Marguerite Du Londel or Dulondel (Jeanne-Pierre-Marie–Marguerite Morel; La Rochelle, France, 1737–1804) was a French ballerina, actress and singer (soprano).
She was engaged with her mother and her two sisters in the French theater company of Jeanne Du Londel and Pierre de Laynay, which was active at the Danish royal court in 1748–53.
She was a success, and the queen of Sweden, Louisa Ulrika of Prussia, compared her to Barbara Campanini and Babette Cochois of the Prussian Ballet in Berlin.
[1] It was one of the most expensive performances made by the French theater in all its twenty years in Sweden, to a cost of 6.000 riksdaler in silver, and with the cooperation of 27 members of the Livgardet.
Marguerite Du Londel also functioned as the French language teacher and dance instructor of Princess Sophie Albertine of Sweden between 1757 and 1769, while her husband and brother-in-law Pierre Lefebvre (married to her sister-in-law Louise Du Londel) was in parallel the instructor of the French language and fencing for the royal princes.
The most known incident of this affair was when the lyric play Le Pientre amoreaux de son modéle by L. Anselme had its premier at the Bollhuset theater in Stockholm, in which Marguerite Du Londel was given the line: "When I was young, I was the taste of a king".
The queen was informed of the secret, but out of friendship for her maid of honor, who had a good name for virtue and good customs – perhaps also in reference to the utter jealousy, which Her Majesty had displayed in the matter of the charming actress and dancer m:lle Dulondel, with whom the King had a son called Fredriksson, a jealousy which caused the exile of m:lle Dulondel from the realm – the queen promised her husband to care for the child under the vow of secrecy.
When some of the remaining French artists performed in the Swedish court in 1780, Gustav III remarked that the only thing preventing them from being a full theatre was that the Du Londel couple was in Paris.
[1] The following year, Marguerite Du Londel was widowed, and the new regency government of Gustav IV Adolf of Sweden discontinued her pension.
When Marcadet left for France in 1795, she was in a difficult situation, but the following year, her daughter Marie Louise Dulondel (1776–1847) married her former colleague Louis Gallodier, and she was thereafter supported by her son-in-law until her death.