Mémoires de Madame de la Guette, écrits par elle-même

First edition. OCLC records no copies in North America, though one copy is held at the Houghton Library.

Red 19th-century half-sheepskin binding, title stamped in gilt, marbled paper boards, marbled endpapers and flyleaves, margins cut slightly affecting the top part of the title-page and the signature on a few leaves. Light scattered foxing throughout.

A very rare copy of one of the most singular and arresting 17th-century memoirs written by a woman, laying bare the exceptional life of a provincial noblewoman under the reign of Louis XIV who bore arms, rode astride, occasionally cross-dressed and even attempted to single-handedly bring the Fronde to an end.

The Mémoires of Catherine de La Guette, published in 1681, stand as a remarkable exception in the literary landscape of their time by virtue of their very early appearance in print. As Felix Raymond Freudmann has noted, nearly all the major memoirs of the seventeenth century written by women were published only in the following century: with the notable exception of de la Guette and the Mancini sisters, the Mémoires of the Duchesse de Nemours appeared in 1709, Mme de Motteville’s in 1723, and Mademoiselle de Montpensier’s in 1729 (The Memoirs of Madame de la Guette. A Study). The rarity of this first edition is further explained by its marginalisation, “the result of the harm done to women’s writings over the long course of literary history” (Merlin Kajman,”Transparence extérieure les mémoires de Mme de la Guette”). Her very existence as a real person was questioned for nearly two centuries, until the second edition of her memoirs edited by Célestin Moreau was published in 1856, and included irrefutable primary sources. “I have always been of a temper more inclined to war than to the quiet pursuits of setting hens to brood and spinning the distaff, though it is said that a woman should know of nothing else”.

From childhood, Catherine Meurdrac escaped the constraints assigned to her sex with the complicity of her father, who provided her with a fencing master to teach her swordsmanship and the handling of the pistol. Her husband, an officer who served in some thirty campaigns across Europe, permitted her to ride astride and even forbade her to “play the part of a woman” by weeping at his departures for war. She followed her “virile heart” by engaging in the then-quintessentially masculine literary exercise of the memoirs. She furthermore presented them in a still uncommon autobiographical form and engaging conversational style. This intimate relationship with all manner of weapons is no mere pose: these Mémoires are viewed as “the most extended seventeenth-century account written by a woman of female military activity, she describes how she cross-dressed and lived a soldier’s life among soldiers”. It also includes descriptions of wounds received and inflicted: “her story’s authority is founded on her ability to match her fellow soldiers’ capacity for violence.” (Joan DeJean, Violent Women and Violence against Women: Representing the “Strong” Woman in Early Modern France).

Lady of the brie region, woman of war, political mediator

Yet for all her martial exploits, Catherine de La Guette was no less a peacemaker in civil war: acting on the Queen’s orders, she crossed a country at war to reach Bordeaux and in a vain attempt to bring the bloody Fronde revolt to an end. The Sieur de la Guette was himself among the rebels, having joined the party of the Princes following the footsteps of the Comte de Marsin, frequently cited in these pages. In times of civil war, during her husband’s lengthy absences, she assumed the mantle of protectress, riding with her guards to defend her estate at Sucy-en-Brie against pillaging, sheltering those at risk of their lives.  As soldiers repeatedly swept through the area, this mother of ten children saw “more than two hundred women and girls taking refuge” under her roof, and soon the men of war turned to the plunder of houses, so that there were “even some women victims of rape as they had not been able to flee quickly enough” [...] Even though she was unable to prevent the worst, Catherine nonetheless recognised the danger faced by women and offered them refuge against a threat of which she was acutely conscious: “no source known to us attests to any such action on the part of male nobles” (Alban Wilfert, “La chair et le sang. La violence sexuelle dans les conflits du XVII^e siècle. Maux et mots du viol”, La Revue d’Histoire Militaire).

The epic narrative of an intimate life

Although was the events of the Fronde that led this woman “of very modest nobility to take up her pen and engage with a genre that was primarily aristocratic and masculine” (Hélène Merlin Kajman), the historical context alone does not account for the breadth and depth of the narrative, which extends far beyond the adventurous years of her life and also include descriptions of “a more everyday life, in a particular personality” and in a desire to remain in existence through the publishing of her memoirs. The narrator conceals nothing of the almost novelistic intensity of her feelings: her love for an absent husband, with each of his departures more painful than the last and each of his returns unleashing a torrent of desire confided to the reader without reserve; the terrible quarrels between her father and her husband, with “plates flying against the tapestries, not by enchantment, but by force of arm”; so many “comic and tragic episodes” (Annick Merlin) written in a direct and vigorous prose recounting the joys, the loves, the humiliations, the fears, the bereavements of an entire life. Madame de La Guette brings her memoirs to a close with the death of her eldest son, killed at the siege of Maastricht in 1676, whom she had joined in Holland some years before. She remained there for her final years. Her date of death is unknown, noted neither in the parish registers of Sucy or Mandres nor in those of The Hague, where she wrote her Mémoires, published in her sixty-eighth year: “for it is clearly apparent from the publisher’s foreword that Madame de La Guette was still living at the time of publication, which was doubtless printed with her consent, and perhaps even with her participation. [...] At this time, little came out of Holland but licentious novels and pamphlets. The Mémoires of Madame de La Guette may well have been mistaken for the insolent productions of Protestant animosity and foreign jealousy which fuelled the Dutch printing presses” (Célestin Moreau, preface to the 2nd edition of the Mémoires, Paris, Jannet, 1856).

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Scarce memoirs of a 17th-century Amazon, challenging the dynamics of gender in war-torn France.