Hello!
I am interested in historical ceramics and have come to your erudite forum and this thread via that, probably seemingly arcane, route!
This is because a ceramic item believed to have the provenance of the couple (or at least Lucy) is currently up for auction and has a small family-derived history included in the sale catalogue (more available on request, apparently).
https://auctions.roseberys.co.uk/m/lot-details/index/catalog/556/lot/172369?url=%2Fm%2Fview-auctions%2Fcatalog%2Fid%2F556%3Fpage%3D9
My interest was piqued by this snippet and so a quick Google later, I find above with great thanks to Dante, the amazing tale of these two infamous folks! I am definitely inspired to write a historical account for publication, based on Lucy and her incredible life, also including the tale and background of her paramour, the roguish Cartwright.
Courtesy of Google Translate, of interest perhaps, here's the French account accompanying the lovely image above of the happy couple at their wedding, again thanks to Dante's diligent detective skills.
"Posted by 'Unknown' October 5, 2017 at 11:28 PM
"Lucy Jonquet was born in Peckham, a modest suburb in south-east London, in 1878. Her family, like many French people of Protestant worship, fled their country during the time of Huguenot religious persecution in the 18th century, and moved to London. The last Jonquet of the line was named Frédéric de Jonquet, and he died in the 1950s without issue. After his first marriage failed he married my maternal grandfather's sister, Mary Laceby, who survived him by 3 years. Freddie was the son of Adolphe, Lucy's older brother. After Mary's death, my mother received from her father, as a memento of her aunt, two opals that were said to have belonged to an Austrian count. My sister has them now, and I myself received a pair of gold cufflinks from Freddie, which I still wear. It wasn't until fairly recently that I started researching Lucy's story. We know she's married twice. The date of the first marriage is unknown, but her husband John Graham is known to have died in Newcastle in the north-east of England in 1898 (when Lucy was only 20 years old). Between 1900 and 1905 little information remains on Lucy's fate before her marriage in Paris to Joseph Hieronyme Rudolph Ferdinand Franz Maria prince Colloredo-Mannsfeld, of Austrian nationality, born in Prague in 1866. How is it that she was in Paris? Where did they meet? We know she was quite tall, from a newspaper article about her then-girlfriend's 1915 trial in London (worth a read). And it is true that the marriage was annulled in 1925 as Cecil informs us above, because Austrian-blood princes can only marry someone of the nobility. My favorite hypothesis is that Lucy, after the death of her first husband, has become, thanks to her size, a dancer - perhaps in London, or perhaps in Paris; then Joseph had a big crush on her and… it didn't last long! Joseph remarried in the 1920s but without having children (he had 60 brooms already, it's not always easy at that age!) And of Lucy we know very little, except that she died in Rome in 1940. Apart from that the only information I have is that my maternal grandfather loved to eat at the restaurant Chez Francis, Place de l'Alma, and that Prince Joseph lived a stone's throw away at 55 avenue de l'Alma . So maybe Freddie had lunch with Lucy there when he was young, and my grandparents went back there with Freddie and Mary after WWII."
