cover image Memoirs: Laughing and Dancing Our Way to the Precipice

Memoirs: Laughing and Dancing Our Way to the Precipice

de la Tour du Pin. Harvill Press, $16 (472pp) ISBN 978-1-86046-548-2

A beautiful aristocrat who survived the French Revolution composed this massive, orderly memoir for her only surviving child. The former Henrietta-Lucy Dillon (1770-1853) was an imaginative girl who fancied Robinson Crusoe; intelligent and eager to learn, she professed to envy the peasants because they ""were not forced, as I was, to hide their tastes and ideas."" After her mother died when Dillon was 12, she lived with her spiteful grandmother, who mistreated her, until a marriage was arranged with the Marquis de La Tour du Pin. Although the author reiterated that she was leaving large-scale analysis to historians, she nonetheless exhibits a canny perspective on how the ""profligate reign of Louis XV"" was central to the ensuing uprising. With the revolution, Mme. de La Tour du Pin and her family lived in exile, finding refuge in Europe and America; there arose one of the happiest occasions of her life, the manumission of her family's black servants. In keeping with her devotion to her family and her native country, she remained a Loyalist and was, in the words of another writer, ""one of the last remaining traces of the `haute soci t ' of pre-Revolutionary days."" While the book is rich in detail and human drama (including the author's imprisonment with her husband and one son's death in a duel), it lacks the breadth of spirit to transcend the remoteness of the period. This memoir stands primarily as a work for historians, researchers and readers with a special interest in the time. (Dec.)