French Historicals Oh La La: Mistress of the Revolution by Catherine Delors

In the second year of my history degree, I had the opportunity to write a dissertation, and naturally I chose my favourite subject, eighteenth-century France. The post-revolutionary period was particularly rich in memoirs and I decided that I would analyse seven autobiographies by noblewomen. This is an extract from my conclusion:

The role of women of the eighteenth-century noble elite was in many respects strictly limited. The task to which they were dedicated by their own order was to form a marriage alliance with another noble house for which they provided heirs. Marriage was therefore usually the most important event in their lives and it was one over which they had little control. In normal circumstances daughters of noble houses had only the right of refusal and knew little of their suitors. They were expected to obey their husband and if their behaviour displeased him he could imprison them permanently in a convent. Independence only came with widowhood and throughout their lives, women were governed by strict rules of etiquette which few dared transgress.

Mistress of the Revolution, which takes the form of a memoir by a fictional character, Gabrielle de Montserrat, reflects exactly this historical reality. This is not the type of historical novel which features a twenty-first century woman in historical dress: Gabrielle is very much of her time.

Teaser Tuesday: From Versailles to the French Revolution

Teaser Tuesdays is a weekly bookish meme, hosted by MizB of Should Be Reading. Anyone can play along! Just do the following:

• Grab your current read
• Open to a random page
• Share two (2) “teaser” sentences from somewhere on that page
• BE CAREFUL NOT TO INCLUDE SPOILERS! (make sure that what you share doesn’t give too much away! You don’t want to ruin the book for others!)
• Share the title & author, too, so that other TT participants can add the book to their TBR Lists if they like your teasers!

I like to dip into the books I’m planning to read, just for a glimpse of the contents.  (Sometimes I overdip and spoil myself…)  So this week’s teasers are from two books recently added to my TBR pile and mentioned in a recent post, F is for Fortune-Telling.  The first one is Mistress of the Revolution by Catherine Delors:

The image on the cover is a detail from The Stolen Kiss by Fragonard.  Catherine has posted about the process of choosing this cover image and about the final choice of cover image for her forthcoming novel For the King (released July 2010).

I’m fascinated by the process of creating book covers and I have to say they have an undue influence on me!  But not just the cover.  If I like the size and the paper and the print, I am more likely to buy the book.

Mistress of the Revolution is the fictional memoir of a French noblewoman, Gabrielle de Montserrat, who tells the story of her journey from the French provinces to the court of Versailles and Paris in the Revolution.

Gabrielle is fictional, but a woman whose life followed a similar pattern is Rose de Beauharnais, better known to history as the Empress Josephine. The Many Lives and Secret Sorrows of Josephine B., the first volume in Sandra Gulland’s Josephine B. trilogy, traces her life through her adolescence in Martinique, her unhappy marriage to a French nobleman, the dangers of the French Revolution and then her involvement with Napoleon.

Since both these novels cover a similar time period, I thought it would be fun to have one pre-revolutionary and one revolutionary teaser.  First the pre-revolutionary teaser, which is from Mistress of the Revolution:

The next morning, the Duchess and I rose later than usual and chatted about the opera over a breakfast of tea and croissants.  That delicacy had been introduced to France by the Queen upon her arrival from Vienna.  We had settled with our reading in the drawing room when the Count de Villers was announced by one of the footmen.  After the usual exchange of bows, curtseys and compliments, the conversation turned to one of the Duchess’s acquaintances.

Mistress of the Revolution by Catherine Delors

A few years later, Joséphine finds life in Paris is rather different!

This morning I went to my dressmaker on the Rue Saint-Honoré.  It was with a sinking heart that I saw a cart approaching, three men and a woman on their way to the guillotine, one of the men a youth, really, quite young and weeping, another man doing his best to console him.  Five boys were following behind the cart, dancing the farandole.

The Many Lives and Secret Sorrows of Joséphine B., by Sandra Gulland

The Alphabet in Historical Fiction: F is for Fortune-Telling

My last Alphabet Challenge post, E is for Erskine, led to this one, as I was thinking about the themes of the supernatural and precognition which appear in Barbara Erskine’s novels, and then began to think about how often characters in historical fiction meet with a fortune-teller or soothsayer.  A example  based on a real-life encounter appears in Sergeanne Golon’s Angélique: The Road to Versailles.  The fictional Angélique visits the notorious fortune-teller who would become known to history as La Voisin, along with her friends Athénaïs de Montespan and Françoise Scarron. Madame de Montespan is the instigator of the trip as she wants to know if she will succeed in attracting Louis XIV:

Flanked by her two guardian angels, Athénaïs de Montespan, bristling with impatience and not at all frightened, entered the witch’s lair.  It was a fine house in the Faubourg du Temple, the newly-rich sorceress having moved from the sinister hovel where, for a long time, the dwarf Barcarole had ushered in her furtive visitors.  Nowadays people called on her almost overtly. Generally she received her clients on a kind of throne, draped in a cloak embroidered with golden bees, but on that particular day Catherine  Monvoisin, whose unpleasant habits had not been changed by contact with high society, was dead-drunk.

A drunken Voisin seizes first on Madame Scarron, telling her that the King will love her and one day marry her.  Then she tells Montespan that King will love her, too, but he won’t marry her.  Finally she reads Angélique’s palm: