Countess of Ségur


Sophie Rostopchine, Countess of Ségur, born Sofiya Feodorovna Rostopchina, was a French writer of Russian birth and origin. She is best known today for her novel Les Malheurs de Sophie, intended for children.

Life

Her father Count Fyodor Rostopchin was lieutenant-general and, later, Minister of Foreign Affairs for Russia. In 1812, he was governor of Moscow during the invasion of the Grande Armée under Napoleon I of France. While facts concerning the origin of the great fire of Moscow are disputed by historians, Sophie Rostopchine's father has been said by some to have organized the great fire which forced Napoleon to make a disastrous retreat.
In 1814 the Rostopchine family left Imperial Russia for exile, going first to the Duchy of Warsaw, then to the German Confederation and the Italian peninsula and finally in 1817 to France under the Bourbon Restoration. In France, the father established a salon, and his wife and daughter converted to Roman Catholicism from Russian Orthodoxy.
It was in her father's salon that Sophie Rostopchine met Eugène Henri Raymond, Count of Ségur, whom she married on 13/14 July 1819. The marriage was largely an unhappy one: her husband was flighty, distant and poor, and his infrequent conjugal visits to their château des Nouettes produced eight children, including Nathalie de Ségur and the father of the historian Pierre de Ségur.
The Comtesse de Ségur wrote her first novel at the age of 58.

Novels

The novels of the Countess of Ségur were published from 1857 to 1872 in the "Bibliothèque rose illustrée" by the publishing house Hachette. They were collected together in 1990 under the title Œuvres de la comtesse de Ségur in the collection "Bouquins".