Marie Louise Lévêque de Vilmorin was a French novelist, poet and journalist. Born in the family château at Verrières-le-Buisson, Essonne, a suburb southwest of Paris, she was heir to a great French seed company fortune, that of Vilmorin. She was afflicted with a slight limp that became a personal trademark. Vilmorin was best known as a writer of delicate but tales, often set in aristocratic or artistic milieu. Her most famous novel was Madame de..., published in 1951, which was adapted into the celebrated film The Earrings of Madame de..., directed by Max Ophüls and starring Charles Boyer, Danielle Darrieux and Vittorio de Sica. Vilmorin's other works included Juliette, La lettre dans un taxi, Les belles amours, Saintes-Unefois, and Intimités. Her letters to Jean Cocteau were published after the death of both correspondents. She was awarded the Renée Vivien prize for women poets in 1949.
Personal life
As a young woman, in 1923, she had been engaged to novelist and aviator Antoine de Saint-Exupéry; however, the engagement was called off, even though Saint-Exupéry gave up flying for a while after her family protested such a risky occupation. Vilmorin's first husband was an American real-estate heir, Henry Leigh Hunt, the only son of Leigh S. J. Hunt, a businessman who once owned much of Las Vegas, Nevada by his wife, Jessie Nobel. They married in 1925, moved to Las Vegas, and divorced in the 1930s. They had three daughters: Jessie, Alexandra, and Helena. Her second husband was Count Paul Pálffy ab Erdöd, a much-married Austrian-born Hungarian playboy, who had been second husband to the Hungarian countess better known as Etti Plesch, owner of two Epsom Derby winners. Palffy married Louise as his fifth wife in 1938, but the couple soon divorced. Vilmorin was the mistress of another of Etti Plesch's husbands, Count Paul Esterházy de Galántha, who left his wife in 1942 for Vilmorin. They never married. For a number of years, she was the mistress of Duff Cooper, British ambassador to France. Louise spent the last years of her life as the companion of the French Cultural Affairs Minister and author André Malraux, calling herself "Marilyn Malraux". Francis Poulenc literally sang her praises, considering her an equal toPaul Éluard and Max Jacob, found in her writing "a sort of sensitive impertinence, libertinage, and an appetite which, carried on into song what I tried to express in my extreme youth with Marie Laurencin in Les Biches".
Family
Louise was the younger daughter of Philippe de Vilmorin by his wife Berthe Marie Mélanie de Gaufridy de Dortan, daughter of Roger de Gaufridy de Dortan and his wife, Adélaïde de Verdonnet. Her siblings were:
Marie "Mapie" Pierre, who married, as her first husband, a cousin, Guy Marie Félix Lévêque de Vilmorin in 1922 by whom she had three children. She married again in 1933, Guillaume de Toulouse-Lautrec-Montfa, comte de Toulouse-Lautrec, a relative of the painter Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec; by him she had further issue a son and a daughter. She became a popular food columnist in French magazines as Mapie de Toulouse-Lautrec.
Louise de Vilmorin's children, all by her first husband, were: a) Jessie Leigh Hunt. She married in 1951 Albert Cabell Bruce Jr., only son of Albert Cabell Bruce by his wife, Helen Eccleston Whitridge, by whom she had issue, four sons: Cabell, Leigh, Thomas, and James, all born 1952–1959 in Midland, Texas. She then married Clement Biddle Wood, an editor of The Paris Review, in 1965. b) Alexandra Leigh Hunt married Henry Ridgeley Horsey. Her children were Henry Ridgely Horsey Jr., Edmond Philip de Vilmorin Horsey, Alexandra Thérèse Leigh-Hunt Horsey, Randall Revell Horsey, Philippa Ridgely Horsey, c) Helena Leigh Hunt, a realist still-life painter. She was married to John Tracy Baxter, with whom according to the New York obituary, she had three daughters, Elizabeth Baxter, Etienne Baxter, and Leigh Baxter.
