Marie-Léonide Charvin (known as Agar) was born in Sedan (Ardennes) on 18 September 1832 into a very modest family from the Dauphiné. Her father, widowed in 1848, remarried.
To escape her stepmother, she married the first man she could find. As he behaved very badly, she decided to move to Paris in 1853, freeing herself from the guardianship of an unworthy husband.

Having received a musical education, she gave piano lessons and sang for a living in "beuglants" and café concerts, with an interpretation that was already theatrical.
Her meeting with a drama teacher, Achille Ricourt, who taught her, propelled her towards the greatest theatres, including the Comédie Française, and towards the greatest roles such as Phèdre, Andromaque... She was with Rachel and Sarah Bernhardt one of the most famous tragediennes of the late ^19th century.
AGAR was born!

During the Commune, which began in March 1871, Agar performed in support of the cause on 30 April for a matinee at the théâtre du Vaudevilleon 14 May at the Tuileries then on 21 May for a concert in aid of the wounded and the widows and orphans of the national guards killed, while the Versailles troops troops entered Paris.

On 6 May 1871, the Commune government organised a concert in the Tuileries to benefit the widows and orphans of the Fédérés and asked the Comédie Française for an artist to sing the Marseillaise. This evening was considered a crime by the poor artist who, in her defence, invariably replied: "I am wherever I can be of help to the unfortunate". This was all it took for^Mme Agar's situation to become impossible at the Comédie-Française, which she left in 1872 to embark on long and arduous tours of the provinces.

Blacklisted and hounded by reactionary newspapers, she was forced to leave the Comédie Française, went into exile in Switzerland, and returned to perform in Paris a few years later. She remarried a curator of African antiquities in Algiers. She died in the Mustapha hospital near Algiers in 1891. Her body was taken back to Paris.

On her tombstone is a reproduction of the beautiful bust of the tragédienne by the sculptor Henry Cros.

(A street bears her name in the 16th arrondissement)

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