

Frederick the Great in old age.  Credit: Wikipedia.

In maturity, he would be a statesman, general, writer, philosopher, art collector, composer, dog lover, devoted friend, doting brother and uncle, and neglectful husband.  Here at Versailles Century, we consider him fascinating and he’s one of our favourite historical characters.

Wandering in Porto last spring, I came across this antiquarian bookshop, Livraria Moreira da Costa.  As the sign says, it was founded in 1902.

Livraria Moreira da Costa, an antiquarian bookshop in Porto.

I can’t resist any kind of bookshop, but especially not a secondhand one, and certainly not an antiquarian one.  As I discovered on closer inspection of the shop window, Moreira da Costa is in fact the last-named kind of bookshop.

Antiquarian titles in the window of Moreira da Costa.