Her grandmother was Virginie de Ternant, founder of the plantation; Louisiana senator and judge Charles Parlange was her maternal uncle.

Her father Anatole Avegno served as a major in the Confederate States Army during the American Civil War; he died in 1862 in the Battle of Shiloh.

[2] He was the commander of the Avegno Zouaves of New Orleans, a cosmopolitan battalion which had soldiers from a wide variety of ethnic backgrounds including French, Spanish, Mexican, Irish, Italian, Chinese, German, Dutch, and Filipino.

The scandal guaranteed that Sargent would receive no more portrait commissions in France, and he decamped for London for good, where he became one of history's most famous portraitists, of the upper classes in Britain and America.

In actuality, “she promptly resumed her role as a living statue.” [4] Antonio de La Gándara painted a full-length portrait of her, entitled Madame Gautreau (1898).