![Simone le Bargy](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/f/fb/Simone_le_Bargy.jpg)
Simone Le Bargy, (April 3, 1877 – October 17, 1985), born Pauline Benda but better known by her stage and pen name, Madame Simone, was a
French actress and woman of letters.
Biography
Born into a
Paris
Paris () is the Capital city, capital and List of communes in France with over 20,000 inhabitants, most populous city of France, with an estimated population of 2,165,423 residents in 2019 in an area of more than 105 km² (41 sq mi), ma ...
ian family of Jewish bourgeoisie, Benda was a cousin of the writer Julien Benda. She made her stage debut in 1902 and played parts for
Henri Bernstein
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Bernstein was born in Paris. His earliest plays, including ''La Rafale'' (1905), ''Le Voleur'' (1907), ...
,
Luigi Pirandello
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,
Henry Bataille
Félix-Henri "Henry" Bataille (4 April 1872, in Nîmes – 2 March 1922, in Rueil-Malmaison) was a French dramatist and poet. His works were popular between 1900 and the start of World War I.
Bataille's parents died when he was young. He atten ...
,
Georges de Porto-Riche
Georges de Porto-Riche (20 May 1849, Bordeaux, Gironde – 5 September 1930, Paris) was a French dramatist and novelist.
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Georges was born into a Jewish-Italian assimilated family.
At the age of twenty, his pieces in verse began to b ...
and
François Porche, her late husband. She took after
Sarah Bernhardt in the role of L'Aiglon's Edmond Rostand and participated in the creation of Chantecler in 1910.
In 1898, she married her diction teacher Charles Le Bargy at the church of Saint-Philippe-du-Roule. He was more than twice her age. After her divorce from him, she took the name, "Simone Le Bargy". She remarried, in 1909, Claude Casimir-Perier, son of former President of the Republic
Jean Casimir-Perier
Jean Paul Pierre Casimir-Perier (; 8 November 1847 – 11 March 1907) was a French politician who served as President of France from 1894 to 1895.
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He was born in Paris, the son of Auguste Casimir-Perier, the grandson of Casimir Pierr ...
. She was the friend of many celebrities of her time and, from 1909, she received the great literary figures of the time, like her later lover
Alain-Fournier, his friend
Charles Péguy
Charles Pierre Péguy (; 7 January 1873 – 5 September 1914) was a French poet, essayist, and editor. His two main philosophies were socialism and nationalism. By 1908 at the latest, after years of uneasy agnosticism, he had become a believing b ...
, and
Jean Cocteau
Jean Maurice Eugène Clément Cocteau (, , ; 5 July 1889 – 11 October 1963) was a French poet, playwright, novelist, designer, filmmaker, visual artist and critic. He was one of the foremost creatives of the s ...
at the castle of the Trie-City.
The most striking feature of her personal life is her brief and passionate affair that began May 29, 1913 with Alain-Fournier, whom she met while he was secretary of her second husband. He was killed January 12, 1915 on the front of the Aisne. Alain-Fournier was killed while leading his company September 22, 1914, during a reconnaissance of the German lines.
She married a third time, to the author
François Porche, which she says in his memoirs was a marriage based on their respective common point following for each of them, a passion rudely interrupted.
She lived 108 years, and was a jury member of the
Prix Femina
The Prix Femina is a French literary prize created in 1904 by 22 writers for the magazine '' La Vie heureuse'' (today known as '' Femina''). The prize is decided each year by an exclusively female jury. They reward French-language works writte ...
from 1935 to 1985, literary salon, friendships and Parisian influences, writing novels, memoirs (Grand Prize for Literature of academy in 1960). Her unhappy first marriage with actor Le Bargy seems to have served as a model for Jean Cocteau's ''Bel Indifferent''.
Publications
* ''Le Désordre'', Paris, Plon, 1930.
* ''Jours de colère'', Paris, Plon, 1935.
* ''Le Paradis terrestre'', Paris, Gallimard, 1935.
* ''Québéfi'', Genève, éd. du Milieu du monde, 1943.
* ''Le Bal des ardents'', Paris, Plon, 1951.
* ''L'Autre roman'', Paris, Plon, 1954.
* ''Sous de nouveaux soleils'', Paris, Gallimard, 1957.
* ''Ce qui restait à dire'', Paris, Gallimard, 1967.
* ''Mon nouveau testament'', Paris, Gallimard, 1970.
* ''Correspondance 1912-1914'', avec Alain-Fournier, édité par Claude Sicard, Paris, Fayard, 1992.
{{DEFAULTSORT:Le Bargy, Simone
1877 births
1985 deaths
French stage actresses
French centenarians
French women dramatists and playwrights
French National Academy of Dramatic Arts alumni
French women writers
Women centenarians