Count Lionel Moreton de Chabrillan (1818-1858) French Consul and Celeste de Chabrillan (1824-1909) actress, author and diarist, lived in Hotham Street, East St Kilda.
Paris Beginnings
The Count and Countess de Chabrillan arrived in St Kilda in 1854. He owned a French castle and she had close friendships with Prince Napoleon and Alexandre Dumas. What on earth did this worldly sophisticated couple make of the ramshackle wild-west town that was gold-era Melbourne?
Celeste was born in Paris in 1824, the illegitimate daughter of a laundress. At age eleven she was apprenticed as an embroideress. As a teenager, she fled when her mother’s lover attempted to rape her and she was taken in by a local prostitute. Celeste soon registered as a prostitute and began working in an elite brothel where she attracted a series of well-to-do lovers. She eventually became a famous dancer and bareback horseback rider under the name ‘la Mogador’, performing at Beaumarchais Theatre and the Hippodrome. One evening, while dining at Cafe des Anglais she met Count Lionel de Chabrillan and they fell in love.
Lionel, born into an aristocratic family in 1818, managed to squander the family fortune bequeathed to him upon his father’s death. He sold off the contents of the family castle near Chateauroux and went searching for a rich respectable titled heiress to marry. However his indebtedness soon forced him to set sail for Victoria’s goldfields in 1852. He returned to Celeste sans gold in 1853. His well-connected family secured him a position as the first French Consular agent in Melbourne in the vain hope he would forget Celeste.
Voyage to Port Phillip
Celeste and Lionel married in London prior to sailing for Victoria, which turned out to be anything but plain sailing. Prior to arriving in Melbourne, Celeste attempted to have her name removed from the register of prostitutes and it took the intervention of the emperor’s cousin, Prince Napoleon, to have it eliminated. Further, facing financial difficulties of her own, she had earlier sent her memoirs ‘Farewell to the World’ to a publisher without Lionel’s knowledge. Her subsequent unsuccessful attempt to stop publication of the scandalous memoirs meant her notoriety preceded her to Port Phillip.
Despite storms, doldrums, mutinous sailors and on-board deaths from infectious diseases, the Croesus delivered them to Melbourne on 9 April 1854. Celeste was socially ostracised by Melbourne society meaning Lionel attended many Vice-Regal events alone which distressed him. Lionel was a hard-working, charming and popular Consul.
St Kilda
Following initial accommodation difficulties the couple’s prefabricated house from Bordeaux was assembled on their land in Hotham Street East St Kilda ‘two leagues from town in the heart of the woods’, near the modern-day Gourlay Street intersection. In her memoir, Celeste described the house as a five-roomed chalet with a kitchen and verandah, all made with pine with a galvanised iron roof and brick chimney.
While Lionel was busy in Melbourne with consular duties, Celeste was often alone at St Kilda so she set to work writing a further volume of memoirs which feature vivid descriptions of the Ballarat goldfields; the difficulties experienced by Chinese miners; the primitive conditions prevailing in gold era Melbourne; the energy-sapping heat; and the widespread criminal lawlessness. She gives an amusing account of the Governor’s Ball at Toorak House (now owned by the Swedish Church) attended by 700 of Melbourne’s finest citizens including wealthy former convicts, but not including a former Parisienne courtesan. The night was ruined by incessant rain, the crush of attendees in the small reception rooms and the disappointing supper of a few hams and a keg of colonial beer. It became disparagingly known as the ‘beer ball’.
By mid 1856 Lionel’s poor business investments again had him in financial strife and Celeste’s health was failing so the couple decided she should return to France for medical treatment. Lionel was unable to accompany her due to consular responsibilities. Her memoir describes their emotional parting as she set sail for Europe aboard the James Baines in August 1856.
Before leaving, Celeste agreed they should sell their St Kilda house. In one of his letters, Lionel was hopeful that the new St Kilda railway line would pass through their land giving them a good price. The St Kilda and Brighton Railway Company opened the St Kilda to Bay Street (North Brighton) line in 1859 which would have passed near the western edge of the de Chabrillan property mid-way between today’s Balaclava and Ripponlea Stations. Lionel later sold the furnished house to Captain Lascazas.
The couple missed each other terribly but they managed a brief French reunion in 1858 when Lionel took several months leave from the consulate and sailed back to Europe. Captain Lascazas acted as Consul in his absence.
By July 1858 Lionel was on his way back to Melbourne. His letters to Celeste contain interesting accounts of his travels through Egypt and Ceylon. More than once he tells her that he refrains from describing the sites so they can enjoy seeing them together sometime in the future.
It was during the return voyage that his health markedly deteriorated. He arrived back in Melbourne on 17 October 1858 but he never recovered, dying on 29 December surrounded by his friends including the photographer Antoine Fauchery. He was only 40. His funeral was held with full honours at St Francis Cathedral (as it then was) in Elizabeth Street and he was buried at Melbourne General Cemetery on 31 December.
Celeste never remarried, but she had an interesting life, writing further memoirs, novels and plays, many of which had a goldfields theme. She died in Paris in 1909.
Combermere Cottage
The little Hotham Street house didn’t stay in the hands of Felix de Lascazas de St Martin for long. In December 1861 stockbroker J B Were was chasing him for money. Mr Were seemed to think that Jean Baptiste Armand Augan, George Thompson Bald and Leopold Wagner had control of Lascazas’ land and assets and would they please hand them over. In October 1861 Augan offered for sale the seven-roomed Combermere Cottage, built by and ‘lately occupied by Le Comte de Chabrillan’. In the 1860s George Thompson Bald was the owner-occupier so it seems the stockbroker Were didn’t get possession of Celeste’s little wooden house.
The house probably disappeared in the late 19th century following land subdivisions. The 1898 MMBW map of the area shows uniform rows of identical brick villas on the western side of Hotham Street north and south of Gourlay Street.
Sources:
“The French Consul’s Wife: Memoirs of Celeste de Chabrillan in gold-rush Australia” Introduced and Translated by Patricia Clancy and Jeanne Allen, Miegunyah Press 1998.
TROVE – trove.nla.gov.au
Ancestry – ancestry.com.au
State Library maps – slv.vic.gov.au
Updated: Liz Kelly August 2022