Célimène Gaudieux

Célimène Gaudieux (20 April 1807 – 13 July 1864) was a French mixed-race singer, nicknamed "muse of the three basins". She practiced her music while working as an innkeeper in La Saline, which still serves as a symbol and muse for the poetry and popular culture of Réunion.

Early life and family Célimène Gaudieux was born a slave on 20 April 1807 in Saint-Paul, Réunion to freeman Louis-Edmond Jeance or Jans and slave Marie-Candide. Her parents' relationship was illegal according to the rules of Code Jaune by Jean-Baptiste Colbert. She had a younger sister name Marie-Céline. As a slave, she did not attend school. Shortly after the arrival of the English on the island in 1810, she, her mother and sister were freed by Louis Edmond Jeance and Gaudieux was then registered in the civil registry as Marie-Monique Jans. Her parents married twenty years after their emancipation.

She liked to boast that she was the granddaughter of Évariste de Parny, a Reunionese poet who is said to have had an affair with her maternal grandmother, a Malagasy slave name Léda from whom a daughter Valère was born, who later married one of de Parny's slaves and gave birth to three daughter, one of whom was Gaudieux's mother.

In July 1852, Pierre Gaudieux died during a smallpox epidemic in Saint-Paul, leaving Célimène with five children to support on her own. Having contracted debts, she was forced to borrow 1200 francs from Guillaume Aubry, a well-to-do merchant in Saint Paul for her daughter Marie Louise's dowry.

When she was reproached one day for being mixed race she replied "I am a mulatto, it is true, but my husband is of the white race, and it is the rule that the horse ennobles the mare".

She became known through travel personalities such as Louis Simonin and became friends with the local cultural elite, most of whom came from mainland France.

Gaudieux bequeathed her songbook to Dr. Jean Milhet, but the whereabouts of this book is now unknown. Only a few songs and texts are still known.