Attributed to Pascal François GERARD known as BARON GERARD (1770 - 1837) Portrait of Mademoiselle Mars in Moscow costume Canvas Height : 65 cm Width : 54,5 cm Old restorations With a fan in her hand," she told me a hundred times, "a woman is stronger than a man with a sword! ! "She had understood the sovereign power of the look, the gesture and the word! That smile, a gentle ray between two rows of pearls, that lively, amiable gaiety, which Mme de Sévigné madly let leap her pen, and that Mademoiselle Mars lets fall from her lip? It will have been mixed like a great and noble and noble stem to all the palms of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, she will have known in turn Châteaubriand Madame Récamier, Gérard, Victor-Hugo and Napoleon! "reports Roger de Beauvoir in his introduction to the Mémoires de mademoiselle Mars (Paris, 1849, T.I, p. 17). Baron Gérard portrayed the three great names of the Théâtre-Français under the First Empire: Talma, Mademoiselle Georges and Mademoiselle Mars. Daughter of actors Maurice Boutet de Monvel, comédien du roi, and Madame Mars, Anne-François-Hippolyte Boutet (1779-1847) made her stage debut at the Théâtre Feydeau in Paris at the age of 14. She was admitted to the Comédie Française in 1799, she went to Dresden in 1813 with the best actors of the French theatre called by Napoleon and was proud to have been one of his muses on two counts: her great beauty and her profession as a theatre actress, one of his passions. one of the emperor's passions, who never went a week without seeing a play. In return, she showed her loyalty to the Emperor, joining, like Talma and Miss George, the "bees" party to counter the "lilies" party. du lys" party. She regularly played roles in Molière's plays, notably Célimène in Le Misanthrope and Elmire in Tartuffe, and was the first to play Dona Sol in Hernani in 1830. She was 52 when Victor Hugo chose her to play a 17-year-old character in his first play. At her at her funeral, one of the attendants, watching the Sociétaires du Théâtre Français pass by, was able to say: "The French theatre is attending its own funeral". Mademoiselle Mars knew Gérard, a friend of her father's who frequented his Salon. Salon and produced two bust portraits of her: one in 1810, engraved by Lignon and copied several times during the period of her romance with one of Napoleon's generals, Charles de Flahaut. A letter addressed to Mademoiselle Godefroid in the 1820s, bears witness to her relationship with the painter: "My dear Mademoiselle Godefroid, as I am unable to find a suitable box for Gérard this evening so that he will not be inconvenienced by the light, I have booked it for today. I have booked it for Saturday today. I hope that this delay will only upset me, and yet, thanks to a bad, bad cold huge cold, my voice is so ill that I am almost consoled that he will not hear me this evening, for my flute is very much damaged. my flute is badly damaged, and I don't want at least, if I strain his eyes, to tear his ears. If my evening's work does not make my cold worse, I shall spend a few moments with him and his great company. In the meantime, send him and Mrs Gérard a thousand love notes, and believe in the sincerity of my friendship for you. sincerity of my friendship for you" (cf. Baron Gérard, Lettres adressées au baron Gérard, peintre d'histoire, par artists and famous people of his time, second edition ? preceded by a note on the life and works of works of François Gérard? 1886, Vol. I, p. 308).