The Beauty of Her Age: A Tale of Sex, Scandal and Money in Victorian England

by Jenifer Roberts

  Meanwhile, Véron had commissioned a new ballet to exploit the talents of his young mistress. La Tentation was an opera-ballet in five acts and Yolande would dance the role of Miranda, a woman shaped by a demon to be more alluring than any woman on earth.

  Rehearsals were underway by 26 March 1832 when four people died of cholera in Paris, the first deaths in an epidemic which would last for seven months and claim an estimated 20,000 lives. The disease marched through every arrondissement of the city; the ninth, where Yolande lived and worked, was one of the first to enter the records.

  Véron kept the opera house open during the epidemic, so Yolande walked daily through the streets to rehearse the new ballet, avoiding the carts which carried away the dead. She did the same during the uprising of 5/6 June when republicans built barricades, fought battles and died in their hundreds, an insurrection immortalised by Victor Hugo in Les Misérables.

  Two weeks after the uprising, she danced her first leading role in the opening performance of La Tentation. It was the evening of 20 June. The scenery was magnificent (‘superb, staggering, prodigious’), the cast was huge, and her first appearance on stage was a coup-de-théâtre. A horde of demons cluster around a smoking cauldron. They throw ingredients into the mix; they recite magic incantations. As they cast the spell, a hideously misshapen green monster emerges from the smoke. The demons plunge it back into the cauldron. They throw further ingredients into the mix, they recite more magic incantations. When they cast the spell for a second time, the beautiful Miranda rises from the cauldron, ‘fresh, timid and ravishing’, dressed in white, her dark hair hanging loose around her shoulders.

  The ballet was overlong and not a success, but Yolande’s spirited dancing was received with enthusiasm. According to the journal L’Entr’acte, her performance was ‘graceful and childlike in turn, and so modest, even when she accepts the mission which her creator and master, the demon, confides to her. Then, by degrees that are ably managed, she rises to the pathos, the devotion and the will of a martyr. She is a pretty woman and a talented one.’

  She was the new star of the Opéra. ‘Every evening,’ wrote one of her admirers, ‘the name of Duvernay was acclaimed by a thousand voices.’ A stage painter, Charles Séchan, described her as ‘one of the most ravishing women you could wish to see … with charming eyes, an adorably turned leg, and a figure of perfect elegance. When she danced, she was full of grace and brio.’ Another admirer, Paul Mahalin, wrote that she had ‘the blood of a dancer and the heart of an artiste, but the spirit which Pauline Duvernay possessed above all else was the spirit of adventure’.2

  One evening in the autumn of 1832, perhaps bored by long performances in La Tentation, perhaps weary of walking through disease-ridden streets, but more likely because she craved attention, she failed to appear at the opera house. Nor was she at home in the apartment which Véron had provided for her. Fearing that she might have drowned in the Seine, Véron and her mother made a visit to the morgue on the Île de la Cité. Unidentified corpses were exhibited here, displayed behind glass screens on tilted tables, their clothes hanging on pegs behind them.

  Yolande was not in the morgue. Her disappearance became the talk of Paris and it was several days before Casimir Gide, the composer of La Tentation, received an anonymous note giving details of her whereabouts. He hurried through the streets and found her hiding behind the grille in a convent. She had, she told him, felt a sudden desire to become a nun.

  She enjoyed the prank and reappeared on stage to the delight of her admirers. She was idolised for her ‘beauty, wit and lightness of heart’; for the spontaneity of her conversation and repartee; and for ‘the gaiety and sentiment, frankness and firm opinions’ expressed in her letters, which Véron sometimes read aloud to his friends. She scorned an offer of 40,000 francs from the elderly Comte de Pourtalès and became renowned as a ‘consummate mistress of sarcasm with would-be lovers’. Stories about her mischief with the men who tried to buy her favours did the rounds of newspapers and gossip sheets.3

  ‘You say you love me,’ she said one day to an elderly Russian aristocrat, ‘but do you love me as much as 100,000 francs?’

  The following day, she returned from class to find the Russian reclining on her sofa, his feet up on the cushions and a large cash box by his side. ‘My dear,’ he said, ‘you asked me yesterday whether I loved you as much as 100,000 francs. Here is my answer.’

  He opened the box to show that it was filled with gold coins. Yolande looked at them with disdain. ‘Take your feet off my sofa,’ she said, ‘and take away that old iron. I was only joking.’

  As news of this rebuff spread through society, a young diplomat made his way to her apartment. ‘I shall not offer you gold,’ he said. ‘It’s my life I would sacrifice for you.’

  Yolande laughed. ‘If I wanted your head, you’d bring it to me, wouldn’t you? You men are all the same. You offer things that are either impossible or of no use at all.’

  After listening to the young man’s protestations, she appeared to relent. ‘Very well,’ she said. ‘Bring me one of your front teeth.’

  An hour later, he returned with a handkerchief held to his mouth and a pill-box in his hand. As Yolande opened the box, he removed the handkerchief, opened his mouth and pointed to a bloody gap.

  ‘Oh, you stupid man!’ she said. ‘I asked you for a lower tooth and you’ve brought me a top one.’

  Such stories became legendary in Paris and soon reached London where two theatres, the Theatre Royal in Drury Lane and the King’s Theatre in the Haymarket, functioned as opera houses on a seasonal basis, engaging members of the Paris Opéra on short-term contracts. In late 1832, Alfred Bunn, manager of the Theatre Royal, approached Louis Véron with a request that Yolande should appear there for the first six weeks of the 1833 season.

  ‘Her mother does her more harm than good,’ wrote Marie Taglioni. ‘She was offered a London engagement, but her mother gave it out that it would be difficult for her to accept it, since she has had offers from all the foreign courts. I must tell you that I am not so difficult to please for I have just signed my London contract.’4

  Despite her mother’s intrigues, Yolande accepted the engagement at a salary of £750 (£80,000), plus a thousand francs for Véron. She and her parents crossed the Channel and took lodgings in Cecil Street near the Strand. Her first appearance in Drury Lane was on 13 February 1833 when she danced the role of Princess Iseult in a new production, La Belle au Bois Dormant (The Sleeping Beauty).

  Princess Iseult was asleep for much of the ballet, so Bunn had inserted an additional scene in which Yolande danced a solo as a naiad, a water nymph. After the performance, as he led her to the front of the stage to acknowledge the applause, two bouquets – described dismissively by Marie Taglioni as ‘garlands of artificial flowers’ – were thrown from one of the side boxes, probably by her father. One fell into the orchestra pit, the other landed at the feet of Alfred Bunn who bent down, picked it up and handed it to Yolande with ‘ineffable grace’.

  The production was received with acclaim, ‘a most gorgeous spectacle … so beautiful that it called forth shouts of rapture’, but the response to Yolande’s performance was mixed:

  Morning Post: To say that she proved herself equal to the undertaking would be but faint praise. Her beauty, grace, and skill were so conspicuous that everyone appeared anxious to join in acknowledging her merits, and we have never seen a foreigner meet with so flattering a reception.

  The Times: She is handsome, of a good figure, and as far as could be judged from the slight exertions she made, not an ungraceful dancer … The little which she did was of a fine quality, agile and graceful in a very eminent degree, and as good as to make us wish for more.

  Morning Herald: Mademoiselle Duvernay belongs to the school of Taglioni and, and without being equal to her model, is remarkable for finished and unlaboured art, unfaltering precision in all the movements she attempts, and an easy and pervading gracefulness … On the whole she
is a star, but not one of the first brilliancy.

  Theatrical Observer: We felt disappointed; very pretty she is certainly, and a graceful dancer, but not la merveille we were led to expect.

  The future Queen Victoria watched a performance on 21 February. ‘Mademoiselle Duvernay is a very nice person,’ the thirteen-year-old princess wrote in her diary that night. ‘She has a very fine figure and dances beautifully, so quietly and so gracefully, somewhat in the style of Taglioni.’ Victoria saw the ballet again on 5 March: ‘Mademoiselle Duvernay danced beautifully and she was encored in her pas seul in the dance of the Naiades. She looked likewise uncommonly well.’5

  Yolande achieved greater success when she made her first appearance as Zelica in The Maid of Cashmere (Le Dieu et la Bayadère) on 13 March. The evening began badly:

  From some unexplained cause the overture was not commenced till a quarter past seven, which caused some slight disapprobation, but when it was finished and the curtain did not rise, the audience became very angry. After waiting a short time, the leader thought it best to recommence the overture, which he did, amidst loud cries of ‘No! No!’ and ‘Off! Off!’ … In the midst of this confusion, up rose the curtain and the audience resumed their good humour.

  This awkward start was forgotten as soon as Yolande appeared on stage:

  Duvernay infinitely surpassed the expectation her previous performance had led us to form; her dancing was graceful and elegant, and in the chastest style, her action simple and natural, and her dress was so becoming that she looked lovely … In the Shawl Dance, she seemed like a spirit of air about to soar into brighter regions. She was greatly applauded throughout, and at the end of the ballet was obliged to come forward to receive the congratulations of the spectators.6

  Four days later:

  Yesterday evening the Maid of Cashmere made her second appearance … and was received with similar honours as on her début … Mademoiselle Duvernay has risen wonderfully in the estimation of the public … her gestures, in answers to the Grand Judge in the first scene, were given with so much expression that she did not require the aid of language to make herself understood, and her love for the unknown, her jealousy, and her affliction at the loss of his attentions, were depicted as vividly as mere action could do. We know not whether we were most charmed with her pantomime or her dancing; her every movement was easy, graceful and unaffected.7

  Princess Victoria, after watching a performance on 19 March, wrote that Yolande ‘danced and acted quite beautifully, with so much grace and feeling; she looked likewise quite lovely … It was in two acts, and I was very much amused.’8

  A young William Makepeace Thackeray saw the production several times and fell deeply in love:

  When I think of Duvernay prancing in as the Bayadère, I say it was a vision of loveliness such as mortal eyes can’t see nowadays. How well I remember the tune to which she used to appear! Kaled [said] to the Sultan, ‘My Lord, a troop of those dancing and singing girls called Bayadères approaches’, and, to the clash of cymbals and the thumping of my heart, in she used to dance! There has never been anything like it – never. There never will be.9

  Yolande’s London season came to an end on 30 March, seventeen days after she first danced in The Maid of Cashmere. As a theatre critic wrote towards the end of the month:

  Those who have not seen Mademoiselle Duvernay in the part have no idea of the extent of her talents. It is a great pity she did not make her first appearance in this piece, for then she would much earlier have done the trick. Now she is within a day or two of departure, the people are beginning to flock after her. Her benefit and last performance is next Saturday, 30 March, and we are led to understand that she posts off to Dover the moment the curtain falls, for she is under a heavy penalty to be in Paris on the evening of 1 April as she dances there the following night.

  Meanwhile, the men-about-town had clustered around the new celebrity. Alfred Bunn ‘declared his attachment by some tender but understood expression of the eye’, while young Lord Ranelagh was so smitten that he followed Yolande to France where she flirted with him for a few weeks before sending him home to England. ‘Although I play the sleeping beauty in public,’ she told him, ‘I cannot perform it in private without first passing through the ordeal of the church.’10

  Back home in Paris, she starred in the ballet Nathalie in which, according to the Courrier des Théâtres, she was ‘as pretty as an angel’. On 30 May, she danced the title role in La Sylphide with ‘so graceful a timidity, so simple a modesty, and such touching expression, that she pleased everyone’.

  In July, preparations began for a new ballet, La Révolte au Sérail, in which several dancers portrayed a group of female warriors. The production opened in early December and Yolande’s pantomime stole the show. In one scene, the women formed a council of war, and while the other dancers simulated a few gestures of communication, ‘Duvernay, by means of the wittiest miming and the most expressive and passionate gestures, managed to convey all the phases of an animated discussion and to give an idea of a council of war held by women. Universal laughter and applause greeted these gay and comical scenes.’11

  In another scene, the dancers lifted their bows to shoot arrows into the wings. On the opening night, Yolande absent-mindedly aimed her bow in the wrong direction. Her arrow sped into the auditorium and embedded itself in a column to one side of the royal box, a few feet from the head of the Duc de Nemours, second son of King Louis-Philippe.

  At the end of the year, Pierre-François Laporte, manager of the King’s Theatre in the Haymarket, arrived in Paris to engage Yolande and Marie Taglioni to appear in London for the first ten weeks of the 1834 season. They opened the season in the King’s Theatre on 1 March, with Taglioni dancing the title role in La Sylphide. The newspapers were quick to compare their talents:

  Duvernay received more applause than Taglioni, we suppose because she is the greater stranger: the greater favourite she can never be of anybody who pretends to be a judge of grace and lightness. Duvernay cannot be placed in the first class of dancers at any time, but least of all when she is on the same boards as Taglioni.

  We own, however, that Duvernay is a very charming creature: her face and person are both nearly faultless, and these, with certain admirers, go far to make her dancing seem faultless too. There seems to be a party disposed to set her on an equal footing, if not on a higher pedestal, than Taglioni; but the attempt must fail. The one is air, and the other earth; but still each is spring when it is clad in beauty.12

  Yolande had many admirers in London and, as the Morning Chronicle explained, ‘had Taglioni never been seen, Duvernay would have been considered one of the most charming dancers that ever exhibited’. Jealous of her allure, Taglioni felt the need to qualify her achievement. ‘She has had here,’ she wrote on 15 March, ‘what we call a succès d’estime only, but as a beauty she has enjoyed enormous success.’13

  Yolande had conquered the fashionable set in a way that the plainer Taglioni never could. The King’s Theatre was the centre of high fashion and, just as the Paris Opéra had opened the Foyer de la Danse to men of society, the King’s Theatre had opened a Green Room where performers mingled with their admirers. Men of the ‘fast set’ watched the ballet from omnibus boxes which abutted the stage, then strolled into the Green Room to make assignations with the dancer of their choice.

  The men in the omnibus boxes included Lord Allen, a fifty-year-old Irish viscount described as ‘a tall, stout, pompous-looking personage … with an invariably new-looking hat and well-polished boots’; Lord Tullamore, another Irish peer and member of parliament; and Edward Ellice, twenty-three years old, son of the secretary of state for war. A gossip sheet, The Satirist, complained about ‘the annoyance caused by these omnibus tadpoles, Tullamore, Allen and others, who … keep up a continual clatter of approbation which reminds us of the unwelcome din of little children’.

  Towards the end of her second London season, Yolande accepted a proposition from Edwa
rd Ellice (who, like his father, was nicknamed ‘the Bear’). As the retired politician Thomas Creevey wrote on 3 May:

  [Ellice] being a very aspiring young man of fashion, has formed a connection with Duvernay the opera dancer, to whom he has paid £2000 down and contracted to pay her £800 a year. The dear young creatures were seen going down in a chaise and four to Richmond. Captain Gronow, the MP and duellist, negotiated the affair for the young Bear with the dancer’s parents.14

  The Star and Garter in Richmond, the haunt of ‘dukes and dandies, pretty women of some repute and no repute, and bright young bucks’, was the scene of many romantic assignations and Yolande’s tryst with Edward Ellice gave rise to much jealousy. On 4 May, The Satirist reported that ‘the ratification dinner given by Ned Ellice to his darling Duvernay at the Star and Garter has excited much remark amongst the admirers of that fascinating danseuse. Lord Allen is perfectly out of his wits and Lord Tullamore is stark staring mad with vexation and envy.’

  Yolande’s engagement at the King’s Theatre ended on 8 May, when she danced ‘with her accustomed grace and was rapturously applauded’. She intended to return to Paris two days later and, according to The Satirist, ‘there was every reason to believe her ardent lover would accompany her or follow in the course of a few days. Papa Ellice protests strongly and firmly against anything bordering on a match with the Fair Brimstone as he styles her.’

  A week later, Yolande was still in London. ‘Duvernay was to have left for Paris on Saturday last,’ explained The Satirist on 18 May:

  but at the pressing solicitation of the Duke of Devonshire, she was induced to prolong her stay and, on Monday, by special invitation, she accompanied Ned Ellice to the Duke’s villa at Chiswick where a splendid fork luncheon was prepared. The Duke enjoyed himself in unrestricted delight, and a jealous schism has arisen between the Duke and young Ned on the subject of the fair danseuse.