The Bouviers: Portrait of an American Family

📒 This is a fascinating book—a richly detailed, elegantly written saga of an extraordinary family that would make absorbing reading even if one member of that family had not become the most celebrated woman in the world. The Bouviers begins with the struggles of Michel Bouvier, a poor immigrant from a remote village in the Rhone Valley of France, to establish himself in the New World, and continues through four generations of the familv he founded. The book is both a narrative of the rise, fall, and rise again of a family's fortunes and a series of vivid portraits —of eccentrics and ne'er-do-wells, of fabulous successes and pathetic failures, of lovers and husbands, of idealists and hedonists. Among the highlights in the gallery are: the rough-and-ready Michel Bouvier, who began as a cabinetmaker in Philadelphia in 1815 and made a fortune in his lifetime; his daughter Alexine, who was spurned at the altar by a European prince and spent the rest of her days as a devoutly religious spinster; Emma Bouvier Drexel, who started a private civil-rights movement that resulted in the contribution of over $40, 000, 000 to schools for Ameri­can Indians and Negroes; M. C. Bouvier, who vastly increased his father's fortune, becoming one of the shrewdest Wall Street financiers of his day.