“Ah, countess! You have not only tamed beasts!”
She could not cut a man down to size, so she was going to enslave lions!
Amazons of Paris is a newsletter researched and written by me, Susanna Forrest, as I work on a book of the same name. The Amazons were circus equestriennes and performers in nineteenth-century Europe, from the famous to the forgotten.
Angèle Abadie – Comtesse de X
Anything that a man can do is much better done by a woman in a skimpy costume – the unwritten rule of the nineteenth-century circus. So when the first big predator tamers emerged in the 1830s, they were shortly followed into the cage by plenty of women cracking whips at big cats, although only one was a former aristocrat. Only one was the Comtesse de X.
According to this genealogical page, Eugénie Paule Angèle Abadie was born in Tarbes in 1850 and married the future Viscount Jean Marie René de Lévézou de Vézins in Paris’ third arrondissement when she was 17. Angèle (as she was known) brought a few million francs to the marriage, courtesy of her wealthy industrialist family, who manufactured cigarette papers. Her cavalry officer husband was nine years older and would eventually rack up the statuses of sous-préfet and secrétaire général de préfecture. They had a daughter, Reine, who several years later was followed by a son and heir, Roger, and lastly many years later by little Liliane.
Eighteen months after Lilians’ birth the marriage ended in the Paris courts on 8 May 1893. Angèle accused René of keeping mistresses. René called Angèle out for her fecklessness. Reine was in her twenties and married to Henri Jacquin, a lyric artist, so her custody was not at stake. René was given charge of their son, Roger, who was boarded at a school in Paris far from the family seat in the south of France. Little Liliane was awarded to her mother. Angèle was 43. She retrieved her millions and was reborn.
The circus historian Henry Thétard says that the animal tamer Edmond Pezon was approached by her around the time of her divorce because she was bored stupid with society and wanted to train as a tamer. Pezon gave her lessons, sold her five lions and provided a “groom” for them called Constant Gallois, who weighed 300 lbs (apparently a prerequisite for working with unhappy big cats). Another source says it was Marck (perhaps a typical newspaper typo for Macdonald?) who trained her, and there’s yet another account later – supposedly direct from Angèle – as we will see.
The following year, Angèle debuted with her five lions at the Folies-Bergère as “Comtesse de X”: an instant sensation. She wore a black, flesh-coloured or blue leotard and a domino mask. “Oh! The veil of anonymity!” wrote Pierre Véron in Le Monde Illustré – not just a mask but also an “X” – “mysterious: double attraction.” There was inevitable scepticism that she really was a femme du monde, but her courage (foolhardiness?) was not in doubt. A lion clawed her in the chest – “These beasts respect nothing, not even the old nobility,” commented Véron – and she missed one performance but was back the next night. La Lanterne said that the entranced behaviour of the audiences at the Folies-Bergére was a spectacle in itself: “A mighty silence when the tamer enters the cage; a unanimous sigh of relief when she leaves.”
She went on tour. At the Casino des Fleurs in Asnières a lioness refused to perform. Angèle whipped her. The lioness leapt for her right arm and tore at it. Without missing a beat, Angèle clubbed her unconscious with an iron bar. She allowed her wound to be dressed and then carried on, although the doctors would later sign her off for eight days. No word about the poor lioness.
In October she was spotted at the Salvator menagerie sale amid a crowd of “copper-skinned Sinte Romani”, “phlegmatic English”, “corpulent Belgians”, “antsy Southeners” and “trendy gossips”. She wore a black veil instead of a mask and her “magnetic” eyes caused the journalist present to breathe “Ah, countess! You have not only tamed beasts!” She bought a three-year-old lioness for 600 francs.
In Marseille that December at the Palais de Cristal her lion, Tsar, jumped at her as soon as she entered the cage, biting her right arm and clawing her chest as the audience screamed. She kept her cool and hit him with a fork till he dropped her arm. She continued the performance and received her ovation at the end. A reporter at the Marseillaise outed her as the daughter of a cigarette paper manufacturer, saying that she had first become enamoured of her vocation when she had seen a tamer called Macdonald perform at the Nouveau Cirque. She said she would shortly return to Paris and organise a show to benefit French soldiers who were having a disastrous time trying to colonise Madagascar.
In January 1896 Le Télégramme ran an extract from an interview with Angèle that came from a largely undigitised paper called the Courrier Artistique. Interviews with Amazons are so rare that I want to believe in this one, but several key facts don’t match up. Who is responsible for that? The person who copied the text to the Télégramme? The journalist at the Courrier Artistique? Angèle herself? We are not in the territory of fact checking – this was a trade paper for a business where truth was elastic. However, I cannot resist the telling of her story here, nor the detail about her eyes flashing when she gives her married name.
She says that she was married for nine years when she divorced (it was somewhat longer), and that she decided to go to the furthest extreme possible. She saw the tamer Edmond Pezon perform at the Folies-Bergère and afterwards asked if she could enter the cage and give a performance to benefit the poor (readers, how much do I love this subversion of Lady Bountiful?). He refused. She shook his hand angrily and said, “You will be seeing me. Farewell!” She hired Macdonald as a trainer instead and purchased her lions. When she first went through the cage door, she said, “I swear to you that I did not tremble, but the emotion I felt was exactly what I had sought.”
Her lions had not been tamed, and Macdonald was supposed to take on the task, but after eight days she impatiently thrust him aside and began. First with one lion, then two, then three and finally five. “The next day,” she says, “I invited Pezon to visit me and I received him from the height of the great cage with my lions at my feet.” By spring of 1896 she was at the peak with a gig at the Cirque d’Hiver in Paris. One of her lionesses gave birth to twin cubs that were baptised with champagne. There is an incredible poster for her time here but I sadly have not found who owns it or gotten permission to use it. See it here.
And so the international touring continued. I have barely dug into the pan-European papers for this, but there are reports that one of the lions scalped her in Madrid (she henceforth wore a wig) and another tore her thigh so badly in Brussels that the king’s surgeon was called and there were concerns about her survival.
It is perhaps not surprising that by 1901 she had retired from public performances, but Thétard is wrong when he says that she sold her big cats and went off to do something else. She set up an animal park in Steele, a suburb of Essen in Germany, and began to breed and train them for sale, along with monkeys, bears and dogs. Macdonald, whose real name was Nordsiech (Nordsied?), and who had previously worked for Carl “human zoos” Hagenbeck, went to work for her. Her youngest daughter Liliane, who had travelled with her on tour, also made a home in Steele. They were joined by Tilly BéBé, aka Mathilde Rupp, a former typist turned trainer of snakes and hyenas who had been talent-spotted by Angèle, and three servants.
This menagerie within a menagerie was rocked that November when Macdonald was exhibiting twelve lions to an agent from Paris. He turned to speak to the Parisian for one moment and a homebred, bottle-fed lion leapt on him. The rest of the pack followed. Angèle had no gun but she waded in with nothing but a fork and they managed to pull Macdonald clear, although no one could save him and he died six hours later. Apparently he whipped the lions a lot, and she had warned him about that. Just ten minutes later, Tilly went into the cage, and they were all mere pussy cats.
You would not guess that this had ever happened if you read the small ads Angèle was placing the following year, when she also became a grandmother, seeking help for Liliane:
“Seeking a girl or widow, who can write well, speak well, and translate in French and German, very gentle character, to do some housework and care for a little girl. Wages 40 Marks per month. Good references. Write to Madame Abadie, Thierpark Steele (Ruhr).”
You might wonder where Liliane’s father was in all this. He had resurfaced, now married to an English widow, and decided that Liliane was being raised in an utterly unsuitable fashion, so he sued for custody. You know that this true story has become a children’s novel now? Or a screenplay? Do get in touch if you want me to write it. I will.
The subsequent battle was extensively covered in the press and finally conclusively outed Angèle, as, “a mother who is truly original in her tastes.” Gil Blas – always a source of casual misogyny – said that at the time of her divorce her husband was already fed up with her long excursions to follow circuses and Buffalo Bill shows. “She could not cut a man down to size, so she was going to enslave lions! The king of the desert is sometimes less terrible than the lord of creation!” I suspect Angèle actually saw the lions as a bigger challenge than her ex, as you will see.
René claimed that he had not spoken up at the time of the divorce because it could make life difficult for the children. He was able to see Liliane till her mother’s travels made that impossible. His new wife, he said, was ready to dedicate herself to his children, and would be a more fitting mother than Angèle. Besides, there was the issues of the male tamers, and the monkey that Liliane was training and that had bitten her quite severely. She was being raised to treat lions as her dolls, and was already starting to train one.
Readers were treated to their correspondence, or at least, to Angèle’s side of it, which is possibly among the more remarkable surviving writing by an aristocratic woman of that era. Smoke and whiplashes rise off the paper. It stings. Naturally I will CC you in on all that I have of it. Her headed paper had two rampant lions on it.
“Sir,
I want you to reimburse me for the thirteen thousand francs about which you wrote me such very loving letters. I have all those letters and the post office receipts for the money I sent you; I have your formal written promises that it was only a loan, and that you would return it all to me when your mother died.
You even made me provide a proxy to receive my money; I know you got some of it, but you forgot to send it to me!
All your correspondence establishes the facts that I put forward.
Now that your mother is dead and you have received the inheritance I want to be reimbursed; if you do not do it with good grace, I will put you on trial, which will be somewhat scandalous for you: accepting money from your divorced wife – money this woman earned by risking her life – and not returning it to her, when you inherited more than a hundred and fifty thousand francs, is a bit of a Montmartre move.* When one makes such ultra-delicate things public, as you did, one pays a matching debt of honor.
So, if in two weeks, I haven't received this money, I'm going to Paris, I'm handing over all your correspondence and suing you, with all due respect to your English widow, your wife apparently… A protestant for you, the grandson of a bishop! An Anglaise for you, former officer! Your choice is not a happy one! Nothing surprises me anymore about you!
But all that doesn’t matter to me! Pay me, that’s all I ask of you.”
* She uses the phrase “casquette de Montmartre”, which could mean a debt at cards.
René, whose letter is not shared, claims she wrote off the debt on 8 April 1897. Fool.
“Sir,
I sent you a summons for 13,000 francs; I believe this figure is not exaggerated, given all the money I provided when you weren’t with the woman you married.
I have already told you that I have all your correspondence, in which you pledged, in very tender words, to return this to me upon the death of your mother…. I think it would be preferable if you returned the sum to me with good grace: it would be more dignified, because I will not shy away from scandals.
If you have friends in the press, I too have influential ones, and if I don't get back the money I lent you – this money that I had so much difficulty earning, that I have often paid for with my own blood – I will recoup it by writing a saga which will amuse many people.
It is shameful for you to have allowed yourself to be lent money by a woman who was no longer yours and, now that you have the means, you are evading payment. I will make the Parisian public the judge of that.”
René was still not getting the message. Another lash of the whip for him. The next letter included a threat to have him stripped of his Légion d’honneur, and:
“It seems, old trickster, you would like us to believe that you owed me nothing on the grounds that I would have given you a receipt for all accounts, like a common fish merchant.
What you forget, you old fool, is that when you sent me this stamped paper with the draft of the receipt that I had to give you, you wrote to me, in Gratz, in Austria: “I need this receipt, my darling!” Ah! Yes, how darling to have the bank notes!!!
…
Liliane, our daughter, will soon debut at the Nouveau Cirque in Paris. She will perform under her name – yours – and I dare you to stop her, because since you defrauded your children for a Neapolitan whore,* your daughter will work to feed her mother until the day she finds an old fool like you to give her all his fortune.
Signed, ABADIE.
PS I want as much scandal as possible – to get the newspapers to write about all of us; then we will laugh!”
* I assume this is the mistress who caused the divorce.
Gil Blas’ happily aghast commentary at this point: “This tamer is unmanageable and wants to treat her ex-husband like she treats her beasts. Here at least she is not afraid to open his chest with her claw.” Le Droit: “Vésins did not respond to these letters, no doubt stripped of all illusions about feminine character.” But in May 1903 she put down her stick and employed instead a carrot.
“Monsieur de V…
Don't you think that the scandal has lasted long enough? Do you want to irremediably lose all your children who flocked to me when you dared to say that I was a bad mother, I who sacrificed everything for them? ? You know this is not true better than anyone, having told me often enough that I was an admirable mother.
You are not as bad as you want to appear, but a new influence has made you commit this incomprehensible act. Return to yourself and remember that one day you will be very happy to have your children around you. It’s so good not to feel alone on this earth!
I write these lines to you not because I am afraid of the court’s verdict – I am sure that it will give me my due – but because this trial is monstrous for the future of my children, and, once again, I sacrifice my amour propre to my maternal love.
Listen to your heart; don't listen to your head which has always made you do crazy things.
A. Abadie.”
In court she struck a demure pose and claimed that she had only threatened to put Liliane in the ring in a moment of passion. Liliane had all the teachers a girl should have, and Angèle dedicated herself to two separate things: the beasts and her daughter’s education. The verdict came in January 1904.
I think we often assume that notions of what a woman should be worked against all women at all times in this period. But it’s more complex than that. As we found out in this earlier newsletter where wronged women literally got away with attempted murder, women win when they are at their most feminine. And so mama Angèle retained custody of her daughter after the judge found that although Liliane’s home was unconventional, there was no sign that she was exposed to undesirable people or that her upbringing had changed since the initial judgment. Because she now lived in Germany, however, her father would have her for the first half of any holiday and her mother the second. Angèle was triumphant.
Angèle died on 13 December 1929 in Strasbourg aged 79. She was buried in Père Lachaise, Paris, in an Abadie family tomb in division 81. Her name is given as Angèle Abadie de Vésins. She still has living descendants though I have been unable to find out more about Liliane specifically. I also don’t yet know what happened to Angèle between the trial and her death. Tilly Bébé’s career is better documented – including her performances with polar bears and in silent movies – and she is generally credited with introducing a more benevolent style of taming to the genre. I wonder if she learned some of that from Angèle or in reaction against her – the clues are few and contradictory. Sources say she died in poverty.
And what about the “beasts”? The hyenas, the lions, the tigers, sourced by merchants like Hagenbeck from the wild and borne off to distant continents to be caged, beaten, and whipped into performing foolish tricks? Their given names were Négus, Atlas, Tsar, Gracieuse, Romeo… We are only just entering into an era where historians tell the stories of animals themselves, and I want to recommend Sandra Swart’s new book The Lion’s Historian if you’re curious about this species’ story.