Marie Lesueur

Marie Lesieur , known as Lesueur , is a French Danseuse born with Paris the October 8th 1799 and died in Ixelles (Brussels) the April 6th 1890.

Girl of Hébert Lesieur and Marie Calliaud, Miss Lesieur appears for the first time on the scene of the Theater of Marseilles in 1816, like prone of the dance. During a representation of the ballet the Venus Birth, in July 1817, it is pointed out while turning the back on the public, in an improper attitude. Forgiven of this impertinence, it quickly becomes the preferred dancer of the Marseillais.

Two years later, it joined with Brussels the troop of ballet that Jean-Antoine Petipa formed there with elements of Marseilles. One can read, in the Almanach of the spectacles for 1820: “ the Inhabitants of Brussels wait, says one, impatiently, a new goddess, crowned at one time in Marseilles: it is Miss Lesueur ”. She begins with the Théâtre from the Currency the May 20th 1819 in the ballet Almaviva and Rosine and immediately gains an enormous success near the public. The Revue spectacles of 1822 describes it like a generally good dancer “ in the mime; but it often gives to its play too outraged expressions which must tire it much. Sometimes endowed, in the bulges and the feet, of an extraordinary strength for his sex, one notices in his dance more force than the gracious one. Remainder, it has a single balance and carries out its pirouettes extremely well; it has a fort beautiful toilet and likes the public ”.

During a representation of the ballet Psyché in April 1823, Miss Lesueur is victim of the negligence of a machinist: “ an ignited torch, shaken on its dress, had left there some sparks which started to take activity, when one realized some. Psyché threw cries, people of the slides and floor took already fire for it; but fortunately, a devil a little more human than his/her comrades came to his help and it was free for… its dress ”.

It very quickly acquires the reputation of a large dancer, but also of an empowered woman, which makes the rain and the good weather within the ballet. The famous painter David does of it one of his models for his table Mars disarmed by Venus (1824). Miss Lesueur represents there Venus and Lucien Petipa is Cupid.

In January 1826, Miss Lesueur falls seriously sick and, after some briefs returns to the scene, one announces that its health condition will not allow him to continue its career.

With its guard, the count van Gobbelschroy, Minister of Interior Department of the king Guillaume I {{er}}, it settles in the property which the count had acquired in the countryside of Brussels, with Woluwe-Saint-Lambert, and which will bear later the name of “Malou castle”. Van Gobbelschroy commits suicide in 1850, after having absorbed its fortune in the first factories of candles of France and Belgium. Some affirm that they married, however the death certificate of the count describes it as single person.

After the death of her guard, Miss Lesueur devotes herself to charity works. She takes a small apartment in the street of the Gross Tower, then settles with Ixelles. She dies in the complete destitution at the ninety years age, in a small house of the street Keyenveld. It appeared of her, in 1824, a lithography of Eeckhout representing it out of Venus.

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