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

by Jenifer Roberts

  The meeting took place in her dressing-room at the theatre while Stephens waited outside, his seconds beside him armed with duelling pistols. Fifteen minutes passed before La Valette opened the door.

  ‘Now, Sir,’ said Stephens, standing to attention. ‘Whenever you please, I am at your service.’

  ‘The honours of a double triumph are yours,’ replied La Valette. ‘With your permission, I shall return to France.’

  ‘The Last Adventure of Pauline Duvernay’ includes three letters, supposedly written by Stephens and his father. These are clearly fictional, but they provide a flavour of the gossip circulating in Paris at the time. The first letter is from Charles:

  My dear son. You have abandoned your hounds and your horses to the care of your servants and your friends. You are neglecting the excitement of the hunting field and the occupations of a gentleman for the pleasures of the opera. My dear son, what has happened to you? Tell me. It has been a long time since I have had to pay your gambling debts. I am worried about you.

  The next letter, from Stephens, is a masterpiece of purple prose:

  My dear father. Since I have seen a French lady dancer who jumps up and down so naturally in the Spanish manner in the King’s Theatre, my dogs, my horses, steeplechases and the fox hunt bore me. I would happily exchange all my animals, snap my fingers at my horses and their harnesses of reindeer skin, for this Andalusian with her warm and moist eyes and flaring nostrils, whose long silky locks are black and lustrous, whose legs are so fine, whose calves are so firm, whose feet are so delicate, and who is called Duvernay. Laporte thinks she will cost me at least £3000 to be paid to the mother, of whom he thinks very little.

  The third letter is again from Charles:

  My dear son. I have received your good news with great satisfaction. Since you find advantage in the affair of the French dancer, it is important for there not to be too long an ‘engagement’ between you. I will pay for your hunting retinue and the price which you need to pay … Thus, my dear Stephens, I enclose an order for £9000 on the House of Baring, which is the basic cost of the dogs, the horses and the servants … Have attention to give the money to the French lady little by little and do not give it to her all at once.

  Details of the arrangement soon became public knowledge. The June edition of Bentley’s Miscellany published a long poem by Thomas Ingoldsby, which was reproduced in a local newspaper as early as 6 June. It included this stanza:

  My Lord Tomnoddy he raised his head

  And thus to Tiger Tim he said

  ‘Malibran’s dead, Duvernay’s fled,

  Taglioni has not yet arrived in her stead;

  Tiger Tim, come tell me true,

  What may a Nobleman find to do?’5

  Stephens had to bide his time while Yolande was wooed by other men during the final weeks of her contract. Although she had no intention of risking her life annuity, she enjoyed teasing him with stories about his rivals. On 11 June, The Satirist published a ‘conversation’ between them:

  ‘Dat Lord Lowther,’ observed Duvernay to Lyne Stephens, ‘ver great – vat you call de leetle son of de dog?’

  ‘Puppy.’

  ‘Oui,’ rejoined the danseuse, ‘poppy, he ver great poppy, he make love to me every night.’

  ‘Does he!’ exclaimed the parvenu, ‘then it is time for me to cease making love by day.’

  7

  MISTRESS LYNE STEPHENS

  Sad complaints are made respecting the kidnapping of the best dancers by certain noted roués like Lyne Stephens.

  The Drama, 2 March 1839

  Yolande danced for the last time on 19 August 1837, performing the Cachucha and a pas de deux from Le Corsair. It must have been a poignant moment as she came forward to acknowledge the applause from the auditorium, knowing that she would never again appear on stage. ‘One cannot renounce this life of excitement and triumph without pain,’ wrote Charles de Boigne. ‘It is a sacrifice which only the heart can understand but which all the money in England is not enough to repay.’1

  Three days later, she and Stephens travelled to Paris where they informed Henri Duponchel that she would not return to the Opéra. She would not complete her original contract which had another eight months to run, nor would she compensate him for the additional thirty-two weeks she had spent in London. She was too valuable a star to lose at such short notice. Duponchel informed her that she was contractually obliged to him for the next sixteen months, that her return to Paris would be announced to the public and that if she failed to appear he would sue. Stephens replied that he was willing to pay any fine the court might impose.

  On their return to London, he installed Yolande in a house in Kensington and provided a cook, housekeeper and lady’s maid, as well as a carriage, coachman and two horses. Proud of his new acquisition, he entertained his hunting and gambling friends to show off the celebrated ballerina who was now his mistress. ‘She had a fine mansion,’ wrote a Paris journal (with some exaggeration), ‘carriage, servants, etc., and entertained each week to dinner about a dozen of the wittiest and most distinguished men in town.’2

  Stephens spent much of his time in Kensington but he continued to live with his father in Portman Square so Yolande was often alone. She occupied herself by giving dancing lessons to the children of the aristocracy and middle classes. ‘She had a lovely foot,’ remembered one pupil, the twelve-year-old Adeline de Horsey (future Countess of Cardigan), ‘and was the embodiment of grace and charm.’3

  During their first winter together, Stephens gave up his shooting parties and his hunting in Melton Mowbray. With Yolande’s celebrity still fresh in men’s minds, he felt it wiser to remain close to her in London. In the spring of 1838, they set out together on a tour of Europe. On 23 May, the Morning Chronicle published a complaint from Pierre-François Laporte:

  Mr Laporte begs respectfully to submit to the impartial judgement of the subscribers the following statement of facts relative to the ballet department … Mr Laporte had, as early as April 1837, engaged Mademoiselle Duvernay for three months of the present season (1838), calculating on her services from the 15th April to the 15th July … In the early part of February, Mr Laporte received a communication from a person authorised to speak for Mademoiselle Duvernay, that she was at Milan, and was preparing to return to England as soon as her health would allow. On the very next day, Mr Laporte left London for Milan, and was there informed by a certificate of her medical adviser that Mademoiselle Duvernay’s health would not admit of her dancing this season.

  Yolande may have forgotten her agreement with Laporte, or perhaps she believed that the change in her circumstances had received such widespread publicity that he should have drawn his own conclusions. When it seemed that he would hold her to the agreement, she resorted to the time-honoured excuse of ill-health.

  Laporte was angry that she had let him down ‘at the eleventh hour’. Henri Duponchel was angry too. His suit for breach of contract was heard in the Tribunal de Commerce on 11 May, with damages set at 25,000 francs, a sum which Stephens could easily pay out of his monthly allowance from his father. By the time the case was heard, he and Yolande were back in England, making plans to spend the following winter in Paris.

  On 24 October 1838, the Morning Post reported that ‘Mr Lyne Stephens intends, in about a fortnight, to remove the whole of his splendid establishment to Paris for the winter’. This ‘splendid establishment’ included eighteen horses and a large number of stable boys and grooms. Yolande accompanied him and the change from Melton Mowbray proved a great success. ‘Hunting is kept up in excellent style in the neighbourhood of Paris,’ commented The Era on 20 January. ‘Earls Pembroke and Yarmouth, Lords Leveson and Seymour, Count Demidoff, and Mr Stephens Lyne Stephens take the lead.’

  During the summer of 1839, Stephens gave two grand dinners in Portman Square, one to ‘a party of sporting gentlemen’, the other to ‘a party of fashionables’. In October, he and Yolande left again for Paris; the Morning Post reported on
16 November that ‘Mr Lyne Stephens has been the leader in sporting circles in Paris since the commencement of the hunting season. Versailles is their headquarters.’

  This was the last time that Stephens spent the winter riding to hounds. In April 1840, he sold his horses and let his stables and coach-house in Melton Mowbray to the Marquis of Waterford. Thirty-eight years old, with a taste for expensive food and wine, he was no longer fit enough for the hunting field. ‘A rich repast with an abundance of wine or spirits occasions indigestion, headache and nervous debility,’ wrote a sporting journalist, ‘in which state no man is in a comfortable condition to ride over a country.’4

  Yolande became entitled to her life annuity two months later. At first, she remained with Stephens, comfortable in the luxurious lifestyle he provided for her in Kensington, but in the summer of 1841, she travelled alone to Paris and remained there for several months. She had fulfilled the terms of the transaction negotiated with her mother; she was free to resume her affair with Félix de La Valette.

  After their last meeting in the King’s Theatre in 1837, La Valette had returned to Paris where, ‘to punish himself for having loved the ungrateful Duvernay, he threw himself into the skinny arms’ of the opera singer Rosine Stoltz. A few months later, he began a relationship with Fanny Elssler, living with her in her apartment until she left Paris in the spring of 1840 for a two-year tour of the United States. He, too, was free to resume his affair with Yolande.

  On 21 November, an English gossip sheet, the New Satirist, published a salacious report:

  Duvernay is now in Paris and, unknown to Lyne Stephens, constantly sees La Valette with whom her former intimacy is renewed. Again does he press that fair creature in his arms; again does her voluptuous bosom heave against his throbbing breast; again are her lips glued to his in all the tender dalliance of love’s delights.

  Rumours of the affair reached London several weeks before they were published in the New Satirist and may have led to a breakdown in Stephens’s mental health. His illness was announced in the Morning Post on 9 October: ‘Mr Lyne Stephens was taken suddenly ill on Thursday last, at his father’s house in Portman Square.’ Two weeks later, the newspaper reported that he remained ‘in a very precarious state’.

  Having enjoyed her affair for several months, and come to the conclusion that La Valette had little to offer in comparison with her English lover, Yolande returned to London in early December. Stephens was recovering by this time and felt well enough to confront her about the rumours. Dissolving into tears, she replied that she had been lonely in Kensington during the many days and evenings he spent with his father in Portman Square.

  Her power of weeping softened his heart. Not only did Stephens forgive her, he also agreed that she should leave Kensington and come to live with him and his father. ‘It is arranged,’ reported The Satirist on 19 December, ‘that Lyne Stephens Senior, and Lyne Stephens Junior, and Mistress Lyne Stephens are, after the present winter, to occupy one house – the one in Portman Square.’

  Lyne Stephens Senior was unhappy with this arrangement. He had nothing in common with his son’s mistress who insisted on conversing in French. He was also tiring of city life; he missed Chicksands Priory and the tranquillity of a house surrounded by woods and gardens. In June 1843, at a cost of £24,000 (£3 million), he acquired the freehold of the Roehampton Grove estate: a late eighteenth-century villa (Grove House), a smaller villa (Lower Grove House), and 144 acres of land.

  A rural area adjoining Richmond Park, Roehampton boasted several grand villas where wealthy families came to enjoy the country air. Grove House was designed in neoclassical style by James Wyatt, the rooms were decorated in the style of Robert Adam, and the house was surrounded by formal gardens with a lake and a dummy bridge. Charles moved here in the autumn of 1843, leaving Stephens and Yolande alone in Portman Square.

  Now Yolande could play the hostess as Stephens entertained his hunting and gambling friends, but these men never introduced her to their wives, nor was she invited into their homes. She was mistress of a grand house in London, but she was not a wife and attitudes were changing as Victorian morality tightened its grip on society. She was condemned for flaunting her relationship with Stephens, for living with him without his father’s presence to provide a veneer of respectability.

  In 1841, her tears had persuaded him to move her from Kensington to Portman Square. Two years later, after his father left for Roehampton, she began to think of ways of persuading him into marriage. Her chance arrived in January 1845, during a stay of several months in Paris, when the death of the ninety-year-old Lady Aldborough provided the perfect opportunity.

  Lady Aldborough had employed a lady’s maid, a middle-aged Englishwoman known for her religious views and strict morals, a lady’s maid who was now in need of a new position. Yolande offered her employment as her own femme de chambre, failing to tell her that she and Stephens were not husband and wife. The maid accepted the position. A few weeks later, as English guests were arriving for dinner, she took Stephens aside and whispered in his ear that her mistress was unable to join the party. He made his way to the bedroom where he found Yolande weeping into the pillows.

  ‘I can no longer live in such public contempt,’ she sobbed. ‘My femme de chambre has resigned from my service because we are not married. I cannot bear this insult. I shall leave the house tomorrow if you continue to think so little of me.’

  Once again, her power of weeping served its purpose. Louis Véron wrote of her ‘perseverance in achieving her goal’, while Paul Mahalin commented dryly that the forthcoming marriage was ‘proof that an English lady’s maid can be useful for something’.5

  Stephens, Yolande and a train of servants left Paris on 23 June and arrived in Dover two days later with ‘a suite of two carriages and thirty-eight passengers from Boulogne’. They made their way to Roehampton, where Stephens asked for his father’s blessing. On 3 July, the Morning Chronicle announced that:

  A notice is to be seen at the Mairie of the second arrondissement of Paris of the intended marriage of Mr Stephens Lyne Stephens with Mademoiselle Yolande Marie Louise Duvernay. Mademoiselle Duvernay is a native of Paris, where she made her first appearance as a danseuse at the Opéra in 1831 … She retired from the stage in 1837, when, according to the Le Constitutionnel, ‘she devoted her heart and life to the rich foreigner who is about to marry her’.

  The owner and editor of Le Constitutionnel was none other than Louis Véron, who must have smiled to himself as he wrote this piece. Ten days later, another journal, The Era, went into greater detail:

  Do you recollect the opera-ballet called La Tentation? … This fascinating nymph, this Miranda, was Mademoiselle Duvernay, then in her 20th year, with beaming eyes, a real Parisian foot, and elegant and light as a bird. All this took place at the Opéra, somewhat more than thirteen long years ago. Mademoiselle Duvernay, after six years of an eventful existence, quitted the theatre and consecrated … her heart and future hopes to the rich foreigner whom she is now on the verge of marrying …

  In Mademoiselle Duvernay’s veins glowed in other days the true blood of a dancer and the passions of an artiste … We have seen a whole generation of dancers pass away, and among that number not one who could boast of a romantic career. La Duvernay alone, a voluntary fugitive from the applause so dear to an artiste, resigns herself to live in opulence, to assume the air of a grande dame … and well she may, for her father-in-law has £90,000 per annum – more than two millions of francs.

  Charles would have preferred his son to marry into high society but he gave the marriage his blessing. He also provided a settlement of £10,000 (£1 million). The deed was signed on 5 July, with two of Stephens’s friends acting as trustees: Rowland Errington and Errington’s brother-in-law, Sir Richard Williams-Bulkeley.

  On 14 July 1845, the wedding party left Grove House for St Mary’s church in Putney, the parish church for Roehampton, where Yolande and Stephens were married in an Anglican ceremony. Afte
r the service, they were driven to the Catholic chapel in Cadogan Terrace, Chelsea, where Yolande attended mass when she lived in Kensington. Here they were married for a second time by a Catholic priest.

  A few days later, they left England to spend several months on the Continent. During their stay in Florence, Yolande sat for a portrait bust in white marble by Lorenzo Bartolini, professor of sculpture at the Accademia di Belle Arti. Her left hand was also cast in bronze. Used today as a paperweight, this tiny sensitive hand has slender, slightly bent fingers and carefully manicured nails.

  8

  THE RICHEST COMMONER

  La Duvernay … a voluntary fugitive from the applause so dear to an artiste, resigns herself to live in opulence, to assume the air of a grande dame.

  The Era, 13 July 1845

  Yolande was thirty-two years old at the time of her marriage. She had grown plump and well cushioned after eight years of luxurious living and was ‘now as remarkable for embonpoint as she used to be for slenderness and agility’. She had hoped that marriage would give her respectability. Instead it shocked society and did nothing to improve her reputation. It was acceptable (if improper) for a man to keep a mistress with a sexual history; to marry her was social disaster.

  When the tenant of Lower Grove House in Roehampton left the property in 1844, Stephens commissioned an architect to improve the house for use as a country villa. He added a coach-house and stables and laid out formal gardens. Six months after their marriage, he and Yolande decided to move away from the censure of London society. They gave up the house in Portman Square and, on 3 March 1846, the newspapers reported that: ‘Mr and Mrs Lyne Stephens have taken possession of their beautiful villa at Roehampton.’ Yolande’s notoriety followed her there. ‘Because Mrs Lyne Stephens’s character had not been spotless,’ explained one of her neighbours, ‘it was natural that the matrons of Roehampton refused to call upon her.’1