In order to fully comprehend the parallel Degas drew between his mother and Estelle, we should first examine the life Degas’ mother led almost three decades earlier. Born to an aristocratic Creole family in New Orleans, she was uprooted along with her four siblings to Paris following the death of her mother and she never fully acclimated to this new environment. Her isolation was due in part to her early marriage to Auguste De Gas, whose “disgust with society” (Sutton 17) suppressed her yearning for a more active social life. Her marital problems – a result of their incompatible personalities – were further eroded by her father-in-law’s refusal to include her own father in business ventures. According to family gossip, in fact, Degas’ mother was so discontent that she had an affair with her bachelor brother-in-law Achille, who suspiciously left his inheritance to her two oldest children (Feigenbaum 17). In a book titled Monsieur Degas, Pierre Cabanne, a close friend of Edgar Degas, explains how Degas’ mother often fled life in Paris to spend time with her brothers-in-law at the “superbe palais” in Naples, and Degas’ strong Neapolitan accent suggests that he accompanied her on these long trips (Cabanne 23). As her travel companion, Degas was therefore aware of his mother’s sense of neglect.
It is conceivable that Degas’ understanding of his mother’s suffering heightened after she died an early death in 1847; he was merely thirteen. How she died is uncertain, but it is possible she died in childbirth, having already painfully miscarried three of eight pregnancies since her marriage to Auguste at sixteen years of age. Although Degas never spoke of his mother, Daniel Halévy, who knew Degas’ mother extremely well, was convinced that the artist was deeply affected by her premature death (Sutton 18); according to Cabanne, Degas even kept a picture of his dead mother and looked at it in secret (Cabanne 24). This detail seems to contradict the fact that Degas never spoke about his mother, but it in fact justifies it as her loss was too painful to communicate in words.