She was the
love child of Fabien Guimart and Anne Bernard, and was legitimised at a late date (December 1765).
Dancer , 1773-1775) She was 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. 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."
Courtesan Aside from her career as a dancer, she has been famed for her love life as well as for her life as a courtesan. 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.
House at Pantin In a career of hitherto unequaled luxury, she bought a magnificent house near Paris at
Pantin, and built a small private theater connected with it, where
Collé's
Partie de chasse de Henri IV which was prohibited in public, most of the
Proverbes of Carmontelle and similar licentious performances were given to the delight of high society. In truth there were three dinner parties a week, according to Edmond de Goncourt, one for the grandest of
grands seigneurs and those of the highest consideration at Court; a second composed of writers and artists and wits that all but rivaled the
salon of
Mme Geoffrin; and a third to which were invited all the most ravishing and lascivious young women, according to the
Mémoires secrets attributed to
Bachaumont. At the same time, according to
Baron Grimm, during a bitter cold spell in January 1768, she asked for her allowance in coins, and, without taking an entourage, climbed to all the garrets of her neighborhood at Pantin, giving
purses of money, coats and warm bedclothes. Throughout her career, her open-hearted generosity disarmed the pamphleteers. Among her admirers was Louis-Sextius de Jarente de La Bruyère, bishop of Orléans.
Hôtel Guimard In the early 1770s, in defiance of the
Roman Catholic Archbishop of Paris, she opened the gorgeous
hôtel Guimard in the
Chaussée d'Antin designed by
Claude-Nicolas Ledoux in the latest
neoclassical taste, decorated with paintings by
Fragonard, and with a theater seating five hundred spectators. The house was almost finished March 1773 when
Grimm's Correspondance littéraire reported the famous anecdote of Fragonard's revenge: La Guimard had quarreled with the painter, who had depicted her as
Terpsichore in large panels of her salon, and found a substitute. Finding his way into the house unaccompanied, Fragonard picked up a palette of paints, and with a few deft touches transformed Mlle Guimard's Terpsichorean smile into a grimace of fury, without lessening in the least the likeness. When La Guimard arrived with an entourage and discovered it, the angrier she became, the more she represented the new portrait. In this
Temple de Terpsichore, as she named it, the wildest orgies took place, according to her detractors. In 1786 she was compelled to get rid of the property, and it was disposed of by lottery for her benefit for the sum of 300,000 francs.
Later life Soon after her retirement in 1789, she married
Jean-Étienne Despréaux (1748–1820), a dancer, songwriter and playwright.
Legacy In 2009 the bed made for Guimard to a Louis XVI design by French visionary neoclassical architect
Claude Nicolas Ledoux (1736–1806) as "the high altar of the temple of love,” as Alan Rubin, the gallery owner, said, was offered for sale by Pelham Galleries at the European Fine Arts Fair in Maastricht. Aside from her portrait at the
Louvre Museum (
illustration), several other Fragonard portrait drawings are conserved at the
Musée des Beaux-Arts et d'archéologie de Besançon as well as a bust by
Gaetano Merchi (1779) is at the
Musée des Arts Décoratifs, Paris. ==See also==