Books: Portrait of a Lady

MEMOIRS OF MADAME DE LA TOUR DU PIN, edited and translated by Felice Harcourt. 468 pages. McCall. $8.95.

Aristocrats make just awful tyrants, admitted that fairest-minded of Frenchmen, Alexis de Tocqueville. But at their best, he insisted, "they rarely entertain groveling thoughts; and they show a kind of haughty contempt for petty pleasures, even when they indulge in them."

A case in point is Henriette-Lucy Dillon, the Marquise de La Tour du Pin. On the first Bastille Day, this remarkable noblewoman was 19 and an apprentice lady-in-waiting to Marie Antoinette. Her husband was son of the Minister for War. She had grown up in a summer chateau that numbered 25 guest rooms.

In brief, young Madame de La Tour du Pin had a lot to lose —and by the time she was 24, fleeing for her life to America, she had lost most of it. What she never lost was the sort of aristocratic attitude that kings cannot give and revolutionaries cannot take away.

She began the Memoirs at the age of 50 as a family letter addressed to her son Aymar, the only survivor of the seven children she had borne. With wit and unsentimental precision she recollected the exact details of a world that had vanished as if it never existed. What delights today's reader, though, is less the firsthand history (from the 1770s until Napoleon's return from Elba in 1815) than the self-portrait that slowly emerges. The Memoirs finally trace a cameo profile of aristocracy viewed from its better side and well deserving of the definition "grace under pressure."

Marquise Milkmaid. This coquette of Versailles, with a pound of powder and pomade on her hair, ended up in moccasins on farms outside Albany, making cider, bending over the family laundry and rising at 3 a.m. to milk the cows. One evening her old friend Talleyrand strolled unannounced into the yard as she prepared a roast. Bringing a touch of Parisian gallantry to wilderness New York, he cried: "Never was a leg of mutton spitted with greater majesty."

How can you keep 'em down on the farm after they've seen Paree? No problem where Madame de La Tour du Pin was concerned. The Good Old Days did not look all that good to her. She rated Marie Antoinette high on courage, low on intelligence and zero on tact. Louis XVI resembled "some peasant shambling along behind his plough." As for her fellow aristocrats—"laughing and dancing our way to the precipice" —almost all had been "sublimely blind."

With her farm wife's ingenuity—obviously she had learned more than English from reading Robinson Crusoe as a girl—Madame de La Tour du Pin had the star-survivor qualities of a first-generation American. She found nothing to compare with the beauty of the Hudson River at West Point. She made friends with America's aristocrats, the Indians. Her monogrammed butter was in demand. But the marquis evidently was a less happy exile, eager to resume his career in French public life at the first opportunity.

Obediently, Madame returned to France with her husband in 1796, after the establishment of the Directorate. "I felt no pleasure at returning," she wrote, then complained no more. As Napoleon rose to Emperor, she settled down to a Frenchwoman's perennial business—being charming where it does the most good, come revolution or restoration.