Marie-Anne Detourbay (18 January 1837 – 21 January 1908)[1] was a French demimonde and salon-holder. She was a famous courtesan during the Second Empire, and also hosted a literary salon which had some influence during the Second Empire and the Third Republic.[2] She is also known for her relationship with Jules Lemaître.
Biography
Marie-Anne Detourbay, was born in rue Gambetta, Reims to a poor and large family. Her mother was a cloth burler[3] and her father unknown.[4] From age eight she was employed to rinse champagne bottles.[5] She moved to Paris when she was 15, where under the name of Jeanne de Tourbey[1] she was discovered in a brothel by Alexandre Dumas fils.[6] She soon became part of the Parisian demimonde.[7]
Through her best friend, actress Josephine Clemence Ennery, nicknamed "Gisette"(fr), she met Gustave Flaubert[2] and Khalil-Bey,[10] who fell in love with her. From Tunis, where he went to write Salammbô, Flaubert wrote:
It is not to keep to my promise that I write to you, dear and beautiful neighbor, but because I think of you almost continually! And I have nothing to say to you, nothing else! I swear by your beautiful eyes and hands. [...] In eight days I'm leaving and in three weeks I'll see you again. This is the important thing. With what joy will I rush to your house, and how my heart will beat by pulling your bell! When I am at your feet, on your carpet, we will talk of my journey, if it amuses you. [...] If you knew how I think about your apartment, which contains you, and even the furniture that surrounds you! Have you not since my departure felt, sometimes, like a breath that passed over you? It was something of me, who escaping from my heart, traversing the space, invisibly, and reaching down there! I lived for five weeks with this memory (which is a desire too). Your image kept me company in loneliness, incessantly. I heard your voice through the sound of the waves and your charming face flutters around me, on the hedges of nopals, in the shade of the palm trees and in the horizon of the mountains. It seems to me that I took away from your dear person a kind of emanation which penetrates me, a fragrance of which I am embalmed, which makes me drunk and intoxicates me. I blame you for occupying so much space in my thoughts. When I want to dream of Carthage, it is the rue de Vendome that represents itself.[11]
Around 1862, she met Ernest Barochefr, son of senior Ministerial Civil Servant Jules Baroche fell in love with her. Ernest himself had been made another Minister of Napoleon III, Master of Petitions at the State Council and Director of Foreign Trade at the Ministry of Agriculture. They would have become engaged but, as Commander of the 12th mobile battalion of the Seine, he was killed in action at the Battle of Le Bourget on 30 October 1870[7] and left her a fortune of 800,000 gold francs (about 2.5 million Euros) and a sugar factory. The director of the factory was retired officer Count Victor Edgar de Loynes.[12]
In 1872, she married de Loynes,.[13] This marriage gave her access to high society, but the Count soon left for America, where he disappeared. Although the marriage was only nominal, because her husband's family had opposed their union,[12] she carried and kept the use of the name and title of Countess de Loynes.[13] Her visitors became more prestigious; received every day between five and seven o'clock. The celebrities of the Second Empire give way to those of the nascent Third Republic, a new regime which the Countess de Loynes did not like. Her visitors included Georges Clemenceau, Georges de Porto-Riche, Alexandre Dumas fils, Ernest Daudet, Henry Houssaye, Pierre Decourcelle, and soon many young writers and musicians led by Maurice Barrès, who gave her his two books Huit jours chez M. Renan (1890) and Du sang, de la volupté, et de la mort (1894) luxuriously bound by Charles Meunier in 1897.[14] Others included Paul Bourget, Marcel Proust, Georges Bizet and Henri Kowalski.[12]
In her latter years she supported the political position of Charles Maurras,[15] and shortly before her death on 21 January 1908, Detourbay helped Maurras and Léon Daudet to found the Royalist newspaper L'Action française by donating 100,000 gold francs.
The Countess of Loynes was buried in Montmartre Cemetery, alongside her parents.
Residences
Reims
58, rue neuve, (now rue Gambetta), from her birth in 1837
16, rue du Cadran-Saint-Pierre (in 1852);
8, rue de la Grosse-Écritoire (in 1854, middle-class pension).
Baldick, Robert (1971). Dinner at Magny's. Gollancz.
Gallimard, ed. (1980). "Lettre à Jeanne de Tourbey du 15 mai 1858". Flaubert : Correspondance, tome 2 Juillet 1851 - Décembre 1858 (in French). Bibliothèque de la Pléiade.
Holden, Wilfred Herbert (1950). The Pearl from Plymouth: Eliza Emma Crouch, alias Cora Pearl, with notes on some of her celebrated contemporaries. British Technical and General Press.
Picard Tajan Ader (1986). Tres Beaux Livres Des Xixe Et Xxe Siècles - Manuscrits - Vente a Paris, Hotel Drouot - 4 Juin 1986.
