In addition, she was strengthened by her double identity. Her father Arthur Dillon was colonel of an Irish Jacobite regiment in French service. Despite the many wars opposing France and Britain, her French family was inseparable from its English relations and servants. Madame de la Tour du Pin knew both the ancien régime and the Empire from the inside. She had been presented to Marie Antoinette (a ceremony which inspired a memorable set piece in her memoirs), received in audience by Napoleon and Josephine, had known the Duke of Wellington since childhood and entertained Louis XVIII to dinner.

Her politics, as well as her Franco-British background, distinguished Mme de la Tour du Pin. She came from the liberal section of the court aristocracy, committed to reforms but tied by a sense of honour to the Bourbons. Both her father and her husband went further than most of their relations in support of the revolution. Her father even fought for the republic - thereby, since he had not emigrated, hastening his death by the guillotine.

With time, she became an extremely formidable figure. When her husband was French prefect in Brussels, their household, one of Napoleon's officials reported, resembled a court - although she remarked that Belgians were so stupid that they were capable of believing that Racine's Hector had died in the Seven Years' War. With one look, wrote a minister, she changed her department's allegiance in 1814, from Bonaparte to Bourbon. Her best friend, the great novelist Mme de Duras, suffered from her devastatingly frank letters of advice. Mme de Duras's daughter Félicie transferred her affections from her mother to Madame de la Tour du Pin. As she grew older, however, Félicie would neglect Mme de la Tour du Pin as she had her own mother.