When the school run by Jeanne Pinon, Rose de Freycinet’s mother, failed, she was able to find a place for her retirement in the Abbaye aux Bois. She was extremely fortunate to have done so, because although the Abbaye was a religious foundation and presumably had some semblance of a mission to the poor, apartments there were normally rented only to women of high social standing. Among those who qualified on those grounds was a famous (or perhaps infamous) socialite called Juliette Récamier.
Amongst Juliette’s admirers, and a frequent visitor once she was installed in the Abbaye, was the author and Catholic apologist, François-René, vicomte de Chateaubriand, and here there is another link with Rose and her mother, because in the twelfth of the ‘Uranie’ letters to her mother, sent from Guam, there was a reference to Chateaubriand as ‘the author we love’. Given the link with the Abbaye, that might have been more than appreciation of his literary works’; they might have known him personally. He was, it seems, not hard to find, because in Victoria Glendinning’s biography of Anthony Trollope, she mentions a visit by Trollope’s mother Fanny to the Abbaye with Mary Clarke, an Englishwoman born in 1893 who had been living in Paris since the age of eight (and therefore throughout the Napoleonic wars) and had come to know Juliette when, according to her Wikipedia entry, she and her mother had rented part of her apartment at the Abbaye.
The subletting story seems improbable, because Juliette’s first apartments there were small and cramped, but somehow the two had become friends and Mary blossomed as a salon hostess. She knew everyone worth knowing in literary Paris, and in 1835 she took Fanny Trollope, who had achieved fame and financial success as an author in her own right, to a reading in Juliette’s “darkened white and blue room crowded with her old Directoire furniture, a harp and Gérard’s painting of Madame de Staël as Corinne” (Trollope, p.98). It was also, as Juliette’s by this time generally elderly visitors would have noted, up three flights of stairs. Among those present on this occasion, including the Duchesses de Nailles and de la Rochefoucauld, was Chateaubriand. His presence was very necessary, because it was to hear him read from his as yet unpublished Mémoires d’Outretombe (Memoirs from beyond the Grave) that the guests had been invited. He was, however, no longer the dashing romantic figure of his youth; Glendinning describes him as being “bored, gloomy and ill”.
Chateaubriand, some twenty-five years before Fanny Trollope came to one of his readings at the Abbaye aux Bois. The portrait was painted by Anne-Louis Girodet de Roussy-Trioson in about 1810, when he would have already been in his forties but was still evidently well preserved. Wikimedia Commons
None of which, of course, was of any interest to Jeanne Pinon, who had been dead for thirteen years, or to Rose, who had died after nursing her husband through cholera and then being infected with it herself, on the 7th of May 1832.
And it is, of course, a complete coincidence that Anthony Trollope’s wife was called Rose.