Her parents were Jean-Baptiste Lalanne and Hélène Masgomieri, both circus performers, her father under the name The Great Navarin and her mother La Vierge Noire.

[3][4][5] The family moved to Paris where her parents performed with the Grands Danseurs du Roi, a troupe of top quality actors, rope dancers, acrobats and artists specialising in farce, who operated under a royal title granted by King Louis XV.

They lived in Caen where Jean-Baptiste and Laurent sold potions and pulled teeth and young Marguerite-Antoinette was apprenticed to Mlle Cornu to learn how to make and fit lace bonnets.

Her first performance, under the name of Mademoiselle Ninette, was undertaken in a pretty costume decorated with lots of patriotic French Republican tricolour ribbons in red, white and blue.

They were quickly won round after her success and decided to create their own troupe, centred around the Lalanne mother and daughter, joined by other performers.

[3] Madame Saqui wrote to M. Daneux, director of le Jardin de Tivoli amusement gardens, seeking a place to perform in the capital.

One of her spectacular public feats involved tightroping across the River Seine at Pont-Royal, using two flags as balance, dressed in a soldier's uniform.

He was bored by the entertainment but Madame Saqui caught his eye as she made her entrance on the rope when the wadding from one of the fireworks accompanying her arrival struck her hard on the right arm.

[3] Napoleon rushed to her aid and touched her injured arm, which caused her to wince but she did not want to miss her opportunity to perform for him and put on a professional smile and climbed back on the rope to resume her interrupted exercises.

[3] Saqui is recorded in having given performances on the tightrope depicting the crossing of Mont Saint-Bernard, the Battle of Wagram and the Fall of Zaragoza during the Peninsular War (both fought in 1809).

In April 1816 Madam Saqui performed at the Covent Garden Theatre, "descending a tightrope stretched at an incline over the auditorium".

This made her famous in Britain and her performance was drawn by George Cruikshank in 'A Wonderfull (sic) Thing from Paris, or, Madame Sacchi Gratifying John Bull's Curiosity.

[11] She was a popular performer with her act including running down an inclined tightrope, stretched from a mast to one of the main walkways, in a storm of exploding fireworks.

[10][12] She performed with her brother Laurent Lalanne, her sister in law and her husband Pierre, but Madame Saqui was the main attraction.

[13][14][15] Her initial costume of tights in her skin colour proved to be too shocking for the British public, so she took to wearing pantaloons under her spangled dress and a hat embellished with ostrich feathers.

A combination of his poor management, coupled with a cholera outbreak in 1832 which saw 20,000 people die in Paris[24] led to the theatre's bankruptcy and Saqui's financial ruin.

[34] Saqui was described in Tales of a Traveller by Washington Irving as "A woman who could dance the slack rope, and run up a cord from the stage to the gallery with fire-works all round her.

"[28] In 1836 in Sketches by Boz, Charlies Dickens recalled "Madame Somebody ... who nobly devoted her life to the manufacture of fireworks, had so often been seen fluttering in the wind, as she called up a red, blue, or party-coloured light to illumine her temple!

"[35] In 1853, when Georges-Eugène Haussmann began his renovation of Paris, commissioned by French Emperor Napoleon III, the satirical caricaturist Cham depicted Madame Saqui in a cartoon in Le Charivari magazine.

[43][44][45][46] In 1907, the French journalist Paul Ginisty wrote her biography: Mémoires d'un danseuse de corde: Mme Saqui (1786–1866).