Journal of My Life During The French Revolution

Grace Dalrymple Elliott, a young Scotswoman, courtesan and socialite, living in Paris was there to witness it all.  Born in 1754, Grace Dalrymple Elliott became one of the most sought after women in Europe.  Educated in a French convent, her barrister father Hew Dalrymple later introduced her to Edinburgh society where she received numerous marriage proposals.

Grace, however, fearless, beautiful and wild, was to reject tradition.  Unhappily married and then divorced, she went on to have affairs with the Prince of Wales and the Duke of Orleans, later known as Philippe Egalité.   She lived a scandalous and remarkable life, maintaining dangerous alliances and surviving treachery and betrayal. 

Entertaining her relationship with the Duke of Orleans, Grace had unprecedented access to the highest ranks of court life, which she vividly recounts.  After her arrival in Paris she was forced to escape violent Revolutionists and the Mob to stay in Meudon, where she was at the mercy of domestic spies and harboured a wanted man.  Unable to flee to England, she was then imprisoned in an infamous institution and became gravely ill.  Surrounded by death and the fear of royalists, Grace only narrowly escaped the guillotine herself, and was finally released to tell her story when the revolutionary leader Robespierre died. 

Her memoir, an eyewitness account of the Revolution, recounts a time of turbulent politics, dark days and lethal enemies during an infamous time in history, which she witnessed while living in Paris.