australian history
A Talent For TheTheatrical
Lucy Frost
Patricia Clancy and Jeanne Allen,
Translators and editors
The French Consul's Wife:
Memoirs of Céleste de Chabrillan in Gold-rush Australia
The Miegunyah Press (MUP) $49.95hb, 304pp
0 522 84775 7
WITHOUT HER REMARKABLE talent for the theatrical, Céleste would
never have become the Countess de Chabrillan. She was
twenty-nine by now, not one of the season's new offerings, and
in the middle of the nineteenth century when respectability was
all the rage, aristocratic men didn't marry women who had escaped
illegitimacy, impoverished childhood, and grinding
apprenticeship as an embroideress, by taking themselves off to
register as a Parisian prostitute. Beautiful and sixteen, Céleste
the prostitute became quite a hit, and in spite of a severe bout
of smallpox, was soon set up in the first of her apartments
maintained by rich admirers. Not that she spent her days
languishing on the couch as she awaited his footsteps, no, she
was busy with her second, parallel career as a dancer and circus
performer. Ah, the thrill of riding bareback, to say nothing of racing chariots around the Hippodrome!
Not content with living this drama, Céleste wrote about it. In the opening sentence of the memoir translated into English for the first time under the title The French Consul's Wife, the author breathlessly seizes her melodramatic moment.
And what a performance! The marriage happens, the couple sail off to Australia, and in April 1854 Céleste , her little adopted daughter, and the Count find themselves 'paddling through the mud like poodles', as for hours they follow the handcart carrying their trunks through the streets of Melbourne. 'We look like acrobats moving house on a rainy day.' Newspapers are already gossiping about the French Consul
Not surprisingly, her account of Victoria is caustic. 'Society' ignores Céleste . Invitations accorded the Consul are not extended to his wife. Gleefully, the excluded author reports on things that go wrong, and especially on pretensions puffing up crassness (or worse). Of the seven hundred people invited to the Governor's Ball, about a third are 'convicts who have served their term or even escaped from the Sydney penal colony'. The ball is a dud. Rain falls in torrents; the venue is twenty times too small for the crowd; 'the ladies' outfits were completely ruined'; and to top it off, a fitting débacle in the realm of food and drink: 'On the sideboard were a few cold meats entirely surrounded by nothing but hams, and the only drink available -- a keg of colonial beer!'
The French Consul's Wife is a delightful portrait of colonial Australia from an unexpected point of view, and a passionate love story, with the distressing finale foreshadowed in the memoirs' original title, Death at the End of the World. Lionel (for Robert was not Mr de Chabrillan's real name), had gone to London alone to publish our marriage banns, while I made my last preparations for departure here and approached Messrs Jacottet and Bourdilliat once again to try and get them to return the manuscript of my Memoirs...and destroy it. (ellipsis in the original)
Immediately the reader is thrown into the middle of two narratives. In one, the Count de Chabrillan has succumbed to years of passion for Céleste , and against the advice of his friends and in the face of his appalled family, has determined to marry his mistress. In the second narrative Céleste as author of a courtesan's scandalous memoir is desperate to stop publication before she refashions herself as wife and countess. Over both narratives hovers a third: Céleste is explaining to readers of the obviously undestroyed Memoirs that the 'Robert' of that earlier volume is 'Lionel' in the story as it continues. Raising the curtain on further drama, Céleste invites the audience to witness her performance.foolish enough to marry his mistress and yet believe that society in the colony of Victoria would welcome the notorious Céleste Mogador, -- who, what is more, had left behind her very strange Memoirs, of which the first two volumes have been published by Librarie Nouvelle in Paris, and which can be bought in Melbourne at M***.
Like many other authors, this femme fatale is out there plugging her book even while she decries her victimisation as the well-intentioned woman who wants to be a respectable wife but is given no opportunity in the petty, malicious colony.
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