An Irishman's Diary

I SPENT a pleasant hour in Paris recently in the company of a 240-year-old dictionary. An English-Irish dictionary, in fact: only the second such work ever published. Which, like its predecessor, first saw the light of day in France and – at least in the case of the copy I saw – remains there, although its exposure to light is these days restricted.

Compiled by a man named John O’Brien and published in 1768, the dictionary is one of the prize exhibits of the old library in the Centre Culturel Irlandais, the former Irish College. The library’s shelves predate the revolution, although they were confiscated for a time during those troubles. And now supporting 8,000 books, they form what looks like a miniature version of Trinity’s Long Room, complete with an intoxicatingly sweet smell of leather bindings, preservative, and age.

Although O'Brien complains in his preface of the "tedious and difficult task" of compiling it, the dictionary is an entertaining and occasionally eccentric companion, its definitions ranging from the prosaic (the allegedly-Irish word Prostreat is translated as, yes, "prostrate") to the poetic, as in the term Foairn Foghlamtha, "swarms of learned men". There is also the odd mistake, like one that jumped off the page at me: Tra'ghbhaile, "an old name of Dundalk in the County of Down". In a book needing the approval of the Louis XV's censor, that historical slur by which the Irish Francach means both "Frenchman" and "rat" also features. Mind you, O'Brien takes care to include the longer version too: Luch Francach, or "French mouse". In any case, the dictionary earned the monarch's imprimatur. A formulaic note states that Louis, "p ar la grâce de Dieu, Roi de Franceand de Navarre", gives this book to the public on September 14th, 1768, in the 54th year of his reign.

Sometimes the most interesting things about an old book are in the margins, however. And in this case the name of its original owner, pasted on the inside cover, caught my eye. It wasn’t just a name: it was a coat of arms for one “T.G. Compte de Lally – Tollendal”. Which ID could only make him a close relative of the Thomas Arthur Compte de Lally whose rise and rather grisly fall I had read about, quite by coincidence, in a St Germain bookshop days before.

As the surname suggests, TA Compte de Lally had paternal origins in Connacht: Tuam to be exact. His father was one of the Wild Geese who had fled to France. And as a first-generation Frenchman, Lally Jnr followed him into the military, serving his adopted country at the Battle of Fontenoy (1745) and enjoying a generally upward career trajectory until he made the very bad mistake of going to India in 1758.

The French by then risked being run out of the subcontinent by the British, who were making India their own. But if anyone could have turned the tide, it probably wasn’t Lally. He qualified for the posting in that he was a good soldier with an impressively deep hatred of England. Against which he knew nothing about Indian terrain or customs, and his arrogance made him deeply unpopular both with his fellow Frenchmen and with their local allies whose caste system he held in contempt.

To cut a long story short, he lost several key battles and, in the process, the French lost India. But how he ended up several years later having his head lopped off back in Paris was more to do with politicking in the French court than it had with his culpability for the defeat. In a generally shabby affair, the same Louis XV did not distinguish himself.

De Lally had returned to France against advice and spent four years in the Bastille before undergoing a one-sided trial on a trumped-up treason charge, in fighting which his unpopularity with his own soldiers did not help. He was duly sentenced to death and dispatched at the Place de Grève, now the Place de la Concorde, in 1761; though not before enjoining his son – Trophime-Gérard de Lally – the dictionary owner – to clear his name.

In doing so, this second-generation Frenchman found a powerful ally in Voltaire. The writer-philosopher had been a shareholder in the Indian colony and once predicted that Lally’s activities would cost him “20,000 livres” a year. Now, though, he adopted his cause with such fervour that when his man was posthumously cleared of treason in 1778, Voltaire wrote that he himself could die happy.

Gérard de Lally, as he was known, survived the revolutionary period with some luck. He tried to save the ill-fated Louis XVI and was arrested in August 1792, a dangerous time to be a prisoner in Paris, but was released just before the September Massacres. Having outlived the terror, he went on to thrive in post-revolutionary France, legitimising the family’s old Jacobite title in the process.

The title apart, his unfortunate father may have left another legacy too. Both the manner of his trial and what was effectively a judicial execution had shamed France internationally. But the actual decapitation – a privilege, by the way, only granted to the wealthier class of condemned – was horribly botched.

The executioner missed with the first blow, breaking the prisoner’s jaw instead. And the ghastly, drawn-out spectacle may have contributed to a situation whereby, a generation later, when aristocratic beheadings were a lot more common, France had found a more efficient way to do it.