author
Marie Quinton
Best remembered as the lively "Belle Meunière" of Royat, she turned her family inn into a famous meeting place and later wrote memoirs that captured a notorious love affair of the Belle Époque. Her story blends local history, celebrity gossip, and a sharp eye for the society around her.
1 Audiobook
About the author
Born in Royat, France, on June 14, 1854, Marie Quinton was an Auvergne innkeeper who became a small celebrity in her own right. She renovated the family mill and, in 1879, opened the Auberge des Marronniers, a place that drew visitors to the spa town and helped make her known as the "Belle Meunière."
She is especially associated with General Georges Boulanger and Marguerite de Bonnemains, whose clandestine relationship she later described in Le Journal de la Belle Meunière. That book, published in the 1890s, preserved the memories that made her name endure beyond her hometown.
Quinton died in Royat on October 25, 1933. Though she was not a novelist in the usual sense, her memoir-like writing offers a vivid glimpse of French social life, gossip, and public fascination at the end of the nineteenth century.