Just for fun, Gill Shaw goes on the trail of Vicomtesse Mina, her 2x great-aunt’s adoptive stepmother-of-sorts, and gets caught in a web of intrigue and espionage…
I don’t quite know why, but Vicomtesse Laurence Camille Clementine Mina Brimont-Brassac, the former Mina Sheppard, fascinates me. It might be her name – find it in the records and it’s guaranteed to be her. Or the fact that I know what she looks like, thanks to an early photograph in the National Portrait Gallery’s collection. Or it could be the curious thought that if she hadn’t obtained a judicial separation from Vicomte Edgar and his womanising ways (and, of course, had it not been for the court case in Reims), she might have had some legal say over what happened to my 2x great-aunt after Edgar’s death.
Catherine Mary Riboldi’s whole life is a fairy tale, a proper Cinderella story, and our Mina would have made a cracking wicked stepmother.
Whatever it is, she seems quite a character, so let’s try a trawl through the newspapers at FindMyPast…
High society
Now, searching for her full name isn’t likely to work, but Viscountess or Madame Brimont just might. And ooh, we have lift off. Pages and pages of hits…
The first dozen or so, I had an inkling I might find – posh people’s comings and goings from society columns, court circulars, ‘arrivals in town’ and the like.
One example from 1857 says ‘Viscount and Viscountess de Brimont have arrived at the Clarendon Hotel from Paris’; another from 1862: ‘Viscount and Viscountess de Brimont have left London for Paris.’
After their separation in 1867, Mina continues to make regular trips to England, and some mentions, like this one from 1868, give more detail: ‘Viscountess de Brimont has left the Palace Hotel, Buckingham-Gate, on a visit to Folkington Place, Sussex, the seat of Mr Frederick Sheppard’.
So, no question that’s Mina, but while it’s interesting to see their social life recorded in the papers, it’s all pretty innocuous.
One more amusing mention comes from the Morning Post’s ‘Foreign Courts’ column in 1863.
‘Paris: The fancy dress ball given on Saturday night by the Minister of State and Countess Walewska at their splendid apartments at the Louvre was of extraordinary magnificence… Among the persons whose dresses were most remarked, the Viscountess de Brimont
