26 - Marquise de Blocqueville, Ingres and Delacroix, the Bertins

Summary

On the Left Bank, at the corner of rue Bonaparte and quai Malaquais, lived the daughter of Marshal Davout, the Marquise de Blocqueville, a childless widow and very distinguished woman with a refined mind. She lived nearly the entire century, never leaving her home, and having friends come to pay her court every evening, with a dinner reception on Mondays. She was connected with everyone: the Countess d’Haussonville [Louise de Broglie], mother of Count Gabriel-Paul d’Haussonville; Madame de [Gervais]; Claude Bernard; Digonneau; Louis Diémer; Eugène Guillaume (the sculptor); etc. It was there that I met Liszt, and I will never forget him playing Beethoven's Sonata in C-sharp Minor for us one evening.

The house is historic. It was built by the father of one of the boarders of the Mazarin College who had the building constructed, but left before it was finished. This house became a social club, and girls came there in the evening. It was there that Abbé Prévost wrote his Manon. He had written a volume of short stories, twelve, I believe, but he had only given eleven to his publisher who was anxious to get the twelfth so he could publish the work. Thus, pressed for time, he wrote the twelfth story about the girl Manon, with whom he had lived; he simply wrote about his own love affair with Manon in this gambling-den. This was the very subject of Jules Massenet's Manon, a subject that also appealed to Giacomo Puccini, whose Manon Lescaut includes a striking fourth act in which we see the embarkation of these women for America, a scene that lends itself to wonderfully treated choral developments.

Madame de Blocqueville was haunted by the fear of being evicted from this house by the Beaux-Arts, whose school had already taken over neighboring buildings. She had lived there for about forty years, and in fact did not have to suffer this distress; she died, and the house still exists. There were some fine portraits there, some interesting marble statuary from the Empire period, and on the mantelpiece, in a frame like those that hold our small photographs, a wonderful pencil sketch by Ingres—the head of the Apothéose d’Homère that the master had dedicated to her.