Letter to a Son

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Remember Always

Henri de Marcellus, author of the unique and valuable anthropological study, Atlas of Man, and its corollary Atlas of Language, compiled, edited and produced by his daughter Juliette, received the attached letter on his 12th birthday from his father, Louis de Marcellus. This letter offers, in the kindest and sweetest way, advice to his son, on the threshold of manhood, about what he would face and how he should approach it. Though written to his own son, this letter is a model for anyone today, as much as when it was written, about what is truly important in life. It is a virtual manual for life, which can be read with advantage by anyone, today just as much as when it was written over a century ago.

Count Louis de Marcellus came into the world in 1863, just seven years before France was defeated in the Franco Prussian war, in which he lost his uncle, Lodois, an officer in the French army. His childhood had already been grieved in 1865 by the tragic loss of his handsome father, Henri, known as the “le Beau Marcellus”, who died in a freak accident at the age of twenty-nine, alighting from his carriage and catching his ankle the wrong way. Henri left a wife and two little boys, Louis and Pierre, to manage a difficult period alone. The widow, Gabrielle Marion du Rosay, beautiful and devout, spent the next years overseeing the education of her boys, chiefly at their country property, the Château de Marandat, in the province of La Charente, not far from the city of Angoulême.

Always delicate, Louis suffered from chronic poor health, which denied him the two professions which interested him, the army and the Church, though he never really made any move in either direction. Instead, this well-read and intellectually refined young man, elegant and attractive, met and fell in love with a family connection, Marie Odette de Forbin. Their happy marriage was made possible by the generosity of his brother, Pierre, who made over to him his own share of their property in order to allow him to meet the demands of financial security made by Marie Odette’s father, the Marquis de Forbin (descended from the Forbes family in Scotland).

Louis served as mayor of the locality, the town of Montbron. He loved his team of four white horses, which he drove with expertise. The family also spent time with Marie Odette’s family in Paris, at their apartment at 38 Avenue Gabriel, and, because of his precarious health, made several trips to spas in Switzerland and to Vichy.

However, their life together would be marked once more by grief: the death of their four year-old daughter, Marie Madeleine, of peritonitis, a tragedy from which Marie Odette never quite recovered.

Louis arranged fireworks for Henri’s 6th birthday, and took him to see interesting things (Henri would forever like “interesting things” – hence the subtitle of his daughter’s website, “des choses 'intéressantes”), including the first real motorcar race, Paris-Bordeaux, in 1897, and to see the Great Mogul go down the Champs Élysées carried in a kind of hammock, as well as King Chulalongcorn, son of the king in ‘Anna and the King of Siam’, accompanied by Louis Leonowens, the son of Anna. Henri was a tall, good looking boy with an original mind. He was destined to be a highly individual thinker, politically astute, an incisive anthropologist, and a soldier awarded the Croix de Guerre for courage in 1918.

Louis did not live to see what his unusual and very interesting son became, as he died at forty-nine from lung disease, but we can see in this wonderful letter from father to son, with its wisdom and gently proffered advice, the influence it carried over a lifetime. Surprisingly, Henri never told his family about it, being an objective and self-contained man, while at the same time a very loving one. That is perhaps a French characteristic, though his gently introspective father Louis was quite different, being very self-understanding, as we can see from this marvellous letter.