Marquise Jeanne-Renée de Travanet, née de Bombelles, was born into a family of high nobility and had been lady-in-waiting to Madame Elisabeth, sister of King Louis XVI, prior to her marriage. She was born March 3rd 1753, married the Marquis de Travanet in 1779, and died May 4th 1828. After the French revolution, which her husband had joined, the couple bought the secularized monastery Royaumont in Asnières-sur-Oise and transformed it into a factory. The couple became estranged from each other, since Jeanne-Rénée retained royalist sympathies, and later divorced.
Her contemporary Henriette Louise von Waldner-Oberkirch depicts her as follows: “I am very intimate with Madame Thavanet, for whom I feel the greatest friendship, and with whom I constantly correspond. She is one of the best, the wittiest, and the most charming woman of my acquaintance. It is she who has composed the song of Pauvre Jacques, of which the words and air are both so touching. She had been for some time lady-in-waiting to Princess Elizabeth.”
(“Memoirs of The Baroness d’Oberkirch, Countess de Montbrison” London 1852)
