Thérèse Bentzon

Marie-Thérèse Blanc, better known by the pseudonym Thérèse Bentzon (21 September 1840 – 1907), was a French journalist, essayist and novelist, for many years on the staff of the ''Revue des Deux Mondes''. She was born at Seine-Port, Seine-et-Marne, a small village near Paris, traveled widely in the United States, and wrote of American literature and social conditions.

Childhood

Marie-Thérèse was the daughter of Edward von Solms, consul of Württemberg in Paris, and Olympe Adrienne Bentzon. She was born in the family house, owned by her grandparents. She had a brother, of whom we know nothing. Her grandmother, a woman she never mentions in her letters except to say she was a "witty and sound Parisian" was at that time remarried to the Marquis de Vitry, an old French aristocrat, born before the French Revolution, who used to tell her stories about this era.

Although her biological maternal grandfather died when her mother was very young, she mentions in her letters to Theodore Stanton that she was raised with an admiration for this unknown grandfather, Major Adrian Benjamin Bentzon, governor of the Danish West Indies from 1816 to 1820. The major, after Denmark lost the Virgin Islands, went on to file a case in the US Supreme Court arguing he should have his sugar cane plantations back. After living in America with his family, Adrian Bentzon went back to Europe, but died later in the Caribbeans. His wife later married the Marquis de Vitry, installed in the small village of Seine-Port.

Marie-Thérèse was in part raised by her grandparents and the new husband of her mother, Count Antoine Cartier D'Aure, whom her mother had married shortly after her father's death (her father was 13 years older than her mother, as her birth certificate demonstrates). At her grandparents' home she received a cosmopolitan education, learning German and English, owing to her father's origin, and having an English nurse. She was taught every day at their house by the village school teacher, and from him learned Greek, Latin and how to write.

She married in 1856 a certain Louis Blanc, but three years later, after she had a son, her husband left her. It isn't clear if he died or if they simply divorced, but she mentions in her letters to Stanton that after three years of a long and grieving time, she finally got free. But with this freedom also came the need for money to provide for her son, whose name is unknown (he is mentioned by the Goncourt brothers as the "son of Madame Blanc").

After working for different newspapers and magazines, she was introduced by her grandfather, the Count Antoine Cartier d'Aure, to George Sand, and spent a lot of time at Sand's house, in Nohant, helping her with her recording of events happening here. Sand mentions her in her journal. Her grandfather and Sand shared an interest in horses, and he had helped the writer buy some pure-breed race horses. As a thank you she agreed to read a short novel written by his granddaughter, and to present her to the then editor of the ''Revue des Deux Mondes'', François Buloz. This was the real beginning of her writing career. As an alias, she took her mother's maiden name, and generally was known as "Théodore Bentzon" a masculine penname that voluntarily identified her as a man, for a woman writing was not well regarded in the nineteenth century.

The ''Revue des Deux Mondes''

At Sand's insistence, and helped by Victor Cherbuliez

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