Marie-Louise-Victoire, marquise de La Rochejaquelein (1772–1857)

Marie-Louise Victoire de Donnissan, known to history as Madame de La Rochejaquelein, was born at the court of Versailles to a distinguished French family. At the age of 17, she married her cousin Louis, marquis de Lescure, a penniless young officer. As the political situation during the French Revolution became more dangerous, the family resolved to emigrate abroad, but then decided their wisest course was to retire to the marquis's Château de Clisson in Boismé in central western France. This they managed to do only a few days before the September Massacres in Paris. Her husband took up arms for the royalists during the civil war in the Vendée region, and the marquise, who was pregnant, accompanied him with her one-year-old daughter after he was wounded.
She endured much hunger, fatigue, illness and misery during this time with the army. Her husband was killed, and the marquise spent the winter of 1793-1794 at a remote farm in disguise as a Breton peasant. She then fled to exile in Spain, but was able to return in 1799. In 1802, at the urging of her mother, she remarried to another cousin, Louis du Vergier de La Rochejacquelein, with whom she had five children. The marquise de La Rochejaquelein wrote her memoirs, which were published in 1814 and remain a valuable eyewitness testimony to the personal costs of one of the most disastrous and bloody conflicts in French history.