Jane Austen Letters

Turn your inbox into a peaceful, calm and organized experience with Tecotype.

A royalist husband abroad

Eliza is in Margate with her son Hastings while her husband, a French officer, has joined royalist émigrés in Turin. She tells her cousin Philadelphia Walter that the French Revolution is keeping the couple apart. Her doubts about the royalists’ prospects are also worries about her own family’s future. The passage is extracted from a longer letter.

Eliza de Feuillide to Philadelphia Walter
JAN 1791

M. de F. had given me hopes of his return to England this winter, but the turn which the affairs of France have taken will not allow him to quit the Continent at this juncture. I know not whether I have already mentioned it to you, but my spouse, who is a strong Aristocrate or Royalist in his heart, has joined this latter party who have taken refuge in Piedmont, and is now at Turin where the French Princes of the Blood are assembled and watching some favourable opportunity to reinstate themselves in the country they have quitted. I am no politician, but think they will not easily accomplish their purpose; time alone can decide this matter, and in the interim you will easily imagine I cannot be wholly unconcerned about events which must inevitably in some degree influence my future destiny.