Histoire d'une grande dame au XVIIIème siècle

"Mr. Lucien Perey's book is certainly a constantly enjoyable read and, in some parts, a pungent novelty. The great lady of M. Perey was a Polish woman brought to Paris as a child in 1771 by her uncle, the Bishop of Wilna, brought up in the Abbaye-au-Bois, married without love to a great Belgian lord, Prince Charles de Ligne, and one day fell madly in love with one of her compatriots, Count Potocki, whom she met on a trip to Poland; forgetting then her husband, her daughter, her sumptuous and delightful existence, having only one thought, only one goal, to become the wife of the man whose mistress she would not lower herself to be, and greeting as a deliverance the death of her husband, carried away by a ball and chain in the Argonne's parades. Mr. Lucien Perey, who has a taste for new things, the art of discovering them and the talent to put them into practice, wrote the story of Hélène Massalska with the help of original documents, the most curious of which is Hélène's account of her stay at the Abbaye-au-Bois."