19th-century French actresses

Blanche d'Antigny (9 May 1840 – 30 June 1874) was a French singer, actress and courtesan whose fame today rests chiefly on the fact that Émile Zola used her as the principal model for his novel Nana.

Marceline Desbordes-Valmore (20 June 1786 – 23 July 1859) was a French poet and novelist.
She was born in Douai. Following the French Revolution, her father's business was ruined, and she traveled with her mother to Guadeloupe in search of financial help from a distant relative. Marceline's mother died of yellow fever there, and the young girl somehow made her way back to France. At age 16, back in Douai, she began a career on stage. In 1817 she married her husband, the "second-rate" actor Prosper Lanchantin-Valmore.She published Élégies et Romances, her first poetic work, in 1819. In 1821 she published the narrative work Veillées des Antilles. It includes the novella Sarah, a contribution to the genre of slave stories in France.Marceline appeared as an actress and singer in Douai, Rouen, the Opéra-Comique in Paris, and the Théâtre de la Monnaie in Brussels, where she notably played Rosine in Beaumarchais's Le Barbier de Séville. She retired from the stage in 1823. She later became friends with the novelist Honoré de Balzac, and he once wrote that she was an inspiration for the title character of La Cousine Bette.The publication of her innovative volume of elegies in 1819 marks her as one of the founders of French Romantic poetry. Her poetry is also known for taking on dark and depressing themes, which reflects her troubled life. She is the only female writer included in the famous Les Poètes maudits anthology published by Paul Verlaine in 1884. A volume of her poetry was among the books in Friedrich Nietzsche's library.

Juliette Drouet (French pronunciation: [ʒyljɛt dʁuɛ]), born Julienne Josephine Gauvain (French pronunciation: [ʒyljɛn ʒozfin ɡovɛ̃]; 10 April 1806 – 11 May 1883), was a French actress. She abandoned her career on the stage after becoming the mistress of Victor Hugo, to whom she acted as a secretary and travelling companion. Juliette accompanied Hugo in his exile to the Channel Islands, and wrote thousands of letters to him throughout her life.

Joséphine-Félicité-Augustine Brohan (1824–1893) was a French actress.
The eldest daughter of Augustine Susanne Brohan and the sister of Émilie Madeleine Brohan, she was admitted to the Conservatoire when very young, twice taking the second prize for comedy.The soubrette part, entrusted for more than 150 years at the Comédie-Française to a succession of artists of the first rank, was at the moment without a representative, and Mlle Augustine Brohan made her debut there on May 19, 1841, as Dorine in Tartuffe, and Lise in Rivaux deux-mêmes.She was immediately admitted pensionnaire, and at the end of eighteen months unanimously elected sociétaire. She soon became a great favorite, not only in the plays of Molière and de Regnard, but also in those of Marivaux. On her retirement from the stage in 1866, she made an unhappy marriage with Edmond David de Gheest (died 1885), secretary to the Belgian legation in Paris.