I am fortunate to have a tolerant family—one that supports and indulges my interest in Macintosh, even when that interest intrudes a little on our summer holidays. This week they were, once again, kind enough to let me take them on a small detour, this time to visit the site in Nice where two of Macintosh’s granddaughters lived in their final years: what was in their time the Place Cassini, but is now the Place de l’Île de Beauté.

The widowed sisters—Mathilde and Anna—lived in the Palais Astraudo, an elegant colonnaded apartment block built on the north side of the place in the mid nineteenth century, next to the Eglise Notre Dame du Port. The sisters, who had begun their lives as émigrés in England, died only a few years apart in the 1870s in aristocratic comfort. Mathilde (by then a baroness) died in July 1872, at number 11, the day before her 80th birthday, and Anna (by then a countesses) followed in April 1879, at number 7, aged 84. The pair lived, and died, in apartments belonging to (or rented by) Mathilde’s son, George-Fernand Dunot de Saint-Maclou, whose wife, Marie-Sidonie de Gombault Razac, was Anna’s daughter, and thus his first cousin.

As I have mentioned before, I have no intention of following the lives of Macintosh’s grandchildren (and great grandchildren) across nineteenth-century France in my book, but it matters to me, for reasons that I cannot fully articulate, to know something of their stories—their beginnings and their endings, and the lives they led that are now largely forgotten.