Adélaïde-Louise d'Eckmühl de Blocqueville
She was the youngest daughter of Louis Nicolas Davout and devoted a significant part of her life to honouring the memory of the "glorious marshal" of Napoléon.
Among the notable guests were Dominique Ingres, Adolphe Thiers, Henri Lacordaire, Octave Feuillet, Elme-Marie Caro, Charles Ernest Beulé, Victor Cousin, and Franz Liszt, who composed a musical portrait in her honor in 1869.
This salon of Mrs. de Blocqueville had its particular physiognomy, with the bronze statue of Davout, who, with his hand on her marshal's staff, seemed to preside over the meetings of the marquise.
[2]In 1874, the marquise published Les Soirées de la villa des Jasmins, where she portrayed four friends "who talked about the soul and its destinies, the unfathomable mysteries of the human heart and discussed a thousand different questions of philosophy, literature and art"; we find there, wrote the critic of the Journal des Savants, "in the midst of many longueurs, many generous ideas, noble impulses, fine observations, right and elevated thoughts".
At the Academie des jeux floraux, which conferred on her the title of "Master of Games" in 1878, she established the Eckmühl Prize in 1880, a biennial competition that rewards the best essay on a subject of Christian philosophy with a golden jasmine.
during the performance of Édouard Pailleron 's comedy Le Monde où l'on s'ennuie at the Théâtre-Français in 1881. All Paris was astonished at the Marquise's similarity with the actress Madeleine Brohan , who played the role of an old duchess with spiritual distributions.