For several decades, the well-known portrait of the novelist Léonie d'Aunet has been used in many books to illustrate the adventures of this young and beautiful Parisian who is said to be the first woman to have had the courage to face an expedition to Spitsbergen (1). Made by her husband the painter François-Auguste Biard (2), this painting is given as having been hung on the official picture rails of the Paris Salon of 1842. However, despite a somewhat sketchy execution, the authenticity of this painting does not has never been questioned – until today. A document drawn up by a notary in 1948 when this painting was bequeathed to the château de Versailles will change everything and help us reveal the true identity of the model.
The name of Léonie d'Aunet probably means nothing to you and yet it has taken an important place alongside that of Juliette Drouet in the heart of one of our famous peers in France.
At not even twenty years old, Léonie made herself known on her return from a perilous travel that she undertook with her companion – the painter François-Auguste Biard – aboard the corvette La Recherche, in the heart of the Arctic Ocean, at destination of the northern archipelago of Svalbard. Returning to the capital after several challenging months, the couple is praised and Léonie acquires the title of first woman to have walked on these inhospitable lands. All of Paris then began to admire the boldness of this intrepid young woman whose beauty was matched only by her temerity. After a marriage and two happy births, the picture is darkened because the notoriety of our adventurer is undermined when the affair of the Passage Saint-Roch breaks out in the press :
" There is much talk in Paris of a deplorable scandal for the honorable people and families involved in it. One of our most famous writers would have been surprised, yesterday, in criminal conversation, by the outraged husband (distinguished painter), who would have been assisted by the police commissioner. The unfaithful wife would have been incarcerated and the lover, so unfortunately happy, would have had the sad advantage of keeping his freedom only on the political grounds that make his person inviolable. " (3).
On July 5, 1845, Léonie was caught in the act of adultery by her husband, accompanied by a police commissioner, in a small bachelor apartment in the 1st arrondissement. The two men find her, to their great surprise, in the arms of our national poet and playwright : Victor Hugo. Without any other form of trial, Léonie is taken to the prison for prostitutes of Saint-Lazare and it is this dark event that will be remembered by History, somewhat forgetting her past exploits.
Since his death, many books and articles have been written about her. Some portray her as the woman Hugo loved the most, while others consider her a vulgar usurper. All agree, however, that Léonie was an intelligent, educated woman with a natural elegance. The journalist Henry Berthoud describes it divinely in these words :
" While we marveled at the skill of the little decorator [Editor's Note : F.-A. Biard], two pretty little white hands, those of the blond-haired angel who seems to have come from heaven to watch over the artist and spread on his forehead the mysterious perfumes of inspiration, to support him in discouragement, to console in sorrows, two pretty hands, cute and beautiful enough to make the Hebes of Canova envious, landed on the piano keys "(4).
If Léonie fascinates whatever the era, rare are the representations of her that have survived until us. In Paris, the Maison Victor Hugo keeps a delicate drawing sketched by an anonymous artist (Fig. 1). It was probably made on his return from the Far North and serve as a model for an engraving published as the frontispiece of the illustrated edition of his book Voyage d'une femme au Spitzberg (5). The Musée Carnavalet has in its collections a photograph of Étienne Carjat developing the profile of an older adventurer (Fig. 2).
Fig.1 on the left – Anonymous, Portrait de Léonie d’Aunet, charcoal on paper, undated,
49,5 x 38 cm, Collection of the Maison Victor Hugo, Paris (inv. : 1523)
Fig. 2 on the right - Étienne Carjat, Portrait de Léonie d’Aunet, photographic print on albumen paper, c. 1861-1865, 9,2 x 5,4 cm, Collection of the musée Carnavalet, Paris (inv. : PH46658)
Louis Guimbaud and Jean Savant – two biographers who have worked on his tumultuous life – quote in their works (6) several representations of which only a few traces remain. According to them, there is a portrait after Charles Saunier ; a second after Léon Seché ; two miniatures of Léonie child and young ; and a drawing representing her at the time of her meeting with her husband.
But the portrait that remains the most famous to this day is undoubtedly the painting by François-Auguste Biard kept in the collections of the château de Versailles (Fig. 3). It is a small oil painting, intimate, more like a sketch than a finished work. However, in its descriptive sheet, this canvas is given as having been hung at the Paris Salon of 1842. Given its dimensions and its graphic treatment, it seems rather unthinkable that such a canvas could have appeared on the official picture rails.
Fig.3 – François-Auguste Biard, Portrait de Flore Gisclon, Oil on canvas, c. 1860-1870,
24,5 x 21,5 cm, © RMN-Grand Palais (Château de Versailles) / Daniel Arnaudet
Moreover, Léonie was always described by her contemporaries - and in particular by Hugo - as being a " woman with golden hair " - which does not really seem to correspond to the painted model.
Finally, we know thanks to the registers recording the works offered at the Salon, that the said portrait exhibited in 1842 measured 130 x 110 centimeters (dimensions probably including the frame).
After putting together these different elements that do not really match, curiosity pushed me to deepen the research and I found myself dusting off the archives in search of answers. Due to legal deadlines for communication, certain documents had never before been studied, in particular the file of the bequest of this famous portrait. In 1948, after his death, a certain Henri Reboul made a bequest to the château de Versailles of three paintings by Biard.
A small point of genealogy which is important : the Bonald law of 1816 prohibiting divorce, Léonie and François-Auguste are obliged to remain united by the sacred bonds of marriage after the flagrante delicto. Nevertheless, during the incarceration of the culprit, the Seine court pronounced a legal separation on August 14, 1845. Biard then awaited the death of his wife in March 1879 before remarrying a few months later with Flore Gisclon. He takes this opportunity to recognize two children with this new wife, one of whom, Flora, will be the wife of Henri Reboul.
The bequest was fairly quickly accepted by the castle commission, but one piece of information – and not the least important – escaped the curator responsible for bringing the works into the collections. Indeed, Me Guy Demanche, notary in Paris responsible for carrying out the wishes of the legatee, mentions in his papers " [...] three paintings executed by Mr. Auguste Biard, painter and father of Mrs. Reboul including two portraits of himself and one of his wife Mrs. Biard born Gisclon [...] " ! (Fig. 4)
Fig. 4 - Arch. nat. - Archives des musées nationaux, service des œuvres d’art (sous-série 2CC) -
Legs Reboul à Maître Demanche, 1948, cote : 20150159/17
The portrait in question therefore represents, not Léonie, but Biard's second wife, namely Élisa Flore Gisclon. During the data entry during the registration of the works, a hasty – and tempting – shortcut was therefore probably made : Madame Biard = Léonie d’Aunet. Unfortunately, once this kind of error is written down in black and white, it is very difficult to establish the truth. The fact that Biard's second married descendants bequeath a portrait of Biard's first wife should have challenged us long before ...
For seventy years now, various works, novels, biographies, articles and others have used this painting to represent the young adventurer of Spitsbergen. This precious document with a notary's letterhead, found at the bottom of a box probably never opened, helps us to establish the truth by revealing the true identity of the painted model ! The History of the Arts is constantly being rewritten, so let's give Flore what belongs to Flore !
Article published in Le Gnomon, Revue internationale d’histoire du notariat,
July-August-September 2021, n° 208
(1) Marie Dronsart, Les Grandes voyageuses, Paris, 1909, p.28
(2) Born in Lyon in 1799 and died in Samois-sur-Seine in 1882, François-Auguste Biard was a prolific artist with an unclassifiable style. Orientalist along the Mediterranean coasts, romantic on the Svalbard archipelago, ethnologist in the heart of the Brazilian forest ... Biard spends most of his life on the waters and on the roads in search of stories and memories to to tell about. If today we especially retain his paintings of landscapes which make us dream of a distant elsewhere, in his time, it was mainly his burlesque genre scenes that made him known. The curious gather each year in front of his paintings exhibited at the Paris Salon and all laugh at the sight of a child who does not want to let his portrait be painted or even in front of poor unfortunates inconvenienced by seasickness. His hours of glory are mainly due to the July Monarchy, which gave him numerous commissions, but the arrival of the Second Empire gradually plunged his name into oblivion, to the point of being practically forgotten in the history of art.
(3) In La Patrie, 6 juillet 1845
(4) Henry Berthoud, Le singe de Biard, Musée des familles lectures du soir, t. vi, Paris, 1839
(5) Léonie d'Aunet, Voyage d’une femme au Spitzberg, Paris, 1854
(6) Louis Guimbaud, Victor Hugo et Madame Biard d’après des documents inédits, Paris, 1927 and Jean Savant, La Vie sentimentale de Victor Hugo, Léonie d’Aunet, t. ii et iii, Paris, 1982.