Valtess of Bigne

Lucie Emilie Delabigne known as Valtesse of Bigne is a demi-mondaine born in 1848 and died in 1910. Its body rests with City-in Avray.

Born with Paris and girl from a linen maid Norman who exerted the trade of the galantery, it prostitua very young person and began on scene in the role from Hébé in Orphée with the Hells from Jacques Offenbach. A critic considered it then as russet-red and shy person as a virgin of Titien. But it was not long in launching out in the courtisanery of high vol. It initially took for lover Prince Lubomirski, then prince de Sagan who ruined himself by financing the splendid private mansion built by Jules February in 1876 to the 98, Boulevard Malesherbes, with the angle of the Rue of the Terrace.

In 1876, Valtesse publishes at Dentu, its autobiographical novel, Isola signed Ego by fidelity with its currency.

The room of Valtesse, in particular its bed, inspired Emile Zola to describe the room of Nana . Here how Zola describes the bed: “ a bed as if there were not some, a throne, a furnace bridge where Paris would come to admire its sovereign nudity (...) With the bedside, a band of loves among the flowers would lean with laughter, watching for pleasures in the shade of the curtains. ”

Henri Gervex took it for model for the wife in her table the Civil wedding , which decorates the room with the marriages of the town hall of the XIXe district of Paris. It would have also inspired the heroin of the novel of Hugues Rebell, Nichina . It was also the character of Highness of the novel " Idylle saphique" of his/her friend Liana of Pougy

It was the friend and sometimes more Edouard Manet, Henri Gervex, Edouard Detaille, Gustave Courbet, Eugene Boudin, Alphonse de Neuville, which was worth to him the nickname of “the Union of the Painters”.

It piled up a vast collection of art, of which it did not give to the Musée decorative Arts that its spectacular bed of bronze parade created in 1877 by Edouard Lièvre and always visible with the museum since 1911.

Portraits

1879 : By Edouard Manet, pastel, 55.2 X 35.6 cm, New York, Metropolitan Museum off Art.
1889 : By Henri Gervex, oil on fabric, Paris, Museum of Orsay.

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