Madame Alice Silvy
(1839-1913)
1 May 1865

Volume 12, page 284, sitting number 16,283.

A carte-de-visite portrait of the photographer’s wife, Marie-Louise-Elisabeth-Lucie-Alice Silvy (née Monnier).

Silvy was a bachelor when he first came to London and opened his studio towards the end of 1859. He met Alice Monnier, the woman who was to become his wife, at a costume ball thrown in Paris on 12 March 1863, by the Pereire brothers, financiers of the Second Empire who had founded Crédit Mobilier in 1852. (Mark Haworth-Booth, Camille Silvy: Photographer of Modern Life, 2010). The story handed down in Silvy’s family is slightly different. In their version, Silvy met Alice Monnier one afternoon at the house of his aunt, his father’s sister, baronne Angèle de Vangermez. An introduction to a Swiss heiress had been arranged to take place that evening at the Pereire costume ball, but, already smitten with Alice, Silvy changed his plans.

From a prominent family in the Jura département, Alice was the daughter of Alexandre Monnier, a historian, whose circle of friends included Victor Hugo, Louis Boulanger and Gustave Courbet (Mark Haworth-Booth, River Scene, France, 1992).

The couple were married less than three months later on 8 June 1863 in the church of St Léger at Jeurre, a small commune in Jura near the Swiss border. Their first child, Louise-Marie-Elisabeth-Angèle Silvy was born in London in 1866. Born on Easter Day [French: Pâques] and baptised four days later on 5 April, she was nicknamed ‘Pâquerette’ within the family. A son, Jean-Marie-Léon-Lazare-Enée, followed two years later. Born in London on 20 June 1868, he was baptised on 24 June.

Alice Silvy died in 1913.