Parallel Lives

Brian Unwin, A Tale in Two Cities: Fanny Burney and Adèle, Comtesse de Boigne

IB Tauris, 288pp, £20.00, ISBN 9781780767840

reviewed by Stuart Walton

The novelist Fanny Burney was the second daughter of the musicologist Charles Burney. Born in 1752, she had a typical Georgian upbringing, with virtually nothing in the way of an education, muddling her way through in later life to an appetite for literature and the ambition to write. Her father’s connections to the metropolitan theatre world of Drury Lane, where he moved the family after inauspicious beginnings in King’s Lynn, introduced her to the cultural luminaries of Hanoverian London - Johnson, Garrick, Reynolds, Sheridan and the like.

Through a chance encounter in a private apartment at Windsor, she met King George and Queen Charlotte, who appeared to be familiar with her wildly popular debut novel, Evelina (1778), in token of which the Queen could think of no more apposite way of conferring the royal seal of approval than by making her Second Keeper of the Robes, so sealing Fanny’s fate for the next five tedious years. She eventually married an exiled French noble, Alexandre d’Arblay, and went with him to Paris during the period of Napoleon’s empire and the defeat at Trafalgar. She would publish another three novels after Evelina, until the final critical disaster of The Wanderer (1814), before living out a long widowhood back in England, dying in 1840 at 87, and bequeathing a copious volume of letters and journals to her niece as literary executor.

Adèle de Boigne was younger than Burney. Born into the French aristocracy’s unluckiest generation in 1781, she was ushered into a contracted marriage at 17 to an aristocratic army officer in his late forties, both parties accepting stoically that the alliance would contain nothing of romantic affection on her part, which indeed it never did. Separated from her husband during his spells of military service, she nonetheless picked her way through both defeats of Napoleon, and survived an extraordinary flit about the barricades of the 1830 Revolution. Adèle too was to live into her eighties, and to leave behind a richly detailed compendium of diaries and letters that contain first-hand accounts of the storm-winds of history as they blew her back and forth across the Channel.

The Anglo-French intrications of the Georgian era and the Regency, Revolution and Empire, are a particular fascination of Sir Brian Unwin, a former president of the European Investment Bank who has taken to writing popular history in his retirement. His first book was about the last days of Napoleon on St Helena, and this study of parallel lives mines the collected writings of its twin subjects, along with a few other secondary sources, to fill in this eventful period with some personality-driven local colour.

There is plenty of interest to be gleaned from the journals. Burney particularly was a gifted literary physiognomist. Samuel Johnson emerges from her pen as an alarming figure, enormous but severely stooped, unexpectedly taciturn and obstinate in his myopia, so that when he perused your bookshelves, his nose brushed along the spines as his rheumy, ruined eyes sought out the titles. David Garrick, the great Shakespearean actor, was the sort of uninvited company that would have you hiding behind the jardinières when the doorbell went. Dropping in at breakfast, his head clad in a dishevelled fright-wig, his tiresome persistent mugging upsetting the servants, he sounds enjoyably horrendous. Everybody is very short. Both Fanny and Garrick himself were only about five foot four, while the glittering Mrs Thrale, who went on to marry an Italian singer, Gabriel Piozzi, to virtually nobody’s approval, was a practically invisible four foot seven.

Adèle de Boigne’s period in England bequeathed her a frank admiration for the laissez-penser constitutional arrangements of the United Kingdom, which would be thrown into relief by her exasperations at the liberties taken back in Paris by British occupying forces after Waterloo. The same Duke of Wellington whom Fanny had observed at a concert in Brussels diplomatically restraining outbreaks of leery triumphalism among his officers when ‘Rule Britannia!’ was played is seen shortly afterwards by Adèle, standing on a step-ladder in the Louvre helping to unhook Napoleon’s looted art treasures from the walls.

The portrait of the disrobing of King Louis XVI, witnessed by Adèle as a seven-year-old interloper in the royal apartments at Versailles, is a miniature masterpiece of the absurdities of deference. Three valets undo the shirtless King’s waistband, so that his breeches fall about the royal ankles. In this half-déshabille, he totters about bidding goodnight to everybody, before tipping backwards into a waiting chair and sticking his legs out. As his shoes are pulled off in synchrony by a pair of pages, they are allowed to fall to the floor with an appropriately regal crash. It’s the sort of scene one hopes hasn’t much changed in the home life of monarchies to this day.

There is something to be learned from the opinions of Adèle on marriage. An unillusioned defender of the aristocratic tradition of loveless alliance, she coolly rejects what she calls the English ‘marriage of inclination’, which leaves the wives adrift in later life when the initial ardour has subsided and the children have gone. The marriages of the socialite Mme Récamier, who hitched herself to an extravagantly wealthy banker at 15, and of the novelist and political theorist Benjamin Constant to a German countess who resorted promptly to bulimia when she realised he had no intention of giving up his obsession with the mercurial Mme de Staël, are further cases in point.

If our sympathies are to be recruited, though, to the social adventures of the privileged, they may equally falter when the tone is misjudged, as with Unwin’s appalled account of the farcical death of the duc d’Orléans who, standing up in an open carriage to bawl at the groom to get a move on, toppled out and fractured his skull. He had to be carried, concussed but still alive, into the roadside dwelling of a greengrocer, amid the squalor of which the ducal death-throes had to take place while doctors cupped and bled him, the only light coming through a window that gave on to a courtyard containing a dungheap. Presumably, if the greengrocer had knowed he was coming, he’d’ve baked a cake.

As though to prove that the whole exercise is more than mere page-riffling froth, the unsparing description that Burney wrote of the mastectomy she underwent in the pre-anaesthetic era of 1811, and from which Unwin quotes with excruciated concision, readjusts the focus. The atrociousness of the procedure, for which she was prepared by being given a glass of wine cordial, and which left its celebrity surgeon himself in a state of shuddering distress, is only deepened by the retrospective suggestion that it may have been the wholly unnecessary result of a misdiagnosis of cancer.

Since Unwin issues his own spoiler alert at the beginning of the book, it seems safe to report that the two women never met. Their weddings were both celebrated at the same chapel in London, five years apart, and although they spent time in each other’s countries, and mixed in almost exactly the same social sets, their paths didn’t cross. The narrative cries out for a final meeting between them, perhaps marked by a wary froideur on either side, although Unwin hopes they would have got on famously. If the book doesn’t ever escape the trap that attends a lot of light popular history, that it isn’t clear whether it is making any kind of case, it’s entertaining enough, albeit increasingly repetitive as it meanders on its way to no obvious conclusion. The exhaustively bilingual renderings of Adèle’s writings at least allow you to test your Napoleonic French.

What seems less forgivable is the editorial sloppiness. If anybody did proofread the book, they haven’t much of a head for figures. In the opening chapter alone, the date 1784 is misprinted as 1874, while a letter Fanny wrote in 1812 has winged its way through the centuries to 2012, and then her only son Alexander dies ten years before his time. At the outset of the second, Adèle is born on 10 February, before changing her mind and re-emerging a page later on the 19th, while in chapter 6, Garrick moves to London from Staffordshire in 1840, an arduous journey indeed for a man who had recently turned 123.
Stuart Walton is the author of An Excursion through Chaos; In the Realm of the Senses; A Natural History of Human Emotions; Introducing Theodor Adorno; Intoxicology; and a novel, The First Day in Paradise.