Maurice Talvande, Count de Mauny Talvande

Maurice Talvande (1866–1941), self-styled as the Count de Mauny Talvande, was a French-born naturalised British garden designer, writer, and furniture maker. He is best known as the owner of Taprobane Island in Ceylon (now Sri Lanka).

Early life Born Maurice Talvande in Le Mans to parents who were not titled, his father was Felix Talvande (a middle-class bank official) and his mother was Marguerite Adélaïde Louise, née Froger de Mauny, known as Madame de Mauny Talvande. She was a granddaughter of a genuine aristocrat of the petty nobility of the duchy of Alençon, Jean Froger de Mauny (1785-1857), who claimed a kinship with the Saintonge noble and more renowned family Froger de la Rigaudière et de l'Éguille.

He attended a Jesuit-run school in Canterbury, England. As a young man, described as "rather good looking", he travelled to America and England where, having assumed the more aristocratic-sounding name of Maurice de Mauny Talvande, he earned a little money giving drawing-room lectures on French châteaux and château life. In 1897, he also gave an address in which he promoted the establishment of settlements for deprived and wayward young men.

Marriage In June 1898, de Mauny married Lady Mary Byng, daughter of the 4th Earl of Strafford, whom he may have met through her brother, who had attended his school. She was a maid of honour to Queen Victoria. There was talk that Lady Mary married de Mauny, who had no social position or fortune, due to her hostility to her father's second marriage to a wealthy American widow, Cora Smith Colgate.

Shortly prior to his marriage, de Mauny established a small boarding school for teenage boys from upper-class English families seeking to polish their French. Situated at the rented Château Azay-le-Rideau in the Loire Valley, de Mauny relied on his wife's contacts to supply the dozen pupils. It was visited by Lord Lorne and attended by the 2nd Duke of Westminster as a 19-year-old. There were persistent rumours of sexual advances made to the pupils by de Mauny who, when confronted by the Duke, admitted he was homosexual. Possibly due to this, but claiming that he had never intended the château to be used as a school, the château's owner cancelled the lease in late 1898. The Journal des Débats, considered the voice of the Gallic Establishment, called de Mauny a "vulgar marchand de soupe".

In 1899, the 4th Earl of Strafford was decapitated by a train. While his entailed estate passed to the 5th Earl, he had willed the entire remainder of his wealth to his two daughters. Also in 1899, Charles Hammond Gibson Jr privately printed Two Gentlemen in Touraine under the name of Richard Sudbury, a fictional romance about the relationship with de Mauny.

In 1901 de Mauny's father died and his mother in 1907, leaving the family home Domaine du Bourg in Pontvallain to de Mauny and to his brother Roger and sister Suzanne. They shared the 17,000 francs that came from its sale. With the money, de Mauny separated from his wife for a year. Nevertheless, by 1909-10, he was forced to declare bankruptcy.

Taprobane Island

It was only after a long search for an earthly paradise that around 1925, de Mauny sighted "Galduwa" (meaning 'Rock Island' in Sinhalese), an islet in Weligama Bay, Ceylon, that was an unkempt wilderness used by locals as a dumping ground for cobras. It was purchased by de Mauny for Rs.250 He described himself as having "an insatiable thirst for beauty" and "longing for perfection."

De Mauny established a furniture manufacturing business, 'Weligama Local Industries', and he collaborated with a Hungarian interior decorator, Mlle Louise Borgia, to make over the homes of the wealthy in Colombo. The business partnership and the furniture factory came to an end during the 1930s, in the wake of the Great Depression.

However, de Mauny went on to become a successful landscape and garden designer for many prominent homes in Colombo, authoring, as "Count de Mauny", The Gardens of Taprobane (dedicated to the Duchess of Sutherland) and Gardening in Ceylon.

Suffering from angina pectoris, de Mauny died of a heart attack in November 1941. Victor sold Taprobane Island in 1943 for Rs.1200. Since then, and particularly after the 2004 tsunami, significant development of the adjoining mainland village has occurred.

Works The Peace of Suffering 1914-1918, Grant and Richards, London, 1919. Gardening in Ceylon, H. W. Cave, 1921. The Gardens of Taprobane, Williams and Norgate, London, 1937.