Maurice Talvande, Count de Mauny Talvande

As a young man, described as "rather good looking", he travelled to America and England where, having assumed the more aristocratic-sounding name of Maurice de Mauny Talvande, he earned a little money giving drawing-room lectures on French châteaux and château life.

[5] In June 1898, de Mauny married Lady Mary Byng, daughter of the 4th Earl of Strafford, whom he may have met through her brother, who had attended his school.

There was talk that Lady Mary married de Mauny, who had no social position or fortune, due to her hostility to her father's second marriage to a wealthy American widow, Cora Smith Colgate.

[citation needed] Shortly prior to his marriage, de Mauny established a small boarding school for teenage boys from upper-class English families seeking to polish their French.

Situated at the rented Château Azay-le-Rideau in the Loire Valley, de Mauny relied on his wife's contacts to supply the dozen pupils.

[4] His wife sold her reminiscences as a former maid of honour to a popular journal, The Quiver, a hitherto unprecedented breach of royal confidentiality that drew a public repudiation by Queen Victoria.

[8] Also in 1899, Charles Hammond Gibson Jr privately printed Two Gentlemen in Touraine under the name of Richard Sudbury, a fictional romance about the relationship with de Mauny.

"[10] It was only after a long search for an earthly paradise that around 1925,[11] de Mauny sighted "Galduwa" (meaning 'Rock Island' in Sinhalese),[12] an islet in Weligama Bay, Ceylon, that was an unkempt wilderness used by locals as a dumping ground for cobras.

He constructed a magnificent and picturesque villa that offered 360 degree views of the sea, and he replanted the island into his vision of a private Eden (the snakes, however, were removed).

This was lined with eight panels of inlaid wood dyed a dull gold and eau de Nil, and bearing a design of lotus buds and flowers.

[12] The furniture was teak and Ceylonese woods upholstered in eau de Nil watered silk, the iron and brass balustrades ornamented with peacocks, and the floors tiled in black and white marble inset with a rampant Sinhalese lion.

[14] De Mauny established a furniture manufacturing business, 'Weligama Local Industries', and he collaborated with a Hungarian interior decorator, Mlle Louise Borgia, to make over the homes of the wealthy in Colombo.

The author Robin Maugham, who visited the island as a young man and in the mid-1970s, felt that the unique beauty and harmony of the villa had become compromised after de Mauny's death by partitioning and the loss of his furniture and fittings, and that the area itself had been despoiled by the construction of a new road along the mainland beach.