of the Revolution of 1830 brought Anselme Popinot in the way of power and honors; he was twice deputy after the beginning of Louis Philippe’s reign, and was also minister of commerce. [Gaudissart the Great.] Anselme Popinot, twice secretary of state, had finally been made a count, and a peer of France.  He owned a mansion on the rue Basse du Rempart.  In 1834 he rewarded Felix Gaudissart for services formerly rendered on the rue des Cinq-Diamants, and entrusted to him the management of a boulevard theatre, where the opera, the drama, the fairy spectacle, and the ballet took turn and turn. [Cousin Pons.] Four years later the Comte Popinot, again minister of commerce and agriculture, a lover of the arts and one who gladly acted the part of the refined Maecenas, bought for two thousand francs a copy of Steinbock’s “Groupe de Samson” and stipulated that the mould should be destroyed that there might be only two copies, his own and the one belonging to Mademoiselle Hortense Hulot, the artist’s fiancee.  When Wenceslas married Mademoiselle Hulot, Popinot and Eugene de Rastignac were the Pole’s witnesses. [Cousin Betty.]

POPINOT (Madame Anselme), wife of the preceding, born Cesarine Birotteau, in 1801.  Beautiful and attractive though, at one time, almost promised to Alexandre Crottat, she married, about 1822, Anselme Popinot, whom she loved and by whom she was loved. [Cesar Biroteau.] After her marriage, though in the midst of splendor, she remained the simple, open, and even artless character that she was in the modest days of her youth.[*] The transformation of the dancer Claudine du Bruel, the whilom Tullia of the Royal Academy of Music, to a moral bourgeois matron, surprised Madame Anselme, who became intimate with her. [A Prince of Bohemia.] The Comtesse Popinot rendered aid, in a delicate way, in 1841, to Adeline Hulot d’Ervy.  Her influence with that of Mesdames de Rastignac, de Navarreins, d’Espard, de Grandlieu, de Carigliano, de Lenoncourt, and de la Bastie, procured Adeline’s appointment as salaried inspector of charities. [Cousin Betty.] Three years later when one of her three children married Mademoiselle Camusot de Marville, Madame Popinot, although she appeared at the most exclusive social gatherings, imitated modest Anselme, and, unlike Amelie Camusot, received Pons, a tenant of her maternal great-uncle, C.-J.  Pillerault. [Cousin Pons.]

[*] In 1838, the little theatre Pantheon, destroyed in 1846, gave a
    vaudeville play, by M. Eugene Cormon, entitled “Cesar Birotteau,”
    of which Madame Anselme Popinot was one of the heroines.

POPINOT (Vicomte), the eldest of the three children of the preceding couple, married, in 1845, Cecile Camusot de Marville. [Cousin Pons.] During the course of the year 1846, he questioned Victorin Hulot about the remarkable second marriage of Baron Hector Hulot d’Ervy, which was solemnized on the first of February of that year. [Cousin Betty.]