Frédérique Louise duchesse de BRUNSWICK (1770-1819)... - Lot 266 - Ader

Frédérique Louise duchesse de BRUNSWICK (1770-1819) born Orange-Nassau, sister of King William I of the Netherlands, she married in 1790 Charles Georges Auguste hereditary duke of Brunswick. 51 L.A. or L.A.S., 1804-1819, to the Princesse de Montmorency; about 110 pages in various sizes, a few addresses and wax seals. Long and beautiful correspondence where are frequently quoted the names of great French or Prussian families, as well as those of some members of the family of Orleans. Giving and asking mainly for family and friendly news, evoking marriages, births and bereavements, the duchess sometimes commented on the political situation in 1814 and 1815, when her brother William was called to the throne of the Netherlands after an exile of 19 years and the Restoration took place in France: "After a quarter of a century of horrors & troubles, the hope of order & peace is reborn on earth by the return of your legitimate master" (April 25, 1814). In 1815, she announced the death of her husband, Guillaume-Frédéric, killed at Waterloo. Staying in The Hague or near Harlem, she described a capital and a court that had become brilliant again. According to her, everything should get better and better even if the Congress of Vienna is prolonged. If she admits that these questions "are not the business of the ladies", she nevertheless allows herself to speak about Napoleon, "of the misdeeds of the monster of the Island of Elba where I find him still much too close to the honest people, because as long as he will live he will trippot [...] I hope only in God to make fruitless the machinations which he could still allow himself! In August 1815, she pities the fate of Louis XVIII, insists on the heroic conduct of the Duchess of Angouleme and all the cruel wounds suffered by France. The last letters are mainly letters of family interest, but one can note some words on the great Wellington, the French minister Lally-Tollendal, or the composer Paër...