On the Trail of Sophie de Tott
I spent more than a year researching for my book on Sophie de Tott, the artist who was a close associate of Elizabeth Craven. She lived at Brandenburgh House at one time and you could almost say she was part of the family.
One of the things I did was to visit Paris and look at some of the places where she lived. In particular I wanted to see the Hotel de Tessé, the home of the Comte and Comtesse de Tessé who adopted Sophie in 1780. Luckily it is still there despite Revolutions and major re-development over more than two hundred years. At one time it was used as a government building, and now it has been turned into private apartments. It is a very handsome neo-classical building on the banks of the Seine right opposite the Louvre. When you looked out of the front windows this is what you saw:-
It is an unrivalled view. Paris doesn't get any better than this. In this house Mme de Tessé held her salon where she received Voltaire, Beaumarchais, André Chenier, the Abbé Grégoire and Thomas Jefferson, who was the American ambassador to France in the 1780s. Sophie thrived on all the intellectual stimulation.
When she came back to Paris after the Revolution, she lodged in a much less grand building, a former convent in the Place des Vosges that had been converted into a hostel for down-and-outs. In 1795 they thought they were lucky to have a roof over their heads - or indeed to have a head at all. Shortly afterwards, the building became a barracks, and now it has been turned into social housing. It is still called the Caserne des Minimes.
The main purpose of my trip was to go to the Bibliothèque Sainte-Genevieve to read Sophie's novel, of which there is only one copy known to survive in the world. The library is right opposite the Pantheon, which was still the Church of Sainte Genevieve in the 1780s when Sophie de Tott first arrived in Paris.
Once inside the library I had to go to the Rare Books department, which is is a rather nice part of the building full of historic paintings and statues.
It was well worth it. The book is perfectly preserved and absolutely fascinating. Three leather bound volumes, more than eight hundred pages of beautiful French prose, undoubtedly by Sophie de Tott and providing incontrovertible proof that she was a novelist as well as being a professional painter.
What an impressive achievement. I can well understand now why Elizabeth Craven wanted Sophie de Tott to be her close companion and thought she deserved a stipend to provide her with security.
So on the whole that was a pretty successful research trip. My discoveries about Sophie de Tott are all in my new book, Sophie De Tott: Artist In a Time of Revolution, which is out now on Lulu books.
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