Léonie Léon
| Léonie Léon | ||
 Léonie Léon (1875) by Jean Corabœuf | ||
| Background information | ||
| Born as: | Marie-Léonie Léon | |
| Born | Nov 06, 1838 Paris, France | |
| Died | Nov 14, 1906 - age 68 Paris, France | |
| Occupation: | Courtesan | |
| Notable for: | Mistress (lover) of Léon Gambetta ↗ | |
| Nationality: | French | |
Léonie Léon (✦6 November 1838, Paris – †14 November 1906 Paris) was French courtesan, best known for being the mistress of statesman Léon Gambetta ↗.
Biography
Born Marie-Léonie Léon in Paris on 6 November 1838, she was the daughter of a French artillery officer. She was educated at the Louvencourt Sisters convent school in Dunkirk. Following the death of her father in the Charenton asylum in 1860, Léon took Louis-Alphonse Hyrvoix, who was in charge of Emperor Napoleon III's security, as a lover. She gave birth to Alphonse Léon, Hyrvoix's son, in Bordeaux on 5 February 1865. Léon and Hyrvoix were lovers for eight years.
Léon Gambetta
Léon met Gambetta in 1868 and was his mistress from 1872 until his death a decade later. She lived in a house on Avenue Perrichont in Auteuil and was his confidante and adviser in his political plans. They corresponded on an almost daily basis and Gambetta repeatedly urged her to marry him. She finally consented in 1882. The couple had arranged to marry in December 1882. Shortly before the wedding day, Gambetta accidentally shot himself in the hand while cleaning his gun. The wound refused to heal, and he died of complications caused by the wound on 31 December. As the couple had agreed to keep their relationship away from the public eye, Léon did not attend his funeral. She did mourn him privately and continued to mourn until she died in 1906. Only after her death did the full details of their relationship become known to the public.
Around 1920, rumors circulated that Léon had been a German spy.
Léon and Gambetta exchanged 6,000 letters between 1872 and Gambetta's death in 1882. Around 1,100 of these are still in existence.
References
- (2004) Women in France Since 1789: The Meanings of Difference (in en). Macmillan International Higher Education. ISBN 9780230802148.
- (1 April 2007) "Your Letter Is Divine, Irresistible, Infernally Seductive": Léon Gambetta, Léonie Léon, and Nineteenth-Century Epistolary Culture 30 (in en), 237–267. Digital object identifier:10.1215/00161071-2006-026.
- (2012) A Political Romance: Léon Gambetta, Léonie Léon and the Making of the French Republic, 1872-82. Palgrave Macmillan. ISBN 978-0-230-36944-3.
- (1942) The Friends of the People (in en). Verlag nicht ermittelbar.
- Orr, Lyndon (1916). "Léon Gambetta and Léonie Léon", Famous Affinities of History: The Romance of Devotion. McClure, 37–57.
- (1985) The International Dictionary of Women's Biography. New York: Continuum. ISBN 0-8264-0192-9.
- More information is available at [ Wikipedia:Léonie_Léon ]
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