Henrietta Lucy Dillon de La Tour du Pin (1770–1853)

Henriette-Lucy Dillon, known as Lucie, was born into a prominent Irish Jacobite military family in exile in France. Her parents were Arthur Dillon, born in England to an ancient family of Irish and Norman descent, and his wife Thérèse-Lucy de Rothe.
Following her mother's death and her father's subsequent posting abroad, Lucie lived with her French grandmother. She was considered witty and beautiful. In 1787, at age 17, she was married to Frédéric-Séraphin, comte de Gouvernet, later marquis de La Tour du Pin, an army officer and diplomat. Following her marriage, she was given her late mother's former place at court as a maid of honor to Queen Marie Antoinette. Lucie was present at Versailles during the meeting of the Estates-General of May 1789 and witnessed the Women's March on Versailles in October of that year after the outbreak of the French

Revolution.
Her husband served from October 1791 to March 1792 as ambassador to the Dutch Republic in The Hague, where Lucie joined him, returning to France only in December 1792.

During the Reign of Terror in 1793, many of her friends and family were executed, and she fled Paris for the family estate of Le Bouilh in the Gironde region. That summer, their estate was seized by the government, her father-in-law was imprisoned, and her husband went into hiding separate from her. With the help of Thérésa Cabarrus, in 1794 she managed to secure a passport for herself and her husband from Thérésa's lover, Jean-Lambert Tallien, a member of the revolutionary National Convention.
The La Tour du Pins went into exile for a new life on a dairy farm near Albany in upstate New York. Lucie considered this the happiest time of her life.

She and her husband returned to France after the establishment of the Directoire in 1796 and a few years later, he was able to resume his diplomatic career. They had to go into exile again after their son Aymar became involved in the plot of Marie-Caroline de Bourbon-Sicile, duchesse de Berry, to place her son on the throne in 1831-1832. After her husband's death in 1837, Lucie moved to Italy, where she died in Pisa.
Her legacy to history is her now-famous memoirs, written at age 50 for her son. They are a unique first-hand account of daily life through a turbulent period of history, much of it unchronicled. The manuscript remained in the family unpublished until 1906. An edition published in 1999 was entitled Laughing and Dancing Our Way to the Precipice.