The directory «Plots»

de Segur Sophie
(1799—1874)
Novels for Children

Sophie, Countess of Ségur (née Countess Sofiya Feodorovna Rostopchina) was a French writer of Russian birth.

She is best known today for her novel Les Malheurs de Sophie ("Sophie's Misfortunes"). The action takes place in a castle in the French countryside during the Second French Empire, where Sophie lives with her parents Mr and Mrs de Réan. Curious and adventurous, she does one silly thing after another, with the critical help of her cousin Paul, who is good and tries to show her the right path. She has two friends, Camille and Madeleine de Fleurville, 'good little girls' whom she tries hard to imitate. But she will learn that life is not a bed of roses ... Therese Martin (1873-1897), known as St. Therese of Lisieux, was an avid reader as a child of the novels of the Countess of Segur.

Reflection of the morals of the Second Empire, The Misfortunes of Sophie describes a society where the moral education of children begins at an early age (Sophie is only four years old) and where each incident is conducive to a lesson. This strict education can on occasion resort to corporal punishment.

Her family was originally from Mongolia. Her father Count Feodor 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 (despite opposition from the wealthy property-owners in the city) 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.

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 (until being made a Peer of France in 1830), and his infrequent conjugal visits to their château des Nouettes (near L'Aigle, Orne) produced eight children, including the father of the historian Pierre de Ségur (Eugène de Ségur is said to have called his wife "la mère Gigogne", or "Mother Gigogne" in reference to a theatre character of 1602, an enormous woman out of whose skirts a crowd of children appeared).

The Comtesse de Ségur wrote her first novel at the age of 58. 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" (publisher: Robert Laffont).

France, 1999, Model Girls

Monaco, 1999, Comtesse de Segur

France, 1977.02.16, Verfeil. House of Countess of Ségur

France, 1999.06.12, Aube. Comtesse de Segur

France, 1999, Sophie, Countess of Ségur

France, 2008, Sophie, Countess of Ségur