Madame Rosa: The 103-year-old matriarch of Paris’s famed Winter Circus tells her incredible life story

Madame Rosa appears at the circus apartment doorway in sparkling diamonds, red lipstick and a walking frame – and sits down beside her leopardskin rug.

“That’s Mickey,” explains the 103-year-old doyenne of Europe’s most famous circus, pointing to all that remains of her former pet. “He died of old age. We had him a long time,” she adds, while offering a visitor one of her luxury Swiss chocolates.

Soon, anecdotes from the matriarch of Paris’s famed Winter Circus come flowing forth: how she got married in a lions’ den, entered a posh hotel carrying a baby primate in a hat box, and helped raise a parrot known for its foul use of the French language.

The great Madame Rosa is now considered the Big Top’s most eccentric, and oldest, character. Born Rosa Van Been to a performing family in Belgium just in time for Christmas in 1910, two years before the Titanic sank, she went on to marry businessman Joseph Bouglione in Paris, in 1928; he bought the Winter Circus in 1934.

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Rosa, now famous in her own right, was friends with Josephine Baker, the black, American-born French dancer, singer and actress, who become a global star with her ground-breaking banana dance. She rubbed shoulders with opera diva Maria Callas and actresses Ingrid Bergman and Rita Hayworth – and outlived them all.

Madame Rosa, who has 53 grandchildren and great grandchildren, survived two world wars and the Nazi occupation but never lost her zest for life. When she married her husband, she advised the pastor against entering the lions’ den for fear he’d get eaten and not finish the service. Her protective elephant respected the sanctity of this marriage so much that he once squashed Callas in retribution for getting too close to her husband after one show.

“The elephant practically knocked her over...,” said Rosa, with a laugh that makes her look decades younger.

Laughter, it becomes apparent, is this incredible woman’s lifeline: the anecdotes she’s told a thousand times still make her wrinkled face light up with a touching naivety when she remembers a punchline or conjures up an image that had been sitting for years undusted in her memory. Nevertheless, she brings to the interview her son Emilien, 80, one of her seven children, as her “memory aid”.

And there was her other “child” – a male gorilla she named Jackie. It was Jackie in the hat box. The footman said, “Gosh. Madame’s hats are pretty heavy,” said Rosa, chuckling. For the month they were at the hotel no one noticed the gorilla, who also had a taste for wine, in the room.

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The couple’s parrot, Coco, was equally loved, but less jovial. He lived to 45 and would squawk profanities at Rosa, if he was ever ignored. “I cannot tell you what he would call me... They are very, very intelligent words. He could speak very fluently,” she said.

Her stories are fantastical, but photos, pictures and her son bear witness. Take her sea voyage to Latin America with the circus in the ’50s. There was a freak storm, which forced the captain to order that the 12 elephants be thrown overboard to save the ship from sinking.

Her son, who was aboard, calls it a “miracle” when suddenly the storm subsided, with the boat afloat and the animals safe. “That was an adventure,” says Madame Rosa.

Then there were the stars. “So many, so many,” says her son, who remembers sitting with Bergman and Hayworth, who flew in from Hollywood to watch the circus perform beneath the Eiffel Tower.

Madame Rosa met Callas, who loved the circus, many times, and was close to Baker, who died in 1975. “She was a friend. Amazing,” Rosa says, adding that she and Baker used to share costume ideas.

But there’s a sadness when she reminisces. “They’re all dead.... They’re all dead,” Rosa says, sighing in front of the portrait of her husband, who died decades ago.

But now that her huge family includes contortionists, acrobats, jugglers, and lion tamers in the popular annual Winter Circus spectacle, their many theatrical get-togethers stop her dwelling on the past.

AP