The Mistress of Paris Read online

  The Mistress of Paris

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Catherine Hewitt studied French Literature and Art History at Royal Holloway, University of London and the Courtauld Institute of Art. Her proposal for The Mistress of Paris was awarded the runner-up’s prize in the 2012 Biographers’ Club Tony Lothian Competition for the best proposal by an uncommissioned, first-time biographer. She lives in a village in Surrey.

  The Mistress of Paris

  The 19th-Century Courtesan Who Built an Empire on a Secret

  CATHERINE HEWITT

  First published in the UK in 2015 by

  Icon Books Ltd, Omnibus Business Centre,

  39–41 North Road, London N7 9DP

  email: [email protected]

  www.iconbooks.com

  Sold in the UK, Europe and Asia

  by Faber & Faber Ltd,

  Bloomsbury House, 74–77 Great Russell Street,

  London WC1B 3DA or their agents

  Distributed in the UK, Europe and Asia

  by TBS Ltd, TBS Distribution Centre, Colchester Road

  Frating Green, Colchester CO7 7DW

  Distributed in Australia and New Zealand

  by Allen & Unwin Pty Ltd, PO Box 8500,

  83 Alexander Street, Crows Nest, NSW 2065

  Distributed in South Africa by Jonathan Ball,

  Office B4, The District, 41 Sir Lowry Road,

  Woodstock 7925

  ISBN: 978-184831-926-4 (hardback)

  978-178578-003-5 (paperback)

  Text copyright © 2015 Catherine Hewitt

  The author has asserted her moral rights.

  No part of this book may be reproduced in any form, or by any means, without prior permission in writing from the publisher.

  Typeset in Van Dijck by Marie Doherty

  Printed and bound in the UK by

  Clays Ltd, St Ives plc

  Contents

  Prologue

  1.A Child of the Revolution

  2.The Child Becomes a Woman

  3.First Love, First Appearances

  4.Creation

  5.A Courtesan Must Never Cry

  6.The Lioness, Her Prey and the Cost

  7.Names and Places

  8.The Union of Artists

  9.Words and Wit

  10.Valtesse and Zola’s Nana

  11.A Picture Speaks a Thousand Words

  12.A Political Affair: Gambetta, Annam and Tonkin

  13.The Thickness of Blood

  14.Slander, Scandal and Sun Queens

  15.The Thrill of the New: the Comtesse in Monte Carlo

  16.The Feminine Touch

  17.New Beginnings: The Sale of the House

  18.The Final Act: Preparing a Legacy

  Epilogue: The Legacy

  Acknowledgements

  Picture acknowledgements

  Selected bibliography

  Notes

  Index

  Prologue

  One Sunday afternoon in May 1933, journalist Jean Robert found himself in the northern French town of Caen.1 He had been invited to attend a lunch with some old school friends. Having spent several pleasant hours in their company, he hastened along to the town hall. The Annual Exhibition of Lower Normandy Artists was under way, and he was eager to see it before returning home. Once satisfied with his tour of the gallery, he stepped outside into the mid-afternoon sun. Checking his watch, Robert realised that he still had an hour before his bus left. As he pondered how best to use this time, his eyes alighted on a door just ahead of him. It was the entrance to the local museum. It had been left wide open, inviting. Delighted by the prospect of an absent-minded meander around the museum, the journalist hurried inside.

  He climbed the stairs and entered the first room. But no sooner had his gaze begun its tour of the exhibition space than something peculiar caught his eye. It was a portrait of a well-to-do gentleman dressed in a blue, 18th-century costume. Robert recognised the name of the painter: Édouard Detaille. He was an artist Robert greatly admired. But Detaille was a painter of military scenes; this was not a soldier. As Robert stepped closer and read the inscription, he was taken aback: Etienne-Michel, Marquis de la Bigne. Then he noticed another painting by the same artist on display close by. This portrait showed an officer in Napoleonic uniform. The subject was identified as Sigismond-Tancrède, Comte de la Bigne. And both works, the journalist learned, had been bequeathed to the museum by a countess: Valtesse de la Bigne.

  Robert was startled. He was friends with the current Marquis de la Bigne. Only a few years ago, he had assisted his friend in researching his family’s history. He could not remember whether he had come across the names of these two men in the course of his research, but one thing was certain: he had never heard of this Valtesse.

  How was this possible? De la Bigne was a local, noble name. Few people shared it. Those who did were almost certainly of the same family. How could he have missed the existence of a countess, and one who had died so recently? And how was it that these paintings had found their way into the museum in Caen?

  As he left the museum, the strange name Valtesse ran through his mind. Who was this woman? He had to find out more.

  Robert knew there to be some members of the de la Bigne family living in Paris, and he wasted no time in paying them a visit. Yes, they had heard about this woman. ‘An adventuress’, Robert was told. But the family could not provide him with anything more substantial. The journalist’s curiosity mounted.

  Then, on his return home, something rather wonderful happened, quite by chance. Robert received a letter from a reader of the journal he wrote for. It told him about some research that was being done on Valtesse de la Bigne. Feeling it might be of interest, the author of the letter had included an article with his correspondence. Robert could hardly contain his excitement. He began to read. And as he did, an incredible story started to unfold.

  This was no ordinary countess or art connoisseur. She had usurped the noble name, invented the men in the paintings, and then bequeathed them to the museum to cement a false association with local nobility. And more: this woman, though born into poverty and destitution, had risen to become one of the most powerful courtesans of 19th-century Paris.

  Her tale begins with another young woman and a flight from Normandy to Paris in the tumultuous years of the 1840s.

  CHAPTER 1

  A Child of the Revolution

  It would still have been dark when the young peasant girl, Emilie Delabigne, boarded the diligence or stagecoach which was to carry her from Normandy to Paris early one morning in 1844. Having loaded a small bundle of possessions on to the roof, diligence passengers took their seats among the strangers who would become their travelling companions over the next three days. The coach must set off before sunrise if they were to maximise the daytime travelling hours – diligences were not as costly as the faster mail coaches, but they would not drive through the night. Passengers were obliged to stop at one of the post stations dotted along the route to Paris where they would rest and eat. Eight people, sometimes more, could be packed into a diligence; at 24, Emilie might well have been the youngest woman of the party setting out that morning.1

  Country folk travelled to the capital for all sorts of reasons: perhaps some pressing business matter to attend to, or an illness in the family that would demand an extended stay with relatives. But it was too far for a humble peasant to travel simply for leisure. Emilie had a more serious reason for taking the coach to Paris.

  Diligences were a notoriously uncomfortable mode of transport, particularly when the roads were rough, as they were in Normandy. Slowly, steadily, the vehicle would pick up pace, creaking as it went, swaying precariously from side to side. Passengers frequently complained
of being thrown this way and that.2 Emilie had to steady herself to watch her childhood home gradually disappearing from view through the carriage’s tiny windows. It was a sight charged with poignancy, anticipation and trepidation. For at this moment, only one thing was certain: she was unlikely ever to see her home again.

  Emilie was not the only young peasant moving to Paris at this time. Migration from country to city had always occurred, but the momentum increased from the mid-century as industrial and commercial development heightened the demand for labour.3 With improved communication, news of Paris’s wonders and delights began to reach the ears of the countryside’s impressionable young. ‘All over France the peasant displays the same foolish awe for the city of Paris. Everything which comes from Paris seems magnificent to him,’ lamented one female commentator.4 Paris dazzled and entranced, enticing the young with the promise of well-paid jobs, better standards of living, opportunities and adventure. By the middle of the 19th century, the mass departure of the young for the capital had become the bête noire of the regional press.

  For many, communication with townsfolk was to be viewed with suspicion. The disappearance of the countryside’s female population caused particular alarm. ‘Just count the losses to our agriculture brought about by our young village girls’ excessive appetite for luxury,’ spat a vicar from Emilie’s region.5 ‘Boarding schools and fashion have turned them into precious little madams, begloved, corseted and crinolined, unable to bend down and reach the ground, incapable of hoeing wheat, of binding sheaves, of feeding the animals.’ Village girls were forgetting their primary responsibility to become virtuous wives and mothers. Worse, they were developing a taste for independence.

  The most dangerous influence of all was felt to be the idealised figure of la Parisienne. Elegant, fashionably dressed, turning heads wherever she went, la Parisienne cast a spell over impressionable young peasant girls. Home, family and friends would be forgotten as girls set out eagerly to transform themselves into this revered – and reviled – model of femininity.

  But not all youngsters migrated with such fanciful notions. The capital boasted very real practical advantages, too. Jobs were not only more numerous; they were more secure. Agriculture was a notoriously unpredictable business. Many peasant children leaving for Paris had watched incredulously as their parents struggled in vain to maintain paltry little farms. The young were realising that such suffering was futile.

  Marriage remained a peasant’s principal means of securing his or her property and future, but in ever-shrinking village populations, opportunities for prosperous partnerships were few and far between. A country girl who could only ever hope to become a farmer’s wife might realistically aspire to marry an artisan or even a bourgeois if she moved to Paris. And many girls whose families were unable to supply the all-important trousseau, so vital to securing a good marriage, found that a temporary job in Paris increased their value on the marriage market when they returned to the countryside as well.6

  But Emilie did not set off to Paris that morning with the idea of one day returning. There was no previously arranged marriage to fund. Her departure was to be permanent.

  Emilie’s parents were approvingly described as an ‘honest’ family, a term generally understood in 19th-century France to mean ‘of modest income’ but ‘hard-working’.7 Unlike the children of many of the poorest labourers, Emilie had learned to read and write (though she would always struggle with her spelling).8 Her literacy casts her father not as a labourer, but rather a member of the ‘middle’ peasantry, involved in commerce and thus part of a social community.9 Still, Emilie’s departure suggests that M. Delabigne was not affluent enough to support a daughter of working or marrying age, or to secure her an advantageous betrothal to the son of a local farmer. In the absence of secure, well-paid jobs, many parents encouraged their children’s departure for the city.

  But even with her parents’ support, once she left Calvados, Emilie would be utterly alone, probably for the first time in her life. She would need to be resourceful and resilient. Fortunately, these were qualities that the young Normandy girl had in abundance.

  A female diligence passenger like Emilie would have arrived in Paris exhausted, her skirts crumpled and her limbs aching from three long days on an unforgiving road, broken only by snatched hours of sleep in strange beds. But as the vast city of Paris came into view, even the weariest of travellers would be inclined to forget their fatigue. After the quiet backwaters of the provinces, Paris’s splendour could not fail to dazzle and amaze.

  When Emilie arrived in the 1840s, the capital was slowly waking up to industrialisation. New buildings were being constructed to accommodate the growing industries, and Paris had seen its first railway open seven years earlier, turning the capital into a hub of activity and cultural interchange. On the surface, Paris was transforming itself into a lavish metropolis which impressed foreign visitors with France’s prowess. As industry swelled, the promise of jobs saw the city’s population double in size in the first half of the 19th century. Hopeful migrants flocked to the city from all corners of France. In the year Emilie arrived, Paris’s population was nudging 1 million.10

  Career opportunities for women were limited for most of the 19th century. There was no state secondary education for girls until the 1880s, meaning that the options were restricted to shop work, dressmaking, laundering or repairing clothes, cleaning, and waitressing or bar tending. There was industrial work, but this was often less well paid than these domestic tasks. A more fortunate young girl might secure a live-in post as a domestic servant. She might be employed as a maid or, if she were educated, a governess. In all cases, the hours were long and the work demanding. A marriage, even if it were loveless, was often a more attractive alternative.

  For an unmarried country girl like Emilie, determined or obliged to find work, a move to the city was her best chance of finding employment. Even then, women’s wages were meagre compared to men’s. But this did not deter Emilie. Calvados was a department that relied heavily on the fickle industry of agriculture; any regular paid employment was to be celebrated.11

  Emilie was lucky. No sooner had she arrived in Paris than she began work as a lingère or linen maid in a boarding school on the outskirts of the city. To secure such a position so quickly, a young girl would need to have some familiarity with the textile industry and the work of a domestic servant. If she were skilled and had contacts, a country girl like Emilie could even be offered a post before leaving and have her travel expenses paid by her employer.12

  A lingère was a position with heavy responsibilities. Emilie was in charge of checking in and distributing the soiled and clean laundry for the whole school. She had to ensure that all the linen was in good repair and stored appropriately. She would make minor repairs and occasionally be expected to make curtains or other soft furnishings for the school. Above all, she had to be cleanly, meticulous and physically strong. The work was laborious and the hours long. She would rise early, work relentlessly and retire late, exhausted, her body aching and her mind numbed. And at the end of each day, she would have barely 1 franc to show for her labours.

  It was a punishing existence that left little time for pleasure, and in any case, conduct manuals advised employers to limit the number of social excursions enjoyed by their staff. Still, Emilie’s board and lodgings were paid for, and a school was a social community in itself. As a newcomer to the city where she was yet to make friends, Emilie no doubt welcomed the company of her colleagues. These were people with whom she could share her new experiences and exchange gossip as the day passed.

  However, for a girl of Emilie’s age, much of the colour and interest of her job came from the men she was now working closely alongside. And as a new face with a fresh, country complexion and an earthy, natural beauty uncommon in Paris, she soon attracted the attention of one of the male teachers, a Monsieur T.13 By chance, Emilie’s new admirer was also of Normandy extraction. Separated from family and friends, in a ci
ty where everything was strange and unfamiliar, Emilie was easily seduced.14 A romance quickly blossomed.

  The period that followed marked a parenthesis in Emilie’s life, during which the monotonous routine of the working week was punctuated by romantic interludes and stolen moments of intimacy. But then one day towards the end of 1847, Emilie made a terrifying discovery: she was pregnant.

  Some accounts claim that Monsieur T. was already married; others paint him as a bachelor fond of his freedom and his drink. Either way, he never married Emilie. Still in her twenties, Emilie had become the figure that 19th-century society most reviled: the unmarried mother. She knew that both she and her illegitimate child would be social outcasts and she would need to seek alternative lodgings. Her story was only too familiar.

  In 19th-century Paris, single mothers were almost always poor and without family, and frequently drawn from the textile and domestic industries. Emilie knew her options to be severely limited. She could hardly return to Calvados, where she would face unemployment as well as contempt. Her wisest move was to see out her pregnancy in Paris. There, she could at least work for most of the term and then make childcare arrangements afterwards. Perhaps the baby’s father would even assist her financially. It was not so much a chance worth taking – it was her only choice.

  But by the time Emilie was nearing the end of her pregnancy in the summer of 1848, France had been thrown into uproar. If Paris’s face appeared to glitter and sparkle, beneath the surface the country’s economy had been faltering since the middle of the 1840s. The Orléanist regime watched in horror as its popularity began to crumble. In February 1848, a banquet in Paris escalated into a full-scale political demonstration, leading protesters to take to the streets and form barricades. A dismayed Louis-Philippe I abdicated, a provisional government was hastily put in place and a republic declared. But when discontent with the new administration’s political approach reached a head in June, radicals once more took to the streets. The Parisian landscape was transformed into a maze of barricades and the streets reverberated with the sound of gunfire and shouting. Tens of thousands of Parisians participated; at least 12,000 were arrested and some 1,500 were killed.15