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Scrittrici dimenticate:Louise de Vilmorin

Louise Lévêque de Vilmorin (4 April 1902 – 26 December 1969) was a French novelist, poet and journalist.

Born in the family château at Verrières-le-Buisson, Essonne, a suburb southwest of Paris, she was heir to a great French seed company fortune, that of Vilmorin. She was afflicted with a slight limp that became a personal trademark. Vilmorin was best known as a writer of delicate but mordant tales, often set in aristocratic or artistic milieu. Her most famous novel was Madame de..., published in 1951, which was adapted into the celebrated film The Earrings of Madame de... (1953), directed by Max Ophüls and starring Charles Boyer, Danielle Darrieux and Vittorio de Sica. Vilmorin's other works included Juliette, La lettre dans un taxi, Les belles amours, Saintes-Unefois, and Intimités. Her letters to Jean Cocteau were published after the death of both correspondents.

As a young woman, in 1923, she had been engaged to novelist and aviator Antoine de Saint-Exupéry. Vilmorin's first husband was an American real-estate heir, Henry Leigh Hunt (1886–1972). They married in 1925, moved to Las Vegas, Nevada, where Hunt's family owned extensive properties, and divorced in the 1930s. They had three daughters: Jessie, Alexandra, and Helena.

Her second husband was Count Paul Pálffy ab Erdöd (1890–1968), a much-married Austrian-born Hungarian playboy, who had been second husband to the Hungarian countess better known as Etti Plesch, owner of two Epsom Derby winners. Palffy married Louise as his fifth wife in 1938, but the couple soon divorced.

Vilmorin was the mistress of another of Etti Plesch's husbands, Count [Maria Thomas] Paul Esterházy de Galántha (1901–1964), who left his wife in 1942 for Vilmorin. They never married. For a number of years, she was the mistress of Duff Cooper, British ambassador to France. Louise spent the last years of her life as the companion of the French Cultural Affairs Minister and author André Malraux, calling herself "Marilyn Malraux".

Francis Poulenc literally sang her praises, considering her an equal to Paul Éluard and Max Jacob, found in her writing "a sort of sensitive impertinence, libertinage, and an appetite which, carried on into song [is] what I tried to express in my extreme youth with Marie Laurencin in Les Biches." (Ivry 1996)