Keeping up appearances... in an almshouse in Amsterdam
‘In winter I live in a room in a Protestant convent’, madam De Nerha wrote at the beginning of the nineteenth century. This ‘Protestant convent’ was in fact the Deutzenhofje at Prinsengracht in Amsterdam – one among several hundreds of almshouses that had been established in the Dutch Republic. Madam De Nerha may be forgiven for being unfamiliar with such social insitutions though: she was an ‘upper-class’ lady, who had lived a life of luxury in Paris with her lover, writer and politician the count of Mirabeau. But when Mirabeau passed away in 1791, De Nerha had to get by on the meagre pension she inherited.
Amsterdam’s Deutzenhofje (click for video impression).
And so it came to be that De Nerha ended up in the Deutzenhofje in 1804, probably at the age of 40. She complained to be ‘more than ten or twelve years the junior’ of the other inhabitants. No wonder: the almshouse was aimed at elderly women, and De Nerha’s admission was a great exception. Why she was admitted is not wholly clear, but perhaps some acquaintances, among them members of the wealthy family Deutz, tried to prevent De Nerha’s social descent after her lover had passed.
To spare her from disgrace, De Nerha was put out of sight. Living in the Deutzenhofje, she was largely unaware of being the recipient of poor relief. She wrote in amazement: ‘in stead of paying rent’ for the small house she inhabited ‘I receive a small reimbursement and the farmers provide me with butter and wheat’. Ignorance is bliss…
Things could have been worse though: the Deutzenhofje was quite prestigious. It was home to twenty women, living in spacious houses with two rooms, a basement and an attic. Most inhabitants of other almshouses would immediately have signed off for such a residence. Not madam De Nerha though: ‘it is not much’ she wrote about the Deutzenhofje. Worse: her lodging ‘was as large as her former bathroom’.
De Nerha occasionally returned to such luxury: during summer she went to country estates, where she stayed with her friends. To do so, she had to attend to her wardrobe though; to pay for this, she taught during the winter. De Nerha remarked: ‘in summer the ant prepares stock for winter. I do the opposite: to be a lady in summer, I have to work in winter’.
Henriette Amelie de Nerha posing alongside a bust of her lover Mirabeau.
Anonymous, 1770-1818, Private collection.
Madam De Nerha had fallen deep, going from the French court life to an almshouse in Amsterdam. But the small house she had somehome managed to acquire, a part-time job as a teacher, and the pension Mirabeau had bestowed her, allowed the posh De Nerha to appear a grand dame until her passing away in 1818.
More info on madam De Nerha can be found in:
E.H. van Eeghen, Brieven van het Deutzenhofje. Madame de Nerha en Mirabeau (Haarlem 1967).