Life
She was the daughter of Count Jerzy Detloff Fleming and Princess Antonina Czartoryska.
On 18 November 1761, in Wołczyn, she married Prince Adam Kazimierz Czartoryski, thus becoming a princess.
She was rumored to have had an affair with the Russian ambassador to Poland, Nikolai Vasilyevich Repnin, who was alleged to have fathered Adam Jerzy Czartoryski..
In Paris in 1772 she met Benjamin Franklin, a subsequent leader of the American Revolution, and the French philosophers Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Voltaire, who were bringing new ideas to the old order.
In 1775 she completely transformed (together with her husband) the Czartoryski Palace at Puławy into an intellectual and political meeting place. Her court was one of the most liberal and progressive in the Commonwealth, although some aspects of her behavior also caused scandals.
Izabela discovered the talent of the young painter Aleksander Orłowski and financed him.
In 1784 she joined the Patriotic Party.
After the suppression of the Kościuszko Uprising, her sons Adam Jerzy and Konstanty Adam were taken as political hostages by Russia's Empress Catherine II.
In 1796 Izabela ordered the rebuilding of the ruined palace at Puławy and began a museum. Among the first objects to be included were Turkish trophies that had been seized by Polish King Jan III Sobieski's forces at the 1683 Battle of Vienna. Also included were Polish royal treasures and historic Polish family heirlooms.
In 1801 Izabela opened the first museum in Poland, the Temple of the Sibyl, also called "The Temple of Memory." It contained objects of sentimental importance pertaining to the glories and miseries of human life. During the November Uprising in 1830, the museum was closed. Izabela's son Adam Jerzy Czartoryski, going into exile in Paris, France, evacuated the museum's surviving objects to the Hôtel Lambert. His son Władysław Czartoryski would reopen the museum in 1878 in Kraków, where it exists today.
Read more about this topic: Izabela Czartoryska
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“Unable to create a meaningful life for itself, the personality takes its own revenge: from the lower depths comes a regressive form of spontaneity: raw animality forms a counterpoise to the meaningless stimuli and the vicarious life to which the ordinary man is conditioned. Getting spiritual nourishment from this chaos of events, sensations, and devious interpretations is the equivalent of trying to pick through a garbage pile for food.”
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I had lived a blessed time; for from this instant
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The wine of life is drawn, and the mere lees
Is left this vault to brag of.”
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