La Rochefoucauld, Alexandrine-Charlotte-Sophie de Rohan-Chabot, duchesse de

Alexandrine-Charlotte-Sophie de Rohan-Chabot, duchesse de La Rochefoucauld (1763-1839), known as Rosalie, was a member of one of the grandest and most extended French noble families. She married Louis-Alexandre de La Rochefoucauld, who was killed in September 1792 in Gisors, not far from the family's château at La Roche-Guyon, 40 miles north-west of Paris. It is at the château where Thomas Jefferson and William Short first met Rosalie and her grandmother Madame d'Enville in 1785. The duchess and Short soon became intimate spending time together at the château and corresponding regularly when he was away in The Hague and Madrid and then living openly as a couple between 1798 and 1802. Marriage plans did not come to fruition and were definitively abandoned when Rosalie married the marquis de Castellane in 1810. Short and Rosalie continued writing to each other, albeit much more sporadically, until her death in 1839.