“At the end of 1926, the Société Française des Films Paramount acquired the film production rights for two best-selling novels by Maurice Dekobra, La Madone des Sleepings and Mon Coeur au ralenti. The two novels have very complicated plots, they were both set in exotic, cosmopolitan places in which fairy tale characters move and mingle.
The realization of the two films was entrusted to Marco de Gastyne, who succeeded in completing Mon coeur au ralenti and then, at the beginning of La Madone des Sleepings, falls ill, leaving Maurice Gleize to shoot and complete the film.
In the part of ‘Madone’, this very extravagant woman heading towards self-destruction while her secretary (who is really a prince in disguise, in love with her) attempts to save her, there is an actress named Claude France, whose life is very similar to that of the character invented by Dekobra.
Johanna Franziska Wittig, born in Vienna in 1893, had lived, until the outbreak of the war, a gilded life in Austria, Switzerland, and France, collecting two or three husbands (amongst them we find the Count of Cally, who covered her with gold and jewels). She became a Red Cross nurse at Vittel Hospital in Paris, by chance discovered that dancer Mata Hari was a spy for the Germans and denounced her. After the war she wanted to become a movie actress under the pseudonym of Diane Ferval, later changing it to Claude France.
Blonde, elegant and with a certain talent, Claude France appeared ladylike and decorative in over a dozen films all of a certain relief, often in costume. She even produced herself as a singer on the stage of the Foliès Bergères. La Madone des Sleepings was her swan’s song: January 4, 1928, before the film was released – the premiere had been fixed for the beginning of March of that year – Claude France committed suicide; the cause of such a gesture has yet to be resolved”. (Vittorio Martinelli)