ABSTRACT
The past is not simply what a person inherits. It is also what they make it – the people and events they choose to remember and the way they work them into their life-stories. In this respect, much of the material in this biography is based on the portrait Riffaud has drawn of herself with its chosen angles of perception, its highlights and, above all, its relations to others. From childhood, Riffaud was very aware of her family tree and as an adult she chose to identify with one ancestor in particular who became as important as living friends and relations in her accounts of her personal history and her ‘family romances’.3 Edme Thomas Liron (1806-1869) is the ancestor through whom she identifies her French roots as well as her geneaological ones, and he has remained a key figure in her life right through into her adult years. The autobiographical manuscript Liron completed in 1869 was a point of reference for Riffaud’s 1994 autobiography4 and it is therefore a point of reference for the present work also.
