22 typescript pages of biographical material by Marie Belloc Lowndes on her grandmother, Louise Swanton Belloc.
Two separate typescripts (pages 1-3 in one typeface, then pages 2-22 in a different typeface, neither complete??).
The first page of the shorter typescript (pages numbered 1-3) has a note reading ‘A lot of this is in Arcadia. E.’. Begins with LS[B]’s brother Armand; describes the arrival of the Swantons in Paris ‘not long before my grandmother’s marriage’, people of the ‘old regime world’ she met there; her earliest acquaintance with Maria Edgeworth, Mary Clarke [later Mme Mohl], and Adelaide Montgolfier (just after the birth of her eldest child, Louise); an account of her first meeting with Jean-Hilaire Belloc and their marriage; the establishment of her salon.
The second typescript (pages numbered 2-22) begins with the return of L S [B]’s brother Armand from Russia and his connections with Baron Klopmann then describes the following: the arrival in Paris of the Swantons and their presence at Napoleon’s ‘grand review in the Champ de Mars’; the death of Mme Swanton’s brother, Frederick Chassériau, in the battle of Waterloo; L S’s first translation work, aged 17 [1813?] (a French guide into English for the Luxembourg Gallery); the move to Rue de Vaugirard when LSB was 19 [1815?]; the situation of L S [B]’s older sister Sophie in widowhood [her husband General Massabeau was ‘lost in the Retreat from Russia’]; Louise’s connections with the Marquise de la Villette and other people of the ‘old regime world’ (as in the shorter typescript above); work on translating Maria Edgeworth; her first meetings with Maria Edgeworth and with Mary Clarke [later Mme Mohl]; L S [B]’s first meeting with Jean Hilaire Belloc in 1821, events leading to their marriage in June 1821, and L S B’s arrival at ‘my future home’ where she was ‘horrified at what she thought to be its extravagant splendour’.