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A Selection of Excerpts from

The Souvenirs of the Marquise de Créquy

Renée-Charlotte-Victoire de Froullay de Tessé, Marquise de Créquy (1710 ?‑1803) :
Souvenirs
Paris : Garnier Frères, n. d. (1839 ?).

Mme de Créquy was a real person, although sometimes her mémoires give one pause to think she was not. There is in fact some controversy as to whether the Souvenirs were not a fabrication by her grandson, Maurice Cousin, to whom they are addressed. For what it's worth, I believe them to be authentic, if possibly somewhat patted into shape here and there.

This remarkable woman was born to the high nobility — which she will never let you forget! — in around 1710: she writes that she herself never knew what year, exactly. Since she died in 1803, she witnessed almost a century of life at the French court, with an unpleasant blip during the Revolution (1789‑1799). At one point indeed, as a very old lady when she had just been presented to Napoleon, she comes back home in the evening and although she's very tired, writes a quick account of how the emperor kissed her hand in the same curiously sensuous way as Louis XIV had done when she was a very young girl. . . .

Her opinions are many and pronounced: sometimes quite wrong. Mostly, when she is not writing about people's family trees, she can be extremely funny, and that is what I like about her. I have no intention of putting all 3000 pages of her online, but I hope you will enjoy an excerpt from time to time.

Excerpts on my Site

• A Day in the Life of St. John Lateran
  Her dramatic eyewitness account of Pope Innocent XIII doing his duty as pastor of souls.

• Benjamin Franklin Eats Some Eggs
  A telling account on all sides; she was placed next to him at a dinner party.

• On the Perils of Latin Toponymy
  A tired wife uses her husband's mania for Latin place names as an excuse to go back home to Hungary without him.

• An attack on the French ambassador in Rome
  Mme de Créquy, his granddaughter and a good Frenchwoman, has one version; as it turns out, the archaeologist Rodolfo Lanciani, proud to be a citizen of Rome, has another, also on this site. What else could I do but link them?

Elsewhere Online

Her entire memoirs are online in the original French on James Eason's site. If you read French, right from Chapter 1 you should find her enjoyable: why she herself has no idea what year she was born; how she came to steal a ring from the corpse of an abbess; forced labor of poodles in a kitchen; and other stories.

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