Oscar Huguenin: self-portrait
Marie de Flavigny
Cosima Liszt
T Combe
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Fritz-Edouard Huguenin-Virchaux (1842-1926) was born in Le Locle in a watchmaking family. He initially trained as an engraver of watch caps, but art was always his passion, and after an informal apprenticeship with an artist in Geneva, he became a drawing teacher in his home town. In 1869 he married Jeanne Joséphine Lassauguette, a French woman from Orthez, and adopted the professional name of Fritz Huguenin-Lassauguette. He painted and sketched throughout the canton of Neuchâtel, and illustrated several books. In 1892 he was appointed to teach drawing at a girls’ school and college in Vevey, and from this time on painted many landscapes of Lake Geneva, the Alps and the canton of Valais.
Artistic talent was not lacking in this branch of the family, as Fritz’s daughter, Jeanne-Louise was also an artist. His nephew, Henri-Edouard, was a landscape painter, and Henri-Edouard’s daughter, Marthe Henriqueta Françoise (born in Portugal) was a portraitist.
Another of Fritz’s sons, Paul-Daniel, (1870-1919) was appointed director of schools in the Leeward Islands in 1896. He and his wife Elisabeth lived on the island of Raiatea , learned the language, and fell in love with this exotic corner of the world, which Paul sketched and painted with talent. Forced to return to Switzerland by ill-health, Paul published an article Rataia la Sacrée in 1902 in the bulletin of the Neuchâtel Geographical Society, and continued his artistic career in Capri and the Valais mountains.
Oscar Huguenin-Tenet (1842-1903) was born in the village of La Sagne, the son of a fervent royalist who participated in the failed uprising of 1856 and was forced to take refuge over the border in France. The young Oscar drew both the republican soldiers who had repulsed the royalists, and the French soldiers he saw while visiting his father at Morteau. In the winter of 1870-71, the French army under General Bourbaki was heavily defeated by German troops, and forced to retreat in disorder. 35,000 soldiers passed through the Val-de-Travers, and Oscar made poignant sketches of the routed army which were subsequently sold to help the refugees.
Oscar Huguenin’s first novel L’armurier de Boudry, was published in 1885, and he rapidly became a popular author in both Switzerland and France. His books are mainly set in a romanticised 18th century Neuchâtel, and glorify local traditions and values. Although his picturesque characters now seem a little stereotyped, and the storylines lacking in action, his books are still in print today. Oscar Huguenin illustrated his own works, and those of other local writers, including his cousin Louis Favre and T Combe. Self-portraits hang in the Musée des Beaux-Arts in Neuchâtel and the town hall in Boudry where he lived for many years.
Sophie Elisabeth Huguenin du Mitan, married Comte Gratien de Flavigny in 1768, and her granddaughter, Marie Catherine Sophie de Flavigny (1805-1876) was married to Comte Charles d’Agoult in 1827. Unhappy in her arranged marriage, Marie found consolation in becoming a leading Parisian hostess, associating with leading Romantic artists such as Victor Hugo, Chopin and Rossini. In 1833 she shocked Parisian society by leaving her husband to live openly with composer and pianist Franz Liszt, by whom she had 3 children: Blandine, Cosima and Daniel.
Their relationship ended in 1844, and Marie began a serious career as a journalist under the pen name of Daniel Stern. She gained considerable respect as a political commentator and feminist thinker, publishing Essai sur la liberté in 1847 to critical acclaim. An ardent Republican, her salon became the meeting-place for many figures of the French Revolution, including future prime minister Emile Ollivier, who subsequently married her daughter Blandine. Marie wrote many articles concerning the Revolution, editorials on the presidential campaign, and philosophical analysis. Her major work, a 3-volume Histoire de la Révolution de 1848, was an objective eye-witness account of history in the making, published between 1850 and 1853, and subsequently used as a reference work by many historians.
During the Second Empire, Marie’s salon was a centre of liberal opposition, and a meeting-place for left-wing politicians, social theorists and foreign exiles. She was committed to democracy and social justice, but her socialism was broad-based and realistic. She strongly advocated better education for women and universal suffrage, while rejecting radical feminism and all forms of extremism. Although less well-known than her countrywoman George Sand, her political and social influence was considerable.
Cosima Liszt (1837-1930), daughter of Franz Liszt and Marie de Flavigny, married conductor and pianist Hans von Bulow in 1857. In 1864 she left him for composer Richard Wagner, whom she married in 1870 in Lucerne. Wagner’s orchestral work, Siegfried Idyll, was written as a birthday present for her commemorating the birth of their son, Siegfried, and it was originally entitled Tribschen Idyll, after the name of their house in Geneva. Wagner assembled and rehearsed a small orchestra in secret, and the first performance took place on the stairs of their home on the morning of Cosima’s birthday. The work was intended purely for the family circle, but financial pressure forced Wagner to publish it in 1877, and it became his most popular orchestral work.
Adèle Huguenin-Vuillemin (1856-1933) was born in Le Locle, a primary school teacher who dreamed of becoming an author. After a few difficult years teaching in Le Locle, she went to England to teach French in a well-off family. In London she met a young journalist named E P Coomb, and after a brief courtship was apparently married by special licence under rather obscure circumstances. (There is no trace of the marriage in the English GRO marriage index.)
However, during their honeymoon, Coomb suddenly left her after reading a newspaper article, and never returned. He wrote to Adèle, sending money, but giving no explanation, and she never saw him again. To the end of her life, she was unsure whether the marriage was valid or not, and never entered into another romantic relationship. Adèle recounted this strange adventure in her largely autobiographical last novel, Cinq épisodes d’une vie (1928).
Still in London, Adèle won a literary competition organised by the Institute of Geneva and turned her back permanently on teaching. After returning to Switzerland, Les bonnes gens du Crozet (written under the pseudonym of T Combe) was accepted by the “Bibliothèque universel”, a magazine which published novels in serial form, and Adèle began her career as a popular author. She published several short stories and novels, all set in the Neuchâtel mountains and featuring ordinary country people. These had a considerable success, as did her stories for children. However, as time went on, she became increasingly implicated in social problems of the day, particularly women’s rights and alcoholism. Une Croix, a novel promoting abstinence, was published in 1891, and Adèle subsequently published many tracts and articles on temperance, feminism, pacifism and disarmament alongside her lighter literature. She continued to write prolifically up to her death in 1933.
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