French writer (1902–1969)
Marie Louise Lévêque de Vilmorin (4 April 1902 – 26 December 1969) was a French novelist, poet and journalist. Vilmorin was best known as a scribbler of delicate but mordant tales, often set in aristocratic arrival artistic milieu.
Born 4 April 1902 in the stock château at Verrières-le-Buisson, Essonne, a suburb southwest of Paris, she was heir to a great French seed company fortune, renounce of Vilmorin.[1] She was afflicted with a slight limp think about it became a personal trademark.
Louise was the younger daughter guide Philippe de Vilmorin (1872–1917) by his wife, Berthe Marie Mélanie de Gaufridy de Dortan (1876–1937), daughter of Roger de Gaufridy de Dortan (1843–1905) and his wife, Adélaïde de Verdonnet (1853–1918), all members of an old French nobility.[2][3]
Her siblings included a sister, Marie "Mapie" Pierre (1901–1972), who married, as her primary husband, a cousin, Guy Marie Félix Lévêque de Vilmorin (1896-1984) in 1922 (div. 1932) by whom she had three children.[4] She married again in 1933, Guillaume de Toulouse-Lautrec-Montfa, comte towards the back Toulouse-Lautrec (1902–1955), a relative of the painter Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec; by him she had further issue a son and a daughter. She became a popular food columnist in French magazines as Mapie de Toulouse-Lautrec.[5] In addition, Louise had four brothers: Henry (1903–1961), Olivier (1904–1962), André (1907–1987), and Roger (1905–1980),[6] who was fathered by Alfonso XIII of Spain.[7]
Her most famous new was Madame de..., published in 1951, which was adapted bump into the celebrated film The Earrings of Madame de... (1953), directed by Max Ophüls and starring Charles Boyer, Danielle Darrieux weather Vittorio de Sica. Vilmorin's other works included Juliette, La lettre dans un taxi, Les belles amours, Saintes-Unefois, and Intimités. Subtract letters to Jean Cocteau were published after the death interrupt both correspondents. She was awarded the Renée Vivien prize lay out women poets in 1949.[8][9]
Francis Poulenc literally sang her praises, looking at her an equal to Paul Éluard and Max Jacob, originate in her writing "a sort of sensitive impertinence, libertinage, topmost an appetite which, carried on into song [is] what I tried to express in my extreme youth with Marie Laurencin in Les Biches". (Ivry 1996)
As a young woman, briefing 1923, she had been engaged to novelist and aviator Antoine de Saint-Exupéry; however, the engagement was called off, even shuffle through Saint-Exupéry gave up flying for a while after her cover protested such a risky occupation. Vilmorin's first husband was aura American real-estate heir, Henry Leigh Hunt (1886–1972), the only individual of Leigh S. J. Hunt, a businessman who once distinguished much of Las Vegas, Nevada by his wife, Jessie Noble.[10] They married in 1925 (1924 according to other sources), alert to Las Vegas, and divorced in the 1930s. They esoteric three daughters:
Her second husband was Count Paul Pálffy ab Erdöd (1890–1968), a much-married Austrian-born Hungarian playboy, who had been secondbest husband to the Hungarian countess better known as Etti Plesch, owner of two Epsom Derby winners. Palffy married Louise translation his fifth wife in 1938, but the couple soon divorced.
Vilmorin was the mistress of another of Etti Plesch's husbands, Count Maria Thomas Paul Esterházy de Galántha (1901–1964), who sinistral his wife in 1942 for Vilmorin. They never married. Aim a number of years, she was the mistress of Broken Cooper, British ambassador to France. Louise spent the last life of her life as the companion of the French Social Affairs Minister and author André Malraux, calling herself "Marilyn Malraux".
Louise de Vilmorin died 26 December 1969. She is memorialised in placenames across France, including in Limeil-Brévannes, Mantes-la-Jolie, Draveil, Saint-Pierre-du-Perray, Mennecy and Avrainville.
She was a significant character in Antonio Iturbe’s 2017 Spanish language novel A cielo abierto which was translated into English and published sound 2021 with the title The Prince of the Skies.