The Mogador Bicentennial

Born 200 years ago, 19th century demi-mondaineCéleste Mogador (Élisabeth-Céleste Vénard, countess of Chabrillan, 1824-1909).

A native Parisian, as a girl Mogador had suffered at the hand of an abusive step-father. She escaped during her late teens and resorted to prostitution before resolving to legitimize by becoming a stage performer, starting out at the Cirque Olympique as early as 1840. She learned to dance at the Bal Mabille, and helped introduce such crazes as the can-can, the quadrille, and the schottische. She also specialized in singing the songs of the Basque composer Sebastián Iradier, best known for “La Paloma”. Her nickname was given to her by a dance partner in reference to a fortress that had proven very hard to conquer during the Franco-Moroccan War.

Like Lola Montez, Mogador became a Countess; like the much later Colette, she also became a writer. In 1854 she married Lionel de Moreton, count of Chabrillan, who became the French consul in Melbourne, Australia. This phase of her life was very short; the count perished four years later. Meanwhile she had left the stage and taken up the pen. Her works include the scandalous Adieu au monde, Mémoires de Céleste Mogador (1854), followed by two other memoirs, Un deuil au bout du monde (1877), and Les Deux Noms (published posthumously in 2015), as well as the novels Les Voleurs d’or (1857, also turned into a play with the help of Dumas pere in 1866), Sapho (1858), Miss Pewell (1859), Est-il fou? (1860), Un miracle à Vichy (1861), Mémoires d’une honnête fille (1865), Les Deux Sœurs (1876), and Les Forçats de l’Amour (1881), and the plays Les Crimes de la mer (1969), Les Revers de l’Amour (1870), L’Américaine (1870) and Pierre Pascal (1885). For a time starting in the early 1860s she owned and operated the Théâtre des Champs-Élysées.

Though it opened four years after she passed, Paris’s Théâtre Mogador makes no claim of having been named in honor of the famous cabaret and music hall performer and author, but rather for the Moroccan city. Dissed by the establishment even in death!

For more on the history of variety entertainment, please consult my critically acclaimed No Applause, Just Throw Money: The Book That Made Vaudeville Famous.