Louise Contat
French actress
Louise-Jeanne-Françoise Contat, called Contat the Elder (16 June 1760 – 9 March 1813), was a French actress.
Biography
She was born in Paris and made her debut at the Comédie Française in 1766 as Atalide in Bajazet. It was in comedy, however, that she made her first success, as Suzanne in Beaumarchais's Mariage de Figaro; and in several minor character parts, which she raised to the first importance, and as the soubrette in the plays of Molière and Pierre de Marivaux, she found opportunities exactly fitted to her talents.
By Louis Marie Jacques Amalric, vicomte de Narbonne-Lara (17, 23 or 24 August 1755 – 17 November 1813), soldier and diplomat, she had one daughter Louise Amalrique Bathilde Isidore Contat de Narbonne-Lara, born at Saint-Pierre-de-Chaillot, Paris, on 21 September 1788, who married in Paris on 2 December 1811 Dutch Jan Frederik Abbema, born in Amsterdam on 13 June 1773, and had one son Émile, vicomte d'Abbéma, who had an only daughter by his wife Henriette Anne d'Astoin named Louise Abbéma (Étampes, 30 October 1853 – Paris, 4 August 1927).
Bouillet writes of her "She played comedy to perfection and made people remark on the flexibility of her talent, succeeding equally as grandes coquettes and as soubrettes". She was part of the success of the plays of Marivaux and Beaumarchais. She left the theatre in 1808, and in 1809 married de Parny, nephew of the poet Évariste de Parny.
Her sister Marie-Émilie Contat (1769–1846), an admirable soubrette, especially as the pert servant drawn by Molière and de Regnard, made her debut in 1784, and retired, in 1815.
In his Memoirs of an Egotist, Stendhal writes that Mlle de Contat "was an inimitable actress" He also mentions her several times in his Journal, at one point declaring himself "astonished by her beauty," and representing "the astonishing delicacy of her nose" in a sketch.
This brief starts where responsible research should: with the source description of “Louise Contat” as french actress. Everything that follows is an evidence route, not borrowed authority.
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The subject matters to the people & ideas register because the source frames it as french actress. Its deeper value depends on whether names, dates, institutions and citations support that framing.
The entry’s evidential value lies in the named roles, institutions and publications that can be tested against primary documentation. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 1, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q3263717. VIAF identifies the subject as 35214120. The Library of Congress control number is no2008079756. 3 of 3 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1760, 1813, 1766 and 1755.
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This entry incorporates text from “Louise Contat” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.