Considered by her contemporaries to be one of the most beautiful women of the Belle Epoque and bearing a resemblance to American actress Ethel Barrymore, she is remembered for the mysterious circumstances of her death: on the night of 24/25 July 1911, she fell from the yacht of her husband, Alfred Edwards.

[2] Another French actress of the turn of the century, Simone le Bargy, wrote about Lantelme in her memoirs, Sous de nouveaux soleils, in which she claimed, among other things, that Mathilde somehow ended up in a brothel run by her mother at the age of fourteen.

[3]What is certain is that as a teenager, Mathilde was trafficked to powerful men, including Henry Poidatz, banker and owner of Le Matin newspaper, whose mistress she became in her late teens.

Poidatz recommended Lantelme to Alphonse Franck, the manager of the Théâtre du Gymnase in Paris, where she made her debut in a comedy called La Bascule on October 31, 1901, in the tiny part of a housemaid, with a few lines of dialogue.

Upon hearing that her friend Alfred Edwards, a media tycoon and amateur playwright, had written a play named Par Ricochet and was looking for an actress, Réjane introduced him to Lantelme, who soon became his mistress.

Misia was extremely jealous of her husband's mistress, and said in her memoirs "I had contrived to get a photograph of Lantelme; it adorned my dressing-table, and I made desperate efforts to look like her, dress my hair in the same way, wear the same clothes."