by Roland Perry
Céleste’s Soeurs de France were kept close to the action and she was as busy as any general, marshalling her troops for the behind-the-barricades work in saving lives and tending to the wounded.
On 1 December 1870 Céleste returned to one of her ambulance stations at Nogent, ten kilometres east of Paris, and helped nurse thirty-five wounded soldiers. The next day she saw French troops moving through the town on the way to the front. Céleste was soon working at a demanding pace as the wounded and dead were brought in. On 3 December she returned to Paris. Sometimes, although near to exhaustion, she would go to halls in Paris to recite her nationalistic poems and raise funds for her work.
On 5 December she was deeply saddened to learn of the death of good friend Alexandre Dumas Sr at the age of sixty-eight. Céleste took time off from her busy rounds of ambulance stations to attend his funeral and burial at his birthplace of Villers-Cotterêts, in Aisne.
CHAPTER 50
Commune with the Devil
Céleste’s forty-sixth birthday on 27 December 1870 passed with little joy as the Prussian Army continued to defeat the French provincial forces that were organised and urged on by Gambetta. Favre travelled to Versailles on 24 January 1871 to discuss peace talks with Bismarck. The Prussian president agreed to end the siege and food convoys would be allowed to enter Paris on condition that the French Government of National Defence surrender key fortresses outside Paris. Knowing that Gambetta’s provincial armies were most unlikely to break through and relieve the capital, Favre agreed to the terms. French President Trochu resigned the next day. On 27 January a most distressed Favre signed the surrender at Versailles, with armistice to come into force at midnight.
Learning of this, and that the Prussians were about to enter Paris, Céleste disbanded Les Soeurs de France. She could not stand the thought of seeing the Prussians march into her city, so she headed for Le Vésinet. There were no trains running and no other transports. She trudged the sixteen kilometres north through intermittent evidence of the invading armies’ destructive path.
As she neared Chalet Lionel at Le Vésinet she began to expect the worst. Her fears materialised. The Prussians had occupied and looted her grand Australian-style home. She decided to have it repaired immediately, yet this soon became of less concern than the news that Solange, now just shy of twenty-two, had disappeared. According to the woman who had cared for her and the home, Solange had gone off of her own volition with Prussian soldiers. This at first surprised Céleste, although Solange was not alone in leaving with the conquering enemy. Mother and daughter had become increasingly estranged, with fault on both sides. Céleste’s expectations for her adopted daughter had been too high and the girl resented her mother’s fame and glamour, a situation exacerbated by her being adopted. Solange did not have Céleste’s drive or intelligence. Not many people did. Also the girl reacted against her mother’s pushing. Solange had been content with her work learning the drapery business, but she was rebellious and difficult.
Céleste made inquiries with the authorities, but was informed that it would be impossible to trace her. The victorious Prussian Army was not about to stop and search for missing French family members, especially unmanageable young adults. Céleste experienced a mix of emotions from distress to guilt over Solange’s disappearance. On reflection, she could only hope that her adopted daughter would find happiness.
An armistice in February 1871 was meant to lead to peace, but it was only the signal for communists to start a bloody internecine war, using radicalised elements of the National Guard to fight the regular French Army. It resulted in the brief control of Paris by the radical Paris Commune from 18 March to 28 May, culminating in bloody confrontations that all but destroyed parts of the capital before the elected government led by Adolphe Thiers resumed power.
By the end of May 1871, the turmoil, death and destruction of war and internal political struggles, which had reigned in some form in France for nearly a year, was over. So also was a liberated, some would say decadent, era.
Looking back on it, the Count Albert de Maugny wrote:
A whole epoch! And what an epoch! Eighteen years of luxury, pleasure, recklessness and gaiety, of gallantry and incomparable elegance. It was a time . . . like an apparition of the eighteenth century. Then [after the Franco-Prussian War and the Commune period] a veil of mourning and sadness suddenly hid the décor; it all vanished again, into shadow and triviality . . . Who can remember without emotion, that swarm of pretty young women . . . happy to be alive, to flirt and to be admired? You see, the mould for those women is broken.1
The fall of the Second Empire had changed the French, and in particular the Parisian, way of life. The royal court had disappeared, as had the aristocracy that had made the courtesans distinctive and special. The dandies were almost all gone. The emperor, who once said he enjoyed a woman as much as a good cigar after dinner, was no more. The life of pleasure now seemed banal and profligate. War had been a great leveller while it was on and after it had ended, everything got serious. The artists who had painted the courtesans, the poets who had been inspired to create verse, and the writers who had been driven to describe them were gone, dying out or out of favour.
Writer Maxime du Camp more or less supported the attitude that the Prussians had what they saw as the morals-free decades in France when he blamed ‘les femmes interlopes’—the female interlopers—for corrupting the solid middle classes, and some of the aristocracy. He reckoned the war had been lost because of it.
It was the generation who had lost themselves in a life of pleasure, du Camp believed, and therefore lost the Franco-Prussian War. They had changed the course of French history. ‘For when France looked within herself for the men she needed, she saw emptiness, and she found no one.’2
In mid-summer 1871 the Count de Naurois returned with his daughter from exile in England. He renewed his friendship with Céleste and did not hesitate to fund the rebuilding of her Le Vésinet homestead. In an odd turn of events, she was asked by his business representative to repay 6000 francs that Naurois had advanced her when she became the director at his Théâtre des Nouveautés. Céleste was confused. She knew from his daughter that he sometimes did some irritating things over money, and Céleste put this strange demand—straight after funding the refurbishment of Chalet Lionel—down to his age, and perhaps some mental confusion. In order to pay him back she asked if she could mortgage the property in his name, which because of his huge wealth was always acceptable to the bank, Crédit Foncier. He did not hesitate to accept this arrangement, and thus had an indirect but legitimate interest in the Le Vésinet property.
After missing more than a year in the tenuous world of the theatre, Céleste’s finances were again uncertain. But with her usual, undiminished drive and diligence, she set about resurrecting her shows. She decided on something simple and income-generating to begin with—a lecture tour of Belgium, commencing in Brussels on 3 April 1872. This seemed safer than another play, which could be a flop with fickle audiences. No one knew how other nations would react to anything in a newly arranged continental Europe, with the Prussian-dominated confederated German nation the new superpower.
Céleste was promoted as ‘Madame Lionel de Chabrillan’. However, the Belgian press had no interest in a French countess. They dragged out her history as a top courtesan. Predominantly male audiences turned up expecting a risqué performance. Instead, they were given tales about the ‘Wild West’ of the Australian goldfields. Céleste, now forty-seven, was still a beautiful woman, but not the sensual coquette she had played at will in front of audiences a generation earlier. She received some catcalls, but restored the night by handling questions about her former life with aplomb. She went on with the tour, using the same format, and managed to avoid a financial failure.
These shows were not the attractive plays she had put on before the Franco-Prussian War. Nevertheless, the income generated allowed her to tread water. She worked hard and produced more plays, but they were flops.
Once more she began to run into liquidity problems and she was forced to take out a second mortgage on the property, which increased Naurois’s indirect interest.
During the summer of 1872, she returned to Le Vésinet and found that she was so far behind in her payments that the bank had put the house up for sale. It was sold to a neighbour, who had often asked Céleste if she would sell. Now, it seemed, the neighbour had acquired it by default. Céleste claimed that she had not received the summonses warning her this would happen. She had a strict honesty policy over all business matters and she accused the neighbour of having stolen the notices from her letterbox.
Céleste informed Naurois. He told her not to worry.
‘Your neighbour is a scoundrel,’ he said, ‘but he shall not get your house. I’m one of your creditors. According to the law, I’m entitled to make a higher bid for it.’
He made the bid the next day, just before the property was transferred legally to the neighbour. Naurois informed her of his acquisition, but he had gone one better by buying all the land surrounding Chalet Lionel.
Céleste had been reading about the orphans in the two former French border provinces of Alsace and Lorraine, which had been taken over by the Prussians. She hurried to see Naurois, an idea forming.
‘Why couldn’t we build something for the orphans on that extra land you’ve bought?’ she asked, focusing all her persuasive powers on him.
‘Whatever made you want that?’
‘I once told you of my deprived childhood,’ she said, ‘and my dark times at Saint-Lazare.’
‘I admire your humanity, my dear, but it isn’t just a matter of building an orphanage. There would be considerable politics involved. The Germans control the region.’
‘I’m sure with your marvellous range of contacts, my dear Count, you could have those children released to live here.’
The count demurred. Céleste nagged him over it and he agreed to look into it with his political connections.
By late 1872, Anne-Victoire was no longer well enough to live on her own at Belleville and Céleste arranged for her to live in an eldery care home. She provided her with all the necessary comforts in her final years, and paid the rent of 100 francs a month. Anne-Victoire developed dementia, which led her to complaining bitterly to her daughter until she died on 24 February 1874, aged seventy-seven.
As her will dictated, Anne-Victoire was buried next to Vincent in the family grave at Pré-Saint-Gervais. Céleste shuddered at the thought of being placed near Vincent herself. She had never forgiven him for molesting her, and blamed it, not without reason, for the early life she had been pushed into. Céleste was made to feel so miserable and lonely by the prospect of being laid to rest in such company for eternity that she swore never to return there, until she, too, was dead.
CHAPTER 51
Muse and Munificence
In 1875, Céleste’s close friend Georges Bizet produced his finest, most commercial opera at the Opéra-Comique. Some critics savaged it and branded it as ‘shocking’, which of course generated interest. The big-drinking, chain-smoking and overweight Bizet, ill and depressed by the critical response, died of a heart attack at age thirty-seven, almost exactly three months after the opening performance. This was when Carmen became a stupendous success, and Bizet never knew. He had lived for his work and had been inspired by people such as Céleste, who believed in his talent and urged him to keep producing. Bizet always said his output and mild acclaim were rewards in themselves. He never seemed to suffer from recognition deprivation, although it was known that he had the highest expectations for Carmen.
‘The gypsy heroine is little more than a splendid animal,’ Paul England wrote in his book Fifty Favourite Operas, ‘irresistible in her sensuous beauty, superb in her physical courage, knowing no law higher than her own desires. Carmen’s amours are rarely of more than six months’ duration’.1
Many critics then and later suggested that Bizet based the character on Céleste, who early in her career fitted most of this description.2 He loved whores and he was so enchanted by Céleste that he wanted to give up his girlfriend for her. Céleste was rarely out of the press and his mind. They lived close to each other for more than a decade, but according to her, never had sex.
Bizet’s early demise prompted Céleste to turn to her creativity for solace. She wrote the play Ambition Fatale with such manic drive that she caught bronchitis and ended up in a nursing home, the Maison Dubois. But the nurses could not stop her frenetic scribbling. By the time she was well enough to leave she had finished and sold the play to the Théâtre Beaumarchais, which produced it at the end of 1875. She did not stop writing and returned to a remote Australian setting for another book, The Two Sisters. It had one memorable line: ‘Dreamers don’t go to Australia; dreamers would not have time to dream there.’
The Australian experience may have been harsh for her, but she was extracting everything from it to help her make a living.
Céleste had moved from being productive to prolific. The book’s sales were modest, but she was keeping her name before the press and public. It prompted Céleste’s publisher to convince her to bring out a new set of memoirs, Death at the End of the World (Un Deuil au Bout du Monde), covering her wedding, the boat trip to Australia and her life in Melbourne and the goldfields. It was 1877, twenty years after she had returned to Paris from her Australian sojourn.
She had been thinking about publishing her memoirs from that time ever since her tour of Belgium five years previously and she had been refreshing her memory of the experience with the odd talk in Paris. It was an about face after all her protests two decades earlier about the republishing of her first set of memoirs. But she felt comfortable with this book and her fears about the Chabrillan family’s reprisals had subsided. It was scandal-free and gave her a chance to reiterate Lionel’s efforts to make sure their marriage was valid. It covered their lives in Australia, and expressed the factual experience from which she drew her themes in the fictional The Gold Thieves.
Death at the End of the World was published under the name Countess Lionel de Chabrillan, a defiant reminder to the Chabrillan family. Just to make the point even stronger, she agreed to the publisher bringing out a third edition of the original memoirs.
The family had won many of the early battles in thwarting her career in publishing and the theatre, but she was winning the war in reminding France of her marriage and her grand love affair with Count Lionel. The new book also kept her name in the press and generated welcome extra income.
Céleste finally convinced her benefactor the Count de Naurois to approach the Count d’Haussonville, who was in charge of helping the people of Alsace and Lorraine, with her suggestion about an orphanage at Le Vésinet. Haussonville knew the Chabrillans and refused to facilitate the building work. Naurois was not used to being rejected, especially over such a humane and charitable project. He persisted. Haussonville accepted the proposal on the condition that Céleste would not be on the list of patrons. Céleste never wished accolades for the charity. She agreed to this and building began. While she was overseeing it, the nuns, the Sisters of Saint-Charles, who would bring up the twenty orphans, approached her about the construction of a small chapel for them. Céleste made sure their wish was granted.
The chapel was consecrated on 22 August 1877 with a fair sweep of France’s aristocracy represented. However, only one member of the Chabrillan family attended—Céleste herself, even though she had not been invited. She lived a stone’s throw from the chapel and orphanage and it was easy to creep into the woods nearby and observe the ceremony. When the guests began to disperse, Naurois beckoned her to meet the nuns and orphan girls, explaining that Céleste was their true guardian angel.
This description flattered and humbled Céleste, for she was forever being reminded in commentary and art that many viewed her as more of a fallen angel. In 1878, 26-year-old French painter Henri Gervex produced a superb oil on canvas he called Rolla. It depicted a young, beautif
ul prostitute lying asleep on her back on a bed with an aristocratic-looking fellow—very much like Alfred de Musset—gazing out the brothel window at Paris rooftops. Gervex said he was inspired by a long poem by Musset. The text recounted the destiny of a young, debauched and idle ‘Jacques Rolla’ (read Musset himself) who fell in love with Maria, a teenager who escaped from a life of misery by going into prostitution. The poem was written a few years before Musset met Céleste, but the girl depicted in 1878 by Gervex bears a very close resemblance in face, body, colouring and circumstance to a young Céleste. Gervex knew her. He had read her memoirs and the perennial stories about her in the Paris press. He had read of Céleste’s relationship with Musset. Again, as with Georges Bizet and the inspiration for Carmen, he would have had the well-known Mogador in mind when he painted the girl.
Similarly to Carmen, this outstanding creation caused feverish controversy. The bureaucracy banned the work from the opening of the Salon de Paris, a place for the best artists to exhibit. The judges saw it as ‘immoral’. The post-Franco-Prussian War era was generating a degree of conservatism as if in repsonse to the idea that, as the Germans had suggested, France’s softened morals had helped in its defeat by the more rigid, disciplined Prussians.
Naurois became ill suddenly in 1878 and called his good friend Céleste to his deathbed to say goodbye.
‘I’m going to leave you 1200 francs a year,’ he told her, ‘which will be held in trust by my stepdaughter. There will be an additional 800 shares, which will need a final payment in a few years.’
Céleste expressed her gratitude.
‘No, no, my dear,’ he said, his eyes filling with tears. ‘My whole fortune would not have been too much of a reward for the happiness you have given me.’