Portrait photographique

Céline de Montaland (1843–1891) joined the Comédie-Française in 1884 and became a full member (sociétaire) four years later, capping a prodigious career in France, Europe and the United States. She made her stage debut at the tender age of six, playing Camille in Émile Augier’s Gabrielle and a child’s role in François Ponsard’s Charlotte Corday. Born to actors, her precocious talent was spotted early, and before she was ten she had already acted, sung and danced on Parisian stages and in several theaters abroad.

Eugène Labiche, one of the masters of the boulevard theater, wrote a role tailored for her in La Fille bien gardée (September 6, 1850), and at the age of seven she appeared on the prestigious stage of the Théâtre du Palais-Royal. Photographed by Nadar while still a teenager, “la petite Montaland” — as everyone called her, being herself very small in stature — went on to enjoy an unbroken string of successes.

For ten years the public applauded a woman who had “become one of the most beautiful women in Paris,” critics praised her, and authors courted her. Her name appeared in Offenbach’s La Vie parisienne, in which she made an appearance; in Alphonse Daudet and Henri Lafontaine’s drama Jack, staged at the Théâtre de l’Odéon; and in La Grande-Duchesse de Gérolstein, Offenbach’s opéra-bouffe with a libretto by Ludovic Halévy, staged in New York. She even signed a three-year contract with the Théâtre Michel in Saint Petersburg before returning to Paris, where, as a crowning achievement, she joined the Comédie-Française in 1884: there she “made her debut in Scribe’s Bataille de dames, created the role in Édouard Pailleron’s Souris, and revived roles in Dumas fils’s La Princesse de Georges, George Sand’s François le Champi, Abraham Dreyfus’s Le Klephte, and Auguste Vacquerie’s Jean Baudry.” Céline de Montaland died prematurely at the age of forty-seven in her apartment on the rue de Valois, a few steps from the theater.