Childhood and Early Years
She was born Julienne Josephine Gauvain on 10 April 1806 in Fougères, Ille-et-Vilaine, the daughter of Julien Gauvain, a tailor, and Marie Marchandet, who was employed as a housemaid. She had two older sisters, Renee and Thérèse, and a brother Armand. Orphaned from her mother a few months after her birth, and her father the following year, Gauvain was raised by her uncle, René Drouet. She was educated in Paris at a religious boarding school and considered a precocious child, having learned to read and write at the age of five. At the age of ten, Gauvain was already proficient in literature and poetry. Around 1825, she became the mistress of sculptor James Pradier, who represented her in a statue symbolizing Strasbourg, at the Place de la Concorde in Paris. They had a daughter together, Claire. On the advice of Pradier, she started an acting career in 1829, initially in Brussels, then in Paris. It was about that time Gauvain began using her uncle's surname, Drouet.
Read more about this topic: Juliette Drouet
Famous quotes containing the words childhood and, childhood, early and/or years:
“Adolescence is a border between childhood and adulthood. Like all borders, it’s teeming with energy and fraught with danger.”
—Mary Pipher (20th century)
“Modern children were considerably less innocent than parents and the larger society supposed, and postmodern children are less competent than their parents and the society as a whole would like to believe. . . . The perception of childhood competence has shifted much of the responsibility for child protection and security from parents and society to children themselves.”
—David Elkind (20th century)
“Many a woman shudders ... at the terrible eclipse of those intellectual powers which in early life seemed prophetic of usefulness and happiness, hence the army of martyrs among our married and unmarried women who, not having cultivated a taste for science, art or literature, form a corps of nervous patients who make fortunes for agreeable physicians ...”
—Sarah M. Grimke (1792–1873)
“Great literature cannot grow from a neglected or impoverished soil. Only if we actually tend or care will it transpire that every hundred years or so we might get a Middlemarch.”
—P.D. (Phyllis Dorothy)