Who was the mysterious Marquise?

Newspaper columnist Frederick Cunliffe-Owen

La Marquise de Fontenoy figures frequently throughout Spice of the Devil: The Outrageous Life of Lady Valerie Meux, chronicling the life of European aristocratic and court society in syndicated columns in English and American newspapers. Valerie Meux was a favourite target of the writer's barbed comments.

But hold on. A marquise is the wife or widow of a marquis, so who is this woman? So who is this man? All is not what it seems. La Marquise de Fontenoy wass not a woman but a man, the pseudonym of an English-born writer and newspaper columnist Frederick Cunliffe-Owen. 

He was the son of exhibition organiser and museum director Sir Philip Cunliffe-Owen and his German wife, Baroness Elisa Amalie Philippine Julie von Reitzenstein. Educated at Lancing College and the University of Lausanne, Cunliffe-Owen joined the diplomatic service and spent time in Egypt and Japan.

He married twice. In 1877 to Emma Pauline de Couvreu de Deckersberg with whom he had two children; secondly to Countess Marguerite de Godart de Planty et de Sourdis.

In 1885, he moved to New York City with Marguerite, where wrote for the New York Tribune, becoming first the paper's foreign editor and later its society editor. The Marquise de Fontenoy died in New York on 30th June 1926.

Valerie would probably approved of the Marquise de Fortenoy assessment of her: “It is doubtful when Susie Langdon (Lady Meux's original name) was dancing in the music halls of Brighton and in the London suburbs at an infinitesimal rate of pay for a week, ever dreamt that her name would become celebrated throughout the scientific and theological worlds as the Mecaenas (a generous patron of the arts, especially literature) whose generosity and munificence had bought about the publication of all sorts of costly Oriental works relating to the early Christian era, and to the reign of Alexander the Great.”

Source: Buffalo Evening News, Saturday, 30th July 1904, p2.