French noblewoman, artist and transgender figure. She was also known by the nickname ‘Missy’ or her pseudonym as an artist, ‘Yssim’ (an anagram of Missy), ‘Max’, ‘Oncle Max’ (‘Uncle Max’) and ‘Monsieur le Marquis’.
She was the fourth and final child of Charles de Morny, Duke of Morny and Sofia Sergeyevna Trubetskaya. Her father was the half-brother of Napoleon III, whilst her mother may have been the illegitimate daughter of Nicholas I of Russia – this made her great-grand-daughter of both Talleyrand and empress Joséphine.
Her extravagant conduct made her a celebrity of the Belle Époque and despite her 1881 marriage to the known homosexual Jacques Godart, sixth and final marquis of Belbeuf – whom she divorced in 1903 – she was open that her sexual preference was for women.
Mathilde wore a full three-piece suit (then forbidden to women), wore her hair short, smoked a cigar and underwent a hysterectomy and a mastectomy. She was also active as a sculptor and painter, studying under comte Saint-Cène and the sculptor Édouard-Gustave-Louis Millet de Marcilly.
Thanks to her personality and fortune, Mathilde de Morny became a lover of several women in Paris, including Liane de Pougy and Colette. On 3 January 1907 Mathilde and Colette put on a pantomime entitled Rêve d’Égypte (‘Dream of Egypt’) at the Moulin Rouge, in which Mathilde caused a scandal by playing an Egyptologist during a simulated lesbian love scene – a kiss between them almost caused a riot and the production was stopped by the prefect of police Louis Lépine.
At the end of May 1944 Mathilde tried to commit hara-kiri but was prevented. She then committed suicide at 3pm on 29 June 1944 by putting her head in her gas cooker.

Link to Wikipedia biography