MERRY - JOSEPH BLONDEL
Paris 1781 - Paris 1853
Portrait Of Félicité-Louise-Julie-Constance De Durfort, Maréchale De Beurnonville
Oil On Canvas: 194 x 130 cm (80.83 x 54.17 in)
Signed and dated: Blondel 1808/13
Provenance: La Maréchale-Marquise de Beurnonville 1807-1870; Etienne Baron de Martin-Beurnonville 1870-1886; Gustave, 1st Count de Reiset (1886-1905); Henry, 2nd Count de Reiset, by descent in the Reiset family at the Château de Breuil until 1998.
Exhibited: Paris, Salon, 1808
Félicité-Louise de Durfort was the youngest daughter and namesake of Félicité, Count de Durfort, Colonel of the Dauphin’s Regiment, pre-Revolutionary French Ambassador of France to the Republic of Venice (where died in exile in 1801) and his wife (married 5 Oct 1772) Armande-Jeanne, Mlle de Béthune-Chabris, younger daughter of Armand-Louis, Marquis de Béthune. She stands here in a simple high-waisted white dress, the splendid cashmere shawl draped over her right arm falling to the ground where the sun streams across it. Her hair is done in the latest fashion, while she is partially shaded by the splendid orange tree against whose large, painted wooden pot she is leaning. To the left we see some steps leading down to a winding path with a distant view of the Château of Balincourt that her husband had acquired in 1803 just two years before their wedding. As the new châtelaine she directed the splendid redecoration in the Empire style that her husband’s considerable fortune made possible.
Unlike her own family, which on both sides was one of the most illustrious in France, her husband had risen to the highest rank from modest origins. His father, Pierre Riel, a Wheelwright from Champignolle, had two surviving sons by his wife, Jeanne Laurain: Pierre, the future Marshal, another son who ended his career as a Lieutenant-Colonel and added the name “de Fontenille”, and a daughter Louise. Pierre Riel, born on 10 May 1752, was a good example of the Bonapartist legend that every soldier had a Marshal’s baton in his knapsack, even though he actually received his from Louis XVIII. As a young man he had married in 1778 for the first time while stationed in the Island of Reunion to Geneviève Gillon de l’Etang, a lady of slightly higher station than himself, who was already the widow of an Anglo-Irish merchant named Macfields. When he left to return to France she refused to accompany him and they were divorced during the Revolution, without leaving issue. She survived him, dying in 1835.
In 1789 the citizens of Colonel Pierre Riel’s home town decided to honor the rising officer, according him a gift of the small property of Beurnonville, for which he gave them the sum of 200 francs, almost the entire value of the land. Henceforth he was known as Pierre Riel de Beurnonville, or M. de Beurnonville, and his royal commission as a Maréchal de Camp of 20 July 1792 addressed him as such. With the advent of the republic he became Monsieur, then Citoyen Beurnonville, but he ended his career as an hereditary Marquis-Peer, elevating his own modest family origins by promoting his simple peasant father to the rank of former officer, and bourgeois. It was as a Lieutenant-General and Senator of the Empire that he married the young Mlle de Durfort, the subject of this painting. The alliance was arranged with her widowed mother and took place in June 1805 when she was twenty-three and her husband thirty years her senior. Years later she said to some young cousins, “women are so unfortunate, we are married very young to worn out men, without heart, without love, without strength, whom we do not choose”. She was a young woman without fortune, however, and as she herself admitted, had little choice in the matter. They had no children and she was widowed on 23 April 1821 at the age of thirty-nine; however he remembered her tenderly in his will as “my dear Wife, for whom the tender love that I had for her and her perfect conduct and the touching signs that she never ceased to demonstrate during our marriage.” He left her the usufruct of almost his entire estate, with the eventual reversion to his nephew, Etienne Martin, Baron de Beurnonville, while excluding all other claims (including those of his wastrel brother Colonel de Fontenille). Despite the high rank he held in French freemasonry, the Marshal evidently retained his allegiance to the Church, asking this his widow establish a donation for prayers for the repose of his soul to be said in perpetuity at their parish church in Paris and at their Château of Balincourt.
Now a wealthy widow, the Maréchale fell in love with a retired officer nine years her junior, Joseph Marie Frémiot, a former infantry captain, the son of a regimental musician. As a mark of the favor in which her husband had been held, her second husband received from the King the personal title of Baron (18 May 1825). Despite her age, she gave birth to her only child, a son, in 1827; Henri Fremiot predeceased both his parents, dying in 1868. She died at their Paris home on 7th February 1870, her husband survived her by two years. The splendid Château of Balincourt, which we may see in the background of our painting, now passed to the Marshal’s nephew Baron de Martin-Beurnonville, while the property of Beurnonville was inherited by Florimonde de Reiset, a nephew of Colette, Baronne de Martin-Beurnonville. Balincourt eventually passed to the widowed Duchess of Marchena (whose husband was a member of the Spanish royal family, and was sold by her daughter in 1960). The portrait hung at the Château of Balincourt until the death of Baron de Martin-Beurnonville, and then passed to his cousin the Count de Reiset.
