Part I - La Belle
Époque
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. T
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.
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. T
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
_______________
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.
[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 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.