The three Louises

 

Rue de la Tourgarnier, 2023.

                                                                

History, like family history, is made up of incompleteness, conjecture, truth, and the sense of being unfair to individuals in the past. An Infinite History is an inquiry, in part, into missing identities. There is one of the missing individuals -- she can be called, for the moment, Louise #3 -- whom I have been able to find, and her story has itself become a journey into the limits of historical inquiry.

Louise #1, or Louise Lavigerie Kiener, with whom An Infinite History ends, and who spent the long winter evenings of 1906 destroying the family papers in a village in the Pyrenees, was part of the fifth generation of the family who are at the centre of the book. She was the great-great-granddaughter of Marie Aymard, who lived in Angoulême in the mid-eighteenth century, and she was connected, by memory and conversation, to the earlier generations of family history. She spent much of her youth with her great-aunts, on the Rempart du Midi in Angoulême, and her great-aunts, in turn, of whom the oldest was born in 1768, lived in their youth only a few steps away, close to their grandmother. Even in old age, according to one unreliable memoir, the cousins were as "joyful as children" when "they met and could reminisce about their childhood years, staying with the uncles and aunts in Angoulême."

But Louise Lavigerie was not the last of the cousins, and she was not even the last of the great-great-grandchildren to be known, at least from time to time, as "Louise Lavigerie."  She was the most captivating, because of the circumstance that she is the only one of Marie Aymard's descendants of whom a few personal letters survive. She was born in Bayonne in 1832, and she was the younger sister of the only famous member of the family, Cardinal Charles Martial Allemand Lavigerie. It is in his archives in Rome that Louise's letters are preserved, together with a few letters about her; one photograph taken by her, of her brother in the oasis of Biskra; and a blurred photograph -- of his funeral -- in which she is placed somewhere in the midst of the crowd of mourners at the Admiralty in Algiers.

The second Louise Lavigerie, Louise #2 -- or Marie Louise Allemand Lavigerie -- was born in Angoulême in 1833. Her parents were first cousins -- both grandchildren of Marie Aymard's daughter -- and she was their only surviving child. Her father, who was a commis voyageur or travelling salesman, became the director of the new national discount bank created in Angoulême during the revolution of 1848, and later a commercial banker in Le Mans. In 1853, she  married a clerk in the commercial tribunal of Angoulême, who joined his father-in-law's bank in the Sarthe.

Louise #2 was a rich heiress, and there are multiple, uninformative public records of her life. In An Infinite History, she appears in the civil records of her birth, marriage and death; in the records of her two children's births and their marriages; in her own marriage contract; in an inventory after her husband's death; and in the records of the property she inherited in Angoulême. Louise #1 mentions her once, in a letter to her brother. There is a more intimate glimpse, in the press reports of a terrible railway accident near Angoulême in 1853, where she was slightly injured; she was described as "a young mother who was weeping and crying out for her child." The infant was then found safe and sound, "playing in the sand underneath the wreckage."

The records of the existence of Louise #3 are far more elusive. She was Louise Marie Antoinette Topin, and she was born in Brienne in the Aube in 1835. She was the first cousin of Louise #2. Her father, an itinerant architect of prison walls and falling bridges, was the brother of Louise #2's mother. In An Infinite History, she appears only on the occasion of her birth, and in the family tree, with no further information.

There is another elusive figure in the story, who was called Berthe Topin. She appears in An Infinite History as one of the signatories of the marriage contract of another cousin, in Angoulême in 1858; she signed immediately below Louise #2. In the census of 1861, "Berthe Louise Taupin" was listed as living in the house of the great-aunts on the Rempart du Midi; she was identified as a "domestique," aged 21. In 1883, Louise #1, in one of her discursive, chatty letters to her brother the Cardinal, refers to "that unhappy Berthe," who had "taken a violent dislike" to Louise #2's new daughter-in-law; "it is jealousy that has made her lose her brain!" In 1892, finally, "Mademoiselle Berthe Topin" appeared in the list of official mourners on the occasion of the Cardinal's death.

These were two of the missing individuals, when An Infinite History was published in 2021. I had a feeling -- a conjecture -- that Berthe and Louise Marie Antoinette might be the same person. But there was no evidence on the basis of which to even mention the possibility. I searched repeatedly online -- the bad infinity of looking again and again in a universe of information that changes continuously over time -- for "Berthe Topin" and "Berthe Taupin" and "Louise Marie Antoinette Topin." There was nothing to be found, or nothing that was connected to any of the Lavigeries.

The moment of discovery came on the basis -- as so often -- of the records of property transactions: the archives of hypothèques or mortgages that have been such a prolific source for the history of bourgeois life since the early nineteenth century. There was a modest house in Angoulême, according to the registers, that was sold in October 1919;  a little below the old town, and not far from the modern site of the Archives municipales d'Angoulême. It had been the property of the late parents-in-law of Louise #2. Louise #2 had herself died in Paris in 1909, and the five heiresses were her widowed daughter and her four grand-daughters, the children of the little boy who was playing happily amidst the train wreck and the new daughter-in-law to whom "Berthe" had taken a dislike in 1882.

The signatory to the transaction, on behalf of the family, was "Mlle Louise Marie Antoinette prenommée en famille Berthe Topin." Her address was given as 24, Rue de la Tourgarnier, also on the outskirts of the old town. All five of the heiresses, in Paris, the Sarthe, and Perigueux, had signed powers of attorney to her. She signed her name "L. Berthe Topin Lavigerie." In the census of 1921, she was at the same address, aged 86, listed as "Louise Topin Lavigerie." She died in Angoulême in 1925, at the age of 89.

Berthe and Louise Marie Antoinette were indeed the same person; "Louise #3". She had been in Angoulême, at least from time to time, for more than sixty years. But she was the sort of person, to a disquieting extent, who has been almost impossibly difficult to find. She had no children; she was never married. When she appeared for the first time in the census of the town in 1861, as the domestic servant of her great-aunt, her mother had died, and her father remarried the following year. Her two brothers, who were both in the army, died without surviving children. Her age was wrong in the census listing, and her last name was wrongly spelled (Taupin rather than Topin.) She called herself "Berthe," and her given names of "Marie Antoinette," even in this family of (unsuccessful) architects of public order, were not particularly popular in the 1850s. She sometimes used the last name "Lavigerie," like several of her cousins. She died with very little property; a chest, in the house where she died, was not opened until more than a month after her death in 1925.

There is something else that was disquieting. I looked again online for "Berthe Topin" and "Louise Marie Antoinette Topin," once I knew who she was; just to see, I suppose, if there was some evidence that I had missed. Louise Topin was still invisible. But "Berthe Topin" was there. There were two search results, and both were from An Infinite History itself -- "Berthe Topin, whom Louise described as 'that unhappy Berthe'," and, then, even more jarringly, "the envious Mademoiselle Berthe Topin of the family of the architects." It was as though I had pursued her into her grave, and endowed her with a new, unfair, enduring identity; the envious Berthe Topin. She was invisible because she was a single, unprosperous, uncelebrated woman -- like so many millions of other women in France in the long nineteenth century -- and she was only too visible, almost a century after her death, at the whim of history, or of a historian who was not a family historian.

Louise #3 is still the individual with whom An Infinite History should have ended. She was the last of the fifth generation of the family at the centre of the book; the last of Marie Aymard's great-great grandchildren. She was still in Angoulême, more than two centuries after her great-great-grandmother was born there in 1713. The evidence of her identity turns on a power of attorney, as in Marie Aymard's notarial act of 1764; she was the mandatary, in this extended and matriarchal -- or aunt-centred -- family, of the five heiresses of her first cousin, Louise #2. She completes the family history.

The story of the three Louises has been an inquiry into the "infinite possibilities" of flat and ordinary history, as in the conclusion of An Infinite History. It has been an act of expiation, in a way, of having not been able to find Berthe or Louise in the first place, and of having described her, too insouciantly, in her cousin's intimate words. It has certainly made me think about the inequality of historical sources, and about the invisibility of single women -- of whom there were 4.5 million, out of a population of 39 million, in the last census in which Berthe or Louise was counted -- in historical understanding.

The history of Louise #1, Louise #2 and Louise #3 has also made me think again about the choice of having ended the book in the early twentieth century, with the fifth generation of Marie Aymard's descendants. There were some reasons of historical principle for having done so, and some inconvenient reasons, to do with the insecure frontier between history and family history. These will be the subject of a future note.

 

 

 

The record of the transaction of which "L. Berthe Topin Lavigerie" was a signatory, in October 1919, is in the Registre de transcriptions of the conservation des hypothèques d'Angoulême, volume 2891, acte 9, in the archives départementales de la Charente. Louise/Berthe appears in the census of 1921 for Angoulême-sud, 6 M 279, available online, 65/624. The record of her death is in the Table des successions et absences, Angoulême-ville, 1923-1927, 3 QPROV 5120, 164/176. The population statistics for France in 1921 are summarised in Résultats statistiques du recensement de la population effectué le 6 mars 1921, vol. 1 (Paris, 1927). I am very grateful to Oliver Riskin-Kutz for having photographed the register of transcriptions in July 2022.

 

 

© Emma Rothschild 2025