Valtesse de la Bigne

Émilie-Louise Delabigne, known as Countess Valtesse de La Bigne (1848, in Paris – 29 July 1910, in Ville-d'Avray), was an elite French courtesan and demi-mondaine who rose through the social ranks to mix with Paris's most glamorous elite. Although born to a working-class family in Paris, she built a life for herself and became a muse to artists like Henri Gervex, Édouard Manet, as well as novelist Émile Zola. Beyond her career as a courtesan, she was also an actress, an art collector, and salonnière. Her parents' employment was unreliable. Delabigne quickly became a lorette or mistress, a role that was above the lower-class streetwalker but below the status of the courtesan. ). Fossey's father refused to condone a marriage between Fossey and Delabigne and in order to break them up he sent Fossey to Algeria, where Fossey eventually married another woman.

To forge a stronger reputation and name for herself, she took the pseudonym "Valtesse" due to its similarity to "Votre Altesse" (your highness)— she later advised her friend (and possible lover) Anne-Marie Chassaigne (now known as Liane de Pougy) to employ a pseudonym as well. She aspired to join the ranks of the "archidrôlesses," or elite courtesans. thumb The bed designed by Édouard Lièvre, currently exhibited in the Valtesse de La Bigne room at the Musée des Arts Décoratifs, Paris.

"Courtisane du Tout-Paris" Valtesse's beauty caught the eye of composer Jacques Offenbach and he promoted her through his operas. Offenbach brought Valtesse to public attention with a small role as Hébé in Orphée aux Enfers at the Bouffes-Parisiens. One critic deemed her "as red and timid as a virgin by Titian."

She nicknamed herself, "rayon d'or," or golden ray, and immersed herself in art and literature. She bought a sumptuous house at Ville-d'Avray, which she decorated with paintings commissioned from Édouard Detaille showing fictional members of her invented "la Bigne" family. — and called the character of Nana "a vulgar whore, stupid, rude!"

She also inspired the heroine of La Nichina, a novel by Hugues Rebell, and the character Altesse in her friend and lover Liane de Pougy's novel Idylle saphique. De la Bigne had looked to the memoirs of the courtesan Céleste de Chabrillan (published under the pseudonym Mogador) for inspiration.

Along with Manet, Valtesse had friendly relationships with many other artists, including Henri Gervex, Édouard Detaille, Gustave Courbet, Eugène Boudin, and Alphonse de Neuville, many of whom painted her. These relationships earned her the nickname "Union des Peintres." She left her massive bronze bed (created in 1877 by Édouard Lièvre) to the Musée des Arts Décoratifs, Paris, where it is still on display.

Personal life Valtesse de La Bigne had a difficult relationship with her family. She entrusted her two children from her relationship with Fossey to her mother's care, who later took them to live in the countryside. When her younger daughter died while in her mother's care, Valtesse won back custody of her remaining daughter and placed her into a Catholic boarding school. Her mother, bitter at her loss of regular income for providing childcare, assaulted de La Bigne's housekeeper, Camille Meldola.

Valtesse's daughter, Julia Pâquerette, went on to marry Paul Jules August Godard and had three children: Paul, Margot, and Andrée. Liane de Pougy served as Margot's godmother. Like her grandmother, Andrée got her start in the theatre. She started acting in New York in the early 1920s, going by the name Andrée Lafayette.