A charming, interesting and candid letter signed affectionately "Rose," chiefly detailing the dramatic and frightening financial collapse of the Barillon family, bankers and perhaps her oldest family friends: famously, Rose's journal of the Uranie voyage was written for Caroline de Nanteuil née Barillon.

A charming, interesting and candid letter signed affectionately "Rose," chiefly detailing the dramatic and frightening financial collapse of the Barillon family, bankers and perhaps her oldest family friends: famously, Rose's journal of the Uranie voyage was written for Caroline de Nanteuil née Barillon.

The letter, written only some 13 months after her own return from the circumnavigation, is written to her sister-in-law and confidante Clémentine, the wife of the Baudin veteran Henri de Freycinet, then living at the Ile Bourbon (Réunion) during Henri's governorship of the island. The Barillons themselves had longstanding connections on the island and nearby Mauritius, so the catastrophic news must have been electrifying when it finally reached them in their Indian Ocean outpost.

Rose de Freycinet (1794-1832) is one of the great romantic figures: smuggled on board the Uranie by her devoted husband, her diary of shipboard life, since published no fewer than three times, is one of the most interesting, candid, and intimate accounts of any of the early circumnavigations or grands voyages. Despite an unconventional courtship, Rose became a great favourite of the whole Freycinet family, and was particularly close to Henri and his wife Clémentine: Louis and Henri enjoyed a long correspondence throughout their life and, as this letter amply attests, the two sisters-in-law were also tremendously affectionate.

Written from Paris in the first days of 1822, the letter details the financial difficulties faced by the Barillon family. Rose's anxiety and sorrow is tangible, because the Barillon family were great friends and protectors of her entire family, the Pinons. Rose's beloved sister Stéphanie Pinon had been the private tutor to the children of a branch of the Barillon family when they were at the Ile de France (Rose was very upset to miss Stéphanie's arrival by only one day during the voyage of the Uranie in July 1818; see A Woman of Courage, p. xii).

The letter details the serious financial situation the family faced, the head of the family (Claude-Georges Barillon) having destroyed the family finances on the stock market with ill-advised speculation, before disappearing. There are great fears for his safety, she writes; he has not been heard from for months. Worst of all they have no "chouchou" left at all, and have had to relinquish all of their jewels, cashmere, silver and so on. While Rose and Louis have offered whatever support and consolation they are able to, it is clear that the Barillons are ruined. Their only hope is that the kind regard in which the family is held may enable them to salvage something from the wreck ("quelque débris dans ce grand naufrage"); Rose's consolation is that dear Caroline is married, and therefore sheltered from the catastrophe, but for the two younger children the future is not so bright. At least Madame Barillon has taught them that virtue and simplicity are the best mainstays. Barillon père later died in Mexico in 1830 (had he run so far?).

As well as the famous diary, which was itself essentially a series of lengthy narrative letters to Caroline, a selection of letters from Rose to Clémentine was used by both Bassett and Rivière to shed important light on her later life, for which the correspondence is a major source. However, the present letter has never been published. Thanks to the enormous interest in Rose and her famous narrative of the voyage, she has become recognised as one of the most interesting nineteenth-century letter-writers, and yet not only are her letters exceptionally rare on the market but few have the drama nor the immediacy of the present example.