Stolen Youth: The Life of Lucie de la Tour du Pin

Lucie Dillon and her son as imagined by an unknown artist

When she turned 50 in 1820, Lucie Dillon, marquise de la Tour du Pin, began to write her memoirs. She intended them for her two surviving children (four were deceased), but in 1822 Lucie's daughter Charlotte suddenly died, leaving only Aymar, her last-born son, as recipient of the record of his mother's extraordinary life. The unfinished text, which breaks off at Napoleon's return from Elba in 1815, was not published until 1907; it has rarely been out of print since. Historians of the French Revolution have long pillaged Lucie's Journal d'une femme de cinquante ans for colorful anecdotes and eyewitness observations to adorn their narratives and bring them to life. In her new biography, Dancing to the Precipice, Caroline Moorehead returns Lucie to the center of her own story.

Lucie was born in Paris at a fashionable address on the rue du Bac, Faubourg Saint-Germain, in 1770. Her parents were second cousins who married in their teens; both were descended from the Irish Dillons of Roscommon. The family's ancestors had been in Paris since the Seventh Viscount Dillon raised an Irish regiment and followed James II's Jacobite court into exile. Lucie's father, like his forebears, was a soldier, so Lucie saw little of him during her childhood. Her mother, as "beautiful and sweet-tempered as an angel," lived under the dominion of her own unpleasant and exacting mother; caught between the constant warring of these women, Lucie later remembered that she "had no real childhood" but became a reserved, discreet, taciturn judge of the hatred between her mother and grandmother.

Whatever the internal psychological truth, Lucie certainly had the external trappings of a glamorous and privileged childhood. When Lucie was 7, her mother was made a lady-in-waiting to Marie Antoinette. That same year, the duc de Lauzun gave Lucie a doll with a full court wardrobe--including a well-made wig and silk stockings--ordered from Rose Bertin, the queen's dressmaker. She heard her mother sing with Niccolò Piccinni and had a wealth of opportunities to develop her own musical talent; she was educated by an excellent private tutor, M. Combes, who became a close friend; she was healthy and attractive, and even smallpox left her unscarred.

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