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"....A N Bonaparte Wyse - the N stood for Nicholas not Napoleon - was an exotic in the pre-war NICS. Grandson of Sir Thomas Wyse and a daughter of Lucien Bonaparte, with a father who was a friend of Mistral, with a chateau in the French Department of Gard, he married an aristocratic Russian lady from Orel. He had been Catholic Secretary in the Dublin National Commission for Education and was a liberal Catholic - if not a free thinker said his brother - who is said to have read daily from the classics in Greek.
Throughout his time in Belfast he travelled to Belfast each week and had his home in Blackrock, where his wife lived. When I was looking at his papers in the National Library I found a bitter letter from his wife about a woman in Belfast. On this I could not possibly comment, and I made no reference to it in the DNB entry I wrote, but there were certainly marital tensions. The Wyse lifestyle was extravagant, and his gross personal estate in the Republic was less than £1000. Wyse features very favourably in Akenson's Education and Enmity, and he had a son in the Free French Air Force during WW2...."
www.cadogan.org  Laurent Laloup le vendredi 03 octobre 2008 Contribution au livre ouvert de William Lucien Wyse Bonaparte | |
