Doctor Dido is a historical novel by the British writer F. L. Lucas. First published in 1938, it was his third novel (not including the novella The Wild Tulip, 1932). With much local and antiquarian detail, it tells the story of Samuel Plampin, Doctor of Divinity at Cambridge and Vicar of St Peter's Babraham, who in 1792 brings to the vicarage as his housekeeper a young Frenchwoman he finds in Cambridge, a destitute refugee from The Terror.
Plot summary
Just arrived in Cambridge on a sodden evening in September 1792 is Mademoiselle Sophie Letourneur, 26, a spirited femme de chambre in the household of the Duc and Duchesse de la Rochefoucauld-d'Enville. She has travelled for nine days from Revolution-torn Paris, carrying a secret message from her Anglophile master to Prime Minister Pitt. She had been told Pitt was in his constituency; now she learns he is at Stowe. She speaks little English, has been robbed on the way and is destitute. She is rescued by Samuel Plampin of Trinity, 45, Doctor of Divinity, King's Reader in Hebrew at the University, and Vicar of St Peter's Babraham. A bachelor (as Fellows had to be then) and hoping for a little adventure, he offers her hospitality for the night. (He is fluent in French, having spent six months in Paris in 1772 "bear-leading a rich lordling".) Next day they travel to Stowe, where Sophie learns from Pitt that her master has been killed and that she cannot safely return to France. Plampin, already drawn to her ("I had forgotten how exhilarating a clever woman can be" ) invites her to remain with him as his housekeeper.
His very ears seemed dumbly to protest, as they heard his mouth utter this egregious folly.
She accepts. A friendship develops. He is kind and amusing, regaling her with anecdotes from the parish and University. An Enlightenment man, he is attracted by her French grace, wit and good sense. On New Year's Eve he proposes marriage; she declines, but agrees to be his mistress. Villagers and University colleagues guess the truth. "Come down off it, Tim Tolliday," says a villager to Plampin's coachman in the 'George' one evening, when the latter has been defending "Emmy Grays" and "Parson's Mamzell". "We all knows what Frenchies be." In an excruciating scene the unimaginative Reverend Aaron Knatchbull of neighbouring Hadworth proposes to Sophie, in vain. Ten years pass, happy for Plampin, content for Sophie – "though there were moments when she would feel stifled among these East Anglian cabbages, buried alive in these foggy turnip-fields" – years clouded only by heresy-hunts of supposed Jacobins in Cambridge and grim news from France.
The Peace of 1802 brings the chance for émigrés to return home and for the British to travel abroad once more. Madame Letourneur longs to see her daughter again; Plampin welcomes the chance of a holiday. But in Paris things start to go wrong. So much that Plampin had admired about the France of his youth has been swept away (though he had begun by admiring the Revolution). The old values have been replaced by vulgarity, aggressiveness, Napoleonic fervour. Plampin grows irritable and finds himself at loggerheads with Sophie's brother Charles, a cocky young Captain of Hussars, who regards the English doctor as grotesque and a poor match for his sister. Only the gracious Madame Letourneur is true to the France Plampin loved. Sophie meets Victor Duroc, Captain of Engineers, a former childhood friend. She grows uneasy and three times begs Plampin to take her back to England: but he is now enjoying the Bibliothèque nationale and the art treasures recently taken from Italy by Bonaparte. He brushes aside her fears. Growing estranged, she goes to amusements without him, wears make-up, dresses in the Grecian style. They quarrel. Victor, she admits to her mother, makes her feel for the first time in her life "alive". One day Plampin returns from the library to find her gone. A sad, guilt-ridden letter from Sophie informs him that she is now Madame Duroc and on her way to Saint-Domingue in the Caribbean.
He understood too well. In the grey light of disillusion, he saw now his own past folly; as a traveller who has climbed some height leading only into a wilderness, not homeward, looking back too late through the last pallors of sunset, sees all too clearly how and where he went astray.