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.

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.

Happy New Year!

The turn of the year was a big deal at Versailles during the reigns of Louis XV and Louis XVI.  Both kings liked to gather their families around the the stupendous astronomical clock in the eponymously named Cabinet de la pendule on New Year’s Eve to watch the year tick over on the clock face.

Louis XV’s astronomical clock in the Cabinet de la pendule in the Petits Appartements at Versailles.  The royal family would gather in front of the clock to celebrate the turn of the new year.  

In those days, gifts were given on New Year’s Day, rather than on Christmas Day.  Louis XVI’s private accounts still exist, and they show that he spent the most on gifts for his wife and his sister, Mme Elisabeth.

I can’t resist a book shop, and especially not a secondhand one; over the last week, I’ve accumulated a small secondhand book shop haul.

Fortunately, I’m well-supplied here in my little lakeside town of Kincardine, ON.  There’s an excellent secondhand and antiquarian book shop here called Condor Fine Books.  You can check out their website at http://www.condorfinebooks.ca .

At last!  It’s taken decades, but my Mitford collection is now complete.  I’m referring to Nancy Mitford’s 4 historical biographies, rather than her novels.  In order of publication, the biographies are: Madame de Pompadour (1954), Voltaire in Love (1957), The Sun King (1966), and Frederick the Great (1970).

Attentive readers might remember this photo from an early post on this blog:

Madame de Pompadour and The Sun King, both by Nancy Mitford.  These are the lavish American editions published by Harper & Row.

At the time, these were the only items in my Mitford collection.  They’ve followed me from home to home through 4 countries over the last 30-odd years, which is why the dust jackets are slightly the worse for wear.  I had once owned a hard cover copy of Frederick the Great, but I donated it to a library that one of my former professors was setting up at Western University (my alma mater, formerly known as the University of Western Ontario).  It’s called the Pride Library.  You can visit its website here: http://www.uwo.ca/pridelib/.

If you look for Prussia on a map of Europe, you won’t find it.  It’s gone.  In the 18th century, however, it was very much there, and growing.

This map illustrates Prussia’s expansion before, during, and after the Versailles Century (1682-1789).

Map of Prussia, 1600-1795. Credit: Wikipedia.

In the beginning, two different branches of the House of Hohenzollern ruled Brandenburg (centre) and Prussia (right, in green).  The Margrave of Brandenburg, as you might remember from the previous post, was one of the 9 electors empowered to select the Holy Roman Emperor.  He was generally called the Elector (German: Kurfürst) of Brandenburg.   Berlin was his capital.  Prussia up to the mid-17th century was a vassal duchy of Poland.  Its capital was Königsberg, nowadays known as Kaliningrad.  In 1618, the Elector of Brandenburg married his last surviving Prussian cousin, the Duchess Anna, and henceforward the two states were in personal union.  In other words, the same man was both Elector of Brandenburg and Duke of Prussia, but the two states were administered separately.  A similar situation happened in Britain, with the personal union of England and Scotland after the death of Elizabeth I and the accession of James VII of Scotland as James I of England.

Germany as we know it today did not exist in the Versailles Century (1682-1789).  The second German Empire (1871-1918), which brought the various German states together into the single national structure that we now call Germany, did not come into being until many decades after the final departure of Louis XVI and his family from Versailles in October, 1789.

In the Versailles Century, Germany was more a geographical region than a country.  It was part of the Holy Roman Empire, which also included the territory of the countries that we now know as Belgium, the Czech Republic, Slovakia, and Slovenia, as well as parts of present day France, Italy, and Poland.

Here is a map of the Empire in 1789:

The Holy Roman Empire in 1789. Credit: Wikipedia.

By this time, the Emperor had little authority outside his own hereditary territories.  As Voltaire quipped, the Holy Roman Empire was neither holy, nor Roman, nor even a real empire.

On this day in 1796, Catherine the Great, Empress and Autocrat of all the Russias, died in St. Petersburg at the age of 67.

Catherine the Great a few years before her death.

She had been found sprawled on the floor of her bathroom on the morning of 16 November.  She was moved to her bedroom, where her doctor examined her and determined that she’d had a stroke.  Having slipped into a coma, she never recovered consciousness and died on the evening of the 17th.

Known to history as Catherine the Great, she’d been born in 1729 as Princess Sophia of Anhalt-Zerbst, one of the most insignificant of the numerous insignificant German statelets at that time.  The Empress Elizabeth (r. 1741-1761) summoned her to Russia in 1744 to marry her nephew and heir, the future Peter III.  The marriage was unhappy and remained unconsummated for years.  Both parties were unfaithful and the paternity of their son, the future Emperor Paul, has always been in doubt.  On Elizabeth’s death at the end of 1761, Peter became emperor, but made himself unpopular in short order.  Within months of the late Empress’s funeral, Catherine organized a coup d’état, assumed the throne — to which she had no actual claim, of course — as empress regnant, not merely regent for her young son, and eliminated all her rivals, including Peter.  She ruled with great energy, enlarging Russia’s territory by a third, building enthusiastically, collecting art on a grand scale, corresponding with the great thinkers of the day, writing voluminously, and taking numerous lovers.  Her last lover, Platon Zubov, later helped to assassinate the Emperor Paul, who had done all he could to undo his mother’s work, even going so far as to decree that no woman should ever again sit on the Russian throne.

I first read Catherine’s memoirs when I was a teenager.  She had written them in French, but my local library had a copy of the English translation edited by Dominique Maroger and translated by Moura Budberg.  I later found and purchased a copy at a local secondhand bookstore (see below).  I believe it’s the original Canadian edition.  It has followed me through 4 countries and sits on a shelf in my bedroom to this day.  It’s a very lively book and Catherine’s voice comes through very clearly.  Unfortunately, she stopped writing, literally in mid-sentence, just as she was beginning to describe a conversation with the Empress Elizabeth shortly before her death which started with that monarch saying, “I insist that you tell me the truth about everything I am going to ask you.”

Cover of Catherine the Great’s memoirs, published in Canada by Hamish Hamilton, Ltd, in 1955.

Have you read this book?  If so, what did you think?  Please comment below, on the Versailles Century Facebook page, or in the Versailles Century gallery on Instagram.

Small though it is, my local secondhand bookshop keeps turning up Versailles Century treasures.  Yesterday it was this original edition of John Miller’s The The Life and Times of William and Mary, which was part of a ‘Life and Times of —–‘ series on British monarchs published by Weidenfeld and Nicolson.  The series editor was the eminent biographer Antonia Fraser.

‘The Life and Times of William and Mary’ by John Miller.

This book, like the others in the series, is lavishly illustrated with both black and white and colour plates.

I’ve always been intrigued by William and Mary, who are such an anomaly in our history.  They were the only joint sovereigns of the British isles, and among the few anywhere.  That their reign was successful is due largely due to their harmonious marriage, and the fact that one generally deferred to the other, thus avoiding a power struggle.  Mary, like any God-fearing woman of her time, believed it was her place to submit to her husband.  William, for his part, who knew from the start that his wife was a potential heiress to the English, Scottish, and Irish crowns, once said that he would not be his “wife’s gentleman usher.” Even so, I had never really understood how the unprecedented joint sovereignty came about.  The book explains it succinctly.

One faction of Parliament, keen to maintain as much legal continuity as possible in the wake of the ouster of Mary’s father, the deeply unpopular James II, wanted Mary to succeed on her own.  An even more conservative faction wanted her merely to serve as regent and not ascend to the throne until her father’s natural death (overseas).  A more radical faction wanted William to take the throne as sole monarch by right of conquest, for which there was a precedent in the case of William the Conqueror more than 600 years earlier.  In the end, the compromise choice was joint sovereignty, with Mary’s sister Anne to be accepted as heiress presumptive.  Thus the pair were crowned William III (r. 1688-1702) and Mary II (r.1688-1694).