Grace Dalrymple Elliot’s autobiography, Journal of My Life During the French Revolution, is one of the best-known English-language accounts of the conflict. It was this book more than any other that inspired me to write The French Lesson, as a sort of answer to Grace Elliot’s record of events.

Orléans had numerous dalliances with women, but Grace was among his favourite mistresses. Like so many British women who took up residence in Paris during the eighteenth century, her past was a chequered one. She had been disgraced after an affair with Lord Valentia, whom her much older husband sued for criminal conversation, or adultery, before divorcing her. Following the scandal, Grace embarked upon a life as a ‘professional mistress’ or courtesan, or, as the French termed it, a dame entretenue. She did well in her profession and before her association with Orléans enjoyed the favour of both the notorious Marquess of Cholmondeley and the even more notorious Prince of Wales. However, it was in Paris, through her affairs with a number of French noblemen, that she truly prospered and was able to make a home.

The events of Grace Elliot’s life have often been called into question. Like Henrietta, she can be an unreliable narrator when it comes to recounting details. Many of the assertions that appear in her Journal have yet to be substantiated and in some cases seem improbable. Dates and names are confused and it has still to be proven where, and for how long, she was incarcerated during the Revolution. However, recent research has begun to throw further light on her somewhat mysterious life. Jo Manning, in her biography My Lady Scandalous, has put together a convincing case that Grace acted as a spy for the British and seemed to have been trafficking correspondence. She and her friend ‘Mrs Meyler’ (a woman whom I suggest in my non-fiction book Lady Worsley’s Whim is actually Seymour, Lady Worsley) also famously helped the Marquis de Chansenets to escape from Paris after the assault on the Tuileries. Sarah Murden and Joanne Major, in An Infamous Mistress: The Life, Loves and Family of the Celebrated Grace Dalrymple Elliott, have unearthed more about her cloak-and-dagger activities and her life in Paris. To these three authors, I am especially grateful.

The French Revolution is a fascinating episode in history – it was a modern political conflict where the state reigned by means of widespread propaganda, indoctrination, fear, and a campaign of systematized murder. Fortunately for us, those who lived through it have left an array of gripping first-hand accounts, of which Grace Elliot’s is just one. In writing The French Lesson I made use of a number of these, including those of Gouverneur Morris, Élizabeth Vigée-Lebrun, Thomas Blaikie, Marie Louise Victoire Marquise de la Rochejaquelein, Restif de la Bretonne, Louis Philippe and Granville Leveson-Gower.