Comtesse Benvenuti

A countess whom Marie meets in society first at Nice in 1873 and again, on several summers, in the German spas; the diary gives no first name and no husband's given name. The Mon Journal t.1 index lists «Benvenuti (comte), 81» and «Benvenuti (comtesse), 81, 131».

Diary

• Nice, 1873-03-22 (003.0080): at a dull evening at Mme de Mouzay's, «Les seuls gens bien étaient le comte et la comtesse Benvenuti, c'est avec cette dernière que j'étais principalement.»
• Nice, 1873-05-04 (004.0287, written in English): Marie and the comtesse de Mouzay call on her: «She is very amiable. But that stupid bataclan all these women with their dogs»; the LAN note ties this to Marie's jibe about the «comtesses du troisième étage» with their lapdogs.
• Wiesbaden / Schlangenbad, 1875-08-26 (039.0264): dining at the Nassauer Hof, «la comtesse Benvenuti, femme aimable mais presque toujours grise. Misère de monde.» (The sentence describes her as nearly always tipsy.)
• Schlangenbad, 1877-09-01 (074.0180): «Ai-je dit que la comtesse Benvenuti était ici et venait souvent me voir ? Ni utile, ni agréable = assommante.» On 1877-09-10 (074.0282), saying goodbye after daily visits: «Elle est extrêmement aimable pour moi, sed inutilis» (a footnote there glosses the Latin).

Marie's verdict throughout is that she is pleasant company but socially useless to her ambitions. No further trace of her was found in the Mon Journal indexes; whether the Nice countess of 1873 and the spa countess of 1875–77 are the same woman is assumed from the name and the repeated pattern (a titled lady who is «amiable»), not proved.