Impoverished St Helens fisherman’s daughter Sophie Dawes – who became the mistress of wealthy French aristocrat Duc de Bourbon and inherited a considerable fortune – passed away on this day in 1840.
The life of this remarkable Isle of Wight adventuress – who became known as the ‘Queen of Chantilly’ – has been narrated in the following Island Echo article. Sophie was said to have been 50 at the time of her death – but her true age is subject to dispute and conjecture.
The Baronne de Feucheres – as Miss Dawes was officially known following a ‘marriage of convenience’ in France – did not receive a flattering obituary in the English press at the time of her passing. No doubt the then British media believed the ‘lower classes’ should know their place and not seek to ‘rise above their station’ in life. The Morning Post scathingly wrote:
“The short but no means simple annals of this parasitical parvenue afford a striking instance of the extraordinary ascendancy which a few personal charms, aided by a plentiful store of low artifice and cunning, can gain over infatuated imbecility.
“The Baronne de Feucheres commenced her career under the alias of Sophy Dawes. Of low untraceable origin, and still lower reputation, she occupied the meanest possible place in the scale of morality.
“Decked out in all the glaring impotence of dress and rouge and in the exercise of her ‘vocation’, she was one night at Asley’s Theatre, when her showy appearance made deep and fearful inroads into the Duc de Bourbon.
“An improvisee intimacy immediately sprung up, which ripened into a lasting liaison. The moral and physical energies of the weak and imbecile Prince gradually became prostrated before the mighty influence of his low-minded mistress.
“He plunged headlong into the mire of abject infatuation and became literally ‘a thing for Dawes to peck at’. “Unaided by the refinements of education or the elegancies of a cultivated and enlightened intellect, by the mere force of her personal attractions, this modern Circe so enthralled him that the poor ‘doating Duke’ could refuse her nothing.”
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Of the untimely Duke’s death (he was found hanged), the Morning Post was of the opinion that:
“It was highly improbable that the aged Prince could have committed suicide.”
The Morning Post concluded with further unflattering remarks on the late Baroness:
“She spoke French like a Parisienne and English like a chambermaid. In her manners she was excessively presuming and vulgar, and her dress was always distinguished for its ridiculous excess. “She was tall, remarkably gauche and clumsy in her carriage, with a fine bold countenance, pretty eyes and teeth, and a clear brown complexion.”
According to the newspaper, the bulk of her considerable fortune of nearly 1 million sterling (£84million in today’s values) was to be inherited by her 10-year old niece Sophie Tharanon. Sophie Dawes, Baronne de Feucheres, also bequeathed £4,000 (£337,000 in today’s values) to her nephew Edward, who went on to become Liberal MP for the Isle of Wight in 1851. However, years of legal wrangles over her inheritance followed in the wake of her death.
