Henriette-Lucy, Marquise de La Tour du Pin Gouvernet
Illustration of Lucie de la Tour du Pin From "Dancing to the Precipice"
Henriette-Lucy, Marquise de La Tour du Pin-Gouvernet was born in 1770. She was from a family with Irish ancestry. Her father was a prominent military official. She married Frédéric, comte de Gouvernet, later Marquis de La Tour du Pin also an army officer and a son of a former French Minister of War. She served as an apprentice lady in waiting to Marie Antoinette from the age of sixteen three years before the start of the French Revolution.
As the French Revolution escalated many close to her went into exile or were executed. Sensing the increasing tension she departed from France with her husband to live in Albany in the USA on a dairy farm. With the creation of the Directory she and her husband felt confident enough to return to France. She saw her husband gain promotion first under Napoleon and then under the Bourbon Restoration.
Unfortunately she once again went into exile when her son was involved in a plot against the King in 1831. She eventually lived out the rest of her years in Pisa Italy.
Her memoirs were written as a letter to her only surviving child and were not intended for a wider audience and were only published in 1906.
Madam De La Tour Du Pin on the Great Fear. Taken from Escape from the Terror The Journal of Madam De La Tour Du Pin, The Folio Society, London (1979) p90-91
On 28th July, there occurred one of the most extraordinary phenomena of the Revolution, one which has never yet been properly explained. It is, in fact, incomprehensible unless one accepts the existence of some gigantic network stretching to every corner of France permitting one single action to communicate revolt, agitation and terror to every commune in the Kingdom simultaneously. … I saw it with my own eyes- and the same thing was happening everywhere else…
I heard a mass of people rushing into the square beneath my window- our house stood on a corner- all of them showing every sign of desperate fear. Women were weeping and wailing, men were raging, swearing, threatening, others raised their hands to Heaven crying “We are lost!” in their midst, haranguing them, was a man on horseback. He wore a disreputable green coat, which looked torn, and was hatless. His dapple-grey was covered in lather, its cruppers cut and flecked with blood. He stopped under my window and began a sort of harangue in the style of quacks in public places, saying: “They (referring to the Austrians) will be here in three hours; they are pillaging everything at Gaillefontaine; they are setting fire to the barns…..” and so on. After a few sentences in this vein, he clapped spurs to his horse and galloped off towards Neufchatel.
Since I am not by nature fearful, I went downstairs, mounted my horse and rode at walking pace along the street which was filling with people who thought their last day had come. I talked to them and tried to convince them that there was not one word of truth in what they had been told, that it was impossible for the Austrians, with whom we were not at war, to have arrived, as the impostor had been saying, in the heart of Normandy without anyone having heard that they were on the march. When I reached the door of the church, I found the curé arriving to sound the tocsin. At the moment, M. de La Tour du Pin rode up, fetched from the fountain by my groom. They found me still mounted and holding on to the curé by the collar of his cassock, trying to explain to him what folly it would be to alarm his flock by sounding the tocsin, instead of joining his efforts to mine to prove to them that their fears were groundless.