A Childhood at Versailles consists of the first 5 chapters of the memoirs of Mme de Boigne (1781-1866), née Adèle d’Osmond, who was a French salon hostess and writer.  She was born in the Château de Versailles and lived at the court of Louis XVI and Marie-Antoinette until her family fled to England during the Revolution.  Later in her long life, she married a rich soldier of fortune 30 years her senior, hosted a brilliant salon in Paris, and became an intimate of the last French queen, Marie-Amélie, consort of King Louis Philippe (r. 1830-1848).  Childless herself, Mme de Boigne addressed her memoirs to her nephew.  The memoirs were not published until 1907, under the title Récits d’une tante, or An Aunt’s Tales.  They’ve never been published in English, as far as I know, so I’ve decided to translate the first 5 chapters, the ones that take place mainly at Versailles, and post them here on this blog for interested readers to enjoy for free.

The chapters are quite lengthy, so I’ve broken each one into several parts.  In Part 1.5, Mme de Boigne describes the behaviour that set malicious tongues wagging about Marie-Antoinette.    

“This excellent prince (Louis XVI) had a great deal of difficulty in overcoming a timidity of spirit, joined to boorishly free manners, the fruit of his childhood habits, which did him no favours with those who only saw this uncouth shell.  With the best intentions of being obliging to someone, the King would advance towards him until his back was against the wall.  If he could not think of anything to say, which happened often, he would give a great bark of laughter, turn on his heels and walk away.  The victim of this public scene always suffered from it, and if he was not a regular at Court, he would go away furious, persuaded that the King had wanted to do him some kind of insult.  In private, the King complained bitterly of the way he had been raised.  He used to say that the only man for whom he felt hatred was the Duc de La Vauguyon⁷, and in support of this sentiment he cited instances of the abject toadying addressed by the Duc to his brothers and himself.  Monsieur had less repugnance for the memory of the Duc de La Vauguyon.

M le Comte d’Artois shared the King’s opinion.  His happy disposition, his charm, perhaps even his frivolity, made him the spoiled favourite of the whole family.  Though he committed stupidity after stupidity, the King scolded him, pardoned him, and paid his debts.  Alas, the one that could never be made good was the discredit heaped on his own head and on the Queen’s!

A Childhood at Versailles consists of the first 5 chapters of the memoirs of Mme de Boigne (1781-1866), née Adèle d’Osmond, who was a French salon hostess and writer.  She was born in the Château de Versailles and lived at the court of Louis XVI and Marie-Antoinette until her family fled to England during the Revolution.  Later in her long life, she married a rich soldier of fortune 30 years her senior, hosted a brilliant salon in Paris, and became an intimate of the last French queen, Marie-Amélie, consort of King Louis Philippe (r. 1830-1848).  Childless herself, Mme de Boigne addressed her memoirs to her nephew.  The memoirs were not published until 1907, under the title Récits d’une tante, or An Aunt’s Tales.  They’ve never been published in English, as far as I know, so I’ve decided to translate the first 5 chapters, the ones that take place mainly at Versailles, and post them here on this blog for interested readers to enjoy for free.

The chapters are quite lengthy, so I’ve broken each one into several parts.  In Part 1.4, Mme de Boigne discusses the fearsome protocol. “l’étiquette,” that governed life at court, not only at Versailles, but at every one of the royal residences.  

“Among the protocols at Versailles, there was one to which my father could never reconcile himself and of which I often heard him speak, which was the way of being invited to what was called the souper dans les cabinets.  The guest list for these suppers consisted of the royal family and about thirty invited guests.  They took place in the King’s private apartments, in rooms with so little space that the billiard table had to be covered with planks in order to put the buffet on it.  The King was forced to rush his game in order make way for the food.

The ladies had been warned that morning or the evening before.  For the occasion, they wore sack-backed gowns, an antiquated costume that had long fallen out of fashion in any other circumstance.  They presented themselves at the small theatre, where a bench was reserved for them.  After the performance, they followed the King and the royal family into the private apartments.

As for the men, their fate was less gentle…

A Childhood at Versailles consists of the first 5 chapters of the memoirs of Mme de Boigne (1781-1866), née Adèle d’Osmond, who was a French salon hostess and writer.  She was born in the Château de Versailles and lived at the court of Louis XVI and Marie-Antoinette until her family fled to England during the Revolution.  Later in her long life, she married a rich soldier of fortune 30 years her senior, hosted a brilliant salon in Paris, and became an intimate of the last French queen, Marie-Amélie, consort of King Louis Philippe (r. 1830-1848).  Childless herself, Mme de Boigne addressed her memoirs to her nephew.  The memoirs were not published until 1907, under the title Récits d’une tante, or An Aunt’s Tales.  They’ve never been published in English, as far as I know, so I’ve decided to translate the first 5 chapters, the ones that take place mainly at Versailles, and post them here on this blog for interested readers to enjoy for free.

The chapters are quite lengthy, so I’ve broken each one into several parts.  In Part 1.3 (see below), Mme de Boigne recalls the sharp class distinctions among the courtiers residing at Versailles on the eve of the Revolution.  Hint: Not everyone who lived at Court was a courtier.  

A CHILDHOOD AT VERSAILLES, PART 1.3

It was soon after my parents settled into Versailles that I came into the world.  My mother had already been delivered of a still-born infant, so I was welcomed with transports of joy and pardoned for being a girl.  I was not swaddled, as was still the custom, but dressed in the English manner and nursed by my mother in the midst of Versailles.  I promptly became the plaything of the princes and the court, all the more since I was very well-behaved, and also since children in those days were as rare a species in a drawing room as they are common and tyrannical today.

My father fashioned a routine for himself and ended up reconciling himself with Court life.

Mme de Boigne (1781-1866), née Adèle d’Osmond, was a French salon hostess and writer.  She was born in the Château de Versailles and lived at the court of Louis XVI and Marie-Antoinette until her family fled to England during the Revolution.  Later in her long life, she married a rich soldier of fortune 30 years her senior, hosted a brilliant salon in Paris, and became an intimate of the last French queen, Marie-Amélie, consort of King Louis Philippe (r. 1830-1848).  Childless herself, Mme de Boigne addressed her memoirs to her nephew.  The memoirs were not published until 1907, under the title Récits d’une tante, or An Aunt’s Tales.  They’ve never been published in English, as far as I know, so I’ve decided to translate the first 5 chapters, the ones that take place mainly at Versailles, and post them here on this blog for interested readers to enjoy for free.

The chapters are quite lengthy, so I’ve broken each one into several parts.  In Part 1.2 (see below), Mme de Boigne introduces the Dillons, her mother’s Irish family, and narrates the story of her parents’ difficult road to the altar.  Her mother, though beautiful and kind, had hardly a penny, you see…

A CHILDHOOD AT VERSAILLES, PART 1.2

I must now speak of my mother’s family.  Mr. Robert Dillon, of the Dillons of Roscommon, was an Irish Catholic gentleman possessed of a pretty fortune.  To augment it, given the state of Catholic disability, he entrusted it to one of his brothers to turn it to account in trade.  Mr. Dillon had married a rich heiress by whom he had an only daughter, Lady Swinburne.  Becoming widowed, he married Miss Dicconson, the youngest of three sisters, all beautiful as angels, whom their father, the governor of the Prince of Wales, had raised at Saint-Germain.  At the time of the wedding the parents had returned to England and established themselves at their home in Lancashire, a very beautiful estate.

Mr. Dillon and his charming wife settled in Worcestershire, and it was there that my mother and her six older siblings were born.  However, the brother in charge of the business affairs in Ireland died, and it became apparent that he had managed them badly.  Mr. Dillon was obliged to take charge of them himself.  The most important trade was with Bordeaux, and he decided to go there and take his family with him.  He liked it there, and his wife, who had been raised in France, preferred it to England.  He took a beautiful house in Bordeaux, bought a small estate called Terrefort nearby, and was living the life of a rich man when, rising from table one day, he clapped his hand to his head, cried, “Oh, my poor wife!  My poor children!” and expired.

His exclamation was quite justified.  He left Mme Dillon, aged thirty-two and pregnant with her thirteenth child, in a foreign land without a single relative or close connection, which the excessive jealousy of her husband would scarcely have tolerated.  This very isolation aroused interest and inspired protectors to step forward.  Her affairs, of which she had no notion, were looked into.  The upshot, as was discovered, was that Mr. Dillon had been living off capital that was about run out.  She was left with thirteen children and nothing to live on but a small property three leagues from Bordeaux that might produce four thousand a year in revenue.

Mme Dillon was still quite lovely, very kind and very virtuous.  Her children were also of a striking beauty.  This lovely, abandoned brood attracted interest and solicitude.  Everyone wanted to fly to their aid.  Such numbers did, in fact, that without ever leaving her little turrets at Terrefort, my grandmother kept up our family name and somehow unlocked the secret to raising thirteen children and establishing them in positions that promised a brilliant future.  Then the Revolution brought all their careers to a halt.  At the time of which I am speaking, only my mother remained to be married off.  She was beautiful and kind, but she had not a penny to her name.

Mme de Boigne (1781-1866), née Adèle d’Osmond, was a French salon hostess and writer.  She was born in the Château de Versailles and lived at the court of Louis XVI and Marie-Antoinette until her family fled to England during the Revolution.  Later in her long life, she married a rich soldier of fortune 30 years her senior, hosted a brilliant salon in Paris, and became an intimate of the last French queen, Marie-Amélie, consort of King Louis Philippe (r. 1830-1848).  Childless herself, Mme de Boigne addressed her memoirs to her nephew.  The memoirs were not published until 1907, under the title Récits d’une tante, or An Aunt’s Tales.  They’ve never been published in English, as far as I know, so I’ve decided to translate the first 5 chapters, the ones that take place mainly at Versailles, and post them here on this blog for interested readers to enjoy for free.

The chapters are quite lengthy, so I’ve broken each one into several parts.  In the first instalment (see below), Mme de Boigne breezily recounts her father’s family history down to the time that he met her mother.  

A Versailles Childhood – Chapter 1, Part 1.1

Such great events occupied the the life of the generation that precedes you and absorbed so much of its attention that the family traditions would be lost if some old woman such as I did not revisit her childhood memories in order to write them down.  I will endeavour to string a few together for your use, dear nephew.

Giannone, in his History of Naples, will instruct you in the most brilliant pretensions of your family, and Moréri will explain the rights that you have to believe yourself the descendant of those fortunate Norman adventurers who conquered Puglia, rights as well founded as are most of these family pretensions to antiquity.  Salisbury Cathedral shelters the mortal remains of one of its archbishops, Saint Osmond, to whom we also attach ourselves. The coat of arms of the county of Somerset has its vol, or pair of wings, which are also part of your arms; they have theirs from their lord Osmond, the compatriot of William the Conqueror.  These arms were given by the Duke of Normandy to his governor, Osmond, who had saved him from the vengeance of Louis d’Outremer.

The English branch was extinguished long ago, but its name has remained familiar and perpetually recurs in poems and novels.  The Norman branch impoverished itself through equal inheritance.  The eldest sons of the last three generations that preceded my father’s only had daughters, and in such great numbers that they made very poor marriages.  Thus one of my great-aunts, the Canoness of Remiremont, when her sister’s husband asked if she ever regretted never having married, replied, “No, brother, the Osmond girls are in the habit of making such bad marriages!”  This is all I will tell you about our family.

If, when the time comes that you go into the world, you attach some value to these noble memories, you will more easily find traces of these distant times than intimate details of what has happened in the last hundred or so years.  In any case, I am not very good at these tales.  I have never attached much value to the advantages of birth.  They were never called into question when I was a girl, and then as a woman I had no right to them; perhaps this situation has prevented me altogether from occupying myself with them as much as many others do.  Therefore, I only want to recount to you those details that come to mind from the memory of what I have personally heard or seen, without pretence of any great narrative, and only as anecdotes that will interest you by virtue of my relationships with the people in question.  It will be a sort of gossip, the whole value of which will be in its sincerity.

The salon hostess and writer Mme de Boigne (1781-1866), née Adèle d’Osmond, was literally born in the Château de Versailles, and spent her childhood at the court of Louis XVI and Marie-Antoinette.

In the first chapter of her memoirs, Mme de Boigne writes, “It was soon after my parents settled into Versailles that I came into the world.  My mother had already been delivered of a still-born infant, so I was welcomed with transports of joy and pardoned for being a girl.  I was not swaddled, as was still the custom, but dressed in the English manner and nursed by my mother in the midst of Versailles.  I promptly became the plaything of the princes and the court, all the more since I was very well-behaved, and also since children in those days were as rare a species in a drawing room as they are common and tyrannical today.”

Adéle d’Osmond, Comtesse de Boigne (1781-1866).

This remarkable circumstance is due to the fact that her mother was a lady-in-waiting to Mme Adélaïde, one of the daughters of Louis XV.  She and her sisters were generally referred to as “Mesdames,”and later, in the reign of their nephew Louis XVI, as “Mesdames Tantes.”  It was not usual for ladies-in-waiting to keep their children at court, but Mme de Boigne’s parents, the Marquis and Marquise d’Osmond, chose — and were permitted — to do so.

We’ll get to my favourite bookshop in Lisbon, Livraria Sà da Costa, in a minute.

First, a word on Portuguese secondhand and antiquarian bookshops in general (called albufarristas in Portuguese) — I’ve never seen so many!  In both Lisbon and Porto, there seemed to be one everywhere I looked.  I’ve previously written about my favourite albufarrista in Porto, Livraria Moreira da Costa.

Livraria Moreira da Costa in Porto.  

I’ve since been informed by a Portuguese friend via Instagram that book publishing was an expensive undertaking in times past, and subject to heavy censorship for much of the 20th century while Portugal groaned under the Salazar dictatorship.  As a result, most people could only afford to buy secondhand books.  If anyone has another explanation, I’d love to hear from you in the comments below.

So, now that the serialization of A Novella of the 18th Century is done, what’s next?

Those who enjoyed the novella will be happy to learn that more of Mme de Boigne’s work is on the way!

Adélaïde d’Osmond, Comtesse de Boigne (1781-1866).

As I mentioned in a previous post, Mme de Boigne is known mainly as a memoirist.  Her memoirs, entitled Récits d’une tante (An Aunt’s Tales), were posthumously published in 1907 and have never since been out of print in France.  Proust read them when they were first published and hugely enjoyed them.  He is said to have based the character of Mme de Villeparisis in Remembrance of Things Past at least partly on Mme de Boigne.  Like Mme de Villeparisis, Mme de Boigne had a famously mixed salon where aristocrats rubbed shoulders with academics and princes with painters.

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 15, the final chapter, the Maréchale pays a significant visit to her notary.

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

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

An Old-Fashioned Notary

A week of waiting had crept by when Mme d’Aubemer addressed a banal question to a new arrival in the drawing room: “What news?”

“One talks of nothing but Henri d’Estouteville’s wedding.”

“Really!” said the Maréchale, smilingly.  “That seems premature to me.”

“Not so much, if it’s to be next week.  In any case, you are better informed than I, since I see that you are in the know.  Nonetheless, when I was congratulating the Marquis, he told me that they’re leaving on Thursday for Caen, where the wedding will take place.  I haven’t seen Henri.”

The Maréchale had difficulty disguising her confusion; a few moments later the post brought a letter from Gudule.  After announcing her satisfaction at finding her grandfather out of danger, she recounted the strange note she had received on the day of her departure from Magnanville, and admitted to no longer being able to bear the uncertainty into which it had plunged her.  She enjoined her aunt to shine a light on this cause of her unhappiness and to put an end to the thousand and one conjectures that were running through her mind one after another and that had almost rendered her mad.  Monday was drawing to a close.  Offering some unforeseen business as a pretext, the Maréchale was on the road to Paris the next morning, quite determined to obtain some clarification.  As chance would have it, she met M Chevreux¹ as she was arriving.  She had him summoned.  He had hardly entered her sitting room when she said, “Tell me, I beg you, what you know of Henri d’Estouteville’s supposed wedding!”

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 14, the Maréchale, Gudule, and Henri are reunited at Magnanville.

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

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

Return to Magnanville

Seven months had passed since Lionel’s death; the old Marquis was still grieving the father of the great-grandchildren he had hoped for, and the Baronne her adored son, despite the embarrassment in which he had placed her.  Not only had Lionel had spent all of his paternal inheritance, but she had had to make large sacrifices of her own fortune, to which her daughter-in-law renounced her rights.¹ Gudule thus found herself once again the heiress to the slender means of the Saveuse battlements, but she also rediscovered the warblers and roses of her native mountains, as buoyant and fresh as she.  Mme de Saveuse felt in the depths of her soul a wellspring of happiness unknown to her until then, which made her still more beautiful and revealed itself in her smallest actions.   Since the confidences interrupted by such an unforeseen event, by which Gudule had been staggered, d’Estouteville’s name had passed neither the Maréchale’s lips nor her niece’s, but both thought of him ceaselessly, and the suspicion that the other was thinking of him was mutual.  On the pretext of thanking Mme d’Aubemer for her goodness in asking for news of him, d’Estouteville had written to her and an increasingly active correspondence developed between them.  His letters, like many others, were handed to Gudule, but she handed them back without comment.  However, her aunt noticed that on those days her affection for her loved ones was even more effusive and her gaiety more free.

It was not without keen regret that Mme d’Aubemer decided to leave Saveuse; her long stay there had flowed past like a dream.  Surrounded by attention and affection as she was, the days seemed much alike, but since they were diversified by varied occupations, they seemed to her to be sufficiently full.  She almost admitted to herself that there comes a time of life when monotony is not dullness, but rather repose.  The mountain air was good for her, and above all the feeling of isolation from which she usually suffered was held at bay; with her sister, she could speak of their youth and friends of times gone by; with Gudule, she could speak of her present relations.  The old marquis himself had perfect recall, and, having served in the musketeers, linked his memories of former times with the Maréchale’s more recent ones, who thus felt herself growing younger in her own eyes.  A number of neighbours, some of them rather likeable, frequently joined the family circle and soon enough seven months had passed very agreeably.  All the same, the thought of spending the winter out of Paris horrified the Maréchale.  Such a thing had never happened and seemed impossible to contemplate.  Still, she delayed her departure from one day to another.  The first snowfall brought home to her that she could no longer put off the fatal hour.  She would very much have liked to take her niece with her, but Gudule wanted to finish her year of mourning at Saveuse, and the Maréchale very sadly had to concede that it was perhaps more suitable to do so.

Taking messages for various people, the Maréchale asked her, “Shall I say nothing to Henri d’Estouteville?”

“No, Aunt,” replied Gudule, blushing. “Not yet!” she replied in a lower voice, smiling gently.