Born in Paris on September 9, 1864, as Mathilde Eloise Beaugiron, the woman who would become known as Marthe de Florian began life in modest circumstances. The eldest daughter of Jean Beaugiron and Andrée Eloise Bara, she was apprenticed as an embroiderer in her teenage years, a reflection of her family’s relative poverty. Two of her brothers died in infancy, while a sister, Andrée Joséphine, survived to adulthood. As Mathilde approached adulthood, she saw a more lucrative path in the thriving French capital, where a courtesan could maintain relationships with wealthy clients from the political, business, and cultural worlds.
In the second half of the nineteenth century, Paris was full of famous courtesans, flourishing as the cultural capital of the world with looser morals than almost any other city of the time. The early years of her career in the 1880s are poorly documented, but she evidently rose quickly on the strength of her considerable beauty. By the mid-1880s, she was established as a prominent courtesan in Belle Époque Paris. Her most consequential early affair was with a banker, Auguste Albert de Gaspard Florian Mollot, when she was still only seventeen or eighteen.
The relationship remains shadowy, partly because Mollot was married. She took one of his middle names to create her courtesan name, Marthe de Florian, and it stuck. The couple appear to have had two children together, although the exact paternity is not entirely clear. A boy named Henri was born in October 1882 but died in infancy at just three months old.
A second son, also named André, was born in April 1884, lived a long life, and would play a significant part in his mother’s story later on. Perhaps her most famous relationship was with Georges Clemenceau, one of the most significant figures in modern French politics. He had entered politics following the establishment of the French Third Republic in the 1870s and gradually rose until he became prime minister in 1906, holding the office until 1909, then serving a second term from 1917 to 1920. He famously led the French delegation at the peace negotiations that ended the First World War.
Clemenceau was also a cultured man who counted Claude Monet as a close friend, moving in many of the same artistic circles as Marthe. The details of their liaison are scant, but it appears to have occurred either shortly before or not long after Clemenceau divorced his only wife, Mary Plummer, in 1891, in a highly contentious split. Around this time, Marthe’s beauty became renowned across Paris, and she was featured in the pages of Le Supplément and La Justice, two newspapers owned by Clemenceau. Her most acclaimed relationship today, however, began in the 1900s with the Italian artist Giovanni Boldini.
Boldini was originally from Ferrara in Northern Italy, but he had moved to Paris in 1872 at the age of thirty. There he established himself as a significant portrait artist and landscapist. When the Paris Exposition was held in 1889, Boldini was nominated as a commissioner to represent Italy and received the Légion d’honneur for his role. Exactly when he and Marthe first met is not entirely clear, but it may have occurred around 1897, when Boldini painted a portrait of one of Marthe’s other lovers, Robert de Montesquiou.
Their relationship became more serious in the early 1900s, and it was at this point that Boldini painted her portrait, which has since become his most famed work. He gave the portrait to Marthe once it was completed, but it seems no one else knew of this. It was only found a few years ago in her old Paris apartment and has since revived interest in Boldini’s work as a whole. Marthe had numerous other relationships with prominent members of Parisian and French society.
Robert de Montesquiou, through whom she most likely met Boldini, was an aesthete known for his pioneering work in symbolist poetry and as an art collector. Renowned as a dandy in French society, he was famously the inspiration for a character in Marcel Proust’s magnum opus In Search of Lost Time and is also believed to have been part of Oscar Wilde’s inspiration for the titular character of The Picture of Dorian Gray, published in 1891. Other notable lovers came from the world of French politics, much like Clemenceau. For a time, she was involved with both Paul Deschanel and Pierre Waldeck-Rousseau.
Waldeck-Rousseau served as prime minister of France from 1899 to 1902, while many years after their affair, Deschanel became president of the country for a spell of less than a year in 1920. Marthe was unusual in having had affairs with so many senior political figures of the age. By the 1890s, she had become acclaimed in Parisian society and found work beyond her engagements as a courtesan. She effectively represented the emerging fashion houses of the Belle Époque, wearing their gowns out and about in Paris and working as a kind of model.
Her signature style became dressing in white, as Boldini had painted her, and she was known within Parisian society as the Venus of the Acacias. Throughout her life, Marthe met many of her lovers and liaisons at an elaborate apartment she owned on the right bank of the River Seine. The apartment was on the fourth floor of 2 Square La Bruyère, near the imposing Sainte-Trinité Church, which had just been built in the 1860s. It was a formidable space covering 1,500 square feet.
From the 1890s onwards, she entertained her clients here and sometimes had to have unruly customers ejected by her bodyguards. She clearly did not suffer fools lightly and was described in La Vie discrète magazine in 1903 as being able to cut straight a man with a single disdainful pout. As her wealth increased and she spent year after year living there, Marthe decorated the apartment lavishly, often with antique eighteenth-century furniture made during the ancien régime period before the Revolution. The walls were adorned with drawings and paintings provided by some of the Belle Époque’s foremost painters, not least the portrait Giovanni Boldini produced of her.
Gilt mirrors, valuable tapestries, and richly embroidered rugs decorated the walls and the floors. It would have been an extravagant space even in the early twentieth century, but it made for an even greater spectacle in more recent times. Marthe ultimately died in that apartment many years later, having long since lost her reputation as one of Paris’s foremost courtesans. From the 1910s onwards, she lived an increasingly quiet life, reverting to her birth name of Mathilde Beaugiron.
Her death occurred on August 29, 1939, just days before the Second World War began far to the east in Poland. She was seventy-four years old. Strangely enough, it was that same war which would play an important role in preserving her apartment for posterity. When she died, Marthe was residing in the apartment on Square La Bruyère with her only surviving child, André Beaugiron, who was nearing his sixtieth year.
He inherited the apartment and continued to live there until his own death in 1966. In his later years, André had become increasingly reclusive and did not have a large network of visitors. Following his death, nothing was really done to change the apartment or dispose of its contents. Because André had wished to leave it much as it had been in his mother’s time, the apartment remained a window into Belle Époque Paris.
André had a daughter, Solange, who inherited her grandmother’s apartment in the mid-1960s. Solange’s story was complex in and of itself. In 1942, at just twenty-three years of age, she fled from Paris, possibly owing to fear of arrest due to her involvement with the French Resistance. At that time, the Nazi regime had occupied the French capital and the north of the country.
She moved to southern France, which was less invasively controlled by the Nazis owing to the Vichy regime. Later she became a playwright, writing works under the pseudonym Solange Beaugiron. She never returned to Paris, and when her father died in 1966, she appears to have had no interest in renovating the apartment on Square La Bruyère. She paid for some limited upkeep, but it was left effectively as it had been for decades.
The story of Marthe de Florian and her apartment took on a new twist in 2010 when Solange died. Only when the executors of her will learned of the apartment and arranged to enter it did they realize what had been left undisturbed for decades. Marthe de Florian’s apartment was effectively a time capsule, filled with paintings, correspondence, mirrors, tapestries, and other objects from the Belle Époque period and the interwar years. Elaborate pieces of taxidermy, including a stuffed ostrich, sat side by side with vintage Mickey Mouse dolls, testifying to Marthe’s eclectic tastes.
Easily the most striking element of the entire collection was a series of love letters, unsigned but believed to be from Giovanni Boldini, as well as his portrait of her painted well over a century earlier. Many of the items were eventually sold at auction in the months that followed. The most valuable piece was Boldini’s portrait, the existence of which had been virtually unknown within the art world until 2010.
It was listed with a reserve price of 300,000 euros but sold for over two million euros, a record for a Boldini and a striking testament to the time capsule that Marthe de Florian’s Paris apartment became in the seventy years after her death.