PONS (Sylvain)[*], born about 1785; son of the old age of Monsieur and
Madame Pons, who, before 1789, founded the famous Parisian house for
the embroidery of uniforms that was bought, in 1815, by M. Rivet,
first cousin of the first Madame Camusot of the Cocon d'Or, sole heir
of the famous Pons brothers, embroiderers to the Court; under the
Empire, he won the Prix de Rome for musical composition, returned to
Paris about 1810, and was for many years famous for his romances and
melodies which were full of delicacy and good taste. From his stay in
Italy, Pons brought back the tastes of the bibliomaniac and a love for
works of art. His passion for collecting consumed almost his entire
patrimony. Pons became Sauvageot's rival. Monistrol and Elie Magus
felt a hidden but envious appreciation of the artistic treasures
ingeniously and economically collected by the musician. Being ignorant
of the rare value of his museum, he went from house to house, giving
private lessons in harmony. This lack of knowledge proved his ruin
afterwards, for he became all the more fond of paintings, stones and
furniture, as lyric glory was denied him, and his ugliness, coupled
with his supposed poverty, kept him from getting married. The
pleasures of a gourmand replaced those of the lover; he likewise found
some consolation for his isolation in his friendship with Schmucke.
Pons suffered from his taste for high living; he grew old, like a
parasitic plant, outside the circle of his family, only tolerated by
his distant cousins, the Camusot de Marvilles, and their connections,
Cardot, Berthier and Popinot. In 1834, at the awarding of the prize to
the young ladies of a boarding-school, he met the pianist Schmucke, a
teacher as well as himself, and in the strong intimacy that grew up
between them, he found some compensation for the blighted hopes of his
existence. Sylvain Pons was director of the orchestra at the theatre
of which Felix Gaudissart was manager during the monarchy of July. He
had Schmucke admitted there, with whom he passed several happy years,
in a house, on the rue de Normandie, belonging to C.-J. Pillerault.
The bitterness of Madeleine Vivet and Amelie Camusot de Marville, and
the covetousness of Madame Cibot, the door-keeper, and Fraisier,
Magus, Poulain and Remonencq were perhaps the indirect causes of the
case of hepatitis of which Pons died (in April, 1845), appointing
Schmucke his residuary legatee before Maitre Leopold Hannequin, who
had been hastily summoned by Heloise Brisetout. Pons was on the point
of being employed to compose a piece of ballet music, entitled "Les
Mohicans." This work most likely fell to his successor, Garangeot.
[Cousin Pons.]
[*] M. Alphonse de Launay has derived from the life of Sylvain Pons a
drama that was presented at the Cluny theatre, Paris, about 1873.
POPINOT, alderman of Sancerre in the eighteenth century; father of
Jean-Jules Popinot and Madame Ragon (born Popinot). He was the officer
whose portrait, painted by Latour, adorned the walls of Madame Ragon's
parlor, during the Restoration, at her home in the Quartier
Saint-Sulpice, Paris. [Cesar Birotteau.]
POPINOT (Jean-Jules), son of the preceding, brother of Madame Ragon,
and husband of Mademoiselle Bianchon--of Sancerre--embraced the
profession of law, but did not attain promptly the rank which his
powers and integrity deserved. Jean-Jules Popinot remained for a long
time a judge of a lower court in Paris. He took a deep interest in the
fate of the young orphan Anselme Popinot, his nephew, and a clerk of
Cesar Birotteau; and was invited with Madame Jean-Jules Popinot to the
perfumer's famous ball, on Sunday, December 17, 1818. Nearly eighteen
months later, Jean-Jules Popinot once more saw Anselme, who was set up
as a druggist on the rue des Cinq-Diamants, and met Felix Gaudissart,
the commercial-traveler, and tried to excuse certain imprudent
utterances of his on the political situation, that had been reported
by Canquoelle-Peyrade, the police-agent. [Cesar Birotteau.] Three
years later he lost his wife, who had brought him, for dowry, an
income of six thousand francs, representing exactly twice his personal
assets. Living from this time at the rue de Fouarre, Popinot was able
to give free rein to the exercise of charity, a virtue that had become
a passion with him. At the urgent instance of Octave de Bauvan,
Jean-Jules Popinot, in order to aid Honorine, the Count's wife, sent
her a pretended commission-merchant, probably Felix Gaudissart,
offering a more than generous price for the flowers she made.
[Honorine.] Jean-Jules Popinot eventually established a sort of
benevolent agency. Lavienne, his servant, and Horace Bianchon, his
wife's nephew aided him. He relieved Madame Toupinet, a poor woman on
the rue du Petit-Banquier, from want (1828). Madame d'Espard's request
for a guardian for her husband served to divert Popinot from his role
of Saint Vincent de Paul; a man of rare delicacy hidden beneath a rough
and uncultured exterior, he immediately discovered the injustice of the
wrongs alleged by the marchioness, and recognized the real victim in
M. d'Espard, when he cross-questioned him at No. 22 rue de la
Montagne-Sainte-Genevieve, in an apartment, the good management of
which he seemed to envy, though the rooms were simply furnished, and
in striking contrast with the splendor of which he had been a witness,
at the home of the marchioness in the Faubourg Saint-Honore. A delay
caused by a cold in the head, and especially the influence of Madame
d'Espard's intrigues, removed Popinot from the cause, in which Camusot
was substituted. [The Commission in Lunacy.] We have varying accounts
of Jean-Jules Popinot's last years. Madame de la Chanterie's circle
mourned the death of the judge in 1833 [The Seamy Side of History.]
and Phellion in 1840. J.-J. Popinot probably died at No. 22 rue de la
Montagne-Saint-Genevieve, in the apartment that he had already
coveted, being a counselor to the court, municipal counselor of Paris,
and a member of the General Council of the Seine. [The Middle
Classes.]
POPINOT (Anselme), a poor orphan, and nephew of the preceding and of
Madame Ragon (born Popinot), who took charge of him in his infancy.
Small of stature, red-haired, and lame, he gladly became clerk to
Cesar Birotteau, the Paris perfumer of the Reine des Roses, the
successor of Ragon, with whom he did a great deal of work, in order to
be able to show appreciation for the favor shown a part of his family,
that was well-nigh ruined as a result of some bad investments (the
Wortschin mines, 1818-19). Anselme Popinot, being secretly in love
with Cesarine Birotteau, his employer's daughter--the feeling being
reciprocated, moreover--brought about, so far as his means allowed,
the rehabilitation of Cesar, thanks to the profits of his drug
business, established on the rue des Cinq-Diamants, between 1819 and
1820. The beginning of his great fortune and of his domestic happiness
dated from this time. [Cesar Birotteau.] After Birotteau's death,
about 1822, Popinot married Mademoiselle Birotteau, by whom he had
three children, two sons and a daughter. The consequences of the
Revolution of 1830 brought Anselme Popinot in the way of power and
honors; he was twice deputy after the beginning of Louis Philippe's
reign, and was also minister of commerce. [Gaudissart the Great.]
Anselme Popinot, twice secretary of state, had finally been made a
count, and a peer of France. He owned a mansion on the rue Basse du
Rempart. In 1834 he rewarded Felix Gaudissart for services formerly
rendered on the rue des Cinq-Diamants, and entrusted to him the
management of a boulevard theatre, where the opera, the drama, the
fairy spectacle, and the ballet took turn and turn. [Cousin Pons.]
Four years later the Comte Popinot, again minister of commerce and
agriculture, a lover of the arts and one who gladly acted the part of
the refined Maecenas, bought for two thousand francs a copy of
Steinbock's "Groupe de Samson" and stipulated that the mould should be
destroyed that there might be only two copies, his own and the one
belonging to Mademoiselle Hortense Hulot, the artist's fiancee. When
Wenceslas married Mademoiselle Hulot, Popinot and Eugene de Rastignac
were the Pole's witnesses. [Cousin Betty.]
POPINOT (Madame Anselme), wife of the preceding, born Cesarine
Birotteau, in 1801. Beautiful and attractive though, at one time,
almost promised to Alexandre Crottat, she married, about 1822, Anselme
Popinot, whom she loved and by whom she was loved. [Cesar Biroteau.]
After her marriage, though in the midst of splendor, she remained the
simple, open, and even artless character that she was in the modest
days of her youth.[*] The transformation of the dancer Claudine du
Bruel, the whilom Tullia of the Royal Academy of Music, to a moral
bourgeois matron, surprised Madame Anselme, who became intimate with
her. [A Prince of Bohemia.] The Comtesse Popinot rendered aid, in a
delicate way, in 1841, to Adeline Hulot d'Ervy. Her influence with
that of Mesdames de Rastignac, de Navarreins, d'Espard, de Grandlieu,
de Carigliano, de Lenoncourt, and de la Bastie, procured Adeline's
appointment as salaried inspector of charities. [Cousin Betty.] Three
years later when one of her three children married Mademoiselle
Camusot de Marville, Madame Popinot, although she appeared at the most
exclusive social gatherings, imitated modest Anselme, and, unlike
Amelie Camusot, received Pons, a tenant of her maternal great-uncle,
C.-J. Pillerault. [Cousin Pons.]
[*] In 1838, the little theatre Pantheon, destroyed in 1846, gave a
vaudeville play, by M. Eugene Cormon, entitled "Cesar Birotteau,"
of which Madame Anselme Popinot was one of the heroines.
POPINOT (Vicomte), the eldest of the three children of the preceding
couple, married, in 1845, Cecile Camusot de Marville. [Cousin Pons.]
During the course of the year 1846, he questioned Victorin Hulot about
the remarkable second marriage of Baron Hector Hulot d'Ervy, which was
solemnized on the first of February of that year. [Cousin Betty.]
POPINOT (Vicomtesse), wife of the preceding; born Cecile Camusot in
1821, before the name Marville was added to Camusot through the
acquisition of a Norman estate. Red-haired and insignificant looking,
but very pretentious, she persecuted her distant kinsman Pons, from
whom she afterwards inherited; from lack of sufficient fortune she
failed of more than one marriage, and was treated with scorn by the
wealthy Frederic Brunner, especially because of her being an only
daughter and the spoiled child. [Cousin Pons.]
POPINOT-CHANDIER (Madame and Mademoiselle), mother and daughter; of
the family of Madame Boirouge; hailing from Sancerre; frequent
visitors of Madame de la Baudraye, whose superiority of manner they
ridiculed in genuine bourgeois fashion. [The Muse of the Department.]