The unequal destiny of Macintosh’s children—Betsey, Polly, and William—is something on which I often reflect, particularly so when the snatches of time I have for research are more suited to chasing down genealogical sources than doing concentrated writing. The tragic suicide of William in 1784 contrasts, for example, with the frustratingly mysterious terminus of Betsey, whom I have failed to trace beyond a final reference to her (as the married Elizabeth Bromley) in June 1806. A rich, and in a genealogical sense, complete story exists only for Polly, the youngest of the three.

Polly lived a long life and died, well in to her 80s, as the Comtesse de Colleville, the well-to-do matriarch of a large French family. None of this was predestined, and the elegant townhouse she occupied at the time of her death, on the rue des Réservoirs in Versailles, would have seemed a world away from the plantation house in Grenada where she spent her first months of life. The route between these two biographical-cum-geographical points in her life was not straightforward, however, and she weathered significant disruptions, not least the French Revolution which turned her and her husband into émigrés. Subsequently abandoned by her husband, Polly raised four girls—Macintosh’s only grandchildren that I have been able to identify—who, for the most part, lived equally long lives and forged advantageous marriages.

Those who have worked with French genealogical sources will be familiar with their incredible abundance, particularly so for the nineteenth century, and the fact that many have been indexed and digitised in ways that make searching and consultation relatively straightforward. I have spent some time in these online archives recently, piecing together the key sources—records of births, marriages, and deaths—that map out the life course of Polly’s children. There is, of course, a whole story to be written (à la Emma Rothschild’s An Infinite History) about Macintosh’s descendants and their lives across nineteenth-century France—a story that is, equally obviously, beyond the scope of my book. That said, it has been important to me to have a sense of what happened next, particularly so for Polly, following her father’s death in 1813, and being able to hint at that familial trajectory will be an appropriate way to round off my book, when the time comes.

When Polly—Madame Maria Macintosh, Comtesse de Colleville as she then was—died in November 1855, she was mourned by an extended patrician family of diplomats and high-ranking army officers. Her funeral was held, “a 11 heures précises du matin,” at the splendid seventeenth-century Église Notre-Dame de Versailles. She was buried, later that day, in the Cimetière Notre-Dame de Versailles. Three of her four daughters outlived her and traversed most of the nineteenth century. The last, Anne-Esther-Isaure, died, like her mother, in Versailles, in 1884—a full century after her tragic uncle William had taken his own life.

Polly left behind not only daughters, but many grandchildren. It would be quite easy to get lost in following their lives and destinies (perhaps I’ll save that for a retirement project), not least because doing so holds in prospect the possibility of finding living descendants in modern-day France. At least one of Polly’s grandchildren gained widespread fame in their own time and has garnered biographical attention subsequently: Georges-Fernand Dunot de Saint-Maclou, founder of the Bureau des Constatations Médicales at Lourdes, and son of Polly’s daughter Augusta-Elizabeth-Matilda. Often referred to as the “Doctor of the Grotto”, Dunot’s work at Lourdes focused on establishing the medical basis to the cures claimed by pilgrims. His life has been the subject of an absolute doorstop of a book by Andrea Brustolon, Georges Fernand Dunot De Saint-Maclou: Il dottore della grotta (2014). At almost 800 pages in length, and a kilo in weight, Brustolon’s book certainly give me something to aim for with mine!