Marie-Madeleine Guimard

Marie-Madeleine Guimard
Portrait of Madeleine Guimard (Paris, BNF)
Born	27 December 1743
Died	4 May 1816

Marie-Madeleine Guimard (27 December 1743,Paris — 4 May 1816) was a French ballerina who dominated the Parisian stage during the reign of Louis XVI. For twenty-five years she was the star of the Paris Opera. She made herself even more famous by her love affairs, especially by her long liaison with the Prince of Soubise. According to Edmond de Goncourt, when d'Alembert was asked why dancers like La Guimard made such prodigious fortunes, when singers did not, he responded, "It is a necessary consequence of the laws of motion".

Not known for hazarding the more difficult movements that were being added to the professional repertory of ballet, she was renowned for her perfectly composed and fluid aristocratic movements, her mime and above all for her expressively smiling visage. She wore her skirt hitched up to reveal an underskirt, without hoops or paniers, held out simply by a starched muslin petticoat. The portrait painter Mme Vigée-Lebrun said, "her dancing was but a sketch; she made only petits pas, simple steps, but with movements so graceful that the public preferred her to every other dancer." Other dancers, like Jean-Georges Noverre, praised her enthusiastically, but Sophie Arnould, who thought that she had more graceful gesture than true dancing talent, remarked, after a piece of scenery fell and broke her arm in January 1766, after which she continued to make public appearances gamely, her arm in a sling, "Poor Guimard! if she had only broken a leg! that would not have kept her from dancing."

She was the love child of Fabien Guimart and Anne Bernard, legitimated at a late date (December 1765), who had been trained by the great choreographer d'Harnoncourt, who had entered her at the age of fifteen among the corps de ballet of the Comédie-Française. After a first affair with the dancer Leger, which produced a child, she was engaged at the Opéra (1761) and made her debut, as Terpsichoré, 9 May 1762, and soon was seen dancing at Court. She was kept by a stream of highly placed admirers, including the gentleman composer Jean-Benjamin de La Borde, with whom she had a daughter in April 1763, and who always remained in her circle, even after she was finally taken up by Charles de Rohan, Prince de Soubise, a maréchal de France and great connoisseur of ballet dancers, who settled on her, it was said, 2000 écus a month.