Meet the Most Beautiful Woman in the World: Cléo de Mérode
By: Denise Shelton
Tags: La Belle Époque, History, Beauty, Dance, Celebrity

Meet the Most Beautiful Woman in the World: Cléo de Mérode

Portrait of Cléo de Mérode (Source: Public domain, color by Klimbim)

She was the most famous woman in the world. Everyone knew her face. Millions scanned the newspapers for tidbits of information about her. Millions more purchased postcards, playing cards, and other items bearing her likeness. She was featured in print advertisements and on posters everywhere: the great beauty of the Belle Époque.

Triple-view postcard featuring Cléo de Mérode (Source: Public Domain)

Dozens of painters, sculptors, photographers, sketch artists, and cartoonists labored to capture her image. Even scandal did not diminish her popularity. It only increased it. But today, hardly anyone knows her name. Who was Cléo de Mérode? Here is her story.

A child prodigy and teen trend-setter

Cléo as a child (Source: Public Domain)

Cléopâtre-Diane de Mérode (1875–1966) was born in Paris, France, into an aristocratic and artistic family. Her parents, Viennese Baroness Vincentia Maria Cäcilia Catharina de Mérode and Austrian judge Theodor Christomannos were not married and estranged. Consequently, the first time Cléo met her father, she was a young adult.

When she was eight, Cléo’s mother enrolled her in ballet classes. The child made her professional debut as a dancer at the Paris Opéra when she was 11. At 16, she was already turning heads with her signature hairstyle, the chignon.

“The Stockholm telephone authorities are finding fault now with the way in which (switchboard operators) do their hair. It appears that of late the Swedish lassies …have adopted the mode of coiffure first initiated by the French dancer Cleo de Merode, in which the hair is drawn over the ears. The subscribers have since found a falling off in the hearing powers of the operators, as the result of which complaints of inefficiency in the service have been made.” — The American telephone journal, Volume 8, 1903

Cléo’s signature hairstyle (Source: Public Domain)

The hairstyle became so popular that it nearly inspired a strike by Swedish telephone operators. Ordered by management to stop wearing their hair over their ears like Cléo de Mérode, they flatly refused to comply.

How the Swedes resolved the dispute is unknown, but the incident shows the dancer’s powerful influence on fashion and beauty trends.

When she wasn’t dancing, beginning in her teen years, Cléo de Mérode was modeling for some of the greatest artists of the day. Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, famous for his paintings and sculptures of ballet dancers, did her portrait as did Edgar Degas.

Portrait by Giovanni Boldini, 1901 (Source: Public Domain)

Other painters who captured her likeness include Manuel Benedito, Giovanni Boldini, Georges Clairin, François Flameng, Henri Gervex, Friedrich August von Kaulbach, Alfredo Müller, Einar Nerman, József Rippl-Rónai, and Carlos Vázquez Úbeda.

She also posed for sculptors Eugène-Denis Arrondelle, Mariano Benlliure, Alexandre Falguière (twice), and Ernst Seger.

The dancer is said to be the model for Alphonse Mucha’s stunning series of Art Nouveau busts La Nature, although this is unsubstantiated.

You can see the wax mask of her by Georges Despret at the Musée Fin-de-Siècle Museum in Brussels.

Cléo de Mérode is depicted in countless newspaper and magazine illustrations, cartoons, and postcards. Georges Goursat drew several caricatures of her during the 1900s.

Photos by Nadar (Source: Public Domain)

But nothing had a greater impact on Cléo de Mérode’s fame than her photographs. Her image was easily mass-produced and distributed worldwide. A postcard bearing her likeness, sent from Uruguay in 1904, recently sold on eBay.

Some of the more prominent photographers who photographed the beauty included Nadar and his son Paul Nadar, Léopold-Émile Reutlinger, and his son Jean Reutlinger, Henri Manuel, Charles Ogerau, and Otto Sarony.

These images, usually on postcards, are still popular with collectors. Millions of these were produced and sold each year throughout her heyday and beyond. People were crazy for Cléo. Anything with her name or picture on it, be it underwear or playing cards, sold like hotcakes.

Gossip Girl of La Belle Époque

Promotional photo showing deMérode’s left ear (Source: Public Domain)

Beauty and fame invariably attract envy and conjecture. One of the first rumors circulated about Cléo was that she used her famous hairstyle, which completely covered her ears, to conceal that she was missing either one or both of them.

There’s no reason to believe the missing ear rumor is true, although, in nearly every photo of her to be found, her ears aren’t visible, nor does she appear to be wearing earrings. Some versions of Mucha’s bust La Nature are equipped with earrings, but the ear lobe isn’t depicted. Obviously, nothing other than a photograph would prove it one way or another, and I could only find one, confirming that her left ear was intact.

Cartoon By Auguste Roubille depicting Léopold II and Cléo de Mérode (Source: Public Domain)

The next rumor about de Mérode was much more serious. It was spread beginning in the fall of 1895, implying that 20-year-old Cléo was having an affair with 60-year-old King Leopold II of Belgium. The age difference aside, Leopold was a world-class womanizer, married, and the father of four children. The press began revering to the pair as “Cléopold.”

Initially, the gossip hurt de Mérode’s reputation somewhat. It didn’t help when in 1899, Leopold took 16-year-old French prostitute Caroline Lacroix as his mistress and proceeded to father two children by her.

This gave the rumor mongers additional clout in deeming Cléo de Mérode a courtesan in service to the king.

Gossip columnists and political cartoonists had a field day with the Cléopold scenario, and the rumor persisted for nearly 10 years. Cléo denied any involvement with Leopold, and evidence suggests she was telling the truth. An article in the June 4, 1911, edition of the New York Times declared no foundation to the rumor. The dancer did not, however, deny the allegation too vigorously. After all, there’s no such thing as bad publicity.

(Cléo de Mérode and the Falguière sculpture depicted in a painting by Carlos Vázquez Úbeda “Cléo de Mérode at the Salon” (Source: Public Domain)

Not long after the Cléopold rumor began, de Mérode caused another sensation over the sculpture La Danseuse that Alexandre Falguièr exhibited at the Salon des Artistes Français in the spring of 1896.

Falguièr said that he based the life-sized marble nude on a full-body plaster cast of Cléo de Mérode. The critical reception for La Danseuse was not good.

In her article “The corset, the bicycle and the Hottentot: Alexandre Falguière’s The Dancer and Cléo de Mérode’s modern, feminine body” academic Susan Waller writes that art critics reacted with unusual vehemence to the artwork, labeling it a “modern” body and denouncing it as “deformed” or “damaged.”

Perhaps the bad reviews motivated de Mérode to strenuously deny having posed for the body, only the face. Whether or not she was telling the truth, she took advantage of the association by using a facsimile of the statue in one of her later performances.

“Her beauty is not only remarkable, judged by any standpoint, but it is of a type very different from that which is ordinarily offered to the eye of the pleasure-loving public… A suggestion of chastity, of melancholy, or even of piety in the object of (the Parisian’s)carnal admiration revives his jaded senses. Cleo de Merode pleases this refined Parisian taste.” — from the New York newspaper the Journal, May 17, 1896

The furor over the statue inspired Carlos Vasquez y Obeda to paint Cléo de Mérode au Salon, which is currently in a private collection. It shows Cléo and another woman at the Salon exhibition inspecting the statue. La Danseuse can be seen at the Musée d’Orsay in Paris.

International sensation

Cléo de Mérode

(Source: The Sketch — August 31st, 1910)

Thanks to her image's wide distribution, the world at large was anxious to experience Cléo de Mérode in the flesh. She toured Europe, where she was generally well-received, except for her appearance at the Alhambra in London in 1902.

In an interview with the British illustrated weekly journal The Sketch, she is quoted as saying, “I dance the ancient dances, the Louis XIII, the Louis XV, the gavot, the pavan, the minuet, and I led at Royan Louis Ganne’s ballet of ‘Phryne.’ I am gowned by a real dressmaker. I know music very well and play the piano as little as possible. I know how to arrange a basket of fruit, place flowers in a jardiniere, and touch a book without spoiling it. I have read the poets and the historians, and I do not write. I wear stockings that are as fine as a woven mist. What other accomplishments shall I speak of?”

F.A. von Kaulbach. Portrait of Cleo de Merode, 1904

The Sketch also provided its readers with de Mérode’s measurements so they could compare them with what the magazine deemed to be those of the Perfect Woman entitled, “Attribute: Cleo de Merode (Perfect Woman)”

(An hourglass figure was considered the standard of beauty at that time):

“Weight: 121 1/4 lbs. (140 lbs.)

Height: 5 ft. 6 in. (5 ft. 6 in.)

Waist: 19 ins. (21 in.)

Neck: 4 in. (4 in.)

Calf: 4 3/4 in. (4 3/4 in.)

Hips: 2 3/4 in. (13 in.)

Shoulders: 13 in. (14 in.)”

The dancer’s first appearance in New York City, in 1897, was a disappointment. Her month-long booking at Koster and Bial’s music hall appearance failed to charm the critics. They were less than complimentary, to put it mildly.

“Cléo de Mérode can go back to her inconspicuous position among the ballet dancers at the Paris Opéra, crowned with the distinction of having made the most successful failure of the season. Critics and public joined in a chorus of disappointment after her first appearance at Koster & Bial’s, and yet she has set a new fashion in personal adornment, crowds mark her progress on the street, and large audiences assemble to see her.” — theater critic for Munsey’s Magazine

The bad reviews didn’t worry Cléo. She was making 40 times her salary at the Paris Opéra. Her response to reports of her critical failure in New York included some criticism of her own.

Portrait by Paul Nadar (Source: Public Domain

“The papers stated that I was a failure, but they lied. I pleased the Americans vastly. The papers pretended that I danced badly, as if Americans could tell. They know nothing about dancing and don’t like ballets.” — Cléo de Mérode

At the height of her fame in France, de Mérode made what was considered to be a risky decision for a “serious artiste.” She agreed to appear at the notorious Folies Bergère cabaret music hall. Some feared it would end her career, but those fears were unfounded. Instead, it garnered her a whole new host of fans. She continued to enjoy a large measure of notoriety until World War I, during which time she entertained wounded soldiers, dancing well into her forties.

The curtain comes down

Poster for Peacock Alley (Source: Public Domain)

In her later years, de Mérode retired to the seaside, where she taught dance and crafted figurines as a hobby. She was also involved in two lawsuits.

In 1923 she unsuccessfully sued the owners of the film Peacock Alley, one of the biggest hits of 1922. The dancer claimed the film’s characters and plotline damaged her reputation. In it, the main character “Cleo of Paris” gives birth to an illegitimate child. The court did not find sufficient parallels to de Mérode’s life to rule in her favor.

(Source: raptisrarebooks.com)

In 1950, however, she successfully sued Simone de Beauvoir for libel. In her book The Second Sex, Beauvoir described de Mérode as a prostitute who came from peasant stock and further claimed she had assumed an aristocratic-sounding stage name to further her career.

Although she had asked for five million francs in damages, the judge only awarded de Mérode one franc because she never properly refuted the rumors previously and had used them to garner publicity. He also ordered de Beauvoir to delete the section about de Mérode in subsequent editions of her book.

Collage of photos by Cecil Beaton (Source: Vogue magazine, fair use)

Cléo de Mérode set the record straight in her autobiography, Le Ballet de ma vie (The Dance of My Life), which was published in 1955.

One of de Mérode’s last interviews was in 1964, for Vogue magazine. Cecil Beaton visited her at her Paris apartment. His photographs and interview of her were featured in the magazine’s February 15, 1964 issue.

Beaton wrote that, as he left, she asked him to destroy any unflattering photos.

Cléo de Mérode never married nor had any children. In her autobiography, she writes that she was only involved with two men in her life: a French aristocrat who died of typhoid fever in 1904 and, from 1906 to 1919, Spanish sculptor Luis de Périnat.

The de Merode tomb in Pere La Chaise Cemetery, Paris

On October 17, 1966, Cléo de Mérode died in the same Paris apartment at 15 Rue de Téhéran where she gave her Vogue interview.

She is interred at the famous Paris cemetery Père Lachaise alongside her mother. Adorning the tomb is a statue of Cléo in mourning sculpted by her former lover Luis de Périnat.