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

by Jenifer Roberts

  This was the 6th Duke of Devonshire, forty-four years old, unmarried and described as ‘vain, dandyish and partially deaf’. Ellice watched Yolande flirt with the duke for the entire afternoon and, as soon as they set out on the return journey to London, he began to complain about her behaviour. She replied that she could do as she pleased – and resentful of any attempt to curb her freedom, she broke off their agreement.

  ‘Young Ellice is inconsolable for the loss of Duvernay,’ explained The Satirist, ‘and what adds to his affliction is that his rival, the Duke of Devonshire, has made a proposition so liberal in its provisions that no doubt can arise as to its immediate acceptance.’

  The duke had several mistresses; he was only playing with her affections, so Yolande returned to Paris and the arms of Louis Véron. ‘Duvernay complains bitterly of the young Bear,’ concluded The Satirist, ‘and congratulates herself that she has escaped from his claws. Véron is quite delighted and gives it out that he is safe in the affection of the charming danseuse.’

  3

  THE IDOL OF ALL THE DANDIES

  The most perfect managerial adept I ever met was my friend, Monsieur Véron … Véron knew his people; for many things can be done with a foreign dancer if you commence operations with a dinner and end them with a diamond.

  Alfred Bunn, manager of the Theatre Royal, 1840

  Yolande was fond of Véron, who had done so much to advance her career, but the behaviour of her mother was a constant threat. Madame Duvernay wanted power in the opera house and Véron was always on his guard. Soon after they returned from London in 1834, she tried to trap him into marrying her daughter. No details have survived but the plot was discovered by the concierge, Madame Crosnier, who had worked in the opera house for forty years.1

  Then she set out to belittle Véron’s influence over Yolande’s career. ‘My daughter’s talent has no need of anyone’s protection,’ she said to him one day when asking for a seat in the stalls for the evening performance.

  Véron made no reply but he sent for Auguste Levasseur, leader of the claque, a group of sixty men who sat in the pit and led the applause in the opera house, cued by Auguste tapping his cane on the floor. Véron told Auguste to ensure that Yolande received no ovation that night, ‘not even a single hand-clap’.

  That evening, after finishing a pirouette, Yolande came to a halt and ‘smiled graciously at the audience’. Auguste failed to tap his cane. The claque remained silent, the audience followed suit, and ‘the theatre maintained the deepest silence’. Yolande fled from the stage and collapsed sobbing in the wings, while her mother demanded an interview with Véron.

  ‘It’s only happened once,’ he told her, ‘but now you must see that your daughter’s talent does need some help.’2

  By the autumn, an exasperated Véron could bear it no longer. More than three years into their affair, his ardour for Yolande had begun to cool. He had also found a new rising star, Fanny Elssler, an Austrian dancer who arrived in Paris in July. Yolande was rehearsing the lead role in a new ballet, La Tempête (based loosely on Shakespeare), when Véron decided to substitute Elssler in the role. She used all her power of weeping to persuade him to change his mind, so he had the scenario rewritten to include leading roles for both dancers.

  Elssler was an immediate success when La Tempête was first performed on 15 September. A few weeks later, Véron openly displayed the change in his affections. Attending a performance at another theatre in October, he booked separate boxes for Yolande and Marie Taglioni, but sat close to Elssler in the most conspicuous box of all.

  Yolande’s response was to make a dramatic attempt to poison herself. Alone in her apartment, she swallowed a glass of vinegar in which she had soaked some copper coins. She then groaned loudly to ensure her neighbours could hear. On cue, they rushed into the apartment, found her ‘writhing and gasping’ on the sofa, and called for a doctor – who soon cured her of the effects of this curious concoction.3

  Already a star of the Opéra, the loss of Véron in her bed did little damage to Yolande’s career and her mother soon arranged for the self-styled Marquis de La Valette to take his place. The illegitimate son of an actress, Félix de La Valette was brought up by his mother in the theatre, took his father’s surname, and added the spurious title of marquis. Twenty-eight years old, he was charming, elegant, good-looking, and ‘richly endowed with audacity, loquacity and a talent for intrigue’. A familiar figure in the Foyer de la Danse – where he was known as ‘very charming and very dangerous’ – he enjoyed liaisons with several dancers who supported him financially. In the autumn of 1834, after deserting Pauline Guichard, a dancer who had recently borne him a child, his eye fell on the beautiful and spirited Yolande.

  Her father had disappeared by this time and her mother was working her way through a series of venal and unscrupulous lovers. An English gossip sheet reported the rumour that Madame Duvernay and her lover of the moment had made a financial transaction:

  Her mother was visited by an old French gentleman who, being very much embarrassed at the time, and knowing that La Valette had made many overtures to Mademoiselle Duvernay, proposed to the mother to raise money upon the prostitution of the young girl. The mother consented. La Valette was deeply enamoured of Duvernay, and she on her part was particularly attached to her admirer. Still the young girl entertained those notions of propriety which seemed to supersede any chance of success.

  Her infamous mother, however, accomplished the aim desired. La Valette was invited to the house for supper; a potion was infused in the drink of the unsuspecting girl; and when she awoke in the morning she found herself in the arms of the handsome Frenchman. Being now ruined beyond redemption, and with truly French resignation, she abandoned herself to all the enjoyments and delights of illicit passion in the arms of La Valette. He behaved to her with the greatest kindness and affection; and she became devotedly attached to him.

  The price that La Valette paid to the mother and her lover was 40,000 francs … and with this sum the old lover absconded, leaving the lost girl’s parent without a single sou of reward for the sale of her daughter’s chastity.4

  Whatever the truth of this story – and it seems unlikely that her affair with Véron was not common knowledge in Paris – Yolande was happy with her new lover. He was younger and better-looking than Véron and his adventurous personality was a match for her own. La Valette was happy too, but he still had his eye on the main chance. His title allowed him to mix easily in high society, and in May 1835 he agreed to marry Virginie de Méneval, a wealthy heiress.

  This prompted another attempt at suicide, this time with an overdose of opium. As the Courrier des Théâtres explained on 23 May:

  The breaking-off of an intimacy was denoted by the announcement of the marriage of one of the parties. The banns had been published and, so it is said, the contract signed. Upon hearing the news, our young artiste lost her reason, gave way to despair and, when she thought she had but little time to live, called on her former lover to whom she uttered these words: ‘You are about to marry and I am about to die.’5

  The news reached London where, on 8 June, The Theatrical Observer reported that Yolande’s overdose had caused ‘a great sensation in Paris’. It published a slightly different version of events:

  It appears that her friend, the Marquis de La Valette, was about to marry a rich heiress. The night before the intended ceremony, la danseuse sent to request he would call on her. He went and she desired him to pour some soothing drops into her tisane, which she drank, and then saying it was poison refused to take any antidote … Duvernay still continues very ill.

  Yolande had taken too little opium to kill herself but the marriage was called off, mainly because of the scandal, but also because La Valette was genuinely fond of his mistress. She returned to the stage on 17 June and continued to dance during the summer and early autumn. On 9 October, she performed the leading role in La Tempête. Ten days later, she disappeared from public view. ‘Pretty women,�
� explained the Courrier des Théâtres, ‘are prone to more indispositions than others.’

  This was Yolande’s second pregnancy, a child conceived in April or May, shortly before she took the overdose of opium. This child too would form no part of her life. It was well known, even in the wilds of the Yorkshire moors, that opera-dancers tended to desert their children. In Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë (published in 1847), the child Adèle, for whom Jane was employed as a governess, was the result of Mr Rochester’s youthful passion for a French opera-dancer who had given birth to a daughter:

  And, Miss Eyre, so much was I flattered by this preference of the Gallic sylph for her British gnome, that I installed her in an hotel, gave her a complete establishment of servants, a carriage, cashmeres, diamonds, dentelles, etc. In short, I began the process of ruining myself in the received style …

  After I had broken with the mother, she abandoned her child … I acknowledged no natural claim on Adèle’s part to be supported by me … but hearing that she was quite destitute, I … transplanted it here, to grow up clean in the wholesome soil of an English country garden.6

  On 19 February 1836, the Courrier des Théâtres reported that Yolande’s health was recovering ‘to the great satisfaction of her numerous admirers’. By 27 April, she was well enough to return to the stage, taking the leading role in Le Dieu et la Bayadère. During the spring and summer, she danced in several productions, including La Tentation, the ballet which had made her famous.

  In August, Louis Véron resigned as director of the Opéra, to be replaced in November by the stage designer, Henri Duponchel. Yolande’s affair with Véron was over, but she still found him a reassuring presence in the opera house. Her relationship with Duponchel, described as a ‘lean, yellowish, pale man … who looked as if he were in perpetual mourning’, was not so comfortable.

  In early September, Alfred Bunn arrived in Paris to negotiate for Marie Taglioni to appear at the Theatre Royal, Drury Lane, the following summer. At the same time, he ‘concluded an engagement, for immediate purposes, with a lady whom some consider her rival … Mademoiselle Duvernay, as genuine a specimen of a French dancer, both privately and publicly, as ever sandalled shoe … It is impossible almost for a Frenchman, certainly for an Englishman, to be a match for a French dancer, who is a perfect mistress of coquetterie and has had the principles of finesse instilled into her mind from the earliest dawn of comprehension.’7

  Three weeks later, the company of the Paris Opéra travelled to the Château de Compiègne where an army of 20,000 men was carrying out manoeuvres under the command of the king’s two elder sons, the Duc d’Orléans and the Duc de Nemours. According to the Paris correspondent of The Times, the theatre at Compiègne:

  is formed with exceeding elegance … The seats are covered with rich crimson velvet and the fronts of the different tiers of boxes, as well as the ceiling of the theatre, are ornamented with gilt mouldings. Five glass chandeliers are suspended from the roof and shed a sparkling brilliancy over the whole of the place … Much was added to the effect of this scene by the presence of many of the lovely ladies of Compiègne, by the gay colours of the uniforms of the military officers, and by the gorgeous dresses of the Royal party.

  The performance on 29 September was Le Dieu et la Bayadère, in which Marie Taglioni danced the main role and Yolande danced a pas de trois in the first act. At a banquet after the performance, she ‘received the most amiable attentions from senior officers’ and was introduced to the Duc de Nemours, who teased her about her marksmanship three years before when she had almost impaled him with an arrow.8

  In late October, Félix de La Valette, who had recently joined the diplomatic service, left for Stockholm on a short-term appointment as secretary to the French ambassador. At the same time, Yolande crossed the Channel for her six-week engagement at the Theatre Royal, Drury Lane, accompanied by her mother and her lover of the moment, one Monsieur Béliser (known as ‘le Bélisaire’). Because of her popularity in 1834, she had used her coquetterie and finesse to persuade Alfred Bunn to pay her a salary of £150 (£15,000) a week.

  The men of society awaited her arrival with anticipation. ‘The competition for an opera-dancer of celebrity is immense,’ wrote Town magazine:

  No sooner does she land and her address become known, than a regular bevy attend her dwelling, and envied indeed is the favoured one whom she first honours with her notice. But the nobs have singular ideas of mutual accommodation in this respect; they play a kind of ‘follow my leader’ game, and it is not at all an uncommon thing to see the lady driven to the theatre in the carriage of one swell, and back in another. She may take the air with a lord in the morning and with a duke in the afternoon.9

  Yolande opened her third London season on 3 November, dancing in the second act of The Maid of Cashmere. The auditorium in the Theatre Royal was ‘very full’ and she was ‘received with rapturous applause’. The critic of The Times was impressed:

  Duvernay acted the Bayadère very delightfully. The eloquence of her pantomime and the graceful finish of her dancing were admirably displayed … The shawl dance was remarkably well executed, and in particular that portion of it in which the draperies are so arranged as to embody the idea of a shell with Venus crouching in the centre of it. The arrival of this dancer is a subject of congratulation to the play-going public.

  On 1 December, she danced the role of Florinda in the first London production of The Devil on Two Sticks (Le Diable Boiteux) in which she performed an unusual Spanish dance, the Cachucha. She stood on stage, castanets in her hands, wearing a pink satin dress trimmed with ‘wide flounces’ of black lace:

  Her wasp-like figure is boldly arched back, making the diamond brooch on her bodice sparkle; her leg, smooth as marble, gleams through the fine mesh of her silk stocking; and her small foot, now still, only awaits the signal from the orchestra to burst into action. How charming she is, with her tall comb, the rose at her ear, the fire in her eyes and her sparkling smile. At the tips of her rosy fingers the ebony castanets are acquiver.

  She springs forward and the resonant clatter of her castanets breaks out; she seems to shake down clusters of rhythm with her hands. How she twists! How she bends! What fire! What voluptuousness! What ardour! Her swooning arms flutter about her drooping head, her body curves back, her white shoulders almost brush the floor. What a charming moment! Would you not say that, in that hand as it skims over the dazzling barrier of the footlights, she is gathering up all the desires and all the enthusiasm of the audience?10

  Yolande infused the dance with sexuality. She teased the men of society who sat in the omnibus boxes, well aware of the effect she was having on their libido. Alfred Bunn spoke of ‘Mademoiselle Duvernay’s lascivious Cachucha dance’, while Charles de Boigne, one of her admirers, wrote breathlessly of ‘those movements of the hips, those provocative gestures, those arms which seem to seek and embrace an absent lover, that mouth crying out for a kiss, that thrilling, quivering, twisting body … that shortened skirt, that low-cut, half-open bodice’.11

  The critic of The Times took a more academic view, commenting that Yolande’s dancing belonged to ‘the first style of the modern school’:

  Its chief excellence is that absence of all visible effort, which distinguishes truly good dancing from the more common style; the finish and precision with which everything she does is executed add great charms to the gracefulness of her movements and the intrinsic beauty of her form. In the Cachucha dance (which is nightly encored and is one of the most universally popular exhibitions of the kind that we have ever witnessed), she does something more; for the spirit and truth which she gives this singularly characteristic dance are as nearly akin to genius as anything in the way of dancing can be.

  The Cachucha was a huge success and Yolande’s sensual performance became the talk of London. A young Mr Simmons was so affected that he sent a poem to The Times for publication. It was titled ‘To the Dancer Duvernay’:

  Song’s fatal gift, they say,
has long been mine

  With all its love-fraught dreams, but until now

  Never did Love, embodied love, divine,

  Clothing the limbs and breathing from the brow,

  Sparkle before my smitten sense! The air

  Is burning with thy form, never to pass

  From the deep mirror of my heart – but there

  (While memory watches by the dazzled glass)

  Belinked for ever with each lovely thing:

  A flower breeze-swung, young morning’s rosy cloud,

  A blossom floating on the winds of spring.

  Incarnate music, poetry endowed

  With life, a visible bliss, a dancing thought,

  A bounding silence, passion motion-wrought.

  ‘This gentleman,’ commented the newspaper when it printed the poem on 13 December, ‘seems mightily smitten, and writes even more foolishly than is the privilege of people in his condition. However, the fair danseuse is entitled to all the praise she can receive, either from the wise or the silly.’

  With the marvels of modern technology, we can see the dance as it was performed at the time, almost as if we are watching Yolande herself on stage. There are videos on YouTube of ballerinas dancing the Cachucha to the original choreography and music, and wearing the same pink satin dress trimmed with black lace. It is certainly very different from anything an audience in the 1830s would have seen before.12

  Yolande was due to return to Paris in mid-December, but her success was so great that Alfred Bunn hoped to retain her services for a further six weeks. She, too, was eager to stay. Bunn negotiated with Henri Duponchel; he paid £80 for the extension and Yolande agreed to add six weeks to the length of her contract in Paris. On 7 December, Bunn announced that ‘the enthusiastic reception given to the splendid ballet of The Devil on Two Sticks has induced him, notwithstanding the very great expense incurred, to perform it every night until Christmas’.