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Royal Readings. The academic Michel Figeac, specialist in the history of European nobility, looked into the fate of the Polish princess Helena Massalska, wife of the prince of Ligne then of count Vincent Potocki, his letters in support.
It is the story of a European princess at the time of revolutions. In bookstores on January 20, the new book by Michel Figeac, published at Vendémiaire editions (336 pages, on sale for 24 euros), tells the story of the Polish princess Helena Massalska. Born in 1763, she was still a child when, an orphan, she fled her country in 1771 in insurrection for Paris. Educated with the elite of the Versailles nobility at the Abbaye-aux-Bois, the young girl was married at 16 to the Belgian prince Charles-Antoine de Ligne. But, in search of happiness, this romantic leaves her husband, following eleven years of living together, to flee with Count Vincent Potocki, a Polish nobleman with whom she is madly in love and whom she will marry in 1792.
A tireless writer
If the author, professor at Bordeaux-Montaigne University and specialist in the history of European nobility, has chosen to focus on the life of this woman – who lived in Poland, France, Belgium, Ukraine, Russia, between the French Revolution, the partition of Poland and the imperial wars-, it is because his correspondence has been found. A correspondence that Michel Figeac shares with his readers, interspersing his story with excerpts from hundreds of letters from this tireless letter writer who died suddenly in 1815 at the age of 52.
“Helena Potocka”, pair Michel Figeac
© Editions Vendémiaire/DR
