The salon’s-eye view in full undress

Memoirs of the Comtesse de Boigne

Vol. I, 1781-1815

Vol. II, 1816-1830

Edited and with an introduction by Anka Muhlstein

Turtle Point Press / Helen Marx Books:

Vol. I: 304 pp., $14.50

Vol. II: 266 pp., $14.50

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Charlotte-Louise-Eleonore- Adelaide d’Osmond was born in 1781, eight years before the Bastille fell, into a family that traced its origins back past the Crusades. Her mother, Eleonore Dillon, was the daughter of a noble Catholic Irishman who had settled in France. Her father, the Marquis d’Osmond, was wealthy, cultivated and sensible. Eleonore, beautiful and charming, was selected to serve as lady-in-waiting to Adelaide, daughter of King Louis XV, sister of King Louis XVI; so the family lived at Versailles, where baby Adelaide (Adele) became a pet of the court and grew up, as it were, at or on the knees of the royal family.

These first, happy years came to an end with the French Revolution. Like many other nobles, the Osmonds took refuge in emigration, first to Italy (where Adele made friends with the daughter of the king of Naples who, in 1830, became queen of France), then to England. London, they found, was a great city composed of identical little houses, where a white dress clean in the morning would be soiled before the end of the day. “Overwhelmed with monotony,” the Osmonds lived in ever more straitened circumstances until, in 1798, Adele, now 17, met an older emigre, the Comte de Boigne, and set her cap at him.

Son of a furrier from Chambery in Savoy, Benoit Le Borgne was a commoner turned soldier of fortune who returned from long, profitable service in India a general and soon Count de Boigne, at the head of an enormous fortune. The teenager made no secret that she married Boigne, 30 years older than she, for his money and for the generous terms to which he consented with her parents. It took little time for her to find that, although upright, honorable and trustworthy, he was also ill bred, surly, offensive, ostentatious and insanely jealous (even of her father and her dog). Unsurprisingly, the marriage broke up after 10 months, the couple separated, reunited, separated again and kept up that awkward exercise until the count moved back to his native Savoy and the comtesse moved to Paris in 1804 with her parents. The more distant the spouses, the more cordial their relations became, until Boigne died in 1830, leaving Adele a very wealthy widow. But she had become her own woman long before that.

A major historian of 19th century France, Hippolyte Taine, has described the role that ladies of her ilk played in the 18th and 19th centuries. “Women were queens, they made the fashion, molded the taste, led the conversation, hence ideas, hence opinions. Where they took the lead in politics, men would follow: each of them carried her salon with her.” Salons, the coteries that gathered in the stream of guests paying court to hostesses, were crucial institutions of those days; and Comtesse de Boigne was one of the influential women that Taine wrote about, her intellect, tact and charm attracting the personalities and celebrities of the capital.

The comtesse describes them with a sharp, opinionated but equable pen. Madame de Stael: witty, brilliant, tactless, big red face, poor complexion and hair arranged in the picturesque manner -- “in other words, badly.” Francois Rene de Chateaubriand: who believed in nothing except his own talent and was entirely absorbed with himself, building a pedestal from which to look down upon the age. Madame de Talleyrand: “The remains of her great beauty adorned her stupidity with a fair amount of dignity.” The Duc de Berry, heir to the throne murdered in 1820: hot-tempered, promiscuous but kind, generous, just. His duchess, Marie-Caroline, a princess of Naples, cheerful, natural, clever, but spoiled, childish, sulky and looking “like a drowned dog” when she dressed up.

“I know history only as gossip,” she declares. And anyway, “I am not writing history, merely putting down my knowledge of certain details” -- those “trivial details that help to give the stamp of truth.” Like her description of the royal palace of the Tuileries: crowded, grubby and stinking everywhere, mostly of food. Or of Charles X, last of the elder Bourbon line, dethroned in 1830: a man of mulish obstinacy and curious superstitions, who handled and mishandled the revolution of 1830 based on advice from the Holy Virgin relayed by his favorite, the Prince de Polignac. He was affable, graceful, gracious, but had a shrill voice, did not pronounce words clearly and read his speeches clumsily. Shortsighted physically, he was no less shortsighted in politics. No wonder the Duke of Wellington was moved to remark that the best hope for the Restoration would be for the senior Bourbons to become extinct.

When the comtesse’s father, Osmond, is sent as ambassador to Turin (“the gloomiest and most boring place in the universe”), Adele goes along to act as his hostess. The capital of Piedmont-Sardinia has lots of showy buildings and lots of pretensions but hardly a fireplace, no proper lighting (there’s just one chandelier in the entire city) and the ballet is bad. The king, Victor-Emmanuel I, returned from dreary Sardinian exile, is determined to destroy all the subversive innovations introduced in his absence, including those works of Satan, scientific research and scientific collections without which the country had got along very well. “Nothing so despotic as so-called paternal government,” comments Adele. Then, in late February 1815, the court moves to Genoa to welcome the queen, returning from Sardinia, and the Osmonds move with it. As the carriages of the royal caravan pass from wintry Alps to Mediterranean sunshine, they skip directly from midwinter to late spring, from snow and icicles to trees in bloom, murmuring brooks, twittering birds, nature on holiday. Adele is kindled back to life: “I have never experienced a more delightful impression.”

In 1816 she accompanies her father again, this time to the London embassy, where she feels more at home. She’s not crazy about the country, but she admires a political order that assures everyone civil rights. Confidence that the law will protect them makes the British free, independent and self-respecting. They have got revolution out of their system. The French meanwhile struggle over pride, prejudice and privilege. Arguing about equality, “a disease engendered by vanity,” they stumble from one confrontation to another.

The comtesse had admired Napoleon but never liked him or his regime based on force, censorship and deception. When a government controls the news and tells lies, opponents invent fables of their own and everything grows murky. Propaganda generates rumor, suspicion and, in due course, indifference. “We’ve got a bellyful of liberty,” a postilion tells her.

A royalist but a moderate, Adele had greeted the empire’s end with relief and the Bourbon restoration with gladness. But she soon learned that, while Louis XVIII was intelligent, he was not wise enough to recognize that things could never be as they had been 25 years before. Frenchmen, as the comtesse remarks, run in cliques formed more by community of taste than by connections of rank or birth. Over 25 years, old cliques had been replaced by new ones that resisted the ghosts from the past. France had changed; French ways, expectations, aspirations had changed. New circumstances demanded less blinkered policies than courtiers, returned from exile resentful and embittered, called for. Like the royal family, restored ruling cliques had learned nothing and forgotten nothing. Back in the Tuileries, the Bourbon Restoration looked arrogant, rigid and determined to reintroduce the wearisome etiquette and formalism of yore. In July 1830, a three-day rising swept it away and brought to the throne a king to Adele’s taste: Louis-Philippe, Duke of Orleans, a Bourbon too but of the junior branch, married to the comtesse’s childhood friend, Marie-Amelie of Naples. Occasion for our diarist to note: “[H]itherto I have related events as seen from the audience, from 1830 on I have been behind the scenes.”

Unfortunately, 1830 is where this excellent translation suspends its course, depriving us of the portion of the memoirs that runs from 1830 to 1848. “In politics,” Comtesse de Boigne had written, “knowledge of persons is as important as knowledge of affairs.” Persons she knew aplenty, and they parade through her pages in full undress. But, well-bred lady that she was, she had to eschew the appearance of meddling in potentially grubby activities. She merely admits that “politics amuse me ... and I gladly take an amateur part in them to occupy my spare time.” Evidently, spare time proved plentiful during the July Monarchy. This is when Louis-Philippe personally shows her around the Versailles he restored, when the queen is a close friend, when one cabinet minister, Chancellor Pasquier, is her lover and other cabinet ministers, such as Francois Guizot and Adolphe Thiers, become regular members of her circle, when even the poet Alphonse de Lamartine -- no friend of the regime -- sends her a young greyhound with earnest instructions as to how the skittish, sensitive beast should be brought up.

The cutoff also deprives us of a hilarious account of the Duchess de Berry’s escapade of 1832, when that scatty lady tried to raise the country against Louis-Philippe and ended up captured, comfortably imprisoned and discreditably pregnant. Comtesse de Boigne attributes the widow’s adventure to the current fashion for chivalric tales: the duchess and her factious entourage “played at living a historical novel,” to the point of adopting the names of Walter Scott characters as nicknames. “His fashion, then at its peak, had a real influence on these would-be heroes of a civil war that happily never happened.”

But one shouldn’t look gift paperbacks in the mouth. Published in 1907, the French edition of the memoirs runs for 1,934 pages in four fat volumes. The present translation, which omits the last 540 pages, offers 456 pages of text in two slender volumes, rich and full of the life and color of the times, further enhanced by Anka Muhlstein’s useful introduction, chronologies, family trees and copious dictionaries of characters that help to guide the reader.

Marcel Proust, who adored these chronicles and mined them for entertainment as well as for historical information, accepted Adele de Boigne for the elegant, engaging and ruthlessly accurate witness that she was. Curiously first presented as “Tales of an Aunt,” her unassuming jottings provide a bridge from the present to a past by now far off, that binds life to history and renders both more vital: the very stuff of living memory whose essence, like that of God, lies in the details.