The Beauty of Her Age: A Tale of Sex, Scandal and Money in Victorian England

by Jenifer Roberts

  First published 2016

  Amberley Publishing

  The Hill, Stroud

  Gloucestershire, GL5 4EP

  www.amberley-books.com

  Copyright © Jenifer Roberts, 2016

  The right of Jenifer Roberts to be identified as the Author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyrights, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

  ISBN 9781445653204 (PRINT)

  ISBN 9781445653211 (eBOOK)

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without the permission in writing from the Publishers.

  British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data.

  A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

  Typesetting and Origination by Amberley Publishing

  Printed in the UK.

  For my stepdaughters, Mandy and Emma,

  with love and gratitude

  CONTENTS

  Genealogical Trees

  Author’s Note

  1: The Petit Rat

  2: The Fair Danseuse

  3: The Idol of All the Dandies

  4: A Princely Fortune

  5: The Parvenu

  6: The Last Adventure

  7: Mistress Lyne Stephens

  8: The Richest Commoner

  9: The Bill of Complaint

  10: A Lawyer’s Will

  11: The Still Sumptuous Duvernay

  12: The First Military Attaché

  13: The Grande Dame

  14: A Mere Point of Etiquette

  15: La Semaine Sanglante

  16: The Ménage-à-Trois

  17: Madame and the General

  18: The Eye-Doll House

  19: Penal Servitude

  20: First Great Grief

  21: That Tearless Cry

  22: A Solitary Dove

  23: The Precious Boy

  24: The Long Wait Ends

  25: The Legacy

  Picture Section

  Notes

  Bibliography

  Acknowledgements

  Illustration Credits

  The Lyne Stephens family.

  The Claremont family.

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  When I was a child, my mother told me of a great fortune in the family. Her grandfather, a lawyer in Cornwall, was one of the beneficiaries, but he invested unwisely in tin mines and sold his interest to pay off his debts. Over the years, I met a number of distant cousins who also remembered a family fortune, some of them with boxes tucked away in lofts and garages containing papers proving their lineage.

  Details had been lost down the generations. We knew only that the wealth was made by relatives in Portugal, and when their second cousin (my great-grandfather’s great-uncle) inherited the fortune in 1826, he added their name to his. After my mother’s death, I found a few old newspaper cuttings among her papers. These explained how the fortune was divided after the death of a Mrs Yolande Lyne Stephens, the richest woman in England. She too had disappeared from history.

  During the next few years, I unearthed the story of the fortune from its beginnings in Portugal in the mid-eighteenth century to its distribution among a large number of beneficiaries more than 150 years later. This led to the publication of Glass: The Strange History of the Lyne Stephens Fortune. The extraordinary rags-to-riches story of Yolande Lyne Stephens featured in a few short chapters at the end of the book. Now I have been able to bring her centre stage.

  Contemporary values of the pound sterling are relevant to this story of great wealth. To obtain present-day values, I have used Bank of England figures for 2015 taken from ‘The Composite Price Index’ compiled by the Office for National Statistics. These provide multiplication factors ranging between 96 and 126 during the course of the story. To convey the magnitude of sums of money, I have occasionally added present-day values in brackets.

  This dancer’s story is a legend and the Alexandre Dumas of the future will write long novels in many volumes about it.

  Albéric Second

  L’Entr’acte, 9 June 1857

  1

  THE PETIT RAT

  Duvernay was one of the most ravishing women you could wish to see … with charming eyes, an adorably turned leg, and a figure of perfect elegance.

  Charles Séchan, 1883

  One of the brightest stars of the Paris Opéra, Yolande Marie Louise Duvernay, was born on a cold winter day in the Passage Saulnier, a narrow street in the ninth arrondissement. It was December 1812. Napoleon’s Grande Armée was in retreat from Moscow. Her family had endured more than twenty years of revolution and wars; her grandmother would tell her how, in the autumn of 1792, she had seen a mob parade through the streets with the severed head of the Princesse de Lamballe, friend and confidante of Marie Antoinette, impaled on a pike.

  Yolande’s father, Jean-Louis Duvernay, was described as a teacher of dance. Her mother, known to history only as Madame Duvernay, had been a performer in her youth and her only child was destined for the stage. Her first six years in the Passage Saulnier saw the defeat of Napoleon, the restoration of the Bourbon monarchy, and a three-year occupation of Paris by allied troops under the command of the Duke of Wellington. In early 1819, a few months after the last foreign soldiers left the city, she was enrolled in the School of Dance in the Salle Louvois, close to the Salle Montansier, the opera house in the Rue de Richelieu.

  Less than a year later, the king’s nephew was assassinated outside the Salle Montansier during an evening performance. In retribution, the building was demolished and a new opera house, the Salle le Peletier, opened its doors in August 1821. Built of wood and plaster in the narrow Rue le Peletier, it was intended to be a temporary structure but would remain the home of the Paris Opéra for more than fifty years. The School of Dance also moved to new premises in the Rue Richer, close to the new theatre and a few minutes’ walk from the Passage Saulnier.

  Almost all pupils in the School of Dance came from poor families and began their training at a young age. ‘I was barely seven when I was sent to the Rue Richer,’ explained one of Yolande’s fellow pupils:

  I left home in the morning fortified only by a cup of coffee. I had neither clogs for my feet, nor a shawl for my shoulders, and more often than not my poor cotton dress was full of holes. I arrived shivering and often starving. Then began the daily suffering …

  Every morning, my teacher imprisoned my feet in a grooved box. There, heel to heel, with knees pointing outwards, my martyred feet became used to remaining in a parallel line by themselves. They call this ‘turning out’. After half an hour of the box, I had to endure another form of torture. This time I had to place my foot on a barre which I had to hold with the opposite hand to the foot in exercise. This was called ‘breaking in’ …

  After being turned out and broken in, we were forced, under pain of our teacher’s reprimands and our mothers’ chastisement, to study assemblés, jetés, balancés, pirouettes sur le cou-de-pied, sauts de basque, pas de bourrée, and, finally, entrechats quatre, six and huit … and do not imagine that such brutal fatigues last only for a short time. They must continue for ever and be constantly renewed.1

  These underfed, poorly clad little girls in the School of Dance were known as the petits rats. They spent their days in the Rue Richer and their evenings in the opera house, appearing on stage in a variety of juvenile roles
. According to Nestor Roqueplan, an habitué of the theatre:

  The rat is a child of the building … a little girl who wears cast-off shoes, faded shawls and soot-coloured hats, warms herself over smoky oil-lamps, has bread sticking out of her pockets, and begs you for ten sous to buy sweets. A rat makes holes in the scenery to watch the performance, rushes about behind the backcloths, and plays puss-in-the-corner in the wings. She is supposed to earn twenty sous a night, but with the fines which her pranks entail, she receives only eight to ten francs a month and thirty kicks from her mother.2

  Each petit rat was under the control of her mother, ‘herself perhaps a decayed celebrity’, who sat in the wings:

  ready to throw a shawl over her offspring as she left the stage; coming, night after night, with her little basket containing eau sucré, or diluted vin ordinaire, and the invariable four-legged stool on which she sat during the performance, abusing the director … for his want of discernment in not bringing forward more prominently the child on whom all her hopes were centred.3

  Yolande’s mother was the most domineering and ambitious of these stage mothers, ready to fight ‘tooth and nail’ for the advancement of her daughter. She was venal, bossy, controlling and manipulative, a woman happy to pimp Yolande for her own financial gain. Mothers of petit rats who had reached puberty were not only in charge of their daughter’s performances on stage, they were also in charge of their sexual availability. Men of society kept an eye on the ballet pupils and, through their mothers, made assignations with the petit rat of their choice.

  In 1829, when Yolande was sixteen, her mother wrote three letters to the director of the Opéra, Émile Lubbert, asking that her daughter be transferred to the classe de perfectionnement taught by the ballet-master Auguste Vestris, a class intended for pupils who showed promise of progressing beyond the corps de ballet.

  Her first letter, written in August, was forwarded to Vestris for his opinion. There was no reply. She wrote again on 25 October, asking that Yolande be granted leave of several months because of her ‘altered health’ and reminding him about her request for the classe de perfectionnement. This time Lubbert replied, granting the leave but making no mention of the transfer. On 2 November she wrote for a third time, thanking Lubbert for granting the leave and ‘also to request the class of M. Vestris. There has never been the least favour from the administration, so I think that this request could perhaps be granted.’4

  At the end of the year, Lubbert agreed that Yolande should enter the class taught by Vestris when she returned from ‘sick leave’. This was a euphemism for pregnancy, the result of an assignation arranged by her mother. There is no further mention of a child in the records. Yolande may have had a miscarriage or an abortion, but the months of absence from class would suggest a full-term pregnancy. If the child of an opera-dancer survived, it was normally given away to relatives or to a family in the country.

  Recovered from childbirth, Yolande joined the classe de perfectionnement in the spring of 1830. Auguste Vestris, known as Le Dieu de la Danse, was an elderly man who had made his début as a dancer as far back as 1772. He understood what was needed to fill the auditorium. ‘He was a sensualist,’ explained the director. ‘He demanded provocative smiles, poses and attitudes, almost without decency or modesty. I often heard him say to his pupils “be charming and coquettish; display the most captivating freedom in all your movements; you must inspire passion so that men in the audience want to go to bed with you”.’5

  In the summer of 1830, a revolution in Paris toppled the Bourbon monarchy and closed the opera house for nine days. The three-day uprising, known as Les Trois Glorieuses, began on 27 July. Six days later, the Bourbon king was replaced on the throne by Louis-Philippe d’Orléans.

  Yolande ventured into the streets during the uprising to see the barricades and experience the sounds and smells of gunfire; when it was over, she walked to the School of Dance through the debris of the fighting. These three days would prove to be a major turning point in her life. The July Revolution removed the Paris Opéra from the control of the state. It became a subsidised private enterprise with an independent director – and Émile Lubbert was replaced by Dr Louis Véron.

  Louis Véron was thirty-two years old, a doctor who was enriched by the launch of a patent medicine, Pâte Régnault, for the treatment of sore throats. A man of unprepossessing appearance, with thick features and a heavy frame, he was described by one contemporary as ‘ruddy, with a pock-marked face, barely any nose … pot-bellied … lips thick, hair rare, eyebrows absent … and with the affectations and mincing airs of the salon’. Another described him as ‘a mould of Régnault paste in a setting of currant jelly’, and a third as ‘a bulky caricature-like figure, with a head entirely buried in an immense white cravat’ which was believed to hide a skin condition.6

  Véron applied for the post of director because he foresaw that the July Revolution would result in the rise of a bourgeoisie. After his appointment on 2 March 1831, he set out to indulge the tastes of this new fashionable class. He formalised the system of sexual assignation by opening the doors of the Foyer de la Danse, a room behind the stage with barres and mirrors where dancers gathered before a performance, to young men of society, most of whom were members of the Jockey Club. According to Albéric Second, another habitué of the opera, the Foyer provided these men ‘with their amorous pleasures, just as the Pompadour stud-farm provides them with their equestrian pleasures; they use it as a storehouse for remounts, nothing more’.7

  Véron also introduced the star system, presenting a sequence of ‘young and beautiful dancers’, each one dancing ‘better and differently from those who have preceded her. If one is aiming neither at the intelligence nor at the heart, one must appeal to the senses and most particularly to the eyes.’ He attended the classes de perfectionnement to select those pupils whose talent and charm would most appeal to his audience.

  Yolande stood out in class for her beauty, her elegant figure and long legs, her lustrous dark hair and wide, sparkling eyes. She looked entrancing in her practice costume: a tight, low-cut bodice above a knee-length ‘bouffant skirt of net or striped muslin’. Vestris could see that Véron found her attractive. On the rare occasions when she came to class alone, he would rush off to the opera house. ‘He would run up all excited,’ wrote Véron, ‘his hair flying, his feet turned out, and say to me “she is there without her mother!”’

  Véron was enchanted by Yolande, this ‘ravishing young dancer’. It was easy for her mother to persuade him to take her to his bed. At the age of eighteen she became his mistress, as well as his first rising star. Just three weeks after he took over as director, he began to prepare her for leading roles, bypassing the normal route of the corps de ballet and the junior grades.

  Taking the stage name of Pauline Duvernay, she was almost overcome by fright when she made her début in the opera house on 13 April, dancing a pas de deux from the ballet Mars et Vénus with Antoine Coulon. She was, wrote the critic of the Courrier des Théâtres, ‘graceful, though a trifle weak. Poses particularly become her.’

  Further performances increased her confidence and she danced her first leading role, Venus in Mars et Vénus, on 5 September. A few weeks later, when she was about to perform a pas de deux with Lise Noblet, Véron found her sobbing in the wings. He asked what the matter was, and when she remained silent, her mother took him aside.

  ‘I will tell you,’ she said. ‘She is dancing this evening with Mademoiselle Noblet. Mademoiselle Noblet has the most beautiful jewels. My daughter has none.’

  ‘Despite my long experience,’ wrote Véron, ‘a woman’s tears always affect me and I sent at once to Madame Janisset [the jeweller] for the supreme remedy for such suffering and such poignant sorrow. It was one of my days of managerial weakness.’

  Yolande had studied her ‘pretty air of melancholy’. She had learned to be manipulative; she knew that tears were a powerful means of persuasion. She cried in class so frequently that, on one o
ccasion, Vestris sprinkled the floor of his classroom with a watering can. ‘Look,’ he said to Véron, ‘those are her tears.’

  ‘This young dancer,’ wrote Véron in his memoirs, ‘lifted to prominence by a skilful mother, had above all studied the power of weeping.’8

  2

  THE FAIR DANSEUSE

  When I think of Duvernay prancing in as the Bayadère, I say it was a vision of loveliness such as mortal eyes can’t see nowadays … to the clash of cymbals and the thumping of my heart, in she used to dance!

  William Makepeace Thackeray, 1863

  At the end of the year, Yolande took over the role of the abbess in a one-act divertissement performed during Meyerbeer’s opera Robert le Diable. The role had previously been danced by the star of the Opéra, Marie Taglioni, who had trained with her father in Vienna and never experienced life as a petit rat.

  The curtain rose on an eerie scene of a ruined cloister with overgrown tombs and glowing lanterns. The footlights were extinguished; the effect of moonlight created by gas jets suspended from the flies. Nuns who had been unfaithful to their vows are summoned from their tombs by a young man. They remove their habits to dance while the abbess encourages them to give in to pleasure. She dances before the boy, luring him towards the grave, but he escapes and the nuns sink back into their tombs.

  ‘One can vaguely see the coffin covers open up in the darkness,’ wrote a young Théophile Gautier:

  then indistinct forms begin to emerge … detaching themselves from each standing tomb and climbing each flag stone like smoky fumes. A ray of light from a gas-jet shoots forth across the church-like vaults, sketching in the bluish shadows the feminine forms which, under the whiteness of their shrouds, begin to move with a deathly sensuality.1

  The seduction scene had proved difficult for Marie Taglioni, but it presented no problems for Yolande. She was, wrote the critic of the Journal de Débats on 14 February, ‘very young and very pretty, dances to perfection, and her miming is full of fascination. This young virtuoso is making rapid progress and is following the traces of Mademoiselle Taglioni with a light foot.’