Ballet dancer
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Emma Livry in Costume for the Ballet of Herculaneum, 1859 (b/w photo)
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Picture this. A young woman, not yet twenty-one, waits backstage during the dress rehearsal of La Muette de Portici, a ballet in which she’s earned the lead role. Gas lamps cast a quiet glow across the stage and into an empty theater. The year is 1862 at the Paris Opera, a place this ballerina was born into. Her mother was only sixteen and a dancer herself when she caught the eye of a baron. He lusted after the prowess she bared onstage, took it for himself, and abandoned her once she got pregnant. Where a mother’s career ended, her daughter’s began. Just beyond the curtain of La Muette, the young ballerina flounces her skirt in preparation to make her entrance. The gauze accidentally catches fire from the flame illuminating the stage. As the blaze spreads across her body, she staggers into the light. It takes too long for spectators to dampen the fire, and she suffers for months before dying from the burns she sustained. Her name was Emma.
Aside from her body on fire, we don’t know much about Emma Livry’s life. In that way, she’s no different from countless French dancers wh
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Emma Livry
French ballerina (1842–1863)
Emma Livry (born as Jeanne Emma Emarot or Emma Marie Emarot; 24 September 1842 – 26 July 1863) was a French ballerina who was one of the last ballerinas of the Romantic ballet era and a protégée of Marie Taglioni. She died from complications after burn injuries sustained when her costume caught fire during a rehearsal.
Biography
Livry was the illegitimate daughter of Célestine Emarot, a ballet dancer, and Baron Charles de Chassiron, which prompted the following rhyming verse:
- Can so skinny a rat
- Be the daughter of so round a cat?[1]
Career
She studied dancing under Madame Dominique and attended the Paris Opera School. Her career was promoted by her mother's lover at the time, Vicomte Ferdinand de Montguyon. On 19 October 1858,[2] at the age of sixteen, she made her debut with the Paris Opera Ballet at the Salle Le Peletier as the sylph in La Sylphide. Her talent brought her fame and she became a widely respected ballerina.[2]
Montguyon prevailed upon the director of
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