When we went to the KMSKA in Antwerp last June, my attention was caught by a striking lady in the hall commemorating the museum’s donors, represented by a portrait and a bust:

This is Marie-Lætitia Bonaparte-Wyse (1831-1902), whose mother was Letizia Bonaparte, daughter of Napoleon Bonaparte’s brother Lucien, and whose legal father was Sir Thomas Wyse of Waterford, member of parliament for Tipperary, though it is generally accepted that her biological father was Studholme John Hodgson, an officer of the 19th Regiment of Foot.
She was educated in Paris and at the age of 17 married Frédéric Joseph de Solms, so was known as ‘La Princesse de Solmes’ for the next few years. He abandoned her; she was expelled from the Second Empire (ruled by her mother’s first cousin Napoleon III) on somewhat obscure grounds in 1852 – aged only 21!
She ran a famous literary salon in Aix-les-Bains, which was then in Savoy rather than France; after 1860, when Aix was annexed by France in return for recognising the reunification of Italy, she reconciled with the French authorities. In 1863 she married her second husband, Count Urbano Rattazzi, who had just finished the first of his two terms as prime minister of the newly unified Italian kingdom.
When he in turn died in 1873, she married a Spanish politician, Don Luis de Rute y Ginez. Whether in Italy, France or Spain she brought writers, artists and politicians together in her salons. She lived until 1901, and has many living descendants through her daughter by her second marriage, the Villanova-Rattazzi family who are based in Spain.
French Wikipedia lists over 30 books and half a dozen plays by her. I found two really vivid pen-portraits of her which are worth reading. Frederic Loliee describes her early career in a chapter of his “Women of the Second Empire” (1907) and Francis Grierson tells of her role as a literary and political hostess in “Parisian Portraits” (1914). Grierson concludes, “With the death of Madame Bonaparte-Rattazzi the last star in the romantic galaxy of the nineteenth century disappeared.” This may be exaggeration, but it’s a good summary.
I bet you had never heard of her before reading this blog post. I hadn’t, before last June.
I thought I might try out her writing for myself, though it’s worth noting that it’s not really her writing that she is remembered for. Her most substantial fiction is a series of four novels published in 1866-67 as by “Madame Rattazzi”, overlapping with her husband’s second term as Italian prime minister.
The titles are (in internal chronology): Le piège aux maris (The Husband Trap), Les débuts de la forgeronne (How the Blacksmith’s Wife Began), La Mexicaine (The Mexican Woman) and Bicheville, ou le chemin du paradis (Bicheville, or the Path to Paradise). You can get them all in French for free here, here, here and here.
I can manage a well-written bande-dessinee in French, but I am not up to reading an entire novel; fortunately I have a DeepL subscription and used it to get a comprehensible English text. (Happy to share that with you, if you ask nicely.)
So. On the one hand, it’s a big sweeping story of several lower-middle-class families in contemporary Paris, and the efforts of well-meaning mothers to get their daughters safely married (something that the author knew about rather well) along with petty crime and mysterious inheritances. The social commentary ranges from cold observation to occasional anger.
Paris and the French countryside are well described and you know what each of the characters is doing and why. The depiction of posh society in a foreign city (the “Bicheville” of the last volume) supposedly was too close to the bone for readers in Florence, then the Italian capital, and is said to have played a part in ending Count Rattazzi’s second term as prime minister, though I felt it clearly drew more on her experience in Aix a decade earlier.
At the same time I felt it was a bit rambling. The sheer number of significant characters made it rather difficult to keep track. Some of them are known by different names in different chapters. The sections set in Algeria in the last two books are very thin on descriptive detail (noticeably so in contrast to the sections in France or Bicheville), and the fourth book ends rather hastily. So I can’t completely recommend it to the casual reader. But I’m glad I gave it a try.
Bicheville, ou le chemin du paradis was the last book that I finished in the calendar year 2024.
Second paragraph of third chapter of La piege aux maris:
Une gare, c’est le temple de l’action. — A la porte, des files de voitures qu’on décharge; à l’intérieur, des colis qu’on roule sur des voilures à bras; des facteurs, des portefaix, des voyageurs groupés ou solitaires, allant affairés, çà et là, ou fumant paisiblement; des soldats avec leurs fusils, des chasseurs avec leurs chiens, des nourrices avec leurs marmots, des citadins et des paysans, des gentlemen et des commis; — des bruits de roues et des coups de sifflets, des voix distinctes et des murmures confus. Et, par-dessus tout, cette horloge inflexible, dont on ne saurait arrêter l’aiguille, dont l’heure tinte comme un glas fatal Au conducteur de la diligence, on disait: Attendez un peu. Prenez un verre de vin; trinquez avec nous. — Le chef de train est invisible. Il est là-bas, de l’autre côté, soldat esclave de sa consigne, être de raison qui donne le signal du départ, comme la pendule sonne l’heure. Dans la cour de la diligence, il n’y avait que les parents et les amis de ceux qui parlaient; ici, les indifférents pullulent On n’ose pas se faire, devant eux, les recommandations enfantines et touchantes; on n’ose pas se dire qu’on s’aime; on n’ose pas pleurer; — on s’embrasse devant des badauds qui rient! | A station is the temple of action. At the gate, lines of carriages are being unloaded; inside, parcels are being rolled on canopies; postmen, porters, travellers grouped together or alone, bustling here and there or smoking peacefully; soldiers with their rifles, hunters with their dogs, nurses with their babies, townsfolk and peasants, gentlemen and clerks; – the sound of wheels and whistles, distinct voices and confused murmurs. And, above all, that inflexible clock, whose hand could not be stopped, whose hour tinkled like a fatal knell The driver of the coach was told: Wait a little. Have a glass of wine; toast with us. – The conductor is invisible. He is over there, on the other side, a soldier enslaved by his orders, a being of reason who gives the signal for departure as the clock strikes the hour. In the coach yard, there were only the relatives and friends of those who were speaking; here, the indifferent swarmed. You didn’t dare make childish and touching recommendations to each other in front of them; you didn’t dare say that you loved each other; you didn’t dare cry; – you kissed each other in front of laughing onlookers! |
Second paragraph of third chapter of Les débuts de la forgeronne:
– Continuez, madame, quelles sont vos intentions… ? | “Go on, madam, what are your intentions…?” |
Second paragraph of third chapter of La Mexicaine:
– Prenons un verre d’absinthe, se dit Fanfan, ça me donnera du toupet ! | “Let’s have a glass of absinthe”, Fanfan said to himself. “That’ll give me some spirit!” |
Second paragraph of third chapter of Bicheville, ou le chemin du paradis:
« Quand je serai la femme de Pierre, nous ne verrons que des amis connus de nous depuis longtemps… Les deux hommes qui paraissaient les plus distingués et les plus recherchés dans le singulier monde que j’ai traversé pendant ces six derniers mois, sont deux infâmes et deux misérables ; que sont donc les autres ? Ce monde où l’on rencontre des Othon du Triquet et des gens comme ces deux êtres dont le nom ne salira pas les pages où se trouve celui de mon bien-aimé, ce monde-là est-il bien le vrai monde ? En ce cas fuyons loin de lui… Pauvre mère ! Reviens à ta vie paisible ; tu vieilliras entourée de la tendresse de tes enfants, je ne serai ni vicomtesse de contrebande peut-être, ni baronne d’aventure peut-être encore, mais j’aurai un intérieur où je ne trouverai que des visages francs et loyaux, et je pourrai sans crainte toucher toutes les mains qui m’entoureront, car s’il s’en trouve quelques-unes noircies par le travail, il ne s’en trouvera aucune souillée par l’infamie. Voilà une grande phrase que mon mari trouvera prétentieuse ; – qu’il soit tranquille, mon bon Pierre… quand il sera près de moi, je n’écrirai plus avec tant de peine ce que je pense, je le lui dirai à lui toujours, et il me semble qu’alors les mots viendront tout seuls ! C’est égal, c’est un bien singulier monde ! » | ‘When I become Pierre’s wife, we will see only friends we have known for a long time… The two men who seemed the most distinguished and the most sought-after in the strange world I have passed through these last six months are two infamous and two wretched people; what are the others? Is this world, where we meet Othon du Triquet and people like these two whose names will not stain the pages where my beloved’s are, the real world? In that case let us flee from it… Poor mother! Come back to your peaceful life; you will grow old surrounded by the tenderness of your children, I will not be a viscountess of smuggling perhaps, nor a baroness of adventure perhaps, but I will have a home where I will find only honest and loyal faces, and I will be able without fear to touch all the hands that surround me, because if there are some blackened by work, there will be none stained by infamy. That’s a big sentence that my husband will find pretentious, but don’t worry, my good Pierre… when he’s near me, I won’t take so much trouble to write down what I’m thinking, I’ll always say it to him, and it seems to me that then the words will come all by themselves! All the same, it’s a very strange world! |