Alice Weiller

Alice Anna Weiller (née Javal; 10 October 1869 – 7 September 1943) was a French hostess and art collector who was appointed to the Legion of Honour. The wife of Lazare Weiller, she took an interest in aviation. During the Second World War, she was interned at Drancy and deported to Auschwitz, where she was murdered. She was the mother of the aviator and industrialist Paul-Louis Weiller. Life The Javal family, who had made their fortune in Alsace, were Jewish mill owners, merchants, and bankers who settled in Paris, where Alice was born. She was the daughter of Louis Émile Javal (1839-1907), a well-known ophthalmologist and collector of Japanese art, and his wife Maria Anna Ellissen (1847-1933), and was one of five children, all given a liberal education. Her sister Jeanne married Paul Weiss and was the mother of Louise Weiss, a journalist and campaigner for women's rights and Jenny Aubry, a psychiatrist and psychoanalyst. On 12 August 1889, Alice married Lazare Weiller (1858–1928), industrialist and regional senator, as his second wife, his first having died. They met through a family called Ellissen, her relations, investors in one of his companies. The witnesses at the wedding were Eugène Spuller, the poet Sully Prudhomme, and Adolphe Carnot, brother of the President of France.