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• current timeframe: 1922, Paris, France
• born September 1857 at a château in Northern France to a formerly noble family
• they sent her to Paris when she was 12 to let her pursue a career in ballet
• she danced as a principal dancer at the Opèra between 1877-1887 • married her rich patron, Victor DuPlessis, who was twenty years older than her, at the age of 30
• they had a friendly if not particularly passionate relationship and never had children
• has lived alone in his family mansion since he died in 1910
• is very active in the artistic circles, spending all the DuPlessis fortune on patronages and sponsorships, tickets for opera and ballet performances and buying original artwork; she has a renowned collection
• is underneath all this extremely lonely and bitter at how her circumstances turned out
• lives her real life in the past, her time at the ballet, especially, missing the friends she had there
• backtagging is good
• no ooc triggers or warnings
• warning for possible period-appropriate homophobia, sexism etc. will be avoided in casual interaction and will never be sprung on people.
• open to timey-whimey jamjar interaction, historical scenarios and, to some degree, straight-up modern au
• no shipping, but i'm here for all the gen interaction and especially mentorship and friendship!
• pm for contact, cest/cet time zone
65-year-old Louise was born in another time.
She doesn't understand the girls of today, she doesn't understand the times themselves, it's as if the world has gone mad in the wake of the Great War. If you ask her. Living alone in her old mansion in inner Paris, she desperately grasps for the normalcy of her own youth, opera, ballet, the arts and classical music, but even the arts are changing their looks these days, abstractions and surrealist touches all way around.
As a patron of the Ballets Russes, she is one day approached by one of the French sponsors of the company, who have heard about Diaghilev's interest in a new principal dancer who has recently arrived from Russia and since the young woman has lost her family in the Revolution, she needs a place to stay while she finds her feet in Paris. Louise's name came up, because her house is big and she's alone, wouldn't she like some company?
Louise really would not, especially not by some 21-year-old flapper from the motherland, but she is, if nothing else, generous of disposition, can afford being so, too, and wants to support the art form that she herself practiced back in her day. So, she accepts and Polina Zaitseva moves into the DuPlessis manor.
This will be the start of a bridging process, between Louise and the present, between Polina and the past, and the two women will, simply by recognising themselves in each other, find peace with the state of things in the year of the Lord, 1922.