La Fortune de Richard Wallace. Book Review.

   This beautifully written and superbly atmospheric novel, by Lydie Perreau, tells the curious story behind the Wallace Collection, the art museum in central London. It depicts life in Regency England and 19th-century France with an exquisite eye for detail.

The complicated family history begins in 1770 with the birth in London of Maria Emilia Fagnani. The daughter of a former dancer, the Italian Marchesa Fagnani (but not of the Marchese) she was recognised by her natural father, the Duke of Queensbury, who allowed his friend, the MP George Selwyn, to adopt her in all but name. He adored her, cossetted her, educated her and eventually left her his considerable fortune. Brought out in society, she met Francis Seymour-Conway, the brilliant and wayward heir of the rich Marquess of Hertford. Francis married her despite his father's opposition. Her illegitimate birth was a social handicap but over men she always exerted an irresistible charm and fascination. She became in due course Lady Hertford.

    In 1802 the pair moved to Paris, where Napoleon had been appointed First Consul. In the French capital the canny Francis was able to acquire valuable works of art that had been requisitioned from palaces and châteaux. His ancestors had been collectors for generations. At the end of the Napoleonic wars, Francis was involved in negotiating the peace treaty. He moved back to England, and never again lived with his wife.

Francis Charles Seymour, 3rd Marquis
 of Hertford

     MieMie stayed in her apartment in the heart of Paris and all her children were brought up there. Her younger son, Henry, was the result of her liaison with the Comte de Montrond, aide-de-camp of Napoleon. The elder son, Richard known as Beauchamp, inherited both his father's title and his passion for collecting artworks. He became one of the great connoisseurs of the 19th century, and bought himself the elegant little country house of Bagatelle, once a royal residence, in the Bois de Boulogne, just outside Paris, where he could display his carefully chosen paintings, sculpture and exquisite furniture. Those acquisitions that he could not fit into Bagatelle he stored or sent back to England, where he had huge houses that he never occupied.

   The younger son, Lord Henry, inherited the fortune of his Queensberry grandfather, and became one of the leading dandies and most admired sportsmen of 19th century France. Founder of the Jockey-Club, his style was legendary and he gave Parisian society much material for gossip.

   Both of these pleasure-loving aristocrats had a eye for women and an aversion to matrimony. In fact Beauchamp went so far as to trick an innocent girl, Louise Bréart, aged 16, into a sham marriage - the same dastardly trick played by the fifth Earl of Berkeley on his unfortunate mistress, Mary Cole. Henry kept numerous mistresses and fathered a child, Seymourina, by one of his mother's housemaids.

Lord Henry Seymour

   Neither brother had a legitimate heir and in 1870, when the elder one died, he left a surprising will bequeathing all of his non-entailed property -- money, real estate and art collection -- to his secretary, Richard Wallace.

   Richard had been MieMie's protegé. In 1824, after the death of her only daughter, she impulsively took in this ragged boy aged six, who had been the drudge of a concierge in a lodging house, enduring the existence of one of Victor Hugo's Misérables. His mother was in Paris in 1817 and was a camp follower who could have had a brief liaison with the young Beauchamp, among others. MieMie brought little Richard up as her page, petted and surrounded by luxury, but expected to run errands and never the equal of the family. Was he the natural child of her elder son, or was he just an appealing waif who was amazingly lucky?

     That is a question many asked when he eventually inherited the immense Hertford fortune, comprising valuable estates in Ireland and England, a string of properties in Paris and the magnificent art collection, now known as the Wallace Collection. Hertford House in London, which now displays all those Titians, Rembrandts, Canalettos, Van Dykes etc., became his, along with another London mansion. There was no doubt that the will was genuine. It was signed and witnessed in due form. The only odd thing about it was that it was dated 1838. In 1870, with France in the turmoil of war, invasion and another revolution - the third that century - nobody was going to investigate too closely.

Château de Bagatelle.

After coming into this inheritance, Richard Wallace became a baronet, celebrated philanthropist and charity patron. After his death his widow bequeathed Hertford House in London and its contents to the British nation. So it was that the name Wallace, a name he had only assumed at the age of twenty-four (in exchange for Jackson), got attached to the museum. The Paris collection, which was even larger, was sold and dispersed.

Hertford House, London, now home

of the Wallace Collection.

    The novel excels at describing Parisian life: opulent society events, the harsh conditions of the poor, and the revolutions of 1830, 1848 and 1870. It explores feelings, character and psychology with sensitivity. It imagines, sympathetically, Richard's development and his awkward predicament in life, on the margins of this refined, luxurious existence, admiring and envying those who really belonged, while he did not. He was MieMie's pet, then became her factotum and eventually her nurse as she grew older. In many ways he was her slave. When she died in 1856, aged eighty-five, she left him nothing. It was humiliating. He had been deeply attached to her and moreover he had run up debts in the expectation that he would receive a legacy. 

     For the next fourteen years he worked for the 4th Marquess, who never treated him as part of the family. His hopes of love and marriage were frustrated by his situation. If the Marquess showed affection for anyone, it was for Seymourina, whom he virtually adopted. When Richard ran up debts, as he often did, the Marquess grudgingly settled them but forced him to sell the few artworks he had managed to buy for himself - paintings that joined the Hertford collection. 

    In the years before his death, as his health declined, the Marquess planned to leave his collection to the French and British nations, buying and adapting a block of properties in the Rue Lafitte in Paris to display them. He had suitable galleries constructed there. In 1865, while an invalid at Bagatelle, the Marquess renewed contact with his Seymour cousins in England and assured them he would be leaving the bulk of his fortune to that branch of the family. He invited them to stay at Bagatelle and one of them remembered the Marquess showing him a will that he assured him was in his favour. Yet on his death no such document could be found.  

     There was an old will of 1838, followed by several codicils added in 1850, in one of which Beauchamp had made Richard his residual legatee, citing the care the latter had given to his mother and himself during a recent illness.  Perhaps MieMie encouraged him to do this (if it was genuine). In 1838 there had been little residue, but in 1870 there was an immense amount. Since no later will could be produced, the magistrate in 1870 had to accept this one. This was lucky for Wallace as his own affairs were so strained he would otherwise have gone to prison for debt.  

     The novel presents a mystery and offers an explanation that remains hypothetical. It is presented with the meticulous detail of a mystery story and winds us up to a high degree of suspense.

     MieMie Fagnani was a friend of Elizabeth Craven and the two had a lot in common. MieMie was never wholly accepted by London high society, despite her brilliant marriage. There were some who could never forget that she had been born out of wedlock. She was still viewed askance by straitlaced hostesses, the same ones who looked down on Elizabeth Craven despite her second marriage to the Margrave of Anspach. 

    In the 1790s, MieMie lived close to the Margravine at Richmond and both opened their doors wide to French émigrés. In 1802, MieMie and her husband attended the Margrave's birthday celebration at Brandenburgh House, and in 1811, Craven wrote a comic poem addressed to the future 3rd Marquess (a poem that has been wrongly attributed to Tom Moore and even to the Prince Regent).*

Come, Yarmouth, my boy, never trouble your brains
About what your old croney,
The Emperor Boney,
Is doing or brewing on Muscovy's plains,
Nor tremble, my lad, at the state of our granaries;
– Should there come famine,
Still plenty to cram in
You always shall have, my dear Lord of the Stannaries.
Brisk let us revel, while revel we may;                For the gay bloom of fifty soon passes away...

 The poem mentions visting Hertford House, Manchester Square, where the Wallace collection is now housed. Both MieMie and Crave eventually left England to seek warmer climes and a more Bohemian society elsewhere. In respect of child custody, MieMie was luckier than Elizabeth Craven. When MieMie decided to separate from Francis, he demanded the children, and would surely have got them if the French hadn't held him captive on the resumption of war. 

    As for Richard Wallace, whatever tricks he may have resorted to, it is quite possible that he was indeed the Marquess's natural son.

     The first photograph below is of the 4th Marquess.

And this is Richard Wallace.

The resemblance is undeniable and is visible in every portrayal of them at every age. So Wallace had reason to believe that he was the Marquess's son, even if Lord Hertford never wanted to acknowledge him. Only a DNA test carried out on their remains could settle this finally.

Sir Richard Wallace

4th Marquess of Hertford

    

There is an immense amount of research in this novel, and just a few odd mistakes. If Richard was born in 1818, then he would have been only 52 in 1870, when he inherited, not 59 as we are told. This probably originated as a typing error, "neux" for "deux", then miscorrected by the computer to "neuf". MieMie's younger son would have been known as Lord Henry Seymour, not Lord Seymour. It was the art collection of Cardinal Fesch (not Fresch), uncle of Napoleon, that was auctioned in Rome in 1845. 

    These are tiny points in an altogether enthralling novel. It is in the highest category of historical fiction and to be warmly recommended to any art-lovers or history enthusiasts.