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 and died: what was in their time the Place Cassini, but is now the Place de l’Île de Beauté.

I presume, but do not know for sure, that the widowed sisters—Mathilde and Anna—lived together, or as neighbours, 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, the day before her 80th birthday, and Anna (by then a countesses) followed in April 1879, aged 84.

As I have mentioned before, I have no intention of following the lives of Macintosh’s 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.