Jean Louis Barthelemy O'Donnell

Comte Jean Louis Barthelemy O'Donnell (1783–1836), was born in Maine-et-Loire, France, and was a Hiberno-French count who survived the French Revolution, campaigned in Italy and Spain under Napoleon Bonaparte, and played a prominent role in local government in France. He was also a member of the Conseil d’État and the Légion d'honneur.

On 15 April 1817, he married Élisa-Louise Gay (1800–1841), daughter of Jean Sigismond Gay (1768–1822) in Paris, and adopted by the latter's second wife, Marie Françoise Sophie Nichault de la Valette (1776–1852), who came from a family ruined by the Revolution. With Élisa-Louise, Comte O’Donnell had two sons, Gustave Anatole O’Donnell (1818–1824), and Sigismond Anatole O’Donnell (1823–1879), who married Jeanne Marthe Marie de Pechpeyrou Comminges de Guitaut, of the Marquis d’Époisses. His mother-in-law, known also as Sophie Gay or Mme. Sigismond, held salons for the rising elite of the "Restauration", frequented by France's greatest writers and artists. She lived at Villiers-sur-Orge, just south of Paris, in the Maison-Rouge, where they moved in 1813, and where Élisa-Louise and Sophie's own three children grew up. This was also where Comte O’Donnell courted Élisa-Louise, and established their family, after his military service. She was also a correspondent of Honoré de Balzac, sending him poems that she had coaxed her half-sister Delphine to write.

At the age of sixteen, he joined the staff command of General Clarck, upon the departure of Napoleon Bonaparte, then First Consul, for the Marengo campaign, where French forces defeated the Austrian army on 14 June 1800, forcing them to withdraw from Italy west of Ticino. His later political and administrative education flourished as a student of Alexandre Theodore Victor, Comte de Lameth, with whom he formed a very close friendship. Lameth was a young nobleman who served in the American Revolutionary War of Independence, became a French revolutionary but later aligned with Napoleon under the Empire, and the Bourbons under the French Restoration.

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