Dancing to the Precipice ─ The Life of Lucie De La Tour Du Pin, Eyewitness to an Era

Lucie de la Tour du Pin was not only an outstanding diarist, but a remarkable woman who was witness to one of the most dramatic and brutal periods of history in which she played the role of observer, commentator and, often, participant. Repeatedly in the right place at the right time, Lucie saw the storming of Versailles and the battle of Waterloo. She served at the courts of both Marie Antoinette and Napoleon's wife Josephine, and went with her husband, a diplomat, to Holland and the Kingdom of Sardinia. Unusually for her time, Lucie loved her husband, indeed was so devoted that she voluntarily joined him when he was imprisoned. Her friends included Wellington, Talleyrand and Madame de Stael. She died, aged 83, in Pisa.
Caroline Moorehead has brilliantly woven Lucie de la Tour du Pin's sharp observations with her tumultuous life and times, to produce a richly rewarding and gripping biography that throws light on the life of women, both powerful and ordinary, on friendship and on domestic life. Mixing politics and court intrigue, social observations and everyday details about food, work, illness, children, manners and clothes, she paints a vivid and memorable portrait of an era that saw the fortunes of France, as well as those of Lucie herself, rise and fall and rise again.