Celeste Mogador (1824–1909)

Céleste Mogador, born Élisabeth-Céleste Vénard, was the daughter of impoverished parents and had a difficult childhood. She ran away from home and was imprisoned as a vagrant at age 16, when she became a prostitute. She then worked as an equestrienne or circus rider at the Hippodrome, an actress, and cancan dancer at the Bal Mabille -- where she was given the surname Mogador -- and became the darling of Paris. She became the lover of the young aristocrat Lionel de Moreton, comte de Chabrillan, who married her in 1854. The couple then took ship for Melbourne, Australia. Céleste not only admitted her scandalous past, but wrote a bestselling memoir, Adieu au monde: Mémoires de Céleste Mogador, that shocked many respectable Australians. The comtesse returned to Paris in 1856 to assist in a business deal for her husband. She drew on her visits to the gold fields of Australia to produce the popular novel, Les Voleurs d’Or, from which Alexandre Duman père wrote a play. It was followed by two more novels, Miss Pewell and The Emigrants. After her husband's death in Australia in 1858, she returned to live in France permanently. In later life, Céleste Mogador became involved in charitable works and founded an order of nuns to care for those wounded in the Franco-Prussian War. She befriended her neighbor, Georges Bizet, and donated her mansion in Vésinet as a shelter for war orphans. Her name has become synonymous with bohemian Parisian life of the 1840s and 1850s.