Beach Town in a Forest

Beach Town in a Forest
Beach Town in a Forest, Pine Knoll Shores located in Carteret County on North Carolina's Crysal Coast. Photo compliments of Bill Flexman and Dave Prutzman

Wednesday, January 29, 2014

French Connection

Part I - La Belle Époque

In order to understand the complexity of Alice Green Hoffman, the woman whose heirs developed Pine Knoll Shores, it is helpful to know about her life in Paris. The story will be told in two parts.


c. 1902 Photo from The Theodore Roosevelt Center at Dickinson University: The Digital Library Collection. [i]

Alice Green Hoffman’s stay in France spanned three very different eras: La Belle Époque or beautiful era (1871-1914), Les Années Folles, the mad years or Roaring 20s (1920-1929) and the Great Depression (1929-1939). She arrived in Paris in the middle of La Belle Époque and left before World War I, returned after 1918 and stayed until the start of World War II. Understanding each of these eras in Paris suggests the life Alice lived there, and vintage photographs help document that life.

La Belle Époque was a time of peace and, for the upper classes, a time of prosperity. Well-to-do Americans living in Paris shared in the social high life of the upper echelons of French society. 

In her 20s, Alice Green had made trips throughout Europe. She loved Paris, and in 1892, at the age of 30, rented an apartment at 55 Champs Elysees with her grandmother, her Aunt Eleanor and a friend Helen Benedict. Three years later, she rented a larger home property in the same neighborhood and took up residence in Paris. The New York Times in its archives has saved a cable, which provides insight to Alice's life abroad. Here is a fragment from that cable:
She was still a single woman at this time, a status she enjoyed for about two more years, until age 43, when she married John Ellis Hoffman, a divorcé. 

A note he wrote in The Secretary’s Fifth Report on the Harvard Class of 1896 indicates that he and Alice married in 1905 and divorced in Paris in 1910. Other sources say that the marriage took place in Paris and that the divorce was in 1911. In any case, the relationship was brief.


John Ellis Hoffman and his wife Alice.
Photo from the Theodore Roosevelt Center at Dickinson University: The Digital Library Collection. [ii]

John Hoffman returned to New York City after their divorce, and Alice may have returned for a period of time before the divorce, but she did not remain there. She rented her New York City property and moved to Paris, where she stayed for long periods of time.

We know from the chapter “The Young and Old Colonel” in When Trumpets Call: Theodore Roosevelt After the White House, written by Patricia O’Toole, that Alice Hoffman owned property near Étoile, which was and still is an exclusive area of Paris. It is where the Champs-Élysees meets the Arc de Triomphe. (Place de l’Étoile or simply Étoile was renamed Place President Charles de Gaulle in 1970.)

By 1902, the first metro line was operational in Paris, and Place de l’Étoile was an end point, so Alice would have had access to a metro station close to where she was living. Of course, horse-drawn carriages, bicycle-drawn carriages, cars and small buses also provided aboveground transportation on the streets of Paris. In fact, traffic could be quite hectic as seen in the vintage postcard below.


Avenue Bois de Boulogne Postcard. [iii]

A photograph of Alice on a horse-drawn carriage suggests this is the way she travelled.


Description: “Alice Green, Eleanor Butler Roosevelt's aunt, in pony cart driven by Mrs. Turnbull, on Rue du Villejust, Paris, the location of Miss Green's house.” Photo and Description from The Theodore Roosevelt Center at Dickinson University: The Digital Library Collection. [iv]

The note above also suggests Alice lived on rue du Villejust, but the date is unknown. Paris is divided into 20 districts or arrondissements, and rue de Villejust was in the 16th arrondissement of Paris, known as Arrondissement de Passy, one of the wealthiest districts of Paris. Half of Passy was in the Bois de Boulogne, and the other half led up to Étoile or the Arc de Triomphe.

For those familiar with Paris in modern days, it may help to know that rue du Villejust was renamed rue de Paul Valéry. It runs into Avenue Foch, once known as Avenue Bois de Boulogne, a very short distance from Étoile.

Although Alice owned expensive real estate in New York City, she chose to claim Paris as her home address. The 1916 Social Register lists Alice Green Hoffman’s address as 29 Avenue Bois de Boulogne, Paris. Alice had moved there in 1895. This property probably abutted rue du Villejust and Avenue Bois de Boulogne, which led directly from the Arc de Triomphe into the Bois de Boulogne and to Route de Suresnes, where Alice owned property after World War I.

Going from the Champs-Elysees to the Bois de Boulogne is similar to going from Park Avenue to Central Park in New York City. The Bois de Boulogne is a large, wooded area, much larger than Central Park, with several lakes. Though the famous clay tennis courts where the French Open is held today and two horseracing tracks were there, it was quite rural in the early 1900s. Knowing Alice Hoffman’s love of nature, it is easy to understand her attraction to this area. I like to imagine her as one of the women out for a stroll in the Bois de Boulogne as seen in the vintage postcard below.

Vintage photograph postcard, c.1907, uncirculated, divided back, published by Lévy frères, Paris, France.© Casas-Rodríguez Collection, 2009. Some rights reserved. [v]

Any property near Étoile or in the Bois de Boulogne would have been glamorous and expensive. The arts were flourishing in the latter part of La Belle Époque, and prosperity was on display.

Even on her North Carolina property, Alice had a good number of people working for her, so she certainly must have had a full household staff in Paris. She would have enjoyed the life of a well-to-do American of social standing. We can imagine the high-society company she kept. We know, for example, that one of her neighbors on Avenue Bois de Boulogne between 1905 and 1918 was the famous composer Claude Debussy.

Some of those pictured in the vintage photos below could also have been her neighbors.

 
Walking on Avenue Bois de Boulogne within view of the Arc de Triomphe. [vi]  Roger Viollet/Maurice Banger.


Elegant Ladies at the Bois de Boulogne, Paris 1909. Maurice Banger. [vii]
Photograph by Jacques-Henri Lartigue [viii]

We get additional insight on Alice’s pastimes and her social standing from what we know about her husband. He wrote in the Harvard alumni report, “I have not been engaged in any business or definite occupation.” He goes on to say, “I take a good deal of exercise such as tennis, skating, etc. and hear much good music.” We imagine that Alice, while she was married, shared at least some of his interests.

We know from later accounts that Alice, like many women of her time, had rose gardens she planted and tended on her Paris property, but she also owned horses. Even more surprising, she had thoroughbreds that raced at various tracks in and around Paris, including at the Hippodrome de Longchamp, located on Routes des Tribunes in the Bois de Boulogne. She also regularly went to the races and bet frequently. In 1908, her horse Flush Royal beat two Vanderbilt horses at the Grand Prix at Longchamp. 


Races at Longchamp - Édouard Manet, 1867
From a reproduction in Wikipedia the Free Encyclopedia. [ix]

A woman who owned and raced horses would have been a woman who dared to step into a man’s world. An inkling of Alice Hoffman’s daring and combative nature, traits that were to emerge in full force later in her life, is evident when Flush Royal died in an accident involving another horse, whose owner Alice, as a requirement for collecting on an insurance policy, threatened to sue. She went so far as to put a notice in the paper to that effect, a notice that would certainly have raised eyebrows of her Parisian neighbors.

We get a much softer view of Alice from earlier photographs in which she appears as a woman of refinement who attracted gentlemen of social stature. Before Alice married John Hoffman, she had other high-society beaus, such as Mr. Coti, “an Italian gentleman of fashion in Paris,” whom she may have been seeing around 1902.

 

Mr. Coti and Alice Green
Photos from The Theodore Roosevelt Center at Dickinson University: The Digital Library Collection. [x]

She attended “fancy dress balls,” where gentlemen such as Spencer Eddy, from a prominent American family, courted her as seen in the following photograph. Although Alice had several beaus, she married only once.


Spencer Eddy with Alice.
Photo from The Theodore Roosevelt Center at Dickinson University: The Digital LibraryCollection. [xi]

In 1888, her sister Grace’s daughter, Eleanor, married President Theodore Roosevelt’s son Theodore. This connection with the Roosevelt family increased Alice’s social prestige in New York and in Paris, where Alice was spending most of her time.

When World War I broke out in Europe in July 1914, France became a much less desirable place to live. Alice left Paris and returned to the United States, leaving her Paris home available for her niece. Eleanor lived in her Aunt Alice’s house in Paris until December 1918, wanting to be close to her husband who was garrisoned near Paris. [xii] It is in this timeframe that Alice Green Hoffman purchased her North Carolina property from John Royall.

For a continuation of this story, see blog post: “From Paris to Bogue Banks.”

Post Author: Phyllis Makuck, revised 3/26/14 and 4/30/14
To contact the author or the History Committee
_______________

I would like to give credit for many of the dates and some of the general information in this feature about Alice in France to Kathleen McMillan Guthrie’s Alice Green Hoffman: The Queen of Bogue Banks: A Thesis Presented to the Faculty of the Department of History, East Carolina University, May 1994.

See photo credits below.



[i] Theodore Roosevelt Center at Dickinson State University and the Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division. Site gives permission to use images for non-profit purposes, and written permission was requested and received.
[ii] Theodore Roosevelt Center at Dickinson State University and the Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division. Site gives permission to use images for non-profit purposes, and written permission was requested and received. 
[iii]www.flickr.com/photos/24736216@N07/7988276139/‎ Free to share
[iv] Theodore Roosevelt Center at Dickinson State University and the Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division. Site gives permission to use images for non-profit purposes, and written permission was requested and received.
[v] Casas-Rodriguez Collection. creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/. Site gives permission to copy free of charge.
[vi] www.parisenimages   Parisienne de Photographie. La Avenue de Champs-Elysess, RogerVioliet. Site gives permission to use images for non-profit purposes.
[vii] www.parisenimages   Parisienne de Photographie. La Avenue de Champs-Elysess, RogerVioliet. Site gives permission to use images for non-profit purposes. See note above.
[viii] © Ministère de la Culture - France / AAJHL “You are free to use up to five or six images from the site for any personal non-profit, educational purpose. This would primarily be your personal home page, but could also be, for example, one-time use for an offline presentation. You must replicate any copyright notice that may appear under the image if it is used on another web site or in an offline presentation. Provide credit to ‘masters-of-photography.com’ as the source for each scan. If the images are used on a web site, display the credit in the form of a link to the site, i.e. ‘Scan courtesy of Masters of Photography.’”
[ix] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Longchamp_Racecourse. Copyright expired. Free to use.
[x] Theodore Roosevelt Center at Dickinson State University and the Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division. Site gives permission to use images for non-profit purposes, and written permission was requested and received.
[xi] Theodore Roosevelt Center at Dickinson State University and the Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division. Site gives permission to use images for non-profit purposes, and written permission was requested and received.
[xii] Eleanor Butler Roosevelt, Day Before Yesterday, Doubleday & Company, Inc., Garden City, New York, 1959.
Hyperlinks:

To see the cable to The New York Times quoted in this article, use the following link. http://query.nytimes.com/mem/archive-free/pdf?res=FA0A17F63F5D11738DDDA80894D9415B838CF1D3

Video footage on “Artistic and Leisure Life In Paris,” a 1910 film, provides a sense of life in and around Paris in the latter days of La Belle-Époque. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_oQu-vZWHTQ

Video footage of Alice Hoffman’s garden when her niece Eleanor was living there during WW I. www.youtube.com/watch?v=ebHgx26THRo
For postcards of Suresnes including one of Alice’s garden at Chateau de Landes

www.granger.com The Granger Collection has excellent photos of the Avenue Bois de Boulogne and the Arc de Triomphe in the 1900s, but restricts their use.