Saint Mars, Gabrielle de (1804–1872)

French novelist. Name variations: Gabrielle de Saint-Mars; Vicomtesse de Saint-Mars; Marquise de Poilow or du Poilloüe; (pseudonyms) Marie Michon, Jacques Reynaud, and Countess Dash or Comtesse Dash. Born Gabrielle-Anne Cisterne de Courtiras on August 2, 1804, in Poitiers, France; died on September 11, 1872, in Paris; married E.-J. du Poilloüe de Saint Mars, in 1824 (separated 1834); children: one son.

Gabrielle de Saint Mars was a popular fiction writer for nearly 40 years. Although she claimed an aristocratic heritage, she was born into a middle-class family in 1804 in Poitiers, France; little is known about her upbringing. At age 20, she married E.-J. du Poilloüe de Saint Mars, a cavalry officer and viscount, and moved to Paris. Her husband's noble title allowed Saint Mars to enter the intellectual life of Parisian high society and become fairly well educated. Her marriage failed, however, and she separated from her husband around 1835.

Saint Mars began to write professionally to support herself and her son, finding benefactors among her friends in the Parisian elite. With the aid of her friend and patron, the novelist Alexander Dumas père, Saint Mars became a journalist for the Revue de Paris in the late 1830s before she turned to writing novels. She published under several pen names, which was not unusual among women writers of the time; her first and favorite pseudonym, Countess Dash, was chosen because it suited her aristocratic pretensions. In 1839, she published her first novel, Le jeu de la reine (The Queen's Game). It met with moderate success, and encouraged her to publish new works, mostly formulaic historical romance novels concerning real and fictional nobles, set in pre-Revolutionary France; new works would appear regularly for the next three decades. Her books, appealing to the nostalgia and romanticism of the 19th-century French elite, became quite popular and sold well for many years.

Saint Mars is believed to have ghost-written several of Dumas' shorter fictional works, and is known to have written for his Mousquetaire (The Musketeer) in the 1850s, under the name Marie Michon. Theirs was a close personal and literary relationship. Saint Mars had a keen eye for detail and for the idiosyncrasies of her contemporaries, skills she revealed in the literary "portraits" she contributed to Le Figaro. In the late 1860s, she composed a six-volume set of memoirs, Memoires des Autres (Memories of Others), a gossipy and nostalgic look at her life and friendships. Saint Mars died in Paris at age 68 in 1872. Her memoirs were published in 1896.

sources:

Buck, Claire, ed. The Bloomsbury Guide to Women's Literature. NY: Prentice Hall, 1992.

Wilson, Katharina, ed. An Encyclopedia of Continental Women Writers. NY: Garland, 1991.

Laura York , M.A. in History, University of California, Riverside, California