Sophie de Tott and Elizabeth Craven
Sophie de Tott by Vigée-Lebrun
Madame de Tott had once lived in Paris among the highest French aristocracy. As a girl she had been adopted by a rich Countess and lived in the heart of the capital, meeting all the leading intellectuals and enjoying the most cultivated salons. Laudatory poems had been written about her. She had known Louis XVI, Marie Antoinette, Lafayette, Madame de Stael and Elisabeth Vigée-Lebrun who painted this oval portrait of her in 1786. Since fleeing from Paris in the Revolution of 1789 she had lived in Switzerland and Germany, earning a living with her paintbrush.
When she came to England she gave musical soirées and painted the portraits of many of her fellow-emigrées as well as English MPs and visiting dignitaries. Her portrait of the Egyptian Mameluke leader Elfi Bey made her celebrated as a painter. Madame de Tott could perform on the piano and the harp and she had a warm and passionate nature. She had loved, more than once, but never married. In the 1790s she had acted as a secret agent and could never risk returning to France because of her involvement with various uprisings against Napoleon.
Elizabeth Craven was so impressed by her that she impulsively awarded her a pension for life, an act of generosity that involved a considerable financial outlay. Then curiously enough they parted and Madame de Tott returned to London where she resumed her work as a painter. She was never mentioned again by the Margravine and does not figure in her Memoirs. What happened to cause the breach and the silence?
Intrigued by the mystery, I started to research the background of Sophie de Tott's life, and found a curious and fascinating story. Her father was famous and had written a book about his experiences working for the Sultan of the Ottoman Empire. Sophie and her sisters had been born in Constantinople and when they came to France they were regarded as exotic foreigners.
Adopted by the Comtesse de Tessé, Sophie had been well-acquainted with Thomas Jefferson and the Marquis de Lafayette, leading lights of American Independence. She corresponded with Jefferson and studied Homer with him.
Miniature portrait of Sophie painting the Comtesse de Tessé, who adopted her.
The first man she loved had written his Memoirs, in which all the details of their agonizing and heart-wrenching love-affair were related. She had become dangerously ill and nearly died when prevented from marrying him. The whole story read like a novel. Ten years later another ill-fated love-affair followed, with a man who held a court position as commander of Louis XVI's bodyguard. Again she had hopes of marrying him but her hopes were cruelly dashed. The details were preserved in manuscript sources that are held in an American library. Luckily, they were willing to provide me with digital images of the surviving letters, in which I was able to decipher the story. I spent a lot of time when I was meant to be on holiday, poring over these letters on my Kindle as I found them so riveting.
I discovered from printed sources that after fleeing the French Revolution Sophie went on to hold her own salon in a studio in Hamburg, where she received writers, emigrés and intellectuals. Then she was forced to flee again because her political activities were discovered. One of her letters was published by the French government, exposing her as an enemy of the state!
I puzzled for a long time over the possibility that Sophie had a secret love-child. Such things were never meant to be discovered and when they occurred, every effort was made to conceal it and avoid suspicion.
I spent quite a long time tracking down portraits Sophie had painted and researching the sitters. Many of them had their own complex stories to tell, which helped fill in details of her own. Some only survive as reproductions, some sadly may be lost and many are wrongly ascribed to other artists. I came to the conclusion that the so-called portrait of Sophie displayed on Wikipedia is a false identification. The real painting of her by Vigée-Lebrun, the oval portrait shown above, is in private ownership in France and the scholar Olivier Blanc (author of the biography of Olympe de Gouges) was kind enough to send me a top-quality photograph of it.
Finally, I stumbled on the startling fact that Sophie de Tott had written a novel. Not only was she a painter, but she was a writer as well! Her novel, published in 1798, is so rare that no library in England or the United Kingdom possesses a copy and nor does the Bibliotheque Nationale de France. It has never been re-printed or digitized and placed on any convenient website.
To read it I had to go to Paris, to the Bibliotheque Sainte-Genevieve in the Sorbonne, which owns what appears to be the only known copy in the world. It is possibly the only copy to survive - but if so, what a fortunate preservation! Here we have a wholly unknown woman writer describing life in the French upper classes in the last years of the ancien régime.
The novel was fascinating and to me such a discovery is as exciting as stumbling on the tomb of Tutankhamun. I had to photograph every single page of the book - 830 of them - and take my pictures home to scrutinize it at leisure. Its tragic story reflects her own unhappy experiences.
The mystery and many of the secrets of Sophie de Tott's life are explored in this new book
The Ebook version of this book is now available on Lulu-com and is on special offer until the end of Women's History Month.
Link to paperback edition is here:-
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