ALEXANDRE I - Le Sphinx du Nord

Paris: Flammarion. Very Good. 1981. Paperback. From the collection of Susan Mary Alsop, with her manuscript notes laid-in keyed to some ink markings in the text, particularly in the chapter on Le Congres de Vienne. This was a reference source for Alsop's book The Congress Dances: Vienna 1814-1815. From the collection of Susan Mary Patten Alsop, a popular historian and a pillar of Washington society, was the daughter of a diplomat, a descendant of founding father John Jay and served with her first husband Bill Patten at the American Embassy in Paris in the 1950s. When her husband died in 1960, she married Joseph Alsop, the journalist, the following year. In the 1970s she embarked on her own literary career producing "To Marietta From Paris: 1945-1960" (1974), followed by "Lady Sackville: A Biography" (1978), "Yankees at the Court: The First Americans in Paris" (1982), and "The Congress Dances: Vienna 1814-1815" (1984). Her Georgetown homes (both with and without Alsop) hosted dignitaries, publishers and a variety of interesting people during the 1960s and 1970s including such luminaries as John F. Kennedy, Phil Graham, Katharine Graham, and Isaiah Berlin, earning her the nickname "the grand dame of Washington society," (to which she rather objected). .