Early Years
Born in Paris, Mathieu de Montomorency was the son of Mathieu Paul Louis de Montmorency, vicomte de Laval (1748–1809), a scion of one of the oldest noble families in France, and his wife, Catherine Jeanne Tavernier de Boullongne (d. 1838), the daughter of an aristocratic French planter in Guadeloupe. His mother's illegitimate mulatto half-brother was the famous Chevalier de Saint-Georges. His father, a colonel of the Auvergne regiment, was appointed a premier gentilhomme de la chambre to King Louis XVI of France's younger brother, the Comte de Provence, in 1780. However, when Catherine was denied the corresponding rank of dame pour accompagner to the prince's wife, Marie-Joséphine, due to her relatively low birth, Laval resigned his post in Provence's household.
Read more about this topic: Mathieu De Montmorency
Famous quotes containing the words early and/or years:
“Our instructed vagrancy, which has hardly time to linger by the hedgerows, but runs away early to the tropics, and is at home with palms and banyans—which is nourished on books of travel, and stretches the theatre of its imagination to the Zambesi.”
—George Eliot [Mary Ann (or Marian)
“I rather think the cinema will die. Look at the energy being exerted to revive it—yesterday it was color, today three dimensions. I don’t give it forty years more. Witness the decline of conversation. Only the Irish have remained incomparable conversationalists, maybe because technical progress has passed them by.”
—Orson Welles (1915–1984)