Princess Clementine Eristavi Tchitcherine owned a restaurant/tearoom called Oussadba Russe, in a 1929 directory, it was located at 84 Faubourg St. Honoré. It featured "tea and Russian music." It was also the name of a perfume, Russian Oussadba.
Clementine de Vere (20 December 1888–31 March 1973), also known by her stage name Ionia, was the most influential female magician in the first half of the 20th century. A British magician and illusionist she was also known as Clementine Weedon and Princess Clementine Eristavi Tchitcherine, she was a British citizen, although she was born in Belgium and lived in France for a long period. She performed with the stage name "Ionia - the Enchantress" or the "Goddess of Mystery".
Born in Brussels in Belgium, Clementine de Vere was the eighth child of the British-born illusionist Herbert Shakespeare Gardiner Williams (1843-1931), a popular conjurer and magician who took the stage name Charles de Vere, and his wife Julia de Vere (née Ferrett, 1852–1916), who performed the first Oriental magic act under the name "Okita". He opened a magic shop in London in 1873, and a magic shop/factory in Brussels in 1878. One of Clementine de Vere's sisters was the French actress Elise de Vère (1879-1917), who starred in the silent film Miss de Vère (English Jig). The family moved to Paris in 1892 where Charles de Vere opened another magic shop which he ran until about 1909, assisted by his sons. Here Clementine de Vere was said to have been influenced by the artists of the Folies Bergère. On 5 May 1904 aged only 15 1/2 she eloped with the American circus artist and tamer Herman Weedon (actually: Herman Armond Wirtheim, 1876–1959) from the Bostock Circus.
In June 1904 the newly married couple travelled to New York as Weedon had a commitment on Coney Island. Clementine accompanied him in the following years on his professional travels in Europe and the United States. From her marriage with Weedon she had a son, Frank H. Weedon (1907-1984), who later was known under the name Frank Wirtheim Tchitcherine. In 1909 Clementine de Vere travelled with Herman Weedon to Denmark, Russia, and Vienna. Between 1900 until 1909 her brother Camille (1885-1909) was working in the family magic business at 13, rue Saulnier in Paris until Camille died of diabetes mellitus. Charles de Vère then gave up his business and retired to Rosny-sous-Bois, where he worked on the preparation of a big show for his daughter Clementine.
"Ionia" was contracted to perform in America, but did not due to the sudden closing of Broadway's Folies Bergere of New York. This theatre was opened in the spring of 1911 and closed in October of the same year because of financial difficulties. Clementine de Vere had a contract with this theatre and after its closure could not find suitable employment. In 1912 Clementine spends most of the year performing in Vienna at the Kaiser Garten and at the Ronacher theatres.
Some of the last recorded appearances of Clementine de Vere as "Ionia" were in Vienna, at the Ronacher Theatre. By 1914 Charles de Vere was disappointed that his daughter had not continued her elaborate act and tried to sell the tricks and pieces of equipment to curb the financial losses that had arisen for him.
She met a Russian-Georgian Prince Vladimir Eristavi Tchitcherine d'Aragvi (19 October 1881–February 1967) in Austria in 1913 and married him on 21 June 1919 in Paris, after her first marriage had been dissolved on 23 June 1917.
"My daughter who was Ionia was at Moscow when the Revolution commenced. All her material pillaged and she was in cellar of Hotel 3 months."
Her father's statement is correct, but her materials were not magic. Clementine had given up magic before when she met Tchitcherine. She was not performing magic in Russia. Clementine was in Russia to buy large tracts of rural real estate, mostly usadbas. In the 1920s Clementine de Vere lived temporarily with her second husband in Washington, D.C. and later in Paris. It was during this time that she opened a Russian tea room she called Oussadba-Russe at 84 Faubourg Saint Honore, Paris.
On 26 October 1928, this second marriage too was dissolved, but Clementine de Vere retained the title of Princess, which she had received by the marriage. She lived in France for the rest of her life and was buried with her parents in Batignolles Cemetery in Paris, after her death in 1973.
Ionia's performing career was relatively short, lasting just five years total. From 1908 until mid 1910 Clementine's act featured trained animals. Her magic act was constructed by her father Charles de Vere in 1909 and debuted in September 1910 in Marseilles. "Ionia's" act was spectacular, filling the stage with illusions. Her act was advertised with beautiful posters which many collectors consider to be some of the most artistic posters of magic's Golden Age. Of the 22 known posters for "Ionia" produced by Moody Brothers of Birmingham, only eleven have survived and are now considered expensive collectibles.
Info on Clementine from wikipedia. More information on deVere can be found at this archival website.
About the Tearoom:
The name Oussadba refers to the usadba, a form of property that includes a house with outbuildings and land surrounding it: a garden, park or vegetable garden. This term for a rural estate is mainly used in Russian architecture. Initially, usadbas were given as presents by Princes or Tsars, who thus "planted" the men they had chosen on a particular land, the usadbas were then inherited, and later bought. The usadba would be a permanent residence of a holiday destination.
La Revue de Paris, 1922:
"Go back now, look at the few shops that face the presidential palace; the narrowest, the smallest of all will strike you with its bright lighting, its colorful coloring, the disparate strangeness of the objects that you see gathered there and the words painted on the facade: Russian Oussadba. Small objects from Saxony, among small handwritten signs: Cakes and Russian tea, Furs for sale... And oriental-looking jewelry, a miniature, lace and an icon. Come in. The shop is tiny, with a narrow staircase applied to the back wall. An employee in a pleated smock, in Turkish red, is bored behind a table, surrounded by objects that are certainly elegant, but which still have a wild appearance, of too marked a color and of a shape whose whim does not has not adapted to certain rules of harmony, a certain perfection in the finish in which Italy excelled during the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, France in the seventeenth and seventeenth."
Bulletin of the American Women's Club of Paris, Inc, 1927:
"The incense of fragrant tea and a background of old Russian fresques by [Ivan] Bilibin, court-painter to the last of the Romanoffs: the quivering heart of old Russia revives for you at the OUSSADBA RUSSE, Paris' super fashionable tearoom."
Paris and Its Environs, with Routes from London to Paris by Karl Baedeker (Firm), 1932:
"There is no longer a tea room at Chez Masson; La Maisonnette Russe and Oussadba Russe have disappeared."
address of the tearoom today, on the far right.
The Perfume:
Schager Courant, 1930:
"The perfume Oussadba-Russe. There is a lot of history associated with this perfume. Prince Alexander Bezoukoff, who resided in St Petersburg (Leningrad) in 1789, was a real dandy. His love for perfumes led him to convert part of his palace into a laboratory, where he made new combinations every day to prepare delicious perfumes in this way. A new perfume which he had prepared pleased him so much that shortly afterwards when he gave a party in his summer residence Oussadba, he drenched everything with this perfume. Perfume had dissolved even in the water of the fountains. This perfume was therefore very popular with the Russian court, and remained so from the time of Catherine II to Nicholas II. Due to fortunate circumstances, the composition of this perfume came into the hands of Princess Eristavi, who managed to form a combination, who took over the further preparation of this perfume."
The perfume was contained in a heavy, round, clear glass bottle, with a gray-blue tinted glass stopper. It had an oval shaped paper label with the name "Russian Oussadba."
The Prince:
The Price called Orel, Russia home and he claimed his mother was Princess Nadejda (Nadine) Eristoff (Eristow, Eristavi) d'Aragva of Switzerland, from a line of hereditary ruling princes of Georgia, and he was the son of Victor Tchitcherine, he was related to Prince Simon C. Sidamon Eristoff, who married JP Morgan's cousin, Ann Tracy.
Prince Vladimir married second in March 1929, Diane Rockwood who was from Indianapolis, IN, and they were also divorced as she charged "cruel and inhuman treatment and non-support" and that the prince was "fault finding and quarrelsome." After his divorce the Prince went to Palm Beach, Florida and went to work selling jewelry.
The Prince married his third wife, one-time screen actress and Ziegfeld Follies beauty, Lucy Cotton on 3 May 1941, just one month after they met at a society luncheon, but they too divorced, in 1944.
She told her lawyer that "life in the household was unbearable; that the prince found fault with everything she did; that she was a prisoner in her own room." When she filed for divorce she charged "extreme cruelty" and "habitual indulgence in a wild and ungovernable temper." She said the prince their their home in a "fit of rage." She said he merely used the place to eat and sleep in and not as a home, despite her efforts to please him. He often locked himself in his room for hours, refusing to speak to her or respond to her entreaties.
It is interesting to note that his former lawyer described the prince as "imperialistic in nature, high strung and irritable; that because of his royalty, he has little regard for what he says of how he says it; that all of these things make it difficult for an attorney to carry out legal affairs of the prince."
In 1941, the Russian Nobility Association issued a bulletin pointing out sternly that the Prince was not a Price. His mother was a Georgian who owned some land and the translation of the Georgian equivalent for landowner into Russian makes him a price in name only. Eristavi was an Italian name and no such title existed in Russia before the collapse in 1917.