Cyprienne Dubernet

Cyprienne Dubernet.

Anne Marie Dubernet known as Cyprienne Dubernet, Madame Olympe Hériot and later Mrs Roger Douine (1857–1945), was a French patron and philanthropist who was made a Chevalier de la Légion d'Honneur.

Biography

Daughter of a wool-spinner, Anne Marie Dubernet came from a modest family in Lot-et-Garonne. She sold rayon corsets at the Grandes Magasins de Louvre and married the director-proprietor, Olympe Hériot (1833–1899), her elder by quarter-century, to whom she had already borne two children. They had four children in total.^[1]

In 1894 they moved to a mansion in Paris. Widowed in 1899, Anne Marie inherited her husband's fortune in accordance with his will. In 1903 she used the money to build a large (1700 square metre), prominent hostel in Paris which she sold in 1928.

In 1904 she bought a yacht and renamed it to El Salvador. She wrote a memoir of the trip (Croisière en Méditerranée (Coulommiers, P. Brodard, 1905, 298 p., in-8)).

On 16 December 1908 she remarried to Roger Douine Hippolytus (died 1925).

During the First World War, she turned her chateau in Essoyes into a hospital. She sold this in 1929. In 1917 she donated 1.5 million francs to enlarge an orphanage founded in 1884 by her first husband in the grounds of his Château de La Boissière. In 1920 she gave the orphanage the Castel de Barbe-Brulée near Cancale to serve as a holiday home.

Thanks to her generosity she was made a Chevalier de la Légion d'Honneur on 5 June 1921 on the order of Marshal Philippe Pétain.

She was buried in the family vault in La Boissière.

References

Translator's note: These are in French.

1. ^ http://mapage.noos.fr/shv2/heriot2.htm

Sources

Translator's note: These are in French.

• Bernard Pharisien, L'Exceptionnelle famille Hériot, Le Mée-sur-Seine, Imprimerie Némont, 2001 (ISBN 2-913163-04-1)
• Gérard Rousset-Charny, Les Palais parisiens de la Belle Époque, Paris, Délégation à l'action artistique de la Ville de Paris, 1990, pp. 170 sqq.

Persondata
Name	Dubernet, Cyprienne
Alternative names
Short description
Date of birth	1857
Place of birth
Date of death	1945
Place of death