Abstract
On Tuesday 15 September 1789 a son of the French chancellor shot himself on arrival in Brighton. When efforts were made to repatriate his remains it was preferred that he stay ‘in the fatal soil of England’. It would appear that the soil of England was indeed fateful as the unfortunate Monsieur de Maupean had been in the country for less than 24 hours before he committed suicide. On his person was found a packet of papers including two credit notes, one for 6000 livres and one for ‘whatever sum he might have occasion’, and at the New Ship Inn his personal effects consisted of ‘two valuable watches, one of them set with diamonds; two diamond crosses of the Order of Knights of Malta; three miniatures of a Lady, set in gold; a pair of diamond shirt sleeve buttons’, a considerable amount of hard cash in varying currencies including 91 shillings, and a cryptic note that declared ‘“Je meurs innocent; J’en atteste de Ciel” I call Heaven to attest that I die innocent.’
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Notes
- 1.
M. MacDonald and T. R. Murphy (1993) Sleepless Souls: Suicide in Early Modern England (Oxford: Clarendon Press), p. 278.
- 2.
The London Chronicle (1789) Saturday 19–Tuesday 22 September, Vol. LXVI, Iss. 5171, pp. 282–83.
- 3.
London Chronicle, p. 283.
- 4.
(1902) A Foreign View of England in the Reigns of George 1 and George II: The Letters of Monsieur César de Saussure to his Family, Madame van Muyden (trans. and ed.) (London: John Murray), pp. 201–2.
- 5.
Saussure, A Foreign View, pp. 196, 198.
- 6.
G. Colman (1755) The Connoisseur, Thursday 9 January, No. 50, p. 8.
- 7.
Macdonald and Murphy, Sleepless Souls, p. 185.
- 8.
The phrase ‘la mort à l’Anglaise’ appears to originate from a review of a 1778 play entitled The Suicide.
- 9.
Macdonald and Murphy, Sleepless Souls, p. 307.
- 10.
(1733) The English Malady, or a Treatise of Nervous Diseases of all Kinds, (London: G. Strahan and J. Leake), pp. iii, i.
- 11.
(2012) Dying to be English: Suicide Narratives and National Identity, 1721–1814 (London: Pickering and Chatto), Kindle edition, location 2365 of 6941.
- 12.
Cheyne, The English Malady, p. ii.
- 13.
McGuire, Dying to be English, location 2358 of 6941.
- 14.
Cheyne, The English Malady, p. i.
- 15.
Cheyne, The English Malady, pp. 262, 52.
- 16.
(2004) Madmen; A Social History of Madhouses, Mad-Doctors and Lunatics (Stroud: Tempus), p. 95.
- 17.
Porter, Madmen, p. 96.
- 18.
Cheyne, The English Malady, p. iii.
- 19.
McGuire, Dying to be English, location 112 of 6941.
- 20.
Quoted in McGuire, Dying to be English, location 136 of 6941.
- 21.
The Gentleman’s Magazine (1756) Vol. 26, p. 28.
- 22.
(2013) Aristocratic Vice: The Attack on Duelling, Suicide, Adultery, and Gambling in Eighteenth-Century England (New Haven and London: Yale University Press), p. 28.
- 23.
Quoted in Andrew, Aristocratic Vice, p. 32.
- 24.
(1994) Shaftesbury and the Culture of Politeness: Moral Discourse and Cultural Politics in Early Eighteenth-Century England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), p. 4.
- 25.
(1997) The Pleasures of Imagination: English Culture in the Eighteenth Century (London: HarperCollins), p. 102.
- 26.
John Locke quoted in P. Carter (2001) Men and the Emergence of Polite Society 1660–1800 (Harlow: Longman), p. 55.
- 27.
Quoted in G. Minois (1999) History of Suicide: Voluntary Death in Western Culture, L. G. Cochrane (ed.) (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press), p. 234.
- 28.
The Gentleman’s Magazine (1737) Vol. 7, p. 284.
- 29.
McGuire, Dying to be English, location 161 of 6941.
- 30.
(c. 1778) National Library of Scotland, Lynedoch MSS 3590, f.227R Georgiana Cavendish, Duchess of Devonshire, to Mary Graham.
- 31.
(2007) The Sylph, J. Gross (ed.) (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press), p. 54.
- 32.
(2015) Fashion Victims: Dress at the Court of Louis XVI and Marie-Antoinette (New Haven and London: Yale University Press), pp. 216, 222.
- 33.
Chrisman-Campbell, Fashion Victims, p. 220.
- 34.
Chrisman-Campbell, Fashion Victims, p. 222.
- 35.
Chrisman-Campbell, Fashion Victims, p. 219.
- 36.
(1766) Sermons to Young Women in Two Volumes (London: D. Payne), I. 38.
- 37.
(2005) Dress, Distress and Desire; Clothing and the Female Body in Eighteenth-Century Literature (Basingstoke: Palgrave), p. 113.
- 38.
Chrisman-Campbell, Fashion Victims, p. 11.
- 39.
(1962) Man, Play and Games, M. Barash (trans.) (London: Thames and Hudson), p. 23.
- 40.
(1783) A Dissertation on the Pernicious Effects of Gaming (Cambridge: J. Archdeacon), pp. 63, 41–44.
- 41.
Quoted in Andrews, Aristocratic Vice, p. 192.
- 42.
Chrisman-Campbell, Fashion Victims, p. 89.
- 43.
(1755), p. 83.
- 44.
Quoted in A. Steinmetz (1870) The Gaming Table; Its Votaries and Victims in Two Volumes (London: Tinsley Brothers), vol. 2, p. 90.
- 45.
(2002) The Age of Chance: Gambling and Western Culture (London and New York: Routledge), p. 66.
- 46.
(1785) Dissertation on Suicide (Cambridge: J. Archdeacon), p. 28.
- 47.
Aristocratic Vice, p. 16.
- 48.
(2008) Aristocratic Women and the Literary Nation, 1832–1867 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan), p. 40.
Bibliography
Cheyne, G. (1733) The English Malady, or a Treatise of Nervous Diseases of all Kinds (London: G. Strahan and J. Leake).
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Dickson, L.W. (2016). Fashion Victim: High Society, Sociability and Suicide in Georgiana Cavendish’s The Sylph. In: Ingram, A., Wetherall Dickson, L. (eds) Disease and Death in Eighteenth-Century Literature and Culture. Palgrave Studies in Literature, Science and Medicine. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-59718-2_11
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