THE OSCHOLARS LIBRARY

Count de Mauny

Seweryn Chomet / Joe Duncan

[A figure who looms out of one of the more cobwebbed corners of fin-de-siècle decadence in the self-styled Count de Mauny. This crepuscular figure has received little mention in studies of the period, but there is a study of him, Count de Mauny – Friend of Royalty, by Seweryn Chomet, which is available from Newman-Hemisphere, 101 Swan Court, London SW3 5RY. We republish here a review by Joe Duncan, kindly supplied by Dr Chomet, that serves as an adequate summary of the book and the life of the ‘Count’.]

Few foreigners transplanted by Fate to Sri Lanka's shores during the past century have managed to surround themselves with such mystique as the Frenchman and naturalized Briton known as the Count de Mauny (1866-1941). Plenty of Lankans and visitors to the Island know of his name and the exotic home he created over seventy years ago on the tiny islet in Weligama Bay, between Galle and Matara, that he christened ‘Taprobane’. Writers as diverse as Paul Bowles, Robin Maugham, Shaun Mandy and Norah Burke have all written vividly about the place, as indeed did the Count himself, but since his death in 1941 surprisingly little light has ever been shed on the man himself. Now Seweryn Chomet, a Physicist and Visiting Research Fellow at King's College, London, has come along to provide readers with some fascinating insights into the sometimes-bizarre reality behind the romantic myth of the man who styled himself Maurice de Mauny Talvande, Count de Mauny.

One of several myths about himself assiduously created by Maurice – and now demolished by Seweryn Chomet – is that he was a high-born French Count. Nothing could have been further from the truth! In reality, Maurice was born plain Maurice Talvande, son of Felix Talvande, a solidly middle-class bank official based at the time (1866) in the provincial town of Le Mans, France. Maurice's mother was Marguerite Adelaide Louise, née Froger de Mauny. Interestingly Maurice's brother Roger never ‘borrowed’ the de Mauny matronymic, being known throughout his life as Roger Talvande. Chomet mentions that historically the real ‘Count de Mauny’ title appears to have been bestowed by the Emperor Napoleon on a French politician named Clement de Ris, who had no known connection with Marguerite's family.

A major fascination of Chomet's short but quite detailed biography lies in his carefully-researched investigation of Maurice de Mauny Talvande's life in Europe before re-inventing himself in Ceylon in the thirty-odd years of his life after 1912. What little Maurice ever wrote about his earlier years seems to have been deliberately romanticised and heavily ‘edited’ in his favour.

For example, Chomet forensically examines what very probably was a decidedly sordid state of affairs surrounding the so-called ‘university’ that Maurice briefly established for young teenage boys from ‘good’ English families at a rented château at Azay-le-Rideau on the Loire River, shortly before his June 1898 marriage to Lady Mary Byng, daughter of the 4th Earl of Strafford. A June 1899 letter written in French to Maurice by Princess Helena, third daughter of Queen Victoria, and a close friend of Lady Mary, which is quoted in full early on in the book, cautiously hints at dark rumours (‘inventions’ - perhaps?) circulating about its recipient. Another letter from the royal Princess to Maurice later that same summer mentions ‘cruel tales’ and ‘heavy clouds’ and suggests Maurice take advice from a leading English (divorce) lawyer, Sir Francis Jeune. A leading New York newspaper had published a scathing article late in 1898 criticizing Azay-le-Rideau for being ‘not a university, but a mere boarding house’ where the main subjects taught were ‘cricket, polo and football’. Anglophobic locals increasingly resented the ‘English take-over’ of the historic castle.

Infinitely more damaging and dangerous than these attacks, reveals Chomet, were the persistent rumours (the subject of Princess Helena's cryptic letters?) of sexual advances made by Maurice to some of the aristocratic adolescents entrusted into his care. By various accounts the ambience at Azay-le-Rideau appears to have been decidedly homoerotic. One of Queen Victoria's less salubrious sons-in-law, the notoriously aberrant Lord Lorne, rumoured to be (at the very least) sexually ambivalent, mysteriously visited the château in August 1898; and the 19-year-old Bend'Or, future Duke of Westminster, who briefly attended the ‘university’ that same summer, later revealed to his mother that before leaving Azay precipitately he had confronted ‘Count de Mauny’ about reports of his homosexuality, and that the ‘Count’ had ‘owned up that it is so’. By late 1898 the château's absentee owner, alarmed by mounting local dissent and these dark rumours of (then) criminal activities, had abruptly cancelled the lease, and the de Maunys had moved on - first to Cannes (where their first child, Victor Alexander, was born in the Spring of 1899), then San Remo, and finally England.

A persistent trait throughout Maurice's life was his uncanny ability to cultivate the friendship of the rich and famous, and to bask in their reflected glory - undoubtedly due largely to his genuine charm, intelligence and natural style. The visitors' book at ‘Taprobane’ – sadly lost, as Chomet regretfully tells us – would surely reveal many fascinating names. Maurice even receives a passing mention in Queen Victoria's Journal, when she refers to a ‘French man M. de Mauny Talvande’ (note: not ‘Count’!) being engaged to Lady Mary (‘Tooka’) Byng, daughter of one of her royal equerries. Lady Mary was thirty-three at the time of the glamorous ‘high society’ wedding in London, followed by a glittering reception at the bride's family's 18th century mansion, Wrotham Park, in Hertfordshire, attended by the Princess of Wales. Chomet suggests that Maurice may have met Lady Mary through his friendship with her brother, George Byng, with whom Maurice briefly attended the same fashionable Jesuit-run school in Canterbury in the early 1880s.

At any rate the ‘de Mauny Talvande’ marriage appears not to have been a success, even before Maurice decamped permanently to Ceylon soon after the Great War – whether because of Maurice's possibly conflicted sexuality or for other reasons such as his constant extravagance (or a combination of such) remains a mystery. Quite possibly, suggests Chomet, Lady Mary continued to subsidize her absent husband for the rest of his life, as well as maintaining for many years on her own the family's substantial rented home in England, for she eventually died in relative poverty. Perhaps the respectable Byng family even ‘paid’ Maurice to stay away, like many a ‘remittance man’ in the distant colonies of those times? Maurice's nephew revealed to Seweryn Chomet in 2001 that it was well known in his family that ‘Uncle Maurice’ was habitually in financial difficulties. If so, Maurice came by it honestly, as the saying goes – shortly before his parents separated in 1890, his father Felix Talvande declared bankruptcy after his eponymous bank collapsed. Felix even spent some time in prison for financial irregularities, and was conspicuously absent from his son's wedding in 1898.

Some years later, in 1909-10, Maurice himself went bankrupt. Seweryn Chomet provides details of the failed newspaper venture that brought him down, and incidentally reveals a tendency on the part of Maurice to ignore the fine print and plunge into business ventures with sometimes-reckless abandon. At the bankruptcy hearing he declared that he had no assets of his own, and had relied mainly on regular remittances from his mother until 1902, when some failed investments forced her to curtail these. It would seem that this financial catastrophe, together with his marital problems that included a year-long separation from his wife in around 1907, the same year that his terrifyingly formidable mother died in France, led Maurice to visit Ceylon for the first time in about 1912, possibly as the guest of none other than Sir Thomas Lipton, the tea magnate. Of course, Maurice had a more romantic explanation for being attracted to Ceylon - his admiration for the rhizome Gloriosa Superba spotted in a friend's Bournemouth greenhouse, which he claimed had been dug up on the Island.

Further lengthy visits appear to have occurred periodically during and after the Great War, and by 1920-1 ‘Ferguson's Ceylon Directory’ has Maurice listed as residing with his twenty-one-year-old son Victor Alexander in Colombo at ‘Ascot’, Albert Crescent, Cinnamon Gardens. (Victor later became a decorated Royal Navy Commander in World War Two, and retired in the 1970s as Chairman of the Rosehough Tea Company. He died childless in 1978 and his sister Alexandra likewise died childless in 1989, in England. Chomet mentions an intriguing but alas! unprovable rumour that Victor had an illegitimate son in Ceylon who eventually emigrated to New Zealand).

The book also provides some interesting background to Lady Mary Byng, Maurice's long-suffering wife, who never visited Ceylon. Her father became Earl Strafford when his older brother, the 3rd Earl, died in 1898, the same year that Maurice married Mary. (An interesting side note, not of course mentioned in the book, is that the Byng family of Wrotham Park shared common ancestry with the 7th Viscount Torrington (1812-1884), previously known as Sir George Byng, whose hapless governorship of Ceylon in the later 1840s coincided with the colonial secretary-ship of Sir James Emerson Tennent. Lady Mary's paternal ancestry derived from a younger son of George Byng (died 1733), the 1st Viscount Torrington, who had fifteen children in all). Lady Mary's immediate family was haunted by tragedy, for all its social eminence. As Seweryn Chomet tells us, both her Byng brothers died tragically young in the early 1890s, and her father – the 4th Earl – would later die in mysterious circumstances after inexplicably wandering on to the line and being decapitated by a passing railway train at Potter's Bar Station, London. Despite such tragedy, marriage into the Byng family gave Maurice the social credibility that he craved, and helps to explain why he got away so well with awarding himself an aristocratic title to which he had absolutely no right.

Maurice's activities in Ceylon during the last two decades of his life are covered only briefly in the book, and Chomet's account here will hold few real surprises for many readers with knowledge of Sri Lanka. Still, it is interesting to read that the future ‘Taprobane Island’ was bought by Maurice in the mid-1920s for a mere Rs. 250, and the purchase registered not in his own name, but in that of his son Victor. One wonders if Maurice was still avoiding creditors back home! Victor sold the little island with the octagonal house built by his father for Rs. 12,000 in 1942, by which time his place of residence appears as Hampshire, England. Maurice's long service during the 1930s as a Weligama Urban Council member is briefly mentioned in the book, and it would be interesting if some future researcher could cast more light on this aspect of his career in Ceylon. Of course, his writings (The Gardens of Taprobane, etc.) receive due mention, also his prolific work as a landscape and gardening designer for many prominent homes in Colombo. The author pays due respect to Maurice's undoubted skills as a craftsman and furniture designer, but points out that today much of what he produced comes across as well-manufactured ‘knock-offs’ of contemporary French designs rather than truly original pieces. Whether Maurice truly employed ‘more than 200’ craftsmen, as he later claimed, in his ‘Weligama Local Industries’ before the Great Depression shut it down for a number of years in the early 1930s, is now impossible to say.

During a visit to Sri Lanka last year (2002), I came across a reference to ‘Count de Mauny’ in an as-yet-unpublished family memoir. The late writer, a prominent Ceylon civil servant during the 1930s and 1940s, mentions encountering the 73-year-old Maurice in his bathing shorts at Weligama early in 1940, and recalls having ‘fallen out’ with him on an earlier occasion. The memoirist had refused permission to the local Government Headman to decorate the Weligama beach with lighted coconut shells and to hold a procession of dancers and fireworks, all at government expense, to entertain Governor Caldecott on a private visit to ‘Taprobane’. If Count de Mauny had himself offered to pay the villagers to put on such a display, comments the memoirist, there could have been no objection, but instead he had expected the local taxpayers (in effect) to cover the cost of what was strictly a private visit. This little anecdote certainly ties in with certain less attractive characteristics of Maurice that come across in Seweryn Chomet's biography – the fondness for grandiose entertainment that emerged early on in his marriage and helped to drive him into a financial quagmire, the desire to mix with ‘top people’, and a certain conscience-free readiness to take advantage of the financial resources of others, whether morally appropriate or not.

Maurice died suddenly from a heart attack during a visit to the Chelvarayan Estate, Navatkuli on November 27, 1941, and was buried at St. Mary's Burial Ground in Jaffna, far away from his beloved ‘Taprobane’. His estranged wife back in England, the unfortunate Lady Mary, died in 1947. For all his many flaws, however, as his biographer points out towards the end of his book, the small-town boy Maurice - with his lack of real credentials, not even a wholly genuine name, to enter British high society as successfully as he did - could not have sustained his assumed role without being a genuinely entertaining, interesting and (above all) believable character. All in all, Mr. Chomet has done aficionados of Sri Lanka a great service in bringing out this highly readable book that for the first time uncovers at least some of the reality behind the mythology surrounding Maurice Talvande, self-styled ‘Count de Mauny’.

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