1813 Marriage Veuve Robillard & M. Lacroix St.-Pierre
Géricault Life
Portrait de Monsieur Nanteuil La Norville, Salon 1817 – Amable Louis Claude Pagnest, Louvre Museum.
1813 Marriage of Veuve Robillard née de Nanteuil & M. Lacroix
Bonne Emilie de Nanteuil married Pierre Robillard, Théodore Géricault’s Robillard cousin, on December 11, 1811, in Paris. This marriage ended early in the afternoon of April 8, 1812, when Pierre Robillard was killed by a pistol-shot in the woods of the Bois de Boulogne – most likely in a duel.
We continue our discussion of the immediate consequences of Pierre Robillard’s death upon Théodore Géricault and his family elsewhere. In the current article we focus on the young widow Bonne Emilie de Nanteuil. As we discussed in our last article, Bonne Emilie de Nanteuil, Pierre’s widow, was excluded from her deceased husband’s estate. In the current article, we fast-forward one year to the summer of 1813, a pivotal period in the history of the First Empire, to the second marriage of Bonne Emilie de Nanteuil, the widow Robillard on July 16, 1813.
We first present three contemporary sources announcing this marriage and then turn to Romuald Szramkiewicz, one of our most important modern sources, for additional detail. We then provide brief commentary and additional context. The marriage of Madame Veuve Robillard (de Nanteuil) and M. Lecroix, a senior civil servant, was reported in the French press. We provide announcements from the Journal de Paris; the Gazette de France; and the Journal de L’Empire.
Sources
Journal de Paris, Politique, Commercial et Litteraire n° 211 Vendredi 30 Juillet 1813, de la Lune le 3.
“Le 16 juillet, 1813, S.M. l’Impératrice-Régente a daigné singer, au palais de Saint-Cloud, le contrat de mariage de M. Lacroix, auditeur au conseil-d’état, sécretaire-général du ministère de l’intérieur, avec Mme. veuve Robillard, née Nanteuil.” (Front Page – first story above the fold)
Gazette de France, 30 Juillet 1813, Empire Français, Paris le 29 juillet.
Le 16 juillet, 1813, S.M. l’Impératrice-Régente a daigné signer, au palais de Saint-Cloud, le contrat de mariage de M. Lacroix, auditeur au conseil-d’état, sécretaire-général du ministère de l’intérieur, avec Mme. veuve Robillard, née Nanteuil (first entry- p.3)
Journal de L’Empire, Vendredi 30 Juillet 1813 Empire Français – Paris, 29 juillet.
“L’Impératrice-Reine et Régente a signé, le 12 de ce moi le contrat de mariage de M. Maxime de Choiseul-d’Aillecourt, auditeur de 1re classe au conseil d’Etat, sous-préfet à Morlaix, avec Mlle Adèle-Félicie d’Astorg, fille de M. le baron d’Astorg, chevalier de l’ordre de la Réunion, député au corps législatif. S.M. a aussi signé, le 15, le contrat de mariage de M. Lacroix, auditeur au conseil d’Etat, secrétaire-général du ministre de l’intérieur, avec Mad. Veuve Robillard, née Nanteuil.” (First page, sencond entry above the fold.)
Note: The Journal de L’Empire gets the date wrong while making the marriage an asterisk to that of the daughter of le baron d’Astorg.
Szramkiewicz
Our most detailed modern source on Théodore Géricault’s Robillard relations is Romuald Szramkiewicz‘s seminal study of the Bank of France: Les Regents et censeurs de la Banque de France nommés sous le Consulat et l’Empire Geneva: Droz, 1974 (pp. 341-357). Szramkiewicz focuses on Jacques Florent Robillard, one of the founders of the Robillard tobacco concern at the Hôtel de Longueville in 1791, who went on to help found the Bank of France in 1800.
The historian also provides a detailed short summary of Bonne Emilie de Nanteuil and her family in the text of pages 346-347 and notes 18-29 there. We examine Bonne Emilie’s family more fully elsewhere and rely here on Szramkiewicz simply to provide the full name of Bonne Emilie’s second husband Louis Antoine François Lacroix St. Pierre; the married names of the couple’s two daughters: Madame Albin Chaladon and Madame Teysier-Palerne de Savy; and several other details. Namely, that the family of Bonne Emilie de Nanteuil was deeply involved in the regional messageries of France (stagecoaches and post) prior to Géricault’s birth and after. Géricault made messageries the subject of his paintings and drawings throughout his career.
Commentary
Théodore Géricault was connected to Bonne Emilie de Nanteuil and her family via her marriage to Pierre Robillard and her family’s involvement in messageries. An important artistic connection also exists.
One of Théodore Géricault’s assistants recalled, many years after the painter’s death in 1824, how, at the Paris Salon of 1819, he and Géricault had stood before portrait by Amable Louis Claude Pagnest, comparing Pagnest’s work to that of the Flemish painter Anthony Van Dyck. (Pagnest, a year older than Géricault died in Paris on May 25, 1819.) :
“A l’exposition de 1819, figurait le portrait de M. de Nanteuil par Pagnest; comme M. Géricault en parlait un jour avec de grands éloges et que j’avais été bien frappé moi-même de cette peinture j’allais jusqu’à lui dire que cela semblait la nature et non de l’art et que je n’avais jamais rien vu de Van Dyck qui m’eut fait cette impression et je l’interrogeais du regard pour savoir si c’était son avis. Il ne me dit que ces simples mots: oh Montfort, c’est bien beau. Van Dyck! et je compris et j’avais compris.” *
The Pagnest portrait (presented at the top of this page) which Géricault was admiring was that of Denis Poissalolle de Nanteuil de La Norville, the father of Bonne Emilie de Nanteuil and the former father-in-law of Pierre Robillard. Pagnest exhibited this portrait at the Salon of 1817.
The three press articles announcing the marriage of Bonne Emilie de Nanteuil and Louis Antoine François Lacroix St. Pierre (two on the front page of important papers) speak to several issues. In July of 1813, Napoleon Bonaparte was busy trying to keep the French Empire intact, and losing. Good news was hard to come by and during a more successful summer the marriage of Bonne Emilie of and Louis Antoine might not be front page news. The fact that at least one paper seems to have got the marriage date wrong possibly reveals as much.
On a personal level the public announcements of the widow Robillard’s marriage in July 1813 confirm that Théodore Géricault, and other members of Géricault’s extended family, could not easily escape reminders of their great grief, even as each tried to move forward with their lives. The Pagnest portrait of 1817 reinforces this point. Théodore Géricault, standing before the Pagnest portrait of his cousin Pierre Robillard’s father-in-law, for a time, discussing the Pagest portrait with others at the Salon of 1819, must have experienced again his own losses of 1812, and after, somewhere within him.
Conclusion
The Salons of the Bourbon Restoration very much embodied the values of the church and state with rare exceptions. Looking at the Pagnest portrait of M. de Nanteuil in the fall of 1819, Géricault would also have been reminded of a different time – a time of grief, but also of innocence and renewal. 1813 was the last full year of the French Empire. Yes, there had been serious setbacks, but the spectre of actual defeat lay far from the parks and concerts of Paris that summer. The second marriage of Bonne Emilie de Nanteuil in 1813 undoubtably called up memories of loss from the previous year. Yet, we can be equally sure that who still held Bonne Emilie in their hearts celebrated her second chance for a happiness and a bright future, opportunites promised and denied Bonne Emilie in her first marriage.
Théodore’s mother and grandmother were gone and sadly missed in July of 1813. Still, Théodore had a close bond with his maternal uncle Jean Baptiste Caruel and his uncle’s family in Chesnay near Versailles. Théodore lived with his father; had friends; and had made a promising start to his career as a painter. After a two-year delay, the final livraisons of the Musée français series one, the Robillard-Laurent family art enterprise, had been presented to the public. Géricault spent spent more of his time painting and spending time with his uncle’s family at the Chesnay estate – a brief summer of peace for France and for the artist before an enormous storm broke upon both the following fall and winter.
Théodore likely enjoyed all the companionship and innocent affection of his uncle’s young wife Alexandrine Modeste de Saint Martin that summer and fall. 1813 was a year of innocence for the young artist at 22, and almost certainly his last. We know that by 1814, or 1815 at the latest, passion or lust had transformed love between aunt and nephew, turning the younger partner’s life upside down. We can assume Alexandrine Modeste suffered every bit as much, or more, with her own sense of conflict, guilt, and desires.
We now also know that five years after the young widow Bonne Emilie de Nanteuil married for a second time in July of 1813, Alexandrine Modeste Caruel de Saint Martin gave birth to Théodore Géricault’s first and only child, legally and socially illegitimate, on August 21, 1818. Géricault was dead five short years after the first birthday of a son the artist would never see.
Contemporaries reported Géricault experienced some sort of nervous breakdown in the fall of 1819. Staring at the Pagnest portrait of Pierre Robillard father-in-law at the Paris Salon of 1819, surrounded by paintings depicting Christ, saints, sin, and redemption, with his own masterpiece of rescue and redemption: the Raft of the Medusa on display nearby, we can fairly ask how much of his own lost innocence, blasted family life, and dark future Théodore Géricault saw before him then.
* Antoine Alphonse Montfort’s notes on Géricault were originally prepared for Charles Clément’s study of the artist and published in book form in 1868 Clément’s (Géricault: Étude Critique et Biographique, p. 259) We cite Yveline Cantarel Besson’s slightly different version of Montfort’s account of the Pagnest-Van Dyck anecdote published in the 1991 exposition catalogue: Géricault: Galeries nationales du Grand Palais, Paris, 10 octobre 1991-6 janvier 1992. Paris: Editions de la Réunion des musées nationaux, 1991. (p. 315-16)
* Edited for emphais, clarity, and context October 23, 2022.